Quick reaction on my lunch break: We won.
Yes, there are pitfalls and concerns on the road ahead, but it’s one heck of a lot more appropriate now to declare the war “won” than it was for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to declare in 2007 that “this war is lost.”
Obviously it was Bush who (eventually) found the winning strategy, but Obama deserves props for staying the course.
.. and another one’s gone
‘nother one’s gone
‘nother one bites the dust
(Hey, maybe I should use song lyrics in all my blog posts! It could be my gimmick! I wish I knew more song lyrics!)
I still find it astonishing and inconsistent that Mr. Nobel Peace Prize entered a war of choice in Libya. But as VDH said, “the only thing worse than starting a stupid war is losing it,” and it looks like there is no further danger of losing to Gaddafi.
And the world… will be a better place…
So what comes next in Libya and the region? Two takes from The Corner, eighteen minutes apart — one hopeful, one non. John P. Hannah of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, is hopeful:
Qaddafi’s inglorious end sends … a powerful reminder that, try as they might, the region’s despots cannot through blood and brutality forever hold off history’s harsh judgement. Assad’s head will rest far less easy tonight. The morale of the Syrian people will receive a much-needed boost to endure the difficult days that no doubt still lie ahead. And perhaps most importantly, the hard men around Assad who have continued to do his dirty work, will have new cause to save their own skins by reassessing their misguided loyalties to a leader who is dragging them and their community ever closer to catastrophe. With a strategic stake in Syria’s fate that dwarfs our interests in Libya, the United States would be well advised to exploit the openings created by Qaddafi’s terminus to re-energize the effort to depose Assad, short-circuit the civil war that he is struggling mightily to ignite, and deliver a crippling blow to the Iranian terror machine that so threatens our interests and those of our allies.
His boss at FDD, Cliff May, almost immediately followed up with a sour note:
If the Great Arab Revolt — “Arab Spring†is a hopeful, not descriptive term — ends up only removing Qaddafi and, from neighboring Egypt, Hosni Mubarak, a despot who was, nonetheless, a reasonably pliant client of the U.S., and if Iran’s theocrats remain in power and manage to save the Assad dynasty in Syria while continuing to use Hezbollah to control Lebanon and sponsoring Hamas in Gaza, the lesson will be clear: It is more dangerous to be America’s ally than its enemy.
Such a lesson will carry long-term strategic consequences. If there are strategic planners in the current administration, now would be a good time for them to start worrying.
Is the glass half full or half empty? The answer is “yes.” Welcome to the geopolitics of the Middle East.
What a long, strange trip it’s been…
As a frequent critic of President Obama, I feel duty-bound to have his back when he gets something right. Obama has been criticized from both the left and the right over the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki, a treasonous American citizen killed by a drone-fired missile in Yemen. But in addition to being a tactical victory, that operation is a welcome reminder that the President understands we are at war.
Or at least, on some days he understands it. Occasionally his “I’m-not-Bush” compulsions overwhelm his commander-in-chiefness, as when he pre-announces a retreat while announcing a surge, or when he floats the indefensible idea of trying Khalid Sheikh Mohammed a few hundred yards away from Ground Zero. But eventually he backed off both of those bad ideas, as well as his grand-standing promise to close Guantanamo. On a more positive note, the take-down of Osama bin Laden was a gutsy call and a genuine triumph for the Obama presidency.
Writing in the Washington Post, Richard Cohen is troubled by the legal ramifications of killing an American citizen, although he admits that “a little ‘yippee’ emitted from me when I heard the news.”
Something big and possibly dangerous has happened . . . in secret. Government’s most awesome power — to take a life — has been exercised on one of its own citizens without benefit of trial. A guy named Barron and another named Lederman apparently said it was okay. Maybe it was. But I’d sure like to hear the attorney general or the president explain why.
Two thoughts: I’d like to hear that explanation as well, but I’m not holding my breath during an election campaign. And, somehow I’m pretty confident that these two “guys” in the Justice Department, who apparently drafted a legal memo supporting the legality of killing al-Awlaki, will not end up demonized in anything like the manner of John Yoo.
I voted against Mr. Obama, and intend to do so again, but from the start I’ve been looking for silver linings in his presidency. Here’s one: Taken as a whole, the Obama presidency is tugging America in the direction of bipartisan support for the war against Islamic fascism. America may become safer as a result.
A few weeks ago I had my virtual fingers slapped by some Facebook friends. It happened after I clicked, for the first time ever, one of those little “Like” buttons at the bottom of an op-ed.
Here is the paragraph in the op-ed that caught my eye:
To be sure, no white candidate who had close associations with an outspoken hater of America like Jeremiah Wright and an unrepentant terrorist like Bill Ayers would have lasted a single day. But because Mr. Obama was black, and therefore entitled in the eyes of liberaldom to have hung out with protesters against various American injustices, even if they were a bit extreme, he was given a pass. And in any case, what did such ancient history matter when he was also articulate and elegant and (as he himself had said) “non-threatening,” all of which gave him a fighting chance to become the first black president and thereby to lay the curse of racism to rest?
You of course are free to agree or disagree, but I thought the paragraph did a good job of describing how a first-term Senator with a thin resume and a dodgy taste in friends was able to convince 69 million Americans that he should be elected to the most powerful office in the world. I saw the Like button, I clicked it, and I went on to something else.
I’m not sure what I thought the Like button would do, but I soon found out. It copied the headline and subhead of that Norman Podhoretz op-ed in the Wall Street Journal to my Facebook wall, topped by an unambiguous statement of my approval. Thus:
Kirk Petersen likes a link:
“What Happened to Obama? Absolutely Nothing.
He is still the same anti-American leftist he was before becoming our president.”
The first response came from a civil and fair-minded friend, who pointedly asked, “What is it you like about that, Kirk?” Other offended friends, thoughtful people one and all, weighed in, and I quickly realized I had fallen into the common trap of overlooking the rhetorical excesses of someone with whom I otherwise largely agreed.
Labeling Obama a leftist is certainly fair game, but calling him anti-American borders on calling him a traitor. Besides being unfair, it’s counterproductive. It’s the type of drive-by slur guaranteed to alienate virtually all of those 69 million Americans, some of whom might otherwise be open to a more measured critique of the Obama presidency.
So after a feeble attempt to defend my beliefs while regretting Podhoretz’s choice of words, I deleted the link and posted this instead:
Two lessons learned tonight: 1) Inflammatory language inflames people. 2) Impulsively clicking a “Like” button on an op-ed can be an insufficiently nuanced way of expressing an opinion.
Three weeks later, also in the Wall Street Journal, Shelby Steele provided the missing nuance. It is not that Mr. Obama is anti-American, but rather that he rejects the very idea of America as the one indispensable nation.
Mr. Obama came of age in a bubble of post-’60s liberalism that conditioned him to be an adversary of American exceptionalism. In this liberalism America’s exceptional status in the world follows from a bargain with the devil—an indulgence in militarism, racism, sexism, corporate greed, and environmental disregard as the means to a broad economic, military, and even cultural supremacy in the world. And therefore America’s greatness is as much the fruit of evil as of a devotion to freedom.
Mr. Obama did not explicitly run on an anti-exceptionalism platform. Yet once he was elected it became clear that his idea of how and where to apply presidential power was shaped precisely by this brand of liberalism. There was his devotion to big government, his passion for redistribution, and his scolding and scapegoating of Wall Street—as if his mandate was somehow to overcome, or at least subdue, American capitalism itself.
Anti-exceptionalism has clearly shaped his “leading from behind” profile abroad—an offer of self-effacement to offset the presumed American evil of swaggering cowboyism. …
So, in Mr. Obama, America gained a president with ambivalence, if not some antipathy, toward the singular greatness of the nation he had been elected to lead.
In 2009, during his “global apology tour” shortly after taking office, Obama was asked if he believed in American exceptionalism. His answer showed that either he did not understand the term, or that he was carefully pretending not to understand it: “I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.” Obama thereby signaled that he rejected a belief of America’s role in the world that goes back more than 170 years, to Alexis de Tocqueville.
As Shelby writes,
Clearly Americans were looking for a new kind of exceptionalism in him (a black president would show America to have achieved near perfect social mobility). But were they also looking for—in Mr. Obama—an assault on America’s bedrock exceptionalism of military, economic and cultural pre-eminence?
American exceptionalism is, among other things, the result of a difficult rigor: the use of individual initiative as the engine of development within a society that strives to ensure individual freedom through the rule of law. Over time a society like this will become great. This is how—despite all our flagrant shortcomings and self-betrayals—America evolved into an exceptional nation.
To describe Mr. Obama’s attitude as anti-American is to caricature it. But he does seem motivated by a vision of America as just one more unremarkable country among many. That point of view has a constituency — but I’m not part of it.
To enlarge the graphic, click on it, then click on it again
More than 30 months into the era of Obamanomics, the administration is still desperately seeking to blame all of the nation’s woes on George W. Bush. They’re getting less and less traction with that argument — Obama’s approval rating just hit a new low of 40%, according to Gallup’s tracking poll.
But Bush has been the go-to guy in Obama’s blame game since the beginning, and the administration keeps trying. Megan McArdle, a consistently insightful economics columnist for the Atlantic, dissects a chart published by the White House this week that purports to show that of the $12.7 trillion added to the national debt over the past decade, $7 trillion is attributable to the Bush administration, with only $1.4 trillion attributable to Obamanomics.
[T]his graph attributes decisions made by Obama and an all-Democratic Congress–like doubling down in Afghanistan–to Bush, while taking responsibility for basically nothing except the stimulus. Â When Obama extends the Bush tax cuts for the rich under pressure from Congressional Republicans, that disappears from his side of the ledger, because after all, he didn’t want to do it. Â When Bush enacts Medicare Part D under pressure from Congressional Democrats, the full cost is charged against his presidency. Â The list of such silliness goes on. Â Our president seems set to coin another presidential motto: “The duck starts here.”
McArdle answers with charts of her own, showing that the deficit, which never reached more than about 3% of GDP during the eight years of the Bush administration, has ballooned to 10% of GDP after less than three years of the Obama administration.
Nor is it exactly obvious to look at the $2.4 trillion in additional debt incurred during Bush’s eight-year presidency, and say that he is nonetheless actually responsible for $7 trillion of our current debt load–and then turn to the $3.1 trillion of debt incurred during Barack Obama’s three-year presidency, and declare that his policies are actually responsible for only $1.4 trillion.
Obama needs a new scapegoat, and the administration has been fitting the House Republicans for that suit. I worried three weeks ago that the Republicans — having forced Obama to concede that entitlement cuts are on the table — would hold out for no debt increase and get blamed for a government shutdown.
The GOP still could get blamed, of course — Newt Gingrich & Co. were blamed in 1994 even though Bill Clinton’s veto actually triggered the shutdown. But now the House Republicans have voted not once but twice to raise the debt ceiling, overruling the Tea Partiers among them.
K-Lo describes the path forward from here:
So what does the new path look like? This tweaked Budget Control Act will pass the House. The Senate will strip out the BBA language. It will pass the Senate. When it goes back to the House, Boehner loses some of his caucus again, but Pelosi will have to get some of her members on board. If this is such a crisis moment, Democrats are the party in power. Boehner negotiated with his caucus and got an imperfect bill that the Democratic Senate could work with — with a statement of principles in it including the BBA. Then the Democrats, who do run Washington, after all, will have to step up to the plate.
Ball’s in your court, Harry Reid and Barack Obama, in other words.
The Senate already has tabled the Boehner bill, but pressure to accept one of the two House plans may rise over the weekend, leading to the scenario K-Lo describes. Let’s hope so. Then the election can go back to being about the phony stimulus and the wildly unpopular Obamacare. Everybody knows who to blame for that.
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So what does the new path look like? This tweaked Budget Control Act will pass the House. The Senate will strip out the BBA language. It will pass the Senate. When it goes back to the House, Boehner loses some of his caucus again, but Pelosi will have to get some of her members on board. If this is such a crisis moment, Democrats are the party in power. Boehner negotiated with his caucus and got an imperfect bill that the Democratic Senate could work with — with a statement of principles in it including the BBA. Then the Democrats, who do run Washington, after all, will have to step up to the plate.
Ball’s in your court, Harry Reid and Barack Obama, in other words.
Who would have predicted that Obama — or any Democratic president — would inspire a headline like this one in the Washington Post: “In debt talks, Obama offers Social Security cuts“? Isn’t Social Security supposed to be the third rail of politics? Isn’t it the Democratic party that has inspired 249,000 Google hits on the phrase “balancing the budget on the backs of the poor”?
As near as I can tell, Obama has expressed nothing more than a willingness to tinker with the formulas for calculating inflation for Social Security and other entitlement programs. Only in Washington is slowing the growth of something considered a “cut”.
But it’s a huge step nonetheless. Kathleen Parker urges Republicans not to overlook
the enormous opportunity for conservatives that has taken shape since the beginning of the year. Just a few months ago, Obama was asking for a “clean†debt-limit increase. That is, an unconditional hike without spending cuts or reforms.Republicans responded by making clear that there would be no increase to the $14.3 trillion debt limit without fundamental reforms, including to entitlements, and without spending cuts larger than the debt-limit hike, enforceable limits on future spending, and no tax increases.
Fast-forward through a few months of intransigence — and a few friendly rounds of golf — and the conversation has become something much different. The president’s proposal for a deal that would save $4 trillion over the next 10 years through cuts to all major spending areas, including entitlements and the Pentagon, is otherwise known as a “sea change.â€
Entitlement reform is essential not because of any rich-versus-poor calculus, but because the programs are unsustainable in their current form. By signaling that some change in entitlements is inevitable, Obama is giving Republicans a bit of protective cover against toxic class-warfare rhetoric.
Republicans have gotten to this point by digging in their heels against tax increases and against raising the debt ceiling — but at the end of the day any budget deal is going to include tax increases, a higher debt ceiling, or most likely both.
If purists force a government shutdown in August to avoid exceeding the debt ceiling, each side will of course point fingers at the other. But Republicans have seen this movie before. In 1995, Bill Clinton triggered a government shutdown by vetoing budget bills — yet Republicans ended up shouldering the blame, and Clinton was re-elected.
Three years ago today I posted my first substantive blog post, about Senator Obama, the Democratic nominee for president. Here’s how it began:
From the start, my take on Obama has been that he’s a talented and charismatic politician who some day could become an important senator.
We know now, of course, that Obama will never be an important senator. But I think the post holds up pretty well.
There have been 443 posts since then (some of them more substantive than others). They’ve attracted more than 1,000 legitimate comments. There also have been more than 93,000 spam comments, blocked by my Akismet plug-in.
Since I added Google AdSense advertising to my site in May 2009, the ads have earned me $93.16, or an average of 12 cents a day. Once that total reaches $100, the Google people will send me a check. (Ca-ching!)Â I’ve had more than 47,000 unique visitors from 150 countries, and I’m grateful to everyone who has taken a look.
These stats don’t exactly make me a titan of the blogosphere, but I enjoy having an outlet for writing. My heaviest traffic came from my one and only Instalanche, in a post noting that Treasury Secretary nominee Timothy Geithner’s tax problems got less attention from the media than Joe the Plumber’s. The one post I’d like you to read if you haven’t already is “Honest Labor: From Mach 2 to Muenster to Madison.”
I was going to do this as two posts, but between entertaining, the sunshine, fireworks and various pressing chores, I didn’t get my July 4 post up in time. Let me end with a favorite quotation from the Collect for Independence Day in the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer (page 242). Regardless of your faith tradition, I hope you’ll join me in giving thanks for the Founders of America, who “lit the torch of freedom for nations then unborn.” And to my favorite sailor, thank you for your service, son.
Happy 5th of July!
http://blog.kirkpetersen.net/2010/02/honest-labor-from-mach-2-to-muenster-to-madison.html
The Rev. Bernard Poppe, my priest and friend, is more liberal than I am. (Ditto for 98% of his flock at St. George’s Episcopal, in the deep blue town of Maplewood, NJ.) So when Bernie started his sermon on Sunday by indicating he had mixed feelings about the death of Osama bin Laden, I was prepared to sit politely in silent disagreement.
But I found I had no quarrel with anything he said.
He said he was pleased at the news bin Laden had been killed — but then appalled by the tenor of the celebration in front of the White House and elsewhere. He questioned his own motives: “I’m not supposed to rejoice at anybody’s death.” He was unpersuaded by the notion that bin Laden had been “brought to justice,” because justice implies due process and an opportunity to mount a defense. The celebrations made it seem more like vengeance than justice. I hope I am accurately reflecting what he said — Father Poppe sometimes posts his sermons online, but this one was delivered without notes.
Father Poppe
I also reject the “brought to justice” formulation, although my reasons probably differ from Bernie’s. The idea that the fight against Islamic jihadism is a war, not a law-enforcement issue, is a well-established conservative meme — I’ve written about it here, here and especially here. Bin Laden declared war on America in 1996, but our government did not acknowledge that we were at war until that awful day in 2001. Much of the Left still has not acknowledged it, although President Obama, to his immense credit, has.
My faith teaches me that Osama bin Laden was a child of God and a sinner — and that he shared those traits with me. Few people in recent history have more fully earned a double-tap to the forehead, and yet hatred and the lust for vengeance are ugly emotions that lead to bad places. It’s appropriate for a minister to remind us of these things.
But if we are not to celebrate death, and if we reject the law-enforcement model, I still believe there is reason to rejoice in the success of the Navy SEALs. We cheer not for vengeance or justice, but for victory. We did not start this war, and it is not over, but our side has won an enormously important battle. I think we can celebrate in good conscience.
Got it done.
I’ve been highly critical of President Obama in the past, and I have no doubt that I will be again. I’m opposed to essentially his entire domestic agenda, and I hope to help vote him out of office 18 months from now.
However.
On the foreign affairs and national security front, Obama’s performance has been a mixed bag — which is to say, much better than on domestic matters. After the newly elected President retained Bush’s defense secretary, I started tagging some of my posts with Bush’s Third Term. Obama went on to allow the Iraq war to stay won, and properly escalated in Afghanistan. (I’m puzzled by Libya, but hoping for the best.)
For at least the next 20 months, Obama is my president, and on some level I wish him well — particularly in his role as commander-in-chief. I have nothing but contempt for Rush Limbaugh’s pre-election “I hope he fails” rhetoric, or for his sarcasm in the wake of Obama’s success this week.
The 1980 debacle at Desert One
The SEALS did the most dangerous part of the mission, of course, but don’t underestimate the danger Obama stared down in giving the green light. The mission went off flawlessly — but there was no guarantee of that. The compound could have been more heavily defended, multiple helicopters could have been lost. It’s not hard to imagine an outcome like Desert One in 1980, which cost eight American lives and contributed to Jimmy Carter’s defeat.
The safer route would have been to have a Predator launch a missile into the compound — zero chance of American casualties, and presumably 100% casualties in the compound. But that would have meant the death of multiple women and children, and no guarantee that bin Laden would subsequently be identified.
Despite the risks, despite not being certain that bin Laden was even in the compound, Obama signed off on the mission. It could have ended badly, but it did not, and Obama deserves enormous credit for a landmark victory in the war against Islamic fascism. Congratulations, Mr. President, and thank you.
Now about that healthcare bill…
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Pick your poison
Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria has been stepping up the violence in response to waves of protest across the country.  As the Washington Post stated in an editorial:
According to Syrian human rights groups, more than 220 people had been killed by Friday. And Friday may have been the worst day yet: According to Western news organizations, which mostly have had to gather information from outside the country, at least 75 people were gunned down in places that included the suburbs of Damascus, the city of Homs and a village near the southern town of Daraa, where the protests began.
The Post editorial is titled “Shameful U.S. Inaction on Syria’s Massacres,” which made me think the Post was advocating armed intervention in that country — which would be War Number Four. But no, the Post has a more nuanced response in mind: it thinks the Obama Administration should recall its ambassador to Damascus. That’ll fix ’em!
For what it’s worth, I agree that we should recall our ambassador. I just don’t think we should pretend that would constitute “taking action.”
The oddest thing about the Post editorial is that its 591 words do not include the word “Libya.” But of course, Obama’s rush to war in Libya creates a context that complicates dealings with other Muslim nations.
Even after a month to get used to the idea, I’m still astonished by the intervention in Libya. It makes no sense, coming from a president who won his party’s nomination in part because he was the only contender who had opposed the war in Iraq from the beginning. My basic take is that the intervention may or may not have been a bad idea — but now that we’re at war with Gadhafi, we damn well better beat him.
But how do we justify allowing Assad to kill his own people after taking up arms against Gadhafi for doing the same thing? Syria — with its ties to Iran, its support for Hamas and Hezbollah, and its recent history of shuttling terrorists into Iraq to kill Americans — is if anything a more odious and important enemy than Libya.
I’m conscious of the fact that this line of reasoning can circle around to bite me. Asking “Why Libya but not Syria” begs the question, “why Iraq but not Libya?” One answer is that in Iraq, the Bush Administration — like the Clinton Administration before it, and like every major intelligence agency in the Western world — believed that Saddam still had stockpiles of the chemical weapons he had used against his own people, believed that he was pursuing nuclear capabilities, and believed it was only a matter of time until he began providing terrorists with weapons of mass destruction.
But I think the better answer to “why Iraq but not Libya” is, “not Libya, because of Iraq.” I’ve never wavered in my support for the war in Iraq, but I’m also not blind to the lives, dollars and opportunities that war has cost. A war-weary America, with its military and its finances stretched thin, should think long and hard about starting additional wars of choice.