IRAQ–One Exit Strategy: Just Leave

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So sayeth Walter Russell Mead in this essay. Mead is one of the true smart guys around these days. He asks and answers some questions:

But what if things come unglued in Iraq? What if law and order don’t return, and the present low level of violence starts to rise and become better organized? What if the body count among U.S. forces continues to increase? Won’t American public opinion demand a speedy retreat? And wouldn’t a retreat that left Iraq still undemocratic undercut the U.S. further?

The short answer is that if Iraqi violence continues to rise, at some point the administration would go to Plan B: Find a general, turn the place over to him and go home.

This of course sounds pretty horrible. But Mead has a point:

Elites would wring their hands, but voters would just shrug their shoulders. Poll after poll shows that Americans want democracy and human rights to spread around the world — but that they don’t want American combat troops to be caught in the crossfire. If Iraqis reject U.S. help to build a democracy, and Bush decides to bring the troops home, most voters will agree with his decision. They were willing to give this democracy-in-the-Middle-East idea a try — and they genuinely do hope it will work — but at the end of the day, they don’t want a war over it.

What Mead is getting at is that Bush’s core Jacksonian supporters are not happy with the way things are going. Mead wrote this in June. Now, in September, it is much worse. Jacksonians like me were not real happy that this war was even called “Operation Iraqi Liberation”, for example. I don’t think it would ever have been worth sending American troops in somewhere solely because they had a horrible government. That’s their problem. I think we should send our troops in somewhere because it is to the benefit of the United States that we do so. While we are at it, we should conduct ourselves with the practical idealism which we are known for. And the whole “where are the WMDs” business is happening at all because Bush and his crew felt the need to get U.N. support and talk about “resolutions” that were violated and all that hogwash. It didn’t work, of course. The people who care about that crap would never, ever support him. So, what should have been a footnote is now a disaster for Bush: the basis for his “legal” argument is missing.

In Bush’s efforts to put a Wilsonian cloak on this war, the focus on “legality” and “human rights” was an attempt to woo the very people who despise him, and he is losing his base as a result. When he announced the price tag to rebuild the place, he lost another huge slice of his supporters. Millions of people in this country absolutely loathe the idea of “foreign aid”. They angrily begrudge every cent spent abroad. Bush’s only hope to sell this program in Iraq would be to focus on American interests and what we get out of the lives and treasure being shovelled into the place. But Bush won’t play it that way.

Bush’s mistake was that instead of reading books by guys like Mead, he believed the two Steves — Ambrose and Spielberg and that Brokaw guy, too. These guys presented a vision of WWII which was incomplete and hence misleading. We have had a half-generation of people who have been taught that the GIs of WWII went forth to liberate a continent and restore freedom and democracy, and that this was a noble cause. That was true in part. But mostly they went because they were drafted, and after that it was to kick the shit of out of the Japs who bombed us and their pals the Nazis who declared war on us. These were the same people who watched Germany overrun Europe without blinking. That was far away and it was somebody else’s problem. Only when we were attacked did the American public care about the war.

Bush has attempted to sell this war and its aftermath to the wrong people for the wrong reasons and they’re not buying. The people who had supported him in a “war on terror” no longer support him in an expensive effort to build a modern, democratic Iraq, a sales pitch that would never have worked with them anyway.

It is probably too late for Bush to “just leave.” And, at this point, it probably doesn’t matter for him. Bush has lost his core political support at home as a result of these blunders, irrevocably I suspect, and unless he acts very decisively very soon in some very noticeable way, he is going to lose the 2004 election as a result.

China in Space

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There is post with some good links about the Chinese space program on Metafilter. I had a bunch of thoughts. I grew up on space exploration and science fiction, and Robert Heinlein’s novels featuring a colonized solar system. I remember the moon landing. I was 5. All very nice and a source of national pride, etc.

The best comment I ever heard anyone make about it was my mother, a true Jacksonian, Boston Irish style. She said if she had been Neil Armstrong, she’d have planted the flag on the moon and claimed it for America. “They could court martial me when I got back. It would be too late.” She would have. Old time lefties used to say the space program was all a front for the Pentagon. If only it were true. I wish we had gone into space to seize and hold the high ground over the planet to obtain a permanent and crushing military superiority for the United States. That strikes me as a worthy use of my tax money. Instead it was, to be blunt, a gigantic publicity stunt, which yielded us no concrete advantage at all. The Chinese, give them this much, will be seeking concrete military advantage with their space program, gaining experience with large, long-range missiles, with anti-satellite technology, with the military exploitation of space, developing the means to deny the use of space to the United States, their main adversary, the dragon they will have to slay one day, or at least drive out of the Pacific basin, back over the horizon to its lair in North America. Even a “moon base” could be used as a weapon platform to outflank satellite-based ABM technology. (See Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. A classic.)

The Chinese will probably talk the claptrap of humanity exploring the cosmos, the expansion of the frontiers of knowledge for all, blah, blah, blah. Unlike us, they aren’t stupid enough to believe in that stuff. They will do what is good for China, which means what is bad for China’s enemies, especially us. That’s what I’d do if I were them, and I don’t hold it against them and I’d expect no less.

How do say Jacksonian in Chinese?

Interesting Interview

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Drudge links to a story about inactive-reserve Israeli military pilots who, as a political stunt, are refusing to participate in attacks on Palestinians. This is typical posturing by Israeli leftists whose agenda doesn’t have enough political support to be enacted via conventional democratic means; sort of the equivalent of U.S. leftists using the courts to bypass legislatures. Ho hum.

But the article links to another, much more interesting piece: an old interview (Part 1, Part 2) with Dan Halutz, the commander of the Israeli air force. The interview is long, and the questions are skeptical — almost to the point of hostility — about General Halutz’s claims of moral authority. But it seems to me that he has thought through the issues and answers the questions well. He comes across as articulate, morally serious and intensely pragmatic.

Time to Update the U.S. Privacy Act of 1974?

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That’s what tech-journalist Declan McCullagh suggests in his latest online column — after learning that jetBlue Airways sold his (and lots of other people’s) personal info to a contractor who is doing research for U.S. government data-mining schemes.

A presentation prepared by contractor, Torch Concepts of Huntsville, Ala., describes how it merged the JetBlue database with U.S. Social Security numbers, home addresses, income levels and vehicle ownership information it purchased from Acxiom, a company that sells consumer data. Not all the details are clear, but the presentation discusses how Torch, on behalf of Uncle Sam, tried to rate each passenger’s security risk level by analyzing the merged databases.

That kind of disgraceful privacy intrusion demonstrates that it’s high time to amend the Privacy Act of 1974, which restricts databases that the U.S. government compiles but does not regulate how agencies access databases the private sector runs.

Enacted largely as a result of a federal report on automated data systems, the Privacy Act covers any “system of records” the government operates with personal information on American citizens. It limits the use and disclosure of those records and requires that the databases be protected with “appropriate administrative, technical and physical safeguards” to preserve their security and confidentiality. Government employees who disclose records in violation of the law’s procedures can be fined and imprisoned on misdemeanor charges.

In today’s world, the venerable Privacy Act doesn’t go far enough. It worked when computers could be defined as “automated data systems,” but Moore’s Law has exploded early 1970s-era notions of computing speed, and hard drive capacity has increased even more dramatically. The law fails to address the “databasification” of modern life.

Sounds good to me.

Clark is not really about Clark — He’s about Hillary

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Hillary with Clark as VP? My long-standing prediction? It is looking more likely by the day. Mark Steyn has weighed in, suggesting that maybe, just maybe, what is happening is this: “General Clark is merely an unwitting “stalking horse”, designed to weaken both Dean and Bush just enough to enable the Democrats’ real white knight to jump in: waiting in the wings, Hillary Rodham Clinton.” William Safire analyzes the situation similarly, and more analytically, noting that control of the Democrat fund-raising apparatus is the key here, and Terry McAuliffe is the Clintons’ special buddy. But this guy, Craig Crawford gets it best of all. (Do read it all.) He starts out with some reverse spin “Sure, believing that the junior senator from New York will run for the 2004 Democratic presidential nomination might be the political equivalent of believing in Unidentified Flying Objects.” (Not on this blog, baby.) He notes that Clark’s entire entourage is Clintonistas. The Clintons needed time for HRC to wiggle out of her promise not to run. They needed someone to derail Dean’s momentum. “Husband Bill publicly launched the pledge-dodge maneuver for his wife just as Clinton loyalists working for Clark leaked word to the media that the general would definitely run.” Clark’s campaign deals lots of dirt to the other Donk candidates. So, how the heck do they get Hillary in and Clark out of the way in just a few weeks? These are the Clintons, remember. “Clark and Clinton stage a summit and in a sudden burst of activity, the deal is done and she takes over his campaign organization just in time for the Nov. 21 filing deadline for the New Hampshire primary.” Right. Watch that date. November 21, 2003. That is D-Day.

Bill Clinton, with his pack of loyal advisors on hand, is the greatest tactical politician we have had in the White House since Nixon, and probably since Franklin D. Roosevelt, and maybe ever. He wants to get back in the White House. He and the wife are set to do it. Put nothing, nothing, nothing past these people. If she runs, she gets the nomination, and odds are better than even she beats W. It will either be close, or she will walk away with it, but Bush will have a Hell of a time beating her.