Click on WORD or PDF below for full content
Jennifer Rubin summarizes a Hitchens column on the false choice between Iraq and Afghanistan.
John McCain tried yesterday to argue that Barack Obama is setting up a false choice between Iraq and Afghanistan. Christopher Hitchens does a better job of it today, explaining “any attempt to play off the two wars against each other is little more than a small-minded and zero-sum exercise.” Hitchens argues that the problem of Afghanistan is not one of simply too few troops which might be eased by shifting troops from elsewhere. And then he concludes:
If we had left Iraq according to the timetable of the anti-war movement, the situation would be the precise reverse: The Iraqi people would now be excruciatingly tyrannized by the gloating sadists of al-Qaida, who could further boast of having inflicted a battlefield defeat on the United States. I dare say the word of that would have spread to Afghanistan fast enough and, indeed, to other places where the enemy operates. Bear this in mind next time you hear any easy talk about “the hunt for the real enemy” or any loose babble that suggests that we can only confront our foes in one place at a time. …
Then Rubin does the same with Tom Friedman’s column questioning Obama’s quest for popularity in the world. Rubin closes with;
… And that I think is what is troubling about Obama’s formulation — that we have somehow made it oh-so-hard to be loved by the world. If we are really looking out for our own and the world’s best interests, we are going to ask our allies to do things they had rather not — like contribute more troops to Afghanistan and draw the line with tyrants and bullies. And we’re going to do a whole lot of things that our adversaries don’t like, such as impose sanctions and use military force when needed. That doesn’t mean we can’t be constructive, cooperative, and cordial in getting our allies on board, or go the extra mile to avoid military conflict with our foes. But this notion that we can get everyone to like us by simply sending George W. Bush into retirement is hooey.
We can and should be firm (like world leaders we will meet with), predictable (with regard to seeing through our military and moral commitments in a war, for instance), respectful of our agreements (trade agreements, even) and look for common ground. But unless we put our own interests on the back burner and allow the world to run amok, as Friedman puts it, a lot of countries aren’t going to like what we’re doing. And being resented or even disliked? Not always a bad thing.
Here’s Friedman’s column. (We’re not doing the Hitchens column because it’s poorly organized and poorly written. Rubin has a link if you want to go there anyway.)
Much ink has been spilled lately decrying the decline in American popularity around the world under President Bush. Polls tell us how China is now more popular in Asia than America and how few Europeans say they identify with the United States. I am sure there is truth to these polls. We should have done better in Iraq. An America that presides over Abu Ghraib, torture and Guantánamo Bay deserves a thumbs-down.
But America is not and never has been just about those things, which is why I also find some of these poll results self-indulgent, knee-jerk and borderline silly. Friday’s vote at the U.N. on Zimbabwe reminded me why.
Maybe Asians, Europeans, Latin Americans and Africans don’t like a world of too much American power — “Mr. Big” got a little too big for them. But how would they like a world of too little American power? With America’s overextended military and overextended banks, that is the world into which we may be heading.
Welcome to a world of too much Russian and Chinese power.
I am neither a Russia-basher nor a China-basher. But there was something truly filthy about Russia’s and China’s vetoes of the American-led U.N. Security Council effort to impose targeted sanctions on Robert Mugabe’s ruling clique in Zimbabwe. …
What Pickerhead had originally intended for today was a review of some more of the Tony Snow tributes. So here’s some of them. Byron York writes about his effective work at the White House.
… Snow’s arrival was an immediate breath of fresh air for the White House communications operation. He set out to talk to reporters in front of the camera. That didn’t cause them to stop criticizing the White House, and it didn’t cause the war in Iraq to go better, but it did give George W. Bush an appealing and effective voice appearing daily on television. “Here they had a guy who could really parry with you, who could really joust with you, and who was not afraid to do that,” says David Gregory, the NBC White House correspondent who has done his share of jousting with spokesmen. “He could go on as a guest and really kick it around.”
So Snow became the best face the administration ever had. “Tony raised the bar for all future press secretaries,” Dana Perino, Snow’s deputy who now holds the press secretary’s job, told me. “He was especially effective talking about matters of national security — he understood the threat, he believed in the mission, and he had tremendous respect for our troops. He held the podium during the toughest days in Iraq, and we were grateful for his steadfastness in communicating that we would prevail if we didn’t let politics get in the way.” …
Fred Barnes too.
… But I think Tony will be especially remembered for something else: his time as White House press secretary for President Bush. Tony did the job differently. Most press secretaries are uninformative and defensive, none more so than Tony’s predecessor, Scott McClellan. Reporters grow to dislike them, at least at a professional level.
During some of the toughest days of the Bush presidency, Tony was on offense. He not only could articulate and explain Bush’s foreign and domestic policies, he could promote them. At the pressroom podium, Tony was an ardent and effective polemicist. When reporters argued with him, they usually lost. Yet Tony was so nice and civil and informative that the press hounds generally liked him while loathing his boss.
After 20-plus years of writing columns and yapping on TV, Tony knew a lot. He knew much more about policy and politics and the ideological wars in Washington than the vast majority of the reporters covering the White House. He had thought through and come to (mostly conservative) conclusions about nearly everything on the agenda. This gave him a distinct advantage. More often than not, he was a step ahead of the reporters.
Tony was press secretary during the darkest days of the Bush presidency. The Iraq war had turned into a sectarian bloodbath in 2006, but Tony understood how critical Iraq was to winning the war on terror and transforming the Middle East. He defended the president’s Iraq policy before and after the surge, never blinking or backing down. He was better at this than the president was. …
Lisa Schiffren finishes with a Corner post on Snow.
In the end, which came too soon, Tony Snow was a well-known TV personality, who gave it up to articulate the views of a White House that couldn’t talk straight. In the beginning, he was the deputy editorial page editor at the Detroit News, the place he became the man everyone knew later. I worked with Tony there, for the three years that I was an editorial writer on his staff. Our editor, Tom Bray, had come to Detroit from the Wall Street Journal in 1983 to turn a stodgy, traditionally Republican editorial page into an exciting, powerful voice of the Reagan Revolution. For this mission he assembled a staff of mostly very young people — there weren’t many seasoned Reaganites back then, and fewer still willing to leave Washington. …
Every four years someone proposes abolishing the electoral college. Playing the part of the ignoramus this year is Sen. Bill Nelson of Florida. Jeff Jacoby takes the part of intelligent grown-up.
… The Electoral College (like the Senate) was designed to preserve the role of the states in governing a nation whose name – the United State of America – reflects its fundamental federal nature. We are a nation of states, not of autonomous citizens, and those states have distinct identities and interests, which the framers were at pains to protect. Too many Americans today forget – or never learned – that the states created the central government; it wasn’t the other way around. The federal principle is at least as important to American governance as the one-man-one-vote principle, and the Electoral College brilliantly marries them: Democratic elections take place within each state to determine that state’s vote for president in the Electoral College. …
Ann Coulter comments on our lack of will to drill.
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, or as she is called on the Big Dogs blog, “the worst speaker in the history of Congress,” explained the cause of high oil prices back in 2006: “We have two oilmen in the White House. The logical follow-up from that is $3-a-gallon gasoline. It is no accident. It is a cause and effect. A cause and effect.”
Yes, that would explain why the price of oral sex, cigars and Hustler magazine skyrocketed during the Clinton years. Also, I note that Speaker Pelosi is a hotelier … and the price of a hotel room in New York is $1,000 a night! I think she might be onto something.
Is that why a barrel of oil costs mere pennies in all those other countries in the world that are not run by “oilmen”? Wait — it doesn’t cost pennies to them? That’s weird.
In response to the 2003 blackout throughout the Northeast U.S. and parts of Canada, Pelosi blamed: “President Bush and Rep. Tom DeLay’s oil-company interests.” The blackout was a failure of humans operating electric power; it had nothing to do with oil. And I’m not even “an oilman.”
But yes — good point: What a disaster having people in government who haven’t spent their entire lives in politics! …
Jonah Goldberg’s column on “evil oil speculators” is priceless.
Contrary to nearly all received wisdom in Washington, not to mention the rhetoric of the presumptive nominees of both major parties, the scariest moments in American politics are often its most bipartisan. Some would say this was demonstrated in the wake of 9/11, when all those allegedly terrible national security laws were enacted by both parties, or in the run-up to war, when Democrats and Republicans united to topple Saddam Hussein. But I find it is most true when Washington takes a populist turn, which it is doing now with pugnacious stupidity, attacking that classic populist boogeyman: the “oil speculator.”
Sen. John McCain has declared the profits of American oil companies “obscene” and wants to hunt down “speculators” with congressional investigations. Sen. Barack Obama also sees “speculation” as the culprit behind our energy woes. Rep. Bart Stupak (D., Mich.) blames Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street star chambers. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi warns that “we are putting oil speculators on notice.” Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid vows to “end speculation on the oil markets.” Even former House Speaker Newt Gingrich — who actually knows how markets work and is better at explaining them than any other politician today — says we have to “punish the speculators” for “betting against America.”
Et tu, Newt? …