(The Euston group formally launched on May 26 in London. Several members have also written op-eds -- see here -- as part of the roll out. Norman Geras, a government professor at the University of Manchester, has been particularly insightful, including this piece in the Guardian:

Within the large "middle" sector of left-liberal opinion opposed to the war there has been, from the start, a differentiating subdivision - between those who opposed the war without being in denial about the considerations on the other side of the argument, and those who precisely have been in denial about them. This latter group extends well beyond the far left.

The signs of denial are abundant in the recent public life of the western democracies: in the banners and slogans for that Saturday on February 15 2003, from which one would never have known that Saddam's Iraq was a foul tyranny; in the numbers of those on the left unwilling to allow, many indeed unable to comprehend, why others of us supported a regime-change war; in a constant stream of comment in liberal daily papers and weeklies of the left; in the excommunications issued and more recent calls for apology or recantation; and, most seriously, in the perceptible lack of interest in initiatives of solidarity with the forces in Iraq battling for a democratic transformation of their country, part of a wider lack of enthusiasm for the success of this enterprise given its origins in a war led by George Bush.)

Posted on April 17, 2006:

Though it hasn't garnered much media attention, there has been an interesting fight brewing within the political Left. Britain's Oliver Kamm got the ball rolling by writing a provocative piece in Progess, a journal published by British Labour Party members, arguing that the Left has abandoned its anti-totalitarian roots. Now, a "new democratic progressive alliance" has come together in the blogoshere to challenge others on the Left who are consumed with anti-Americanism and have a soft spot for tyrants. Kamm and many others have signed The Euston Manifesto.

Drawing on the "lesson of the disastrous history of left apologetics over the crimes of Stalinism and Maoism, as well as more recent exercises in the same vein (some of the reaction to the crimes of 9/11, the excuse-making for suicide-terrorism, the disgraceful alliances lately set up inside the "anti-war" movement with illiberal theocrats)," the Manifesto's preamble states:

We are democrats and progressives. We propose here a fresh political alignment. Many of us belong to the Left, but the principles that we set out are not exclusive. We reach out, rather, beyond the socialist Left towards egalitarian liberals and others of unambiguous democratic commitment. Indeed, the reconfiguration of progressive opinion that we aim for involves drawing a line between the forces of the Left that remain true to its authentic values, and currents that have lately shown themselves rather too flexible about these values. It involves making common cause with genuine democrats, whether socialist or not.

The present initiative has its roots in and has found a constituency through the Internet, especially the "blogosphere". It is our perception, however, that this constituency is under-represented elsewhere — in much of the media and the other forums of contemporary political life.

The broad statement of principles that follows is a declaration of intent. It inaugurates a new Website, which will serve as a resource for the current of opinion it hopes to represent and the several foundation blogs and other sites that are behind this call for a progressive realignment.

Stay tuned...

A staunch U.S. ally, Colombian President Alvaro Uribe cruised to re-election winning by an astounding 40-point margin. A recent cover piece in The Economist reported on "The Battle for Latin America's Soul." Will the region go the way of Venezuela's Chavez and Bolivia's Morales or choose the path of friendlier relations with the U.S. and openness to foreign investment? Well, Colombians have made their decision. Under Uribe's leadership, Colombia has experienced strong economic growth -- 5.1 percent in 2005 -- and the FARC, which had used previous government "peace initiatives" to strengthen its position, has been severely weakened. This is quite a turn-a-round considering that only a few years back the FARC welcomed the newly elected Uribe by training mortars on his inaugural ceremony.

So let's see, voters in Canada and Colombia endorse pro-U.S. candidates. And Mexican voters are likely to elect a president who has sprinted ahead in the polls by portraying his opponent as a Hugo Chavez wannabe. Uncle Sam is on a roll.

I doubt it's a coincidence that on the day before the UN Security Council meets to discuss Iran's nuclear enrichment activities Tehran announces plans to build two more nuclear reactors -- and that the Russians will likely be the lead contractor. And at least one powerful Republican, Senate Armed Services Chairman John Warner, appears resigned to the eventuality of an Iranian nuclear weapon. American diplomats, who are set to join the EU in direct talks with Iran, will not have an easy time of it given Tehran's skillful diplomatic maneuvering.

Jay Lefkowitz, Special Envoy for Human Rights in North Korea, argues in a speech to the Asia Society that promoting human rights is very much in the American national security interest.

Government conduct at home naturally influences conduct toward other nations. The 20th century shows us numerous examples of this correlation. With Hitler, Stalin, Mao and others, the march of tyranny at home was an antecedent to international aggression. For this reason, making human rights part of our national security agenda is not only an appropriate policy, but also a necessary one.

There are some who question this approach. Some argue that our concern about human freedom amounts to interference in internal affairs of another state -- a sort of new imperialism. In other words, what happens in North Korea stays in North Korea. Others do not protest raising the human rights issue, but believe this is a matter solely to be worked out between North and South Korea. Finally, some recognize that human rights is a legitimate area of concern, but argue that raising it will prevent us from making progress on more immediate security concerns like North Korea’s nuclear arsenal....

Fundamentally, the United States will pursue a policy that has freedom and respect for the individual as its cornerstone. The promotion of human rights is certainly an important end in and of itself, and therefore a clear objective of our policy. But it is also a critical means to an even broader end -- America’s effort to extend freedom and security across the globe.

Let's hope they become good world citizens.

Splitting the Sunnis from Zarqawi has been a high priority for the U.S. in Iraq. But as in Tal Afar and other towns, it's difficult to have enduring success if Sunnis watch those who help us get assassinated and believe that Zarqawi's henchmen control the ground. Today's Washington Post story on Ramadi is not encouraging, especially given the progress we had made with tribal leaders. But it looks like the Marines, who've requested additional troops for many months, will get some more.

The U.S. military said Monday it was deploying the main reserve fighting force for Iraq, a full 3,500-member armored brigade, as emergency reinforcements for the embattled western province of Anbar, where a surge of violence linked to the insurgent group al-Qaeda in Iraq has severely damaged efforts to turn Sunni Arab tribal leaders against the insurgency.

The insurgents have assassinated 11 tribal leaders in the Ramadi area since the end of last year, when Sunni sheiks in the city began open cooperation with the U.S. military. That alliance was heralded by U.S. commanders as a sign of a major split between Sunni insurgents and the larger Sunni community of western Iraq.

The insurgent attacks since then have all but frozen the cooperation between Sunni tribal leaders and U.S. forces in Ramadi, local leaders say....

"We hope to get rid of al-Qaeda, which is a huge burden on the city. Unfortunately, Zarqawi's fist is stronger than the Americans'," said one Sunni sheik, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of insurgent retaliation. He was referring to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, an umbrella group for many of the foreign and local resistance fighters in Iraq. Local Sunni leaders often insist that the most violent insurgent attacks are by foreign fighters, not Iraqi Sunnis.

In Ramadi, "Zarqawi is the one who is in control," the sheik said, speaking to a Washington Post special correspondent in Ramadi. "He kills anyone who goes in and out of the U.S. base. We have stopped meetings with the Americans, because, frankly speaking, we have lost confidence in the U.S. side, as they can't protect us."

...Marine officers on the ground have been open for more than a year now about needing more troops in Anbar, whose Sunni population, remoteness and comparative lawlessness have made it a stronghold for the insurgency. Anbar borders Syria, a conduit for some of the weapons, money and fighters.

Iraq veteran Owen West has an excellent piece in today's New York Times. West is vice chairman of Vets for Freedom, "a group of Iraq and Afghanistan War veterans who believe in the mission of freedom in the Global War on Terror, but who have become frustrated with the way the operation has been politicized and reported to the home front." I highly recommend visiting Vets for Freedom often.

On June 6, 1984, President Reagan delivered a remarkable speech commemorating the 40th anniversary of the D-Day landings. This Memorial Day we remember "the boys of Pointe du Hoc" and all the other American heroes who gave their lives for our freedom.

Remarks at the U.S. Ranger Monument
Pointe du Hoc, France
June 6, 1984

"We're here to mark that day in history when the Allied armies joined in battle to reclaim this continent to liberty. For four long years, much of Europe had been under a terrible shadow. Free nations had fallen, Jews cried out in the camps, millions cried out for liberation. Europe was enslaved, and the world prayed for its rescue. Here in Normandy the rescue began. Here the Allies stood and fought against tyranny in a giant undertaking unparalleled in human history.

We stand on a lonely, windswept point on the northern shore of France. The air is soft, but 40 years ago at this moment, the air was dense with smoke and the cries of men, and the air was filled with the crack of rifle fire and the roar of cannon. At dawn, on the morning of the 6th of June, 1944, 225 Rangers jumped off the British landing craft and ran to the bottom of these cliffs. Their mission was one of the most difficult and daring of the invasion: to climb these sheer and desolate cliffs and take out the enemy guns. The Allies had been told that some of the mightiest of these guns were here and they would be trained on the beaches to stop the Allied advance.

The Rangers looked up and saw the enemy soldiers--the edge of the cliffs shooting down at them with machine guns and throwing grenades. And the American Rangers began to climb. They shot rope ladders over the face of these cliffs and began to pull themselves up. When one Ranger fell, another would take his place. When one rope was cut, a Ranger would grab another and begin his climb again. They climbed, shot back, and held their footing. Soon, one by one, the Rangers pulled themselves over the top, and in seizing the firm land at the top of these cliffs, they began to seize back the continent of Europe. Two hundred and twenty-five came here. After two days of fighting, only 90 could still bear arms.

Behind me is a memorial that symbolizes the Ranger daggers that were thrust into the top of these cliffs. And before me are the men who put them there.

These are the boys of Pointe du Hoc. These are the men who took the cliffs. These are the champions who helped free a continent. These are the heroes who helped end a war.

Gentlemen, I look at you and I think of the words of Stephen Spender's poem. You are men who in your "lives fought for life . . . and left the vivid air signed with your honor.''

I think I know what you may be thinking right now--thinking, "We were just part of a bigger effort; everyone was brave that day.'' Well, everyone was. Do you remember the story of Bill Millin of the 51st Highlanders? Forty years ago today, British troops were pinned down near a bridge, waiting desperately for help. Suddenly, they heard the sound of bagpipes, and some thought they were dreaming. Well, they weren't. They looked up and saw Bill Millin with his bagpipes, leading the reinforcements and ignoring the smack of the bullets into the ground around him.

Lord Lovat was with him--Lord Lovat of Scotland, who calmly announced when he got to the bridge, "Sorry I'm a few minutes late,'' as if he'd been delayed by a traffic jam, when in truth he'd just come from the bloody fighting on Sword Beach, which he and his men had just taken.

There was the impossible valor of the Poles who threw themselves between the enemy and the rest of Europe as the invasion took hold, and the unsurpassed courage of the Canadians who had already seen the horrors of war on this coast. They knew what awaited them there, but they would not be deterred. And once they hit Juno Beach, they never looked back.

All of these men were part of a rollcall of honor with names that spoke of a pride as bright as the colors they bore: the Royal Winnipeg Rifles, Poland's 24th Lancers, the Royal Scots Fusiliers, the Screaming Eagles, the Yeomen of England's armored divisions, the forces of Free France, the Coast Guard's "Matchbox Fleet'' and you, the American Rangers.

Forty summers have passed since the battle that you fought here. You were young the day you took these cliffs; some of you were hardly more than boys, with the deepest joys of life before you. Yet, you risked everything here. Why? Why did you do it? What impelled you to put aside the instinct for self-preservation and risk your lives to take these cliffs? What inspired all the men of the armies that met here? We look at you, and somehow we know the answer. It was faith and belief; it was loyalty and love.

The men of Normandy had faith that what they were doing was right, faith that they fought for all humanity, faith that a just God would grant them mercy on this beachhead or on the next. It was the deep knowledge--and pray God we have not lost it--that there is a profound, moral difference between the use of force for liberation and the use of force for conquest. You were here to liberate, not to conquer, and so you and those others did not doubt your cause. And you were right not to doubt.

You all knew that some things are worth dying for. One's country is worth dying for, and democracy is worth dying for, because it's the most deeply honorable form of government ever devised by man. All of you loved liberty. All of you were willing to fight tyranny, and you knew the people of your countries were behind you.

The Americans who fought here that morning knew word of the invasion was spreading through the darkness back home. They thought--or felt in their hearts, though they couldn't know in fact, that in Georgia they were filling the churches at 4 a.m., in Kansas they were kneeling on their porches and praying, and in Philadelphia they were ringing the Liberty Bell.

Something else helped the men of D-Day: their rock-hard belief that Providence would have a great hand in the events that would unfold here; that God was an ally in this great cause. And so, the night before the invasion, when Colonel Wolverton asked his parachute troops to kneel with him in prayer he told them: Do not bow your heads, but look up so you can see God and ask His blessing in what we're about to do. Also that night, General Matthew Ridgway on his cot, listening in the darkness for the promise God made to Joshua: "I will not fail thee nor forsake thee.''

These are the things that impelled them; these are the things that shaped the unity of the Allies.

When the war was over, there were lives to be rebuilt and governments to be returned to the people. There were nations to be reborn. Above all, there was a new peace to be assured. These were huge and daunting tasks. But the Allies summoned strength from the faith, belief, loyalty, and love of those who fell here. They rebuilt a new Europe together.

There was first a great reconciliation among those who had been enemies, all of whom had suffered so greatly. The United States did its part, creating the Marshall Plan to help rebuild our allies and our former enemies. The Marshall Plan led to the Atlantic alliance--a great alliance that serves to this day as our shield for freedom, for prosperity, and for peace.

In spite of our great efforts and successes, not all that followed the end of the war was happy or planned. Some liberated countries were lost. The great sadness of this loss echoes down to our own time in the streets of Warsaw, Prague, and East Berlin. Soviet troops that came to the center of this continent did not leave when peace came. They're still there, uninvited, unwanted, unyielding, almost 40 years after the war. Because of this, Allied forces still stand on this continent. Today, as 40 years ago, our armies are here for only one purpose--to protect and defend democracy. The only territories we hold are memorials like this one and graveyards where our heroes rest.

We in America have learned bitter lessons from two World Wars: It is better to be here ready to protect the peace than to take blind shelter across the sea, rushing to respond only after freedom is lost. We've learned that isolationism never was and never will be an acceptable response to tyrannical governments with an expansionist intent.

But we try always to be prepared for peace; prepared to deter aggression; prepared to negotiate the reduction of arms; and, yes, prepared to reach out again in the spirit of reconciliation. In truth, there is no reconciliation we would welcome more than a reconciliation with the Soviet Union, so, together, we can lessen the risks of war, now and forever.

It's fitting to remember here the great losses also suffered by the Russian people during World War II: 20 million perished, a terrible price that testifies to all the world the necessity of ending war. I tell you from my heart that we in the United States do not want war. We want to wipe from the face of the Earth the terrible weapons that man now has in his hands. And I tell you, we are ready to seize that beachhead. We look for some sign from the Soviet Union that they are willing to move forward, that they share our desire and love for peace, and that they will give up the ways of conquest. There must be a changing there that will allow us to turn our hope into action.

We will pray forever that some day that changing will come. But for now, particularly today, it is good and fitting to renew our commitment to each other, to our freedom, and to the alliance that protects it.

We are bound today by what bound us 40 years ago, the same loyalties, traditions, and beliefs. We're bound by reality. The strength of America's allies is vital to the United States, and the American security guarantee is essential to the continued freedom of Europe's democracies. We were with you then; we are with you now. Your hopes are our hopes, and your destiny is our destiny.

Here, in this place where the West held together, let us make a vow to our dead. Let us show them by our actions that we understand what they died for. Let our actions say to them the words for which Matthew Ridgway listened: "I will not fail thee nor forsake thee.''

Strengthened by their courage, heartened by their value [valor], and borne by their memory, let us continue to stand for the ideals for which they lived and died.

Thank you very much, and God bless you all."

Today's Hotline reports on an internal RNC poll showing strong support for comprehensive immigration reform:

RNC senior adviser...Matthew Dowd urges Republican Nat'l Committee members to favor a "comprehensive" solution to immigration, which the public believes is "unifying -- not polarizing."

Dowd: "Furthermore, majorities of Hispanics back it. Therefore, it is imperative for the Republican Party to talk about immigration effectively and comprehensively and demonstrate leadership on this vital issue as we move toward the mid-term elections."

Dowd's memo says that an internal RNC poll conducted by Jan Van Louhuzen finds that "overwhelming support exists for a temporary worker program. 80% of all voters, 83% of Republicans, and 79% of self-identified conservatives support a temporary worker program as long as immigrants pay taxes and obey the law."

More, from the RNC internal poll: "When voters are given the choice of other immigration proposals, strengthening enforcement with a tamper-proof identity card (89% among all voters, 93% among GOP), various wordings of a temporary worker program (the highest at 85% among all voters, 86% among GOP), and sending National Guard troops to the border (63% among all voters, 84% among GOP) score the highest among both all voters and Republican voters."

Also: "Voters don't consider granting legal status to those already here amnesty."

Dowd concludes: "Finally, when discussing immigration reform, tone and language are extremely important. To continue to grow the party, we must conduct this debate with civility and respect for our nation's heritage -- as the President has said, we are both a nation of laws and a nation of immigrants. That is why the American people favor a balanced plan that secures the border, improves enforcement, enhances immigration avenues AND deals compassionately and equitably with those who are already here."

In addition,

Voters don't consider granting legal status to those already here amnesty. Seventy percent (70%) of voters say illegal immigrants who have put down roots in the U.S. should be granted legal status after they go to the back of the line, pay a fine, pay back taxes, learn English, and have a clean criminal record; just 25% say that would be amnesty and we should instead impose criminal penalties on illegal immigrants in the U.S. Republican and conservative opinion is only slightly lower. 68% of conservatives and 64% of Republicans support granting legal status over criminal penalties.)

John Kerry's running mate has never stopped running for president. He tried to get Kerry to fight on in Ohio even after it was clear there weren't enough uncounted ballots to put Kerry over the top. Kerry was smart enough to realize that delaying the inevitable may have excited the party's base but would have done terrible damage to a potential comeback in 2008. But Edwards' plea wasn't about getting Kerry into the Oval office; it was about Edwards pandering to the Left and his '08 ambitions. Since then, Edwards has jettisoned much of the Southern "centrism" that got him elected Senator from the state of North Carolina and on the 2004 ticket. On Iraq, he was a hawk. He voted for the war and made forceful speeches on why Saddam Hussein must go. Now, like Kerry, he has repudiated his old position and sounds more like Howard Dean, the man who sent the Democratic establishment into a panic pre-Iowa and New Hampshire. Yesterday, Edwards was in Iowa sounding very much like the Dean of 2004. According to the Des Moines Register,

Former U.S. Sen. John Edwards said Thursday, at the outset of an Iowa swing, that Democrats ought to express their outrage over the Bush administration's reported use of millions of telephone records to track terrorists, despite caution from others in his party on a similar issue.

The 2004 vice presidential nominee, considered a likely candidate for president in 2008, said the National Security Agency's use of telephone records to track suspected terrorists should be a political issue.

"Most Americans want us to monitor al-Qaida, but they hate the idea of the president not following the law," Edwards told the Register by phone.

Some Democrats eyeing the 2008 presidential nomination, including Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack and Indiana Sen. Evan Bayh, have said party leaders should be wary about making a political issue out of a similar Bush policy. In December, it was reported that Bush had authorized the NSA to wiretap, without warrants, international phone calls and e-mails traveling to or from the United States.

Without evidence that the policy has wronged anyone specifically, Democrats could be falling into a Republican campaign trap, Vilsack has argued.

This month, reports were published that the NSA had collected domestic telephone records of millions of Americans, as part of its tracking of potential terrorist activity.

Edwards echoed Democrats who have called for congressional hearings on the record-keeping, which leaders in the Republican-controlled Congress have declined to convene.

"The reason it has political impact is because it goes to a lot of other things that show this president doesn't respect the law and the Constitution," Edwards said.

I can't help but think that Howard Dean must be amused by it all.

Last time I checked Sens. Larry Craig (R-ID) and Mitch McConnell (R-KY) aren't moderate squishes.

Craig:

Is this bill perfect? No. But it realistically addresses the immigration challenges facing America today by delivering in each of the three critical areas of reform: better border security, increased internal enforcement, and visa reform. Without all three, reform is meaningless, because it will be incomplete and ineffective.

I'm very pleased that Idaho's growers are one step closer to being able to hire workers more efficiently, with confidence those workers are here legally. Without that ability, and without those workers, crops will rot in the field and American agriculture will look to outsourcing to foreign countries. I doubt Americans want to be dependent on foreign nations for food in the same way we are for oil. If it becomes law, this legislation will prevent that from happening.

As we move forward, I will encourage my fellow House and Senate negotiators to work together with American farmers and consumers in mind, and reach a compromise soon.

McConnell:

Today, the Senate passed a bill to strengthen our borders, reform guest-worker programs that benefit employers and our economy, and deter illegal activity. I believe more work needs to be done to improve the bill as Congress considers it further. However, this is a necessary first step to balancing our tradition as a nation of immigrants, but also a nation of laws.

I also suspect that Sen. McConnell (with California Gov. Pete Wilson in mind) isn't interested in watching the GOP become a minority party in the years ahead. That said, House Republicans are in a position to get tough border enforcement in the final conference bill and shouldn't let this opportunity pass them by.

With an eye toward North Korea, the US Navy has accelerated its missile defense capability in the Pacific region. From the Associated Press:

For the first time, a Navy ship at sea successfully shot down a long-range missile in its final seconds of flight, the military said Wednesday.

The test was seen as an important step toward giving ships the ability to shoot down weapons as they are about to hit their targets. Until now, the Standard Missile 2 was only launched from ships to intercept a long-range missile in the early or middle stage of flight.

For the test, a missile fired from the Pacific Missile Range Facility on Kauai was destroyed in its final stage by an SM-2 launched from USS Lake Erie.

The Navy already can shoot down a missile in its final stage with a Patriot Advanced Capability 3, or PAC-3, missile launched from land.

The experiment with the SM-2 could broaden a warship's capability, said Rear Adm. Barry McCullough, director of surface warfare on the staff of the chief of naval operations.

The Pearl Harbor-based Lake Erie is equipped with technology that allows it to detect and track intercontinental ballistic missiles. Since 2004, U.S. warships with ICBM tracking technology have been patrolling the Sea of Japan, on the lookout for missiles from North Korea.

The U.S. military is installing missile tracking radar and interceptor missiles on 18 U.S. Pacific Fleet ships. It is also equipping underground silos in Alaska and California with interceptor missiles.

And in Europe,

NATO countries face a growing threat of attack by long-range missiles, a senior alliance official said on Wednesday as he presented a study on options for a missile shield system to protect Europe.

"There is a growing threat of long-range missile attack on NATO territory. It is timely to examine ways and means of addressing that threat." [said] Marshall Billingslea, NATO assistant Secretary General for Defence Investment.

But many on the continent aren't buying it.

"There is a difference in perception," said Andrew Brookes of the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies. "America is looking at protection from strategic missile attacks from places like China, North Korea and Iran. Europe doesn't believe that's a threat."

"Europeans, inherently, don't buy into this fantasy," Brookes said.

Though, it appears some in NATO believe Mr. Brookes has bought into his own fantasy.

Here's an interesting nugget from the latest Economist:

For many, perhaps most Americans, the question is not "Should we welcome immigrants?" but "How many?" A moderate influx may be economically helpful and culturally invigorating; a huge one would be disruptive. It is not easy, however, to look at a proposed law and predict how many newcomers it might let in.

Some estimates are extremely high. Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think-tank, put it at 100m over 20 years if the Senate bill were enacted. His study, released on the same day as Mr Bush's speech, also included a "maximum" estimate of 193m. That figure—equivalent to 60% of the current population—was seized upon by alarmists such as Rush Limbaugh, a talk-radio host, and Dianne Feinstein, a Democratic senator from California.

But cooler heads queried Mr Rector's methodology. Michael Fix of the Migration Policy Institute, a pro-immigration think-tank, said he doubted that the guest-worker programme would expand as fast as Mr Rector assumes, that immigrants would naturalise as quickly, that so few would die or return home, and that so many would bring their parents. Compounded over decades, small changes in assumptions lead to big changes in results. The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office estimates that immigration reform would add a more modest 7.8m people to America's population over ten years.

That population is growing more rapidly than any other rich country's, but this owes more to a healthy birth rate than to immigration. Granted, some of the higher birth rate stems from immigrant fertility. But the melting pot is still bubbling: adult immigrants work, and their children virtually all speak English. A flexible labour market and stingy welfare state ensure that there is no resentful immigrant underclass with time on its hands, as in France.

Avoiding just such a simmering immigrant underclass is one reason conservative George Will supports a path to citizenship:

As the debate about immigration policy boils, augmented border control must not be the entire agenda, lest other thorny problems be ignored....

Conservatives should favor reducing illegality by putting illegal immigrants on a path out of society's crevices and into citizenship by paying fines and back taxes and learning English. Faux conservatives absurdly call this price tag on legal status "amnesty." Actually, it would prevent the emergence of a sullen, simmering subculture of the permanently marginalized, akin to the Arab ghettos in France.

One last thing: those in the White House and on Capitol Hill should read this and then this (on the "political disaster" facing Republicans) before the GOP Jumps the Shark on immigration.

Wired News has the story of a 25-year-old's contribution to world civilization.

Today's Wall Street Journal editorial weighs in:

The most urgent need is for leaders in both Iraq and Washington to do more to improve security in Baghdad. The White House has been right to point out that the media have missed many good news stories in Iraq, but current coverage probably understates the trauma of daily life in the capital. Iraq can survive the car bombs we hear about on the news. The real problem is more generalized lawlessness and a lack of basic services like electricity that have made normal life nasty, brutish and too often short.

Educated Iraqis are fleeing Baghdad in increasing numbers, a terrible sign for the country's democratic future if the exodus is not stopped. The new government and coalition commanders may have to think in terms of a major redeployment of U.S. and Iraqi forces, with the aim of securing Baghdad at all costs. A 30-day plan for a more visible street presence and with frequent security checkpoints would be one place to start.

As the Journal notes, evidence continues to mount that the current "footprint" isn't getting the job done in Baghdad. This reality more than anything else is the biggest threat to the political progress Iraq has made. It's also why talk of decoupling the security situation in Iraq from the issue of US troop reductions is worrisome.

Yesterday, during his press conference with Israeli Prime Minister Olmert, the president gave an interesting answer to this question:

Q The U.S. has the most powerful military in the world, and they have been unable to bring down the violence in any substantial way in several of the provinces. So how can you expect the Iraqis to do that?

PRESIDENT BUSH: If one were to measure progress on the number of suiciders, if that's your definition of success, I think it gives -- I think it will -- I think it obscures the steady, incremental march toward democracy we're seeing. In other words, it's very difficult -- you can have the most powerful army of the world -- ask the Israelis what it's like to try to stop suiciders -- it is a difficult task to stop suicide bombers. That's the -- but that's one of the main -- that's the main weapon of the enemy, the capacity to destroy innocent life with a suicider.

And so I view progress as, is there a political process going forward that's convincing disaffected Sunnis, for example, to participate? Is there a unity government that says it's best for all of us to work together to achieve a common objective which is democracy? Are we able to meet the needs of the 12 million people that defied the car bombers? To me, that's success. Trying to stop suiciders -- which we're doing a pretty good job of on occasion -- is difficult to do. And what the Iraqis are going to have to eventually do is convince those who are conducting suiciders who are not inspired by al Qaeda, for example, to realize there's a peaceful tomorrow. And those who are being inspired by al Qaeda, we're just going to have to stay on the hunt and bring al Qaeda to justice. And our Army can do that, and is doing that right now.

President Bush is absolutely right. Substantial political progress has been made despite the violence. Though, drawing an analogy between the level and scope of violence in Tel Aviv and Baghdad, for example, is a stretch and I'm assuming not an effort to decouple the security situation in Iraq from the issue of US troop reductions. On this issue, Max Boot writes on "Securing Baghdad" (free reg. req'd) in today's Los Angeles Times and former West Point military historian Frederick Kagan offers "A Plan for Victory in Iraq" in the current Weekly Standard.

Signs of life are stirring in the White House. Here's what the vice president had to say in a speech yesterday at a Bilbray for Congress event in San Diego:

Issues of national security will clearly be at the top of the agenda in this election year. The President and I welcome the discussion, because every voter in America needs to know how the leaders of the Democratic Party view the war on terror. Their leader in the Senate, Harry Reid, has boasted publicly of his efforts to kill the Patriot Act. Their nominee for President in the last election viewed terrorism mainly as a law enforcement issue, and recently said that American troops are "terrorizing" Iraqis. The Chairman of the Democratic Party is Howard Dean, who said the capture of Saddam Hussein didn't make America safer. And those prominent Democrats who advocate a sudden withdrawal from Iraq are counseling the very kind of retreat that Osama bin Laden has been predicting and counting on. Yet these Democrats will not -- and cannot -- make the case that somehow surrender in Iraq would make our nation safer.

This is also the crowd that objects to the terrorist surveillance program -- even though that program has helped prevent attacks and has protected American lives. We've heard it said many times that our government failed to connect the dots before 9/11. We now know that some of the hijackers were in the United States, here in the San Diego area, and they placed telephone calls to al Qaeda operatives overseas before that attack. But we did not know about their plans until it was too late. To help prevent another such attack, and based on authority given him by the Constitution and by statute, the President authorized a surveillance program to intercept a certain category of terrorist-linked international communications. Let me emphasize that because on occasion you will hear the press or our opponents talk about domestic surveillance. This is not domestic surveillance. One end has to be outside the United States, and therefore international, one end has to be affiliated in some fashion with al Qaeda. It's hard to think of any category of information that could be more important to the safety of the United States. The program is a wartime measure, it's limited in scope to surveillance associated with terrorists, and it is conducted in a way that safeguards the civil liberties of the American people. Leaders of Congress have been briefed on this program more than a dozen times on the program. I have personally presided over most of those briefings. In addition, the entire program is reconsidered and reauthorized by the President every 45 days. He has reauthorized it more than 30 times since September 11th, because it has helped prevent attacks. It has protected American lives. And that program remains essential to the security of the United States. If there are individuals inside our country talking with al Qaeda, we want to know about it because we will not sit back and wait to be hit again. (Applause.)

This enemy is weakened and fractured, yet still lethal and still determined to kill Americans. We have a duty to act against them as swiftly and as effectively as we possibly can. Either we are serious about fighting this war or we are not. And with George W. Bush leading the nation, we are serious, and we will not let down our guard.

(Just a thought but Republicans may want to remind voters of British intelligence failures leading up to the July 7 bombings and note the return in force of the ACLU Democrats -- see here and here.)

Posted on May 22, 2006:

The British government has released two reports -- here and here -- on the July 7, 2005 terrorist bombings in London, which killed 52 and injured over 800. In the current Weekly Standard, Gary Schmitt reviews what the British learned and notes the following:

If there is any smoking gun when it comes to the failure of British intelligence and the July 2005 bombings, it's the fact that there appears to have been knowledge of Khan's role as a possible al Qaeda fellow traveler among the post-9/11 detainees in both Pakistan and Guantanamo. What is known for sure is that Khan had traveled to Pakistan in 2003 and late 2004. And while he was only one of several hundred thousand U.K. residents who visited Pakistan for a month or longer in 2004, at least one detainee, and perhaps a second, subsequently recognized Khan and knew about his efforts to reach out to Muslim extremists while there.

In addition, the government's report takes note of the fact that in the run-up to the bombings themselves, the terrorists appeared to be in relatively constant phone contact with an individual or individuals in Pakistan. Although "it is not known who this was or the content of the contacts," according to the report, "the methods used, designed to make it difficult to identify the individual, make the contacts look suspicious."

Of course, it is impossible to know whether, if these "leads" had been followed up, the bombings would have been prevented. Nevertheless, the irony here is what would have been required to crack the case--information gained from detainee interrogations and from listening in on calls made to terrorist suspects abroad. Both are practices pushed by the Bush White House and roundly reviled by London's elite.

Those who support the NSA's al Qaeda spying program may want to cite the British experience in explaining the program to their constituents. Most in the media surely won't and I doubt Harry Reid or Nancy Pelosi will either.

The Pentagon has released its latest report on the status of the Chinese military, the Washington Post reports today. Its findings:

China's military buildup is increasingly aimed at projecting power far beyond its shores into the western Pacific to be able to interdict U.S. aircraft carriers and other nations' military forces, according to a Pentagon report released yesterday that outlines continued concerns over China's rising strategic influence in Asia....

The People's Liberation Army "is engaged in a sustained effort to interdict, at long ranges, aircraft carrier and expeditionary strike groups that might deploy to the western Pacific," the report said. Long-term trends in China's development of nuclear and conventional weapons "have the potential to pose credible threats to modern militaries operating in the region," it said....

The report details how the Chinese military is investing in cruise missiles, precision weapons and guidance systems that could target ships, submarines, aircraft and airbases as far away as the "second island chain" including the Mariana Islands and Guam. As part of this strategy, China is buying Russian aircraft, such as the IL-76 transport and IL-78 tanker aircraft, and has shown interest in the Su-33 maritime strike aircraft. China is in the early stages of "developing power projection for other contingencies other than Taiwan," said Peter W. Rodman, assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs.

On Taiwan, the report said China had deployed about 100 more short-range ballistic missiles to garrisons opposite the island, increasing the total from 650 to 730 last year to between 710 and 790 now. "The balance between Beijing and Taiwan is heading in the wrong direction," Rodman said, adding that "maybe our job is to be the equalizer if a contingency arises."

Beijing's military build-up is also driving closer relations between the U.S. and India -- a burgeoning relationship designed, in part, to thwart what Heritage Foundation scholars John J. Tkacik Jr. and Dana Dillon discuss in a recent issue of Policy Review.

Sen. Harry Reid and Company have sent a letter to the president asking for a new National Intelligence Estimate on Iran. "In order to avoid repeating mistakes made in the run-up to the conflict in Iraq," they write, "we must have objective intelligence untainted by political considerations and policy preferences." The latter is, of course, pure garbage but I'd expect nothing less from senators who hope to be in the majority some day. That said, there's no doubt that the 2002 NIE was deeply flawed in its assessment of Iraq's wmd programs. But while the 2002 NIE vastly overestimated Iraq's programs, the one issued prior to the 1991 Gulf War vastly underestimated Saddam's nuclear program at the very least.

On August 11, 1991, the Washington Post reported:

International inspectors...unearthed one of the most important—and disturbing—finds of the post-Cold War era: a huge assembly line for the covert manufacture of equipment to make an Iraqi bomb.

The location of the sophisticated, secret factory for manufacturing hundreds of uranium gas centrifuges was unknown to any foreign intelligence agency despite intense scrutiny and untouched by five weeks of severe aerial bombardment during the Gulf War that supposedly eviscerated the Iraqi nuclear project. As such, it is a monument to the world’s ignorance about what a determined bomb-builder such as Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein can do.

The factory was a key component in Iraq’s elaborate highly redundant and largely secret network of physics, chemistry and metallurgical laboratories, industrial mines, metalworking factories, electrical power generators, nuclear research reactors and radioactive waste processing sites—all aimed at swiftly putting a nuclear weapon in the hands of one of the world’s most ruthless leaders.

The Post also reported:

Despite repeated warnings and Saddam’s own public statements, Western experts consistently underestimated Iraq’s scientific and technical capabilities. Inspection officials now believe Iraq was only 12 to 18 months from producing its first bomb, not five to 10 years as previously thought.

So if we are seeking an informed debate about Iran and the limits of our intelligence capabilities, shouldn't the public also know the extent to which US intelligence has underestimated a target nation's programs as well as overestimated them?

I don't agree with everything in this piece but Richard Cohen is right about a few things: A trial that was supposed to "highlight the many crimes of Saddam Hussein" has instead obscured them and those anti-Iraq War folks calling for action in Darfur face a moral contradiction of their own.

On most days, [the trial] has been a sputtering charade, which somehow has managed not to highlight the many crimes of Saddam Hussein but to obscure them. This is an important point, for behind the stated reason for the war itself -- ridding Iraq of weapons of mass destruction -- was the repellent nature of Hussein's regime. It was no mere run-of-the-mill Middle Eastern dictatorship, like that of next-door Syria or, in its own way, Iran, but a place where the state could murder casually and with impunity -- and often did.

It was a place of torture. It was a place of massacre. It was a place of unspeakable terror. It was a place where children were killed. It was a place where women were raped. It was a place -- just to cite what happened to the Fayli Kurds, a small ethnic group from near the Iran border -- where families were rousted from their homes, the men separated from the women (and never seen again), the women raped and abused and sometimes forced at gunpoint across the frontier into Iran. Some died of exposure in the mountains and some died of fatigue and some were killed in the crossfire of Iraqi and Iranian troops then fighting their war in the 1980s. So far, none of this has been mentioned at the trial.

For many who supported going to war in Iraq, the nature of the regime was important, even paramount. It is disappointing that this no longer gets mentioned. I suppose the handwriting was on the wall when Michael Moore failed to mention Hussein's crimes at all in his movie "Fahrenheit 9/11." Years from now, someone coming across the film could conclude that the United States picked on the Middle Eastern version of Switzerland. Now, all the weight is on one side of the moral scale.

But what would have happened if the war had actually ended back when George Bush stood under that "Mission Accomplished" banner? The U.S. combat death toll then was 139. (It's now approaching 2,500.) Would it have been worth 139 American lives to put an end to a regime that had murdered many thousands of its own people and had been responsible for two major wars? After all, aren't some of the people who want Washington to do something in Darfur the same people who so rigorously opposed the Iraq war on moral grounds? What if we could pacify Darfur -- immense, arid and without population centers -- at the cost of 139 American lives? What is the morality of that? Two hundred thousand have already died there. Should we intervene?

Pardon me for raising the question without answering it. I do so only to discomfort, if I can, some of the people who are so certain of their moral righteousness when it comes to the Iraq war. I want to know why the crimes of Saddam Hussein never figure into their thinking and why it was morally wrong -- not merely unwise -- to topple him....

A few months back I cited an article in the January issue of National Geographic. Lewis M. Simons traveled to Iraq to report on Camp Slayer, where scientists continue to examine the "new forensic evidence of Saddam Hussein's murderous regime." He noted a Clark University Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies estimate that Saddam's regime had murdered up to 240,000 men, women, children and infants. Here are some of the victims and how they died:

Patterns of neat bullet holes peppered skulls and garments, many of them the baggy trousers peculiar to Kurdish men. Staring at cardboard boxes filled with skulls in plastic bags and skeletons precisely arrayed on steel gurneys, inhaling the oddly metallic death smells....

"As you work with the victims, especially the children -- their clothing, the baby bottle, the little shoes, just like the ones we bought for our daughters years ago, the little hands, so expressive in death -- you have to try not to get into the heads of the monsters who did this, or it becomes overwhelming. You look at a perfectly knitted baby bonnet with two bullet holes in it, and you think, these could be your own kids," [said an American forensic scientist]. "The women often had children with them and received, perhaps, the blessing of being shot once at close range. All of this is based on clear evidence, not speculation."

[He] pointed out an entry hole at the top of the skull ... an exit hole near the left socket, and a radiating crack in the left cheek ... female, mid-30s, five foot four to five foot six....

Simon also noted:

Initially, X [an Iraqi forensic scientist] gladly agreed to be identified in this story. But shortly before it went to press he got word to me of death threats against him and his family.... The threats most likely where made by Sunni supporters of Saddam Hussein, who are striving to diminish evidence against the former dictator.

So far, Saddam's trial has been a missed opportunity to remind the world of the horrors of his dictatorship. In Cohen's words, what a "damn shame."

Montenegrins have voted for full independence from Serbia. The last time an independent Montenegro existed delegates were gearing up for Versailles following The Great War. Serbia, which annexed Montenegro in 1919, will also likely watch Kosovo become an independent state in the not-to-distant future. But as the old order further dissolves, the work of the U.S. and the EU isn't done -- far from it. Small failed states clustered together in the Balkans can be just as bad as one large failed state. Overwhelmingly Muslim Kosovo, in particular, is very much pro-U.S. and having a vibrant, democratic pro-US Kosovo is obviously in our national security interest. But its economy is poor and civil society weak. The Bush administration and its successor should avoid putting Kosovo and the region as a whole on the back burner of American policy or five years or so from now we may be asking, "Who lost the Balkans?"

Given the UN Security Council's dithering ways, it's good to see the Bush administration steadily building a parallel structure to deal with threats that doesn't go through the slog of Turtle Bay. Next week, the US will conduct military exercises with Turkey as part of the Proliferation Security Initiative -- a program created in 2003 to track and intercept illicit wmd trafficking by rogue nations. Who knows, in time there may even be a Genocide Prevention Initiative composed of nations that will act when the next Rwanda or Darfur rolls around.

The British government has released two reports on the July 7, 2005 terrorist bombings in London, which killed 52 and injured over 800. In the current Weekly Standard, Gary Schmitt reviews what the British learned and notes the following:

If there is any smoking gun when it comes to the failure of British intelligence and the July 2005 bombings, it's the fact that there appears to have been knowledge of Khan's role as a possible al Qaeda fellow traveler among the post-9/11 detainees in both Pakistan and Guantanamo. What is known for sure is that Khan had traveled to Pakistan in 2003 and late 2004. And while he was only one of several hundred thousand U.K. residents who visited Pakistan for a month or longer in 2004, at least one detainee, and perhaps a second, subsequently recognized Khan and knew about his efforts to reach out to Muslim extremists while there.

In addition, the government's report takes note of the fact that in the run-up to the bombings themselves, the terrorists appeared to be in relatively constant phone contact with an individual or individuals in Pakistan. Although "it is not known who this was or the content of the contacts," according to the report, "the methods used, designed to make it difficult to identify the individual, make the contacts look suspicious."

Of course, it is impossible to know whether, if these "leads" had been followed up, the bombings would have been prevented. Nevertheless, the irony here is what would have been required to crack the case--information gained from detainee interrogations and from listening in on calls made to terrorist suspects abroad. Both are practices pushed by the Bush White House and roundly reviled by London's elite.

Those who support the NSA's al Qaeda spying program may want to cite the British experience in explaining the program to their constituents. Most in the media surely won't and I doubt Harry Reid or Nancy Pelosi will either.

From 2003 on, there were many officials pushing for a heavier "footprint" in Iraq. Powell, for example, pressed early on for more combat troops and advisors to, as he put it, crush the insurgency before it could get off the ground. And according to this New York Times piece, Powell and others also pushed for a larger contingent to train the Iraqi police force AFTER it became apparent that the force was in very bad shape. The Times also has this nugget concerning the CIA's pre-war assessment of the police force:

Before the war, the Bush administration dismissed as unnecessary a plan backed by the Justice Department to rebuild the police force by deploying thousands of American civilian trainers. Current and former administration officials said they were relying on a Central Intelligence Agency assessment that said the Iraqi police were well trained. The C.I.A. said its assessment conveyed nothing of the sort.... [T]he assessment by the C.I.A. led administration officials to believe that Iraq's police were capable of maintaining order. Douglas J. Feith, then the Defense Department's under secretary for policy, said in an interview that the C.I.A.'s prewar assessment deemed Iraq's police professional, an appraisal that events proved "fundamentally wrong."

But Paul Gimigliano, a spokesman for the C.I.A., said the agency's assessment warned otherwise. "We had no reliable information on individual officers or police units," he said. The "C.I.A.'s written assessment did not judge that the Iraqi police could keep order after the war. In fact, the assessment talked in terms of creating a new force."

A copy of the document, which is classified, could not be obtained.

Given the CIA's track record of selectively leaking material to bolster its image and tarnish that of the White House, I wonder why someone over there hasn't leaked this police document if the agency's assessment was so spot on.

(And these are the clowns the Democratic Party is taking its marching order from.)

I know it will come as a shock that a number of "open-minded progressives" at The New School acted like fools today during Sen. McCain's commencement address. They don't like his views on just about everything -- Iraq, Iran, the War on Terror, abortion, gay marriage, etc. -- and the fact that he spoke at Liberty University the week before. When Sen. McCain spoke at Liberty there were also some in the audience who disagreed with him on some issues. But they listened respectfully to an elected official who had also spent nearly 6 years as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam. Such courtesy was evidently in short supply in Greenwich Village.

The National Review's Rich Lowry was at McCain's speech and blogged the following on NRO's Corner:

...shameful performance by The New School student body, but I suppose it could have been worse. Kerrey must be a little embarrassed. He gets up: “For those of you who listened to two speeches...one from McCain...the other from [the student], you saw two acts of bravery.” (Actually, it is very bad form to directly attack another speaker in such a forum—but I guess Kerrey feels he can only go so far in defending civility.) Kerrey says, in contrast, that in heckling from the audience, there is “no bravery required.” He gets pretty good applause. Asks if when students get older and someone is heckling, laughing or booing them, will they stand up for their beliefs? “Will you stand and say unpopular things?” A loud shout from the back: “You are a war criminal!”

Another: “Let's graduate!”
Posted at 4:36 PM

McCain delivers... [Rich Lowry]

...a beautiful prose poem to America, national service, and civil debate (congrats Mark Salter, as ever), and gets derided for it, of course.

“I supported the war in Iraq.” Boos. Explains the war was not for cheap oil. A little heckling: “You're full of it!” Says he thought the “country's interest and values demanded” the war. Someone shouts: “Wrongly!” Someone else: “More poetry!” (A reference to lines from Yeats McCain had quoted earlier.)

He says “whether [the war] was necessary or not...we all should shed a tear” for those who have sacrificed in it. Some hissing.

Shouting.

He eventually enters into a Bushian rift: “All people share the desire to be free”; “human rights are above the state and beyond history”; we are “insisting that all people have the right to be free.” Someone shouts: “We're graduating, not voting!” Lots of derisive shouts and laughter and applause.

As McCain continues with a personal story, a student shouts: “It's about my life, not yours.” McCain:

“When I was a young man, I thought glory was the highest value...” Groans from the students. “It's not about you!” “Sit down!”

McCain circles back around to the theme of civility: “We are not enemies, we are compatriots...” Boos, shouts. McCain: It “should remain an argument among friends”; we should be “respectful of the goodness in each other.” Literally one person applauds.

McCain goes on to tell his story about his reconciliation with an opponent of the Vietnam War: “I had a friend once...” Groans, boos.

He talks about forgiving his friend who dissented from the war. Hostile rumblings from the students.

He says after the reconciliation, he and his friend “worked together for shared ideals.” A shout: “We don't share your ideals!” As McCain closes there is a mix of boos and applause, and a few people even stand to clap.
Posted at 4:28 PM

McCain opens... [Rich Lowry]
...with a long riff about the arrogance of youth and how he learned humility as he grew older. He says we have “a noisy contentious society,” and that we love “self-expression,” but “that passion sometimes overwhelms our civility.” (That's you standing with your backs to him in front!) He says he was young he was “quite infatuated with self-expression” and thought he was “so much more eloquent and wiser than anyone I knew.” Hard to imagine an opening better suited to, through the subtle art of self-deprecation, make the protestors look like asses.
Posted at 4:08 PM

(As I mentioned last month, the Iranian economy is highly vulnerable to international sanctions -- particularly those that would hinder its crude production and ability to sell oil on the world market. Today's Washington Post notes: "Experts on Iran point to a number of reasons it might be reluctant to cut oil exports. Oil accounts for 85 percent of Iran's exports, according to an International Monetary Fund report issued last month. Revenue from those exports makes up 65 percent of government income. And Iran uses a good chunk of that money to raise public-sector wages and to subsidize its own gasoline prices, one way to keep domestic discontent in check when unemployment is running at more than 12 percent and inflation at 13 percent." Unfortunately, the odds the international community will come together to put the screws on Iran's oil industry are pretty slim.)

Posted on April 12, 2006:

The regime may be more vulnerable to comprehensive sanctions than many realize. Despite high oil prices, the mullahs are running an economy with little job growth and high unemployment. Radio Free Europe reports that Iran's president has been traveling around the country reassuring people on the economy.

President Ahmadinejad has discussed the issue of unemployment -- estimated to be at least 11 percent and closer to 20 percent -- in several recent speeches, hinting at his recognition that he must satisfy voters' most immediate concerns. He announced in the northeastern town of Quchan on April 11 that 180 trillion rials (approximately $200 million) will be distributed in the provinces for job creation, IRNA reported. In a speech in Mashhad on April 10, he said, "Employment is one of the most important issues to be tackled by the nation and the government," state television reported. "There are so many young people who have a specialization. They have learned and studied but there is no employment opportunity for them."

A sanctions-induced economic tailspin may convince many Iranians that their government's nuclear weapons quest isn't such a good idea. Of course, the most comprehensive sanctions would be those imposed by the UN Security Council. But that would require Russia and China to act responsibly so don't hold your breath. And even if the UN acted with speed and resolve in applying real sanctions it may not be enough to stop Iran's weapons program. But it's worth a try.

Charles Krauthammer, who can't be accused of being an "amnesty" squish, writes in today's Washington Post that a final bill that includes rigorous border enforcement and a path to citizenship for those already here "would make sense."

I am not against legalization. Admittedly, legalization is desperately unfair to the further millions who have been waiting in line at U.S. consulates around the world. By itself, it would only encourage future illegal immigration. But if coupled with a program that closes down the border, it would make sense. It would resolve the problem once and for all.

And yesterday on Fox, he argued:

Essentially all of that millions with the few exceptions are going to end up citizens, and I'm not against that if you enforce security, if you've got a fence that stops the new illegals.

Similarly, George Will argued in a Post column that we should vigorously enforce border controls. But he also warned that the U.S. should avoid the mistakes many European nations have made in permanently marginalizing an immigrant underclass. He wrote:

As the debate about immigration policy boils, augmented border control must not be the entire agenda, lest other thorny problems be ignored....

Conservatives should favor reducing illegality by putting illegal immigrants on a path out of society's crevices and into citizenship by paying fines and back taxes and learning English. Faux conservatives absurdly call this price tag on legal status "amnesty." Actually, it would prevent the emergence of a sullen, simmering subculture of the permanently marginalized, akin to the Arab ghettos in France.

One thing's for sure, the president has a lot riding on getting an immigration bill on his desk and, in the famous words of Gene Kranz, "failure is not an option."

In his speech a few days ago, the president said that no matter what your position is on immigration we should strive to conduct the debate in a "reason and respective tone." Yesterday, the Senate's top Democrat, Harry Reid (NV), did his best to keep the dialogue civil. During debate on an amendment by Sen. Inhofe (R-OK) making English the national language, Reid had this to say: "I really believe this amendment is racist."

Below is the list of Republican and Democratic senators who are apparently "racist" for voting for a "racist" amendment.

Alexander (R-TN)
Allard (R-CO)
Allen (R-VA)
Baucus (D-MT)
Bennett (R-UT)
Bond (R-MO)
Brownback (R-KS)
Burns (R-MT)
Burr (R-NC)
Byrd (D-WV)
Carper (D-DE)
Chafee (R-RI)
Chambliss (R-GA)
Coburn (R-OK)
Cochran (R-MS)
Coleman (R-MN)
Collins (R-ME)
Conrad (D-ND)
Cornyn (R-TX)
Craig (R-ID)
Crapo (R-ID)
DeMint (R-SC)
DeWine (R-OH)
Dole (R-NC)
Dorgan (D-ND)
Ensign (R-NV)
Enzi (R-WY)
Frist (R-TN)
Graham (R-SC)
Grassley (R-IA)
Gregg (R-NH)
Hagel (R-NE)
Hatch (R-UT)
Hutchison (R-TX)
Inhofe (R-OK)
Isakson (R-GA)
Johnson (D-SD)
Kyl (R-AZ)
Landrieu (D-LA)
Lincoln (D-AR)
Lott (R-MS)
Lugar (R-IN)
McCain (R-AZ)
McConnell (R-KY)
Murkowski (R-AK)
Nelson (D-FL)
Nelson (D-NE)
Pryor (D-AR)
Roberts (R-KS)
Santorum (R-PA)
Sessions (R-AL)
Shelby (R-AL)
Smith (R-OR)
Snowe (R-ME)
Specter (R-PA)
Stevens (R-AK)
Sununu (R-NH)
Talent (R-MO)
Thomas (R-WY)
Thune (R-SD)
Vitter (R-LA)
Voinovich (R-OH)
Warner (R-VA)

Ned Lamont is running against Sen. Joe Lieberman in Connecticut's Democratic primary. He's got a new ad out featuring the creator of the lefty blog Daily Kos, Markos Moulitsas Zuniga. According to the National Journal,

[The] second ad begins like an ordinary campaign commercial -- with the candidate sitting in a living area and discussing his views on the issues. It takes an unexpected turn when supporters, wearing "Lamont for Senate" T-shirts, arrive -- lead by popular left-leaning blogger Markos Moulitsas Zuniga of DailyKos.

Moulitsas tells Lamont and viewers, "Look, everybody is here, ready to go. So hurry it up."

I wonder if the media will get around to asking Mr. Lamont to comment on his new ad buddy's previous remarks on the ambush of four U.S. contractors in Iraq -- remarks that got him removed from the Kerry for President web site blogroll.

Prediction: Lieberman crushes Lamont.

Here's what Roll Call's Morton Kondracke had to say about Qwest's trumpeting that it refused to cooperate with the National Security Agency:

In the beginning, Qwest, this other company, to its discredit, said it was not cooperating with the NSA and specifically decided not to cooperate. Now if we are fighting a war on terrorism, you would think the telephone companies would want to cooperate and I would hope that they would be cooperating.

And for a company to opt out and say no, no, no we are to privacy minded for this is it is basically helping terrorists. I think Senator Roberts is absolutely right. What's going on now is shocking. People are treating the Constitution of the United States as a suicide pact. Here we have al- Qaeda, everybody has been watching "United 93," and everybody should watch "United 93," just to remind us of what we're dealing with.

They would slam a plane into the capitol, they would blow up an atomic bomb if they possibly could, and we are acting like people who are trying to protect us are criminals.

Harold Meyerson, editor-at-large for the liberal American Prospect, has some nasty things to say about the centrist Democratic Leadership Council. He writes:

A MODEST PROPOSAL. The new issue of Blueprint, the bimonthly journal of the Democratic Leadership Council, which went up online today, features an article by Tony Blair entitled “Fighting for Values,” which is part of the magazine’s cover package on “Defeating Jihadism.” The piece is a resounding defense of civilization and globalization, a scathing attack on obscurantism and protectionism. Blair makes the case for the Iraqi invasion and occupation, of course, but, by past standards, somewhat briefly.

Since every day that Blair continues to serve as Prime Minister depresses the Labor Party’s polling by another couple of points, and twists the party into ideological knots defending a foreign policy that its members don’t believe in and that the British public rejects, here’s a suggestion that can make everybody happy: With the number of Labor MPs prepared to vote for Blair’s ouster clearly growing, the PM needs a graceful exit. Why doesn’t the DLC hire the guy -- give him an Al From Life Fellowship, say -- and take him out of the UK altogether? For that matter, why doesn’t some UK-based Third Way-ish foundation hire Joe Lieberman, and get him the hell out of Connecticut and the Senate? Call it the Great Transatlantic Insufferable Moralist With Blood On Their Hands Swap Meet. Our debt to the DLC would be incalculable.

I asked someone with ties to the DLC about Meyerson's comments and got this response:

Maybe Meyerson will offer a guest column to Saddam in the Prospect on "How My American Leftist Friends Continue to Undermine My Enemy and Condemn Leaders like Blair and Lieberman Who Ended My Tyranny."

To be continued I'm sure...

Euripolix.com reports,

European officials are stepping up counter terrorism measures following threats against Denmark, Norway and France. EU member states have strengthened security following the reputed risk of jihadists arriving through Turkey.

Le Monde reports that radical Islamists are threatening to carry out a “mission” in Europe following the publication of cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammad.

The publication of cartoons showing the Prophet Muhammad in a Danish newspaper sparked violent protest in the Muslim world last February. Several attacks were directed against EU missions - particularly against Danish representations in the Middle East.

The French newspaper says that internet videos of Mohamed Hassan who recently escaped from an American jail in Afghanistan, calls for terrorists to attack Denmark, Norway and France.

The threats follow April’s televised message by Osama Bin Ladin, a primary founder of the al-Qaeda movement, in which he calls for a boycott against any states that backed Denmark during the cartoon controversy. In the same video, Bin Laden also criticized French relations with its domestic Muslim community.

Speaking of Europe, has any reporter asked Secretary Rumsfeld or White House Press Secretary Snow to comment on Saddam's apparent "preparations for 'Blessed July,' a regime-directed wave of 'martyrdom' operations against targets in the West [that] were well under way at the time of the coalition invasion"?

Amr Hamzawy, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, wrote an interesting piece recently in Beirut's Daily Star on the "ideological crisis" facing al Qaeda. He notes that in the Arab world there seems to be an "emerging public consensus that democracy is the only viable way ahead" to address the "severe crises of Arab societies." Hamzawy points to bin Laden's latest videotape as evidence that such an emerging consensus has greatly undermined the message of al Qaeda.

It is not lost on bin Laden that a clear majority of Arabs has grown less sympathetic to his group's terrorist agenda in the last few years....

In previous videotapes, he accused pro-Western Arab governments and official religious institutions of seducing their populations away from the path of jihad. But this time he blamed Arab liberal intellectuals and writers for betraying the true spirit of Islam. For bin Laden, the liberals disseminate "blasphemous ideas" of democracy, human rights, and moderation, and in so doing diminish the degree of popular support for Al-Qaeda's jihad. The Al-Qaeda leader's decision to open a front against Arab liberals may threaten them, but it is also a testimony to their moral and political influence in the Arab world of today.

Since 2001, Arab liberals have become more assertive in pushing for gradual democratic reform and respect for human rights as the only viable strategies to master the severe crises of Arab societies. Over the past years, their message has caught the attention of growing segments of Arab populations. There appears to be an emerging public consensus that democracy is the only viable way ahead. Bin Laden is right in fearing this development, since it undermines the logic of his terrorist agenda. Indeed, liberals in Morocco, Egypt, Lebanon, and even Saudi Arabia have proven as effective in combating terrorism as various "hard" security measures. Al-Qaeda is on the defensive not only because of the geographical but also the political isolation of its leaders: Its radical, militant blueprints have lost a great deal of their appeal as Arabs have had a change of heart....

Although it's uncertain whether Arab liberals will see their dream realized, Al-Qaeda's project no longer represents an alternative.

Too many conservatives have short memories. When the Clinton White House and the media falsely portrayed GOP efforts to slow the growth of Medicare spending as "cuts," conservatives complained bitterly. House Republicans even put out a 39-page press kit to rebut the "the lies the Democrats and their allies" were spinning on the GOP's spending proposal. Times have changed. Today, many conservatives, particularly in the House, have simply adopted the same Democratic tactic in an effort to undermine the president's immigration proposal. As the editors of the Wall Street Journal note,

[The president] also realizes that, for the illegals already here, mass deportations are impractical and would spell political suicide for the GOP. Hence, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist is trying this week to garner more support for a bipartisan plan that would put these illegal workers on a path to citizenship if they pass a background check, pay fines, learn English and satisfy other requirements.

This is derided in some circles as "amnesty" -- a scare tactic thrown around to end discussions -- but the 11 or 12 million illegals already here are hardly likely to come out of the shadows if they know they will be deported.

It's bad enough that Republicans have embraced Democratic spending habits. Now, some of them have incorporated the Democrats' Medicare scare tactics into their own rhetoric on immigration. No wonder we could be looking at Speaker Pelosi.

It's disappointing (and in some cases very surprising) to see some on the right turn their backs on the vision of Ronald Reagan on immigration, as today's Wall Street Journal editorial argues, and seek to purge the GOP of dissenters. "The GOP is losing this one for the Gipper," the editors note, as the "GOP's nativist wing" seeks to "hijack the Gipper's reputation" to push their cause. Look out Gov. Jeb Bush. You could also be part of the purge given your apostasy on immigration. If things keep going the way they are, the Grand Old Party should consider renaming itself the "Over-the-Cliff Party." Disappointing and depressing, indeed.

Today, Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen lectures ("Straight Talk Unexpressed") Sen. McCain on Iraq. He writes:

"I supported the decision to go to war in Iraq," McCain said at Liberty University. "I stand that ground because I believed, rightly or wrongly, that my country's interests and values required it." Yes, I understand. I once felt the same way. But it is now clear that the war was a mistake and the prime reason for it -- to rid Iraq of weapons of mass destruction -- was bogus. The war has cost us plenty, more than 2,400 American lives and billions of dollars, but also many people's faith in the honesty of their leaders. No one can support this war and not address its immense cost. No one, not even McCain.

But back on March 11, 2003 Cohen supported going to war for reasons beyond the issue of Saddam's extant wmd stockpiles. In fact, he supported the war even though the Bush administration had advanced "untenable, unproven arguments." He noted that the alternative policy of containment wouldn't work and that leaving Saddam in power would amount to "appeasement" and just "postpone a worse war."

There ought to be an understanding that while war is bad -- very, very bad -- sometimes peace is no better, especially if all it does is postpone a worse war. That is what would happen if the United States now pulled back, leaving Saddam Hussein in power and our troops sweating in the desert, their morale and their strength dissipating.

What would happen then? Ultimately, Hussein would wait us out. This is what he has been doing since the Persian Gulf War in 1991, when he began this game of hide-and-seek with his weapons of mass destruction. If, at the moment, he does not have nuclear weapons, it's not for lack of trying. He had such a program once and he will have one again -- just as soon as the world loses interest and the pressure on him is relaxed....

I grant you that in the run-up to this war, the Bush administration has slipped, stumbled and fallen on its face. It has advanced untenable, unproven arguments. It has oscillated from disarmament to regime change to bringing democracy to the Arab world. It has linked Hussein with al Qaeda when no such link has been established. It has warned of an imminent Iraqi nuclear program when, it seems, that's not the case. And it has managed, in a tour de force of inept diplomacy, to alienate much of the world, including some of our traditional allies.

But the fact remains that were it not for those 250,000 troops sitting out in the desert, there would be no inspectors in Iraq. Hussein kicked them out once and he will kick them out again, just as soon as the world, as is its wont, loses interest and succumbs to the lust for oil, contracts and, in the case of France, the chimera of a glorious yesterday....

What's more, I have some doubts about this war -- especially the challenge of governing and rebuilding Iraq afterward. But I have less doubt about the sort of peace that would result from what, after all, would be appeasement. Saddam Hussein -- not to mention other despots -- will have taken the measure of us. He will resume his old ways. By then, a just war might be unthinkable -- and a just peace no longer in our grasp.

Cohen is one of the last people who should be lecturing Sen. McCain on Iraq.

The president struck the right tone tonight but has a lot work ahead of him to get to a signing ceremony. His call for a "reason and respective tone" obviously didn't make it to the ears of Rep. Patrick McHenry (R-NC) who said after the speech (via Hotline blog) that "a guest worker program is nothing more than amnesty wearing make-up --it's easier to look at, but just as ugly underneath." How witty. House Majority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) also put out a statement that made more news in what it didn't say:

House Republicans have responded to the concerns of the American people by passing a strong border security bill that reflects our commitment to re-establishing basic respect for our immigration laws and sealing our border against illegal entry. If the Senate passes an immigration bill, I'm committed to working with Chairman Sensenbrenner and House Republicans to ensure we make border security our first priority and meet our commitments to the American people.

Boehner didn't reject a guest worker program or "paths to citizenship" for those already here. Why? Because he and other House GOP leaders want to get a bill out of conference that doesn't include the felony provision that was in the House-passed bill -- a bill that Boehner, ironically, didn't support.

So at the end of the day Republicans will have to decide whether they want to be the party of Patrick McHenry or President Bush -- in other words, a minority party or a majority party in the years ahead.

More socialism, less capitalism -- see here.

Agence France Press notes that in a tight oil market a successful attack on a major oil installation would have major repercussions. Consider this:

On February 24, Saudi security forces foiled an attack on oil installations in Abqaiq, which account for 70 percent of the country's output, and 10 percent of the world's, sending jitters through the oil sector.

According to Gal Luft, head of the U.S.-based Institute for the Analysis of Global Security (IAGS), the attack - had it succeeded - would have cut four to six million barrels per day out of an already tight oil market.

"It would have exceeded all of the oil taken off the market by the OPEC (Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries) during the 1973 Arab oil embargo," he said.

Hopefully, the U.S. will have implemented a real energy policy before a major attack is pulled off. I'm not holding my breath, though.

Opponents of President Evo Morales say his energy nationalization plan and cozying up to Hugo Chavez could greatly constrict foreign investment in Bolivia and push current investors to flee. The AP reports,

Bolivian opposition leaders warned Evo Morales' tough stance on foreign energy companies facing nationalization could drive investors away and Brazil's state oil firm expressed outrage at the president's accusation that it was operating illegally....

He raised eyebrows again Thursday when he said foreign companies might not be compensated for giving up control of operations and assets — a seeming hardening of his position just hours after Bolivian and Brazilian officials met in La Paz and agreed to form a commission to study how energy companies would be compensated.

"If they have recovered their investment, then there is no reason to compensate them whatsoever," Morales told a news conference.

In Bolivia's capital, opposition leaders on Thursday warned Morales' hard-line stance could isolate the impoverished nation internationally and criticized the president for being too influenced by Hugo Chavez, Venezuela's president.

"(Morales') declarations in Europe could lead us to greater international isolation and to Bolivia being shunned by investors," said Sen. Oscar Ortiz of the opposition Podemos party. "That would be serious for the country because then the gas underground wouldn't do us any good." several

On Thursday, Chavez said he would provide Bolivia with a credit line of $100 million and would donate $35 million, which would fund computers in Bolivian schools and children's food kitchens....

Is the Washington Times using the same journalistic standards of the liberal media? How many times have conservatives pointed to misleading headlines in the New York Times or taken apart the numerous anti-Bush Associated Press pieces that read more like editorials than hard news pieces? I know I have pointed out such journalistic sleights of hand many times. Today, this Washington Times piece on immigration piece isn't much better. The headline, "Senators agree on 'amnesty' proposal," isn't exactly fair and balanced in characterizing the Senate's agreement or what conservatives like Kansas Sen. Sam Brownback believe. What a disappointment.

Commissioned in 1950, the aircraft on the carrier Oriskany launched attacks on North Korean forces and supply lines, conducted thousands of combat missions against North Vietnamese targets and even played a major in the film "The Bridges of Toko Ri," starring Grace Kelly and William Holden. Now, the Los Angeles Times reports that the Oriskany will spend its remaining years submerged off the coast of Florida continuing its service to our nation.

PENSACOLA NAVAL AIR STATION, Fla. — After more than half a century of wartime valor, maritime tragedy and cinematic triumph, the aircraft carrier Oriskany is preparing for its final mission: sinking into an afterlife as an artificial reef....

Although thousands of artificial reefs have been created along U.S. coastlines, the 900-foot-long Oriskany is the largest vessel ever designated for sea-bottom service.

Weather permitting, the now-corroded carrier that was home to 3,460 sailors — including a future Sen. John McCain — and 80 aircraft during the wars in Korea and Vietnam will be towed 24 miles offshore on Tuesday and sunk a day later. To minimize the risk of storms or tidal action affecting its position, it will be aligned north to south, bow out and stern to the distant shoreline....

One who hopes to be among the spectators is Charles Tinker, a retired Navy captain who was a 34-year-old fighter squadron pilot when the Oriskany endured its deadliest incident, an Oct. 26, 1966, fire that took the lives of 44 shipmates.

"I've got a sentimental feeling toward the ship. I spent a lot of my life aboard, an important part of my life," said Tinker of his two separate tours of Oriskany duty. He remembers the harrowing fire "as if it was last week."

Sending the Oriskany to a watery grave for the enjoyment of tourists "initially didn't sit too well," Tinker said. But with time he's come to regard the reef project as a way of keeping the carrier in public service instead of in the scrap yard....

"There's some vets who think it's not dignified" to sink the Oriskany, said Denny Earl, another Vietnam-era flier. Earl, an avid diver, isn't among them.

"A lot of ships are sold for scrap," he said. "To me, being converted to razor blades is not very dignified either." Now 65, Earl plans to pay an undersea visit to the old warship as soon as state authorities deem it opened, likely within a week of the sinking.

Earl earned citations for exceptional valor during the Vietnam War when, wounded in both legs by enemy fire, he dropped his payload and returned his A-4 Skyhawk for a textbook landing on the Oriskany while banging his fist against the cockpit window to stay conscious....

From the Washington Times (via The Frontrunner):

"Europe faces a growing threat of ballistic missile attack from rogue states such as Iran and North Korea and needs missile defenses to counter the threats, a NATO report says." The 10,000-page report, commissioned four years ago, sees a "growing" threat from Iranian Shahab-3 missiles, as well as from North Korea and Syria. It argues that "territorial missile defense is technically feasible." However, some nations, including France and Germany, oppose such a shield.

General Wesley Clark's presidential aspirations peaked the day he announced his candidacy for the 2004 Democratic nomination. Smart and articulate and armed with the perfect resume for the Commander-in-Chief's job post-9/11, Clark has managed to transform himself from soldier-statesman to just another politician. According to the Union Leader, Clark told a group of firefighters the following:

"Right now we're being led down a path to nowhere," Clark told the Professional Fire Fighters of New Hampshire, who had gathered for the final day of their biennial convention. The group also received visits earlier in the week from Sen. John Kerry and Sen. Joseph Biden.

Clark called for a special prosecutor who would be empowered to go beyond the Justice Department in following the ramifications of the lobbying scandals that have engulfed the capitol.

Clark emphasized the importance of improving U.S. foreign relations, including dialogue between the United States and Iran. "We need a dialogue with Iran. I'm told we had opportunities to have that dialogue," he said. "It's been rebuffed three times....

The United States needs a regional strategy for the Middle East, which would include dialogue with both Syria and Iran. "We need to be talking to people even if we disagree with them he said....

In his speech, Clark, who has been a harsh critic of the Iraq war, also recalled the early days after Sept. 11, when he says he learned of plans to invade Iraq. About a week after the attacks, he said he visited the Pentagon and was told of the Iraq plan by the generals in the joint staff who used to work for him. "I was absolutely stunned," he said.

Several months later, after the United States had begun its war in Afghanistan, Clark asked if the Iraq invasion was still the plan. He said his military contacts told him, "'Oh sir, it's worse than that. This is the memo that outlines a five-year campaign plan: Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and we're going to end up in Iran.'"

"I said, 'Is that a classified piece of paper?'" Clark said. "And he said, 'Oh, yes sir.' I said, 'I don't want to see it.'"

It's unclear if Clark addressed the question of whether we should just live with a nuclear-armed Iran if the only remaining alternative to stop or curtail the program is military action. There are strong arguments on both sides -- those who say "yes" we can contain a nuclear-armed Iran like we did the Soviets and those who counter that it would be a huge strategic blow to U.S. security interests -- but instead of engaging his audience on this question Clark trotted out the latest Democratic talking point on Iran and added in a conspiracy theory worthy of Howard Dean.

Evidently, America's repeated "rebuffs" to Iranian efforts to "dialogue" forced the regime to repeatedly break the promises made to the European Union that it would cease enrichment activity. Of course, it was not too long ago that Democrats were encouraging the White House to let the Europeans take the lead. But when that path hit a roadblock they changed their tune. And on Clark's memo nonsense, what can you say. Apparently, working with France to get the Syrian dictatorship out of Lebanon, especially following the regime's role in the assassination of the former Lebanese prime minister, isn't something the U.S. should be doing. Why? Because it gets in the way of constructively "talking to people" -- Assad in this case -- "even if we disagree with them" -- we disagree with Assad's green light to car bomb Hariri.

The fire fighters deserved better than what the general served up.

The Iraqi News Agency reports:

High-Ranking Al Qaeda Leader Detained in Iraq

Karbala. High-ranking leader of terrorist organization Al Qaeda was detained today in Iraqi province of Karbala during military operation, Iraqi news agency INA reports.

Abdel Fatih Isa, a.k.a. Abu Aisha, was arrested in a private home where he had been hiding for a long time. The arrest was made after a few houses in the town had been searched through.

The terrorist is among the chief organizers of terrorist acts in capital Baghdad. According to military sources Abu Aisha was an officer from the Iraqi army during Saddam Hussein’s rule, the agency notes.

If true, did Aisha have any contact with al Qaeda before the invasion in March 2003? Has his name appeared in any of the captured Iraqi documents that have been released?

I have to make a correction related to one of the many postings I have done on the presumptive Democratic presidential candidate. A while back I wrote,

As to foreign policy, though, Warner has been virtually content free. For example, on Iraq he won't say how he would have voted on the war authorization had he been in Congress at the time. He won't tell voters if he would have regretted his vote today had he supported the authorization back then. He won't say whether he believes the president made the right decision to remove Saddam Hussein from power in March 2003 or whether he believes the President should have given UN inspectors more time. Guess he's waiting to see how things look in Iraq a year or so from now.

Well, at a DLC-sponsored foreign policy event yesterday, Warner, according to the AP, informed us that he won't "be lectured [to] by Karl Rove about what is needed to keep this country safe." And on Iraq,

He told reporters afterward that while he hopes the Iraq war is successful, he would consider pulling U.S. troops out if the country did not make progress in coming months on democracy and security.

"I think you don't take that off the table," he said when asked about troop withdrawal.

I'm sure the Iraqis working with the U.S. will be encouraged by the words of the governor. Of course, Warner still refuses to answer basic questions about Iraq. But that can't last.

In a speech to the National Press Club, another presumptive presidential candidate, Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold, said that Democrats "must get out of our political foxholes and be willing to clearly and specifically point out what a strategic error the Iraq invasion has been."

Well Mr. Red State governor, was Iraq a "strategic error" or not?

The editors of the Wall Street Journal and Marshall Wittmann of the Democratic Leadership Council are of one mind on what to make of Ahmadinejad's missive to President Bush.

The Journal observes,

The letter also contains repeated references to what Mr. Ahmadinejad imagines, with some justification, are the main concerns of the Western left. It's all here: the exploitation of Africa's mineral resources; homelessness and unemployment in the U.S.; the budgetary wastefulness of the war in Iraq and U.S. fiscal imbalances. The concern is almost touching, though perhaps Mr. Ahmadinejad needs to broaden his daily media sources beyond the BBC.

And from Wittmann's Bull Moose blog:

Our President is severely weakened and our enemies are emboldened. Yesterday, the Iranian tyrant issued a propaganda missive that was Hitlerian in its content and intent. His rant masqueraded as a diplomatic overture will no doubt cause some to welcome it as an extended olive branch. In the 1930's, Hitler similarly attempted to encourage appeasement with hints of reconciliation.

History repeats itself as a farce.

The New York Times,

"Mr. Ahmadinejad, who has said that Israel should be wiped off the map, again questioned the Holocaust and the basis upon which Israel was created, asking whether support for such a "regime" by the United States government was in line with Christian teachings."

No doubt, Ahmadinejad is getting advice from Teheran's Jihad Communications Strategies Group on how to persuade and influence the new "useful idiots" of the West. Focus groups of gullible Westeners might have been surveyed. For instance, this line could be embraced by the Move On crowd,

"If billions of dollars spent on security, military campaigns and troop movement were instead spent on issues including health and aid to the poor, he wrote, "would there have been an ever increasing global hatred of the American governments?"

Yes, all we are saying is give peace a chance and annihilate a few million more Jews....

Stars and Stripes reports on the operations of the 1st Battalion, 68th Regiment in Iraq:

BAQOUBA, Iraq — Troops with the 1st Battalion, 68th Armor Regiment have their own saying for laying the smack down on the enemy: “bringing the Scunion on them,” said Staff Sgt. Art Hoffman, 30.

The phrase comes from the name “Route Scunion,” a road where U.S. troops are often hit by roadside bombs, explained Hoffman, of Baltimore.

“It’s kind of like his little catchphrase, for when we’re bringing the heat on somebody, we’re going to ‘bring the Scunion,’ ” said Hoffman, battalion senior intelligence officer, referring to battalion commander Lt. Col. Thomas Fisher.

Hoffman said U.S. and Iraqi troops “bring the Scunion” to the enemy with great frequency.

One night, four insurgents mortared and shot at an Iraqi army checkpoint for the second time in as many days, he said.

An unmanned drone flying overhead tracked the insurgents as they got into a car and drove away. That’s when the 1-68 Armor called in an Apache helicopter, he said.

When the car stopped, the Apache disabled the car with its 20 mm cannon and a patrol picked up four insurgents half an hour later, Hoffman said.

“It’s like every other day we’re down there having to fight these guys, and it’s getting worse and worse for the [enemy],” he said.

Fisher, of Sioux Falls, S.D., said his approach toward Iraqis is, “We can sit here and talk like gentlemen and figure out the solutions to problems, or we can go shoot at each other,” he said.

Paraphrasing the war philosopher Sun Tzu, Fisher said the best general is the one who wins without firing a shot.

“We have to remember that we’re not going to judge our success in this engagement by how many people we kill. We’re going to be judged by what kind of society is established,” he said.

From Agence France-Presse:

The top Iranian nuclear negotiator praised Russia and China on Tuesday as taking a "realistic" approach after talks among major powers failed to resolve differences over the Tehran nuclear program. "We feel that certain countries have been acting in a more realistic manner" over the nuclear issue, the negotiator, Ali Larijani, said, referring to the two UN powers. He was in Athens for talks with the Greek foreign minister, Dora Bakoyannis. "Other countries are trying to create headaches," he said. "I come from a region where a lot of problems have been created by the United States. "Our advice to the European Union is not to follow the policy of a country which creates problems for this region. The EU can play a constructive role."

I'm sure government officials in Khartoum, speaking of another vile regime coddled by Russia and China, wholeheartedly agree with Mr. Larijani. Leave us alone so we can pillage Darfur and our friends in Tehran can build their nuclear weapons without getting hassled by the Americans.

On another note, Gerard Baker of The Times (London) gives his take on Ahmadinejad's letter (via the Swiss Embassy) to President Bush calling for direct talks with the U.S. He writes:

There seems to be nothing of real substance in the letter (unless you count the Iranian president's seeking common religious ground with George Bush) and the US has dismissed it. But there's method, I suspect, in Ahmadinejad's missive.

It comes at a moment when the west appears to be at a loss as to how to proceed in the face of Iran's nuclear defiance. UN sanctions won't get past the Russians and the Chinese; operating outside the UN might get support but can hardly be effective without the involvement of those two crucial partners of Iran, and military options remain distinctly unpalatable.

Into this vacuum has come the call for the US to treat directly with Teheran.
In the US this is rapidly becoming the Democrats' agreed position. Having tried for a while to out-hawk the administration with Hillary Clinton's condemnation of the "outsourcing of US policy" to the Europeans, Democrats now say the US should speak directly to the Iranians and see what gives.

Why not at least try? they say. The alternative is not getting us very far. At best talks might produce some Iranian movement or reveal the true scale of Iran's ambitions. At worst they will fail because of Iranian intransigence and we will have demonstrated even to the Chinese and the Russians the
utter futility of trying to deal with these people diplomatically.

So why not?

The answer is that before embarking on any diplomatic (or for that matter military) initiative, you should be assured of a reasonable chance of success, otherwise, the process itself becomes larger than the objective you are trying to achieve and can bog you down in a futile exercise. In
the meantime the other side gains simply from the passage of time.

If the Iranians seriously demonstrate a willingness to abandon their military ambitions, then by all means talk to them. If all they want to is exchange views about the iniquities of the war in Iraq, the historical unreality of the Holocaust and the merits of the continued existence of Israel, the US would be well advised to politely decline.

Castro has given the green light to China and other nations to drill for oil in the Florida Straits. According to the New York Times,

In 1977, the United States and Cuba signed a treaty that evenly divided the Florida Straits to preserve each country's economic rights. They included access to vast underwater oil and gas fields on both sides of the line.

Now, with energy costs soaring, plans are under way to drill this year — but all on the Cuban side.

With only modest energy needs and no ability of its own to drill, Cuba has negotiated lease agreements with China and other energy-hungry countries to extract resources for themselves and for Cuba. Cuba's drilling plans have been in place for several years, but now that China, India and others are involved and fuel prices are unusually high, a growing number of lawmakers and business leaders in the United States are starting to complain. They argue that the United States' decades-old ban against drilling in coastal waters is driving up domestic energy costs and, in this case, is giving two of America's chief economic competitors access to energy at the United States' expense....

Cuban officials invited American oil companies to bid for the other leases on the Cuban side of the Florida Straits even though drilling in Cuban waters would violate the United States' longstanding trade embargo against Cuba.

Wonder how good our slant drilling capabilities are nowadays?

From the Associated Press:

GW skipper extends hand to Venezuela

ABOARD THE USS GEORGE WASHINGTON — The captain of a U.S. aircraft carrier leading a two-month deployment to the Caribbean said Venezuela, whose leader said the naval exercises were intended as a threat, was welcome to participate in an operation designed to strengthen ties with regional allies.

Capt. Garry White of George Washington, a nearly 1,100-foot Nimitz-class carrier that was sailing roughly 150 miles north of the Caribbean island of Curacao on Saturday, said the exercises were intended to “promote peace and stability” in the region.

“I hope that Venezuela will come out and participate with us,” White said aboard the carrier. “But if they don’t they’re certainly welcome and we hope that we’ll be able to have stronger ties with them and every other country in the region in the future.”

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, a fierce critic of Washington, has accused the U.S. military of trying to threaten the South American nation with the naval exercises. Cuban President Fidel Castro also has criticized the exercises, accusing the United States of trying to intimidate his country with the show of military strength.

The U.S. military has dismissed the criticism, noting that it holds annual exercises in the region....

We haven't heard Porter Goss's side of the story but I'm sure we will. I doubt he and his staff are going to let all the stuff being dumped on them -- from Dana Priest in the Washington Post, an anonymous administration source, and the Democrats -- go unanswered. Of course, as this Washington Times editorial notes, "the real back story of the Goss ouster" is a separate issue from the "from debates over Gen. Hayden's merits." Today's Wall Street Journal editorial makes a similar point. And, after reading Reuel Marc Gerecht's WSJ piece, there's no doubt the general has his work cut out for him. Gerecht writes:

Another myth is on the verge of being born. To wit: Porter Goss, the conservative ideologue, greatly politicized the CIA, and encouraged or forced several critically important senior officers to leave the agency, thus dispiriting the entire organization.

Implicit in Ms. Harman's commentary -- made more explicit elsewhere by her, by other Democrats in Congress, and by sympathetic members of the press -- is the assumption that the Bush administration is waging a vendetta against Langley's upper echelons for their hostility to the administration and their embarrassing leaks to the press, especially before the 2004 elections. The current version of this theme, best articulated by Howard Dean of the Democratic National Committee, posits a completely apolitical, professional CIA -- correctly analyzing Iraq (weapons of mass destruction excepted, of course) -- being pounded by a partisan, bellicose, mendacious Republican administration, punishing those who speak truth to power.

One has the sneaking suspicion that Mr. Dean, like others in politics and the press, really has no idea at all what CIA case officers, working-level analysts and their few Iraqi reporting assets (overwhelmingly expatriate cliques of former Baathist Sunni military officers) were writing about Iraq from 2001 until the invasion. I'll take a bet that not a single analyst or Iraq task-force case officer foresaw, in a written report, the all-important role of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani and the senior Shiite clergy; the power of the Salafi fundamentalist movement among the Sunnis; or the speed and nature of the Sunni insurgency before the insurgency actually developed.

But a remote understanding of the CIA has not prevented Mr. Dean, and others, from speaking with certainty about how astute Langley was in Iraq. Few seem to suggest that some in the senior management of the CIA might possibly want to rewrite history to make themselves look better, or that agency officers, like senior State Department officials, can occasionally misbehave and forget that they are apolitical executive-branch officers.

So what do we actually know about the state of the CIA -- especially the clandestine service, which has always defined the agency? And what can we say about Porter Goss's brief tenure?

The one thing we know for sure is that Mr. Goss certainly didn't degrade the capabilities of Langley, given how poor the espionage capacity already was. And the agency's covert-action (CA) capabilities -- against targets that really mattered (for example, Iran) -- were for most purposes nonexistent when Mr. Goss arrived and remain so today (the brain and muscle for these things take years to develop). A working-level CIA officer familiar with the operations directorate's Iran assets described Langley's CA abilities inside Iran from 2000 through 2004 as "unchanged: they're zero."

... Regrettably, reform at the CIA is now dead. The only real chance opened immediately after 9/11 and closed when President Bush decided to retain the services of George Tenet, who always remained close and sympathetic to the operations directorate. Ms. Harman, many other prominent Democrats, and the anti-Bush press have put another nail into the clandestine service's coffin by rallying around an organization that desperately needs to be radically deconstructed. However tepidly or lazily Mr. Goss approached his work, he and his abrasive minions ought to be complimented for at least firing somebody. Given the history of the CIA, this is not an insignificant achievement.

In the 1980s, it was the Republican Party which was hopelessly lost concerning the supposed value and achievements of the CIA. Today, it's the Democrats who've lost it. This is a pity. The first-rate young men and women at the CIA, who have been quitting Langley quietly in large numbers for decades, deserve better.

(Markos Moulitsas, founder of the liberal blog Daily Kos, is an example of why Senator Clinton may not have an easy run to the nomination. His piece in yesterday's Washington Post is also a reason Democrats would have been better off nominating Howard Dean in 2004. The ensuing electoral blowout would have thoroughly discredited the McGovern resurgence that has since gained momentum in the Democratic Party. Now Hillary faces a dilemma on the road to the White House.)

Posted on April 13, 2006:

The fact that the Democratic Party's base is firmly against the Iraq war has put its leading presidential candidate in a tough spot on Iran. Will Senator Clinton continue to embrace a hawkish position on Iran or adopt a softer line? She voted for the Iraq war but, unlike Kerry and Edwards, hasn't abandoned (so far, at least) her position in support of the war -- support that has brought her withering criticism from the Left. Will she defy the anti-war base again on Iran?

Last September, the senator stated, “a nuclear-armed Iran would shake the foundations of global security to its very core.” But she hasn't said much since, except to say that Bush should take the nuclear option "off the table" in reaction to Seymour Hersh's over-the-top New Yorker piece. Presumably she stands by her September position and would support the use of force should it be necessary to prevent a "nuclear-armed Iran" that would "shake the foundations of global security to its very core." But it's extremely doubtful that Democrats who oppose the Iraq war agree with Hillary's current position on Iran. They'd support sanctions but would rather live with a nuclear-armed Iran than with what they believe would be the consequences of an attack. This is probably why Hillary Clinton has been so quiet on Iran lately.

Since her election, Hillary has positioned herself as a Scoop Jackson Democrat on many national security issues. But Scoop didn't win the Democratic presidential nomination in 1972; McGovern did. It's not clear today that Democratic activists have learned the lesson of McGovern, which is why Sen. Clinton faces a dilemma on Iran and why her road to the Democratic nomination won't be smooth sailing.

Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright distances herself from the foreign policy "realists" in today's Washington Post. She rightly argues, "if all America stands for is stability, no one will follow us for the simple reason that we aren't going anywhere." Her Clinton-era colleague, former UN Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, understood the pitfalls of jumping on the "realist" bandwagon many months ago. Setting aside Albright's distortion on why we invaded Iraq and her administration's spotty national security record, it's good to see another senior Democrat join the ranks of other democracy promoters such as World Bank chief Paul Wolfowitz and the late President Ronald Reagan.

Though, the secretary's position on Hamas is confusing. She writes that the Hamas victory suggests, "that, in the Middle East, democracy will do less to extinguish terror, as President Bush predicts, than to ignite it." But seven paragraphs later she informs us,

As for the Palestinians, let us be fair -- elections did not create Hamas. Voters turned to that terrorist group only because prior Palestinian governments didn't deliver. Now, precisely because of the elections, Hamas will be tested as it has never been before, and it will be required to do what it has never done. This will create pressure on the organization to refrain from violence and to moderate its policies toward Israel. Democracy did not create Hamas, but it may cause Hamas to change -- or to fail. Either outcome would be an improvement on the status quo.

So President Bush was right to push for elections in the Palestinian territories?

Today's New York Sun reports on a growing protest at the New School, located in New York City, against Sen. McCain's pending commencement address. They don't like his views on just about everything -- Iraq, Iran, the War on Terror, abortion, gay marriage, blah, blah, blah -- and they're angry that he's also speaking at Liberty University. According to the Sun,

the campaign against the Republican of Arizona began three weeks ago, after the New School's president, Bob Kerrey - a former Democratic senator of Nebraska - announced that Mr. McCain would give the speech. Since then, about 1,000 signatures have been collected on paper petitions and at an Internet site, an organizer of the opposition, Harper Keenan, said."

"This ceremony is supposed to represent the culmination of these students' experience at a school that is known for being progressive, liberal, and open-minded," she said. "For the speaker not to represent these values at all is appalling."

So we're "progressive, liberal, and open-minded" but we only want to hear from those we agree with. Wonder if they offer an introductory course in logic at the New School?

I doubt you will. From the Associated Press:

First Iraqi Graduates Army Ranger School

FORT BENNING, Ga. - A former lieutenant in Saddam Hussein's army on Friday will become the first Iraqi to graduate from the Army's Ranger School, a 61-day training ordeal that pushes soldiers to their physical and mental limits in forests, swamps and mountains.

"I have a big, huge faith in the future of Iraq and that's why I'm here," said Capt. Arkan, who was identified only by his first name to protect him and his family back home.

Arkan, 25, a lieutenant in the Iraqi army in Baghdad at the time of the U.S.-led invasion, said he felt no animosity toward the United States when bombs began falling on the city in March 2003.

"It was a situation you expect from war," he said. "They were fighting Saddam Hussein, not the people. They came for the people. You have to take these matters professionally."

He will graduate Friday with 185 classmates, including students from Moldova, Taiwan, the Czech Republic, Georgia and Greece.

Col. Clarence K.K. Chinn, commander of the Ranger Training Brigade, said training international students has been a tradition since the school's founding in 1950.

"Once an officer gets training in the United States, there's a loyalty toward this country," he said. "We want to build and strengthen our military alliances. What happens with the politicians is a separate matter."

The Ranger training is designed to simulate the stress and deprivation of combat. In the first week, students must adjust from normal sleep patterns and three meals a day to an hour or two of sleep a night and two Army ration meals a day, plus almost constant physical training.

Arkan's weight dropped from 180 to 160 pounds the first week. "There's no walking in this school. You're running all the time," he said.

Arkan said an important motivator for him was being the first Iraqi selected for the school. Another Iraqi soldier is in a class that started Monday and others are expected to follow.

"You're not coming over here as a regular infantry captain," he said. "You're coming to represent your country. For me, I think I've done very well."

One of Arkan's classmates said his war experiences in Iraq were helpful.

"We were impressed with the amount of knowledge he had about combat, something a lot of us did not have," said 1st Lt. Bryan Brokaw, 23, of the Arizona Army National Guard. "We all asked him questions."

Some of Arkan's Green Beret classmates practiced their language skills by greeting Arkan in Arabic, Brokaw said.

With the collapse of Saddam's regime, Arkan's military career ended abruptly, but he promptly signed up when Iraq's first new Army battalion was formed in July 2003, he said.

He was selected to attend an officers' course at Fort Benning's Infantry School in 2004 and went on to graduate from the Army's Airborne School, also at Fort Benning, in 2005. Then he returned to Iraq until he reported to the Ranger school earlier this year.

Arkan said he's uncertain of his assignment upon his return.

"As for the terrorist groups, their days are numbered," he said. "God willing, everything is going to be good."

(Today's Wall Street Journal editorial weighs in on the latest peace initiative. The editors doubt it will hold given the track record of the criminal regime that resides in Khartoum. They also have a message for many of those demanding action to stop the brutality. "There's a lesson here for all of those liberal internationalists who now demand the Administration 'do something' in Darfur: If you want to stop genocide, don't shackle the world's only policeman.")

Posted on April 28, 2006:

Nearly two years ago I attended a lecture by Samantha Power, author of "A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide" (a book I highly recommend), at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. She spoke on the same day the government of Sudan got a seat on the UN Human Rights Commission. On the negotiations to end the killing in Darfur, Power warned that peace talks are sometimes just cover so nations can look the other way at atrocious behavior. But how do you stop such behavior before it becomes a full-blown genocide and once it does how do you end it before eveyone is murdered or displaced? She answered that what is missing in Darfur, as it was in the Balkans and Rwanda, is the "political will" of the international community to act. Though, citing Iraq, she rejected a "militant unilateralist" approach in favor of a reformed UN armed with a robust force ready to intervene to prevent more Rwandas. This brings me to the superb piece, Crisis Intervention: Iraq, Darfur, and American Power, by The New Republic's Lawrence Kaplan. He writes:

Springtime has arrived on the nation's college campuses, but this year the students out marching in the streets are demanding a foreign intervention rather than protesting one. For months now they've been in full cry, and rightly so, over the international community's disinclination to halt the genocide in the Darfur region of western Sudan. Next Sunday, they and like-minded people around the United States will convene for a massive rally in the nation's capital.

But the marchers will have to contend with an unwelcome guest: the specter of Iraq....

Then again, the use of unilateral U.S. military power isn't the solution most Darfur activists have in mind. Even as western Sudan burns, Darfur advocates such as House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi argue that the United States must employ its military power only on behalf of--and, more important, in concert with--international organizations such as the United Nations. The Save Darfur Coalition, a leading umbrella group for organizations bent on action, intends to save Darfur not by urging the Bush administration to launch air strikes against Sudan's murderous militias but by petitioning the White House to bolster funding for African Union peacekeepers and to lobby the United Nations.

But will the African Union put a halt to the killings in Darfur? Absolutely not. Its Arab members have stymied the force at every turn. Will the United Nations solve the crisis? That seems extremely unlikely as well. The organization amounts first and foremost to a collection of sovereign states, many of them adamantly opposed to violating Sudan's own sovereignty. Can NATO save the day? Not really, given the fears of entanglement expressed by its European members. As in Bosnia before it, the victims of Darfur can be saved by one thing and one thing alone: American power.

Unfortunately for the victims of Darfur, too many of their advocates have come to view that power as tainted, marred by self-interest and by its misapplication in Iraq. Hence, the contradiction at the heart of the Darfur debate, which pits the imperative to halt the persecution of innocents (Darfur activists have enshrined as their motto the biblical admonition not to "stand idly by the blood of thy neighbor") against a reflexive opposition to the only power that can actually do so.

With the latter sentiment in vogue as a result of the Iraq war, it is as if nothing has been learned and nothing remembered from the decade that went before. Never mind Bosnia. Never mind Kosovo. And, as long as Darfur activists like number two Senate Democrat Dick Durbin of Illinois cling to the mantra that the United States must be what he calls a "defensive nation," well, never mind Darfur either.

Interestingly, former Clinton official Richard Holbrooke has separated himself from Democrats like Durbin, who have adopted the language of foreign policy "realists." Too bad Durbin and company aren't listening.

Take the case of Ray McGovern, the retired CIA analyst who made today's headlines by challenging Secretary Rumsfeld during the Q&A following his speech last night in Atlanta. In its coverage of the exchange, the Los Angeles Times, for example, described (reg. req'd) McGovern as "a 27-year CIA veteran who once gave then-President George H.W. Bush his morning intelligence briefings." In previous news stories featuring McGovern anti-Iraq War quotes, he has been described as a CIA veteran who also briefed President Reagan and other top GOP officials. But what is interesting is that the reporters took the time to let readers know that he briefed Reagan and Bush I but didn't find space to inform them that McGovern's far-left political views extend well beyond the Iraq War. I don't know the extent of his Reagan briefings, but I do know that McGovern was an opponent of Reagan's foreign policy. For example, he co-authored a memo that said during the Reagan years "the planting of evidence to demonstrate that opponents of governments in Central America were sponsored by the USSR reached new heights (or depths)." Such manufactured evidence, McGovern wrote, was the "justification...needed for the Contra war against the Sandinistas!"

McGovern also accused the first President Bush of manipulating Congress into voting for the first Gulf War. The administration's "PR campaign had the desired impact, and Congress voted to authorize the use of force against Iraq on January 12, 1991." He pointed to the congressional testimony of a girl who was later revealed to be the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the U.S., and also this:

There was a corollary fabrication that proved equally effective in garnering support in Congress for the war resolution in 1991. The White House claimed there were satellite photos showing Iraqi tanks and troops massing on the borders of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, threatening to invade Saudi Arabia. This fueled the campaign for war and frightened the Saudis into agreeing to cooperate fully with U.S. military forces.

On September 11, 1990, President George H. W. Bush, addressing a joint session of Congress, claimed "120,000 Iraqi troops with 850 tanks have poured into Kuwait and moved south to threaten Saudi Arabia." But an enterprising journalist, Jean Heller, reported in the St. Petersburg Times on January 6, 1991 (a bare ten days before the Gulf War began) that commercial satellite photos taken on September 11, the day the president spoke, showed no sign of a massive buildup of Iraqi forces in Kuwait. When the Pentagon was asked to provide evidence to support the president's claim, it refused to do so‹and continues to refuse to this day.

Interestingly, the national media in the U.S. chose to ignore Heller's story.

By ignoring the above and only noting his security briefings to Reagan and Bush I, a subtle message is sent to readers and viewers that McGovern isn't some wild-eyed leftist when, in fact, he really is. Subtle spin, indeed.

Marshall Wittmann's takedown of the Left on his blog today reminds me of Jeane Kirkpatrick's famous "San Francisco Democrats" speech in which she took on the "blame America first crowd." In fact, Wittmann's take is so good (especially coming from a senior fellow at the Democratic Leadership Council) I have posted below his words in their entirety:

Blame Iran First

The Moose avers that Ahmadinejad is not Bush.

If one reads the left wing blogosphere these day one would think that the greatest threat to the world today is not a Holocaust denying madman with apocalyptic visions, but rather the President of the United States. Even a former Secretary of State is in a tizzy over the frightening faith of George W. Bush (she should read some of the speeches of the sainted FDR if she wants to really see some scary invocations of the Lord).

In the view of the left, the Iranians are just misunderstood, while the Bushies are clearly moving us to war. Some Democrats on Capitol Hill are suffering from sleepless nights worrying about the October Surprise that will deny them the Chairmanships and the offices with the swell view of the Mall.

The Moose urges the lefties to take a Xanax and a deep breath. The truth is that the Bushies are following your advice on Iran. Mr. Unilateral of yesterday is Mr. Multilateral of today. For the past couple of years, the Administration has allowed the Europeans to try to talk reason to the Iranian mullahs - to no avail. Lefties, you don't have to rely on Administration "lies" about the Iranian race to go nuclear - the International Atomic Energy Agency has verified it for you.

And now, the Bush folks are attempting to build an international consensus behind sanctions at the U.N. - not war, but sanctions. One would think that the lefties would love this course - but no, they are in a fearful fit. Of course, the Administration has not taken the military option off the table. And neither has Hillary - good for her. Who is engaged in saber rattling with the exception of Sy Hersh's anonymous sources?

This is a time for a demonstration of national resolve against the Iranian nukes. If the mullahs sense weakness, it will reinforce their reckless behavior and make a military confrontation that much more likely.

Where is the left's outrage about the Russian and Chinese probable obstruction of sanctions with teeth? No, the only rage they offer is directed at the U.S. government.

Let's stipulate that the Bushies have made many errors. But so far, they have followed a prudent (perhaps too cautious), mulitlateral approach toward Iran. Yet, some of the same folks who once urged multi-lateralism are urging the Bushies to make unilateral concessions to the mullahs.

What is truly remarkable is that while the Iranians are clear about their intentions many are in deep denial. One of the lefties' favorite bloggers makes excuses for Ahmidinejad - he is just misunderstood when he threatens to "wipe Israel off the map." Charles Krauthammer writes,

"Last week Bernard Lewis, America's dean of Islamic studies, who just turned 90 and remembers the 20th century well, confessed that for the first time he feels it is 1938 again. He did not need to add that in 1938, in the face of the gathering storm -- a fanatical, aggressive, openly declared enemy of the West, and most determinedly of the Jews -- the world did nothing.

"When Iran's mullahs acquire their coveted nukes in the next few years, the number of Jews in Israel will just be reaching 6 million. Never again?"

This new Blame the Bushies First crowd reminds the Moose of the Blame Reagan First crowd of the eighties in the confrontation with the Soviets and the Blame Clinton First crowd in the nineties in the confrontation with the Serbs. Blame Iran first.

Today's Hotline reports on the election advice Rush Limbaugh offered yesterday to the GOP:

Rush Limbaugh: "There are" GOPers "planning to abandon" Bush "in droves, particularly during this election year." Bush is "an albatross around their neck." GOPers, "I'll just give you some advice right now. All of you" GOPers "in Congress -- including you," Sens. Chuck Hagel (R-NE) and Olympia Snowe (R-ME) "and all the rest of them, McCain -- you want to win re-election this year, if you're up? You want" GOPers "to hold the House? Unify behind George W. Bush. Just do it. Just do it. Don't try to please moderate or" Dem "voters by showing your independence. Just go out there and unify and support" the pres. "on a number of issues that you can."

Unfortunately, too many House Republicans have often gone out of their way to stick it to the president. They joined in on the hysteria over the Dubai Ports deal and on immigration they have not unified "behind George W. Bush." Instead, too many have demagogued the issue (which worries RNC Chair Ken Mehlman) in much the same way Democrats have on gas prices. They haven't unified behind the president to control spending (though, there's a glimmer of hope on that front). And on Iraq, rather than making a coordinated argument on the consequences of leaving Saddam in power -- as many Democrats advocated -- and why we must win, we get comments like this expressing hope for an "October Surprise."

Good thing it's only May 4, not November 7, and there is still time to recover as the influence of Majority Leader Boehner takes hold. By the way, guess what Republican Senator will likely do the most campaigning for House Republican candidates? The one from Arizona.

From Reuters:

US says hot on heels of Zarqawi

The U.S. military said on Thursday it was close to capturing the leader of al Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, after discovering documents and the unedited copy of a video he released last week.

Zarqawi was throwing all his resources into attacks in Baghdad and was probably somewhere close to the capital, U.S. military spokesman Major-General Rick Lynch told a news conference.

"We believe it is only a matter of time until Zarqawi is taken down. It's not if, but when," he said.

"He's willing to pull his people from outside the perimeter of Baghdad into Baghdad to go full out on operations inside of Baghdad. Which leads us to believe his personal location is probably somewhere close to those operations. Zarqawi is zooming in on Baghdad, we are zooming in on Zarqawi."

At his weekly media briefing, Lynch showed brief clips from what he said was the unedited video showing Zarqawi, wearing New Balance running shoes, struggling to handle the machine gun he was shown firing in the version posted on the Internet and aired on television. Another clip appears to show his aides grabbing the gun's hot muzzle and fumbling with it after he had finished.

Each clip lasted only a few seconds and Lynch did not say how much more footage there was.

"So what you saw on the Internet was what he wanted the world to see 'look at me. I am a capable leader of a capable organization and we are indeed declaring war against democracy in Iraq'," Lynch said. "What he didn't show you were the clips that I showed you: wearing New Balance sneakers with his uniform, surrounded by supposedly competent subordinates who grab the hot barrel of a just-fired machine gun, ... a warrior leader, Zarqawi, who doesn't understand how to operate his weapons system.

"It makes you wonder."

DEMOCRACY A FAILURE FOR ZARQAWI

Zarqawi was now focusing his strategy on Baghdad to prevent the formation of a government of national unity, Lynch said.

Prime Minister-designate Nuri al-Maliki is forming a cabinet embracing majority Shi'ite Muslims as well as Sunni Arabs and Kurds, a move widely seen as vital in quashing the Zarqawi-led insurgency and mounting sectarian bloodshed.

"The person who has the most to lose in the formation of a government of national unity is Zarqawi," Lynch said. "He's been told by his leadership that democracy equals failure for Zarqawi and al Qaeda in Iraq."

The video and documents were captured during a series of raids around Yusufiya, just south of Baghdad, which Lynch said was a staging post for suicide and other attacks in the capital.

Washington says the edited video was a desperate bid by Zarqawi to win recruits and shore up support.

But analysts say it shows he has a long term strategy to challenge the government not based only on suicide bombers.

From the Marine Corps Times:

High schoolers suspended after protesting recruiters

Marine Corps recruiters in Frederick, Md., are worried that anti-military sentiment may be growing at a local high school following an on-campus protest of Marine recruiters that ended with five students suspended, a Corps spokeswoman said May 1.

The April 27 protest at Fredrick’s Gov. Thomas Johnson High School, included the leader of school’s Young Socialist Club. According to Sgt. Tiffany Carter, the students passed out leaflets during a “die-in,” and lay on the ground in front of a recruiting booth Marines had set up on campus.

A sheriff’s deputy led two students away after they refused to move. Three others went willingly to the principal’s office. Carter said Marine recruiters have visited the school ten times during the school year without incident, but that several students began efforts early in the school year to persuade members on the Frederick County Board of Education to ban military recruiters from school property....

Other Maryland public schools have been under pressure to restrict military recruiting. Must be something in the water.

Valerie Plame Wilson, the NY Times reports, "is shopping a book proposal among a small group of publishers, according to two people familiar with the project." It will be interesting to read the book's acknowledgements.

(The far Left despises Democrats like Rep. Steny Hoyer -- see here and here -- and Sen. Lieberman -- see here. That's why it seems a bit odd that the chairman of the "centrist" Democratic Leadership Council, Gov. Vilsack, and the Senate minority leader, Harry Reid, will be speaking here -- a founder of which said this.)

In September, Roll Call reported that the House Minority Whip, Rep. Steny Hoyer (MD), had cobbled together a dozen or so of his colleagues "to shape the Democratic strategy on national security issues and battle perceptions that the party is weak on defense."

The No. 2 House Democrat, a moderate who supported U.S. involvement in Iraq, said he believes Democrats lost the “national election because of national security” and because of a “lack of confidence of the American public.” He added that many voters had doubts that Kerry and the Democrats were committed to defeating terrorism.

Hoyer, of course, is right. But, as Sen. Lieberman is finding out, the Democratic faithful are not buying Hoyer's line. And apparently neither is one of the members of Hoyer's own group, the one-time deputy of the "centrist" Democratic Leadership Council, Rep. Ellen Tauscher (CA).

She has co-sponsored legislation with Rep. John Conyers (MI), ranking member on the Judiciary committee, calling for the termination of the NSA's terrorist surveillance program -- a program Gen. Hayden says "has been successful in detecting and preventing attacks inside the United States." Tauscher calls the Bush administration's actions "despicable" and is "deeply disturbed" by it all. Meanwhile, her ally spends his days pushing for the impeachment of the president and accusing the White House of "defrauding" the nation into war.

That stone is getting bigger by the day.

Five months ago, Vance Serchuk, a research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, wrote the following in the pages of the Weekly Standard:

While American politicians spent the ast months of 2005 arguing over the U.S. military presence in Iraq, their counterparts in the Netherlands were debating the future of the Dutch contingent in Afghanistan. At issue is The Hague's pledge to deploy slightly over 1,000 Dutch troops to the restive Uruzgan province when NATO assumes responsibility for southern Afghanistan this summer.

The Netherlands' skittishness makes for an important cautionary tale not only about the near-farcical indecision of a European ally in the war on terror, but more important, the risks inherent in outsourcing ever-greater responsibility for Afghanistan to NATO, as the Bush administration evidently hopes to do....

The debacle with the Dutch began this fall, when the country's military intelligence service produced a report describing the treacherous conditions in Uruzgan and predicting casualties if the Netherlands dispatched forces there. Opposition parliamentarians began to rail against the mission, buoyed by public opinion; one poll found a whopping 71 percent of Netherlanders opposed to it.

In truth, NATO's expansion into southern Afghanistan isn't being driven by conditions on the ground or by what makes sense for winning the war there. Rather, it is a function of the Pentagon's misplaced desire to reduce its commitments in the Middle East and bludgeon some defense reform out of Brussels in the process.

The Bush administration furiously denies that NATO expansion should be seen as an American exit strategy, but this denial would seem more credible if the Pentagon didn't then explicitly link its 2,500-man drawdown in Afghanistan to the alliance's growing presence there. The danger here goes well beyond the narrow question of manpower. To a much greater degree than the Bush administration seems to appreciate, success in Afghanistan depends on a good-as-gold, long-term security guarantee from the United States. The survival of the Taliban, in turn, is contingent on a belief that the insurgents will outlast the Americans; that, sooner or later, Washington will tire of a grinding guerrilla war and go home.

The United States needs to leave no doubt that its military will continue fighting in Afghanistan as long as the democratically elected government in Kabul needs help. For the same reason, irrespective of whether a diminution in the number of American soldiers is operationally doable, the Pentagon would have been wise to skip the press release and implement its drawdown quietly. Simply put, there was no strategic advantage to be gained in announcing to the world that there will be fewer U.S. forces in Afghanistan this year.

Afghanistan's leaders certainly understand this. Senior officials in Kabul, tribal elders in the south, and newly elected legislators have all expressed concern about the troop reductions. "I would not like them to leave," Mullah Naquibullah, a tribal leader in Kandahar, told the New York Times last month.

Since Serchuk's piece, there have been several reports -- including this one from today's New York Times -- of increased Taliban activity in southern Afghanistan and serious concerns about passing off operations to NATO. From the Times:

Each spring with the arrival of warmer weather, the fighting season here starts up, but the scale of the militants' presence and their sheer brazenness have alarmed Afghans and foreign officials far more than in previous years.

"The Taliban and Al Qaeda are everywhere," a shopkeeper, Haji Saifullah, told the commander of American forces in Afghanistan, Lt. Gen. Karl Eikenberry, as the general strolled through the bazaar of this town to talk to people. "It is all right in the city, but if you go outside the city, they are everywhere, and the people have to support them. They have no choice."

The fact that American troops are pulling out of southern Afghanistan in the coming months, and handing matters over to NATO peacekeepers, who have repeatedly stated that they are not going to fight terrorists, has given a lift to the insurgents, and increased the fears of Afghans.

Good thing the Warsaw Pact stayed put.

Here's what MSNBC's Chris Matthews had to say last night:

Somebody is responsible for this war. Is it the president, the politicians in Congress who voted to authorize the war, the military who saluted Bush three years ago when the war was popular who are now calling for Defense Secretary Rumsfeld's resignation, or it was cooked intelligence from the administration?

Of course, others may say that in the end it was Saddam Hussein who was "responsible for this war." And some may also still agree with the overall judgment made by liberal Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen on March 11, 2003:

There ought to be an understanding that while war is bad -- very, very bad -- sometimes peace is no better, especially if all it does is postpone a worse war. That is what would happen if the United States now pulled back, leaving Saddam Hussein in power and our troops sweating in the desert, their morale and their strength dissipating.

What would happen then? Ultimately, Hussein would wait us out. This is what he has been doing since the Persian Gulf War in 1991, when he began this game of hide-and-seek with his weapons of mass destruction. If, at the moment, he does not have nuclear weapons, it's not for lack of trying. He had such a program once and he will have one again -- just as soon as the world loses interest and the pressure on him is relaxed....

I grant you that in the run-up to this war, the Bush administration has slipped, stumbled and fallen on its face. It has advanced untenable, unproven arguments. It has oscillated from disarmament to regime change to bringing democracy to the Arab world. It has linked Hussein with al Qaeda when no such link has been established. It has warned of an imminent Iraqi nuclear program when, it seems, that's not the case. And it has managed, in a tour de force of inept diplomacy, to alienate much of the world, including some of our traditional allies.

But the fact remains that were it not for those 250,000 troops sitting out in the desert, there would be no inspectors in Iraq. Hussein kicked them out once and he will kick them out again, just as soon as the world, as is its wont, loses interest and succumbs to the lust for oil, contracts and, in the case of France, the chimera of a glorious yesterday....

What's more, I have some doubts about this war -- especially the challenge of governing and rebuilding Iraq afterward. But I have less doubt about the sort of peace that would result from what, after all, would be appeasement. Saddam Hussein -- not to mention other despots -- will have taken the measure of us. He will resume his old ways. By then, a just war might be unthinkable -- and a just peace no longer in our grasp.

"A new atmosphere of increased religious tolerance has spurred a resurgence of Sufism and brought the once-underground Sufis and their rituals out in the open," today's Washington Post reports. Where has this happened? Of all places: Saudi Arabia. Over a year ago, Stephen Schwartz wrote an interesting piece in the Weekly Standard on an underreported sect of Islam known as Sufism. Schwartz described the stark difference between Wahhabism, the dominant religious force in the Saudi kingdom, and Sufism this way:

The Muslim world comprises a spectrum of religious interpretations. If, at one end of the continuum, we find the fanatical creed of Wahhabism, cruel and arbitrary, more an Arab-supremacist state ideology than a religious sect, at the other end we find the enlightened traditions of Sufism. These stress not only intra-Islamic dialogue, separation of spiritual from clerical authority, and teaching in the vernacular, but also respect for all believers, whether Muslim, Christian, Jewish, Hindu, Buddhist, or other. Sufis emphasize, above all, their commitment to mutual civility, interaction, and cooperation among believers, regardless of sect.

Schwartz continued:

At the same time, on human rights grounds, the United States must speak up for Sufis against those who repress them, often violently, especially in Saudi Arabia. To repeat, in the Wahhabi-dominated kingdom, an independent, spiritual Sufi oppositional culture is emerging, with special attraction for young people. Against the backdrop of Saudi fanaticism, including the open support for radical Islam coming from some of Riyadh's richest and most powerful personalities, Sufism exemplifies the Islamic pluralism that, if restored to Saudi Arabia, could shut off the money flow to al Qaeda and its allies worldwide. These are opportunities in the war against terror that the United States would be foolish to miss.

But is the "new atmosphere of increased religious tolerance" real or, as one Middle East scholar told me, just "window dressing" by the Saudi Wahhabi establishment to keep the Americans quiet? Regardless, the resurgence of Sufism in other nations is something to watch closely and encourage in the face of Islamic radicalism.

Speaker Hastert and Majority Leader Boehner released the following statement this morning:

The Senate emergency spending bill represents a huge spending spree, but the big losers will be the American taxpayers stuck with the tab. President Bush requested $92 billion for the War on Terror and some hurricane spending. The House used fiscal restraint and stayed within the President's request for true emergency spending. We support the President's threat to veto the wayward spending bill. The American people don't deserve a special interest shopping cart disguised as a supplemental.

Having Boehner in the leadership is making a difference. Unlike most House Republicans, he has never accepted the pork-barrel culture of Washington that has gotten far worse in the last ten years. The old saying that there are three political parties in Washington -- Democrats, Republicans, and Appropriators -- rings even truer today.

(Connecticut Democrats haven't been reading the Daily Kos blog site. They're supposed to dump Lieberman. A new Quinnipiac poll of Democratic voters finds Lieberman trouncing his primary opponent, Ned Lamont, 65 - 19 percent. The poll also found that "only 15 percent would vote against a candidate based only on his position on the war.")

Posted on April 30, 2006:

Unlike John Edwards, who supported the Iraq War when running for president before abandoning his position to cozy-up with the Left, Sen. Joe Lieberman remains a profile in courage. From today's Washington Post:

"I'm not surprised that there's a primary challenge," Lieberman conceded. According to a February poll by Quinnipiac University, 61 percent of state voters said invading Iraq was the wrong thing to do. But the former Democratic vice presidential nominee said he will not back down from his position.

"It's one that I believe is in the best interests of the country," Lieberman said recently, after a trip to the Middle East. If he has put his job at risk, he said, so be it.

From today's International Herald Tribune:

PARIS Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin of France said Monday that he was determined to stay in office despite mounting pressure on him to resign in connection with a dirty-tricks campaign targeting his chief rival, Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy.

A five-year investigation into what is known as the Clearstream affair suddenly turned into a full-blown political scandal Friday, when Le Monde reported that Villepin, instructed by President Jacques Chirac, had ordered a corruption inquiry into Sarkozy.

In a measure of how much the affair has rattled the government, both Villepin and Chirac took the unusual step of formally denying the allegations. On Monday, Villepin's office said that the prime minister was ready to testify if investigators summoned him and that he was not planning to step down.

"He is determined to stay because he has done nothing wrong and has nothing to hide," said Véronique Guillermo, Villepin's spokeswoman. "A reshuffle is not on the table."

But so far this and previous statements have done little to calm the political upheaval the affair - already dubbed by some pundits as the French Watergate - has caused.

Coming barely three weeks after the government was defeated by street protests over a youth jobs law and 12 months ahead of presidential elections, the scandal risks overshadowing the last year of Chirac's presidency and is what many regard a blow to Villepin's presidential aspirations.

Julien Dray, spokesman for the opposition Socialist Party, said over the weekend that Chirac should act swiftly. "Perhaps he should separate right away from his prime minister," Dray said. "Perhaps he should envisage new elections."

Even in Villepin's own center-right party, several lawmakers grumbled that he should step down before the scandal sapped the party's chances in next year's elections.

The scandal began in 1991, when France sold six frigates to Taiwan in a deal worth $2.8 billion. Ten years later, a judicial inquiry was opened into allegations that French officials and industrialists had received kickbacks from the deal.

Then, in April 2004, the judge in charge of the investigation, Renaud Van Ruymbeke, received an anonymous letter and a CD-ROM accusing Sarkozy and several other high-level politicians and businessmen of benefiting from such kickbacks and channeling the payments into secret bank accounts through a clearinghouse based in Luxembourg called Clearstream.

It took Ruymbeke one year to establish that the accounts were nonexistent, sparking the latest and most politically charged question: Who sent that CD- ROM with the apparent intention of tarnishing Sarkozy's name and crippling his presidential ambitions?

Villepin's name came up officially for the first time in the sworn testimony of a retired intelligence officer on March 28, testimony which was subsequently leaked to Le Monde.

General Philippe Rondot, a respected French spy who tracked down the terrorist Carlos the Jackal, said that Villepin had asked him in January 2004 to investigate the corruption allegations against Sarkozy, the newspaper said.

Villepin, who was foreign minister at the time, responded with a statement last Friday confirming that he had asked Rondot to conduct an investigation into the Clearstream affair but denying that Sarkozy's name was mentioned.

Providing some comfort to Villepin, Rondot has made it known that he was "scandalized" by Le Monde's account of his testimony, which he called "biased." But a note that the general made to himself after his conversation with Villepin in early 2004, and that was subsequently confiscated by investigators in a string of recent raids targeting the Defense Ministry, the Foreign Ministry and the Interior Ministry, appears to show that Sarkozy's name came up. The memo read: "Political stake: N.Sarkozy. Fixation on Sarkozy (re: conflict J. Chirac/N. Sarkozy)."

As Villepin braced for questions in Parliament on Tuesday, speculation mounted over who would succeed him if he were forced to step down.

There is no obvious answer. Two names have circulated in the French media ever since the recent protests over the jobs law: Defense Minister Michèle Alliot-Marie and Sarkozy himself.

Both were already among the favorites for the post after last year's no-vote in the European referendum, when Villepin was appointed. But Alliot-Marie may be too closely associated with the Clearstream herself: Before retiring last December, Rondot was one of her advisers, though she claims to have been completely unaware of the investigation he was conducting.

Sarkozy's advisers say that his being appointed prime minister would jeopardize his chances for president next year. Indeed, some say he may leave the government altogether to disassociate himself from the final days of the Chirac era and concentrate on his campaign.

"At this point, the earlier he leaves the better," said Manuel Aeschlimann, chief campaign strategist for Sarkozy's Union for a Popular Movement party. "Given how deplorable the image of the government is, it is in his interest to differentiate himself."

(From the Toronto Star: "Stephen Harper's government has quietly committed Canada to 'indefinite' participation in NORAD and agreed to give the military alliance new responsibilities to watch for a terror attack by sea. Fresh off his softwood lumber truce, Harper's government yesterday gave another boost to Canada-U.S. relations when it signed off on the renewal of the landmark North American Aerospace Defence Command treaty.")

Posted on March 17, 2006:

Leadership matters. Tuesday's Globe and Mail has some interesting poll results on the Canadian troop deployment to Afghanistan.

Canadians' views have shifted sharply in support of the Afghan military mission even as troop casualties have mounted over the past three weeks, a new poll suggests.

A modest but clear majority -- 55 per cent of respondents to a nationwide poll taken for The Globe and Mail and CTV over the past four days -- now broadly support the decision to send troops to Afghanistan. Only 41 per cent oppose the deployment.

In late February, more than 60 per cent said that given a vote in Parliament, they would opt against sending troops to the war-torn country. Only 27 per cent said they would vote in favour.... Perhaps most surprisingly, a clear majority -- 59 per cent -- said they are willing to tolerate Canadian casualties to "help achieve security and stability in the region."

The poll results "suggest that a concerted public campaign in defence of the mission by senior military officers, as well as political figures from both the Conservative government and Liberal Opposition, has had an impact."

This change in public attitude doesn't surprise me. A while back, the German Marshall Fund released a poll that found increased European disapproval of President Bush's foreign policy but with an interesting twist. One exception was in Britain (I should note that Poland’s approval numbers mirrored those in the U.S.), “where there was a slight upturn in approval.” I doubt it was a coincidence that this “upturn” occurred in a nation where the national government most vigorously made the case for getting rid of Saddam and for promoting democracy in the region. Bush’s lowest ratings were in countries, namely France and Germany, whose leaders adamantly and very publicly opposed Bush's policies. Even so, Germany's Gerhard Schröder ran on an explicitly anti-American platform and lost to an opponent who forcefully countered his demagoguery. Canada's Stephen Harper did the same against the anti-U.S. rhetoric of Paul Martin. And, of course, Australia's John Howard won a fourth term, while Tony Blair was elected to an unprecedented third. Is there a message here?

Though little reported, U.S. diplomacy with the former East Bloc nations has been quite successful. American investment has poured into a region that Business Week recently profiled in this piece, "Rise Of A Powerhouse." Of course, the region's continued economic vitality may get clipped if some of the big EU member states get their way. Central European governments continue to assist our military and intelligence operations (though trusting the CIA may be far more difficult because of Mary McCarthy and company), and recently Bulgaria joined Romania in signing a military base agreement with the U.S. We have also strengthened our relations with the Baltic states and nations like Georgia, birthplace of Stalin. Now, if we can only get more in "old Europe," to borrow a phrase from Secretary Rumsfeld, on board.

Apparently, Peru isn't interested in being a satellite state of the Caracas regime. From the Associated Press:

Peru recalled its ambassador from Venezuela on Saturday over what it called President Hugo Chavez's "persistent and flagrant interference" in its upcoming presidential elections.

Chavez has characterized one of Peru's presidential candidates as a thief and repeatedly endorsed a nationalist candidate.

"The government of Peru has decided to immediately remove its ambassador from the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela for the persistent and flagrant interference in internal affairs of Peru, in clear violation of the principles and norms of international law," the Foreign Ministry said in a statement e-mailed to The Associated Press.

The statement said that besides Chavez's "repeated declarations" about Peru's electoral process, the decision also was in response to comments he made Saturday aimed at Peru's President Alejandro Toledo.

Perhaps former President Jimmy Carter can mediate.