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We start with the Iraq election portion of Hugh Hewitt’s Friday interview with Mark Steyn. Barack Obama diminishes himself with his indifference to the election’s success.
HH: I began a series of interviews yesterday with Thomas P.M. Barnett, the author of the Pentagon’s New Map. He’s got a new book out called Great Powers which I recommend to you. He’s a pretty fierce Bush critic, but even he has to grudgingly admit that the best part of the Bush administration was strategic patience with regards to Iraq, a willingness to change, and the big bang theory, which is you could never cure the Middle East until you turned all the tables over.
MS: Absolutely. Absolutely right. And you know, a lot of us were saying this in 2002-2003. And that phrase you used, strategic patience, does not come naturally to America, because America isn’t an imperial power. And so it doesn’t like to do, put in the time and effort required to change a political culture, and to change even the broader culture. And I think that actually it’s unfinished work, but I think in the last five years, tremendous progress has been made in doing that. …
Jennifer Rubin posts on the election for Contentions.
… Even if you accept the premise that Iraq was a “mistake” or that “it wasn’t worth it,” it is the Obama administration’s responsibility to ensure Iraq remains stable, that the democratic process goes forward, and the drawing down of troops proceeds smoothly. Perhaps the studied silence is a function of not having the full foreign-policy apparatus in place. (Or maybe Christopher Hill is busy in his basic Arabic language course.) But General Odierno’s job is not made easier by the obvious lack of interest that the President is displaying in what is perhaps the only good news coming out of the Middle East these days.
Amir Taheri writes in the NY Post.
WITH the results of Iraq’s latest elections nearly complete, it’s clear that the nation has taken another major step toward lasting democratization.
A robust campaign – more than 14,000 candidates and 400-plus political parties and alliances competing for 440 seats in the provincial assemblies – gave Iraqis the widest possible choice of personalities and policies. …
… This time, Grand Ayatollah Ali-Muhammad Sistani, the principal Shiite clerical leader, refused to endorse any group or Shiite list. He believes Iraqis no longer need his guidance in elections, having gained enough political experience to make considered choices on their own. Opposed to the intervention of the clergy in politics, Sistani insists that Iraq today has a working democracy that needs no religious chaperon.
Since no single party is likely to win a majority in any of the 14 states, all will end up having coalition governments. Maybe Iraq is emerging as a model of democratization for the Arab world, after all.
Robert Samuelson provides a forward look at what the next TARP program might look like.
If this were a movie, we’d call it “TARP, the Sequel.” The Obama administration will soon unveil its plan to bolster the nation’s financial system. Given the widespread revulsion to financial “fat cats,” the public reception may be underwhelming. But we need to move beyond populist denunciations of “bailing out Wall Street.” The purpose of action is more compelling. It is to reverse a massive worldwide credit contraction that’s clobbering the real economy of production and jobs.
Global finance has swung from one extreme to the other. Having engaged in excessive risk-taking — by misjudging the hazards of “collateralized debt obligations” (CDOs) and other feats of financial engineering — banks and investors have become terrified of almost any risk. The result is paradoxical. As individual financial institutions try to minimize their risks, they increase the risk for the broader economy by denying needed credit or dumping securities (bonds, mortgages).
Here’s how the vicious circle works. …
London’s Daily Telegraph has a look at Obama’s start.
During last year’s epic election campaign, Hillary Clinton said that in the White House “there is no time for on-the-job training”. Joe Biden, too, remarked that the presidency was “not something that lends itself to on-the-job training”. Both were aiming barbs at their then primary opponent. Mrs Clinton has since brought what she would refer to as her “lifetime of experience” to the role of Secretary of State, while Mr Biden has traded 36 years in the Senate for the vice-presidency. And the rookie they derided is President.
Now, the words of his former rivals are returning to haunt President Obama. After a distinctly rocky start to his presidency, he has admitted he “screwed up” and is returning to one thing in his political career that he has perfected – campaigning. In Elkhart, Indiana, today and Fort Myers, Florida, tomorrow, Mr Obama will try to seize back control of the political agenda with question-and-answer sessions with voters in two of the swing states that gave him victory.
Already, however, he is struggling, and the product he is now selling is not himself but a near-trillion-dollar economic “stimulus” package loaded with pet Democratic spending projects that has awakened slumbering Republicans in Congress and is now supported by barely a third of Americans. …
Now we have a series of posts on the new administration’s astonishing lack of competence in the personnel sphere. Roger Simon starts it off.
… An interesting review of recent books about Abraham Lincoln in this weekend’s WSJ by John A. Barnes has this quote about our greatest president: “He knew men on the instant.” Considering the current fiasco of seemingly half his cabinet appointments being tax cheats, including the Secretary of the Treasury, Barack Obama appears to be the opposite of that.
But we knew that, didn’t we? Or we should have. Barack Obama picked as his spiritual mentor the most execrable of men, a racist even, Reverend Jeremiah Wright. It should have been apparent from that alone that Obama was no judge of character – or, even worse, he simply didn’t care. He was more concerned with his own advancement.
But the country ignored that as the media papered it over. …
Posts from The Corner and the Weekly Standard explore the Zinni disaster.
This morning a story in the Washington Times reported “The Obama administration asked retired Marine Gen. Anthony Zinni to be U.S. ambassador to Iraq but abruptly withdrew the appointment without explanation, Gen. Zinni said Tuesday.”
This is a seemingly inexplicable move by the Obama administration. Zinni, who has a reputation for being very straightforward, claims he was offered the job by Hillary Clinton personally and had begun planning before the offer was revoked. Circumstances surrounding Zinni’s alleged ambassadorship may yet come to light and perhaps explain what happened. However, for the time being it looks just like another in a very long line of problems the Obama administration has had staffing the new administration. …
… Barely two weeks into his presidency, the media is bewildered by the daily snafus coming from the White House: the galactic mismanagement of the corrupt stimulus bill, the Daschle debacle, the Geithner outrage, the Zinni circus, the Killefer embarrassment. These are hardly the products of a well-oiled machine. Then there’s the utter lack of seriousness conveyed by Obama’s claim that we are at war with “some” terrorist organizations and his disingenuous handling of Gitmo and rendition.
These screw-ups portend ill for bigger issues down the road. As Victor Davis Hanson noted yesterday, Obama will soon need to address issues percolating in Russia, North Korea, and Pakistan—not to mention Iran. He won’t be able to safely vote “present”.
It’s early in the presidency. The last two weeks don’t necessarily signal that the administration is incompetent or that things can’t be righted.
But it sure highlights the incompetency of many in major media.
In 2006 the British medical journal Lancet interfered in our political campaign by publishing a bogus story on Iraqi civilian deaths. The end of that is at hand. Max Boot has the story in Contentions.
Back in 2006 the British medical journal Lancet published a study claiming that 655,000 Iraqis had died since the U.S. invasion of Iraq. No one denied that there had been lots of civilian casualties but that figure struck most observers as being ridiculously high-designed perhaps to make a political point, but hardly a serious accounting of the costs of war.
As is the nature of these things, however, such findings, no matter how outlandish, make big news. The follow-up does not. One has to search far and wide to learn that the study’s author, Gilbert Burnham of Johns Hopkins, has been censured by his professional peers at the American Association for Public Opinion Research for ethics violations related to this study. …
Shorts from National Review.