Cognitive dissonance...

The mainstream press, maintaining the storyline, regardless of the facts...

The Atlantic, 7/27/2012:

Syria's admission Monday that it has chemical weapons has revived a controversial theory about one of the biggest intelligence failures in American history: The non-existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The theory holds that Saddam Hussein did in fact have huge stockpiles of chemical weapons all along, but they were never uncovered by U.S. forces because he secretly smuggled them out to Syria days before the 2003 invasion of Iraq. If true, it's the type of revelation that would recaste the Iraq War in the history books...

Associated Press, 7/31/2012:

Britain will help the Iraqi government dispose of what's left of deposed Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's chemical weapons, still stored in two bunkers in north of Baghdad, the British embassy in Baghdad announced Monday...Saddam stored the chemical weapons near population centers so that he could access them quickly, despite the danger to his civilian population.

NY Times: Bush middle east policy vindicated

Ok, they didn't put it that way. But I will.

What the Times said was Libyan Arms Pact Reduces Qaddafi’s Power

In late 2009, the Obama administration was leaning on Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi and his son Seif to allow the removal from Libya of the remnants of the country’s nuclear weapons program: casks of highly enriched uranium.

Meeting with the American ambassador, Gene A. Cretz, the younger Qaddafi complained that the United States had retained “an embargo on the purchase of lethal equipment” even though Libya had turned over more than $100 million in bomb-making technology in 2003. Libya was “fed up,” he told Mr. Cretz, at Washington’s slowness in doling out rewards for Libya’s cooperation, according to cables released by WikiLeaks.

Today, with father and son preparing for a siege of Tripoli, the success of a joint American-British effort to eliminate Libya’s capability to make nuclear and chemical weapons has never, in retrospect, looked more important.

And why was that effort successful? Does anyone else remember this?

It received little notice at the time, but in an interview with the British Spectator in September, Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi (search) said Qaddafi had told him in a phone conversation that "I will do whatever the Americans want, because I saw what happened in Iraq, and I was afraid."

I do. Libya is one of the collateral benefits of Iraq, and it's been obvious for a very long time. Back in 2005, when Chuck Hagel decided to hop on the "rush-to-defeat" bandwagon, I made this comment about what had happened in Iraq:

2 1/2 years ago, Saddam Hussein was in power in Baghdad. He was paying the families of Palestinian suicide bombers. He was providing a haven for some Al-quaeda members. He was shooting at US and British planes that were enforcing the UN no-fly zones. He had the largest army in the middle-east. He was taking UN Oil-for-Food money and preventing aid in the form of food and medicine from reaching his oppressed citizens. Now he's gone, his armies are gone, his sons are gone and the Iraqi people have elected a representative government that's making progress towards a democratic constitution. The influence of the actions in Iraq has caused changes in behavior - positive changes of behavior - in Syria and Lebanon and Libya.

So, yeah, I'm going to say "Bush policy vindicated."

Hindsight

Kathryn Jean Lopez notes a change - finally! - in (highly paid New York Times columnist/Chi-Com Dictatorship cheerleader) Tom Friedman's tune on Iraq:

Thomas Friedman today:

Former President George W. Bush’s gut instinct that this region craved and needed democracy was always right. It should have and could have been pursued with much better planning and execution. This war has been extraordinarily painful and costly. But democracy was never going to have a virgin birth in a place like Iraq, which has never known any such thing.

Thomas Friedman in 2006:

It is now obvious that we are not midwifing democracy in Iraq. We are baby-sitting a civil war.

...

leaving, while bringing other problems, might also make it easier to build coalitions to deal with post-U.S. Iraq, Iran, Hezbollah and Syria.

Yes, hindsight's 20-20. But that doesn't mean that it wasn't possible to see that Friedman was wrong in 2006, as he's wrong about so much today. For example, here's some of what I was saying about Iraq in 2005:

2 1/2 years ago, Saddam Hussein was in power in Baghdad. He was paying the families of Palestinian suicide bombers. He was providing a haven for some Al-quaeda members. He was shooting at US and British planes that were enforcing the UN no-fly zones. He had the largest army in the middle-east. He was taking UN Oil-for-Food money and preventing aid in the form of food and medicine from reaching his oppressed citizens. Now he's gone, his armies are gone, his sons are gone and the Iraqi people have elected a representative government that's making progress towards a democratic constitution. The influence of the actions in Iraq has caused changes in behavior - positive changes of behavior - in Syria and Lebanon and Libya. On the day after that ridiculous comment, the New York Times, Bush administration mouthpiece, carries a front-page story that starts "Iraqi leaders moved to the brink of agreement on a new constitution on Sunday, solving several contentious issues..." And Hagel's got the nerve to go on the air yesterday and compare Iraq to Vietnam and say that "we're not winning."

and 2006:

The fact is that the "major campaigning" in Iraq lasted about 8 weeks. At which point in time, the country needed to be rebuilt. That's the exercise we've been involved in for the last 3 years. Has it been different than what I, or anyone else expected?

Welcome to reality.

...

If you'd told me 3 1/2 years ago that in the spring of 2006, Iraq would have held democratic elections, Afghanistan would have held democratic elections, there would not have been another attack on American soil because we're killing the terrorists over there instead of dealing with them over here, and that the American military death toll in Aghanistan and Iraq combined would not yet have reached the official New York death toll for 9/11, would I have supported that? The answer to that is not only "yeah," it's "hell, yeah!"

This really wasn't a hard call. But there were people like Friedman so blinded by their ideological response to George W. Bush that they weren't able to see it.

Blair keeping the faith

I'm not a particular fan of Tony Blair, another modern, "3rd-way" pseudo-socialist politician, but on this, I agree with him completely.

Former prime minister Tony Blair said Friday he had no regrets about removing Saddam Hussein after delivering a robust defence of the 2003 invasion of Iraq at a public inquiry into the war.

Rounding off his day-long evidence session, Blair said he accepted "responsibility but not a regret for removing Saddam," insisting the Iraqi leader was a "monster" who had "threatened not just the region but the world."

The thing is, for all of the "Bush lied, people died" nonsense that's followed, there was no serious doubt anywhere in early 2003 that Saddam Hussein had WMD programs. Bush knew, the British knew it, the French and Russians knew it - everyone knew it. We still don't know to what extent the weapons were moved or hidden or non-existent, but there wasn't anyone making a compelling case that they didn't exist before the war.

And, on a related topic, where are all of the "Bush is going to war for his oil buddies" people now? How'd that work out for you?

October surprise?

Does anyone remember allegations of an October surprise in 1980? The story was that George H. W. Bush supposedly flew to France to meet with representatives of the Ayatollah Khomeini, in an attempt to prevent the release of US hostages before the US elections. There is no credible evidence that it happened, but if there had been, there would have been an impeachment.

There may not be anything to this, either, but it warrants investigation.

WHILE campaigning in public for a speedy withdrawal of US troops from Iraq, Sen. Barack Obama has tried in private to persuade Iraqi leaders to delay an agreement on a draw-down of the American military presence.

According to Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari, Obama made his demand for delay a key theme of his discussions with Iraqi leaders in Baghdad in July.

"He asked why we were not prepared to delay an agreement until after the US elections and the formation of a new administration in Washington," Zebari said in an interview.

...

While in Iraq, Obama also tried to persuade the US commanders, including Gen. David Petraeus, to suggest a "realistic withdrawal date." They declined.

Perhaps someone needs to remind Mr. Obama that a) the President of the United States is the Commander in Chief and dictates foreign policy and b) he is not the President.

One wonders whether the mainstream press has enough resources to spare from the Palin investigation to look into these allegations...

Dear Mr. Obama

God Bless this young man, and all the others like him...

Barack Obama - wrong again

There's a common technique of sportswriters and pundits of talking about things that they got wrong, a way to do it so that you don't actually concede that you were wrong. Barack Obama has mastered it.

“I think that the surge has succeeded in ways that nobody anticipated,” Obama said while refusing to retract his initial opposition to the surge. “I’ve already said it’s succeeded beyond our wildest dreams.”

There it is. He was wrong, dead wrong, absolutely, totally wrong, could not be more wrong. But he can't admit that he was wrong, and tries to frame it so that he doesn't have to.

1. Find the issue one which you were wr...wr...wrong


2. Defend your position as being the correct position


3. Retroactively declare that there was total unanimity - "no one could have POSSIBLY foreseen this!"

In the case of the surge, it is obvious that, not only was he wrong then, he's wrong now.

"The surge has succeeded in ways that nobody anticipated."

Poppycock. George W. Bush, for one, anticipated the surge working. John McCain anticipated the surge working. General Petraeus, millions of other Americans, and I all anticipated the surge working. By retroactively declaring that no one anticipated it, you get to pass off poor judgment as good judgment. But he was W-R-O-N-G. George Bush was right. John McCain was right.

Barack Obama tried to lose the war in Iraq. He failed. And now, he wants no blame for taking that position, because he wants you to believe that winning was unforeseeable, and if it was unforeseeable, well, no one can blame him for not foreseeing it. But it wasn't unforeseeable, it was very predictable, it has played out much as many of us anticipated, and he demonstrated dreadful judgment in trying to prevent it from happening.

He won't tell you that that's what happened. But I will.

This is not a link to Sarah Palin in a bikini

Sometimes, you get one right.

I am going to brag on this prediction for quite a while.
It was one year and nine days ago that I wrote an e-mail that included the following:

things are going to change tremendously over the next 12 months. How they’ll change is anyone’s guess, but my expectation is that a year from now, the media will no longer be able to hide the fact that things are going well in Iraq, and that the world is better off because we went in.

Me, 7/18/2007

Where do we stand now? The AP, of all people, is acknowledging that maybe we're winning in Iraq.

The United States is now winning the war that two years ago seemed lost.

Limited, sometimes sharp fighting and periodic terrorist bombings in Iraq are likely to continue, possibly for years. But the Iraqi government and the U.S. now are able to shift focus from mainly combat to mainly building the fragile beginnings of peace — a transition that many found almost unthinkable as recently as one year ago.

Despite the occasional bursts of violence, Iraq has reached the point where the insurgents, who once controlled whole cities, no longer have the clout to threaten the viability of the central government.

There is much that they still don't understand, or get wrong, but it's good to see that the truth is finally starting to leech through.

Perspective

Because of the blatant and persistent bias in the American press, being a liberal means never having to say that you're sorry. No matter how often you are wrong:

Just keep in mind that if we had followed the starter Senator's judgment at any point during his political career, Iraq could have been too dangerous a place for his flight to even consider touching down.

Blowing my own horn again

The New Yorker, July 2008: "Iraq, despite myriad crises, has begun to stabilize.... The improved conditions can be attributed, in increasing order of importance, to President Bush’s surge, the change in military strategy under General David Petraeus, the turning of Sunni tribes against Al Qaeda, the Sadr militia’s unilateral ceasefire, and the great historical luck that brought them all together at the same moment. With the level of violence down, the Iraqi government and Army have begun to show signs of functioning in less sectarian ways."

Me, July 2007: "My expectation is that a year from now, the media will no longer be able to hide the fact that things are going well in Iraq."

Just sayin'...

We're winning this War on Terror

In the Times of London, Gerard Baker says Cheer up. We're winning this War on Terror

In America, large swaths of the political class continues to insist Iraq is a lost cause. The consensus in much of the West is that the War on Terror is unwinnable.

And yet the evidence is now overwhelming that on all fronts, despite inevitable losses from time to time, it is we who are advancing and the enemy who is in retreat...We are prevailing in this struggle. We know it. And everywhere: in Afghanistan, in Iraq, and among Muslims around the world, the enemy knows it too.

Good stuff.

Anbar province handoff

A year ago I wrote that "my expectation is that a year from now, the media will no longer be able to hide the fact that things are going well in Iraq."

Today, we see (from Reuters) Iraqi forces to take over security in Anbar

The U.S. military will transfer control of security in Iraq's Anbar province to Iraqi forces this week, a remarkable turnaround given the vast western region was considered lost to insurgents less than two years ago.

Anbar will be the 10th of Iraq's 18 provinces returned to Iraqi security control since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, but it will be the first Sunni Arab region handed back.

No word yet on when the "reality-based community" will be apprised of this reality...

Elections matter

This comment from Fred Kagan doesn't necessarily say it all, but it says a lot...

When American strategy in a critical theater was up for grabs, John McCain proposed a highly unpopular and risky path, which he accurately predicted could lead to success. Barack Obama proposed a popular and politically safe route that would have led to an unnecessary and debilitating American defeat at the hands of al Qaeda.

Frog with no legs is deaf

On July 8, 2007, License to Wed, a critical failure, opened at the US box office, and ended up taking in $10,422,258 for its opening weekend. It finished the year 50th on the list of the top-grossing movies of 2007.

There were also five Iraq-war related movies released in 2007. Each of which started with its fundamental premise a belief the George Bush is evil, the United States shouldn't be in Iraq, the US is wrong, the military is evil - standard left-wing, blame America first sensibilities. The people involved in these movies are some of the biggest box office draws in the world. Robert Redford, Tom Cruise and Meryl Streep headlined Lions for Lambs. Brian De Palma directed Redacted. Rendition starred Reese Witherspoon and Grace is Gone starred John Cusack. Tommy Lee Jones was the star of In The Valley of Elah.

Despite the starpower, and critical acclaim vastly exceeding License to Wed, not one of those movies finished ahead of it on the list. In fact, those five films combined opening weekend box office results were $10,935,511. That's right, the combined draw of those five critically acclaimed, high-powered films was slightly less than 5% higher than License to Wed.

So, what came out of Hollywood last weekend? You got it - another "the army is wrong" film, Stop-Loss. Anyone want to guess how well it did? Maybe this headline will contain a hint: Stop-Loss DOA.

The great thing about that piece is the quote from the "studio source" explaining why all of these movies are failing:

"It's not looking good - no one wants to see Iraq war movies. No matter what we put out there in terms of great cast or trailers, people were completely turned off. It's a function of the marketplace not being ready to address this conflict in a dramatic way because the war itself is something that's unresolved yet. It's a shame because it's a good movie that's just ahead of its time."

There are really two different things in that statement that need to be addressed.

First is the obvious business issue - if the studio knows before it releases it that there is no audience for the film, why the hell are they making and releasing it? Assume, for the moment, that the source is exactly right about why there is no audience, the fact is, they're saying up front that there is no audience. They are spending money making, promoting and releasing a movie that they already know no one wants to see. Does Paramount actually have share-holders? Is anyone responsible to them?

The second point, however, is going to challenge one of the assumptions from the first point. The source is assuming that people just aren't ready for Iraq-themed movies. I'm not aware that there's any evidence to support that point of view. If you want to say that the American public is not ready for movies pointing out how venal and ugly the US actions in Iraq are, that it's not ready for movies about how evil the US Army is, well, I suppose that's true. But this studio source is acting like the scientist in the old joke*, who carefully measures how far a frog can jump with four, three, two, one and no legs, and concludes that a frog with no legs is deaf. You can't keep making anti-American movies and assume that American audiences aren't going because they're about the war in Iraq.

Well, I guess you can, if you're a Hollywood studio executive, but there's a serious flaw in the logic behind the statement. If there was a movie about the war in Iraq in which the US Army was a force for good and not evil, the results may well be different.







* - A scientist puts a frog on the floor and says, "Jump, frog, jump!" And then he writes in his notebook, "frog with four legs can jump 20 feet."

He then cuts off one of the frog's front legs, puts the frog on the floor and says, "Jump, frog, jump!" And then he writes in his notebook, "frog with three legs can jump 15 feet."

He then cuts off the frog's other front leg, puts the frog on the floor and says, "Jump, frog, jump!" And then he writes in his notebook, "frog with two legs can jump 10 feet."

He then cuts off the frog's other rear leg, puts the frog on the floor and says, "Jump, frog, jump!" And then he writes in his notebook, "frog with one leg can jump 5 feet."

He then cuts off one of the frog's front legs, puts the frog on the floor and says, "Jump, frog, jump! Jump, frog, jump!" And then he writes in his notebook, "frog with no legs is deaf."

Channeling Obama

Frank J. is channeling Obama, and it's funny because it's true...

Iraq continues to be a serious problem, and the Bush administration has done nothing but increase the problem and cause unnecessary deaths. It is a mess, but I have a solution: I would never have gone there.

The Iraq War will be a big problem to inherit, but it would not be if we hadn't have gone there. That's why that is my solution. People ask me, "Won't leaving Iraq now be abandoning the Iraqi people?" Well, it wouldn't be abandoning them if we hadn't had gone there. "What about a civil war?" others ask, to which I say there would be no civil war if Saddam were still in charge because we didn't go to Iraq. As you can see, not having gone to Iraq easily solves all these problems.

...

And I do have experience: Experience at not going to war. That's why not having gone to Iraq is the perfect solution for me. It's one I'm uniquely able to espouse and have been consistent on. Years ago I said we shouldn't invade Iraq, and that is still my solution.

The Lies of Tet

There's an important piece this morning from Arthur Herman in the Wall Street Journal about The lies of Tet.

The Tet offensive was Hanoi's desperate throw of the dice to seize South Vietnam's northern provinces using conventional armies, while simultaneously triggering a popular uprising in support of the Viet Cong. Both failed. Americans and South Vietnamese soon put down the attacks, which began under cover of a cease-fire to celebrate the Tet lunar new year. By March 2, when U.S. Marines crushed the last North Vietnamese pockets of resistance in the northern city of Hue, the VC had lost 80,000-100,000 killed or wounded without capturing a single province.

Tet was a particularly crushing defeat for the VC. It had not only failed to trigger any uprising but also cost them "our best people," as former Viet Cong doctor Duong Quyunh Hoa later admitted to reporter Stanley Karnow. Yet the very fact of the U.S. military victory -- "The North Vietnamese," noted National Security official William Bundy at the time, "fought to the last Viet Cong" -- was spun otherwise by most of the U.S. press.

The US military didn't lose in Vietnam - the US left and the US media did. Intentionally. And they're trying to do it again in Iraq.

It was a mistake then:

For over ten years, bombs rained down on every village and hamlet in South Vietnam, and no one budged. It took the coming of a Communist ‘peace’ to send hundreds of thousands of people out into the South China Sea, on anything that could float, or might float, to risk dehydration, piracy, and drowning.

- General Vernon Walters

It would be a mistake now.

I'll come back to this when I don't want to vote for John McCain in November. This is important, and on this issue, he's a great candidate...

Sickening

Today, we see the latest example of the barbarism of the enemy.

Two mentally retarded women strapped with remote-control explosives—and possibly used as unwitting suicide bombers—brought carnage Friday to two pet bazaars, killing at 73 people in the deadliest day since Washington flooded the capital with extra troops last spring.
...
Brig. Gen. Qassim al-Moussawi, Iraq's chief military spokesman in Baghdad, said the women had Down syndrome and may not have known they were on suicide missions. He said the bombs were detonated by remote control.

And there are still people who would say that it's all George Bush's fault.

Every single time something like this happens, it strengthens my belief that we need to be doing what we're doing in the Middle East. The existence of beings that would do that is a threat to everyone. Everywhere.

They must be stopped.

It matters who wins elections

Michael Yon, with another very important story.

...When I finally succeeded in getting back into Iraq in late 2006, even I was truly amazed at the progress that had been made across Iraq with the training and management of Iraqi Army and Police forces.

There’s only a small group of writers who honestly spend enough time in Iraq to make serious claims based on firsthand accounts. But I’ve seen the Iraqi Army with my own eyes. I’ve done many missions in 2005 and 2007, in many places in Iraq, along with the Iraqi Army: please believe me when I say that, on the whole, the Iraqi Army is remarkably better in 2007 and far more effective than it was in 2005. By 2007, the Iraqis were doing most of the fighting. And ... this is very important ... they see our Army and Marines as serious allies, and in many cases as friends. Please let the potential implications of that sink in.

We now have a large number of American and British officers who can pick up a phone from Washington or London and call an Iraqi officer that he knows well—an Iraqi he has fought along side of—and talk. Same with untold numbers of Sheiks and government officials, most of whom do not deserve the caricatural disdain they get most often from pundits who have never set foot in Iraq. British and American forces have a personal relationship with Iraqi leaders of many stripes. The long-term intangible implications of the betrayal of that trust through the precipitous withdrawal of our troops could be enormous, because they would be the certain first casualties of renewed violence, and selling out the Iraqis who are making an honest-go would make the Bay of Pigs sell-out seem inconsequential. The United States and Great Britain would hang their heads in shame for a century.

Alternately, in an equation in which the outcome is a stable Iraq for which they (Iraqi Police and Army officials) are stewards, the potential benefits are equally enormous. Because if Iraq were to settle down, and then a decade passes and we look back and even our most severe critics cannot deny that Iraq is a better place, a generation of Iraq’s most important leaders would have deep personal bonds with their counterparts in America and Great Britain. This could actually happen.

What we know that just ain't so...

Michael Yon, who has been, and is, in Iraq, has another great and important piece about the coverage in the legacy media.

Resistance is futile: You will be (mis)informed.

America seems to be under a glass dome which allows few hard facts from the field to filter in unless they are attached to a string of false assumptions...No thinking person would look at last year’s weather reports to judge whether it will rain today, yet we do something similar with Iraq news...Clearly, a majority of Americans believe the current set of outdated fallacies passed around mainstream media like watered down drinks at happy hour.

why has al Qaeda turned to killing "innocent Muslims"?

Instapundit linked to a fantastic piece from TigerHawk about Al Quaeda and the "Arab Street." And it underscores, once again, how important it is that we win in Iraq, and how damaging the Democratic policy of "whatever hurts Bush is a good thing and whatever helps him is bad" has been, and continues to be, to the security of the region.

...why has al Qaeda turned to killing "innocent Muslims"? ... The best answer, or at least the answer that will best withstand the scrutiny of history, is that the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq, wittingly or not, put al Qaeda in an almost impossible position. We invaded and occupied a country in the heart of the Arab Middle East. If al Qaeda had railed against the mere presence of American troops in Saudi Arabia, the invasion and occupation of Mesopotamia was both intolerable -- al Qaeda's image and self-image could not suffer such a grave indignity -- and a tempting opportunity to humiliate the only remaining "superpower." Al Qaeda had to declare its objective to be the defeat of the United States in Iraq. (This is, by the way, why the characterization of the eventual withdrawal of American troops from Iraq is of strategic importance in and of itself, but that is the subject of another post.)

Of course, Al Qaeda clearly believed that it could drive the United States from Iraq just as Osama bin Laden believed that we would not have the stomach to invade Afghanistan, or that he and his mujahideen could push Saddam's armies out of Kuwait without the help of the Americans. Unfortunately, the army and Marines of the United States and its allies proved to be much harder targets than al Qaeda imagined, and George W. Bush and Tony Blair were more able to withstand domestic political opposition than just about anybody expected they would be. Soon, it became clear that al Qaeda would not be able to drive the Coalition from Iraq no matter how many Sunni Ba'athists it recruited.

...

It remains to be seen whether, when the dust literally and figuratively settles, al Qaeda will have succeeded either in rendering Iraq ungovernable under Western norms or in persuading a sufficient number of Americans that we have "lost." It is clear, though, that however much the Arab world may hate the United States for bringing the war into its midst, it is increasingly lining up against al Qaeda in the waging of that war. In the fullness of time history will reveal that the polarization of the Arab and Muslim world against al Qaeda is essential for victory against the transnational jihad, and that it was the direct result of the forward foreign policy of Bush and Blair.

Read the whole thing...