As the noose tightens around Assad over the Hariri assassination, we shouldn't forget his active support of our enemies in Iraq.

From Thursday's Journal editorial:

The House took a step in that direction this month by passing another immigration "reform" bill heavy with border control and business harassment and light on anything that will work in the real world.

This past Saturday, the Washington Post published a letter by Coleen Rowley, former FBI Special Agent and the Chief Division Counsel for the Bureau's Minneapolis office, criticizing an editorial,"Vital Presidential Power," co-authored by Weekly Standard editor William Kristol and AEI resident scholar Gary Schmitt. The Kristol-Schmitt op-ed was a defense of President Bush's decision to by-pass the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act in ordering NSA electronic surveillance of al Qaeda-related communications to and from the United States. Ms. Rowley, who is now running for Congress in Minnesota as a Democrat (DFL), made the following key criticism in her letter:

"... Contrary to Kristol and Schmitt's assertion that 'the Justice Department decided there was not sufficient evidence to get a FISA warrant to allow the inspection of his computer files,' no evidence of Moussaoui's suspicious flight training and ties with terrorism was presented to the Justice Department. The department was never contacted and so did not decide anything; therefore, no decision was ever made regarding the given evidence and its subsequent application to FISA standards.

That means the FISA procedures were not the reason the FBI failed to inspect Moussaoui's computer files. Rather, the FBI's failure to share and analyze intelligence sufficiently is what enabled Moussaoui to escape further investigation."

Technically, what Ms. Rowley writes is true. The Department of Justice never did make a decision about a possible FISA warrant for Moussaoui. But her point is also misleading. If the testimony of various FBI agents and headquarters officials set out in the Joint Inquiry into Intelligence Community Activities before and after the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001 by the House and Senate intelligence committees is accurate, the reason the Justice Department didn't pursue a FISA warrant was because the FBI itself refused to move forward with an application to the Justice Department. For all of the FBI's suspicions of Moussaoui, the Bureau believed there was not sufficient evidence that he was an "agent of a foreign power" or "terrorist" and, hence, the case did not in their judgment meet the "probable cause" standard required under FISA to obtain a warrant. If so, this would seem to confirm Kristol and Schmitt’s point that the “probable cause” standard required by FISA did play a central role in no FISA warrant being issued in this instance.

What follows are excerpts from the Joint Inquiry:

“Around this time, an attorney in the National Security Law Unit at FBI Headquarters asked the Chief Division Counsel in the Minneapolis field office whether she had considered trying to obtain a criminal warrant. The Chief Division Counsel replied that a FISA order would be the safer course..... (319)

At the suggestion of a Minneapolis supervisor, the agent contacted an FBI officer who had been detailed to the CTC. The agent shared the details of the Moussaoui investigation with the CTC detailee and provided the names of Moussaoui’s associates. The agent explained in a Joint Inquiry interview that he was looking for any information CTC could provide to strengthen the case linking Moussaoui to international terrorism..... (320)

On Wednesday, August 22, the FBI Legat in Paris provided a report that [ deleted ] started a series of discussions between Minneapolis and Headquarters RFU as to whether a specific group of Chechen rebels was a “recognized” foreign power, that is, was on the State Department’s list of terrorist groups and for which the FISA Court had previously granted orders.

The RFU agent told Joint Inquiry staff that, based on advice he received from the NSLU, he believed that the Chechen rebels were not a “recognized” foreign power and that, even if Moussaoui were to be linked to them, the FBI could not obtain a search order under FISA. The RFU agent told the Minneapolis agents that they had to connect Moussaoui to al-Qa’ida, which he believed was a “recognized” foreign power. (321)....

Ultimately, the RFU agent agreed to submit Minneapolis’ FISA request to attorneys in the FBI’s NSLU for review.

In interviews, several FBI attorneys with whom the RFU agent consulted confirmed that they advised the RFU agent that the evidence was insufficient to link Moussaoui to a foreign power. One of the attorneys noted that Chechen rebels were not an international foreign terrorism group under FISA (321)....

On August 27, the RFU agent told the Minneapolis supervisor that the supervisor was getting people “spun up” over Moussaoui. According to his notes and his statement to the Joint Inquiry, the supervisor replied that he was trying to get people at FBI Headquarters “spun up” because he was trying to make sure that Moussaoui “did not take control of a plane and fly it into the World Trade Center.” The Minneapolis agent said that the Headquarters agent told him:

‘[T]hat’s not going to happen. We don’t know he’s a terrorist. You don’t have enough to show he is a terrorist. You have a guy interested in this type of aircraft – that is it.’

[On August 28, the RFU agent edited, and returned to Minneapolis for comment, the request for a FISA Court order that Minneapolis had prepared. The RFU agent told the Joint Inquiry that it was not unusual for FBI Headquarters agents to make changes to field submissions. The major substantive change was removal of information that tried to make connections between the Chechen rebels and al-Qa’ida. After the edit was complete, the RFU agent briefed the FBI Deputy General Counsel, who told the Joint Inquiry that he agreed with the agent that there was insufficient information to show that Moussaoui was an agent of a foreign power]. (322-23)

1) "What Happened to Iraq's Biological Agent Storage Tanks or the Spray Dryer Used for Turning Liquid Agent into a Dried Form? Any Update on the Document that Indicated Iraq had Built a Fermentation Plant?" -- Here

2) "What did Hans Blix say in March 2003 about Saddam's Missile & WMD-Warhead Disarmament? Did UN Inspectors Conclude Saddam had Disarmed? NO" -- Here

3) "What did Charles Duelfer have to say about Saddam's Missile Programs? Did Iraq Comply with UN Resolutions Regarding these Programs? NO" -- Here

4) "It's Easy to Forget Just How Close Saddam Came to Having a Nuclear Weapon in 1991, Despite Regular Inspections by the IAEA & the Eyes of US Intelligence" -- Here

5) "Document Date: Feb-02, Title: ...Training Manual from Al Qaida Chemical Plant regarding Chem Warfare, Description: Contains papers concerning Iraqi officials, prices of equipment, training plans, and actions...all concerning chemical warfare" -- Here

6) "Did Saddam Hussein Account for the VX known to have been Produced? No. How about the 600 Tons of VX Precursors UNSCOM believed Iraq had Imported? No. Did it Matter? Yes. Just Ask Clinton Defense Secretary William Cohen" -- Here

7) "Did Saddam Hussein Comply With the Provision of UN Resolution 687 Regarding Terrorism? No" -- Here

8) "Did Saddam Hussein Comply With the Provision of UN Resolution 687 Regarding Terrorism? No, Part II" -- Here

9) "With the apparent death of "Halabja" al-Douri, Let's Review Some Material from the Duelfer and UNMOVIC Reports that Won't Appear in a New York Times Editorial Anytime Soon" -- Here

10) "Trust in Saddam: What Hans Blix Doesn't Tell Audiences Nowadays" -- Here

11) "The Media Somehow Missed the Other News Powell Aide Made Yesterday" -- Here

12) "Who were Zawahiri's reported contacts in Iraq? Have members of the Iraqi Delegation that reportedly Traveled to Afghanistan to Meet the Taliban and Bin Ladin been Identified? Have Any Republicans Bothered to Ask?" -- Here

13) "Why did President Clinton Worry About a Terrorist Attack on the United States with Weapons Supplied by Iraq?" -- Here

14) "Why were U.S. Government Officials 'Deeply Worried' That Saddam Hussein Might Give 'Radical Islamist Groups' Biological Weapons to Attack the U.S. during the Clinton presidency?" -- Here

15) "Guess What Clinton's Assistant Secretary of State Had to Say about Saddam's Nuke Program in 2002?" -- Here

16) "What did U.S. intelligence tell the Clinton administration on the nuclear reconstitution issue?" -- Here

17) "Does the National Journal's 'Exclusive' Piece on Pre-War Intelligence Distort the Public Record?" -- Here

18) "More Distortion on Iraq & Niger" -- Here

19) "Another Media Distortion: Joe Wilson Didn't Uncover Forgeries and Didn't 'Debunk' Much of Anything" -- Here

20) "Another Washington Post Distortion" Here

21) "The Washington Post Continues the 'Imminent Threat' Myth" -- Here

22) "Paris v. The Wall Street Journal" -- Here13)

Tom Bevan of Real Clear Politics explains here.

... must we reveal every method we're employing for national security to the world....

Have you noticed that the Bush administration is always duping the Democrats? Just listen to John Kerry, Jay Rockefeller, Hillary Clinton, or Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid. They voted for the war in Iraq. They walked onto the Senate floor to explain their vote. Saddam possessed chemical and biological weapons. He wanted nuclear weapons. He had ties to terrorists. He was a serial violator of UN resolutions and, yes, Saddam was an imminent threat.

Fast forward to the Spring 2003. Saddam's statue had been toppled but no weapons of mass destruction had been found. High-profile Democrats were not so sure they wouldn't be found, so they kept silent. If the weapons were uncovered (as President Clinton's defense secretary expected), they could still share credit with the president for disarming a tyrant. If no stockpiles were located, they could turn around and blame it on the president. It wasn't until well after March 2003 that Democrats trotted out the "Bush lied on wmd" routine in full force. Then came the backfilling on their Iraq war authorization vote. Kerry, Rockefeller, Reid, Hillary Clinton, et al. were duped into voting for the war because the White House manipulated the intelligence and painted a false portrait of Saddam Hussein. Sen. Clinton's "Letter to Constituents on Iraq Policy" is a good example of the "I was duped" fantasy. But the story doesn't end there.

Now, the White House duped those Democrats who were reportedly informed about the NSA surveillance program -- an operation that spied on al Qaeda communications with persons inside the U.S. Like the Iraq war authorization vote, the White House tricked them once again into going along with their spy plan.

Boy, those Democrats are a gullible lot. Voters will surely want to put them in charge of the House and Senate come November.

The chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R-MI), explains why in today's Washington Times.

During Operations Desert Storm, Enduring Freedom and Iraqi Freedom, coupled with the ongoing global war on terror, the United States has collected a vast array of foreign papers, documents, electronic media and other materials. These documents, stored in more than 35,000 boxes in a warehouse in the Persian Gulf, could constitute a treasure trove of intelligence related to Saddam Hussein and actions taken by his regime prior to the war in Iraq.

Despite the possibility that these documents may contain critical information, a vast and untold amount dating back to Operation Desert Storm in 1991 still remains untranslated. At the government's current rate of translation, there is a high probability that many of these CDs, books, ledgers and other items will go unreviewed for decades or more. This is unacceptable. We need to know what is in these documents now, not sometime in the future or possibly never. Why, you may ask, is it taking so long to translate these documents? Given the insight they could provide into prewar Iraq, shouldn't everyone want to know what the documents may say?

Go here.

While in Iraq, the defense secretary hinted at reducing levels by two Army brigades that would "drop the American troop presence below the 138,000 level that had been considered a baseline prior to the temporary addition of about 20,000 troops to provide extra security during the Oct. 15 referendum and the Dec. 15 election. Rumsfeld had previously said those 20,000 would be leaving soon."

But Henry Kissinger, who supported Saddam's removal from power, argues that as Iraqi units are trained they should be added to the baseline US force to put maximum pressure on the insurgents.

The views of critics and administration spokesmen converge on the proposition that as Iraqi units are trained, they should replace American forces – hence the controversy over which Iraqi units are in what state of readiness. But strategy based on substituting Iraqi for American troops may result in confirming an unsatisfactory stalemate. Even assuming that the training proceeds as scheduled and produces units the equivalent of the American forces being replaced – a highly dubious proposition – I would question the premise that American reductions should be in a linear relationship to Iraqi training. A design for simply maintaining the present unsatisfactory security situation.

The better view is that the first fully trained Iraqi units should be seen as increments to coalition forces and not replacements, making possible accelerated offensive operations aimed at the guerrilla infrastructure. Such a strategy would help remedy the shortage of ground forces, which has slowed anti-guerrilla operations throughout the occupation. While seemingly more time-consuming, it would in fact present better opportunities for stabilizing the country and hence provide a more reliable exit route....

Pressures to continue or accelerate the withdrawals could magnify so that the relationship to the political criteria of progress will be lost. A process driven by technical or domestic criteria may evoke a competition between various Iraqi factions to achieve nationalist credit for accelerating the U.S. withdrawal, perhaps by turning on us either politically or with some of their militia....

Japanese Foreign Minister Taro Aso states the obvious. From the AP:

Japan has long listed China's military expansion as a top security concern in the region but the remarks by Japanese Foreign Minister Taro Aso were unusually blunt and echoed U.S. concern about Beijing's military spending.

''It's a neighboring country with nuclear bombs, and its military expenditure has been on the rise for 12 years. It's beginning to pose a considerable threat,'' Japanese Foreign Minister Taro Aso told a news conference....

''China is fanning threat and anxiety,'' Aso said. ''The content of China's military expenditures is difficult for outsiders to know, and that fuels suspicion.''

See comments of Dan Blumenthal, former senior director for China, Taiwan and Mongolia in the Secretary of Defense's Office of International Security Affairs and current AEI fellow, here.

From today's Washington Post:

Annan castigated what he called unfair media coverage of his role and that of his son, Kojo, in the United Nations' now-defunct oil-for-food program in Iraq.

He scolded James Bone of the Times of London for telling him, "Your own version of events don't really make sense."

Annan responded: "I think you're being very cheeky. Listen, James Bone -- you've been behaving like an overgrown schoolboy in this room for many, many months and years. You are an embarrassment to your colleagues and to your profession. Please stop misbehaving and please let's move on to a serious subject."

Annan said not enough weight was given to bribes and oil smuggling outside of the $64 billion program, recently documented by a U.N.-established inquiry, headed by former Federal Reserve chairman Paul A. Volcker.

"We all have to be careful, whatever responsibilities we have, not to be fed by people with agendas," Annan said.

Asked again if he bought a Mercedes tax-free for his son with his diplomatic discount, Annan said: "I know you are all obsessed about the car. If you want to know more about it, please address yourself to my son or his lawyer."

"I am neither his spokesman or his lawyer," he said. "The report of Paul Volcker is clear. I am not going to rehash it."

From the Duelfer Report, Volume 3, Biological Warfare, September 30, 2004:

(Storage Tanks/Fermenters)

In 1990, Iraq produced at least 39—possibly as many as 70—1,000-liter mobile tanks that could be readily converted into fermenters. Additionally, 8 mobile 800-liter tanks/fermentors were transferred from Al Kindi Vet Vaccine Facility to Al Hakam in 1987/88. Of the combined 1,000-liter and 800-liter mobile tanks, only 24 were cited as destroyed by Iraq. Evidence of such destruction of 24 units was provided to UNSCOM and stored at the UN Headquarters in the Canal Hotel. Thus, 23 remained after the alleged unilateral destruction of BW weapons and agents by Iraq in 1991. ISG has determined that two more tanks were destroyed at Al ‘Aziziyah. Of those remaining, four are 800-liter imported tanks/fermentors.

Rihab [Dr. Rihab Rashid Taha Al ‘Azzawi, head of Iraq’s bacterial program] stated that Iraq was able to produce one cubic meter model fermentors “with bad wheels.” Documentary evidence dated September 2000 recovered by ISG indicates that Iraq converted one cubic meter storage tanks into fermentors that are assessed to have been indigenously fabricated for Al Hakam under Rihab’s supervision. These storage tanks have been an unresolved issue for the UN. Rihab denied receiving mobile tanks/fermentors while at Al Hakam in 1994.

(Fermentation Plant)

ISG obtained a document that indicated 10 one cubic meter tanks were connected prior to 2000 to form a 10 cubic meter fermentation plant (location unknown). Another document indicates the delivery of an additional 13-14 such tanks in 1993.

(Spray Dryer)

A spray dryer—the second of two air freighted into Baghdad in 1989, model number 0142 was located in 1997 by UNSCOM in a warehouse in northern Iraq, the first model 0141 was at Al Hakam in 1991 and was destroyed in 1996. Before the two weeks it took to assemble a sampling team, Iraq again relocated the dryer, completely disassembled it to cleanse and sterilize it and then reassembled it. This dryer was under monitoring until 15 December 1998 by UNSCOM. Its present whereabouts is unknown.

It's a good bet Americans may be interested in getting an answer. Sen. Rockefeller and Rep. Pelosi were briefed on the NSA surveillance program two years ago, but are quick to let everyone (particularly their party's hysterical base) know that they had serious "concerns" about it. According to today's Washington Post,

Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.) revealed Monday that he had written to Vice President Cheney the day he was first briefed on the program in July 2003, raising serious concerns about the surveillance effort. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said she also expressed concerns in a letter to Cheney, which she did not make public.

So, Rockefeller and Pelosi are now claiming that they opposed the NSA operation as briefed to them by intelligence officials. They also want to hold the president "accountable" for pursing the program. But what about their accountability in light of the remarks of Gen. Michael Hayden, deputy national intelligence director, made at a Monday news conference?

REPORTER: Have you identified armed enemy combatants, through this program, in the United States?

GENERAL HAYDEN: This program has been successful in detecting and preventing attacks inside the United States.

REPORTER: General Hayden, I know you're not going to talk about specifics about that, and you say it's been successful. But would it have been as successful -- can you unequivocally say that something has been stopped or there was an imminent attack or you got information through this that you could not have gotten through going to the court?

GENERAL HAYDEN: I can say unequivocally, all right, that we have got information through this program that would not otherwise have been available.

America is a battlefield in the war against al Qaeda that stretches from New York, Washington and Los Angeles to Madrid, Baghdad, Karachi and Jakarta. The commander-in-chief believes he had the legal authority to conduct surveillance when "one party to the communication is outside the U.S" (as does a Clinton associate attorney general here), and, according to Gen. Hayden, the president's actions stopped terrorist "attacks inside the United States."

Pelosi and Rockefeller and other Democrats opposed these actions.

Let the debate begin.

John Schmidt, who served in the Clinton Justice Department from 1994 to 1997, wrote the following in today's Chicago Tribune:

President had legal authority to OK taps
Chicago Tribune
By John Schmidt
Published December 21, 2005

President Bush's post- Sept. 11, 2001, authorization to the National Security Agency to carry out electronic surveillance into private phone calls and e-mails is consistent with court decisions and with the positions of the Justice Department under prior presidents.

The president authorized the NSA program in response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks on America. An identifiable group, Al Qaeda, was responsible and believed to be planning future attacks in the United States. Electronic surveillance of communications to or from those who might plausibly be members of or in contact with Al Qaeda was probably the only means of obtaining information about what its members were planning next. No one except the president and the few officials with access to the NSA program can know how valuable such surveillance has been in protecting the nation.

In the Supreme Court's 1972 Keith decision holding that the president does not have inherent authority to order wiretapping without warrants to combat domestic threats, the court said explicitly that it was not questioning the president's authority to take such action in response to threats from abroad.

Four federal courts of appeal subsequently faced the issue squarely and held that the president has inherent authority to authorize wiretapping for foreign intelligence purposes without judicial warrant.

In the most recent judicial statement on the issue, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review, composed of three federal appellate court judges, said in 2002 that "All the ... courts to have decided the issue held that the president did have inherent authority to conduct warrantless searches to obtain foreign intelligence ... We take for granted that the president does have that authority."

The passage of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act in 1978 did not alter the constitutional situation. That law created the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that can authorize surveillance directed at an "agent of a foreign power," which includes a foreign terrorist group. Thus, Congress put its weight behind the constitutionality of such surveillance in compliance with the law's procedures.

But as the 2002 Court of Review noted, if the president has inherent authority to conduct warrantless searches, "FISA could not encroach on the president's constitutional power."

Every president since FISA's passage has asserted that he retained inherent power to go beyond the act's terms. Under President Clinton, deputy Atty. Gen. Jamie Gorelick testified that "the Department of Justice believes, and the case law supports, that the president has inherent authority to conduct warrantless physical searches for foreign intelligence purposes."

FISA contains a provision making it illegal to "engage in electronic surveillance under color of law except as authorized by statute." The term "electronic surveillance" is defined to exclude interception outside the U.S., as done by the NSA, unless there is interception of a communication "sent by or intended to be received by a particular, known United States person" (a U.S. citizen or permanent resident) and the communication is intercepted by "intentionally targeting that United States person." The cryptic descriptions of the NSA program leave unclear whether it involves targeting of identified U.S. citizens. If the surveillance is based upon other kinds of evidence, it would fall outside what a FISA court could authorize and also outside the act's prohibition on electronic surveillance.

The administration has offered the further defense that FISA's reference to surveillance "authorized by statute" is satisfied by congressional passage of the post-Sept. 11 resolution giving the president authority to "use all necessary and appropriate force" to prevent those responsible for Sept. 11 from carrying out further attacks. The administration argues that obtaining intelligence is a necessary and expected component of any military or other use of force to prevent enemy action.

But even if the NSA activity is "electronic surveillance" and the Sept. 11 resolution is not "statutory authorization" within the meaning of FISA, the act still cannot, in the words of the 2002 Court of Review decision, "encroach upon the president's constitutional power."

FISA does not anticipate a post-Sept. 11 situation. What was needed after Sept. 11, according to the president, was surveillance beyond what could be authorized under that kind of individualized case-by-case judgment. It is hard to imagine the Supreme Court second-guessing that presidential judgment.

Should we be afraid of this inherent presidential power? Of course. If surveillance is used only for the purpose of preventing another Sept. 11 type of attack or a similar threat, the harm of interfering with the privacy of people in this country is minimal and the benefit is immense. The danger is that surveillance will not be used solely for that narrow and extraordinary purpose.

But we cannot eliminate the need for extraordinary action in the kind of unforeseen circumstances presented by Sept.11. I do not believe the Constitution allows Congress to take away from the president the inherent authority to act in response to a foreign attack. That inherent power is reason to be careful about who we elect as president, but it is authority we have needed in the past and, in the light of history, could well need again.

Weekly Standard contributor Tom Joscelyn points to this interesting piece from the Associated Press on his new blog (http://thomasjoscelyn.blogspot.com).

December 20, 2005 Tuesday 7:55 PM Eastern Time

U.S. Army Digs Up Weapons Cache in Iraq

BYLINE: RYAN LENZ; Associated Press Writer

DATELINE: ZUWAD KHALAF, Iraq

BODY:
U.S. soldiers in the northern Iraqi desert dug up more than 1,000 aging rockets and missiles wrapped in plastic, some of which were buried as recently as two weeks ago, Army officials said Tuesday.

Commanders in the 101st Airborne Division said an Iraqi tipped them off to the buried weapons, perhaps an indication that residents in this largely Sunni Arab region about 150 miles north of Baghdad are beginning to warm up to coalition forces.

"The tide is turning," said 2nd Lt. Patrick Vardaro, 23, of Norwood, Mass., a platoon leader in the division's 187th Infantry Regiment. "It's better to work with Americans than against us."

As the sun set, soldiers from the 101st continued to uncover more, following zigzagging tire tracks across the desert floor and using metal detectors to locate weapons including mines, mortars and machine gun rounds.

"This is the mother load, right here," Sgt. Jeremy Galusha, 25, of Dallas, Ore., said, leaning on a shovel after finding more than 20 Soviet missiles.

The weapons are of primary concern for soldiers in Iraq, where bombs made with loose ordinance by insurgents are the preferred method to target coalition forces.

"In our eyes, every one of these rockets represents one less" bomb, Vardaro said.

Vardaro would not comment on whether there were signs the caches had been used recently to make bombs. But service records accompanying the missiles dated to 1984, suggesting they were buried by the Iraqi military under Saddam Hussein.

Still, the plastic around some of the rockets - of Soviet, German and French origins - appeared to be fresh and had not deteriorated as it had on some of the older munitions.

A U.S. Air Force explosive ordinance team planned to begin destroying them as early as Wednesday morning.

First, America can't "win the war in Iraq" and now the head of the Democratic Party contributes this to the war effort against al Qaeda.

This is an interesting nugget from a New York Post op-ed today:

In 2002, the feds (presumably the NSA) picked up random cellphone chatter using the words "Brooklyn Bridge" (which apparently didn't translate well into Arabic). They notified the New York Police Department, which flooded the bridge with cops. Then the feds overheard a phone call in which a man said things were "too hot" on the bridge to pull off an operation. Later, an interrogation of a terrorist allowed by the Patriot Act led cops to the doorstep of this would-be bridge bomber. (His plans would definitely have brought down the bridge, NYPD sources told me.)

Why didn't Bush get a warrant? On who? For what? The NSA wasn't looking for a man who might blow up the bridge. It had no idea what it was looking for. It just intercepted random phone calls from people in the United States to those outside — and so heard the allusions to the bridge that tipped them off.

In criminal investigations, one can target a suspect and get a warrant to investigate him. But this deductive approach is a limited instrument in fighting terror. An inductive approach, in which one gathers a mass of evidence and looks for patterns, is far more useful.

But, if the Democrats are to be heeded, it will no longer be possible.

Wonder if Howard Dean signed on to this "report." Yet another reason voters aren't likely to want a Speaker Pelosi in the midst of the War on Terror. Here are some more reasons.

With the far-left impeachment train gathering steam, this may be a good time to review a December 2003 piece in Slate by Stewart Baker, general counsel to the National Security Agency from 1992 to 94.

In the spring and summer of 2001, with al-Qaida's preparations growing even more intense, the turmoil grew so bad that national security wiretaps were allowed to lapse—something that had never happened before. It isn't clear what intelligence we missed, but the loss of those wiretaps was treated as less troubling than the privacy scandal that now hung over the antiterrorism effort....

We should know that we can't prevent every imaginable privacy abuse without hampering the fight against terror; that an appetite for privacy scandals hampers the fight against terror; and that the consequence of these actions will be more attacks and more dead, perhaps in numbers we can hardly fathom....

So the effort to build information technology tools to find terrorists has stalled. Worse, the wall is back; doubts about legal authority are denying CIA analysts access to law enforcement information in our new Terrorist Threat Integration Center. Bit by bit we are recreating the political and legal climate of August 2001.

And sooner or later, I fear, that August will lead to another September.

National Review's Byron York explains here.

In a little-remembered debate from 1994, the Clinton administration argued that the president has "inherent authority" to order physical searches — including break-ins at the homes of U.S. citizens — for foreign intelligence purposes without any warrant or permission from any outside body. Even after the administration ultimately agreed with Congress's decision to place the authority to pre-approve such searches in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court, President Clinton still maintained that he had sufficient authority to order such searches on his own.

We heard a lot of criticism from politicians and editorial page writers on the failure of U.S. intelligence to "connect to dots" to prevent the September 11 attacks. But what about connecting them post-9/11. Gary Schmitt, currently a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, wrote on the limitations of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) in the Weekly Standard in October 2001 and co-authored with William Kristol this editorial in today's Washington Post. The Wall Street Journal has an excellent editorial on the "Beltway furor over last week's leak of National Security Agency wiretaps." And Dick Morris gives his take in today's New York Post.

See here for complete results.

Craig S. Smith explains in Sunday's New York Times.

While French universities are open to all high school graduates, the grandes écoles - great schools - from which many of the country's leaders emerge, weed out anyone who does not fit a finely honed mold. Of the 350,000 students graduating annually from French high schools, the top few grandes écoles accept only about 1,000, virtually all of whom come from a handful of elite preparatory schools.

Most of the country's political leaders, on both the right and the left, come from the grandes écoles. President Jacques Chirac and his prime minister, Dominique de Villepin, studied at the National School of Administration, which has produced most of the technocrats who have run France for the last 30 years.

From a Weekly Standard friend:

"Four days after Iraq's third free election this year, and on the day Afghanistan's new parliament opens, Freedom House released its major survey of global freedom. The study can be found here.

In his essay on the Middle East, Arch Puddington, director of research at Freedom House, writes:

The global picture thus suggests that 2005 was one of the most successful years for freedom since Freedom House began measuring world freedom in 1972.... The Freedom in the World 2006 ratings for the Middle East represent the region's best performance in the history of the survey.... Since the events of 9/11, the United States has made the promotion of democracy -- in the Middle East primarily but in other regions as well -- a greater priority among the broad mix of foreign policy goals.... the administration of George W. Bush, building on policies initiated by his predecessors, has pushed forward an agenda in which the advancement of freedom plays a tangible role.... While the precise impact of democracy promotion policies is often difficult to measure, it is by now clear that the efforts by the established democracies to expand freedom's reach are paying dividends. Democracy promotion has always had its critics, and the critics' objections, as might be expected, have been amplified during a controversial war. But if the gains for freedom revealed in this survey tell us anything, it is that the policies of the United States, Europe, and other free societies are achieving some crucial goals. These efforts should be strengthened, not diminished.

The findings of Freedom House are a reminder that these are remarkable days in the history of liberty."

The New York Sun has an excellent editorial today on the Democrats and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

America is in a war with Islamic extremists who are trying to defeat our country. "Two of the terrorist hijackers who flew a jet into the Pentagon, Nawaf al Hamzi and Khalid al Mihdhar, communicated while they were in the United States to other members of al Qaeda who were overseas," Mr. Bush said in his radio address. "But we didn't know they were here, until it was too late." The president said the activities he authorized by the National Security Agency "make it more likely that killers like these 9/11 hijackers will be identified and located in time."

Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) delivered the following remarks today on the Senate floor regarding a New York Times article published last Friday:

As the New York Times reported, the President of the United States has authorized, after counseling with the Department of Justice and various legal authorities, as well as consulting with Congress on up to 12 occasions, the use of intercepted messages from the National Security Agency as part of our ongoing counterterrorism efforts. The New York Times suggested that this was a secret way to threaten the civil liberties of Americans. The fact is, as is now being revealed, Congress was consulted at least 12 times since September 11th about the President’s authorization of these interceptions of communications, interceptions which were not solely within the United States but were from known links to international terrorism in the United States and known links with international terrorism overseas.

It is perhaps not a coincidence that just before the vote on cloture on the reauthorization of the PATRIOT Act, the New York Times released this story. Indeed, at least two Senators -- I heard with my own ears -- cited this article as a reason why they voted to not allow a bipartisan majority to reauthorize the PATRIOT Act. As it turns out, the author of this article had turned in a book to his publisher 3 months ago. The paper failed to reveal that the story was tied to a book release and sale by the author James Risen. The title of the book is "State of War, the Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration." It is about to be published by the Free Press in the coming weeks.

It is a crying shame that America's safety is endangered by the potential expiration of the PATRIOT Act in part because a newspaper has seen fit to release, on the night before the vote on the reauthorization of the Act, and as part of a marketing campaign for selling the book, something that is blatantly misrepresentative of the facts and appears to be an attempt to strike terror or perhaps paranoia into Senators and others out of some unrealistic and inaccurate concern for invasion of civil liberties.

It is appropriate that Congress have hearings to look into this, but the fact is, the President and his administration have briefed high ranking Members of Congress on 12 occasions since this so-called secret program of intercepting communications between known terrorist contacts in the United States and overseas occurred.

Robert Kagan and William Kristol explain here.

THE PURPLE INK on 11 million Iraqi fingers had not yet dried after an unprecedented, almost miraculous exercise in democratic freedom--and already there were querulous American critics working hard to make light of the whole thing. "Experts Cautious in Assessing Iraqi Election," ran the headline on a Friday Washington Post story by Robin Wright; "High Turnout, Low Violence a Positive Step, but Not a Turning Point, Analysts Say." And indeed, the indefatigable Ms. Wright had telephoned her usual cast of sour experts, each of whom was eager to help explain why, whatever else it might be, the peaceful election of a national assembly for a fully self-governing Arab democracy was Not a Turning Point. Elsewhere in the Post, former Clinton assistant secretary of state Susan Rice took the occasion of Iraq's elections to reject, with a bit of a sneer, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's assertion that democracy in Iraq serves American security interests.

Funny, isn't it? We seem to remember that the Clinton administration's declared foreign policy doctrine was something called "democratic enlargement." No longer operative, it seems.

Funny, I never knew that Albert Brooks had such a command of Islamic culture and history.

First, it was John Kerry who caved in to the anti-war left. John Edwards soon followed -- see here. Now, it's Sen. Clinton. In the last few weeks, the prospective presidential candidate supported the Levin resolution on timetables for troop withdrawal from Iraq, penned "a letter to constituents" that basically said she was duped into voting for the war, and now she is joining the filibuster to water-down the Patriot Act.

Speaking of, does Gov. Mark Warner support the filibuster or will he refuse to answer as he has done on many questions regarding Iraq.

Richard John Neuhaus, Editor-in-Chief of First Things, November 28, 2005:

This is an argument very much worth having. Charles Krauthammer writes in the Weekly Standard: “But if that is the case, then McCain embraces the same exceptions I do, but prefers to pretend he does not. If that is the case, then his much-touted and endlessly repeated absolutism on inhumane treatment is merely for show. If that is the case, then the moral preening and the phony arguments can stop now, and we can all agree that in this real world of astonishingly murderous enemies, in . . . very circumscribed circumstances, we must all be prepared to torture. Having established that, we can then begin to work together to codify rules of interrogation for the two very unpleasant but very real cases in which we are morally permitted–indeed morally compelled–to do terrible things.”

Krauthammer is writing against Senator John McCain’s proposal for banning all forms of “cruel, inhuman, or degrading” treatment of prisoners, a proposal which has overwhelming support in Congress but is opposed by the Bush administration. McCain has said that in extreme circumstances — such as the familiar “ticking time bomb” scenario — authorities will do what they have to do to extract information. Krauthammer says that means McCain’s proposed rule is “merely for show,” and comes close to saying that its supporters are guilty of hypocrisy.

I am not at all sure. Establishing a principle is not “merely for show.” Recognizing, clearly but sotto voce, that there will sometimes be exceptions to the principle is not hypocrisy. Those who, under the most extreme circumstances, violate the rule must be held strictly accountable to higher authority. Here the venerable maxim applies, abusus non tollit usus–the abuse does not abolish the use.

We are not talking here about the reckless indulgence of cruelty and sadism exhibited in, for instance, the much-publicized Abu Ghraib scandal. We are speaking, rather, of extraordinary circumstances in which senior officials, acting under perceived necessity, decide there is no moral alternative to making an exception to the rules, and accept responsibility for their decision. Please note that, in saying this, one does not condone the decision. It is simply a recognition that in the real world such decisions will be made.

This understanding of the matter offends the legal, and legalistic, mind of Alan Dershowitz of Harvard who has suggested that officials should have to get a court order in order to torture a prisoner. This, like Krauthammer’s proposal and the apparent position of the administration, would be a giant step toward “normalizing” torture and other forms of cruel and inhumane treatment. In short order, it would likely result not only in the very widespread abuse of the rule but in the effective abolition of the rule.

Krauthammer’s moral logic is that it is sometimes necessary to do evil in order that good may result. Here he is in the company of Michael Walzer who has argued that effective leaders must be prepared to have “dirty hands.” An alternative argument is that coercion, even brutal coercion, may be morally justified in extraordinary circumstances in order to save thousands of innocent lives. In that event, it is further argued, the use of such coercion is not evil but is the moral course of action.

Whether, in fact, the circumstances justified the action must be subject to the rigid scrutiny of higher authority. There will likely be cover-ups, rationalizations, and other forms of duplicity. Where possible, they must be exposed, in the full awareness that in this connection, as in all connections, we are dealing with fallen humanity. As with all rules, the aim is to make sure that the exception to the rule does not become the rule.

McCain is right: The United States should be on record as banning “cruel, inhuman, or degrading” treatment of prisoners. The meaning of each of those terms will inevitably be disputed, as will the case-by-case application of the principle. But again, abusus non tollit usus.

Victor Davis Hanson
Chicago Tribune
December 2, 2005

On torture, U.S. must take the high road We mustn't stoop to our enemies' level

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) recently proposed an amendment to a defense appropriations bill in an attempt to plug loopholes in existing anti-torture laws. The amendment, which President Bush opposes, is a good idea for America--but not necessarily for the reasons cited by most critics of the administration.

Contrary to popular belief, throughout history, torture has brought results--either to gain critical, sometimes lifesaving, intelligence or more gratuitously to obtain embarrassing confessions from terrified captives.

The question, then, for a liberal democracy is not whether torture in certain cases is effective, but whether its value is worth the negative publicity and demoralizing effect on a consensual society that believes its cause and methods must enjoy a moral high ground far above the enemy's.

Nor can opponents of torture say that it is entirely foreign to the U.S. military experience, at least from what we know of it even in so-called good wars like World War II. There were American soldiers--sometimes in furor over the loss of comrades, sometimes to obtain critical information--who executed or tortured captured Japanese and German prisoners. Those who did so operated on a de facto "don't ask, don't tell" understanding, occasionally found it effective and were rarely punished by commanding officers. Even so, soldiers never descended to the levels of depravity common in the Wehrmacht or the Soviet and Imperial Japanese armies.

There is also not much to the argument that our employment of torture will only embolden the enemy to barbarously treat Americans held captive. What a silly idea! Captured Americans have already been filmed being beheaded--or shot or burned--and their mutilated corpses hung up for public ridicule.

We know from both its professed creed and its conduct in the field that Al Qaeda cares nothing for civilized behavior. Its barbarism is innate, not predicated on any notion of reciprocity. Beheading and torturing prisoners occurred before the sexual humiliation so amply photographed at Abu Ghraib. U.S. soldiers already grasp what surrendering to Al Qaeda terrorists would mean; they've seen other Westerners appearing hooded and in jumpsuits on the Internet before losing their heads to choruses of "Allahu Akbar."

Others argue that by employing torture we will only earn the censure of the liberal, especially European, world. Maybe so, but once again, Europe, the United Nations and international human-rights groups, for reasons that transcend the war in Iraq, will fault the United States no matter what it does.

Castigating our misdemeanors, while mostly ignoring the felonies of real barbarians, seems to ensure these sidelined utopians a sense of easy moral smugness. We see that in regard to Guantanamo Bay. Europeans fixate on American interrogations of captive murderous terrorists but remain silent about thousands who have been killed, tortured or forgotten in Fidel Castro's gulag a few miles away. Iran, North Korea, Serbia and Saddam Hussein's Iraq tortured and executed tens of thousands without much fear that either the United Nations or the Europeans would spend their own lives and treasure to stop such endemic barbarism.

There is also a danger that once we try to quantify precisely what constitutes torture, we could, in the ensuing utopian debate, define anything from sleep deprivation to loud noise as unacceptable. Indeed, we might achieve the unintended effect of only creating disdain for our moral pretensions from incarcerated terrorists. They would have no worries of suffering pain but plenty of new demands on their legalistic hosts, from ethnically correct meals to proper protocols in handling their Korans.

So we might as well admit that by foreswearing the use of torture, we will probably be at a disadvantage in obtaining key information and perhaps endanger American lives here at home. (And, ironically, those who now allege that we are too rough will no doubt decry "faulty intelligence" and "incompetence" should there be another terrorist attack on an American city.) Our restraint will not ensure any better treatment for our own captured soldiers. Nor will our allies or the UN appreciate American forbearance. The terrorists themselves will probably treat our magnanimity with disdain, as if we were weak rather than good.

But all that is precisely the risk we must take in supporting the McCain amendment--because it is a public reaffirmation of our country's ideals. The United States can win this global war without employing torture. That we will not resort to what comes so naturally to Islamic terrorists also defines the nobility of our cause, reminding us that we need not and will not become anything like our enemies.

John Burns of the New York Times continues his first-rate reporting from Iraq.

On a day when the high voter turnout among Sunni Arabs was the main surprise, Ali and his posse of friends, unguarded as boys can be, acted like a chorus for the scene unfolding about them. A new willingness to distance themselves from the insurgency, an absence of hostility for Americans, a casual contempt for Saddam Hussein, a yearning for Sunnis to find a place for themselves in the post-Hussein Iraq - the boys' themes were their parents', too, only more boldly expressed.

Turnout "at least 67 percent" reports Lebanon's Daily Star.

The New York Sun has the story here.

From the Wall Street Journal, December 9, 2005:

Even as Saddam Hussein's trial and the dramatic witness testimonies about his crimes are broadcast live across the world, doubts about the legitimacy of the war continue to get a lot of media attention. But thanks to a Frenchman -- no, that's no typo -- we can obtain a fresh moral perspective on why the coalition invasion of Iraq and the continuing battle against extremists in that country served, and serves, the cause of justice.

Just out in Paris, "Le Livre Noir De Saddam Hussein" (The Black Book of Saddam Hussein) chronicles the mind-numbing death toll and suffering in Saddam's Iraq during more than three decades of non-intervention. Each terror attack is today played out live on TV to bolster the anti-Bush camp's claims of a war gone awry, But the butcher of Baghdad terrorized his people with impunity on a mass scale until the horror show was ended by allied troops in 2003.

"The American war was perhaps not a good solution to put an end to Saddam Hussein's dictatorship. But, as this book shows, after 35 years of a dictatorship of exceptional violence which destroyed Iraqi civil society and created millions of victims, there wasn't a good option," the book's editor, journalist Chris Kutschera, writes in his introduction. Coming from a French journalist, that's a rather large concession. But no wonder. The 700-page account of Saddam's crimes destroys all claims to the cause of "peace" by the war's opponents.

Bill Roggio reports from Barwana, Iraq:

The polls have been open for six hours in the town of Barwana, one of the three Triad cities which include Haqlaniyah and Haditha. The poll site sits right beneath the now-destroyed Barwana bridge, where Zarqawi terrorists routinely executed residents for not conforming to their perverse interpretation of Islam....

Barwana, once part of Zarqawi self declared “Islamic Republic of Iraq”, is now the scene of al-Qaeda’s greatest nightmare: Muslims exercising their constitutional right to chose their destiny.

The transcript may be found here.

and "soldiers talk democracy," while Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid talks baseball. The president "is 0 for 3 in his last three speeches," Reid said today. "He hasn't leveled with the American people or laid out a strategy for success." How inspiring.

The Wall Street Journal reports (sub req'd) today that the administration

has been pressing Congress to fund research into a new generation of nuclear weapons. Lawmakers have twice turned down proposals to design a new nuclear 'bunker-buster' bomb.... But last month, with little debate, Congress approved $25 million for research into what is supposed to be a sturdier, more reliable warhead than those designed during the Cold War....

Such simulations lead some to wonder if this administration...might use the reliable-warhead program...as an opening to build new military capabilities. 'I don't trust this group....We have to be on guard,' Rep. Hobson says.

This is a good time to review an excerpt from a Wall Street Journal editorial, "Hobson's Choice," last March:

Thomas Hobson was a 16th century English stablekeeper who, when it came to renting horses, gave his customers only one option -- the horse nearest the stable door. David Hobson is a Republican Congressman from Ohio who, when it comes to America's nuclear arsenal, seems intent on giving the President only one option -- the arsenal we have now.

We turn to this subject following North Korea's recent announcement that it has nuclear weapons. Not that this is news -- we've known for some time that Pyongyang has several atomic bombs.

But it is a timely reminder that the United States now faces asymmetrical nuclear threats for which it needs a different kind of deterrent than the one the U.S. inherited from the Cold War.

That deterrent includes an anti-ballistic missile shield, which already is being deployed in Alaska. It also potentially includes weapons such as the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator -- more commonly known as the nuclear 'bunker buster' -- the purpose of which would be to credibly threaten, or destroy, deeply buried sites such as those in which North Korea hides its arsenal.

The bulk of the existing U.S. nuclear arsenal was conceived in the 1970s and built in the 1980s, when the pressing need was to enhance the credibility of our retaliatory options against the Soviet Union. The pressing need today is to persuade adversaries like North Korea and Iran that we possess not only the capacity, but the will, to take out their nuclear bunkers without having to resort to very high-yield weapons that could kill tens of thousands of civilians above ground.

The Congressman is within his rights as a representative to try and quash this or that budget item through the power of the purse. And if Mr. Hobson wants to run for President, he can do that, too.

Until then, he ought to at least have to defend his theory of nuclear containment in a public debate on the floor of the House, where everyone can see what he's up to. His colleagues and party leaders might be surprised to learn that a subcommittee chairman wants to determine the nuclear posture of the United States.

Today's Washington Times reports:

The Pentagon yesterday announced a landmark change in the use of combat troops, elevating "stability missions" -- commonly called nation-building -- to an equal status with major combat operations.

The evolution in war-planning priorities underscores how the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States by the al Qaeda terror network continue to fundamentally reshape how U.S. military commanders deploy the armed forces.

The Washington Post has also reported on this new directive. While many may agree on this post-conflict focus (as I do), there's quite a divide -- Powell, Shinseki, Rumsfeld, etc. -- on just how big the deployed force should be to accomplish the mission (and having traveled throughout Kosovo there other issues to be sorted out related to the role of a stability force once on the ground). Whether one agrees or disagrees with its conclusions, this Rand study on the "Arithmetic of Stability Operations" is a good place to start the debate that will surely be part of the 2008 presidential campaign.

A few war opponents on the left know Howard Dean goofed with his we can't "win the war" line -- read here, for example. Dean's remark allowed the White House and "hacks" to frame the debate between those who want to pursue victory and those (like Dean) who are conceding defeat. The trick for Democrats now, the argument goes, is to repackage their withdrawal demand as a necessary strategy for stabilizing Iraq. Frederick Kagan and Sen. McCain explain why such a strategy would not work here and here. But even if one dismisses them as partisans, it will be tough sledding convincing the public that the war's opponents have the winning strategy when the folks at the Democratic Leadership Council are writing stuff like this in reaction to Rep. Pelosi's withdrawal comments:

Demands for an immediate troop withdrawal or arbitrary deadlines risk turning premature declarations that the United States has failed in Iraq into a self-fulfilling prophecy. That is why Democrats must reject them.

If our forces leave before the Iraqis can defend themselves, the result will be a national security disaster for the United States. Iraq will be convulsed into full-scale civil war that could provoke a regional conflagration. The Sunni triangle will likely become home base for the global jihad network, a safe haven for hatching new terrorist plots against our country and our friends. America will once again have broken faith with Iraq's long-suffering Kurds and Shi'a, and the cause of Arab democracy will be set back for a generation.

Democrats would be better off following the lead of the DLC, but the heart of the party believes in Dean and made him chairman -- and now they're stuck with him.

Heritage Foundation scholars John J. Tkacik Jr. and Dana Dillon make their case in the latest issue of Policy Review.

What Beijing Wants

In early 2000, Condoleezza Rice wrote, “China resents the role of the United States in the Asia-Pacific Region. This means that China is not a ‘status quo’ power but one that would like to alter Asia’s balance of power in its own favor. That alone makes it a strategic competitor, not the ‘strategic partner’ the Clinton administration once called it.”

While Dr. Rice has become a bit less direct in her locution during her tenure as secretary of state, her observation remains valid. Johns Hopkins professor Francis Fukuyama, writing in the Wall Street Journal (March 1, 2005), sees a similar trend in China’s ambitions: “The Chinese know what they are doing: Over the long run, they want to organize East Asia in a way that puts them in the center of regional politics. They can succeed where [then-Malaysian Prime Minister Mohammed] Mahathir failed because they are an economic powerhouse capable of doling out favors.” Of course, they can also mete out sanctions.

In the view of numerous analysts, a desire to demonstrate to Asia that China, not Japan, is the dominant regional power was the animating force behind the government-organized anti-Japanese riots and boycotts of Japanese goods in the spring of 2005. It is clear that Beijing intends to become the predominant force in Southeast Asia by constructing a framework of relationships that place Beijing in positions of leadership and influence while isolating the United States from its traditional role and its allies in the region.

Military.com has the letter here.

From's full statement may be found here.

"The communist state, meanwhile, responded to U.S. critiques with predictably strident rhetoric -- but also took the unusual step of inviting Western tourists to visit in 2006," reports today's Washington Times.

Bush, telling it like it is here. Democracy over dictatorship is the key to long-term peace and security, as Condi Rice also explained yesterday.

Find it here, and here is what a national anti-military group has been up to.

Lebanon's Daily Star reports here.

From the Associated Press:

A prominent anti-Syrian journalist and lawmaker was killed by a car bomb Monday, a day after returning from France, where he had been staying periodically for fear of assassination....

Lebanon has been rocked by a series of explosions since the Feb. 14 assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. The attacks have mainly targeted journalists and politicians known to be opposed to Syrian influence in Lebanon.

Kristol editorial, "Back to Basics," Weekly Standard, October 3, 2005:

Ronald Reagan used to say that the right policy is often simple-though not easy to carry out. Efforts to win the war, cut taxes and spending, and appoint constitutionalist judges will of course encounter real-world difficulties and political obstacles. But back to basics is the path to political health and successful governance.

Washington Times headline, "Bush agenda 'going back to the basics' on taxes, war," December 12, 2005:

"What you will see more of next year is the president going back to the basics -- winning the war and growing the economy and creating jobs," White House deputy press secretary Trent Duffy said. "The president certainly spent the last week doing that and will do so next year. He is going to go back to the basics."

Secretary of State Rice writes in today's Washington Post on "why promoting freedom is the only realistic path to security."

If the school of thought called "realism" is to be truly realistic, it must recognize that stability without democracy will prove to be false stability, and that fear of change is not a positive prescription for policy.

After all, who truly believes, after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, that the status quo in the Middle East was stable, beneficial and worth defending? How could it have been prudent to preserve the state of affairs in a region that was incubating and exporting terrorism; where the proliferation of deadly weapons was getting worse, not better; where authoritarian regimes were projecting their failures onto innocent nations and peoples; where Lebanon suffered under the boot heel of Syrian occupation; where a corrupt Palestinian Authority cared more for its own preservation than for its people's aspirations; and where a tyrant such as Saddam Hussein was free to slaughter his citizens, destabilize his neighbors and undermine the hope of peace between Israelis and Palestinians? It is sheer fantasy to assume that the Middle East was just peachy before America disrupted its alleged stability.

Had we believed this, and had we done nothing, consider all that we would have missed in just the past year: A Lebanon that is free of foreign occupation and advancing democratic reform. A Palestinian Authority run by an elected leader who openly calls for peace with Israel. An Egypt that has amended its constitution to hold multiparty elections. A Kuwait where women are now full citizens. And, of course, an Iraq that in the face of a horrific insurgency has held historic elections, drafted and ratified a new national charter, and will go to the polls again in coming days to elect a new constitutional government.

Henry Kissinger, who supported Saddam's removal from power, explains the folly of withdrawal timetables, and why the Pentagon's "linear" thinking on the training of Iraqi forces "runs the risk of confirming the adage that guerrillas win if they do not lose."

Whatever one's view of the decision to undertake the Iraq war, the method by which it was entered, or the strategy by which it was conducted – and I supported the original decision – one must be clear about the consequences of failure. If, when we go, we leave nothing behind but a failed state and chaos, the consequences will be disastrous for the region and for America's position in the world....

The views of critics and administration spokesmen converge on the proposition that as Iraqi units are trained, they should replace American forces – hence the controversy over which Iraqi units are in what state of readiness. But strategy based on substituting Iraqi for American troops may result in confirming an unsatisfactory stalemate. Even assuming that the training proceeds as scheduled and produces units the equivalent of the American forces being replaced – a highly dubious proposition – I would question the premise that American reductions should be in a linear relationship to Iraqi training. A design for simply maintaining the present unsatisfactory security situation.

The better view is that the first fully trained Iraqi units should be seen as increments to coalition forces and not replacements, making possible accelerated offensive operations aimed at the guerrilla infrastructure. Such a strategy would help remedy the shortage of ground forces, which has slowed anti-guerrilla operations throughout the occupation. While seemingly more time-consuming, it would in fact present better opportunities for stabilizing the country and hence provide a more reliable exit route....

Pressures to continue or accelerate the withdrawals could magnify so that the relationship to the political criteria of progress will be lost. A process driven by technical or domestic criteria may evoke a competition between various Iraqi factions to achieve nationalist credit for accelerating the U.S. withdrawal, perhaps by turning on us either politically or with some of their militia....

In 1997, UNSCOM declared that it had accounted for 817 of the 819 missiles prohibited by UN resolution 687. But the 819 referred only to the Scuds that Iraq imported from the Soviet Union, not the issue of Iraq’s indigenous missile production. The report stated:

However, priority requirements are: clarification of and accounting for Iraq’s indigenous production of proscribed missiles, including seven missiles claimed to have been for training, and conventional warheads and warheads for biological and chemical agents, and major missile parts.”

Clinton national security council official Ken Pollack explained all this in his book, The Threatening Storm:

UNSCOM discovered a secret Iraqi Scud engine plant still in operation in 1995, leading it to conclude that Iraq may have been building new missiles even as UNSCOM destroyed its old ones. Consequently, UNSCOM personnel concluded that Iraq had at least a dozen al-Husseins [Scuds] when it ceased cooperation with the inspectors in 1998....

Although virtually all the Soviet-supplied Scuds have been accounted for, because Iraq was able to produce Scud-type missiles indigenously there is no way to know just what its actual Scud inventory consisted of or how many it now has left. (169)

Here's what UNMOVIC's March 2003 report stated on this issue:

The lack of evidence to support Iraq’s declarations on its destruction of...indigenously produced ‘training’ engines, as well as on the key engine components, such as turbo-pumps, raises the question whether they were all destroyed as declared....

In order to address the broader question of the existence of a possible Scud-type missile force, Iraq should provide specific documentation in support of its declarations. An example would be the two reports written by the missile force commander on 30 January 1991 and in May 1991 that, on the basis of Iraq’s own declarations and outside information, are known to exist. The first report could help clarify the state of the combat missile force at the end of the Gulf War. The second report could allow clarification of the status of the missile force just after the adoption of resolution 687 (1991).

What about Saddam's chemical and biological warheads? The same March 2003 report declared:

Although UNSCOM verified the destruction of 73 to 75 of the 75 special warheads that Iraq declared, a number of discrepancies and questions remain, which raise doubts about the accounting of the special warheads, including the total number produced: statements by some senior Iraqi officials that Iraq had possessed 75 chemical and 25 biological Scud-type warheads; the finding that, at a minimum, 16 to 30 structural rings remain unaccounted for; Iraq’s numerous changes to its declarations on these matters; Iraq’s admitted action taken to mislead UNSCOM on the location and number of special warheads; the physical evidence which conflicts with Iraq’s account of its destruction of biological warheads; and the fact that no remnants of biological warheads were found by UNSCOM until after Iraq’s admission in 1995 that it had had an offensive biological weapons programme.

As a consequence of the accounting questions above, uncertainty remains concerning the types and numbers of chemical and biological agents it filled into the special warheads. The finding of degradation products related to nerve agents on some warhead remnants suggests that its declaration may not be complete.

Did the New York Times crowd print much of this or this or this? No.

Frederick Kagan explains in the upcoming issue of the Weekly Standard. In his lengthy piece, he makes the following points:

1. Arbitrary deadlines or milestones for withdrawal threaten to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.t

2. US Troops do NOT Impede Progress and are NOT the primary target of the insurgency; the elected government is.

3. Giving up on Iraq is NOT the way to "Fix" the US Army; it would only "increase" the danger of "breaking" the force -- a force that should have been enlarged long before Iraq.

4. Prematurely turning things over to the Iraqis is an exit strategy, NOT a victory strategy.

5. CENTCOM talk of minimizing our "Footprint" is a mistake; US Forces must be directly involved in attacking the insurgents in order to reduce their strength to a level the Iraqis are capable of handling.

6. The policy of "as Iraqi forces stand up, U.S. forces will stand down" is wrong; Pre-election operations/tactics shouldn't go away after December 15, 2005.

7. The "Oil Spot" strategy should be combined with ongoing "Whack-a-Mole" operations, NOT a substitute for them. Adopt a new target -- clearing and holding Baghdad and the entire Sunni Triangle at whatever pace the growth of the Iraqi Security Forces will allow, all the while continuing to attack al Qaeda and Sunni holdouts as necessary.

8. The presence or absence of sizable American forces will also play a vital role in determining whether the Sunni Arabs opt for violence or politics in the wake of the elections.

9. Iraq presents a firmer basis for optimism today than it ever has before. The challenges remain great, and failure will continue to be a real possibility for months if not years to come.

10. The greatest danger to success lies on the home front, in the danger that misrepresentations of Iraqi reality, politically motivated policy demands, and simple fear, exhaustion, and confusion will undermine our efforts.

11. The other danger is that those who do want to succeed--the Bush administration, CENTCOM--will inadvertently undermine our commitment by continuing mistakenly to emphasize the damage the American presence does to the prospects for success.

12. Continued U.S. military engagement is needed for success in Iraq--success that seems now to be closer than it has ever been--if we hold fast to the sound strategy for victory that has recently emerged, and do not lose our nerve.

Here's what Dean's brother had to say about the Connecticut senator.

Earlier this week while discussing the war in Iraq, Senator Joseph Lieberman said, "It's time for Democrats who distrust President Bush to acknowledge he'll be commander-in-chief for three more critical years, and that in matters of war we undermine presidential credibility at our nation's peril."

Unfortunately, President Bush has no credibility. His administration misled our nation into the war in Iraq on trumped-up charges of weapons of mass destruction. His "stay the course" strategy has led to over 2,100 American deaths. And no one sees an end in sight.

It is disturbing enough that Senator Lieberman remains one of the president's biggest cheerleaders. But his call for opponents of the president's failed policy to keep quiet is outrageous.

The only way we will end this war is by having an honest debate about how and when we can bring our troops home.

Please. The last thing this crowd wants is an honest debate. Many of them (see above or the statements of Ted Kennedy & Co.) spend their waking hours trying to convince Americans engaged in combat that their commander-in-chief lied them into war. Total garbage, of course, as Sen. John McCain has said: "It is a lie to say that the President lied to the American people."

Sens. Lieberman and McCain understand the difference between expressing policy disagreements intended to "win" the war in Iraq versus a deliberate campaign of massive distortions and outright lies intended to undermine a commander-in-chief while America is at war. The American people also understand this, which is why sensible Democrats are getting very nervous about Dean & Co.

The New Republic's Lawrence Kaplan explains here (sub. may be req'd):

The contradiction pits the liberal ideal that discourages impinging on the autonomy of others against the liberal ideal that no people ought to be governed without their consent--and that liberals ought therefore to support the democratic aspirations of foreign peoples. The tension between the two manifests itself in every war, with liberals who heeded Hans Morgenthau's admonition to mind our own business arguing that we have no right to violate the sovereignty of a Yugoslavia or an Iraq, while the descendants of Woodrow Wilson argue that to do otherwise would amount to a betrayal of liberalism.

The latter group had the upper hand during the presidency of Bill Clinton, who, if a president earned a ribbon every time he resorted to military action, would be sporting a chestful today. But those days are long gone. What we have in their place is a crude and cheap version of realism, which, although ostensibly a method of analysis that eschews ideology, is rapidly becoming an ideology of its own. Unfortunately, its key tenets as laid out by the Gary Harts and Paul Krugmans of this world--non-interference, narrowly defined vital interests, a foreign policy scrubbed of idealism--provide no adequate response to the war of ideas in which we're presently engaged and will be long after the war in Iraq draws to a close.

America hater Harold Pinter doesn't let the Academy down. But hey, the Associated Press reporter says the Academy is just "rewarding writers who make a stand against authority" like they did "in rewarding the literature prize to Soviet dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn in 1970."

A Post and Courier columnist reports that Gov. Warner was a hit at a fundraiser last night in South Carolina. In fact, he was so good that he "appears to have wrapped up South Carolina's 2008 Democratic presidential primary more than two years before voters will go to the polls and after only his second visit."

But shouldn't a "Southern centrist" who aspires to be commander-in-chief tell us how he would have voted on the Iraq war authorization if he had been in Congress at the time? Would he regret that vote today if he had supported the authorization back then? Does Gov. Warner believe the president made the right decision to remove Saddam Hussein from power in March 2003 or does he believe the President should have given UN inspectors more time, and, if so, how much time?

Sen. Clinton has had to take a position on all of the above questions without knowledge of how things will look in Iraq 6 or 18 months from now. It's smart politically for Gov. Warner to kick the can down the road before taking a position so he can calibrate his answer with the facts on the ground, but why would Clinton strategists not try to get him on record today? And why are reporters giving the governor a free pass on the biggest issue a president faces -- whether or not to go to war?

Duelfer's September 2004 report stated:

ISG has substantial documentary evidence and source reporting indicating that the Regime intentionally violated various international resolutions and agreements in order to pursue its delivery systems programs. Sources with direct access have described missile projects with design ranges well beyond UN limits and ISG has research documents to corroborate these claims. Additionally, ISG has exploited documents that confirm Iraq circumvented UN sanctions by illicitly importing components for use in its missile programs....

ISG has uncovered numerous examples of Iraq’s disregard for UN sanctions and resolutions in an effort to improve its missile and UAV capabilities. These violations repeatedly breached UNSCR 687, 707, 715, 1051, 1284, 1441 and pursuant annexes and enabled Iraq to develop more robust delivery system programs. (70-71)

Duelfer concluded:

Given Iraq’s investments in technology and infrastructure improvements, an effective procurement network, skilled scientists, and designs already on the books for longer range missiles, ISG assesses that Saddam clearly intended to reconstitute long-range delivery systems and that the systems potentially were for WMD. (2)

He further wrote:

Iraq used covert procurement methods to acquire materielthat was either banned or controlled under UNSCRs 661, 687, the Annexes to the Plan approved by UNSCR 715, and the Export/Import Mechanism approved by UNSCR 1051. ISG judges that these efforts were undertaken to reestablish or support Iraq’s delivery systems programs. The period from 1998 to the start of OIF showed an increase in Iraq’s procurement activities, and it is in this period that ISG believes Baghdad made its most serious attempts at reconstituting delivery system capabilities similar to those that existed prior to 1991. (56)

In addition,

the Iraqi missile and UAV programs benefited from Iraq’s defiance of UN sanctions because they were able to obtain material and technical expertise they otherwise could not have developed. Several sources and documentary evidence confirm that Iraq participated in such activities. The measures taken to conceal these activities from the UN are evidence that Iraq was well aware these activities were illegal. (74)

Did the New York Times crowd print much of this or much of this? No.

To be continued...

Today's Wall Street Journal reports:

"Congressional investigators are looking at whether the administration underplayed prewar intelligence that was correct in forecasting the post-Saddam chaos that currently engulfs" Iraq. Senate Intel. Cmte Vice-Chair Jay Rockefeller (D-WV): "During the run-up to the war, the intelligence community produced dozens of assessments explaining the range of problems that could develop in postwar Iraq. This is an area...regrettably, where the administration paid little attention."

Just how "correct" the pre-war intell was on post-Saddam Iraq is a good question, but for the sake of argument let's assume it was accurate. Rockefeller claims it was and "regrets" the White House "paid little attention" to it at the time. Let's get this straight. The White House should have paid more attention to the post-Iraq assessments produced in 2002-3, but less attention to the same community's assessments on Saddam's nuclear, chemical and biological programs -- judgments that Saddam was in massive violation of his international disarmament obligations.

One other thing: here's an assessment of the consequences had we left Saddam in power the vice chairman of the non-partisan Select Committee on Intelligence may want to review

Sensible Democrats are panicked by Dean's remark that the US cannot win in Iraq, and even the DNC press folks are doing their best to backfill the big hole Dean's mouth has dug for them. The head of the major opposition party in the US told Zarqawi, Zawahiri and bin Laden that America won't be victorious in Iraq. In other words, Americans engaged in combat in Iraq won't win.

"Dean's take on Iraq makes even less sense than the scream in Iowa: Both are uninformed and unhelpful," said Rep. Jim Marshall (D-Ga.) in today's Washington Post. The Post also reported:

Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee Chairman Rahm Emanuel (Ill.) and Rep. Steny H. Hoyer (Md.), the second-ranking House Democratic leader, have told colleagues that Pelosi's recent endorsement of a speedy withdrawal, combined with her claim that more than half of House Democrats support her position, could backfire on the party, congressional sources said....

"We have not blown our chance" of winning back the House but "we have jeopardized it," said a top strategist to House Democrats, who requested anonymity to speak freely about influential party leaders. "It raises questions about whether we are capable of seizing political opportunities or whether we cannot help ourselves and blow it" by playing to the liberal base of the party.

Democratic strategists looking for big gains in 2006 want to stoke the anti-war base of the party just enough so they show up at the polls but not too much so they become the face of the party. But this political strategy has hit the reality of Howard Dean and Nancy Pelosi and Ted Kennedy. Republicans should try to drive a wedge as deep as they can between the Dean crowd and sensible Democrats like Sen. Lieberman, Reps. Hoyer and Marshall and the folks at the DLC who understand the stakes in Iraq.

As usual, Sen. Joe Lieberman acts as one of the very few adults in the Donkey party. The Kennedy-Dean crowd spend their waking hours telling the US troops that their commander-in-chief lied them into war, yet they "support the troops." Please.

When Howard Dean was gaining steam for the Democratic nomination, the party's establishment panicked -- and rightly so. Dean would have been demolished. One prominent Democrat even penned an effective anti-Dean piece in the Washington Post in April 2003 under the headline, "The Blair Democrats: Ready for Battle." He wrote:

After all, four of the leading Democratic presidential contenders -- Rep. Dick Gephardt and Sens. Joseph Lieberman, John Kerry and John Edwards -- not only voted to support the war but also joined British Prime Minister Tony Blair in demanding that Bush challenge the United Nations to live up to its responsibilities to disarm Iraq....

Just as the swift liberation of Iraq has strengthened the Blair Democrats, it has weakened the party's antiwar contingent, whose worst fears failed to materialize. The outcome deals a near-fatal blow to the presidential prospects of Howard Dean, whose staunch opposition to the war thrilled Iowa's left-leaning activists but is out of step with rank-and-file Democrats, about two-thirds of whom approve of the war....

Recognizing that U.S. global leadership requires strong military forces and the will to use them, they reject the left's attempts to cast Democrats as a reflexively antiwar party. Indeed, the Iraq debate revealed a party that is moving away from McGovernism and back to its internationalist roots.

But where have these Blair Democrats gone with Chairman Dean once again leading the anti-war charge? Aside from Sen. Lieberman (and to a lesser extent Gov. Mark Warner, at least for now), who's relentlessly attacked by left-wing blogs, the Democrats have been kowtowing to their anti-war base.

Kerry and Edwards, for example, have long since abandoned their initial positions on the war -- arrived at when they were planning presidential runs -- and despite the media spin that Hillary stuck to her guns on Iraq in her "letter to constituents," the senator basically said she was duped on the war and the other week supported a Levin-sponsored amendment on withdrawal timetables. Warner has said that he opposes withdrawal timetables but won't say how he would have voted on the congressional war resolution -- he'll presumably see how things are going a few months from now before letting us know.

While they may dress their rhetoric up a bit to sound less Howard Dean-like, most of the "Blair Democrats" are fast becoming "Dean Democrats," putting an exit strategy ahead of a victory strategy. Dean understands this and now feels free to pop off with hardly a peep of opposition from the presidential wannabes. He may even be rethinking his presidential ambitions. Why not?

The same Democratic establishment that helped torpedo his '04 bid has now adopted his core position on Iraq. The base is with him, and Dean is far more charismatic than Sen. Feingold, the only other potential candidate who opposed the war from the start. Kerry's star has dimmed and Edwards has performed a complete flip-flop on the war. Hillary Clinton and Warner are trying to have both ways but that act may be hard to sustain over the long run and will likely invite a strong challenge from the left because Iraq isn't going away.

Candidate Dean, anyone?

If anyone has an example of a party chairman making remarks similar to those of Howard Dean, please send them along to wws@weeklystandard.com.

Capt. Rozelle is profiled in this small newspaper in Alexandria, Virginia. He understands how the world changed on September 11, unlike defeatists like Howard Dean and Nancy Pelosi.

For instance, “the week I met my new foot,” he said that a reporter from CBS News followed him around.

“I was proud, and felt that I was sending a positive message to the American people,” said Rozelle. He complained that “the media would invade the lives of families of fallen soldiers and put them on display – not as a tribute, but as a way to taint public opinion against the war.”

He said that this type of “exploitive and politically driven negative propaganda was not in the historic spirit of honoring dead soldiers. So I felt I could tell a story of success.”

...Capt. Rozelle later said that he believed the day he reported to duty with the 3rd ACR, he said, was the same day that “I believe my journey to Iraq started.” It was Sept. 11, 2001, when terrorists commandeered passenger planes and destroyed the World Trade Center towers in New York and attacked the Pentagon in Arlington.

A growing number of critics have said there was no connection between the 9/11 attacks by al Qaeda terrorists and Saddam Hussein's B'aath Party regime in Iraq, and that the United States made a mistake invading that nation over misplaced fears that Saddam was harboring or developing weapons of mass destruction.

But Rozelle said Saddam was clearly a threat. “Even [former] President Clinton said that Iraq was a threat because of its nuclear, biological and chemical capabilities,” he said.

In addition, Rozelle said the Iraqi leader had shown that he was a threat in that in that region. “I stood over a gravesite in Iraq of 3,000 people that were shot in the head, and some of them buried alive,” he said. “Is Saddam Hussein not a weapon of mass destruction?

“There was no doubt in my mind what our mission was; it was to get rid of the terrorists, whether the B'aath Party or al Qaeda.”

Howard Dean, America's enemies thank you.

With December 7 fast approaching, WWII vets share their stories with NavySEALs.com's W. Thomas Smith Jr.

On Meet the Press today, Tim Russert and Sen. John McCain had the following exchange over what Sen. Ted Kennedy has called "a devious scheme."

MR. RUSSERT: The Pentagon, in fact, was paying Iraqi journalists to publish articles favorable to the United States' position. The Los Angeles Times first reported it. The Pentagon has now admitted it. Should they stop it?

SEN. McCAIN: If these are accurate stories and written by legitimate people, then I don't think there's anything wrong with it. If they are not accurate and they are made up by different people, then, of course, it should be stopped.

MR. RUSSERT: But here we are trying to teach democracy...

SEN. McCAIN: Yeah.

MR. RUSSERT: ...and freedom of the press...

SEN. McCAIN: Yeah.

MR. RUSSERT: ...and lack of state-sponsored censorship if you will and we're paying Iraqis to print articles?

SEN. McCAIN: Well, I don't know if that's a standard practice or not in Iraq. If these are accurate stories, we should make every effort to get them out if they're accurate. We're in a propaganda war where this is a war for the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people as well. I think we need more details as to exactly what went on, but if it's legitimate...

MR. RUSSERT: But in principle you have not problem paying the Iraqis...

SEN. McCAIN: But if that's the standard procedure in Iraq, if that's what you need to do to get a story in one of these newspapers, but it has to be accurate and it has to be done by a legitimate person. I understand these are men and women who serve in our military that are responsible for these stories. If that's the only way you get stories in, then I'm not terribly offend by it, Tim.

Weekly Standard contributor Robert Kagan explains in today's Washington Post.

The current discussion about drawing down American troops in Iraq -- whether "immediately," "rapidly" or "as soon as possible" -- would be amusing were it not so dangerously divorced from reality. There could be no greater mistake than drawing down the U.S. force now, at a moment when there is real hope for success if the United States perseveres....

Talk of reductions and withdrawal is as unhelpful as it almost certainly is ephemeral. For 2 1/2 years, despite the endless promise of reductions, despite election battles, scandals and shifting political fortunes, the United States has maintained a steady force of 130,000 to 150,000 troops in Iraq. You can bet that the numbers will not be dramatically smaller a year from now or even two years from now. Wouldn't we be better off, wouldn't our prospects for success be greater, if we just admitted it? Better still, the administration could explain why it is so important to keep these troops in place so that the public understands the long road ahead. It could start taking steps to increase the overall size of the U.S. military so that the sustained deployment doesn't "break" the Army. And it could stop making false promises of reductions that cannot and should not occur until Iraq is indeed secure and stable.

If you ever get the chance, go visit this outstanding tribute to America's World War II generation.

The Financial Times has the story here.

Thus there’s much to play for and, to make the play more interesting, a new society was recently launched at a crowded, sweaty reception in the House of Commons. The Henry Jackson Society is named for the US congressman who insisted that US governments consider the internal character of the states with which they deal. The society is seeking to occupy the ground of an intellectual buttress for these ideas which have come to be known as neo-conservative: a ground crowded in the US, but empty in Europe.

See here.

Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), a member of the Armed Services Committee, sent a letter to the Defense Department's inspector general asking for an investigation into the program and the Lincoln Group contract. Kennedy called it "a devious scheme to place favorable propaganda in Iraqi newspapers."

Do the American people really want this crowd running the Senate and the House in a time of war?

Liberal Democrats chairing major committees, spending their time trying to convince Americans engaged in battle that their commander-in-chief lied them into war?

I doubt it.

The folks at the DLC write:

Demands for an immediate troop withdrawal or arbitrary deadlines risk turning premature declarations that the United States has failed in Iraq into a self-fulfilling prophecy. That is why Democrats must reject them.

If our forces leave before the Iraqis can defend themselves, the result will be a national security disaster for the United States. Iraq will be convulsed into full-scale civil war that could provoke a regional conflagration. The Sunni triangle will likely become home base for the global jihad network, a safe haven for hatching new terrorist plots against our country and our friends. America will once again have broken faith with Iraq's long-suffering Kurds and Shi'a, and the cause of Arab democracy will be set back for a generation.

The DLC's remarks come on the heels of those made by the House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer.

From Hoyer press statement on the President's Iraq speech, November 30, 2005:

I believe that a precipitous withdrawal of American forces in Iraq could lead to disaster, spawning a civil war, fostering a haven for terrorists and damaging our nation's security and credibility.

Hanson writes in today's Chicago Tribune:

But all that is precisely the risk we must take in supporting the McCain amendment--because it is a public reaffirmation of our country's ideals. The United States can win this global war without employing torture. That we will not resort to what comes so naturally to Islamic terrorists also defines the nobility of our cause, reminding us that we need not and will not become anything like our enemies.

The Washington Post reports that the US military will give a higher priority to preparing for post-conflict stability operations -- very good idea. But while many may agree on this post-conflict focus, there's quite a divide -- Powell, Shinseki, Rumsfeld, etc. -- on just how big the deployed force should be to accomplish the mission. Whether one agrees or disagrees with its conclusions, this Rand study on the "Arithmetic of Stability Operations" is a good place to start the debate that will surely be part of the 2008 presidential campaign.

A friend of the Worldwide Standard emailed some material Sen. Kerry apparently hasn't read.

Senator Kerry, November 30, 2005:

Secondly, this debate is not about an artificial date for withdrawal. Several times in his speech today, the president set up this straw man and then knocks it down. That's not what this debate is about... The president today in his speech said, I quote, 'America will not run in the face of car bombers and assassins so long as I am commander in chief.' Well, so long as Jack Reed is a United States senator and John Kerry is a senator and the rest of us are senators, none of us, no one, has ever suggested or believes that we should run in the face of car bombers or assassins. That, again, is not what this debate is about. All of us agree. No one is talking about running in the face of a challenge; we're talking about how to win, how to succeed, how do you best achieve our goals."

Representative John Murtha, November 17, 2005:

Our military has done everything that has been asked of them, the U.S. cannot accomplish anything further in Iraq militarily. IT IS TIME TO BRING THEM HOME.

"The top House Democrat on military spending matters stunned colleagues yesterday by calling for the immediate withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq..." -- "Hawkish Democrat Joins Call for Pullout; GOP Assails Murtha's Demand to Leave Iraq," (Washington Post, November 18, 2005)

Representative Nancy Pelosi, November 30, 2005:

We should follow the lead of Congressman John Murtha...."

"Pelosi, at a press conference with reporters, said Murtha -- her closest confidant on defense matters -- has 'changed the debate' in the country on the war, has won her support and will win the backing of the 'majority of House Democrats.' Murtha, a retired Marine who initially supported the war, announced two weeks ago that he no longer supported the conflict in Iraq and called for a rapid withdrawal of American troops from the region." (Roll Call, November 30, 2005)