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Debra Saunders knows we need to be patient in Iraq.
During a teleconference from Iraq with reporters last week, Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch, commander of coalition forces operating in the region south of Baghdad, explained, “Lynch’s rules of war fighting.” Rule 1 is, “Everything is timing, and the second rule is, everything takes longer than you think it’s going to take.”
I’ve had people ask me what it would take for me to support withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq. The answer: If military leaders such as Lynch or top Iraq commander Gen. David Petraeus say this war is not winnable, then it’s time to get out.
But when U.S. senators — be they Republicans Richard Lugar and Pete Domenici, or Democrats Hillary Clinton and Harry Reid — call for a timetable to withdraw U.S. troops, that’s not a sign to get out. It’s a sign that D.C. pols want to be on the popular side of an unpopular war. It’s a sign that Washington lacks what Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., described as “the courage necessary to put our country’s interests before every personal or political consideration.”
U.S. troops serving in Iraq deserve better. …
David Ignatius too.
… Getting into Iraq was President Bush‘s decision, and history will judge his administration harshly for its mistakes in the postwar occupation. But getting out of Iraq is now partly in the hands of the Democrats who control both houses of Congress. History will be equally unforgiving if their agitation for withdrawal results in a pell-mell retreat that causes lasting damage. …
And the editors of the Washington Post.
IT SEEMS like just weeks ago, because it was, that Congress approved funding for the war in Iraq and instructed Gen. David H. Petraeus to report back on the war’s progress in September. Now, for reasons having more to do with American politics than with Iraqi reality, September isn’t soon enough. …
Don Surber of the Charlestown Daily Mail has more.
I will not mince words. The call to bring our troops home from Iraq is nothing short of a surrender that will move the theater of war from Baghdad to the streets of the United States.
Unlike Vietnam, the enemy will follow our soldiers home.
On Sunday, the New York Times called for a surrender in Iraq. In so doing, the newspaper abandoned any pretense of liberalism, of decency and of compassion for one’s fellow man. …
Jay Nordlinger of National Review Online gives us a delightful change of pace. He has excerpts from speeches given by Abby and Steve Thernstrom when they received Bradley Awards in May. Pickerhead was honored by an invitation and is happy to relive that evening.
Here’s Abby;
… We are true neo-cons. We lingered long on the left until mugged by reality. Even in the ’50s, however, when we met, I was a political disappointment to my parents, who had sent me to Communist schools. Literally. The children of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg arrived at my high school after I left.
But my Communist political education failed to take. For reasons I don’t know, I was stubborn, fiercely independent, and willing to pay the price for rebellion. I was the only student in my school, for instance, who refused to wear a black armband when the Rosenbergs were executed in June 1953. It was not a recipe for popularity at that school. . . .
And Steve;
Abby hails from Greenwich Village; I’m from the heartland, specifically two small Midwestern industrial cities, Port Huron and Battle Creek, Michigan. My father, the son of a Swedish immigrant laborer, had to leave school after the 8th grade to earn his keep. My mother’s formal education ended with high school, but she was a devoted life-long reader who encouraged me to read voraciously from an early age. . . .
I met Abby at Harvard in 1958. By then, I had read deeply in Marx, and considered myself a democratic socialist. Over time, though — a long time — I gradually lost my faith that the government could run the economy more fairly than a free market, and began to move back towards Battle Creek, as it were. The year spent in England as a visiting professor at Cambridge University in 1978-79 was particularly eye-opening, as we lived through the final months of the Callaghan Labour government and found ourselves cheering Margaret Thatcher’s election. The tragic degeneration of the civil rights movement, in which I had been active in college and graduate school, also sapped my faith in left liberalism. . . .
John Fund has some Thompson thoughts.
Power Line posts Thompson’s letter to them.
The easiest and most generally used tactic when running against a lawyer is to trade off a general perception that most people dislike lawyers. Goodness knows that a lot of lawyers have earned disfavor but, as it turns out, folks understand our system better than a lot of politicians think they do. In my first run for the Senate, my opponent tried the old demagoguery route – “He has even represented criminals!†– to no avail.
A first cousin of this ploy is to associate the lawyer with the views of his client. Now-United States Chief Justice John Roberts addressed this notion during his confirmation hearings. “… [I]t’s a tradition of the American Bar that goes back before the founding of the country that lawyers are not identified with the positions of their clients. The most famous example probably was John Adams, who represented the British soldiers charged in the Boston Massacre.â€
Samizdata says Tintin books are in trouble in the UK.
Robert Samuelson tries to answer why we don’t get happier.
Corner post on Sicko.
Michael Munger, chair of the PolySci Dept. at Duke, with a great piece on recycling.
Two empty bottles, still cool from their malty contents. I glance at my lovely wife. And as always after a couple of beers, she looks strikingly attractive… as an audience for an economics lecture.
Her reaction, also as always, is to pretend to focus intently on her book, and probably to wonder how we ever managed to have children. …
… “Recycle, regardless of cost!” doesn’t solve a problem; it creates one. Laws requiring recycling harm me, the environment, and everyone else. We have to take prices into account, because prices are telling us that we can’t save resources by wasting resources.
Well, it’s late, and it’s time I head upstairs. I put the glass bottles in the recycle container. They are brown glass, and though their “value” is negative, at least they can be recycled at nominal cost. Besides, it makes me feel good. I’m saving the Earth, one piece of expensive garbage at a time.