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Christopher Hitchens says if you want to read a “tell-all” book that informs about Bush and the war, read Douglas Feith’s book.
… It’s also of considerable interest to learn that the main argument for adhering to the Geneva Conventions was made within the Pentagon and that the man who expressed the most prewar misgivings concerning Iraq was none other than Donald Rumsfeld. Feith doesn’t deny that he has biases of his own. One of these concerns the widely circulated charge that his own Office of Special Plans was engaged in cherry-picking and stovepiping intelligence. Another is the criticism, made by most of the neocon faction, of Paul Bremer and the occupation regime that he ran in Baghdad. In all instances, however, Feith writes in an unrancorous manner and is careful to supply the evidence and the testimony and, where possible, the actual documentation, from all sides.
Without explicitly saying so, Feith makes a huge contribution to the growing case for considering the Central Intelligence Agency to be well beyond salvage. Its role as a highly politicized and bewilderingly incompetent body, disastrous enough in having left us under open skies before Sept. 11, 2001, became something more like catastrophic with the gross mishandling of Iraq. For these revelations alone, this book is well worth the acquisition. (I might add that, unlike McClellan, Feith is contributing all his earnings and royalties to charities that care for our men and women in uniform.)
I don’t know Feith, but I can pay him two further compliments: When you read him on a detail with which you yourself are familiar, he is factually reliable (and it’s not often that one can say that, believe me). And his prose style is easy, nonbureaucratic, dry, and sometimes amusing. If a book that was truly informative was called a “tell-all” by our media, then War and Decision would qualify. As it is, we seem to reserve that term for the work of bigmouths who have little, if anything, to impart.
Daniel Pipes notes interesting contrasts between Obama and McCain over Mid-East policy.
How do the two leading candidates for president of the United States differ in their approach to Israel and related topics? Parallel interviews with journalist Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic, who spoke in early May with Democrat Barack Obama and in late May with Republican John McCain, offer some important insights.
Asked roughly the same set of questions, they went off in opposite directions. Obama used the interview to convince readers of his pro-Israel and pro-Jewish bona fides. He thrice reiterated his support for Israel: “the idea of a secure Jewish state is a fundamentally just idea, and a necessary idea”; “the need to preserve a Jewish state that is secure is … a just idea and one that should be supported here in the United States and around the world”; and “You will not see, under my presidency, any slackening in commitment to Israel’s security.” …
As far as their prospects go in the November vote, David Brooks says a pox on both their houses.
It took Christopher Columbus about 70 days to get to the New World — a bit less than half as long as it took us to get through the 2008 primary calendar. But by Tuesday night, we’ll have reached our destination, and people in the Obama and McCain camps are feeling good about themselves.
Neither campaign is planning a major pivot for the fall. Both are confident they have a strategy for victory.
So my role today is Dr. Doom — to break through unmerited confidence and raise the anxiety level in both camps. …
Thomas Sowell says we should pay attention to what Obama has done.
It is amazing how seriously the media are taking Senator Barack Obama’s latest statement about the latest racist rant from the pulpit of the church he has attended for 20 years. But neither that statement nor the apology for his rant by Father Michael Pfleger really matters, one way or the other. Nor does Senator Obama’s belated resignation from that church. For any politician, what matters is not his election year rhetoric, or an election year resignation from a church, but the track record of that politician in the years before the election.
Yet so many people are so fascinated by Barack Obama’s rhetorical skills that they don’t care about his voting record in the U.S. Senate, in the Illinois state senate, the causes that he has chosen to promote over the years, or the candidate’s personal character and values, as revealed by his actions and associations. Despite clever spin from Obama’s supporters about avoiding “guilt by association,” much more is involved than casual association with people like Jeremiah Wright and Father Pfleger. In addition to giving $20,000 of his own money to Jeremiah Wright, as a state senator Obama directed $225,000 of the Illinois taxpayers’ money for programs run by Father Pfleger. In the U.S. Senate, Obama earmarked $100,000 in federal tax money for Father Pfleger’s work. Giving someone more than 300 grand is not just some tenuous, coincidental association. Are Barack Obama’s views shown by what he says during an election year or by what he has been doing for decades before? …
David Harsanyi writes on “cap and trade.”
How does Washington plan to resolve our energy problems and control atmospheric temperatures? Well, how do they fix anything? By proposing a gargantuan boondoggle.
A “cap and trade” bill, one that will supposedly cut 66 percent of our emissions by 2050, is being debated in Congress this week.
To begin with, proponents of America’s Climate Security Act have been misleading the public by claiming that cap and trade is a “market- based” solution. In truth, cap and trade does to the market what “American Idol” does to music.
The idea sounds harmless: government caps emissions, and corporations trade the allotted credits among themselves. Some of the credits will be auctioned off by government. The Wall Street Journal estimates these auctions will net $6.7 trillion for government coffers by 2050. …
Daily Mail with a monster fish story. This is here for the halibut.