College buddy Tom Streithorst is out with an article in the UK’s Prospect Magazine titled “Why The Hurt Locker shouldn’t have won,” based on Tom’s extensive experience as a journalist embedded with U.S. forces in Iraq.  Tom’s thesis is that although some aspects of the movie are outstanding, it is marred by an unrealistic portrayal of the troops.

Three scenes are absolutely wrong. In one, Sergeant James escapes his base and roams Baghdad by himself, lost and confused, looking for an Iraqi he suspects of killing a boy. No, Americans never leave the base by themselves. In the second, the soldiers wander around their base, drunk out of their minds. One of the exceptional features of the Iraq war is it is probably the first war ever fought without alcohol or drugs. And, in the last and worst, our boys have their guns aimed at an Iraqi they suspect to be a car bomber. Despite his repeatedly not obeying their orders to back up, they don’t shoot him, even though they themselves might die.

Tom left out the scene where the one sergeant sucker-punches cowboy Staff Sergeant James — his superior — after the cowboy took off his headphones.  And when the sniper team waited hours for a shot at the enemy sniper in the cinderblock pillbox, rather than calling in air support in a setting where there was no danger of civilian casualties.  I also thought the Iraqi with the time bomb locked to his body would have been dropped when he disregarded translated orders to stop walking toward the troops.

But while I agree with Tom that the bizarre roaming-around-Baghdad scene is a serious flaw, the rest of it I can chalk up to creative license.  After years of reading about tediously polemical anti-war movies set in Iraq — all of them box-office duds — I’m just glad that the first Iraq movie to gain critical acclaim avoids taking cheap political shots.  Sergeant James is reckless to the point of pathology, but he’s clearly a Good Guy.

My acid test for the quality of a movie is how much of it I remember later.  There are probably 20 scenes in Schindler’s List that I can replay in my mind after seeing the movie once, in 1993.  Hurt Locker is a lesser film, but I’ll remember James’s heart-wrenching apologies to the walking Iraqi time bomb he couldn’t save.  I also saw Avatar, the other major Best Picture contender, and while it was enjoyable enough, the main thing I remember is fiddling with the 3-D glasses.

(Photo: Everett/Rex)

Tagged with: Iraq • Military

While much of the discussion about health care has focused on the lack of 60 Democratic votes in the Senate, the House may pose an even bigger obstacle.  For legislative process geeks, John Podhoretz explains the coming maneuvers.  First the House has to pass the Senate bill, with the understanding that there would then be discussions on a second, “reconciliation” bill (normally just used for budget matters) that “fixes what’s wrong with the first bill.”

It appears that, in an effort to make this as easy as possible on the Senate, the House is now under pressure from the Senate and the White House to vote for the reconciliation bill before the Senate. At which point the Senate will take it up and ramrod through the second bill with 51 votes, Obama signs it, and there’s health-care.

This strategy requires the House not only to vote for a wildly unpopular bill once, but then to vote on its sequel almost immediately afterward. In other words, House members are going to be forced to cast two wildly unpopular, highly visible votes in succession, without anybody else taking the heat. And there is going to be deal-making and back-scratching and all manner of sleazy behavior to achieve it, all of which will just increase the public sense of a corrupt process that has ensnared Democrats just as corruption seemed to ensnare Republicans in 2006. All so the Senate can sneak it through. And the House has good reason not to trust that the Senate will hold to its part of the bargain. What if there is a colossal meltdown in public support just before the reconciliation vote? What if the Senate decides to change it a little and throws it all back into chaos again? What if House members were to cast two votes and there was no health care at the end of the process?

…Thus, the best hope of derailing health care will not derive from high motives – stopping this dreadful measure before it becomes law — but rather very low motives — sheer, panicked self-preservation on the part of Democratic pols hoping against hope to hold on in spite of the looming Republican wave.

And remember, the House only had a five-vote margin when it passed its own version of health care “reform” last year.

Disregard all the talk about the process being “broken.”  This is checks-and-balances as the Framers intended.  It’s supposed to be hard to pass sweeping legislation.

Tagged with: Health Care

Three hearty cheers for Muhammad Tahir ul-Qadri, a Pakistan-born Muslim scholar in London, who has issued a fatwa declaring that suicide bombing and other acts of terrorism are prohibited by Islam.

Pointing out that terrorists commit acts of self and mass murder with the firm conviction that they will be rewarded by God and that they are heaven bound, Dr.Qadri’s fatwa convincingly advances scriptural evidence to demonstrate that the perpetrators of suicide bombings are destined for hell, not heaven.

According to the scholar, modern terrorists justify their indiscriminate killings by claiming that Islamic scripture allows such campaigns in war. However, he opened new ground by citing Islamic sources which prohibit killing of women, children, elders, religious leaders, business people, non-combatants and even service personnel not engaged in aggression.

“Contrary to the mindset of the perpetrators of the 11th of September 2001 attacks in New York or the 7th July 2005 tube bombs in London, damaging enemy property or avenging a wrong done by another is strictly prohibited by sound Islamic scholarship,” Dr. Qadri told the audience.

I hope my new hero Dr. Qadri has taken security precautions.  There’s some debate over whether his fatwa is as “historic” as he claims, as well as how influential the fatwa will be, coming from a Sufi.  But as one Western academic said,

Those who are already hardliners will pay no attention at all. But “swing voters”— poorly educated and angry Muslims, who respect mainstream scholars, will probably take note.

From his lips to Allah’s ears.  The only hope for an enduring victory against radical Islam is for a different vision of Islam to take hold. (Hat tip: Glen, on Facebook)

Associated Press photo

Tagged with: Islam • Islamic Fascism

… and in other news, pigs flew.  From this week’s Newsweek cover story, “Victory at Last“:

“Iraqi democracy will succeed,” President George W. Bush declared in November 2003, “and that success will send forth the news from Damascus to Tehran that freedom can be the future of every nation.” The audience at the National Endowment for Democracy in Washington answered with hearty applause. Bush went on: “The establishment of a free Iraq at the heart of the Middle East will be a watershed event in the global democratic revolution.”

…

Bush’s rhetoric about democracy came to sound as bitterly ironic as his pumped-up appearance on an aircraft carrier a few months earlier, in front of an enormous banner that declared MISSION ACCOMPLISHED. And yet it has to be said and it should be understood—now, almost seven hellish years later—that something that looks mighty like democracy is emerging in Iraq. And while it may not be a beacon of inspiration to the region, it most certainly is a watershed event that could come to represent a whole new era in the history of the massively undemocratic Middle East.

Any recipe for defeating Islamic fascism has to include Islamic democracy as an ingredient.  Iraq could be not just Obama’s greatest accomplishment, but Bush’s as well.

Tagged with: Bush's Third Term • Iraq

These days I self-identify as a Republican, but some of my best friends are Democrats.  Actually, as a function of the town where I live, virtually all of my best friends are Democrats.

So on behalf of my friends and on behalf of simple civility, I hereby call on all Republicans everywhere to abandon the contemptuous use of “Democrat” as an adjective.  If you need a handy analogy to understand why references such as “Democrat leaders” or “the Democrat Party” are offensive, consider the difference between the phrases, “he’s a Jewish boy” and “he’s a Jew boy.”  Or, if the problem is not that you are obnoxious, but rather merely that you are ignorant, a quick glance at the party’s official homepage will confirm that the correct usage is “Democratic Party.”

I associate the misuse of the term with Bob Dole, who famously made an ill-received reference to “Democrat wars” in his vice presidential debate with Walter Mondale in 1976.  [Interestingly, Wikipedia's lengthy entry tracing the ignoble history of "Democrat Party (phrase)" doesn't mention Dole.  But I digress.]

All of this came to mind as I prepared to approvingly post a passage by Andrew McCarthy in The Corner, describing why he believes the Democrats will use unusual parliamentary tactics to force through a health care bill opposed by a majority of Americans.  My annoyance at the first few words below caused me to spin off on this lexicographic tangent:

In the Democrat leadership, we are not dealing with conventional politicians for whom the goal of being reelected is paramount and will rein in their radicalism. They want socialized medicine and all it entails about government control even more than they want to win elections. After all, if the party of government transforms the relationship between the citizen and the state, its power over our lives will be vast even in those cycles when it is not in the majority. This is about power, and there is more to power than winning elections, especially if you’ve calculated that your opposition does not have the gumption to dismantle your ballooning welfare state.

I admire McCarthy, and I note that earlier in the very same paragraph (before the bit I quoted), he properly uses the term “Democratic leadership.”  So I’m choosing to interpret this as a typo.

I also hope his analysis is incorrect, and that the desire for re-election will sway enough Democrats [note correct usage of noun form] to sink Obamacare.  But I fear he may be right.

Tagged with: Health Care

I couldn’t be bothered to watch the seven-plus-hour health care summit yesterday (given my new full-time job and all), but I still care about the subject.  Count on the blogosphere and the punditocracy to plow through all the raw material and offer up the best bits.

Hat tip to Peter Wehner at Commentary for flagging a strong performance by GOP Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin. The six-minute clip above is worth watching — Ryan offers a fact-based, forceful-yet-respectful explanation of the impossible economics of Obamacare.

Don’t have six minutes?  Here’s a transcript of Ryan’s remarks, via the Washington Post’s very helpful, comprehensive library of transcripts from every speaker.  And if you don’t want to bother with the transcript, here’s a sample (emphasis mine):

Look, we agree on the problem here. And the problem is health inflation is driving us off of a fiscal cliff.

Mr. President, you said health care reform is budget reform. You’re right. We agree with that. Medicare, right now, has a $38 trillion unfunded liability. That’s $38 trillion in empty promises to my parents’ generation, our generation, our kids’ generation. Medicaid’s growing at 21 percent each year. It’s suffocating states’ budgets. It’s adding trillions in obligations that we have no means to pay for it. …

And if you take a look at the CBO analysis, analysis from your chief actuary, I think it’s very revealing. This bill does not control costs. This bill does not reduce deficits. Instead, this bill adds a new health care entitlement at a time when we have no idea how to pay for the entitlements we already have.

The one-minute clip below is also nice — via Did I Miss Something.  The unlikely pair of Arianna Huffington and George Will reach an agreement, of sorts, on the best tactical approach for Democrats now.

Tagged with: Health Care

Doesn’t the debate on Obamacare seem so last week already? This morning I tried to force myself to pay attention to today’s steel-cage Kabuki match at the White House.  I got as far as the headlines on the Washington Post homepage (highlighting mine).

Just as a matter of politics, I fail to understand why the administration is so intent on enacting, during an election year, legislation that is so overwhelmingly unpopular.  David Brooks, who generally admires Obama, gives the gruesome numbers:

If you average the last 10 polls, 38 percent of voters support the reform plans and 53 percent oppose. Obama’s reform is more unpopular than Bill Clinton’s was as it died.

Tagged with: Health Care

Alvin Valentine describes his criminal past, as Evan Misshula and Jim McGreevey look on. Photo by Nina Nicholson.

Now that the Web Goddess is the head of communications for the Episcopal Diocese of Newark, I’ve been writing occasional articles for diocesan publications.  Recently I had the opportunity at a diocesan event to cover former NJ Gov. Jim McGreevey and two ex-cons as they discussed Exodus Transitional Community, which helps formerly incarcerated people make  a transition back into society.  An excerpt:

McGreevey is a member of the Newark Diocese’s Prison Ministry, and became involved with Exodus as part of his field education at General Theological Seminary, where he is seeking a Master of Divinity degree.

More statistics: 730,000 people walk out of prison every year.  One third of them will be back in jail in a year; two-thirds of them will be back in three years.  The prison system “engenders complete dependency as a means of satiating or controlling prisoners,” McGreevey said, and then spills them out into the job market with atrophied social skills and “the scarlet letter of a previous felony conviction.”  The current re-entry program, “such as it is, is a complete and utter failure.”

Read the whole thing.

I wasn’t blogging when McGreevey resigned in 2004, but if I had been, I would have had harsh words for his conduct.  Now I applaud him for this work.  Surely it’s in society’s best interest to improve the job prospects of people emerging from prison.

Tagged with: Episcopalian Issues • New Jersey • Web Goddess

I call myself a blogger, but I’m more like an essayist who uses blogging software.

Many of my posts start out as a simple idea and end up as 600-800 words.  (Except when they end up as 2,000 words.)  I think it’s a self-esteem issue — I’m concerned that someone will mock me, and have the facts on their side.  So I research and try to substantiate every nuance, and the word count grows. (I’m up to 77 so far!)  Then I run out of time or energy, resulting in no posts at all for a week at a time.

So let’s try a classic quickie blog post — little or no analysis from me, just recent quotes from three of my favorite pundits.  Krauthammer:

Leave it to Mickey Kaus, a principled liberal who supports health-care reform, to debunk these structural excuses: “Lots of intellectual effort now seems to be going into explaining Obama’s (possible/likely/impending) health care failure as the inevitable product of larger historic and constitutional forces. . . . But in this case there’s a simpler explanation: Barack Obama’s job was to sell a health care reform plan to American voters. He failed.”

He failed because the utter implausibility of its central promise — expanded coverage at lower cost — led voters to conclude that it would lead ultimately to more government, more taxes, and more debt. More broadly, the Democrats failed because, thinking the economic emergency would give them a political mandate and a legislative window, they tried to impose a left-wing agenda on a center-right country. The people said no, expressing themselves first in spontaneous demonstrations, then in public-opinion polls, then in elections — Virginia, New Jersey, and, most emphatically, Massachusetts.

That’s not a structural defect. That’s a textbook demonstration of popular will expressing itself — despite the special interests — through the existing structures. In other words, the system worked.

Victor Davis Hanson:

Those who accuse former Bush administration officials of criminality for having supported enhanced interrogation techniques are nearly silent about the ongoing and vastly increased targeted assassinations ordered by the Obama administration, and I for one am confused by this standard of attack.

If a suspected jihadist on the Afghan Pakistan border were to be asked his choice, he might very well prefer to be apprehended, transported to Guantanamo, and harshly interrogated rather than blown to bits along with any family and friends who happen to be in his vicinity.

To make things simpler, water-boarding the confessed architect of the murder of 3,000 innocents, on a moral scale, seems less atrocious than executing suspected terrorists, as we are now doing. Since the easy denunciations of criminality are moral rather than legal — no one has actually convicted a John Yoo or a Dick Cheney of anything — surely we should hear something about these capital sentences handed down from the sky on those who, quite unlike KSM, are suspected, rather than confessed, killers.

And Andrew McCarthy (profiled in the New York Times):

“A war is a war,” Mr. McCarthy declared. “A war is not a crime, and you don’t bring your enemies to a courthouse.”

In the debate over how and where to prosecute Mr. Mohammed and other Sept. 11 cases, few critics of the Obama administration have been more fervent in their opposition than Mr. McCarthy, a 50-year-old lawyer from the Bronx who had built a reputation as one of the country’s formidable terrorism prosecutors.

Now he has a different reputation: harsh critic of the system in which he had his greatest legal triumph.

Mr. McCarthy has relentlessly attacked the administration for supporting civilian justice for terrorism suspects. He has criticized the military commissions system and called for creation of a national security court. After the arrest of the suspect in the Christmas bomb plot, he wrote, “Will Americans finally grasp how insane it is to regard counterterrorism as a law-enforcement project rather than a matter of national security?”

Argghh… 659 words.  But I only had to write about 150 of them!

Tagged with: Krauthammer • McCarthy • Victor Davis Hanson

Vice President Joe Biden has come under fire for telling Larry King last week that:

… progress in Iraq “could be one of the great achievements of this administration.”

“You’re going to see 90,000 American troops come marching home by the end of the summer,” he said. “You’re going to see a stable government in Iraq that is actually moving toward a representative government.”

By the time I became aware of this, the pile-on had already started.  I held off on commenting because it seemed like all the interesting rhetorical gambits had already been played.

Max Boot looked on the bright side:

Some might dismiss this as chutzpah from someone who, like Barack Obama, opposed the surge needed to stabilize the situation in Iraq. But, brazen or not, it’s great to see the Obama administration taking ownership of Iraq and realizing that simply pulling out all our troops can’t be the sole goal of our policy there.

Yes, except I don’t think an unscripted comment from Biden,  a walking gaffe machine, is necessarily a reflection of the administration’s thinking.

Over at The Corner, Peter Kirsanow had the cleverest humorous take:

[T]he administration’s achievement is no more astounding than Bull Connor’s passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Kruschev’s reunification of Germany, or Jefferson Davis’s preservation of the Union.

But after thinking about it for several days, I started to realize that Biden was right.

Bear with me here, and think about the fact that after more than a year in office, the Obama administration has not screwed up what the Bush administration achieved in Iraq.  Of course, when you put it that way, it sounds kind of dismissive toward Obama.  But I assert that “not screwing up Iraq” is a non-trivial achievement — and certainly a much better outcome than many of us feared before the election.

Now compare that with the other achievements of Obama’s first year in office:

• Health care? No.
• Cap and trade? No.
• Unemployment? No.

Well, he did successfully nationalize two of the Big Three automakers.   [Update: Not to mention porkulus!] Hm… what’s the opposite of an achievement?

All kidding aside, there is one arena where Obama has an opportunity for a genuinely great achievement: Afghanistan, where the administration is attempting to replicate the strategy that was so successful in Iraq.  From the New York Times:

For much of the past eight years, American and NATO forces have mounted other large military operations to clear towns and cities of Taliban insurgents. And then, almost invariably, they have cleared out, never leaving behind enough soldiers or police officers to hold the place on their own.

And so, almost always, the Taliban returned — and, after a time, so did the American and NATO troops, to clear the place all over again.

“Mowing the grass,” the soldiers and Marines derisively call it.

This time, in Marja, the largest Taliban stronghold, American and Afghan commanders say they will do something they have never done before: bring in an Afghan government and police force behind them. American and British troops will stay on to support them. “We’ve got a government in a box, ready to roll in,” said Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the top American commander here.

There are no guarantees, of course — the Afghan “surge” may fail.  But if it does succeed — and as in Iraq, I define “success” in Afghanistan as a reasonably stable, reasonably self-sufficient, democratic government allied with the United States — then I’ll be happy to give Obama credit for that achievement.

Tagged with: Afghanistan • Iraq • Obama