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Tony Blankley advocates staying in Iraq until it is on more stable footing.
…A commendable editorial appeared in Sunday’s edition of The Washington Post calling for Mr. Obama to negotiate quickly an extension for our troop presence. It pointed out if our troops are forced to leave at the end of the year, “military experts warn, next year Iraq will lack critical defense capacities: It will be unable to defend its airspace or borders, protect oil shipments or platforms in the Persian Gulf, or partner with U.S. Special Forces in raids against al Qaeda. Perhaps most seriously, American soldiers who have been serving as de facto peacekeepers in the city of Kirkuk and along the sensitive border zone between Iraqi Kurdistan and the rest of the country will disappear. Many experts believe that in their absence violence could erupt between Kurds and Arabs.”
…One of the greatest dangers to Iraq – as both anti-war and pro-war advocates agree – is that Iran may come to dominate the Iraqi government. That risk has just increased in the past few months as cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, the murderous Shiite militia leader turned political leader, has returned to Iraq from Iran…
…The danger from this is that if the stabilizing, confidence-building American troops are removed from the power equation in Iraq, the Iranian pawn, Mr. al-Sadr, may convert his community-level service portfolio into renewed sectarian violence.
How and when we leave Iraq is now vastly more important than how and why we entered Iraq. Both our interests in the Middle East and the interests of the Iraqi people hang in the balance with President Obama’s judgment. It would be a tragedy if we lose all after paying so much. …
More on the Goldstone recant. This time from Jeff Jacoby.
…But in an article published Friday in The Washington Post, Goldstone admitted that his mission’s venomous central allegation — that Israel purposely murdered Palestinian noncombatants — was false:
“If I had known then what I know now,’’ he writes in his opening paragraph, “the Goldstone Report would have been a different document.’’ What he knows about Israel now is “that civilians were not intentionally targeted as a matter of policy.’’ By contrast, “that the crimes allegedly committed by Hamas were intentional goes without saying — its rockets were purposefully and indiscriminately aimed at civilian targets.’’ He acknowledges that Israel has been conscientiously investigating incidents in which civilians were killed, whereas Hamas has investigated nothing. And he states the most elemental truth about the Islamist extremists who rule Gaza, a truth nowhere mentioned in the UN report that bears his name: “Hamas . . . has a policy to destroy the state of Israel.’’
That is a point that an honest investigation of the fighting in Gaza would have stressed. It would have explained the conflict’s asymmetrical nature — Israel, a nation-state that bends over backward to avoid harming civilians, was facing Hamas, a terrorist organization that not only targets Israeli civilians, but deliberately puts Palestinian civilians in harm’s way.
…Goldstone’s panel claimed not to know “that Hamas hid its fighters among civilians, used human shields, fired mortars and rockets from outside schools, stored weapons in mosques, and used a hospital for its headquarters, despite abundant available evidence.’’…
Goldstone thoughts from Charles Krauthammer.
On Richard Goldstone’s retraction in a Sunday Washington Post op-ed of the central finding of his U.N. report charging Israel with war crimes:
That Amnesty International reaction [reaffirming Israeli war guilt] is an indication of how much the Goldstone op-ed, this retraction, this weasely, excuse-laden retraction, is too little and too late [to undo] what he did in this report, the one that he’s now saying wasn’t true — [it] did incalculable damage to Israel by accusing it [of war crimes]. Remember, the only Jewish state on the planet is accused of carrying out a war in which it deliberately, as a matter of policy, attacks innocents — which was never true. …
Charles Krauthammer likes Paul Ryan’s proposed reforms.
…Critics are describing Ryan’s Medicare reform as privatization, a deliberately loaded term designed to instantly discredit the idea. Yet the idea is essentially to apply to all of Medicare the system under which Medicare Part D has been such a success: a guaranteed insurance subsidy. Thus instead of paying the health provider directly (fee-for-service), Medicare would give seniors about $15,000 of “premium support,” letting the recipient choose among a menu of approved health insurance plans.
…Ryan’s plan is classic tax reform — which even Obama says the country needs: It broadens the tax base by eliminating loopholes that, in turn, provide the revenue for reducing rates. Tax reform is one of those rare public policies that produce social fairness and economic efficiency at the same time. For both corporate and individual taxes, Ryan’s plan performs the desperately needed task of cleaning out the myriad of accumulated cutouts and loopholes that have choked the tax code since 1986.
…But the blueprint is brave and profoundly forward-looking. It seeks nothing less than to adapt the currently unsustainable welfare state to the demographic realities of the 21st century. …
Karl Rove tells us more about Paul Ryan’s reform plan.
…The Path to Prosperity would return discretionary spending to its 2008 levels and hold it flat for five years; reduce the federal government’s work force by 10%; slash corporate welfare; reform the tax code; and reduce the corporate and top personal rate to 25%. It would repeal ObamaCare, change Medicare so the government helps all seniors pay for an insurance policy they choose, and send states money for each person covered by Medicaid, plus the flexibility to spend that money as they see fit.
…Mr. Ryan would have the government spend $40 trillion over the next 10 years, $6.2 trillion less than Mr. Obama’s budget plan of $46 trillion. This is an overall reduction in what the government plans to spend, not a cut from what it is spending today.
Under Mr. Ryan’s proposal, for example, health-care spending would still rise for both Medicaid, which serves the poor, and Medicare, which serves seniors. The $275 billion spent on Medicaid this year would grow to $305 billion in 2021 while the $563 billion spent on Medicare this year would grow to $953 billion in 2021. Nor would anyone 55 years or older be affected by any Medicare reforms. …
Investor’s Business Daily editors comment on how President Obama’s energy policies are hurting taxpayers and the economy.
…Obama said there was “not much we can do next week or two weeks from now” about gas prices. He didn’t address his two-year war on domestic energy including a seven-year moratorium on oil drilling off both coasts, the eastern Gulf of Mexico and in the Chukchi and Beaufort seas off Alaska.
He could lift that ban today, sending a powerful supply-and-demand signal to the market. He could unlock areas in the West where oil shale reserves are estimated to be triple the crude Saudi Arabia has underground.
He could support the Keystone pipeline project to deliver oil from Canada’s tar sands to the U.S. market. That project would build a 1,661-mile pipeline from Alberta to refineries near Houston, create 13,000 “shovel-ready” jobs and provide 500,000 more barrels of oil per day. …
Jennifer Rubin thinks our Speaker is surpassing expectations.
…In the run-up to the unveiling of the 2012 budget, the media concocted a rivalry between Boehner and Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.). The reality is different. Sources directly involved in the process tell me Boehner never asked Ryan “not to go there” or tried to dissuade him from putting out a very dramatic budget. To the contrary, he gave Ryan license to invade turf usually held by other committees. What other budget has put forth a tax scheme? That’s usually the jurisdiction of the Ways and Means Committee. As the committee chairman raised this or that objection to Ryan’s scheme, Ryan was, according to senior leadership staff, consistently supported by Boehner as well as Majority Leader Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Va.).
That brings us to the drama over the 2011 continuing resolution. I’ll be blunt: Boehner has played the Congress, the president, the Senate and the media like a fiddle. He could, days ago, have reached a compromise with the Democrats, taken the last spending cut offer and dumped the policy riders. After all he could have used Democratic votes to pass a lowest-common-denominator CR. He didn’t. Instead, he has extended the negotiation up to the deadline. He’s not going to leave a dollar on the table. And most important, the freshmen congressmen can rest assured he has gotten the best deal possible. The smartest move yet? Boehner did not allow Obama to announce a deal last night, stealing the thunder after doing virtually nothing to forge a deal. Why is this important? It demonstrates to his caucus and to the president and the Democratic Senate that he isn’t going to crumble whenever the president unleashes a new round of condescending rhetoric. …
…Maybe the pundits and pols should stop underestimating Boehner. So far, he’s won every battle.
Jennifer Rubin gives us some interesting insight into the budget negotiations.
Maybe it’s my 20 years as a labor lawyer, having gone through dozen and dozens of collective bargaining negotiating sessions, but I’m amazed at how little the press and activists on both sides understand what is going on.
A shutdown is like a contract end date, with the potential for a strike or lockout. The chief negotiator for the GOP is Speaker of the House Rep. John Boehner (R-Ohio). It’s not who is in control on the other side. In order to get the best deal for his side, the chief negotiator has to convince both his own side and the other side that there is no more room to spare. So, first you let the clock run down toward midnight. The media hysteria helps Boehner in this regard. Then — and this is important — it can not come down to a single issue. A savvy negotiator needs two. Oh, and look — Boehner has two. He has the riders and he has the amount of cuts.
If the Democrats really can’t abide by the riders, they have to agree to more cuts. If they can’t go any higher on cuts, they need to fork over something on riders. This is rudimentary negotiation strategy. …
George Monbiot continues with thoughts about his conversion to nuclear power.
…The UN Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (Unscear) is the equivalent of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Like the IPCC, it calls on the world’s leading scientists to assess thousands of papers and produce an overview. Here is what it says about the impacts of Chernobyl.
‘ Of the workers who tried to contain the emergency at Chernobyl, 134 suffered acute radiation syndrome; 28 died soon afterwards. Nineteen others died later, but generally not from diseases associated with radiation. The remaining 87 have suffered other complications, including four cases of solid cancer and two of leukaemia.
In the rest of the population there have been 6,848 cases of thyroid cancer among young children – arising “almost entirely” from the Soviet Union’s failure to prevent people from drinking milk contaminated with iodine 131. Otherwise “there has been no persuasive evidence of any other health effect in the general population that can be attributed to radiation exposure”. People living in the countries affected today “need not live in fear of serious health consequences from the Chernobyl accident”. …’