Kerrey: Centrality of the War in Iraq

By way of Bill Bennett's radio program this morning came notice of former Democratic Senator and Presidential candidate now New School President's, Bob Kerrey, commentary on liberals and supporting the War. It is must reading.

It is entitled "The Left's Iraq Muddle". He begins with a concise restatement of the justifications for deposing Saddam and he does so by invoking the tried and true American foreign policy that believes democracies can be imposed by military.

Here is the key part:

American liberals need to face these truths: The demand for self-government was and remains strong in Iraq despite all our mistakes and the violent efforts of al Qaeda, Sunni insurgents and Shiite militias to disrupt it. Al Qaeda in particular has targeted for abduction and murder those who are essential to a functioning democracy: school teachers, aid workers, private contractors working to rebuild Iraq's infrastructure, police officers and anyone who cooperates with the Iraqi government. Much of Iraq's middle class has fled the country in fear.

With these facts on the scales, what does your conscience tell you to do? If the answer is nothing, that it is not our responsibility or that this is all about oil, then no wonder today we Democrats are not trusted with the reins of power. American lawmakers who are watching public opinion tell them to move away from Iraq as quickly as possible should remember this: Concessions will not work with either al Qaeda or other foreign fighters who will not rest until they have killed or driven into exile the last remaining Iraqi who favors democracy.

The key question for Congress is whether or not Iraq has become the primary battleground against the same radical Islamists who declared war on the U.S. in the 1990s and who have carried out a series of terrorist operations including 9/11. The answer is emphatically "yes."

This does not mean that Saddam Hussein was responsible for 9/11; he was not. Nor does it mean that the war to overthrow him was justified--though I believe it was. It only means that a unilateral withdrawal from Iraq would hand Osama bin Laden a substantial psychological victory.

Do read the rest.

Tenet: The Point About Saddam

Rich Lowry has been posting salient points from Tenet's new book. Here is a key one (emphasis mine):

Exactly [Rich Lowry]

Here's a key point about the debate over Iraq—it was always fundamentally about how much risk we were willing to tolerate in a post-9/11 environment (page 328):

The absence of evidence and linear thinking, and Iraq’s extensive efforts to conceal illicit procurement of proscribed components, told us that a deceptive regime could and would easily surprise us. It was never a question of a known, imminent threat; it was about an unwillingness to risk surprise.

04/30 12:11 PM

Read some more here.

The War at Home

From Glenn Reynolds comes this pointed reply to the question "Is the war lost?"

It's up to you The Iraq war is lost or won if the American people choose to lose or win it. With the way things are going at the moment, I perfectly understand why they might choose to give up on the war. But that is not because the war is inherently unwinnable by a country as great and rich and powerful as the United States.

-- Kanan Makiya, Iraqi scholar who supported the U.S. invasion

Washington Post

Nathan Hale: New Yardstick for Congressional Action

Nathan Hale over at The American Thinker articulates a principle that should be guiding our national legislators in their daily deeds and talk. It is pretty simple.

Does this action weaken or strengthen our opponents' will to fight?

And the corollary:

Does this action strengthen or weaken OUR will to fight?

The key, Hale points out, is that the point of war is not to kill people but to break his will to fight. It is for this reason that Lincoln sent Sherman to Atlanta, Truman dropped atomic bombs on Japan. As Victor Hanson says, it is the moral way to wage war. The quicker the opponent's will is broken, and the more resolutely it is broken, the sooner life can return to and remain in normalcy, or at least, the best it could be.

Speaker Pelosi, Going Where no Grandma has Gone Before

Kathryn at The Corner was one the first to point out this editorial, in today's Post, putting a fine point on Pelosi's foolishness. You know, visiting Syria and inciting peace talks and understanding with the West and Israel.

As any diplomat with knowledge of the region could have told Ms. Pelosi, Mr. Assad is a corrupt thug whose overriding priority at the moment is not peace with Israel but heading off U.N. charges that he orchestrated the murder of former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq al-Hariri. The really striking development here is the attempt by a Democratic congressional leader to substitute her own foreign policy for that of a sitting Republican president.

Remember, this is the woman who claimed that being a grandmother qualified her to be Speaker of the House. Well, this shows us that she is just a grandmother.

UPDATE: Here is Claudia Rossett on Pelosi's trip. It is called "Pelosi was Nuts to Visit with Assad". (ht: Michael Goldfarb at The Weekly Standard)

UPDATE 2: What's this? Pelosi's trip broke the law? So says Robert F. Turner, a former assistant of Secretary of State, in the Wall Street Journal editorial today. It's titled "Illegal Diplomacy". He says:

The Logan Act makes it a felony and provides for a prison sentence of up to three years for any American, "without authority of the United States," to communicate with a foreign government in an effort to influence that government's behavior on any "disputes or controversies with the United States." Some background on this statute helps to understand why Ms. Pelosi may be in serious trouble.

(ht: Drudge)

Algeria 1957 and Iraq 2007

Commentary's Contentions has been the site for several good exchanges between specialists regarding Iraq and historical precedents. The first was Victor Davis Hanson and Max Boot and now Arthur Herman and Max Boot. I'll dig up the VDH/Boot exchange next. But first, Herman submitted an article in Commentary comparing the experience of the French in Algeiers in the late '50's with our experience in Iraq and the lessons we could learn. Max Boot offers his qualified agreement and then Herman responds.

UPDATE: Here are the letters between VDH and Max Boot, from the first of the year, on Iraq and the "surge". Apparently it starts with Boot. All the letters appears linked at the bottom of each letter.

Boot 1 & Hanson 1, Boot 2 & Hanson 2, Boot 3 & Hanson 3, Boot 4 & Hanson 4

Then and Now

James Taranto of WSJ's Best of the Web has real doozer: Guess which stalwart Senators would have penned the column "Iraq: the Decade After" in the Washington Post back in 2002? Here's an excerpt for a clue (emphasis added):

Although no one doubts our forces will prevail over Saddam Hussein's, key regional leaders confirm what the Foreign Relations Committee emphasized in its Iraq hearings last summer: The most challenging phase will likely be the day after -- or, more accurately, the decade after -- Saddam Hussein.

Once he is gone, expectations are high that coalition forces will remain in large numbers to stabilize Iraq and support a civilian administration. That presence will be necessary for several years, given the vacuum there, which a divided Iraqi opposition will have trouble filling and which some new Iraqi military strongman must not fill.

Senators Joe Biden and Chuck Hagel.

The very ones who just voted to pull out our troops by next year. Taranto's only guess as to how their "decade" of overcoming the greatest challenge has come and gone so quickly is that the planet they live on has a 150-day long year.

President Bush Quotes Iraqi Bloggers

Today, Bush quoted two Iraqi bloggers (Iraq the Model) and their report that the surge is working. More at Pajamas Media.

UPDATE: Michele Malkin documents some disapproval in the MSM that Bush would use "unverified statements". Michele responds:

And never mind that Iraq the Model isn't merely an "opinion" blog reacting to news, as the snobs at the AP would have you believe. They are reporting news from the ground--which is a serious threat to MSM outlets like the AP that continue to rely on anonymous stringers relying on anonymous sources feeding them unverified statements.

She also posts Omar and Mohammed's response to the news.

Lieberman on Morality and Iraq

Kathryn Lopez at the Corner posts these comments of Lieberman made today, in response to the Senate's deliberations of the Iraq War spending bill which includes an imposed exit date from Iraq. If I find more of his statements, I'll post them or a link.

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Arguing for eliminating Iraq withdrawal language from the supplemental appropriations legislation, Senator Joe Lieberman (ID-CT) stated on the Senate floor today,

“Indeed, it is an awful irony of this debate that many of the same people who consistently and correctly call on the United States to do more to stop the bloodshed in Darfur now demand we abandon the Iraqis.”

Senator Lieberman continued, “We hear that Sunnis and Shia have been fighting for centuries, and that no matter how tragic, we cannot possibly hope to resolve this conflict. We have heard these arguments before. We heard them in the 1990s about Yugoslavia. We heard them about Rwanda. Like the euphemism of “civil war,” it is another way for us to distance ourselves, emotionally and morally, from what is actually happening—and from the people it is happening to. It allows us to think of these places as a sort of abstract tragedy, in which there are no victims, just victimizers, whom we can walk away from with impunity… The wanton slaughter of innocent people that our soldiers are trying to stop in Baghdad is not the inevitable product of ancient hatreds, but the consequence of a deliberate, calculated strategy by an identifiable group of perpetrators—first and foremost, Al Qaeda.”

Concluding, Senator Lieberman outlined both the strategic and moral consequences of a premature withdrawal from Iraq, “I ask my colleagues: consider what it will mean if Congress orders our troops to pull back from this battle, just at the moment that they are taking the initiative. Consider the consequences if we knowingly and willingly withdraw our forces and abandon one of the few states in the Middle East to have held free, competitive elections to extremism and violence...”

“We cannot redeploy from our moral responsibility to the Iraqis. It is contrary to our traditions; it is contrary to our values; and it is contrary to our interests. And yet that is precisely what this Congress will be calling for, if we order our troops to withdraw.”

UPDATE: Republican attempts to remove the deadline failed, 48-50. Two Republicans (Gordon Smith of Oregan and Chuck Hagel of Nebraska) sided with Democrats and Lieberman and Mark Pryor of Arkansas sided with Republicans. (via NY Times' The Caucus)

UPDATE 2: Senator Lieberman's website has made the speech fully available here (scroll down).

Passive Voice Watch and War on Terror

From today's The Corner, an interesting observation regarding current reporting. It reminds me of George Orwell's essay on politics and English language.

Press Passivity [Michael Rubin]

A writer with whom I spoke about two weeks ago pointed out a very interesting trend in the press reporting and political commentary about the war on terrorism. All too often, reporters and politicians use the passive voice.

Take British Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett in yesterday’s USA Today: “It's widely argued now that the existence of the camp is as much a radicalizing and discrediting influence as it is a safeguard for security.” Well, who argues? A McClatchy story yesterday read, “Nearly 2,700 Iraqi civilians were killed in the city in September.” Well, who killed them? Baathist insurgents or Iranian-backed militias?

If the public read that Iranian-backed militias killed nearly 2700 civilians, we might be less willing to reward their murderers. From today’s New York Times: “Most of the 500 municipal workers who have been killed here since 2005 have been trash collectors.”

Again, someone did the killing. Why hide it? It’s important to know what we are up against.

I’d submit two conclusions: Journalists do not use the active voice because they do not know the subject of the action—in which case their editors should send them back to ask tough questions—or the editors wish to absolve the subjects for political reasons. Either way, it’s poor journalism and irresponsible punditry. Sorry to be a grammar nerd, but it’s time to have a passive voice watch.

Posted at 1:34 PM

UPDATE: Jonah adds a few more observations:

Re: Press Passivity [Jonah Goldberg]

Michael makes an excellent point. I'd add a few of other possible causes of the passivity:

Laziness: By phrasing things passively, reporters don't have to actually track down real quotes and assign accountability.

Copycatting: If the New York Times uses a certain style, it will catch on, regardless of the merits.

Globalization: Reuters has a policy of not using the word "terrorist" objectively in part because they are a global news service and some of their customers object when you call their preferred team terrorists. Similarly, CNN doesn't call anyone a "foreigner" because CNN fancies itself a global news service as well. Passive voice reporting might be a related phenomenon because it allows news outlets to avoid offending various consituencies, ideological and geographic.

Groupthink: Because the press as a "class" see the war with considerable unanimity, editors don't catch things which simply "sound right."

Condescention: When Iraqis kill Iraqis, some may reason, they aren't fully formed moral actors, but manifestations of Bush's folly simply acting the way Third Worlders do.

None of these are mutually exclusive and I'm sure there are others. Indeed, most of them overlap considerably. I just think that when trends like thos pop-up there are lots of reasons for them.

Posted at 2:00 PM

UPDATE 2: Curiosity (and some free time) got the best of me, so I went and found an on-line version of Orwell's essay, called "Politics and the English Language". In addition to his always timely observations about language and politics, it contains good advice for writers, such as this:

What is above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way around. In prose, the worst thing one can do with words is surrender to them. When you think of a concrete object, you think wordlessly, and then, if you want to describe the thing you have been visualising you probably hunt about until you find the exact words that seem to fit it. When you think of something abstract you are more inclined to use words from the start, and unless you make a conscious effort to prevent it, the existing dialect will come rushing in and do the job for you, at the expense of blurring or even changing your meaning. Probably it is better to put off using words as long as possible and get one's meaning as clear as one can through pictures and sensations. Afterward one can choose -- not simply accept -- the phrases that will best cover the meaning, and then switch round and decide what impressions one's words are likely to make on another person. This last effort of the mind cuts out all stale or mixed images, all prefabricated phrases, needless repetitions, and humbug and vagueness generally.

But, more apropos to Rubin and Goldberg above, Orwell talks about politicans and government publications: political orthodoxy of any kind purposefully hides full accounts of events and its actors.

Orthodoxy, of whatever colour, seems to demand a lifeless, imitative style. The political dialects to be found in pamphlets, leading articles, manifestos, White papers and the speeches of undersecretaries do, of course, vary from party to party, but they are all alike in that one almost never finds in them a fresh, vivid, homemade turn of speech.

Why? Because using the passive seeks to hide the hand of the puppeteer, focusing on the puppet or the results instead. It locates the action in a vacuum; it is a sleight of hand that most of us used when we hide the fact that our loose tongue got somebody else in trouble--"It came to be known that Mr. X does not like you." Political parties, Orwell says--and journalists are not exempt their own political pressures--, that the euphemisms (of which passive voice is a kind) allow to speak of an event in a diminished way. Passive voice then allows the speaker to hide the actor.

More:

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness.

Why? As brutal as the images main street media's coverage of the ravages that daily pour out of Iraq, they are only brutal with a part of the whole picture. And I am not merely talking out their ignoring the good news--which they do. I am talking about the subsequent diminishing of the role of the actors that results from focusing on the action. Part of it may in fact be the result of tv images always getting, by the very nature of the way events unfold, the carnage of the bombs or bullets, and not the immediately preceding action of the actors perpetrating their barbarities. At any rate, active voice connects actor to act; vivid action verbs do it to startle the reader out of his somnobletic Sunday afternoon reading to encounter an incarnation of a particular action that a particular person has done to particular people or person. There are three foci. Passive only two.

For instance: Compare this sentence

Bledsoe threw Glenn the football

with

The football was thrown to Glenn (by Bledsoe).

Mark Twain's advice was: choosing the best word over an acceptable word was the difference between lightning and the lightning bug. Active voice strikes, passive glows. Passive voice does not quickens, it deadens.

Such phraseology [eg, euphemisms and passive voice] is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.

Again, Orwell is concerned with members of the political class corrupting language, politics, and public opinion. But surely he would not discount the impact that the press has in the same realm? They are, after all, framing how many or most of us understand the way the world is. They do have, however, less and less control in this since cable news and talk radio expanded the perspectives possible. And, of course, the Internet has exploded the control and access to sources of news from the hands of a few to countless numbers of people throughout the world. In this light, as Jarvis, Andrew Sullivan and others have said, the Internet has done for people what the Gutenberg printing press did for people in the Reformation. It took the interpretation and reading of Scripture from the Church and gave a Bible (and its interpretation) to the mass of Europe's people.

For a free people, we do count on our government officials and leaders to give us as complete and unvarnished accounts of events affecting our lives and country. Despite mistakes in the recent past, I don't have any doubts that the Bush administration did and continues to do the best it can. (This was the prudential wisdom of keeping Clinton's heads of FBI and CIA well into his first term). But it is also necessary and good that the press exists to challenge, refine or refute what the government reports. However, it seems that the press is more ideologically wedded, as a political class, not to an accurate coverage of an unpredicatable situation whose outcome is by no means certain--in other words, a war--but to a position that seeks through a paritial coverage to lead its readers and viewers to turning this war into another Vietnam.

UPDATE 3: Michael Rubin says that Isaac Chotiner over at The New Republic's blog, The Plank, picked up on his original comment, listed above, and appears to defend, as Rubin says it, omitting the subject. It will be interesting to see his reply, if any.