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Charles Krauthammer asks and answers, “Who Lost Iraq?”
Barack Obama was a principled opponent of the Iraq war from its beginning. But when he became president in January 2009, he was handed a war that was won. The surge had succeeded. Al-Qaeda in Iraq had been routed, driven to humiliating defeat by an Anbar Awakening of Sunnis fighting side-by-side with the infidel Americans. Even more remarkably, the Shiite militias had been taken down, with U.S. backing, by the forces of Shiite Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. They crushed the Sadr militias from Basra to Sadr City.
Al-Qaeda decimated. A Shiite prime minister taking a decisively nationalist line. Iraqi Sunnis ready to integrate into a new national government. U.S. casualties at their lowest ebb in the entire war. Elections approaching. Obama was left with but a single task: Negotiate a new status-of-forces agreement (SOFA) to reinforce these gains and create a strategic partnership with the Arab world’s only democracy.
He blew it. Negotiations, such as they were, finally collapsed last month. There is no agreement, no partnership. As of Dec. 31, the U.S. military presence in Iraq will be liquidated.
And it’s not as if that deadline snuck up on Obama. He had three years to prepare for it. …
More of this from Fred and Kim Kagan.
Iran has just defeated the United States in Iraq.
The American withdrawal, which comes after the administration’s failure to secure a new agreement that would have allowed troops to remain in Iraq, won’t be good for ordinary Iraqis nor for the region. But it will unquestionably benefit Iran.
President Obama’s February 2009 speech at Camp Lejeune accurately defined the objectives of American policy in Iraq as being ”an Iraq that is sovereign, stable, and self-reliant.” He then outlined how the U.S. would achieve that goal by working ”to promote an Iraqi government that is just, representative, and accountable, and that provides neither support nor safe-haven to terrorists.”
Despite recent administration claims to the contrary, Iraq today meets none of those conditions. Its sovereignty is hollow because of the continued activities of Iranian-backed militias in its territory. Its stability is fragile and perhaps ephemeral, since the fundamental disputes among ethnic and sectarian groups remain unresolved. And it is not in any way self-reliant. The Iraqi military cannot protect its borders, its airspace, or its territorial waters without foreign assistance.
While President Obama has clearly failed to achieve the goals for Iraq that he set five weeks after taking office, Iran, in contrast, is well on its way to achieving its strategic objectives. …
Meanwhile Andy Malcolm found our leader in Europe.
How dumb do they think we are back there in D.C.?
We have a Democratic president, who isn’t really in Washington (he’s over advising Europe on its debt crisis, if you can believe that). He’s been doing little else but fly around this country on Air Force One to the tune of $181,000 an hour.
By night, Obama typically holds fundraisers. By day, Obama gives another speech (“Thank you. Thank you. Please be seated”) allegedly to pressure Congress to pass that infamous jobs bill that was so urgent back in August that he went on vacation and didn’t deliver the address until a month later. …
Spengler writes on political polarization in our country.
Has America become irrational? Not since the 1930s have politics been so polarized, from the Tea Party movement on one side of the spectrum to the Occupy Wall Street protesters on the other. Why does the right object so vehemently to government spending? And why does the left attack private capital with parallel passion? The answer lies not in the American psyche, but in the statistics.
America is engaged in class war, but not of the sort one reads about in the mainstream press. The truly indigent – young African-American men, for example, most of whom are now unemployed – have little to do in this war. Large corporations for the most part are bystanders as well; they will make their peace with the victor. This is a war of survival between the productive middle class on one hand, and the dependents of the state on the other. …
… households that considered themselves comfortably middle class, and looked forward to a comfortable and secure retirement, find themselves on the edge of calamity. During the bubble years of 1998-2007, when America imported $6 trillion of overseas capital, the ride was easy.
When the whole world brought its savings to the United States, people of mediocre skills and slack work habits could afford big houses, expensive vacations, and (at taxpayer expense) generous pensions. Why Americans expected to live well indefinitely on the largesse of foreign investors is a question for the psychiatrists, not the economists.
The crisis has called into being a political movement of the exasperated middle class, namely the Tea Party. It has erased the image of the government unions as champions of progressive causes, and exposed them as an “aristocracy of labor” (in Marx’s phrase) parasitizing the public revenue.
The outcome inherently favors the Republicans. Debt – the catchall name for the crushing tax burden – has become a hot button issue even for many Democrats. But this election will be fought more desperately, and nastily, than any other that comes to mind during the past century. This is an existential struggle, a political war of survival for the American middle class. If the government unions go down in the fight, the Democratic Party of Barack Obama will cease to exist in its present form – and that would be a beneficial outcome for the United States.
Thomas Sowell has a go at Occupy WS.
In various cities across the country, mobs of mostly young, mostly incoherent, often noisy and sometimes violent demonstrators are making themselves a major nuisance.
Meanwhile, many in the media are practically gushing over these “protesters,” and giving them the free publicity they crave for themselves and their cause — whatever that is, beyond venting their emotions on television.
Members of the mobs apparently believe that other people, who are working while they are out trashing the streets, should be forced to subsidize their college education — and apparently the President of the United States thinks so too.
But if these loud mouths’ inability to put together a coherent line of thought is any indication of their education, the taxpayers should demand their money back for having that money wasted on them for years in the public schools.
Sloppy words and sloppy thinking often go together, both in the mobs and in the media that are covering them. …
Joel Kotkin says we need more babies.
The world’s population recently passed the 7 billion mark, and, of course, the news was greeted with hysteria and consternation in the media. “It’s not hard to be alarmed,” intoned National Geographic. “We should all be afraid, very afraid,” warned the Guardian.
To be sure, continued population increases, particularly in very poor countries, do threaten the world economy and environment — not to mention these countries’ own people. But overall the biggest demographic problem stems not from too many people but from too few babies.
This is no longer just a phenomenon in advanced countries. The global “birth dearth” has spread to developing nations as well. Nearly one-third of the 59 countries with “sub-replacement” fertility rates — those under 2.1 per woman — come from the ranks of developing countries. Several large and important emerging countries, including Iran, Brazil and China, have birthrates lower than the U.S.
In the short run this is good news. It gives these countries an opportunity to leverage their large, youthful workforce and declining percentage of children to drive economic growth. But over the next two or three decades — by 2030 in China’s case – these economies will be forced to care for growing numbers of elderly and shrinking workforces. For the next generation of Chinese leaders, Deng Xiaoping’s rightful concern about overpopulation at the end of the Mao era will shift into a future of eldercare costs, shrinking domestic markets and labor shortages. …
More of this from Nicholas Eberstadt who speaking of Europe says;
… No plausible amount of self-imposed budget austerity, furthermore, is likely to save these existing arrangements for the future, for Europe’s welfare states are being fatally undone by her public in another arena: the crèche. “Sustainability” is the term of the decade among Europe’s cognoscenti: and European birth trends have made the continent’s magnificent edifices of entitlement arithmetically unsustainable.
Half a century ago, the 17 countries that currently comprise the Euro zone were bearing about 5 million children each year. In a pay-as-you-go welfare state, those babies are now men and women in the prime of their working lives, supporting the health and pension benefits of older (and smaller) cohorts that preceded them. (Today there are about 2.2 Western Europeans in their late 40s for each in his or her late 70s.)
Over the intervening decades, though, Europe’s birth totals have plunged—and although the Euro zone’s population is much larger now than it was in 1960, the region today registers 30 percent fewer births. Over that period, Europe’s childbearing patterns shifted into sustained sub-replacement fertility, and by 2009, the Euro zone was on a trajectory which, if continued, would portend a shrinking of each subsequent generation by about a quarter (absent compensatory immigration). …