President Bush's Democracy Agenda in Tatters

This morning's Washington Post has an excellent article on the Bush administration's troubled global democracy-promotion agenda. The initiative, for all its high-sounding promise, has been battered by bureaucratic resistance and real-life setbacks around the world:

Two and a half years after Bush pledged in his second inaugural address to spread democracy around the world, the grand project has bogged down in a bureaucratic and geopolitical morass, in the view of many activists, officials and even White House aides. Many in his administration never bought into the idea, and some undermined it, including his own vice president. The Iraq war has distracted Bush and, in some quarters, discredited his aspirations. And while he focuses his ire on bureaucracy, Bush at times has compromised the idealism of that speech in the muddy reality of guarding other U.S. interests.

The story of how a president's vision is translated into thorny policy is a classic Washington tale of politics, inertia, rivalries and funding battles -- and a case study in the frustrated ambition of a besieged presidency. Bush says his goal of "ending tyranny" will take many generations, and he aims to institutionalize it as U.S. policy no matter who follows him in the White House. And for all the difficulties of the moment, it may yet, as he hopes, see fruition down the road.

At this point, though, democracy promotion has become so identified with an unpopular president that candidates running to succeed him are running away from it. At a recent debate, they rushed to disavow it. "I'm not a carbon copy of President Bush," one said. Another ventured that "maybe going to elections so quickly is a mistake." A third, asked if he agreed with Bush's vision, replied, "Absolutely not, because I don't think we can force people to accept our way of life, our way of government."

Read the whole thing. Democracy promotion in Washington policy circles took a tailspin after the victory of Hamas in the Palestinian elections of 2006.

The article notes that while global democracy promotion has been a long-term policy of the United States, President Bush has pushed democracy in foreign policy more than any other U.S. president.

The case for democracy promotion is a good one. Democracies are more peaceful, and they best protect the basic rights of their citizens.

Establishing elections themselves is only one facet of a state's democratic transformation. The history of democratization shows that democratic regimes consolidate over long periods of time. The British case, for example, held up as the world's prototypical parliamentary system, unfolded over centuries of state-building.

Nations need to resolve a series of national crises before they can stablize into patterns of peaceful democracy and policy-making. For example, the basic elements of a constitutional or political regime need to be settled before the onset of divisive and destablizing issues, such as the expansion of suffrage or the amelioration of socioeconomic dislocation from industrialization.

Nations also need to have achieved a widespread sense of community, with boundaries of the nation matching those of the state. Dramatic ethnic diversity must be concomitant with a centralized ethos of national purpose. Political legitimacy needs to be established, and the process for the selection of the leadership needs to gain universal acceptance.

Democracy also flourishes within a culture of political pragmatism and tolerance of difference. Pragmatism is a political style - part of a nation's political culture - that is characterized by a tradition of adjustment and tinkering of the political procedures and policies of the state. It's a politics of "muddling through." Nations that develop a pragmatic style of development, like Britain, are able to establish systems and laws over time, through deliberation, rather than through more ideological or ad hoc methods. Pragmatism lends itself to bargaining and cooperation.

These sociocultural attributes of democratization are not often discussed in the current rage to establish democracy in Iraq, Syria, or Palestine. But each of these nations - and others around the world - will need to establish these cultural attributes if the promise of democratization is to bear fruit.

A Guilty British Liberal Loses His Innocence

In his weekend article, Andrew Anthony, a writer at London's Sunday Observer, tells how after September 11 he was torn between his longstanding progressive beliefs and the nagging clarity of evil that unpinned the murder of thousands of innocents in America that day. He was facing an ideological reckoning.

His awakening came slowly, and was prompted by stream of leftist commentary he was reading following the attacks, which held the United States to be the source of the world's evils, and held up a standard of moral relativism justifying the terrorist barbarity:

What all these reactions had in common, I realised, was not complexity but simplicity. For all of them this was an issue of the powerless striking back at the powerful, the oppressed against the oppressor, the rebels against the imperialists. It was Han Solo and Luke Skywalker taking on the Death Star. There was no serious attempt to examine what kind of power the powerless wanted to assume, or over whom they wanted to exercise it, and no one thought to ask by what authority these suicidal killers had been designated the voice of the oppressed. It was enough that Palestinians had danced in the West Bank. The scale of the suffering, the innocence of the victims and the aims of the perpetrators barely seemed to register in many of the comments. Was this a sign of shock or complacency? Or was it something else, a kind of atrophying of moral faculties, brought on by prolonged use of fixed ideas, that prevented the sufferer from recognising a new paradigm when it arrived, no matter how spectacular its announcement?

In the end I reached the conclusion that 11 September had already brutally confirmed: there were other forces, far more malign than America, that lay in wait in the world. But having faced up to the basic issue of comparative international threats, could I stop the political reassessment there? If I had been wrong about the relative danger of America, could I be wrong about all the other things I previously held to be true? I tried hard to suppress this thought, to ring-fence the global situation, grant it exceptional status and keep it in a separate part of my mind. I had too much vested in my image of myself as a 'liberal'. I had bought into the idea, for instance, that all social ills stemmed from inequality and racism. I knew that crime was solely a function of poverty. That to be British was cause for shame, never pride. And to be white was to bear an unshakable burden of guilt. I held the view, or at least was unprepared to challenge it, that it was wrong to single out any culture for censure, except, of course, Western culture, which should be admonished at every opportunity. I was confident, too, that Israel was the source of most of the troubles in the Middle East. These were non-negotiables for any right-thinking decent person. I couldn't question these received wisdoms without questioning my own identity. And I had grown too comfortable with seeing myself as one of the good guys, the well-meaning people, to want to do anything that upset that image. I viewed myself as understanding, and to maintain that self-perception it was imperative that I didn't try to understand myself.

In a sense 11 September was the ultimate mugging, a murderous assertion of a new reality, or rather a reality that already existed but which we preferred not to see. Over the years I had absorbed a notion of liberalism that was passive, defeatist, guilt-ridden. Feelings of guilt governed my world view: post-colonial guilt, white guilt, middle-class guilt, British guilt. But if I was guilty, 9/11 shattered my innocence. More than anything it challenged us all to wake up and open our eyes to what was real. It took me far too long to meet that challenge. For while I realised almost straight away that 9/11 would change the world, it would be several years before I accepted that it had also changed me. I had been wrong. This was my story, after all.

Read the whole thing. Anthony's got a kind of interesting high-brow demeanor to his writing. Perhaps it's just a bit of British intellectualism (although I don't get the same feeling when reading Tony Blair's pieces).

In any case, Anthony's story is welcomed and good (check his new book, here). It's reminiscent of many stories of moderate Americans who became 9/11 conservatives amid their disgust at the rekindling of hard-left anti-Americanism that followed the terrorist attacks.

Murder Stalks Poor Minorities in L.A. County

This morning's Los Angeles Times details the findings of the paper's "Homicide Report," a study of the distribution of homicides in Los Angeles County for 2007. Here's an excerpt from the main summary:

An online project of The Times called the Homicide Report has tracked Los Angeles County homicides, as they have happened, since the beginning of the year. The project has yielded a vivid statistical outline of the county's current homicide problem -- at least 520 killings by early August. It also has chronicled some of the damage that rippled through families and communities rent by deaths that happened before their time.

Homicide is not fair, hitting hardest among Latinos and especially among blacks. Latinos are killed at more than three times the rate of whites, while blacks succumb to homicide at three times the rate of Latinos, the Times analysis shows.

Adult males are the eye of the storm. The national homicide rate is about six deaths per 100,000 people each year. But for Latino men in their 20s in Los Angeles County, the rate is 52 deaths, and for black men, 176 deaths. In human terms, that means that losing a son to homicide, a remote possibility in some neighborhoods, looms as a daily threat in others.

In South Los Angeles and Athens this year, for example, there have been at least 20 homicides within a single ZIP Code in just seven months. A few miles away, in the Woodland Hills, Tarzana and Brentwood ZIP Codes, months go by without any.

People living close to frequent violent death find refuge in denial. On the same streets where sidewalks are stained by the melted wax from homicide shrines and young men loiter in wheelchairs, people talk about being "caught slippin' " (letting one's guard down) or about friends having "passed" (not having been killed). Bereaved parents describe years of obsessively protective behavior -- children locked indoors, hourly cellphone calls to check in. Then, in the next breath, they avow that they never thought their child could be murdered.

Be sure to read the story, and check out the chronicles of the victims at the homicide report blog.

I recently posted on the tragedy of America's urban crisis.

I am deeply troubled by these statistics. Urban violence is a national crisis, and the 2008 presidential hopefuls need to address this issue more forcefully. Remedies to the crisis are not to be found solely in the realm of law enforcement, but must also come from changes at the family level.

Sunday Animaniacs YouTube

I got a kick out of this Animaniacs YouTube, on the U.S. presidents, courtesy of Sparks from the Anvil:

It's a good one. I love this part:

William Harrison, how do you praise?

That guy was dead in thirty days!

Or how about this:

Harry Truman, weird little human,

Served two terms and when he's done,

It's Eisenhower who's got the power,

From '53 to '61!

Enjoy!

More on the Daily Kos Syndrome

In a recent post I commented on the narcissism and megalomania of Markos Moulitsas of the Daily Kos. I'm not the only one who's noticed Kos' inclination toward self-aggrandizement.

Kimberly Strassel, in Friday's Wall Street Journal, offered an excellent analysis of the relationship between Kos radicals and moderate congressional Democrats. It turns out that Henry Cuellar, a moderate, free-trade Democrat in Texas, was attacked by Kos for his partisan "treason" in 2006. But Cuellar whethered the storm, and his story points to a lot of emptiness in Kos' chest-thumping:

A centrist Democrat who is pro-business, free-trade and strong on law enforcement, the congressman was designated an apostate by the left-wing Netroots crowd. They decamped to his district and bankrolled a liberal primary challenger. Mr. Cuellar triumphed, though Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas would later swagger on his blog: "So we didn't kill off Cuellar. But we gave him a whooping where none was expected and made him sweat."

Which is the point. If the liberal blogging phenomenon deserves to be known for anything, it is the strategy to intimidate or silence anyone who disagrees with its own out-of-the-mainstream views. That muzzling has been on full display in recent weeks as Mr. Moulitsas and fellow online speech police have launched a campaign against the centrist Democratic Leadership Council. DLC Chairman Harold Ford, Jr. was even thwacked last week for daring to speak to this editorial page (my sincere apologies, Mr. Ford)--the clear goal to discourage him from making such a free-speech mistake again.

Yet a lively midweek chat with Mr. Cuellar suggests that this campaign of threats isn't necessarily having the intended effect. If anything, it might be backfiring. "They win when they intimidate people," says Mr. Cuellar. "I've taken everything they've thrown, plus their kitchen sink, and I still stand proud as a moderate-conservative Democrat." He says his triumph over blogger fire has only strengthened his conviction that his party will only win elections if it continues to be a "big tent" open to all views. "To make that tent smaller, to force people--not to persuade, but to force, because these are threats--to quiet down, that's destructive in the long term and the short term."

Apparently, the netroots hordes spent hundreds of thousands dollars to unseat Cuellar in the primary, without success:

Despite all the blogger bravado that they now run the show, Mr. Cuellar's experience has been more the norm than the exception. The press may adore them, but the Netroots simply haven't notched many concrete victories. "Every time I see [Sen.] Joe Lieberman in the hall, we like to say 'we're still here, aren't we?'" says Mr. Cuellar, a spunky tone in his voice. California's Jane Harman, reviled as a "warmonger," last year whipped antiwar activist Marcy Winograd in a primary, 62%-38%. Ellen Tauscher, who heads the New Democrat Coalition in Congress, was savaged by left-wing blogs for her votes authorizing Iraq and free trade, and in particular for her warning to her party not to "go off the left cliff." She walked away from her re-election with 66% of the vote.

Mr. Cuellar goes so far as to argue that instead of cowing Democratic moderates, the left-wing attacks have united them. More middle-of-the-roaders now believe that if the bloggers were to win a high-profile primary, it would only energize them to go after others. "This has brought us together to say, 'this is us, and we've got to stick together,'" he says.

This is not to say that Kos is having no effect on moderates. Incumbents don't want to have to wiggle out from under from under Kos' thumb. That's understandable, but I think if Democratic members of Congress continue to stand firm against the netroots they'll save their party from obscurity.

Kos is much more blustery than knowledgeable about politics (be sure to read my dissection of his poor Washington Post essay in my earlier post). Strassel captures this in her essay's conclusion:

In a match-up on "Meet the Press" this past weekend, the Daily Kos's Mr. Moulitsas extolled those who use his site to trash thoughtful folks such as Mr. Cuellar as a shining example of "democracy." In the same breath he then commanded the DLC's Mr. Ford to "control" his moderate members, and force them to stop disagreeing with liberal Democrats. If you get that logic, you might just be a Daily Kos reader.

I watched that debate, which aired last Sunday. I think Ford was head-and-shoulders above Kos, particularly in his classiness. Ford might have been more agressive in going after a number of Kos' off-the-wall claims. In any event, argument isn't Kos' strong suit. Intimidation is. Ford could barely get a word in edgewise through most of the debate.

I don't like Kos. I'm going to keep the pressure on him on this blog.

Suicide of Reason? Radical Islam and the West

I picked up a copy of Lee Harris' new book yesterday, The Suicide of Reason: Radical Islam's Threat to the West. I've just read the preface thus far, but I thought I'd share a blurb from the book jacket with readers. This is what John McWhorter had to say about the volume:

Once again Lee Harris throws cold water on thinking Americans' tendency to view Islamist terrorists as noble freedom fighters in the vein of black Americans during the civil rights movement or East Timorese throwing off the Indonesian yoke. Harris understands that we are faced with an ememy who seeks not reasoned negotiation but the destruction of the Western way of life, and that holding to self-critical, multi-culti pieties during this crisis will spell self-sabotage.

I'm familiar with some of Harris' other writings. He's also the author of Civilization and its Enemies.

Plus, his article in Policy Review, "The Intellectual Origins of Anti-Americanism," is a modern classic. Here's a great quote from that article, dissecting blame-America ideology, which holds the United States as the source of evil in the world:

America-bashing is anti-Americanism at its most radical and totalizing. Its goal is not to advise, but to condemn; not to fix, but to destroy. It repudiates every thought of reform in any normal sense; it sees no difference between American liberals and American conservatives; it views every American action, both present and past, as an act of deliberate oppression and systemic exploitation. It is not that America went wrong here or there; it is that it is wrong root and branch. The conviction at the heart of those who engage in it is really quite simple: that America is an unmitigated evil, an irredeemable enormity.

Harris' stuff is great. Happy reading!

Appeasement in Middle East Studies

Cinnamon Stillwell's got a great article up today at American Thinker, "Appeasement Finds a Home in the Academy":

Instead of providing moral clarity in a time of war, too many academics busy themselves inventing strategies to get along peaceably with genocidal terrorist groups and the governments that aid and abet them. Among the appeasers, three professors of Middle East studies stand out: the University of Minnesota's William O. Beeman; Boston University's Augustus Richard Norton; and Harvard University's Sara Roy.

William O. Beeman, professor and chair of the department of anthropology at the University of Minnesota, as well as president of the Middle East section of the American Anthropological Association, apparently thinks the bloody, belligerent Iranian regime can be placated by politeness. In a recent article (scroll down), Beeman counseled the U.S. to negotiate with Iran using "language" that is "unfailingly polite and humble."

Humbleness toward a regime hell-bent on building the bomb, funding terrorists worldwide, threatening to wipe Israel off the map, seizing U.S., British and Canadian citizens as hostages, and supplying weapons that kill American servicemen in Iraq?

"Politeness," is hardly the best tactic for dealing with opponents who clearly hold strength in the highest regard, but such is Beeman's recommendation. Unfortunately, it's advice that the Bush administration, and the State Department in particular, appear to be following, and the lack of desirable results thus far point to its ineffectiveness. The recent decision to consider classifying Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps as a foreign terrorist organization provides hope that realism may yet prevail.

Read the rest. Norton and Roy are calling Hezbollah and Hamas "complex and nuanced," and they suggest that we can work with these groups.

Never Forget: Freedom Isn't Free

Robert over at the Independent Christian Patriot has a moving YouTube video posted, and I thought I'd also put it up here:

:

Check it out!

Global Warming as Moral Crusade

In a recent post, I criticized Newsweek's sensational global warming article, "The Truth About Denial." Here's what I said:

I'm skeptical... of all the sky-is-falling extremism over global warming - although I've never thought of myself as a "denier of climate change." There are real issues of immense importance at debate. Yet, my own background in international relations suggests that the consensus on global warming is not as strong as environmental activists claim.

Given my thoughts on this, I was pleased to see Robert Samuelson's critical rebuttal in Newsweek of his own magazine's moralistic journalism. Here's a snippet:

If you missed NEWSWEEK's story, here's the gist. A "well-coordinated, well-funded campaign by contrarian scientists, free-market think tanks and industry has created a paralyzing fog of doubt around climate change." This "denial machine" has obstructed action against global warming and is still "running at full throttle." The story's thrust: discredit the "denial machine," and the country can start the serious business of fighting global warming. The story was a wonderful read, marred only by its being fundamentally misleading.

Read the whole thing. Samuelson's skeptical that the world's industrialized societies - even with the present state of technology - will find the political will to reduce emissions enough to relieve warming effects:

One way or another, our assaults against global warming are likely to be symbolic, ineffective or both.

But here's where he really gets to the nub of what's wrong with the moral crusade on the environment:

Against these real-world pressures, NEWSWEEK's "denial machine" is a peripheral and highly contrived story. NEWSWEEK implied, for example, that ExxonMobil used a think tank to pay academics to criticize global-warming science. Actually, this accusation was long ago discredited, and NEWSWEEK shouldn't have lent it respectability. (The company says it knew nothing of the global-warming grant, which involved issues of climate modeling. And its 2006 contribution to the think tank, the American Enterprise Institute, was small: $240,000 out of a $28 million budget.)

The alleged cabal's influence does not seem impressive. The mainstream media have generally been unsympathetic; they've treated global warming ominously. The first NEWSWEEK cover story in 1988 warned THE GREENHOUSE EFFECT. DANGER: MORE HOT SUMMERS AHEAD. A Time cover in 2006 was more alarmist: BE WORRIED, BE VERY WORRIED. Nor does public opinion seem much swayed. Although polls can be found to illustrate almost anything, the longest-running survey questions show a remarkable consistency. In 1989, Gallup found 63 percent of Americans worried "a great deal" or a "fair amount" about global warming; in 2007, 65 percent did.

What to do about global warming is a quandary. Certainly, more research and development. Advances in underground storage of carbon dioxide, battery technology (for plug-in hybrid cars), biomass or nuclear power could alter energy economics. To cut oil imports, I support a higher gasoline tax—$1 to $2 a gallon, introduced gradually—and higher fuel-economy standards for vehicles. These steps would also temper greenhouse-gas emissions. Drilling for more domestic natural gas (a low-emission fuel) would make sense. One test of greenhouse proposals: are they worth doing on other grounds?

But the overriding reality seems almost un-American: we simply don't have a solution for this problem. As we debate it, journalists should resist the temptation to portray global warming as a morality tale—as NEWSWEEK did—in which anyone who questions its gravity or proposed solutions may be ridiculed as a fool, a crank or an industry stooge. Dissent is, or should be, the lifeblood of a free society.

I'm still learning about all of this, but I think Samuelson hits the nail on the head: Calling doubters a denial cult forms part of a broader campaign to shut down dissent.

In the comments to my earlier post, Dan Nexon, who blogs over at Duck of Minerva, noted that the science of warming is complicated, and left a link to the Real Climate page, and a post on the "global cooling myth."

But check this entry over at American Thinker as well: "Twisting Science to Fit the Global Warming Template."

How's that for fair and balanced!

The Fall of Rome: Implications for U.S. Primacy?

Angevin13, over at The Oxford Medievalist, recently put up a great post on the fall of Rome in which he reviews Peter Heather's The Fall of the Roman Empire.

Angevin provides an excellent analsysis. Even better, though, is that his writing's a pleasure to behold! The post was written in response to the recent claim by the Comptroller of the Currency that the lessons of the rise and fall of the Roman empire might have some contemporary implications for the longevity of U.S. global leadership.

Here's how Angevin condudes the post:

I do have some exit questions that some people may want to debate. I happen to believe it's chauvinistic to think the United States will endure forever, unchanged. Assuming it does not, will the end be more like the fall of the Roman Republic, or the fall of the Roman Empire? If the latter, will it be like Gibbon's "internal maladies" thesis, or Heather's "exogenous shock"? More than a few acquaintances of mine have opined that our present illegal immigration problem is comparable to the wave of Germanic migrations the Romans faced in the fourth and fifth centuries. I think, at present, that hypothesis has some merit, but is also deeply flawed. But I'll opt out here and let you all flesh that out...

Here's my response from the comments:

Your historical analysis and review of Heather's thesis is precise and well-stated. I don't know enough of the history to quibble with any of it.

Yet, I'm skeptical of the rise and fall thesis for the U.S. case, which ties in to the decline and fall argument. The debate on American decline was going really strong in the late-1980s with the rise of Japanese industrial competitiveness and the significant structural economic problems the U.S. was facing in the late Reagan administration (especially the huge trade and budget deficits).

Historians and political scientists spent a lot of time analyzing the issues, and much of the analysis was very persuasive. I was particularly inclined to support more of an activist trade and industrial policy to promote strategic sectors in the economy, which might have had an impact on beating back Japanese attempts at world high-tech predominance.

In hindsight, our worries of U.S. decline were overblown. The U.S. outgrew all the Western democratic economies in the 1990s. By the end of the decade, America had stretched its lead on all the major measures of great power status. American unipolarity was so pronounced, that some scholars argued that even if a balancing coalition of states wanted to rein in American hegemony, the U.S. lead (in the economy and military spending - which was larger than the top 20 economies combined) was so pronounced that others simply gave up any efforts.

Today, while the considerable budget deficits of the Bush years have troubled some economists, it's been American difficulties in Iraq that have raised the declining hegemon thesis again.

I'm of the belief that while the U.S. is currently strained militarily, economically defense spending as a percentage of GDP is sustainable, and thus we would not be getting to the point of "imperial overstretch" that was the popular critique in the '80s. Paul Kennedy - in "The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers" (1987) - wrote that countries that were overextended military were likely to face strategic decline over the long term.

The problem here? History proved Kennedy wrong. Today, to the extent that the U.S. faces relative decline, one has to analyze comparatively the prospects for America's peer competitors to bridge the gap in America's power vis-a-vis their own.

Even countries like China face decades before they could supplant the U.S. as the world's most vibrant and dominant nation. The locus of technological and financial innovation remains in the U.S. Talk of financial power in Beijing - with the large Chinese balance of payments surpluses - omits the point that for China to pull the plug on capital liquidity to the U.S. would be tantamount to torpedoing its most important consumer market. Economic interdependence makes both parties to a bilataral relationship vulnerable.

How will the U.S. collapse and disintegrate? It's a fascinating question. Most likely it will be a combination of economic weakness and internal chaos (perhaps unmanageable ethnic segmentation emerging from greater and greater diversity). Yet, Rome's probably not the model of what will happen to the U.S. in the wake of imperial decline. Britain is. We will move into the ranks of second rate powers, and hitch our interests to the dominant state in the system. This could be centuries from now, as far as we know.

The point about immigration needs to be looked at in context, of course. If high rates of continuing in-migration result in demands for ethnic separation (in the Southwest, for example), the traditional assimilationist melting pot model could be threatened and overturned. It's something that has to be considered, and perhaps a period of restrictionism in immmigration - as was the case in the early 20th century - might work to incorporate those already here and build up and renew American national identity.

On the other hand, demographically, the U.S. is expected to be in a much better position in terms of the percentage of young, productive citizens compared to the other advanced democracies. America is much more likely to sustain a large economy and avoid a debilitating social welfare cost liability than is true in the case of countries like Japan.

Given an analysis like this, U.S. preponderance will endure. And should America's dominant ideology of capitalism, liberty, and inclusion prevail over fissiparous multicultural tendencies, then talk of a Roman-style collapse will look quaint and ill-informed - for decades, if not centuries, into the future.

For more information on this, see some my posts on the durability of U.S. primacy (here, here, and here).

And don't forget to sure to check out Angevin's page!

Graffiti Taggers Allegedly Kill Neighborhood Leader

I was very moved by this story of Maria Hicks, of Pico Rivera, who was killed last Friday when she confronted a youth graffiti tagger in her neighborhood:

Maria Hicks lived in her quiet Pico Rivera neighborhood her whole life -- two houses down from her mother, and across the street from her daughter and three grandchildren.

She believed in keeping up the neighborhood, and few things bothered her more than newly scrawled graffiti.

On Friday night, police said, Hicks, 57, was driving home from visiting her sister in Whittier when she noticed a teenager spraying graffiti on a cinder-block wall two blocks from her house near San Gabriel River Parkway and Woodford Street.

Hicks honked her horn and flashed her lights at the teenager. As he walked away, she followed him in her car. Suddenly, another car pulled up behind her and someone fired several rounds through Hicks' rear windshield. She was struck in the back of the head and died Monday at a local hospital.

"You think about it, and my mom died over a can of spray paint," said Hicks' daughter, Melinda Wall, 34. "She was not one to hold her tongue. She felt strongly about keeping your community nice."

Sheriff's detectives arrested three people Wednesday in connection with Hicks' slaying, which has touched a nerve in Pico Rivera and beyond. Residents took part in a community candlelight vigil Wednesday night, and her death has sparked discussions in communities around Southern California dealing with a rise in graffiti and other gang-related vandalism.

Read the whole story.

I was amazed a couple of weeks back with all the graffiti in New York, some of it in fact demonstrating tremendous creative artistry. But stories like this one remind me that graffiti is a sign of crime, social breakdown, and the loss of order in a community.

I send my condolences to the family, and hope and pray that her killers are brought to justice.

Iraq Progress Causing Fits on the Left

I haven't finished reading the Der Speigel article on the dramatic progress of U.S. forces in securing large sectors of Iraq. It's worth noting some points about it now, however.

The piece opens with a discussion of the consolidation of peace in the city of Ramadi just weeks after a series of deadly U.S. firefights with insurgents. Just prior to the engagement locals said the area was a virtually uninhabitable security nightmare. Here's a key synopsis of the argument, especially as it relates to the enduring meme on the left that the war is "lost" :

Ramadi is an irritating contradiction of almost everything the world thinks it knows about Iraq -- it is proof that the US military is more successful than the world wants to believe. Ramadi demonstrates that large parts of Iraq -- not just Anbar Province, but also many other rural areas along the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers -- are essentially pacified today. This is news the world doesn't hear: Ramadi, long a hotbed of unrest, a city that once formed the southwestern tip of the notorious "Sunni Triangle," is now telling a different story, a story of Americans who came here as liberators, became hated occupiers and are now the protectors of Iraqi reconstruction.

Der Speigel's article joins a growing number of reports indicating that the surge is working. This USA Today article notes that the incidence of large-scale, al-Qaeda style truck bombings have declined by about half since early this year. Michael Yon, as well, continues to provide his online dispatches, which paint not only military progress, but political movement as well.

With the increasing frequency of positive reporting on the Iraq project, I'm sometimes blown away at leftist efforts to discredit the good news. A troubling case in point is this post by TRex over at FireDogLake.

TRex attacks Michael O'Hanlon in regards to his recent New York Times article making the center-left case for progress on the surge. Apparently, in an interview with Glenn Greenwald of Slate, O'Hanlon was peppered to the point of exhaustion regarding his on-the-ground research methods in Iraq. Most of O'Hanlon's sources for the update apparently were American, so TRex attacks him as a liar in his post:

I’ve been waiting for what seems like ages for Glenn Greenwald to publish the column detailing the results of his interview with feted “war critic” turned Iraq War cheerleader Michael O’Hanlon, and boy howdy, it doesn’t disappoint. You can read Greenwald’s column here with a full transcript of the conversation available here.

One by one, my man G2 demolishes the pillars supporting the conventional wisdom about O’Hanlon and Pollack’s wildly mendacious Op-Ed, “A War We Just Might Win” until finally, poor O’Hanlon must have desperately wanted to curl up and hide, whimpering, underneath the table. This is why over at Sadly, No! they call Greenwald, “Glennzilla”.

The lies are so thick on the ground around this issue that it’s hard to know where to begin, but let’s start with one of the more glaring falsehoods, that O’Hanlon and Pollack (both from the pro-Iraq-War “liberal” think tank, the Brookings Institute) were “fierce critics” of the president’s catastrophic invasion of Iraq.

Read the rest. TRex is mad because O'Hanlon since 2003 - in his periodic New York Times updates - has been a sober skeptic on the possibility of U.S. success in the war, and now he's changed his stripes. Maybe O'Hanlon's in fact a fire-breathing Cheneyite under cover at the liberal-leaning Brookings institution. It's all so subterranean!

The problem is that TRex has only succeeded in demonstrating how well he can work to impugn someone's reputation. He compares O'Hanlon's reporting with Judith Miller's New York Times articles making the case for Iraqi WMD in the run-up to the war. That ought to get the radical hordes fired up!

Unfortunately, the evidence is coming in too strongly for TRex to even have a shred of credibility. His post looks like a desperate rear-guard attempt to spin success into failure. Liberals are quaking that the U.S. might win in Iraq.

One might expect if the left "supported the troops" they'd be applauding at the news of American and Iraqi progress. Given FireDogLake's project (and I'm sure many others in the left blogosphere), that'd be a bad bet.

Hat tip to Jules Crittenden.

The Leftist Tide in American Politics?

Is America turning left? The Economist wants to know:

FOR George Bush, the presidency is becoming a tragic tale of unintended consequences. In foreign policy, the man who sought to transform Iraq, the Middle East and America's reputation has indeed had revolutionary effects, though not the ones he was aiming for. Now something similar seems to be happening in domestic politics. The most conservative president in recent history, a man who sought to turn his victories of 2000 and 2004 into a Republican hegemony, may well end up driving the Western world's most impressive political machine off a cliff.
That machine has put Republicans in the White House in seven of the past ten contests. At times it has seemed as if the Democrats (oddly, given their status as the less Godly party) have had to rely on divine intervention to get elected. Watergate helped Jimmy Carter in 1976, just as the end of the cold war and Ross Perot's disruptive third-party campaign helped Bill Clinton in 1992. Better organised and more intellectually inventive than their “liberal” rivals, American conservatives have controlled the agenda even when they have lost: Mr Clinton is best remembered for balancing the budget and passing welfare reform, both conservative achievements. In a country where one in three people see themselves as conservatives (against one in five as liberals) and where the South and West have grown far more quickly than the liberal north-east, it is easy to see why Mr Bush and his strategist, Karl Rove, dreamed of banishing Democrats from power for a generation.

Now they would settle for a lot less. Having recaptured Congress last year, the Democrats are on course to retake the presidency in 2008. Only one Republican, Rudy Giuliani, looks competitive in the polls, and his campaign is less slick than those of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Voters now favour generic Democratic candidates over Republican ones by wide margins. Democrats are more trusted even on traditional conservative issues, such as national security, and they have opened up a wide gap among the young, among independents and among Latinos (see article).

The easy scapegoat is Mr Bush himself. During his presidency, the words Katrina, Rumsfeld, Abramoff, Guantánamo and Libby have become shorthand for incompetence, cronyism or extremism. Indeed, the failings of Mr Bush's coterie are oddly reassuring for some conservatives: once he has gone, they can regroup, as they did after his father was ousted in 1992.

Yet this President Bush is not a good scapegoat. Rather than betraying the right, he has given it virtually everything it craved, from humongous tax cuts to conservative judges. Many of the worst errors were championed by conservative constituencies. Some of the arrogance in foreign policy stems from the armchair warriors of neoconservatism; the ill-fated attempt to “save” the life of the severely brain-damaged Terri Schiavo was driven by the Christian right. Even Mr Bush's apparently oxymoronic trust in “big-government conservatism” is shared in practice by most Republicans in Congress.

From this perspective, the worrying parallel for the right is not 1992 but the liberal overreach of the 1960s. By embracing leftish causes that were too extreme for the American mainstream—from unfettered abortion to affirmative action—the Democrats cast themselves into the political wilderness. Now the American people seem to be reacting to conservative over-reach by turning left. More want universal health insurance; more distrust force as a way to bring about peace; more like greenery; ever more dislike intolerance on social issues.

Read the whole thing (and also click on The Economist's supplemental analysis of trends in partisan identification).

Next year does look to be a Democratic year in terms of party dynamics. But I don't think we're heading toward a long-term realignment toward Democratic liberalism (some analysts even argue that the GOP retains the edge toward lasting party preeminance). But the final paragraph of The Economist's piece is intriguing:

One finding that stands out in the polls is that most Americans distrust government strongly. Forty years ago they turned against a leftish elite trying to boss them around; now they have had to endure a right-wing version. In democracies political revolutions usually become obvious only in retrospect. In 1968, with America stuck in another bruising war, few liberals saw Richard Nixon's southern strategy as part of a long-term turn to the right. All that was clear then was that most Americans urgently wanted a change of direction. That is also true today.

I think the main changes people want are two: success in Iraq and economic security. Until those two issue areas improve, Democratic prospects will remain bright.

Real Men Don't Cry

Men aren't supposed to cry, right? At least that's what cultural gender roles tell us.

Well, check out Gordon Marino's "My Turn" column over at Newsweek. Marino admits he breaks down sobbing quite a bit, something that's happened to him frequently since hitting the 50-year mark:

I was recently writing a piece about Joe Frazier and his monumental first fight with Muhammad Ali, and, the next thing I knew, my keyboard was awash in tears. I have the utmost respect for Mr. Frazier's courage in the ring, but it seemed odd to be weeping over Smokin' Joe.

I was a fanatical sport parent and pushed one of my sons very hard in football. He had some significant success, but in the end was too small to succeed at the Division I level. My son is thriving and is now at peace with his football past, but all I need to do is recall the hours we spent practicing together for my face to steam up and the floodgates to open.

Though men don't talk about it much, I don't think I'm alone in my middle-age crying jags. An Army colonel acquaintance who was also a professor needed only to start talking about his former students to get a catch in his throat.

Another friend, a college administrator, would find himself in the middle of a meeting and suddenly his eyes would be seeping—about what, it was hard for him to say. Stoically, he would go on, but some people were unnerved by his display of raw emotion.

Though he is well past the half-century mark, former president Bush began sobbing inconsolably in an address to the Florida House to mark the end of his son Jeb's tenure as governor. He did the same when he was on "Larry King Live" with his daughter.

Then, this past winter, there was the fiftysomething John Kerry choking up as he hit the words "home" and "Vietnam" in his speech to the Senate.

In truth, we men don't know what to say or do about these emotional squalls. When tears started visiting me at awkward times, I would try to hide them, even from my wife. There was a part of me that wanted to laugh as I wept, which in itself was something to cry about.

Yeah, guys try to hide the tears. But, I'm not very weepy personally. There I times I think I should be crying - or times when I wish I as crying (especially after another one of my 5 year-old son's periodic destructive rampages across my new townhome's interior infrastructure) - but no tears come.

When my Dad passed away in 2004, I barely shed a tear. Yet, when I saw "The Rookie" at the theaters in 2002, I was bawling like a child at the heart-tugging seen when Jim Morris's dad shows up at Arlington Stadium to apologize to his boy for not being supportive of his son's aspirations as a child.

Now, that made me sad! The scene must have pressed the button to release all the pent-up father-son repressed emotions.

I could mention a few more films that made my gush like Niagra Falls. That's about the only time I let the tears rip! Maybe because it's dark in those theaters!

What is a Chicken Hawk? An Update

Some time ago I posted a popular entry, "What is a Chicken Hawk?"

In that post I cited Jeff Jacoby's response to the liberal slur against non-uniformed supporters of the Iraq war. You know the attack: "If you're so gung-ho on this disastrous imperial war, why don't you enlist and put your body in harm's way yourself?"

I wrote the post originally to respond to a rabidly hate-filled attack on my pro-administration stance.

I still get these upleasant rants, of course, generally of the same venomous variety. Lefty commenters here just can't stand that I'm a civilian educator who supports the war. I'm attacked as a fascist blowhard, a "BushHitler" lemming, or whatever the most recent denunciation happens to be. You know what I'm talking about!

Recently I've been attacked by the anonymous guy over at Ecophotos blog. He first attacked me some time back - out of the blue - after I'd left a friendly comment on Echidne of the Snake's blog during one of my "good morning" commenting rounds to other bloggers.

Apparently, Ecophoto Man doesn't like what I write, and he's taken exception to my post on Markos Moulitsas, "The Daily Kos Syndrome." He called rightwingers "assholes" in his first comment (under the pseudonym "The New Civil War in Amerca"). But rather than debate the post by examining my critique of Kos's Washington Post essay, Ecophoto Man has returned for additional attacks. Here's a snippet of Ecophoto Man's rant:

I AM A LIBERAL, A DEMOCRAT, AND A LOYAL AMERICAN CITIZEN WHOSE KID IS SERVING IN IRAQ (A CAPTAIN IN THE U.S. ARMY AND CURRENTLY ON HER THIRD DEPLOYMENT). YOUR WILD AND INCORRECT ASSERTION OFFENDS ME. GET A LIFE!

WRONG, MR. DOUGLAS. YOUR PARTISAN IDEOLOGY HAS NO ROOM TO HONOR THE SACRIFICES OF... THOSE FAMILIES WHO JUST HAPPEN TO BE ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE AISLE. YOU AND YOUR READERS ARE LITTLE MORE THAN SELF-CONGRATULATING SYCOPHANTS.

I've think I've joked before about the PROCLIVITY FOR CAPITAL LETTERS in one of my earlier posts.

Notice the appeal to military service - Ecophoto Man's got a kid in uniform! The chicken hawk slur is alive and well!

So let's update a bit here: Lisa De Pasquale's got a great esssy up today at Townhall.com, "Are We Hypocrites for Not Enlisting?" The essay's a reponse to the recent criticism of Mitt Romney, who recently defended his sons in their choice not to enlist in the military. Here's the key segment of De Pasquale's entry:

Liberals’ incessant calls to draft every 18-year-old College Republican is tantamount to the disrespect they have for the military. They demand that every person who supports the war join the military or send their children. If they don’t, they’re hypocrites. This isn’t going to be a winning strategy for the Left. Is every person that wears an AIDS ribbon, but doesn’t go to Africa (as Laura and Jenna Bush did) to help children with HIV/AIDS a hypocrite? Are vice presidents and celebrities that travel in private jets and SUVs while lecturing the little people on the proper amount of toilet paper also hypocrites?

In Treason, Ann Coulter wrote, “Instead of relentlessly attacking the military as immature or testosterone crazed – meaning ‘braver than me’ – liberals might have the good grace to realize they live in a country where big burly men are willing to protect them from bullies.” Thanks to those extraordinary men and women that persevered through the recruitment process and continue to serve, we all enjoy freedoms that we ourselves are not willing or able to fight for.

As I noted to Ecophoto Man, the chicken hawk argument doesn't fly with me (it's dumb and intellectually dishonest).

I'll note, though, as I have before: My family members have served in uniform in World War I, World War II, and the Korean War. But it's really not necessary to mount this type of defense: It doesn't matter if conservatives or their family members have served. The chicken hawk attack is just a deflection: Liberals don't want to debate the real issues, so they'll assume your lack of military credentials, and then attack you as a hypocrite. It's pathetic, but that's the way it is on the irrational left these days.

But hey, check out Jules Crittenden's response to the chicken hawk slur as well! With all the tough liberal talk of standing up for principle, maybe we'll see more peaceniks chuggin' on over to Iraq to line up as human shields!

Update: Ecophoto Man has posted his entire rant in the comments section of a Daily Kos post.

Now I know what's gotten that old "Swampcracker" all riled up! (Swampcracker's one more of Ecophoto Man's many pseudonyms.) If you attack the prophet the faithful will retaliate in a rage of pious passion. Where's Islamic Rage Boy when you need him!

A Comment on Postmodern Logic

I'm endlessly fascinated by the funky argumentative logics of the radical left. As some of my readers have noticed, I've initiated a number of debates with lefty bloggers in recent weeks (see here and here).

Some have asked: Why do I do it? Sure, a lot of it is fascination and a hint of orneriness. But more seriously, my response is that engaging the enemy at home is the best way to learn about the nature and capabilities of the adversary. And I do think we have an enemy at home in the hardline left, which I see as a modern fifth column movement seeking the destruction of the country.

It's difficult to engage lefties in debate, however. Even the most evidentiary, logical, or principled argument will fail to persuade a postmodern ideologue. As Dr. Sanity points out in a recent post, postmodernists somehow manage to win all arguments:

Substitute almost any talking point of today's political left for "Manmade Global Warming Debate". and you their tried and true recipe for "winning" debates: ignore reality, truth, and reason.

It turns out that postmodern philosophy and rhetoric are simply perfect for this purpose (see here, here, here, here, here and here, for example) and can be mobilized rapidly whenever there is the slightest possibility that a glimpse of the real world might break through the barrier of perpetual psychological denial.

Those who live in the wonderful world of denial go through their daily lives secure in the knowledge that their self-image is protected against any information, feelings, or awareness that might make them have to change their world view. Nothing--and I mean NOTHING--not facts, not observable behavior; not the use of reason or logic; or their own senses will make an individual in denial re-evaluate that world view. All events will simply be reinterpreted to fit into the belief system of that world--no matter how ridiculous, how distorted, or how psychotic that reinterpretation appears to others. Consistency, common sense, reality, and objective truth are unimportant and are easily discarded--as long as the world view remains intact.

This is one of the wondrous aspects of postmodern rhetoric, where reality and truth are only relative, is that anybody's "reality" is as good as anybody else's. For the dedicated postmodernist, polls and opinion are the final arbiters of truth; and the results of a poll or two, constructed along ideological lines to fit a particular template, is all you need to confirm your reality.

Reality is a matter of opinion (simply ignore any polls that don't agree with your reality, of course). This type of useful rhetoric can even determine today, what history will say many tomorrows from now. With enough repetition and passion, "history" can be set in stone in the temporal present!

Extremely convenient for anyone who wants to avoid confronting their own contradictions in the present.

The rhetorical passion and word play is mere camouflage for the inherent philosophical and psychological contradictions that the postmodern left exploits in order to achieve and maximize political power. They are perfectly aware that their positions don't make any sense and can be refuted by anyone with basic knowledge of logic and logical fallacies; but their goal is to maintain the psychological denial necessary to believe in the left's ideology. Interpreting this defense and exposing it is essential to countering that ideology.

Read the whole thing. Dr. Sanity also adds this point a little later in the entry:

The entire purpose of the contradictory discourse technique is actually to shut down any argument or debate.

The opposite of my fascination with the left's flawed argumentative logics is the pure, almost raging frustration I get with these types. I think this flows from my profession as a teacher.

In the classroom, when engaging students in discussion, there is the air of the institutional mission to educate, to open minds, to challenge beliefs and opinions with countervailing data or arguments. Most students have a sense of respect and deference for knowledgeable discourse grounded in evidence or history.

I don't find that to be the case in exchanges with the radicals. In fact, in one of my debates with one of the craziest of my left opponents, my arguments caused so much frustration on the other side as to elicit a violent reaction, and some retaliation.

In any case, that's enough of this for today. I'll be posting more on liberal irrationalism as the whim dictates.

Civilian Casualties and U.S. Conduct in Iraq

Colin Kahl, writing in the new International Security (PDF), provides an outstanding examination of the U.S. military's record of minimizing noncombatant casualities in the Iraq war.

Kahl's research shows that while the war has resulted in a heavy loss of civilian life, U.S. forces in Iraq have a better record of limiting noncombatant fatalities than in America's previous wars. Further, a powerful norm of noncombatant immunity has generated tremendous collective expectations for combat behavior that conforms with international human rights standards.

Here's the comparison of the record in Iraq to earlier wars:

The number of documented fatalities attributable to U.S. forces or crossfire in Iraq is much lower than those for many other U.S. military campaigns of the last century where civilians were clearly targeted. During World War II, for example, U.S. and British forces engaged in strategic bombing against German and Japanese cities, killing more than 1 million noncombatants. In a single night of U.S. firebombing over Tokyo in 1945, at least 85,000 people, mostly civilians, were incinerated—nearly 21 times the total number of civilian deaths from U.S. air strikes in Iraq through the end of 2006 (according to IBC data), and 6–10 times the total number of Iraqi civilians killed by all U.S. ground and air forces or crossfire in the first three and one-half years of the war. Although some might argue that improvements in precision-guided munitions account for the majority of this historical difference, many of the noncombatant fatalities from bombing during World War II were the result of attacks aimed at destroying enemy morale, not incidental by-products of crude targeting and guidance technologies.

Perhaps the most telling comparisons, however, are to the U.S. wars in the Philippines and Vietnam, the two most significant foreign counterinsurgency campaigns in U.S. history. In the Philippines between 1899 and 1902, approximately 16,000 guerrillas were killed and at least 200,000 civilians perished (out of a total population of 7.4 million in 1900). U.S. forces engaged in the widespread destruction of crops, buildings, civilian property, and entire villages as forms of collective punishment against families and communities suspected of supporting insurgents. Hundreds of thousands of Filipino civilians were moved to concentration camps to separate them from guerrillas, and ablebodied men who dared to venture outside of these “protected zones” were assumed to be enemies and could be shot.

In Vietnam, the United States also fought in ways that put civilians directly in the crosshairs. Almost 750,000 North Vietnamese troops and Vietcong were killed during the war, and a conservative estimate of civilian deaths from violence in South Vietnam places the total at 522,000 (out of a total population of 16 million in 1966). U.S. troops fighting in Vietnam relied on massive firepower directed on occasion at targets in densely populated areas. U.S. forces established “free fire zones” in some areas, allowing anyone not wearing a South Vietnamese military uniform to be shot. The U.S. military used more than 29 times the tonnage of incendiary bombs in Vietnam as it did in World War II, and sprayed toxic defoliants on land in South Vietnam that was home to about 3 percent of the population. U.S. forces were also involved in many cases of outright murder and several incidents of mass killing. In the most notorious case, at My Lai on March 16, 1968, as many as 571 unarmed men, women, and children were massacred by a platoon of U.S. soldiers. Recently declassified records show abuses were documented in every U.S. Army division deployed to Vietnam.

The contrast between the current Iraq war and previous U.S. counterinsurgency campaigns is striking. Adjusted for population size and duration, civilian deaths in Iraq through the end of 2006 were 11–17 times lower than in the Philippines. Because available data for the Philippines do not separate casualties caused by U.S. forces, this estimate is based on all violent deaths in Iraq. This certainly underestimates the difference between the Philippines and Iraq because, in the former case, anecdotal evidence strongly suggests that U.S. troops were responsible for a much higher percentage of total deaths. In the case of Vietnam, extrapolations from available hospital records suggest that at least 177,480 South Vietnamese civilians were killed by U.S. bombing and shelling. Controlling for population and duration, Iraqi civilian fatalities ttributable to direct U.S. action and crossfire through the end of 2006 were 17–30 times lower than those from bombing and shelling alone in Vietnam. Without adjusting for population, the average monthly deaths are still 10–16 times lower than in Vietnam.

Outside the U.S. context, contemporary Russian counterinsurgency efforts in Chechnya offer an even starker contrast. In the two Chechen wars (1994–96 and 1999–present), the Russians used an extraordinary amount of indiscriminate firepower, including intensive artillery and aerial bombardment in dense urban settings. The lowest estimate of civilian deaths attributable to Russian actions through 2003 is 50,000 out of a total Chechen population of approximately 1 million (other estimates place the death toll for the two wars as high as 250,000). Even the most conservative estimate is 100–175 times the U.S.-caused toll in Iraq through 2006 (controlling for duration and population). Given the nature of the conflict, the number of civilians killed in Iraq, however awful, is not sufficient to suggest systematic U.S. noncompliance with the norm of noncombatant immunity. On the contrary, compared with conflicts where civilians were directly targeted, Iraqi casualty data provide some indirect evidence for U.S. adherence.

Kahl takes a look at a range of factors contributing to the high level of American compliance with the laws of war in minimizing noncombatant casualties. There has been an almost incredible effort by the American military to prevent unintended death. Steps to this effect include developing "off limits" targeting protocols and preapproved "strike lists"; embedding operations observers with forward-deployed troops to facilitate the designation of insurgent targets versus civilian assets; and the deployment of precision-guided weaponry and mitigation practices.

The author suggest that as ambitious and effective as these noncombatant protection practices have been, there remain a number of cases of U.S. noncompliance with international standards of civilian protection. These instance include collateral damage casualities reaching totals outside of acceptable levels, escalation of force incidents after the initial stage of major combat (where U.S. forces often overreacted to perceived threats emanating from civilians), and the military's practice of mounting large-scale offensive operations in the earlier years of the counterinsurgency period, which were widely criticized as inadequately planned to avoid noncombatant fatalities.

Yet, events like the 2005 Haditha atrocity have been relatively rare events throughout the U.S. deployment. These tragedies have generated widespread media coverage, and military officials have worked even more diligently to guarantee against additional episodes of U.S. noncompliance. Additionally, criminal investigations are launched at the outset of allegations of noncombatant deaths at the hands of U.S. soldiers.

What's noteworthy as well is that military analysts have suggested that the U.S. has done so well in adhering to international norms against civilian killing that rules to limit such incidents indeed may have placed U.S. forces at a tactical disadvantage. Under rules of engagement carefully proscribing when American troops may use deadly force, significant numbers of insurgent and militia members have survived engagements with U.S. forces, melting back into the general population to fight and kill another day, and to destabilize the Iraqi population.

Kahl provides a powerful quote that capture the ethos of compliance among the American military in Iraq. In describing what he expected of a company of paratroopers as they prepared for the assault on Samawah in 2003, a captain of the 82 Airborne announced:

I need guys who can hit targets. I need guys who will do anything to protect their buddies. I need guys who are ready to kill. . . . And I want you to remember something. You are Americans. Americans don’t shoot women and children. They don’t kill soldiers that have surrendered. That’s what the assholes we’re up against do. That’s what we’re fighting. We’re gonna do things differently. But if your life is in danger, you shoot. And you shoot to
kill.

The bottom line is that the popular perception on the left of the U.S. military in Iraq as an occupation army committing wanton atrocities across the civilian space in Iraq is wrong. The U.S. has not engaged in an indiscrimate campaign of gross human rights violations. There have been a number of highly publicized cases of U.S. violations of international rights standards - Abu Graib, for example - but these case have in fact been substantial anomolies in an otherwise U.S. regime of aggressive compliance with the laws of war.

Critical commentators in the left-wing press, academe, and among the radical antiwar contingents would do well to read this research and evaluate U.S. practices for what they are: Agressive tactics for protecting civilian life in wartime, and the judicious development and extension of rules of engagement and protocols advancing the cause of America's just war mission in the liberation of Iraq.

Update: Who links to this post?

Central Sanity: "Soldiers and Civilians."

Chicago Ray: "Wednesday's Hero Blogburst."

Right Truth: "Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps Now Terrorist Organization."

The Rove Legacy

Karl Rove never moved me all that much. He appeared to serve the role that any loyal presidential advisor should serve, which is to provide the best tactical and strategic advice to advance the political power of his boss, and that of the party. Rove's tenure in the White House is noncontroversial from my perspective.

What will be Rove's legacy? This morning's Los Angeles Times provides a nice analysis:

In nearly a decade as the guiding political strategist for George W. Bush and the Republican Party, Karl Rove was often hailed as a genius. He masterminded Bush's rise to national prominence, directed his two winning presidential campaigns and wrote a campaign playbook for GOP success in Congress and statehouses across the country.

Some Republican strategists, including Rove himself, even dreamed that the system Rove created would make the party invincible, able to dominate American politics for decades.

Now, as Rove prepares to leave the White House at the end of the month, the party that bears his imprint faces a difficult question: Can "Rovism" survive Rove? Will Rove's unique combination of innovative campaign techniques and polarizing hardball tactics translate into long-term success for his party? Or has it seen its best days?

One thing seems clear: History will rank Rove as one of the most powerful political advisors of modern times. With his influence stretching beyond campaign strategy to policy decisions and the inner workings of the most prosaic of federal agencies, Rove ranks with President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Harry Hopkins and President McKinley's Mark Hanna.

But looking to the 2008 elections and beyond, even some Republicans say that though some of Rove's techniques have revolutionized politics and changed the way both parties organize their campaigns, other parts of Rovism contained the seeds of its eventual destruction.

Rove's relentlessly polarizing tactics and his over-the-top use of government power for political purposes, critics say, were bound to wear out their welcome with a fundamentally pragmatic and moderate electorate.

Read the whole thing. The article continues with an interpretation of Bush's fortunes I've long held: The political difficulties of the Bush years - and those of the Republican Party going forward - rest not so much in the adminstration's "Great Society conservative" ideology and its failures, but rather in the rubble of America's liberation of Iraq.

More than anything else, the Iraq war will be the key determinant of the upcoming fortunes of the GOP. Had Iraq's reconstruction been better planned - with less disorder, looting, destruction, and death - the United States might have consolidated its lighting military victory and turned Iraq's regime change into an internationally popular war of liberation. In contrast, nearly five years of military struggle - which has allowed critiques to frame the war as a "disaster" and a "quagmire" - have left the GOP with an unnecessay foreign policy albatross.

In terms of political strategy, those faulting Rove's overreaching or his ideological inconsistencies would be well to remember that he deeply understood the power of partisanship as electoral strategy. I wince sometimes when I hear all this talk about "bipartisaship" or efforts to move beyond "political paralysis." But politics at its core is about achieving power and implementing policies based on a deep-seated set of partisan beliefs about the role of government.

Rove knew what hot-button socially conservative issues would fire up the base - abortion, same-sex marriage, gun rights - and he pushed these to capture slim electoral Repubican majorities. This deft exploitation of wedge issues - and his brainy, back room "architect" role at the White House - is what drives liberals to demonize this adminstration with their radical hardline leftist attacks.

Karl Rove as presidential advisor is no more evil than other successful campaign strategists from earlier periods of Democratic presidential power. For the left, he came to symbolize the Machiavellian inclination of the Bush "regime," and for that he'll forever remain in the liberal pantheon of "evil" operatives of the American political tradition.

Van Halen Announces New Tour

I was thinking about Van Halen yesterday after visiting Pia's Courting Destiny page. Pia grew up on Long Island, and in the post she talks about how she was kind of geeky growing up and into in high school. I left a comment, noting how I was kind of a geek too, and I reflected a bit on Van Halen:

I was kind of a late bloomer in high school as well. I’m a bit younger than you - Van Halen was hot when I was a junior, and I used to have a crush on this girl named Rae Marie Bonacci, and I used to think about her when “You Really Got Me” came on. When I went to the twentieth reunion a few years back, Rae Marie and some of the other hotties from back then start fawning over me (my wife thought it was kind of funny!).

So you never know how people will turn out or remember you!

I thought about Van Halen today as well, when on the way home from dropping off my course syllabi at my campus copy center Van Halen's cover of "Pretty Woman" came up on my local Jack FM syndicate.

So, with all the Van Halen-ing, I was interested to see that Van Halen announced a come back tour today:

They're in their 50s now, and they've traded their long heavy-metal locks for close-cropped cuts, but the original members of Van Halen are back in business and promise that they're better than ever.

"Usually, when a band comes back like us, it's rockers with walkers," frontman David Lee Roth told reporters at the Four Seasons Hotel here on Monday. "This is anything but."

Van Halen held a press conference to announce a 25-date concert tour beginning Sept. 27 in Charlotte, N.C. The re-formed group features three original members—Roth, guitarist Eddie Van Halen and drummer Alex Van Halen—along with Eddie Van Halen's son, Wolfgang, on bass.
"This is not a reunion," said Roth, 51. "This is a whole new band."

"It is totally blowing our minds and I think it will yours, too," said Eddie Van Halen, 52. "It's better than it's ever been."

With its flamboyant frontman, "Diamond Dave," Van Halen was one of the most popular rock bands of the 1980s. But the group split up in 1985 and the original lineup hasn't performed together since.

"I'm shocked any of us are still vertical," Roth quipped.

He and Eddie Van Halen insisted that the band's reunion isn't just a one-tour deal. After performing throughout North America, Van Halen plans to hit Asia and Australia.

"Then we make an album," Roth said, adding that the group has "lots of dreams, lots of ambitions."

"We really have re-formed this team like a brother team that it never was before," he said.
Wolfgang Van Halen, 16, brings "a young energy and a spirit" to the band, Roth said, adding that the teenage rocker chose the tour's song list, which features "close to 25 of your greatest hits."
"You know every single song, you know every guitar lick, every woo, every kick, every jump, every drum lick," he said. "We can't afford to shirk that duty."

The band has been rehearsing since October and plans to exceed fans' expectations, Roth said.

"None of us want to give you less than our best," said Eddie Van Halen. "And we are at our
best."

I faded away from listening to Van Halen in the early-1980s, as my skateboarding career took off, and along with it my Hollywood punk rocker credentials.

I listen to all the old stuff now, of course: I pump "Ain't Talkin' 'Bout Love" regularly on the Odyssey van's speakers when I'm chauffering my boys to art and swimming lessons. Usually, my oldest son plugs in his iPod ear buds to jam something a bit more cool for his pre-teen generation. He says "Van Halen's not hip, Dada."

He used to say that about Aerosmith a few years ago too, until one of his Disney Channel stars did a cover video of "Walk This Way." He now rocks back and forth to the beat when I pump that song on the radio, and we both point at each other and smile while singing, "just give me a kisssss!"

The Urban Killing Fields: Where is the Outcry?

Stanley Crouch, in his column up today at the New York Daily News, argues that the crisis of violence in urban America cries out for public debate and discussion. Yet, the issue is a hot potato on the presidential campaign trail:

We have now developed an urban badlands which is national and troubling because of the incredible numbers of people who are murdered or suffer the physical and psychological effects of violent crime. Our presidential candidates are quick on the draw when asked about the war on terror or homeland security, but the American people have not heard a peep from them about the concrete killing fields of our cities. Perhaps, because so many of the perpetrators and the victims are "people of color," the donkeys don't want to be seen as bleeding hearts while the elephants are afraid of being called racists.

In the 19th century, murderous cowboys, rustlers and bank or train robbers had neither the arms nor the occasions presented to them that could have resulted in the kinds of carnage we now take for granted. The mob wars of the 20th century left numbers of dead that would be pointed to with pride by a mayor today as proof of how much better things have gotten.

Addressing a dilemma tantamount to terrorism, a few months ago Ben Stein wrote in the conservative American Spectator that, "In the five and a half years since Sept. 11, 2001, there have been roughly 40,000 killings by gangs and gang members in this United States of America, mostly in the African-American and Hispanic sections of large cities." In his book, "The Devil and Dave Chappelle," William Jelani Cobb writes: "Between 1976 and 2004, African-Americans, who are 13% of the population, constituted nearly 47% of the homicide cases in the United States."

Besides all of the human costs of these murders, the burden is estimated by the World Health Organization to cost an annual $300 billion. That amounts to about 150 weeks in Iraq, or three years.

This would seem a good subject for presidential debates, right? Wrong, apparently.
But just last week the news media were often given to breast-beating as they reported on the three college students who were lined up against a wall and killed execution style in Newark. Newark youth worker Shamonique Jones, who lives in the area where the three were gunned down, told The New York Times that the tragedy was a matter of "being in the wrong place at the wrong time" because the Crips, who ominously trouble the neighborhood, do much of their recruiting in the summer months. On CNN those murders were put in the context of slaughters taking place at nauseating rates in many other American cities.

One Newark man interviewed by CBS seemed to speak for all of those living under the oppression of violent crime when he said that the neighborhood where the three young people were murdered is under siege. There seemed to be more robberies, burglaries and carjackings. But Newark Police Chaplain John McClain, who is the great uncle of one of the three victims, said that the killers should be thought of as what they are, terrorists.

A New Jersey resident asked a fundamental question, "Will these knuckleheads have to join the Ku Klux Klan before this country wakes up and faces the horror of what they are doing?" I think that question should be answered by every one of those running for President because the corpses will not have stopped piling up throughout our concrete killing fields when the next commander in chief is sworn in.

Croach is perceptive in his point that those on the left avoid the bleeding heart tag and conservatives hestitate to speak truth to race politics for fear of the racist label.

I've commented before that the Democrats, at a recent debate, missed the chance to seriously address the crisis of black underclass crime. Both parties, however, have an historic opportunity to make urban policy a major platform during the 2008 race. This shift would be especially smart for the GOP, as it moves to reestablish itself as the party of competent government and the champion of traditional values.