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NY Times op-ed by two dudes from the liberal think tank Brookings suggests we may overlook a chance for victory in Iraq.
VIEWED from Iraq, where we just spent eight days meeting with American and Iraqi military and civilian personnel, the political debate in Washington is surreal. The Bush administration has over four years lost essentially all credibility. Yet now the administration’s critics, in part as a result, seem unaware of the significant changes taking place.
Here is the most important thing Americans need to understand: We are finally getting somewhere in Iraq, at least in military terms. As two analysts who have harshly criticized the Bush administration’s miserable handling of Iraq, we were surprised by the gains we saw and the potential to produce not necessarily “victory†but a sustainable stability that both we and the Iraqis could live with. …
… for now, things look much better than before. American advisers told us that many of the corrupt and sectarian Iraqi commanders who once infested the force have been removed. The American high command assesses that more than three-quarters of the Iraqi Army battalion commanders in Baghdad are now reliable partners (at least for as long as American forces remain in Iraq).
In addition, far more Iraqi units are well integrated in terms of ethnicity and religion. The Iraqi Army’s highly effective Third Infantry Division started out as overwhelmingly Kurdish in 2005. Today, it is 45 percent Shiite, 28 percent Kurdish, and 27 percent Sunni Arab.
… In war, sometimes it’s important to pick the right adversary, and in Iraq we seem to have done so. A major factor in the sudden change in American fortunes has been the outpouring of popular animus against Al Qaeda and other Salafist groups, as well as (to a lesser extent) against Moktada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army.
These groups have tried to impose Shariah law, brutalized average Iraqis to keep them in line, killed important local leaders and seized young women to marry off to their loyalists. The result has been that in the last six months Iraqis have begun to turn on the extremists and turn to the Americans for security and help. …
… How much longer should American troops keep fighting and dying to build a new Iraq while Iraqi leaders fail to do their part? And how much longer can we wear down our forces in this mission? These haunting questions underscore the reality that the surge cannot go on forever. But there is enough good happening on the battlefields of Iraq today that Congress should plan on sustaining the effort at least into 2008.
Hugh Hewitt interviews John Burns who gives us background to use when Petraeus gives his report in September.
But to speak of General Petraeus in particular, General Petraeus is 54 years old. Let’s look at this just simply as a matter of career, beyond the matter of principle on which I think we could also say we could expect him to make a forthright report. At 54, General Petraeus is a young four star general, who could expect to have as much as ten more years in the military. And he has every reason to give a forthright and frank report on this. And he says, and he says this insistently, that he will give a forthright, straightforward report, and if the people in Washington don’t like it, then they can find somebody else who will give his forthright, straightforward report. He is not without options on a personal basis, General Petraeus, and I think he, from everything I’ve learned from him, sees both a professional, in the first place, and personal imperative to state the truth as he sees it about this war.
The Captain posts on a good David Ignatius column from Sunday and the Clinton/Obama spat.
Debra Saunders writes on John Doe v. The Flying Imams.
Imagine you’re waiting to board a plane, and you see fellow travelers acting strangely and muttering words that you don’t understand. Maybe they’re Muslim, maybe they’re not. You’re afraid that they are up to no good. What do you do?
Nothing. If you report the behavior, you might get sued. Or so Americans had reason to believe after House Democratic leaders omitted from a homeland security bill a measure by Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y. — that passed by a 304-to-121 vote in a different bill — to grant immunity from civil liability to people who report potential threats to or acts of terrorism against transportation systems or passengers.
Until late last week, that is, when King announced a deal with Democratic leaders to put his amendment into the homeland security bill, which later was approved by both houses. …
Michael Goodwin has more on the Eliot mess.
For someone who fancies himself a student of political history, Eliot Spitzer seems to have missed the most important lessons. Chief among them is that the coverup is usually worse than the crime.
New York’s Democratic governor, who in two past interviews with me said he had learned things from F.D.R., Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton, was on top of the world just a week ago. He had squashed dissent in his own party and all that stood between him and one-man rule of the Empire State was the weakened Republican leader of the state Senate.
But as Week 2 of the “Eliot Mess” begins, Spitzer is in a free fall. The definition of “scarce” in Albany is anybody of either party who believes the governor’s claim he had nothing to do with the dirty tricks plot his office concocted against Senate Majority Leader Joe Bruno. …
… The plot was aligned perfectly with comments he often made about getting rid of Bruno. With Democrats enjoying a huge majority in the Assembly, and with Speaker Shelly Silver mostly abdicating his leadership role to Spitzer, Bruno was the last man willing to say no to the governor. With only a two-seat GOP majority, the feisty Bruno could still block legislation, hold up appointments and deny confirmation to Spitzer judicial picks.
But with Bruno gone, Spitzer would hold vast power over all three branches of government.
Although Spitzer often spoon-fed the media to weaken his targets as attorney general, we don’t know how far he was willing to go in this case. But as the Marist poll makes clear, Spitzer must soon tell the whole truth. Or risk becoming another casualty of a coverup.
Corner posts illustrate how the academy fleeces taxpayers.
What’s the biggest higher education scandal of them all? Ward Churchill? Deconstructionist nonsense? Ideologically biased women’s studies programs? Actually, the biggest higher ed scandal of them all just may be a clever university tactic for tricking the taxpayers into subsidizing all of these abuses. I’m talking about the way colleges and universities collect multi-millions of dollars from the federal government in overhead costs every time they receive money for scientific research. On average, colleges charge the federal government for research overhead at a rate of 52 percent. That means a university can bill the federal government an average of 52 additional cents for every dollar it receives in direct research funding. At private universities, the government is charged an average of 57 percent for overhead.
Now maybe this money really is needed to cover overhead costs. But there are some important signs that the numbers are being inflated, and that university research overhead may in fact amount to a hidden way of getting taxpayers to subsidize ideological women’s studies programs–and every other aspect of university spending–under the guise of supporting valuable scientific research