Bushwacked Barack

Via-Pajamas Media

Using his predecessor as a foil for his failures might trap the president, as polls show he is beginning to suffer by comparison.

by Mark Impomeni
President Obama’s much hyped budget address in front of a George Washington University audience Wednesday has been widely viewed as the first speech of the 2012 presidential election campaign. One could be forgiven for forgetting that Mr. Obama was addressing the nation as a president seeking reelection and not as a first term junior senator from Illinois, as it was the 2008 campaign that the speech recalled.

The president’s favorite bogeyman, President George W. Bush, featured prominently, just as he has for most of President Obama’s major speeches. The class warfare rhetoric was back in full force Wednesday too, as the president argued that all of the country’s financial woes would simply vanish if only those heartless Republicans would agree to rescind the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 — the same tax cuts Obama himself agreed to extend less than six months ago.

If the president and his advisors think that they can win a second term by dragging the same old tired rhetoric and petulant political attacks before the voters again like raw steaks before the pride, they may find the lions less hungry for the offering this time around. Mr. Obama’s one-two punch strategy of tax the rich and bash Bush just doesn’t stand up to the numbers.

According to the most recent IRS data from 2008, the top one percent of income earners paid roughly $390 billion in income taxes on income of approximately $1.6 trillion, for an average effective tax rate of 23%. If the Bush tax cuts were repealed today, and the top tax rate went back up to the Clinton-era 39.6%, it would be reasonable to project that the average effective tax rate for the top income filers would only go up to where it was in 2000, 28%. Under those conditions, the government could only expect an additional $58 billion in tax revenue this year. That’s hardly more than a rounding error in a budget with a deficit of $1.6 trillion.

Even if President Obama argued for a return to the pre-Reagan top tax rate of 70% — which when last seen in 1979 carried an effective tax rate of 37% according to the Tax Policy Center — the government would realize just over $200 billion in additional revenue, or a little more than a tenth of this year’s deficit. Of course, none of this takes into account the consequences of tax hikes, reduced economic activity and correspondingly shrinking incomes for those in the top one percent of tax filers. The real take from increasing taxes at the top rates is likely to be much lower. Despite the rhetoric, President Obama simply can’t balance the budget on the backs of the rich.

The other pillar in Mr. Obama’s apparent reelection strategy, bashing Bush, similarly does not survive closer scrutiny. In 2008, President Bush was a deeply — if unfairly — disliked president. With his approval ratings mired in the low thirties, Bush was shunned even by his own party’s nominating convention. Mr. Obama’s election narrative was as much a referendum on Mr. Bush as a choice between himself and Sen. McCain.

Much has changed. The former president has enjoyed a surge in his approval ratings, as most former presidents do. In Mr. Bush’s case, this has been aided both by his respectful silence on matters of national policy and his openness in interviews conducted during the launch of his highly successful memoir. A recent Gallup poll showed the former president with an approval rating of 47% at the end of last year. While that result places Bush ahead of only Richard Nixon among the former presidents the poll tested, it is a far cry from the 36% approval he held at the end of his presidency and equals Mr. Obama’s approval rating in the most recent Gallup survey.

Worse for Mr. Obama, the voting public’s perception of him when compared to Mr. Bush is not flattering. Democratic pollster Douglas Schoen recently asked likely voters whether Obama had been a better president than Bush. The results were surprising. Just 43% said Mr. Obama had been a better president while 48% favored Mr. Bush. A majority of 56% said that Mr. Obama did not deserve a second term. Mr. Bush’s increasing popularity coupled with Schoen’s results show that the voting public is much less inclined to pay attention to attacks against Mr. Bush this time around. Running another referendum on Bush could end up backfiring on President Obama.

For a man ostensibly focused on winning the future, President Obama spends a disproportionate amount of his time fighting the battles of the past. But the American public is not looking back at what prior presidents did; they are looking toward the current president for leadership and solutions on the big challenges facing the country. As a policy address, President Obama’s budget speech failed miserably to provide either. The numbers show that as a campaign speech, it wasn’t much better.

Video-Fact Check

Via-Freedom's Lighthouse

Bush team attempts to preserve Bush administration's success in Iraq

Via-Power Line

President Obama hasn't had much to brag about lately. So today he bragged about bringing troops home from Iraq and ending combat missions there:

By the end of this month, we'll have brought more than 90,000 of our troops home from Iraq since I took office; more than 90,000.

Politico calls this the first step of a victory lap on the war in Iraq. Whether there will be an actual victory to correspond with the lap remains in doubt. July was the deadliest month in Iraq since 2008, with 535 people killed and more than 1,000 wounded, and Iraq has been unable to form a government in the six months since its parliamentary elections.

But if there is a victory (or even just an absence of civil war) it will be down to the Iraq surge that President Bush instituted and Senator Obama vehemently opposed. For that matter, as Politico acknowledges, it was Bush who, for better or for worse, instituted the troop withdrawal policy for which Obama today took credit.

Finally, it is to Bush's team that the Obama administration is now turning to attempt to preserve the success brought about through Bush's surge. In response to the inability of Iraq's political class to form a government, and the resulting jump in violence, Brett McGurk, Bush's point man on Iraq policy at the time of the surge, is now in Baghdad advising U.S. officials. Moreover, Sadi Othman, described by the Washington Post as General Petraeus's "main interlocutor with Iraqi politicians during the surge," has been asked to return. And Ali Khedery who was an adviser to Ryan Crocker, the Bush administration's ambassador to Iraq, will work temporarily for James Jeffrey, the next ambassador.

Jeffrey will replace Chris Hill, Obama's odd selection to be ambassador. Hill had never served in the Middle East and he did not serve with distinction in Iraq. Rather, as Max Boot says, he "took a curiously hands-off attitude toward the Iraqi political process." The fruits of that attitude have been bitter.

It is far from clear that Bush's Baghdad "Dream Team" (Boot's phrase) can repeat its past success in the context of an ever-diminishing U.S. military presence. If it cannot, Obama's "first step" in his "victory lap" might be his last.

In any case, it's telling that Obama is relying just about entirely on Bush era policies and personnel as he tries to find something in the world to brag about.

The Media's Golf Double Standard

Via-The Daily Beast


by Mark McKinnon

The president has gone golfing more than he’s met the press. Had Bush tried that, he’d have been clubbed by the media. Mark McKinnon on Washington’s 18-hole hypocrisy.

News flash: President Obama hasn’t held a formal press conference in almost a year (274 days and counting) yet has golfed 32 times since he was elected—eight more times than President George W. Bush did during his entire presidency.

Now personally, I think the president should golf every day and never have a press conference. I want the leader of the free world to be as stress-free as possible. And if golf helps fade the psychic heat from the job, by all means tee it up often, Mr. President. Sadly, press conferences have turned into not much more that vanity exhibitions for White House reporters who preen and exhort in front of the cameras—not to convey needed news to the public, but to make themselves seem important.

Does anyone really think that Obama has been hiding from the press? Obama has more press exposure than any president ever—by a long shot. He and his team have just figured out clever ways to communicate by going around the White House press corps, whose members are about as busy as the Maytag repairman these days. They’ve become glorified babysitters.

But imagine the press histrionics we would have heard if George W. Bush had gone nine months without a press conference?

Recall that Bush was loudly criticized when he didn’t hold press conferences frequently enough to satiate a badgering press, though he averaged one about every two months. Over the course of his presidency, he held 45.

Bush was also constantly ridiculed and criticized for playing golf, most memorably by Michael Moore in Fahrenheit 9/11. In August 2003, Bush gave up the game, believing it sent the wrong message to grieving parents of soldiers killed or wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan. Of course, he was ridiculed for that as well.

Obama was criticized by foreign press recently when, unable to travel to pay respects to the president of Poland who was killed in a plane crash, he went golfing.

But there was not a critical peep from the American press.

On Memorial Day last year, the press reverently reported that Obama placed a wreath on the Tomb of the Unknowns in the morning, and then observed a moment of silence that afternoon—on the golf course before teeing off. (I can only imagine how this would have been reported if Bush’s moment of “silent remembrance and solemn prayer” was on the green.)

And here’s how ABC reported an outing after Obama had just returned from a trip to Germany visiting the horror of the Holocaust camps: “Nobody would fault Obama for taking Sunday to catch up on sleep and unwind after the breakneck travel schedule. But instead of vegging out on the couch, Obama returned to the White House for only about 90 minutes, then hopped in his motorcade and went right back to Andrews to get in nine holes of golf at one of the three courses on the base.”

And how about this headline from The Washington Post: “Just the Sport for a Leader Most Driven.” Richard Leiby reports, “To some, Obama’s frequent outings reflect a cool self-confidence.” The article then quotes a sports psychologist who said Obama seemed able to play golf despite the grim reports by the media about the wars and the economy.

That bears repeating. Here is a journalist remarking about Obama that he is “able” to play golf despite war casualties and economic disaster. For Bush, the press couldn’t believe that he would dare golf at such a time, but for Obama they marvel that he can.

Now that’s a double standard that unfortunately we’ve come to expect. When it comes to press coverage of Bush vs. Obama, it’s become par for the course.

As vice chairman of Public Strategies and president of Maverick Media, Mark McKinnon has helped meet strategic challenges for candidates, corporations and causes, including George W. Bush, John McCain, Governor Ann Richards, Charlie Wilson, Lance Armstrong, and Bono.




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Did the CIA 'Cook the Books' on Iran?

Via- American Thinker

Do you remember that 2007 U.S. National Intelligence Estimate which concluded -- to virtually everyone's astonishment -- that four years earlier Iran had suspended its nuclear weapons program?

Publication of that NIE cut the ground out from under the Bush administration's efforts to prevent Iran from getting its hands on a nuclear bomb. After all, why pressure the mullahs in Teheran to stop a program they'd already abandoned? And, of course, the NIE's conclusion was cited by President Bush's political enemies as (further) evidence that the President and his team were so driven by their hard-line ideology that they (as usual) ignored the evidence provided by our country's senior intelligence analysts.

Now, thanks to a by German investigative reporter Bruno Schirra published in the July 20 edition of The Wall Street Journal Europe, we have evidence to suggest that the 2007 NIE's conclusion about Iran's nuclear bomb program wasn't merely wrong, but corrupt

Here's a summary of Schirra's explosive article:


Over in Germany the Federal Prosecutor had charged a German-Iranian businessman with brokering supplies for Iran's nuclear bomb program, thus violating the country's War Weapons Control Law and its Foreign Trade Act. But a lower court in Frankfurt refused to try the case on grounds that at the time of the businessman's alleged activities, Iran didn't have a nuclear weapons program. According to Shirra, the court actually cited the 2007 U.S. NIE as evidence of its conclusion.


But the Federal Prosecutor appealed the lower court's decision to Germany's Federal Supreme Court -- and that's when Germany's foreign intelligence service, the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND) stepped in by submitting what's called an "office testimony," which Schirra defines as "factual statements about the Iranian program that can be proved in a court of law."


According to Schirra:


The BND...has amassed evidence of a sophisticated Iranian nuclear weapons program that continued after 2003....In a 30-page legal opinion on March 26 and a May 27 press release in a case about possible illegal trading with Iran, a special national security panel of the Federal Supreme Court in Karlsruhe cites from a May 2008 BND report, saying the agency "showed comprehensively" that "development work on nuclear weapons can be observed in Iran even after 2003.


According to the judges, the BND supplemented its findings on August 28, 2008, showing "the development of a new missile launcher and the similarities between Iran's acquisition efforts and those of countries with already known nuclear weapons programs, such as Pakistan and North Korea".....In their May press release, the judges come out even more clear [sic], stating unequivocally that "Iran in 2007 worked on the development of nuclear weapons."


Simply put, while our country's intelligence service believed that Iran had abandoned its nuclear bomb program in 2003, Germany's intelligence service was amassing evidence that the Iranian bomb program was ongoing.


This raises three obvious and crucially important questions:


Was our country's intelligence service aware of the BND's evidence and conclusions when its analysts wrote that 2007 NIE about Iran?
If not, why not?
If our intelligence service was aware of the BND's evidence and conclusions, then how and why did the authors of that 2007 NIE reach the opposite conclusion about Iran's nuclear bomb program?


To answer these questions, you need a bit of background about how National Intelligence Estimates are produced, and of how our country's intelligence service works with our allies' intelligence services. What follows is based on my own experience during the Reagan Administration, as Special Assistant to the Director of Central Intelligence and then as Vice Chairman of the National Intelligence Council.


Our country's intelligence service is actually a collection of more than a dozen agencies including the CIA, the National Security Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the intelligence services of each military service, the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI and a few others we won't talk about. Even after all the reorganizations of the last few years -- it's now so screwed up that if my life depended on it I couldn't draw an accurate chart -- there's a unit that sits in the office of the Director of National Intelligence called the National Intelligence Council. The NIC is comprised of the intelligence community's most senior analysts, and it's the NIC that produces the National Intelligence Estimates.


These NIEs reflect the overall, coordinated judgments and conclusions of all the various agencies and components of our country's intelligence service. They include the evidence on which these key judgments are based, and when properly done they even include dissents by one or another agency, for instance if there's a disagreement about the evidence itself or about the meaning of the evidence. All this explains why NIEs are so highly classified, and why they carry so much weight. And it explains why the release of an NIE's key judgments -- such as those of that 2007 Iran NIE -- is such a big deal.


In times of national emergency, the President can ask for a special NIE to be produced within days, or even overnight. But as a general rule, it takes weeks or even months to produce an NIE -- to amass the evidence, sift through it, and to coordinate both the evidence and its implications with senior members of all the agencies and entities that comprise our country's intelligence service. And the individuals who actually produce the NIEs -- the members and leaders of the National Intelligence Council -- can get their hands on anything our intelligence service knows.


Of course, we aren't the only country with an intelligence service. Our allies also have services of their own, and some of them are very, very good. That's why senior officials of our country's intelligence service stay in close touch with their counterparts in, say, London, Paris - and Berlin.


It is inconceivable to me that senior officials of our intelligence service were unaware of the BND's evidence and conclusions about Iran's nuclear bomb program. Indeed, if the BND's officials withheld what they knew from our officials that constitutes an act of allied betrayal whose implications for US-German relations are, well, staggering.


On the other hand, if our intelligence officials were aware of the BND's evidence and conclusions, why did we reach the opposite conclusion? Did our analysts judge the BND's evidence to be invalid? Or did they just ignore the BND's evidence because they didn't like it and because our intelligence officials wanted to throw a banana peel under President Bush's feet?


I don't know the answers to these questions. What I do know is that a nuclear-armed Iran threatens our national survival, and that to meet this threat President Obama and his advisers need the best possible intelligence. Only the House and Senate intelligence oversight committees can get to the bottom of all this. But right now leading members of these committees, and the Speaker of the House, are blathering on -- and on -- about the phony issue of whether former Vice President Dick Cheney ordered the CIA to not testify about some program to wipe out the leaders of al Qaeda that never actually got off the ground.


This isn't politics; this is suicide. God help us if our enemies conclude that the United States is no longer capable of being serious about intelligence.


Herbert E. Meyer served during the Reagan Administration as Special Assistant to the Director of Central Intelligence and Vice Chairman of the U.S. National Intelligence Council. He is widely credited with being the first senior U.S. intelligence official to forecast the Soviet Union's collapse, for which he later was awarded the U.S. National Intelligence Distinguished Service Medal. He is author of How to Analyze Information and The Cure for Poverty.

Obama’s Inheritance: Al-Qaeda in Retreat

Via-World Affairs
Marc A. Thiessen

In a widely noted speech at the National Archives in May, President Barack Obama said of George W. Bush’s national security policies: “We are cleaning up something that is quite simply a mess.” The president is wrong. Far from a mess, when it comes to national security, President Obama actually inherited a very strong hand from his predecessor. When Bush left office in January, America had marked 2,688 days without suffering another terrorist attack on its soil, an outcome that seemed all but impossible when the smoke cleared on September 12, 2001. Despite repeated attempts, al-Qaeda failed in its efforts to strike the U.S. again—because Bush kept its leaders on their heels and left them increasingly defeated and discredited on battlefronts across the globe.

To understand exactly how strong Obama’s hand is on national security, one needs only to compare the situation today to the one Bush inherited when he arrived at the White House. In 2001, the Taliban ruled Afghanistan, and had turned that country over to al-Qaeda to train terrorists and plan attacks. Pakistan was one of the only countries in the world that recognized the Taliban regime, but the United States was not actively working with that country’s leaders or its military to shut down al-Qaeda’s operations. Saudi Arabia had turned a blind eye to facilitators within its own borders who were providing recruits, money, religious justification, and logistical support to al-Qaeda. In Southeast Asia, a terrorist network called Jemaah Islamiyah was growing in strength and collaborating with al-Qaeda on attacks planned for the American homeland.More...

The terrorists were engaged in a virtually unimpeded offensive. They had launched a string of attacks against America: the first effort to bring down the World Trade Center in 1993; the murder of nineteen American airmen at the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia three years later; the 1998 bombing of American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania; and the attack on the USS Cole in 2000, causing the deaths of 17 American sailors. In none of these cases was there a forceful United States response.

Within weeks after the 9/11 attacks, U.S. special operations forces were on the ground in Afghanistan; and in less than a month they had destroyed the Taliban regime, and driven al-Qaeda from its sanctuary there. Following Afghanistan’s liberation, America and its coalition partners captured or killed hundreds of al-Qaeda leaders, managers, and operatives in more than two dozen countries. Among them were most of al-Qaeda’s top operational commanders—the senior leaders responsible for day-to-day planning of the terror group’s activities across the globe:

• In November 2001, coalition forces killed al-Qaeda’s number three leader, Muhammad Atif, with an air strike in Afghanistan;
• In March 2003, his replacement, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed(KSM)—the mastermind of 9/11—was captured in Pakistan;
• In May 2005, the man who took over for KSM as external operations chief, Abu Faraj al-Libbi, was captured in South Asia;
• In December 2005, al-Qaeda’s next external operations chief, Hamza Rabia, was killed;
• In April 2006, another top external operations leader, Abd al-Rahman al-Muhajir, was killed;
• In June 2006, al-Qaeda’s leader in Iraq, Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi was killed;
• In October 2006, another senior operational leader, Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi, was captured;
• And in Bush’s final year in office, a string of at least six top al-Qaeda operational leaders reportedly met their end: Abu Layth al-Libi, killed in January 2008; Abu Sulayman al-Jaziri, killed in May 2008; Abu Khabab al-Masri, killed in July 2008; Khalid Habib, killed in October 2008; and Usama al-Kini, al-Qaeda’s chief of operations in Pakistan, and his lieutenant, Sheikh Ahmed Salim Swedan, killed in January 2009.

These may not be household names—but that is only because they were eliminated before they could launch attacks that would have won them a place alongside Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in the pantheon of mass murder. The killing or capture of many of these operational leaders prevented new terrorist attacks. Period.

In the past seven years, America and its coalition partners also struck at terrorists on other fronts across the globe. Indonesia crippled Jemaah Islamiyah—a terrorist group that had partnered with al-Qaeda in a plan in which 17 Southeast Asian terrorists were to hijack a plane and fly it into the Library Tower in Los Angeles. The Philippines killed the top leader of the Abu Sayyaf terrorist group—an al-Qaeda affiliate responsible for a campaign of kidnappings, bombings, and beheadings that claimed the lives of several Americans. In 2007, Algerian forces killed the deputy commander of al-Qaeda’s North Africa wing. Since the Riyadh bombings in 2003, Saudi Arabia has launched a crackdown on terrorists operating within its borders, detaining hundreds of al-Qaeda operatives and other extremists. And in Europe, security services broke up al-Qaeda cells in Germany, Denmark, and Turkey in 2007 that were planning new attacks.

Al-Qaeda also suffered serious setbacks in Iraq, the country it had repeatedly described as the main front in its war against the West. During Bush’s surge, al-Qaeda was driven from the strongholds it had established in Anbar and other provinces, as American and Iraqi forces killed and captured hundreds of its fighters and operatives. As a result of the decline in violence, and the political progress it created, the Bush administration was able to begin bringing American forces home under a policy the president called a “return on success.”

Over the last two years of the Bush presidency, the number of American troops in Afghanistan increased from less than 21,000 to more than 31,000. While the security situation in Afghanistan has deteriorated since 2001, conditions in that country are in no way comparable to the dire circumstances in Iraq before the surge. When Bush left the White House, the Taliban and al-Qaeda controlled no province or major city in Afghanistan, and the terrorist training camps remained shut. According to an April 2009 Brookings Institution study, “Violence levels [in Afghanistan] remain far less severe than in Iraq of 2004–2007 . . . [S]tatistically speaking, the level of violence in a deteriorating situation in Afghanistan’s war related violence today is roughly comparable to the situation in improved Iraq . . . [and] overall levels of violence are rather modest by the standards of war-torn lands.” In a 2008 Asia Society poll, only 14 percent of Afghans said security was the biggest problem in their local area, and only 4 percent expressed support for the Taliban. The extremists in Afghanistan enjoy no popular support, and the country is nowhere near collapse—and poses nowhere near the threat it did before Bush took office.

Al-Qaeda and the Taliban have also come under pressure in the tribal regions of Pakistan. They do not have the freedom of movement and operation there that they once enjoyed in Afghanistan. Their leaders are under constant assault from Predator strikes, and focused daily on avoiding death or capture. And the government of Pakistan, which turned a blind eye to the Taliban and al-Qaeda before Bush took office, now counts as a strong ally in the fight against these extremists —as evidenced by the current Pakistani assault on Taliban forces in the Swat Valley.

To keep the pressure on the enemy in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and other fronts, Bush created new tools to prosecute the war on terror. He signed the Patriot Act—which broke down walls between the intelligence and law enforcement communities, allowing them to share information as they were unable to in the Clinton years. He established a program at the National Security Agency to monitor terrorist communications. He built new programs at the Treasury Department to deny extremists state-of-the-art banking and financial tools, thus making it more difficult for them to raise funds, move money, pay operatives, bribe officials, and finance new attacks. And he established the CIA program to detain and question top terror leaders—an effort that doubled our intelligence on al-Qaeda.

As the Bush administration ratcheted up pressure on the enemy, terrorist violence across the world plummeted. According to data from the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), as of September 2007 the global death toll from terror attacks was down by 40 percent compared to 2001. A separate study by the IntelCenter examined the 63 “most significant” attacks launched by al-Qaeda and its affiliates over a period of nearly 10 years. It found that by mid-2007 the number of Islamist attacks across the world had declined by 65 percent from a high point in 2004—and fatalities were down by more than 90 percent. The bottom line: The Bush administration’s strategy of staying on offense worked.



Increasingly defeated on the battlefield, al-Qaeda has also suffered significant setbacks in the other front of this war: the battle of ideas. The first came in Iraq. The popular rejection of al-Qaeda began in Anbar, where it had moved in and attempted to impose a Taliban-like rule. It banned men from shaving, cut off the fingers of people who smoked, tried to force the daughters of local tribesmen to marry al-Qaeda leaders, and killed anyone who dared to question these demands. With their actions, they turned the population against them and sparked what has become known as the “Anbar Awakening”—the first large-scale Arab uprising against Osama bin Laden and his network. As American and Iraqi forces supported the resistance, this popular rejection quickly spread to other parts of Iraq.

The importance of these developments cannot be overstated. As President Bush put it in a 2008 speech: “For the terrorists, Iraq was supposed to be a place where al-Qaeda rallied Arab masses to drive America out. Instead, Iraq has become the place where Arabs joined with Americans to drive al-Qaeda out.” As a result, al-Qaeda suffered more than a military defeat in Iraq—it suffered a massive ideological defeat as well.

It also suffered rejection in the broader Muslim world. Since 9/11, al-Qaeda and its affiliates have launched attacks in places such as Jordan, Indonesia, Morocco, Algeria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Kenya. Most of the victims of these attacks have been Muslims. According to the U.S. intelligence community, in 2007 alone, al-Qaeda and its allies killed an estimated 9,500 Muslim civilians—this in a year when terrorist attacks were reportedly down compared to previous years.

This violence has triggered a wave of anger and revulsion. Today, support for suicide bombings has plummeted in Muslim nations from the Middle East to South Asia, and Osama bin Laden’s popularity is at its lowest point since the 9/11 attacks. According to the 2007 Pew Global Attitudes Project, support for suicide attacks has dropped by more than half from 2002 to 2007 in key Islamic countries: In Lebanon, from 74 percent in 2002 to 34 percent; in Bangladesh from 44 percent to 20 percent; in Indonesia from 26 percent to 10 percent; and in Pakistan from 33 percent to just 9 percent.

In Saudi Arabia—the nation that produced 15 of the 19 hijackers in the September 11 terrorist attacks—a December 2007 poll by Terror Free Tomorrow found that Osama bin Laden’s countrymen have turned “dramatically against him, his organization . . . and terrorism itself.” Less than 10 percent of Saudis retain a favorable opinion of al-Qaeda, and 88 percent approve the Saudi military and police pursuit of al-Qaeda fighters. Support for bin Laden has dropped from 49 percent in 2003 to 15 percent today. And 69 percent of Saudis said they favored their government working with the United States to defeat the insurgency in Iraq.

In Pakistan, a Terror Free Tomorrow poll found that support for bin Laden in Pakistan’s North West Frontier Province—one of al-Qaeda’s principal bases of operations—plummeted from 70 percent in August 2007 to just 4 percent in January 2008. In the 2008 national elections, Islamist parties in Pakistan received just 2 percent of the vote—a five-fold decline from 2002. And polls show that just 1 percent of Pakistanis said they would vote for al-Qaeda if given the chance. A recent Washington Post story described how the recent Taliban drive in the Swat Valley has produced a flood of refugees fleeing “the indignities and horrors inflicted by occupying Taliban forces—locking women inside their homes, setting donkeys on fire—as they tried to force residents to accept a radical version of Islam.” One refugee told the paper: “We all said to each other, what sort of people have come here? And what kind of sharia is this? Cutting off people’s heads has nothing to do with Islam.”

A third area where al-Qaeda has lost ground is within the jihadist ranks themselves. Reacting both to al-Qaeda’s brutal tactics and the humiliations it has suffered in the crosshairs of the U.S., militant leaders and Islamic religious scholars have begun to publicly criticize Osama bin Laden. In Saudi Arabia, for example, Sheikh Salman al-Oadah—a cleric respected in jihadist circles and credited by bin Laden as an important ideological influence—has publicly condemned al-Qaeda’s campaign of violence. In 2007, he appeared on Arabic television and challenged bin Laden, declaring: “Brother Osama, how much blood has been spilled? How many innocent children, women, and old people have been killed, maimed, and expelled from their homes in the name of al-Qaeda? Will you be happy to meet God Almighty carrying the burden of these hundreds of thousands or millions on your back?”

Recently, al-Qaeda suffered its most damning repudiation to date, when the chief architect of its extremist ideology—an Egyptian physician named Sayyid Imam Abd al-Aziz al-Sharif (known by his pseudonym Dr. Fadl)—publicly withdrew his support for al-Qaeda. Dr. Fadl was mentor to al-Qaeda’s second in command, Ayman Zawahiri, and was so close to bin Laden that he once operated on the al-Qaeda leader after an assassination attempt in Sudan. Dr. Fadl was eventually captured and jailed by Egyptian authorities. In 2007, he published a book from prison—Right Guidance for Jihad Activity—in which he declared, “There is nothing that invokes the anger of God and His wrath like the unwarranted spilling of blood,” and issued this warning to young Muslims: “Oh, you young people, do not be deceived by the heroes of the Internet . . . who are launching statements inciting the youth while living . . . in a distant cave. They have thrown many others before you into the infernos, graves, and prisons.”

These ideological challenges from within have caused a serious internal crisis for al-Qaeda, forcing its members to explain themselves to the Muslim masses they had once been so confident of being able to rally. According to Ted Gistaro, U.S. national intelligence officer for transnational threats, al-Qaeda senior leaders spent nearly half their airtime in 2008 defending their legitimacy and responding to charges they had violated Islamic laws of war. Zawahiri published a 200-page book responding to Dr. Fadl called The Exoneration—a sign both of how seriously he took his former mentor’s attack, and how devastating it could be to al-Qaeda’s cause. When terrorists spend their time answering to their fellow Muslims for their conduct, instead of rallying them against America, it is a clear sign indeed.

This does not mean the threat has dissipated. To the contrary, if the past seven years offer any indication, the enemy is planning new attacks on the American homeland—on a scale to equal, or even dwarf, the attacks of 9/11. After failing to carry out another spectacular attack in the United States after 9/11, al-Qaeda is increasingly desperate to prove that it is still a force and a threat. But the terrorists are weaker, less popular, and under greater pressure than they were before 9/11 as a result of the Bush policies. And the federal government has institutions in place to protect the American people that were not available to President Bush when he took office eight years ago.



What has Barack Obama done with this inheritance? Just six months into his administration, the new president has a mixed record.
In Iraq, Obama has announced only a modest acceleration of the drawdown already set in motion by his predecessor—continuing, in effect, the Bush policy of “return on success.” Obama also declared that while all American combat forces will withdraw by August 2010, a residual force of up to 50,000 U.S. troops will remain in Iraq for the foreseeable future—drawing praise from John McCain and other supporters of the surge, and consternation on the left.

At a town hall in Turkey, Obama was asked why his plan in Iraq seems so similar to Bush’s plan. He replied: “I opposed the war in Iraq . . . [But] it doesn’t mean that I don’t have now responsibilities to make sure that we do things in a responsible fashion.” In remarks before the Turkish Parliament he went further, declaring that “the future of Iraq is inseparable from the future of the broader region”—words that could just as easily have been spoken by his predecessor. And in the biggest surprise of his young presidency, Obama chose Iraq—not Afghanistan—for his first visit to a combat zone. Speaking to U.S. troops at Camp Victory, he declared: “From getting rid of Saddam, to reducing violence, to stabilizing the country, to facilitating elections, you have given Iraq the opportunity to stand on its own as a democratic country. That is an extraordinary achievement, and for that you have the thanks of the American people.” While directed to our troops, those words also served as an unintended tribute to the commander in chief who led them in those actions—George W. Bush.

Obama also paid tribute to his inheritance from Bush in his early actions in Afghanistan—by applying the principles of the surge in Iraq to the battle there. News reports indicate that, as the Afghan strategy was reviewed, a debate raged within the administration between two factions: those (led by Vice President Biden) who argued for a limited counterterrorism mission; and military commanders (led by General David Petraeus) who argued for a robust counterinsurgency plan like the one that worked in Iraq. In the end, Obama sided with his military commanders, sending 21,000 additional troops to Afghanistan with a new mission to secure the population and train the Afghan army and police. This was fewer than the 30,000 troops his commanders had asked for, but the overall strategy seems to be largely what General Petraeus requested—and remains strikingly similar to the recommendation made in the Bush administration’s end-of-term Afghanistan strategy review. Moreover, in Pakistan news reports indicate that Obama has continued the policy of aggressive Predator strikes against terrorist leaders—and is reportedly considering expanding them to other parts of the country.

But the truest national security threats for Obama still lie ahead. In April, America's top commander in Iraq, General Ray Odierno, announced that the U.S. withdrawal in some Iraqi cities would have to be delayed, and that he may need to temporarily increase U.S. forces in some areas to root out al Qaeda from its last Iraqi strongholds. Yet by the June 30 deadline set for the withdrawal, press reports indicated that the pullout of U.S. combat forces had proceeded without delay. It is unclear whether Odierno's request was denied, or he changed his mind. But in the months ahead, he may ask for additional pauses that could postpone our ultimate departure date. Will the president approve such requests? And while President Obama enjoys a respite in Iraq today, what will he do if al-Qaeda attempts a comeback? Terrorist attacks have increased since he took office, though overall violence still remains at the lowest point since the summer of 2003. But if this violence escalates and al-Qaeda attempts to take back the safe havens it forfeited over the past two years, will Obama stand by idly?

Obama’s Afghanistan strategy has received broad support from conservatives, but deep skepticism from his fellow liberals. House Appropriations Committee Chairman David Obey recently said of the “surge” there: “The president feels obligated to give it a shot, and we’ll help him give it a shot for a year” (emphasis added). But after that, Obey warned, he wants a “fish or cut bait” assessment of the situation in Afghanistan—an ominous warning from the man who holds the purse strings for America’s armed forces.

Afghanistan was useful to the left when its spokesmen could hold it up as proof that Bush had taken his eye off the “real war” with his misadventure in Iraq. But now that the combat mission in Iraq is drawing to a successful conclusion, and as fighting escalates and casualties mount in Afghanistan, voices on the left may increasingly declare it a quagmire, and calls for retreat might grow—both from within and without the administration. Will Obama show the same fortitude in the face of these calls for retreat that President Bush showed in Iraq?

Here at home, Obama has dismantled one of the most important tools our nation has to prevent terrorists from striking America—the CIA program to detain and question senior al-Qaeda leaders captured in the war on terror. He not only ordered this program shut down, he released—over the protestations of five CIA directors, including his own—a series of Justice Department memos that described in detail the techniques used to interrogate KSM and other high-value detainees. By making public the details of how we interrogate captured terrorists—and the legal limits of our interrogation techniques—Obama gave critical intelligence to the enemy. Al-Qaeda will now use this information to train its operatives to resist interrogation about planned attacks.

Obama himself has allowed that his actions have escalated the risk to our country. Speaking at the CIA—before the very intelligence officers he had publicly accused of engaging in “torture”—Obama made the stunning admission that his actions had made their job more difficult. “I’m sure that sometimes it seems as if that means we’re operating with one hand tied behind our back, or that those who would argue for a higher standard are naïve. I understand that . . . So yes, you’ve got a harder job. And so do I. And that’s okay.” These words will come back to haunt him if America is attacked again.

Other intelligence tools may still come under assault. For example, in the Senate Obama was a vocal critic of the National Security Agency’s program to monitor foreign terrorist communications. He voted against confirming then-NSA Director Michael Hayden to lead the CIA because Hayden was “the architect and chief defender of a program of wiretapping and collection of phone records outside of FISA oversight.” In 2007, Obama voted against the Protect America Act, which temporarily authorized the NSA program. Last year, he promised to filibuster a long-term authorization but at the last minute switched his vote. He explained that he still wanted to make changes to the law, including stripping out immunity for telecommunications companies for their cooperation with the NSA—which would effectively kill the program.

Will Obama allow the program to continue through 2012 as Congress authorized—breaking his pledge to his liberal base? Or will he move forward with his promised review and impose new constraints on the NSA’s ability to learn what the enemy intends? If he does, and we fail to connect the dots before the next attack, he will bear responsibility for the consequences.

Another target may be the Patriot Act. Certain elements of this act—such as the provisions regarding the government authority to conduct “roving wiretaps” of targets with multiple phones or e-mail devices, and the government’s powers to seize business records with the FISA court’s approval—will expire at the end of 2009. Will Obama ask Congress to pass legislation reauthorizing these provisions? And if he does, will he insist that Congress refrain from making other changes that weaken the legalization—even to provisions that he himself criticized as a senator? If the president lets Congress dilute this vital law, he will put our nation at greater risk of attack.

Finally, Obama has to decide whether he wants to continue the battle of ideas that Bush began. In his inaugural address, in stark contrast to his predecessor, he did not mention the word “democracy” once. And in announcing his new Afghan strategy, Obama omitted any mention of supporting democracy in Afghanistan—prompting the Afghan foreign minister to complain to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. This lack of attention to democracy prompted 140 politicians, scholars, and democracy activists from across the Muslim world to sign an open letter urging Obama to “elevate democratic reform and respect for human rights as key considerations in your engagement with both Arab regimes and Arab publics.” He had a golden opportunity to do so in his recent speech in Cairo. But instead of making clear that America’s commitment to advancing freedom in the region is unwavering, all he offered were a few brief platitudes about democracy—failing to mention it once in his discussion of Afghanistan, Iraq, or the nation where he was speaking, Egypt.

In the seven years before Obama took office, America’s foes suffered serious blows in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and a defeat in Iraq. They have been increasingly rejected by their fellow Muslims and even by their fellow jihadists. The president ought to realize that his own legacy depends on what he does with this inheritance. On his one-hundredth day in office, he declared at a White House press conference: “Ultimately I will be judged as commander-in-chief on how safe I’m keeping the American people.” This is one statement with which no one, whatever their party or political persuasion, can disagree

Making Bush Looks Good

Via- Warning Signs

By Alan Caruba

It’s taken barely half a year to make George W. Bush look good to a lot of Americans who experienced “Bush Derangement Syndrome” or, like myself, were critical of several of his policies while President.

I imagine Bush watching the evening news these days and just laughing as he watches Obama just “step in it” every time he encounters the same or some new problem with which Bush dealt.
On the issue of taxes, Bush was a dedicated tax-cutter. On the issue of spending, Bush never saw a spending bill he couldn’t sign until deep into his second term. He even advocated a prescription add-on to Medicare, raising its costs and hastening its bankruptcy.

And, of course, there’s the Iraq War which followed his payback for 9/11 during which he chased al Qaeda and the Taliban out of Afghanistan. The Iraq War began in 2003 and lasted six years to the point where we are drawing down forces or at least moving them out of the major cities to see if the Iraqis themselves can provide security.More...

A lot of the problems with the conduct of the Iraq War can be traced to Donald Rumsfeld, the former Secretary of Defense who just flat-out got it wrong too many times. On paper Rumsfeld had terrific credentials, but either he was terribly advised by his generals or he didn’t pay them proper attention or both. Wars cannot be fought “on the cheap” or won with too few troops.

Lastly, in defense of Bush, the housing bubble collapsed in October, one month before the 2008 elections following a long period of general prosperity. Indeed, the timing of the collapse has always struck me as very suspicious.

It followed a September 15th electronic run on U.S. banks that put the Federal Reserve in overdrive to stem its effects. By the time they closed the accounts involved, $550 billion had been withdrawn and, without prompt action, $5.5 trillion would have withdrawn and the economy would have collapsed.

As it is, under Obama’s guidance, the Recession he keeps reminding everyone he inherited is now raging from sea to shining sea thanks to idiotic decisions to throw billions at General Motors and Chrysler, both of whom were going to have to declare bankruptcy anyway, and then taking ownership in GM, an unprecedented action and one that runs contrary to a Constitutional prohibition on dispensing public funds to private enterprise.

Obama wasn’t content with that. Having inherited the panicky TARP funding effort, he allowed them to move forward without any insistence that they be used for the provision of credit. That one act alone would have helped stem the credit freeze that is forcing businesses to lay off workers by the thousands. Instead, the U.S. ended up with a sizeable ownership of banks and insurance companies.

If there is one thing that government is famous for, it’s the inability to run any kind of private enterprise. Amtrak hasn’t turned a profit since it began in 1971. With the advent of email, the U.S. Postal Service is in freefall and, if it weren’t for Fedex, nothing would ever be delivered overnight.

On the foreign policy front, the pathetic North Koreans feel free to fire off missiles, Iran’s president Ahmadinejad feels free to insult the President, and China says it hates us for the profligacy of Obama’s crazed trillion-dollar Cap-and-Trade Act and his proposed trillion-dollar healthcare reform program. If you really, really want to destroy what’s left of the U.S. economy, both of these proposals will shovel the last bits of dirt on what is left.

Obama isn’t just our nightmare. He is the world’s nightmare. He is a patsy willing to sit through a 50 minute diatribe against the U.S. by Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega, a photo opportunity ambush by Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, and top it off with a very demeaning bow to a Saudi prince. He signaled weakness with his Cairo speech. He has come out in defense of the deposed Communist ex-president of Honduras, putting him in the same company as Cuba’s Raul Castro and Senor Chavez.

He’s off to visit the Russians in a week and they will eat his lunch. Since the days of Harry S. Truman, U.S. Presidents have resisted the Russian’s threats, bluffs, and proxy wars. Obama is not made of such stuff and will probably agree to junk the entire U.S. arsenal of nuclear weapons in return for as much vodka and caviar the Russians want to sell us.

About the only thing I which we can count on will be Obama’s endless bleating and blaming of George W. Bush for all the problems he has encountered in a job he so desperately wanted.

Obama’s performance rating, according to Rasmussen, is heading south. It took just over a half year to reach negative status and by the end of the year, Democrats in Congress are going to be hiding in their offices and cloakrooms rather than be seen with him.

Bush Hatred and Obama Euphoria Are Two Sides of the Same Coin

Now that George W. Bush has left the harsh glare of the White House and Barack Obama has settled into the highest office in the land, it might be reasonable to suppose that Bush hatred and Obama euphoria will begin to subside. Unfortunately, there is good reason to doubt that the common sources that have nourished these dangerous political passions will soon lose their potency.

At first glance, Bush hatred and Obama euphoria could not be more different. Hatred of Mr. Bush went well beyond the partisan broadsides typical of democratic politics. For years it disfigured its victims with open, indeed proud, loathing for the very manner in which Mr. Bush walked and talked. It compelled them to denounce the president and his policies as not merely foolish or wrong or contrary to the national interest, but as anathema to everything that made America great.

In contrast, the euphoria surrounding Mr. Obama's run for president conferred upon the candidate immunity from criticism despite his newness to national politics and lack of executive experience, and regardless of how empty his calls for change. At the same time, it inspired those in its grips, repeatedly bringing them tears of joy throughout the long election season. With Mr. Obama's victory in November and his inauguration last week, it suffused them with a sense that not only had the promise of America at last been redeemed but that the world could now be transfigured.

In fact, Bush hatred and Obama euphoria -- which tend to reveal more about those who feel them than the men at which they are directed -- are opposite sides of the same coin. Both represent the triumph of passion over reason. Both are intolerant of dissent. Those wallowing in Bush hatred and those reveling in Obama euphoria frequently regard those who do not share their passion as contemptible and beyond the reach of civilized discussion. Bush hatred and Obama euphoria typically coexist in the same soul. And it is disproportionately members of the intellectual and political class in whose souls they flourish.

To be sure, democratic debate has always been a messy affair in which passion threatens to overwhelm reason. So long as citizens remain free and endowed with a diversity of interests and talents, it will remain so.

In October 1787, amid economic crisis and widespread fears about the new nation's ability to defend itself, Alexander Hamilton, in the first installment of what was to become the Federalist Papers, surveyed the formidable obstacles to giving the newly crafted Constitution a fair hearing. Some would oppose it, Hamilton observed, out of fear that ratification would diminish their wealth and power. Others would reject it because they hoped to profit from the political disarray that would ensue. The opposition of still others was rooted in "the honest errors of minds led astray by preconceived jealousies and fears."

Indeed, the best of men, Hamilton acknowledged, were themselves all-too-vulnerable to forming ill-considered political opinions: "So numerous indeed and so powerful are the causes, which serve to give a false bias to the judgment, that we upon many occasions, see wise and good men on the wrong as well as on the right side of questions, of the first magnitude to society."

In surveying the impediments to bringing reason to bear in politics, it was not Hamilton's aim to encourage despair over democracy's prospects but to refine political expectations. "This circumstance, if duly attended to," he counseled, "would furnish a lesson of moderation to those, who are ever so much persuaded of their being in the right, in any controversy."

As Hamilton would have supposed, the susceptibility of political judgment to corruption by interest and ambition is as operative in our time as it was in his. What has changed is that those who, by virtue of their education and professional training, would have once been the first to grasp Hamilton's lesson of moderation are today the leading fomenters of immoderation.

Bush hatred and Obama euphoria are particularly toxic because they thrive in and have been promoted by the news media, whose professional responsibility, it has long been thought, is to gather the facts and analyze their significance, and by the academy, whose scholarly training, it is commonly assumed, reflects an aptitude for and dedication to systematic study and impartial inquiry.

From the avalanche of vehement and ignorant attacks on Bush v. Gore and the oft-made and oft-refuted allegation that the Bush administration lied about WMD in Iraq, to the remarkable lack of interest in Mr. Obama's career in Illinois politics and the determined indifference to his wrongness about the surge, wide swaths of the media and the academy have concentrated on stoking passions rather than appealing to reason.

Some will speculate that the outbreak of hatred and euphoria in our politics is the result of the transformation of left-liberalism into a religion, its promulgation as dogma by our universities, and students' absorption of their professors' lesson of immoderation. This is unfair to religion.

At least it's unfair to those forms of biblical faith that teach that God's ways are hidden and mysterious, that all human beings are both deserving of respect and inherently flawed, and that it is idolatry to invest things of this world -- certainly the goods that can be achieved through politics -- with absolute value. Through these teachings, biblical faith encourages skepticism about grand claims to moral and political authority and an appreciation of the limits of one's knowledge, both of which well serve liberal democracy.

In contrast, by assembling and maintaining faculties that think alike about politics and think alike that the university curriculum must instill correct political opinions, our universities cultivate intellectual conformity and discourage the exercise of reason in public life. It is not that our universities invest the fundamental principles of liberalism with religious meaning -- after all the Declaration of Independence identifies a religious root of our freedom and equality. Rather, they infuse a certain progressive interpretation of our freedom and equality with sacred significance, zealously requiring not only outward obedience to its policy dictates but inner persuasion of the heart and mind. This transforms dissenters into apostates or heretics, and leaders into redeemers.

Consequently, though Bush hatred may weaken as the 43rd president minds his business back home in Texas, and while Obama euphoria may fade as the 44th president is compelled to immerse himself in the daunting ambiguities of power, our universities will continue to educate students to believe that hatred and euphoria reflect political wisdom. Urgent though the problem is, not even the efficient and responsible spending of a $1 trillion stimulus package would begin to address it.

Mr. Berkowitz is a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.

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Complete Original Article from WSJ

Mileage Standards: Not the Way to Energy Independence

After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, then-President George W. Bush enjoyed sky-high approval ratings. A short time later, his popularity began to slip when he rallied the country to invade first Afghanistan then Iraq. At the end of his two-term reign, Iraq was relatively stable with a functioning government and there was talk of planning to bring most of our troops home. And Bush’s ratings were at historic lows.

I won’t list all the circumstances, from biased reporting to poor policy decisions, which caused Bush’s popularity to plummet. Most Pajamas Media visitors have their own complete list and all of us can rewrite history. But there is one opportunity that the Bush administration let slip through its fingers: an intelligent energy policy.

Consider this scenario. What if President Bush had explained that along with trying to get control of terrorism, the free flow of oil in the Middle East was important to world security. What’s more, our country’s dependence on imported oil was putting our own security at risk. To correct the problem, Bush could have asked the American people to do their part to conserve as much energy as possible. And if that included a modest tax on gasoline to encourage better habits, using all the revenue for transportation, I would be fine with that.

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Complete Original Article from Pajama Media

Bush's Real Sin Was Winning in Iraq

In a few hours, George W. Bush will walk out of the Oval Office for the last time as president. As he leaves, he carries with him the near-universal opprobrium of the permanent class that inhabits our nation's capital. Yet perhaps the most important reason for this unpopularity is the one least commented on.

Here's a hint: It's not because of his failures. To the contrary, Mr. Bush's disfavor in Washington owes more to his greatest success. Simply put, there are those who will never forgive Mr. Bush for not losing a war they had all declared unwinnable.

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Here in the afterglow of the turnaround led by Gen. David Petraeus, it's easy to forget what the smart set was saying two years ago -- and how categorical they all were in their certainty. The president was a simpleton, it was agreed. Didn't he know that Iraq was a civil war, and the only answer was to get out as fast as we could?

The chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee -- the man who will be sworn in as vice president today -- didn't limit himself to his own opinion. Days before the president announced the surge, Joe Biden suggested to the Washington Post he knew the president's people had also concluded the war was lost. They were, he said, just trying to "keep it from totally collapsing" until they could "hand it off to the next guy."

For his part, on the night Mr. Bush announced the surge, Barack Obama said he was "not persuaded that 20,000 additional troops in Iraq are going to solve the sectarian violence there. In fact, I think it will do the reverse."

Three months after that, before the surge had even started, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid pronounced the war in Iraq "lost." These and similar comments, moreover, were amplified by a media echo chamber even more absolute in its sense of hopelessness about Iraq and its contempt for the president.

For many of these critics, the template for understanding Iraq was Vietnam -- especially after things started to get tough. In terms of the wars themselves, of course, there is almost no parallel between Vietnam and Iraq: The enemies are different, the fighting on the ground is different, the involvement of other powers is different, and so on.

Still, the operating metaphor of Vietnam has never been military. For the most part, it is political. And in this realm, we saw history repeat itself: a failure of nerve among the same class that endorsed the original action.

As with Vietnam, with Iraq the failure of nerve was most clear in Congress. For example, of the five active Democratic senators who sought the nomination, four voted in favor of the Iraqi intervention before discovering their antiwar selves.

As in Vietnam too, rather than finding their judgment questioned, those who flip-flopped on the war were held up as voices of reason. In a memorable editorial advocating a pullout, the New York Times gave voice to the chilling possibilities that this new realism was willing to accept in the name of bringing our soldiers home.

"Americans must be clear that Iraq, and the region around it, could be even bloodier and more chaotic after Americans leave," read the editorial. "There could be reprisals against those who worked with American forces, further ethnic cleansing, even genocide." Even genocide. With no hint of irony, the Times nevertheless went on to conclude that it would be even worse if we stayed.

This is Vietnam thinking. And the president never accepted it. That was why his critics went ape when, in a speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars, he touched on the killing fields and exodus of boat people that followed America's humiliating exit off an embassy rooftop. As the Weekly Standard's Matthew Continetti noted, Mr. Bush had appropriated one of their most cherished analogies -- only he drew very different lessons from it.

Mr. Bush's success in Iraq is equally infuriating, because it showed he was right and they wrong. Many in Washington have not yet admitted that, even to themselves. Mr. Obama has. We know he has because he has elected to keep Mr. Bush's secretary of defense -- not something you do with a failure.

Mr. Obama seems aware that, at the end of the day, he will not be judged by his predecessor's approval ratings. Instead, he will soon find himself under pressure to measure up to two Bush achievements: a strategic victory in Iraq, and the prevention of another attack on America's home soil. As he rises to this challenge, our new president will learn that when you make a mistake, the keepers of the Beltway's received orthodoxies will make you pay dearly.

But it will not even be close to the price you pay for ignoring their advice and succeeding.

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Works and Days

Victor Davis Hanson
Obama has been very good in lowering expectations by reminding us 24/7 that there are no easy solutions to the present fiscal meltdown. True enough. But why then a continuation of the megalomaniac sets—the retracing of the Lincoln Illinois trip to the inauguration in the spirit of vero possumus, the Victory Column, the Greek temple convention sets, etc?

The more he willingly takes on the Lincolnesque or Caesarian mantle, the more the media worries that we have put too many expectations on Obama. Well, surely one way to lower our expectations would be to take a night-flight on a 737 to DC from Chicago, rather than reenact train-bound Young Mr. Lincoln. (Remember, unlike Lincoln, Obama flew back to Chicago from DC to take the train back to DC again). It sort of reminds one of the lectures about the Obama family off limits / Obama family center stage for photo-ops and interviews.
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One President at a Time

Obama was also insistent that there is only one President at a time—well, sort of at least. On the economy, however, he started issuing communiqués weeks ago; on Gaza, in contrast, it was silence and all Bush’s. Note the Israelis just stopped in Gaza. Odd timing? They are unsure of the reaction of the Obama administration, fearing an off-handed sympathetic remark about Hamas, or, more likely, eager not to leave him with an embarrassing situation on his first day in office that he might not forget.

Bush Considered

I wrote an essay about Bush’s successes for the Monday National Review Online. Here are some disappointments:

a. Cronyism: I don’t think Scott McClellan, Harriet Meyers, Michael Brown, etc. were employable outside the White House.
b. First-term spending: the gargantuan leap in the size of the federal government discredited the tax cuts (that brought in more revenue) and the entire notion that Republicans were financial watch-dogs.
c. The Iraq war was authorized on 23 Congressional counts—not just WMD. So why focus on that alone?
d. Why do administration figures conduct engaging and spirited interviews and defenses of policies in the last two weeks of their tenure, but not the last eight years?
e. Congressional Democrats were not bipartisan Texas Democrats: not vetoing their bills as the price for their support of the war meant endless red-ink.
f. Loudly with a small stick: Bellicose rhetoric like smoke ‘em out or dead or alive cannot be juxtaposed to pulling back from Fallujah in April 2004, or giving a reprieve to Sadr.
g. Katrina was mostly a state and local breakdown, coupled with a culture of dependence fostered by federal entitlement: Had Bush landed, sloshed around in the muck, had a photo-op wet and muddy, yelled at some bureaucrats, then the press would not have not so easily turned it into a racist genocidal plot.
h. The financial meltdown was in part due to letting Frank, Dodd, Rains, etc. ruin Fannie and Freddie, the result of hundreds of billions of additional debt, and naïve promotion of an ‘ownership society’, when about 30% of the population always has no business owning the responsibilities of a home.

All the above is set off against a corruption free, honest Bush governance (cf. the Blago/Obama nominees pre-office problems), lack of another 9/11 at home, constitutional governments in place of the Taliban and Saddam, a decimation of Al Qaeda, with negative polls in the Middle East for bin Laden and suicide bombing, no more nuclear processing in Libya, Dr. Khan shut down, Syrians out of Lebanon, pro-US governments in Europe, good relations with China and India, the Obama acceptance of the Bush anti-terror framework, crashing oil prices, an isolated Ahmadinejad and Chavez, two good Supreme Court Justices, etc.)

All Bad on Day One?

I think history suggests that it is far better for an incoming President (cf. Reagan, Clinton, Bush, etc.) to face a recession than to enter office during a boom—given the cyclical nature of economic downturns juxtaposed with the four-year election span. And abroad the world is not in such dire shape, despite what we have heard the last eight years. Iraq is stable. There is an existing strategy to deal with the Taliban. The Bush second term was multilateral to the core, and pro-American conservative governments now flourish in Europe. Chavez, Putin, and Ahmadinejad are about broke, and losing influence. India and China are friendly. Africa appreciates the massive influx of US HIV-relief. Al Qaeda is in disarray. Bin Laden’s popularity and that of suicide bombing itself have plummeted. Thousands of al Qaeda operatives were killed in both Afghanistan and Iraq. Dr. Zawahiri is shriller than ever, and more than ever neglected. The homeland has been untouched since 9/11. Gas prices have crashed, giving us a half-trillion-dollar stimulus and robbing our enemies of trillions more.

Bush was right then or is Obama wrong now?

Readers may cite some earlier criticism of Bush’s foreign policy (concrete not rhetorical) that Obama has not de facto retracted before even entering office, but I cannot. FISA, the Patriot Act, renditions, Guantanamo, Iraq, Afghanistan? So what in the end was the opposition to FISA, the promises to summarily close Guantanamo, and the desire to have combat troops out of Iraq by March 2008 (yes, 2008 not 2009) all about?

There is no media, again…

After watching Eric Holder fumble over questions that pertained to his own independence, subservience to the President, and faulty memory, I thought those were just the problems that once prompted Senators and the NY-DC press to declare Alberto Gonzales unfit for the office of Attorney General.

In regards to the Geithner nomination, I also thought after the Zoë Baird and Linda Chavez doomed cabinet nominations that the press and Congress would not allow anyone to serve who had hired either an illegal alien or a worker with improper green card credentials. And in regards to the Geithner tax problems, believe it or not, most of us really do try to pay all estimates on self-employed income on time, do pay all of our self-employed FICA taxes, and prefer to overpay than to underpay them. So I am baffled that with his nomination, the two chief federal officers who oversee American tax policy—the Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, and Charles Rangel, Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee—simply cannot follow the tax codes. But if they cannot, who else can and will?

The Rich Party, the Poor Go Hungry

The 2005 Bush inauguration, despite occurring in boom times, was, I remember, deemed by the media as crass and a rich man’s fest, insensitive to the general poverty around. The more than twice as expensive 2009 Obama inauguration, despite occurring in a severe recession, is a measured and proper celebration of diversity and landmark progress. Annuit coeptis indeed.

Is Biden obsessed with Cheney?

Now Joe Biden claims that he is better qualified than any prior VP, and knows as much or more than Cheney. I feel for Obama, for how can he expect Biden to behave the next four years? Joe is self-obsessed, insecure, and lacks the temperament for high executive office. In short, he will have to have a coterie of censors who monitor his every move. The more he gratuitously attacks Cheney, the more one senses that he wishes to be as influential as Cheney. Given Biden’s zillion positions on the war, and his impression that FDR addressed the nation on television as President in 1929, why does he believe he knows as much or more than Cheney?

That’s All it Took?

Gulag Guantanamo becomes problematic and complex once it’s Obama’s rather than Bush’s. Suddenly what do you do with Khalid Sheik Mohammed? Will the Senators allow these non-uniformed terrorist enemy combatants to be tried or held in their states? Do any countries want their own detainees back? If you catch more terrorists on the battlefields of Afghanistan, do you turn them over to the Afghan army? Hold them in prison camps in Afghanistan? Let them go? Do a FDR—that is, try them in military tribunals and shoot them in secret if found guilty? Ship them to Cuba? Indict and try them—if so where—New York or DC (and hope a single juror doesn’t nullify the verdict and free the architect of 9/11)? Probable solution? I think it is the following: say everyday you’re going to close Guantanamo (but don’t for a year), sell some detainees back to their home countries (some federal perks given in the exchange), say you can’t try any of them since three were water boarded and Bush polluted the court process, and then put them in some sort of nameless facility overseas before quietly letting them go.


The Obama Winning Formula

1. Combine charm, youth, rhetoric, a multiracial persona with dramatic sets like the retracing of the Lincoln route to DC and the Latin seal to create a sort of messianic personality that ensures popularity ratings over 50%.

2. In deference to the Left, showcase black feminist poets, gay priests, radical environmentalists, open borders advocates—all in symbolic ways or in appointments to lower, less important offices that won’t turn up too embarrassing on the Drudge Report.

3. Tack to the center on the hunch that the media was anti-Bush rather than anti-his positions per se. So putting an Obama stamp on existing Bush foreign policy does wonders, and helps unite the country. As we have seen with Sen. Patrick Leahy’s softball questioning of Eric Holder (in comparison to his fiery dissection of Attorney General Gonzalez), or the media silence about the suddenly OK Patriot Act (there will be no more stories about a shredded American Constitution), power is all that matters, and all that ever did.

How long can all this last? Well, Clinton survived Monica as the media began emphasizing that Ken Starr was a ‘cigarette lawyer’ rather than the President as a serial philander with a subordinate employee in the Oval Office, who lied about it to the American people. To near silence, he pardoned a fugitive on the FBI’s most wanted list who had given Clinton subordinates and surrogates hundreds of thousands of dollars for the pardon. Again, we have no media anymore, only a group of rather elite socializers who believe they play a key role in ensuring social justice by their enlightened ethical commentary. A successful journalist in DC or New York is instead a social position, analogous to the thousands who lived in 18th-century Versailles, and occasionally were invited to dine with Louis himself.
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43, For a Final Time

He takes his leave neither angry nor forlorn but rather with the serenity of someone sustained by a providential sense of history.



As the nation arrives, for the first time since 1825, at the end of consecutive eight-year presidencies, a summing up of the second of them must begin with this fact: Not since Abraham Lincoln's has an administration been so defined by a single subject as George W. Bush's has been by the Iraq War, which the country now thinks was improvidently begun and incompetently conducted. Historical judgments are, however, subject to history's contingencies, and if, a decade hence, Iraq has a nonsectarian regime controlled by a multiparty, recognizably democratic process, and if this exerts an improving tug on the region, Americans might then consider the war at least partially redeemed.

If history's judgment is that the war was positively related to the fact that there was no attack on America after 9/11, then history's judgment of the commander in chief will be much less severe than today's unhinged critics of him can imagine. Furthermore, some, and perhaps many, Americans probably are alive today because persons conspiring to commit mass murder were thwarted by the president's ferocious focus after 9/11.

He believes that America has "a calling from beyond the stars to stand for freedom." But "standing for" does not entail "exporting." To stroll in Arlington cemetery among headstones recording deaths during the appallingly named "Operation Iraqi Freedom" is infuriating: No American should have died for freedom in Iraq, and none did. All who sacrificed there did so for the security of America's freedom. The "nation building" there has been a learning experience, teaching Americans to recoil from suggested repetitions.More...

By grafting a prescription-drug entitlement on to Medicare, just as the demographic deluge of the baby boomers' retirements was beginning, the president expanded the welfare state more than any president since Lyndon Johnson created Medicare in 1965. By signing every grotesque spending measure that arrived on his desk with the support of a majority of congressional Republicans—e.g., the 2002 farm bill that increased corporate welfare for agriculture at a time of record farm profits —the president committed his party to a situational ethic of governance that amounts to no ethic at all. By signing the McCain-Feingold speech-rationing (a.k.a. "campaign reform") legislation, the president violated his oath to defend the Constitution. By federalizing the family tragedy of Terri Schiavo, the president and some congressional allies made risible their stock of rhetoric in praise of limited government. By enacting the No Child Left Behind law, which is the thin end of a potentially enormous wedge, the administration licensed potentially unlimited federal supervision of the quintessentially local responsibility of education in grades K through 12, thereby further weakening federalism. And by presiding, in its last four months, over more and more flamboyant government intervention in the economy than at any time in 75 years, the administration completed the GOP's intellectual disarmament.

Actually, however, the contraction and self-marginalization of the Republican Party began before Bush entered office. In 2000, he became the first Republican to win the presidency while losing the North. In 2004, when he won re-election by winning Ohio, that was the only large state he carried outside the South. That year Bush became the first president since his father in 1988 to win more than 50 percent of the vote. This was a costly achievement, attained by embracing a sterile template of politics: Get your base riled up—it does not much matter about what—and hope that your base is a bit larger and angrier than the other party's, and that swing voters are a small slice of the turnout.

The president does not depart an angry man. He takes his leave with the serenity of someone sustained by a providential sense of history, as well as by wide reading of presidential histories, which contain many accounts of miseries. He leaves in eager anticipation of resuming life where he has been happiest, deep in the heart of Texas.

By grafting a prescription-drug entitlement on to Medicare, just as the demographic deluge of the baby boomers' retirements was beginning, the president expanded the welfare state more than any president since Lyndon Johnson created Medicare in 1965. By signing every grotesque spending measure that arrived on his desk with the support of a majority of congressional Republicans—e.g., the 2002 farm bill that increased corporate welfare for agriculture at a time of record farm profits —the president committed his party to a situational ethic of governance that amounts to no ethic at all. By signing the McCain-Feingold speech-rationing (a.k.a. "campaign reform") legislation, the president violated his oath to defend the Constitution. By federalizing the family tragedy of Terri Schiavo, the president and some congressional allies made risible their stock of rhetoric in praise of limited government. By enacting the No Child Left Behind law, which is the thin end of a potentially enormous wedge, the administration licensed potentially unlimited federal supervision of the quintessentially local responsibility of education in grades K through 12, thereby further weakening federalism. And by presiding, in its last four months, over more and more flamboyant government intervention in the economy than at any time in 75 years, the administration completed the GOP's intellectual disarmament.

Actually, however, the contraction and self-marginalization of the Republican Party began before Bush entered office. In 2000, he became the first Republican to win the presidency while losing the North. In 2004, when he won re-election by winning Ohio, that was the only large state he carried outside the South. That year Bush became the first president since his father in 1988 to win more than 50 percent of the vote. This was a costly achievement, attained by embracing a sterile template of politics: Get your base riled up—it does not much matter about what—and hope that your base is a bit larger and angrier than the other party's, and that swing voters are a small slice of the turnout.

The president does not depart an angry man. He takes his leave with the serenity of someone sustained by a providential sense of history, as well as by wide reading of presidential histories, which contain many accounts of miseries. He leaves in eager anticipation of resuming life where he has been happiest, deep in the heart of Texas.
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Bush Legacy

The

Whatever history's verdict on the Bush administration might be, it is likely to be very different from what we hear from the talking heads on television or read from the know-it-alls on editorial pages.

Whatever history's verdict on the Bush administration might be, it is likely to be very different from what we hear from the talking heads on television or read from the know-it-alls on editorial pages.More...

Many, especially among the intelligentsia, are also obsessed with whether we are being nice enough to the cut-throats locked up at Guantanamo, some of whom have already been turned loose to resume a life of terrorism. The rights of the Geneva Convention do not apply to people who neither obey the Geneva Convention nor are covered by the Geneva Convention.

That a President of the United States protected us from deadly enemies may not seem like much of an accomplishment to some. But it may be more fully appreciated when we get a President who eases up on that protection, in order to curry favor at home and abroad.

We can only hope that it will not take the sight of an American city lying in radioactive ruins to wake people up to the dangers that George W. Bush protected us against, despite an unending chorus of carping.

No one in his right mind would say that the Bush administration was flawless. But many of their worst political mistakes were the kinds of mistakes that decent people often make when dealing with indecent people, both domestically and internationally.

The idea with which President Bush arrived in Washington, that he could gain bipartisan support by going along with the Democrats, and not vetoing any bills that Congress passed, ignored the fact that it takes two to tango.

Having proclaimed his goal as bipartisanship, it was he who was blamed when the bipartisanship failed to materialize. Wooing Ted Kennedy and going along with massive government spending did not stop Kennedy from getting up in the Senate and loudly proclaiming that Bush "lied, and lied and lied!" about Iraq.

Whatever the merits or demerits of going to war against Saddam Hussein, the question whether he had weapons of mass destruction immediately at hand makes a better talking point than a serious argument.

President Bush was not the only national leader who thought Saddam Hussein had such weapons, nor were such weapons the only reason why the Iraqi dictator posed a continuing danger that all diplomatic efforts, over more than a decade, had failed to extinguish.

This issue can be debated, and no doubt will be debated for years, if not generations, to come. But the irresponsible charge that "Bush lied" for some nefarious purpose-- to trade "blood for oil" or to generate business for Halliburton, for example-- is more than a slander against him. It undermines our whole nation and gives comfort to our enemies around the world.

Domestically, the Bush legacy leaves a lot to be desired. Going along with the McCain-Feingold bill restricting free speech was perhaps the Bush administration's biggest dereliction of duty. Maybe they figured that they could pass the problem along to the Supreme Court to stop it, since this bill so clearly violated the First Amendment to the Constitution.

But the Supreme Court was also guilty of a dereliction of its duty and let the McCain-Feingold bill stand.

Advocating amnesty for illegal aliens was another political disaster, especially when accompanied by denials of the obvious.

Although the Bush administration went along with the chorus of calls for promoting home ownership among people who could not afford home ownership, President Bush at least sounded a warning while others were still pushing lenders to lend to people who proved unable to repay their loans.

A mixed bag? Aren't we all? But an honorable man.