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Purple fingers in Iraq again. Story in The Corner.

Marty Peretz reviews various commentary on the success of Iraq. Here he looks at Tom Ricks’ description of the catch-22 that Obama has created for himself.

…There are three especially compelling personal testimonies arguing that Iraq is on its way to making its own inter-ethnic and inter-sectarian history, and it will be a relatively democratic history. …

…The second of these pronunciamientos comes from Tom Ricks, authoritative or especially believable because of his authorship of two critical books on the American venture in Iraq, Fiasco and The Gamble. In “Extending Our Stay in Iraq,” an op-ed in last Wednesday’s Times, Ricks focuses on President Obama’s coming predicament. Having pledged to start removing American troops early on, Obama may find that his withdrawal will come just at a time when U.S. personnel are needed most. The president put himself long ago–during the campaign, when he played to the crowds–in this Iraqi conundrum. In his West Point address, he repeated the promise of withdrawal from Afghanistan when our presence there could be most important. This is a tic of the president’s, as a recent TNR editorial pointed out and as Dexter Filkins argued in the same issue. Ricks concludes that American and Iraqi leaders “may come to recognize that the best way deter a return to civil war is to find a way to keep 30,000 to 50,000 United States service members in Iraq for many years to come. … As a longtime critic of the American invasion of Iraq, I am not happy about advocating a continued military presence there. Yet… just because you invade a country stupidly doesn’t mean you should leave it stupidly.”

In one way or another, the logic of this last sentence will be taken up by the Obami in their irresistible volte face on Iraq. It will be an embarrassment, an enormous one. But there is no alternative save shame and defeat. …

Fouad Ajami also comments on one of the most amazing events in the Middle East. All of the cynicism from the Left regarding how we came to invade Iraq cannot tarnish the remarkable democracy of this once tortured nation.

…As Iraq approaches its general elections on March 7, we should take yes for an answer. The American project in Iraq has midwifed that rarest of creatures in the Greater Middle East: a government that emerges out of the consent of the governed. We should trust the Iraqis with their own history. That means letting their electoral process play out against the background of the Arab dynasties and autocracies, and of the Iranian theocracy next door that made a mockery out of its own national elections. …

…There was willfulness in this reading of de-Baathification. In the new Iraq, released by American power from its long nightmare, it was either de-Baathification or mass slaughter of yesterday’s tormentors. The American regency in Iraq made its share of blunders. But that order No. 1 issued by proconsul Paul Bremer, banning the Baath, was a boon to the new Iraq. On the whole, the hand of vengeance was stayed. It was remarkable how little violence was unleashed on those who had perpetrated on Iraqis a reign of the darkest terror. …

…Of all that has been said about Iraq since the time that country became an American burden, nothing equals the stark formulation once offered by a diplomat not given to grandstanding and rhetorical flourishes. Said former U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker: “In the end, what we leave behind and how we leave will be more important than how we came.”

We can already see the outline of what our labor has created: a representative government, a binational state of Arabs and Kurds, and a country that does not bend to the will of one man or one ruling clan.

You don’t have access to Pickings circa 2005, but we do. We replay a Mark Steyn column from The Australian on the occasion of the first elections in post-war Iraq. This is from February 1, 2005.

… Three years ago, Jonathan Kay of Canada’s National Post wrote that if Robert Mugabe turned up at an Arab League meeting he’d be the most democratically legitimate leader in the room. That’s no longer true.

What happened on Sunday was a victory for the Iraqi people and a vindication for a relatively small group of Western politicians — most notably the much-maligned US Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, whose faith in those Iraqi people turned out to be so much shrewder than the sneers of his detractors.

John Kerry is wrong. It’s time for him and Ted Kennedy and Kim Beazley and Paul McGeough to stop under-hyping. If freedom isn’t on the march, it’s moving forward dramatically in a region notoriously inimical to it.

This weekend’s election was a rebuke to the parochial condescension of the West’s elites.

“These elections are a joke,” Juan Cole, a professor of modern Middle East history at the University of Michigan, told Reuters. Sorry, professor, the joke’s on you. And the modern Middle East history is being made by the fledgling democracy of the new Iraq.

As if global warming alarmists don’t have enough problems, now Paul Ehrlich is coming to their defense. Mitch Berg has the story in Hot Air.

… Ehrlich started his academic career as an entomologist, an expert on Lepidoptera – butterflies.  But in 1968 he wrote one of the biggest best-sellers in the history of pseudo-scientific literature, The Population Bomb.  In it, Ehrlich reprised the work of Thomas Malthus, arguing that population growth would eventually, inevitably lead mankind to three choices:  Stop making new humans, stop consuming resources, or starve to death.  The book started ”The battle to feed all of humanity is over … hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death.” He spent much of the next decade writing other books and articles in support of his thesis in Population Bomb, adding in a later article “By 1985 enough millions will have died to reduce the earth’s population to some acceptable level, like 1.5 billion people.”  The book and his body of “work” through the seventies proposed a number of radical solutions to the overpopulation crisis; dumping sterilizing agents into water supplies, allowing only selected people the privilege of reproduction, and performing mass “triage” of nations, the same way an emergency room triages patients – between those who don’t need help (North America, Australia, parts of Europe), those who can be saved, and those who are beyond help – India, Sub-Saharan Africa, and much of Asia, which he predicted would be hell on earth by the 1980’s; he essentially gave up all hope for Africa and India.  Our ecology was going to strike back at us; in a 1969 article, “Eco-Catastrophe!”, he predicted that by the end of the century the population of the US would be under 20 million, and our life expectancy would be around 40 years – due not to starvation, but to pesticides. …

In the Weekly Standard, Steven Hayward looks at the fortunate demise of the global warming conspiracy. He neglects to cover one thing: will the Climategate hackers win the Nobel Prize too?

…Two weeks ago the World Meteorological Association pulled the rug out from under one of Gore’s favorite talking points—that climate change will mean more tropical storms. A new study by the top scientists in the field concluded that although warmer oceans might make for stronger tropical storms in the future, there has been no climate-related trend in tropical storm activity over recent decades and, further, there will likely be significantly fewer tropical storms in a warmer world. “We have come to substantially different conclusions from the IPCC,” said lead author Chris Landsea, a scientist at the National Hurricane Center in Florida. …

…A London Times headline last month summarizes the shocking revision currently underway: “World May Not Be Warming, Scientists Say.” … Skeptics such as Anthony Watts, Joseph D’Aleo, and Stephen McIntyre have been pointing out the defects in the surface temperature record for years, but the media and the IPCC ignored them. Watts and D’Aleo have painstakingly documented (and in many cases photographed) the huge number of temperature stations that have been relocated, corrupted by the “urban heat island effect,” or placed too close to heat sources such as air conditioning compressors, airports, buildings, or paved surfaces, as well as surface temperature series that are conveniently left out of the IPCC reconstructions and undercut the IPCC’s simplistic story of rising temperatures. The compilation and statistical treatment of global temperature records is hugely complex, but the skeptics such as Watts and D’Aleo offer compelling critiques showing that most of the reported warming disappears if different sets of temperature records are included, or if compromised station records are excluded.

The puzzle deepens when more accurate satellite temperature records, available starting in 1979, are considered. There is a glaring anomaly: The satellite records, which measure temperatures in the middle and upper atmosphere, show very little warming since 1979 and do not match up with the ground-based measurements. Furthermore, the satellite readings of the middle- and upper-air temperatures fail to record any of the increases the climate models say should be happening in response to rising greenhouse gas concentrations. … Bottom line: Expect some surprises to come out of the revisions of the surface temperature records that will take place over the next couple of years.

Eventually the climate modeling community is going to have to reconsider the central question: Have the models the IPCC uses for its predictions of catastrophic warming overestimated the climate’s sensitivity to greenhouse gases? Two recently published studies funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, one by Brookhaven Lab scientist Stephen Schwartz in the Journal of Geophysical Research, and one by MIT’s Richard Lindzen and Yong-Sang Choi in Geophysical Research Letters, both argue for vastly lower climate sensitivity to greenhouse gases. …

Thomas Sowell continues with his health care columns explaining one of the unintended effects of comprehensive health insurance plans. When doctors have to deal with the hassles of third-party bureaucracy to get paid, much less Obamacare socialist medicine, we have less doctors.

…Those who are old enough to have paid off their medical school debts long ago, and successful enough that they can afford to retire early, or to take jobs as medical consultants, can opt out of the whole elaborate third-party payment system and its problems. What the rising costs of medical liability insurance has already done for some, other hassles that bureaucracies and politicians create can have the same effect for others.

There is another group that doesn’t have to put up with these hassles. These are young people who have reached the stage in their lives when they are choosing which profession to enter, and weighing the pluses and minuses before making their decisions.

Some of these young people might prefer becoming a doctor, other things being equal. But the heady schemes of government-controlled medicine, and the ever more bloated bureaucracies that these heady schemes will require, can make it very unlikely that other things will be equal in the medical profession. …