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The Kagans, Kimberley and Frederick, review recent gains in Iraq.
America is very close to succeeding in Iraq. The “near-strategic defeat” of al Qaeda in Iraq described by CIA Director Michael Hayden last month in the Washington Post has been followed by the victory of the Iraqi government’s security forces over illegal Shiite militias, including Iranian-backed Special Groups. The enemies of Iraq and America now cling desperately to their last bastions, while the political process builds momentum.
These tremendous gains remain fragile and could be lost to skillful enemy action, or errors in Baghdad or Washington. But where the U.S. was unequivocally losing in Iraq at the end of 2006, we are just as unequivocally winning today.
By February 2008, America and its partners accomplished a series of tasks thought to be impossible. The Sunni Arab insurgency and al Qaeda in Iraq were defeated in Anbar, Diyala and Baghdad provinces, and the remaining leaders and fighters clung to their last urban outpost in Mosul. The Iraqi government passed all but one of the “benchmark” laws (the hydrocarbon law being the exception, but its purpose is now largely accomplished through the budget) and was integrating grass-roots reconciliation with central political progress. The sectarian civil war had ended.
Meanwhile, the Iraqi Security Forces (ISF), swelled by 100,000 new recruits in 2007, was fighting hard and skillfully throughout Iraq. The Shiite-led government was showing an increasing willingness to use its forces even against Shiite militias. The announcement that provincial elections would be held by year’s end galvanized political movements across the country, focusing Iraq’s leaders on the need to get more votes rather than more guns. …
Thomas Sowell on the “cocky ignorance” of Barack Obama.
Now that Senator Barack Obama has become the Democrats’ nominee for President of the United States, to the cheers of the media at home and abroad, he has written a letter to the Secretary of Defense, in a tone as if he is already President, addressing one of his subordinates.
The letter ends: “I look forward to your swift response.”
With wars going on in both Iraq and Afghanistan, a Secretary of Defense might have some other things to look after, before making a “swift response” to a political candidate.
Because of the widely publicized statistic that suicide rates among American troops have gone up, Senator Obama says he wants the Secretary of Defense to tell him, swiftly: …
… All this sounds very plausible, as so many other things that Senator Obama says sound plausible. But, like so many of those other things, it will not stand up under scrutiny. …
Jake Tapper of ABC and John Dickerson of Slate post on Obama’s Jim Johnson problem.
Dickerson:
The Obama Standard
Barack Obama called out Countrywide by name on the campaign trail during the primaries. He particularly criticized the company’s CEO for his excessive compensation and more generally “infecting the economy and helping to create a home foreclosure crisis,” which he linked not only to the 2 million who lost their houses but to school districts that couldn’t purchase supplies and pay teachers. This is the same CEO who gave Johnson his sweetheart deal. Obama’s aides also criticized Clinton’s then-campaign strategist, Mark Penn, for giving PR advice to the company.Now the man Obama has entrusted with what he has called the most important decision of his campaign is wrapped up in Countrywide and tied to the CEO. There are lots of unanswered questions about the Johnson deal, though no evidence as yet that he did anything wrong. But the Obama standard isn’t wrongdoing. It’s mere connection to the company. By that standard, this is bad news.
Since Obama has just held a national seminar for 16 months on changing politics and shedding the old insider way of doing things, you might expect that he’d take these disclosures seriously, if for no other reason than to show that even when it might hurt him, he’s committed to letting the light shine on his associates. Nope—his campaign has called the issue irrelevant. Double bad.
The Corner spots a Dem member of congress who says Obama is too liberal.
John Fund saw the same thing.
It’s only a trickle, but still remarkable to see several Democratic House members shying away from their party’s presumptive presidential nominee because of his liberalism. Barack Obama should hope it doesn’t turn into a widening seepage of support. …
Jim Taranto likes the Obama/Carter dig.
… Democrats kept running against Hoover for decades thereafter. As recently as 1992, some were referring to the incumbent president as “George Herbert Hoover Bush.” And it worked: Bush got trounced.
So maybe this “Barack Jimmy Carter Obama” thing will catch on. And at least it isn’t as invidious as calling him “Barack Hussein Obama.”
John Stossel says “entitlements” will soon eat the federal budget.
Congress is spending us into a hole. We hear about the cost of earmarks and the Iraq war. But what about “entitlements”?
That’s the government’s ironic term for programs that transfer money from people who earned it to people who didn’t.
Entitlement? How can you be entitled to someone else’s money?
To finance “entitlement” programs, the government threatens force against the taxpayers who provide the money. Why are people who favor compulsion called humanitarians, while those who favor freedom are stigmatized as greedy?
But I digress. Today’s big problem with entitlements is that their growth will soon eat everything in the federal budget.
Last month, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) analyzed the growth of government spending and deficits for Rep. Paul Ryan (R.-Wis.), ranking member of the Budget Committee. The report estimated that spending on Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, which in 2007 represented about 8 percent of GDP, would balloon to 14.5 percent in 2030 and 25.7 percent in 2082.
There is no way that can fly. …
American.com on the problems with organic foods.
Organic agriculture has been growing rapidly in recent years—by a factor of 10 from 1992 to 2005—but still accounts for a tiny 0.5 percent of total farmland in the United States, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). Yet organic food has garnered an extraordinary amount of attention from the media and, along with “local” food, is a darling of foodies and environmentalists, who talk up its civic virtues and benefits to the environment. There’s just one problem with this: agriculture has moved away from small-scale, local, and organic farming because these types of farms are land- and labor-intensive and don’t do a very good job of feeding lots of people. In addition, they are not definitively better for the environment, and their growth would lead to higher food prices than most Americans are willing to pay. …
Larry Kudlow says the voters want us to drill.
The recent spike in oil prices and unemployment is dramatically changing this presidential campaign — virtually overnight. The near $20 jump in oil to $140 a barrel, the unexpected half-point increase in the jobless rate to 5.5 percent (the biggest monthly increase in twenty years), and the resulting 400-point plunge in stocks has created a new campaign issue right before our eyes.
Public worry number one is now oil, jobs, and the economy, with the inflationary woes of the U.S. dollar right underneath. The candidate who can connect with these issues will win in November. But so far neither Obama nor McCain are dealing with the new political reality.
In fact, it’s all about oil right now. The price has doubled over the past year while the economy has slumped.
But here’s an eye opener. Recent polling data from Gallup show the percentage of voters blaming oil companies for skyrocketing gasoline prices has dropped from 34 percent to 20 percent over the past year. At the same time, support for more drilling in U.S. coastal and wilderness areas has increased to 57 percent from 41 percent.
And the candidates remain blind to these shifts. …
Fortune magazine says oil prices are going to fall.
High-flying tech stocks crashed. The roaring housing market crumbled. And oil, rest assured, will follow the same path down.
Not everyone agrees. In an echo of our most recent market frenzies, some experts pronounce that the “world has changed,” and that the demand spikes, supply disruptions, and government bungling we face now will saddle us with a future of $4, $5 or even $10 a gallon gasoline.
But if you stick to basic economics, it’s clear that the only question is when – not if – prices will succumb.
The oil bulls are correct in their explanations of why prices have jumped, to a record $138.54 a barrel on Friday. It’s indisputable that worldwide demand has surged, chiefly driven by strong growth in China, India and the Middle East. It’s also true that most of the world’s reserves are controlled by governments in places like Russia and Venezuela that mismanage production, thus curtailing supply growth.
But rather than forming a permanent new plateau for prices – as the bulls contend – those forces are causing a classically unstable market that’s destined for a steep fall. …