Charles Krauthammer: Washington vs. Maliki
Maliki is not just weak but unreliable. Time is short. We should have long ago — say, when Stephen Hadley wrote his leaked memo last November about Maliki’s failure — begun working to have this dysfunctional government replaced.
Even the French foreign minister, upon returning from a recent fence-mending trip to Iraq, called for Maliki’s replacement. (One can discount his later apology as pro forma.) Such suggestions are often denounced as hypocritical and contrary to democracy. Nonsense. In a parliamentary system, a government serves only if it continues to command confidence.
Does anyone imagine that Maliki enjoys the confidence of the majority of Iraqis? If he does not, parliament, representing the people, has the perfect right to vote no confidence and bring down the government.
Austin Bay: Gen. Petraeus’ Pivotal Report
There really is no particularly informative historical precedent for Gen. David Petraeus’ upcoming public assessment of Iraq.
Perhaps we are entering new historical terrain, where the commanding general’s pivotal strategic gambit is a media event.
And media event it is. With its certain long-term global import and short-term political impact, Petraeus’ report meets a hustling television exec’s primal requirement: drama.
When the spotlight strikes his face and he begins to speak, we will witness drama in large letters.
No one, however, should confuse the general’s appearance with entertainment.
Christopher Hitchens: Which Iraq War Do You Want To End?
When people say that they want to end the war in Iraq, I always want to ask them which war they mean. There are currently at least three wars, along with several subconflicts, being fought on Iraqi soil. The first, tragically, is the battle for mastery between Sunni and Shiite. The second is the campaign to isolate and defeat al-Qaida in Mesopotamia. The third is the struggle of Iraq’s Kurdish minority to defend and consolidate its regional government in the north.
William Kristol: The Left Shudders and Bush leads
Not in the Vietnam war of 1963-68, the disastrous years where policy was shaped by the best and brightest of American liberalism. Not in the Vietnam war of 1969-73, when Richard Nixon and General Creighton Abrams managed to adjust our strategy, defeat the enemy, and draw down American troops all at once–an achievement affirmed and rewarded by the American electorate in November 1972. Not in the Vietnam of early 1975, when the Democratic Congress insisted on cutting off assistance to our allies in South Vietnam and Cambodia, thereby inviting the armies of the North and the Khmer Rouge to attack. And not in the defeats of April 1975. As the American left celebrated from New York to Hollywood, in Phnom Penh former Cambodian prime minister Sirik Matak wrote to John Gunther Dean, the American ambassador, turning down his offer of evacuation:
Dear Excellency and Friend:
I thank you very sincerely for your letter and for your offer to transport me towards freedom. I cannot, alas, leave in such a cowardly fashion. As for you, and in particular for your great country, I never believed for a moment that you would have this sentiment of abandoning a people which has chosen liberty. You have refused us your protection, and we can do nothing about it. You leave, and my wish is that you and your country will find happiness under this sky. But, mark it well, that if I shall die here on the spot and in my country that I love, it is no matter, because we all are born and must die. I have only committed this mistake of believing in you [the Americans].
Please accept, Excellency and dear friend, my faithful and friendly sentiments.
S/Sirik Matak
The Khmer Rouge took Phnom Penh a few days later. Sirik Matak was executed: shot in the stomach, he was left without medical help and took three days to die. Between 1 and 2 million Cambodians were murdered by the Khmer Rouge in the next three years. Next door, tens of thousands of Vietnamese were killed, and many more imprisoned. Hundreds of thousands braved the South China Sea to reach freedom.
Mark Steyn: They wait for us to run again
George W. Bush gave a speech about Iraq last week, and in the middle of it he did something long overdue: He attempted to appropriate the left’s most treasured all-purpose historical analogy. Indeed, Vietnam is so ubiquitous in the fulminations of politicians, academics and pundits that we could really use anti-trust legislation to protect us from shopworn historical precedents. But, in the absence thereof, the president has determined that we might at least learn the real “lessons of Vietnam.”
“Then as now, people argued the real problem was America’s presence and that if we would just withdraw, the killing would end,” Bush told the Veterans of Foreign Wars convention Aug. 22. “Many argued that if we pulled out there would be no consequences for the Vietnamese people … . A columnist for the New York Times wrote in a similar vein in 1975, just as Cambodia and Vietnam were falling to the communists: ‘It’s difficult to imagine,’ he said, ‘how their lives could be anything but better with the Americans gone.’ A headline on that story, dateline Phnom Penh, summed up the argument: ‘Indochina Without Americans: For Most a Better Life.’ The world would learn just how costly these misimpressions would be.”
Charles Krauthammer: The debate on Iraq takes a turn
After months of surreality, the Iraq debate has quite abruptly acquired a relationship to reality. Following the Democratic victory last November, panicked Republican senators began rifling the thesaurus to find exactly the right phrase to express exactly the right nuance to establish exactly the right distance from the president’s Iraq policy, while Murtha Democrats searched for exactly the right legislative ruse to force a retreat from Iraq without appearing to do so.
In the last month, however, as a consensus has emerged about realities on the ground in Iraq, a reasoned debate has begun. A number of fair-minded observers, both critics and supporters of the war, agree that the surge has yielded considerable military progress, while at the national political level the Maliki government remains a disaster.
Amir Taheri: France’s Pro-U.S. Turn on Iraq
August 21, 2007 — ONE key promise that Nicolas Sarkozy had made during his presidential election campaign last spring was to “correct foreign-policy mistakes” made by his predecessor Jacques Chirac.
Chief among these was Chirac’s desperate efforts to prevent Iraq’s liberation from Saddam Hussein’s regime of terror. Chirac failed to save his friend’s regime but managed to sour relations with the United States, Great Britain and more than 40 other democracies that joined the Coalition of the Willing to liberate Iraq in 2003.
Sarkozy’s moves to correct the mistake started before his election, when he met President Bush at the White House in 2006 and described Chirac’s policy as “arrogant.”
Christopher Hitchens: Fighting the “Real” Fight
The founder of al-Qaida in Mesopotamia was Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who we can now gratefully describe as “the late.” The first thing to notice about him is that he was in Iraq before we were. The second thing to notice is that he fled to Iraq only because he, and many others like him, had been driven out of Afghanistan. Thus, by the logic of those who say that Afghanistan is the “real” war, he would have been better left as he was. Without the overthrow of the Taliban, he and his collaborators would not have moved to take advantage of the next failed/rogue state. I hope you can spot the simple error of reasoning that is involved in this belief. It also involves the defeatist suggestion—which was very salient in the opposition to the intervention in Afghanistan—that it’s pointless to try to crush such people because “others will spring up in their place.” Those who take this view should have the courage to stand by it and not invent a straw-man argument.
Reuel Marc Gerecht: What would the Democrats do?
Among certain Arab elites, there is considerable interest in how a Democratic administration would differ from the eight years of George W. Bush. It’s a good question. Most Democrats, at least those running for president or sitting in Congress, have spent more time attacking Bush than explaining what Democrats would do if they were making foreign policy. But the Middle East seriously wounded, if not disgraced, the last two Democratic presidents. The candidates’ reticence on the subject is understandable. Yet sooner or later, Hillary Clinton and company have to tell us what they think about Islam, Sunni Islamic extremism, al Qaeda, the religious dynamics of Iraq, clerical Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan, rendition (Bill Clinton, if we recall, established the practice), close intelligence liaison relationships with torture-fond foreign security services (again, President Clinton had no insurmountable problem with this), and the appropriateness of preemptive U.S. military strikes against terrorist targets.
Michael Yon: Bread and a Circus, Part II of II
That morning, still in Baqubah and trying to get the convoy organized, a truck driver had approached us with intention in his eyes. LTC Johnson closed on the man whom he suspected was a suicide bomber. My video was running as Johnson drew his pistol. If a bomb had detonated, Johnson and a few others would have definitely been killed. I might have survived—although in no condition to write these words—but had I, it would have been solely due to Johnson and the others having closed space with the man. But they actually risked their lives not to save mine, but his: they could have shot him from a distance of perhaps even 10m farther, but it happened so suddenly they just moved straight in. That was courage.
As it happened, the man who had closed space with us was simply an Iraqi coming forward to help start the convoy rolling. The Iraqi man—I’ll call him “Tonto†because he’s still in the thick of the war—owned some trucks and wanted to get his business going. Guts and capitalism make an impressive combination.
