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Mark Steyn on the speech will be first up.
… “Our goal in war,” wrote Basil Liddell Hart, the great strategist of armored warfare, “can only be attained by the subjugation of the opposing will.” In other words, the object of war is not to destroy the enemy’s tanks but the enemy’s will. That goes treble if, like the Taliban and al-Qaida, he hasn’t got any tanks in the first place. So what do you think Obama’s speech did for the enemy’s will? He basically told ‘em: We can only stick another 19 months, so all you gotta do is hang in there for 20. And in an astonishingly vulgar line even by the standards of this White House’s crass speechwriters, he justified his announcement of an exit date by saying it was “because the nation that I’m most interested in building is our own.” …
… Obama’s speech is only about Afghanistan if you’re in Afghanistan. If you’re in Moscow or Tehran, Pyongyang or Caracas, it’s about America. And what it told them is that, if you’re a local strongman with regional ambitions, or a rogue state going nuclear, or a mischief-making kleptocracy dusting off old tsarist dreams, this president is not going to be pressing your reset button. Strange how an allegedly compelling speaker is unable to fake even perfunctory determination and resilience. Strange, too, how all the sophisticated nuances of post-Bush foreign policy “realism” seem so unreal when you’re up there trying to sell them as a coherent strategy. Go back half-a-decade, to when the administration was threatening to shove democracy down the throats of every two-bit basket case whether they want it or not. Democratizing the planet is, in a Council of Foreign Relations sense, “unrealistic,” but talking it up is a very realistic way of messing with the dictators’ heads. A pipsqueak like Boy Assad sleeps far more soundly today than he did back when he thought Bush meant it, and so did the demonstrators threatening his local enforcers in Lebanon. …
Charles Krauthammer also was underwhelmed by the speech.
…No one expected Obama to do a Henry V or a Churchill. But Obama could not even manage a George W. Bush, who, at an infinitely lower ebb in power and popularity, opposed by the political and foreign policy establishments and dealing with a war effort in far more dire straits, announced his surge — Iraq 2007 — with outright rejection of withdrawal or retreat. His implacability was widely decried at home as stubbornness, but heard loudly in Iraq by those fighting for and against us as unflinching — and salutary — determination.
Obama’s surge speech wasn’t that of a commander in chief but of a politician, perfectly splitting the difference. Two messages for two audiences. Placate the right — you get the troops; placate the left — we are on our way out.
And apart from Obama’s personal commitment is the question of his ability as a wartime leader. If he feels compelled to placate his left with an exit date today — while he is still personally popular, with large majorities in both houses of Congress, and even before the surge begins — how will he stand up to the left when the going gets tough and the casualties mount, and he really has to choose between support from his party and success on the battlefield? …
Tunku Varadarajan blogs about it in The Daily Beast.
1. In the parlance of Olympic diving, President Obama’s speech at West Point had a significant “degree of difficulty”: How to impress upon a nation, weary and wary of war, the importance of winning in Afghanistan? It would have helped him immensely if he’d actually used the word “winning”—or any kindred words—somewhere, anywhere, in his speech. But he did not: “Successful conclusion” and “responsible transition” just do not hack it. One gets the sense that for this president, winning at something as unseemly as war is an aesthetic choke-in-the-throat. (That said, and to persevere with the diving metaphor, the speech was not a belly flop: It had that inevitable, clockwork, wind-up-and-whirr elegance that we’ve come to expect from Obama. There’s no question: He’s a theater jock.)
2. This correspondent has always found simplistic the dichotomous belief ascribed to Obama, that the war in Iraq is “bad” and the one in Afghanistan “good.” In Obama’s view, both wars are “bad,” the difference being that Iraq’s is diplomatically toxic, while Afghanistan’s is not inherently so. The contrast, in effect, has never been one of moral value, but one of manageability. Eager to wash his hands of the diplomatically “unmanageable” war, he wasted no time in signing a treaty of withdrawal from Iraq, with a neat-o timetable. But to paraphrase Lady Bracknell: To pull out of one war may be regarded as a misfortune. To pull out of both looks like carelessness. And so, with the decision to send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan—the “surge” that dare not speak its name—Obama has acquired uncontestable title to the war against the Taliban. If Obama has not won “Obama’s War” by early 2011, he will not, in all likelihood, win a second term.
3. What has struck me most about Obama’s Afghan enterprise—and his speech did not cause me to alter my view—is how obvious it is that he doesn’t really want to do it. He wants to do health care. Obama has tried every delaying trick in the book—waiting for three months after Gen. McChrystal’s request for more troops, having meeting after meeting after meeting, sending Gen. Jones to tell McChrystal not to ask for more troops, having his economic team say it will cost too much, framing the venture in terms of “exit strategies” rather than victory, etc. His ambivalence was on naked display tonight. Can you imagine Churchill delivering a speech like this, one so full of a sense of the limitation of national possibilities? No wonder Hillary—when the camera panned to her—looked like she needed a drink. No wonder the cadets all looked so depressed. Would you want Eeyore for commander in chief? …
David Warren has well-deserved criticisms for the president.
…Indeed, the very delivery of these extra troops “a day late and a dollar short” was accompanied by dark insinuations in Obama’s speech that the Bush administration before him had failed to provide the resources their generals had requested. Former defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld, quiet in his retirement, rightly spoke up on this, knowing it to be a lie, and demanded an inquiry.
It is extremely bad form on the part of the current U.S. president, to continue slandering the previous administration, as a source of cheap excuses. This shows a terrible inability to assume responsibility; and is the more reprehensible in light of Bush’s refusal to blame the Clinton administration for ghastly oversights that contributed to 9/11. It was not in the American interest to backbite; and a president is obliged to remember that national interest.
…Having telegraphed the escalation last March, Obama will certainly find an enemy that is ready for it. The Taliban have been experimenting with new locales for insurgency in the north of Afghanistan, for the express purpose of draining and diffusing allied anti-insurgency efforts. They will be very grateful for Obama’s precise exit schedule; for while they were expecting U.S. stamina to run out within a couple of years, they now have a time-tabled commitment to surrender.
Peter Wehner reminds us that Obama was against the Iraq surge before he was for the Afghanistan surge.
…Second, it’s worth recalling that Obama himself was a fierce critic of the surge/counterinsurgency strategy he now embraces. On January 10, 2007, the night the surge was announced, Obama declared, “I am not persuaded that 20,000 additional troops in Iraq are going to solve the sectarian violence there. In fact, I think it will do the reverse.” A few days later he insisted the surge strategy would “not prove to be one that changes the dynamics significantly.” And responding to President Bush’s January 23 State of the Union address, Obama said
“I don’t think the president’s strategy is going to work. … My suggestion to the president has been that the only way we’re going to change the dynamic in Iraq and start seeing political accommodation is actually if we create a system of phased redeployment. And, frankly, the president, I think, has not been willing to consider that option, not because it’s not militarily sound but because he continues to cling to the belief that somehow military solutions are going to lead to victory in Iraq”.
As late as July 2008, when asked by ABC’s Terry Moran whether, “knowing what you know now, would you support the surge?” Obama answered, “No.” This was one of the most misinformed and foolish comments of the entire campaign. …
…I fully expected Barack Obama would be arrogant as president; what genuinely surprises me is how graceless he has turned out. This is but one way — and not the only way — in which Barack Obama resembles Jimmy Carter.
Karl Rove has an upbeat take on the prospects of winning.
…Still, Tuesday’s speech should improve Mr. Obama’s standing at home. It wasn’t just former Vice President Dick Cheney who disapproved of what he called the president’s dithering on Afghanistan. So did the American people: Mr. Obama’s job approval on Afghanistan slid to 35% immediately before his speech this week, from 56% in July.
Yet the American people seem poised to accept Mr. Obama’s action. In late November, 47% told Gallup they supported a troop increase in Afghanistan, while only 39% backed a reduction. This was up from 42% in favor and 44% opposed about two weeks earlier. Unleashing his military and national security team to swarm Congress and TV talk shows will help his case.
…Fortunately, the antiwar left has little power to stop the president from making good on his commitments. Notwithstanding Mr. Obama’s vote against funding the war in Afghanistan in May 2007, the White House can win a battle over war funding by standing with a coalition of victory-centered Republicans and Democrats who don’t want their president embarrassed.
Only a failure of presidential nerve or an unwillingness to make further midcourse corrections as the need arises will keep Mr. Obama from achieving the goals he has spelled out.
Victory can still be won. It won’t be quick and it won’t be easy, and it will take active leadership from Mr. Obama. But it is now within his grasp.
Climategate has given new meaning to the phrase inconvenient truth, and we toast the hacker who shared the e-mails with the world. Senator Boxer, however, wants the person(s) prosecuted. David Harsanyi fills us in on this and more.
…Yet, Sen. Barbara Boxer, the Democratic chair of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, is off hunting bigger game.
“You call it Climategate; I call it e-mail-theft-gate,” Boxer clarified during a committee shindig. “We may well have a hearing on this, we may not. We may have a briefing for senators, we may not.” Boxer, as steady as they come, went on to put the focus where it belongs: hackers. She warned that part “of our looking at this will be looking at a criminal activity which could have well been coordinated . . . . This is a crime.”
If this hacker(s) is unearthed on U.S. soil (or anywhere in the Middle East, actually), Boxer can jettison the guilty party to Gitmo for some well-deserved sleep deprivation.
But surely there is time for some sort of investigation? This is, after all, the senator who ran a vital committee hearing in 2008 so that an Environmental Protection Agency whistleblower who accused the Bush administration of failing to address greenhouse-gas emissions appropriately could have his say. …
James Delingpole is back in the Telegraph, UK with a Climategate update. Here are three of his bullet points.
1. Australia’s Senate rejects Emissions Trading Scheme for a second time. Or: so turkeys don’t vote Christmas. Expect to see a lot more of this: politicians starting to become aware their party’s position on AGW is completely out of kilter with the public mood and economic reality. Kevin Rudd’s Emissions Trading Scheme – what Andrew Bolt calls “a $114 billion green tax on everything” – would have wreaked havoc on the coal-dependent Australian economy. That’s why several opposition Liberal frontbenchers resigned rather than vote with the Government on ETS; why Liberal leader Malcolm Turnbull lost his job; and why the Senate voted down the ETS.
3. Hats off to The Daily Express – the first British newspaper to make the AGW scam its front page story.
The piece was inspired by another bravura performance by Professor Ian Plimer, the Aussie geologist who argues that climate change has been going on quite naturally, oblivious of human activity, for the last 4,567 million years.
5. Legal actions ahoy! Over the next few weeks, one thing we can be absolutely certain of is concerted efforts by the rich, powerful and influential AGW lobby to squash the Climategate story. We’ve seen this already in the “nothing to see here” response of Dr Rajendra Pachauri, the jet-setting, troll-impersonating railway engineer who runs the IPCC and wants to stop ice being served with water in restaurants. This is why those of us who oppose his scheme to carbon-tax the global economy back to the dark ages must do everything in our power to bring the scandal to a wider audience. One way to do this is law suits.
At Ian Plimer’s lunch talk yesterday, Viscount Monckton talked of at least two in the offing – both by scientists, one British, one Canadian, who intend to pursue the CRU for criminal fraud. Their case, quite simply, is that the scientists implicated in Climategate have gained funding and career advancement by twisting data, hiding evidence, and shutting out dissenters by corrupting the peer-review process. More news on this, as I hear it.
Lord Monckton has written an indispensible summary of the Climategate revelations so far.
In Forbes, Shikha Dalmia gives a well-written review of the Climategate e-mails. She bookends this review by asking Obama to act with integrity.
“Science and scientific process must inform and guide decisions of my administration on a wide range of issues, including … mitigation of climate change,” President Barack Obama declared in a not-so-subtle dig at his predecessor soon after assuming office. “The public must be able to trust the science and scientific process. Public officials should not suppress or alter scientific technological findings.”
Last week’s Climategate scandal is putting Obama’s promise to the test. If he wants to pass, there are two things he should do, pronto: (1) Start singing hosannas to whoever broke the scandal instead of acting like nothing has happened; and (2) Ask eco-warriors at the Copenhagen Climate Change Summit next week to declare an immediate cease-fire in their war against global warming pending a complete review of the science. …
However, Climategate is fast shattering the global warming consensus, and so Obama won’t have even that to hide behind should he go ahead and sign up the U.S. to cut its carbon emissions 80% below 2005 levels by 2050 at Copenhagen next week. There is zero chance right now that Congress will endorse these cuts, which will dwarf the trillion-dollar Iraq price tag. So Obama won’t really be able to advance his foolish crusade, but he will lose the opportunity to protect his own integrity by joining the growing chorus of voices–some of them of global warming believers–demanding a thorough investigation of this episode. Former Chancellor Lord Lawson is asking the British government to launch a formal inquiry about it. Sen. James Inhofe, an Oklahoma Republican, is doing the same here in the U.S. Penn State is launching an investigation of Mr. Hockey Stick Mann’s conduct. Calls for Phil Jones resignation are rising in England. …
…A complete airing of the science of global warming, which is looking less and less avoidable by the day, might eventually vindicate the claims of climate warriors. Or it might not. The only thing Obama can control in this matter is which side he will support: The truth, or–what he accused his predecessor of–ideology.
In Volokh Conspiracy, Ilya Somin comments on Heather Wilhelm’s WSJ article about Ayn Rand. She thinks Rand is bad for libertarianism. Somin does not agree.
…In this Wall Street Journal article, Heather Wilhelm argues that Ayn Rand is bad for libertarianism because her personal obnoxiousness and emphasis on the “virtue of selfishness” and celebration of a small entrepreneurial elite tends to alienate potential adherents. I too dislike some aspects of Rand’s personality and disagree with many parts of her philosophy. Nonetheless, it’s hard to ignore the fact that Rand has done more to popularize libertarian ideas than any other writer of the last century or so — a point I emphasized in my own recent critical assessment of Rand . Literally millions of people have been influenced by her, including the vast majority of the last two generations of libertarian scholars, activists, and intellectuals, many of whom first became libertarian in the first place after reading her books. No other modern libertarian writer has won over so many people, and only a handful of nonlibertarian ones have equaled Rand’s achievements in popularizing an ideology. …
…Economist Bryan Caplan has an excellent article explaining how Atlas Shrugged vividly (and often realistically) portrays the dangers that government control of the economy creates for the general public.
It is true, of course, that this theme is a less prominent element of Atlas than Rand’s valorization of elite entrepreneurial “supermen and superwomen.” Had I written the book, I would have concentrated a lot more on the former and a lot less on the latter. I would have done many other things differently, too. Then again, if I had written the book it probably wouldn’t have attained even a fraction of its vast popularity.
Rereading Atlas Shrugged today, I come away with a more favorable impression of Rand than before. Rand’s positive heroes still seem unrealistic and sometimes unappealing. On the other hand, I find her villains and her portrayal of government generally compelling. I still think that her philosophy and her literary style have many shortcomings. Today’s free market advocates shouldn’t ignore Rand’s weaknesses, nor should they accept all of her ideas. They certainly shouldn’t imitate her authoritarian leadership style and her intolerance for opposing views. But it would be wrong to deny that her influence has been a huge net benefit for the movement.