Spokesmen for their own victims

Root cause of terrorism: in fact the left and right both agree about the root cause of terrorism—oppression. They just disagree about the identity of the oppressor. The left thinks it is the West/Israel/Capitalism. The right thinks is the regimes themselves.

But the real culprit is the UN. The UN and its system is what gives these thugs whatever legitimacy they have. The system that insists on treating all regimes as morally equal is what keeps the people of the Arab and Muslim countries in the totalitarian prisons we insist on calling nationstates.

That is why working with the UN to gain legitimacy is a mistake in the long run. In the long run it just gives more legitimacy to a corrupt world order of incompetent Third world thugs and their creditors, all in the name of human equality. If colonial powers ran such brutal and extractive governments we would all be appalled and ready to fight to free these people. But dress them in nice suits and seat them around that nice UN emblem at a big, important looking table and suddenly they are spokesmen for their own victims.

Howard Dean

A concerned reader writes:

"Michael -

Do you mean JOHN DEAN, the snitch who turned in Richard Nixon? Or do you

mean HOWARD DEAN, the Democratic presidential candidate?

I liked Howard Dean, but I like John Kerry too, as well as John Edwards.

Of course, the Democrats didn't need to field a strong candidate in this

year's election, since George W. Bush is the worst President since Lyndon

Johnson. With regard to your electoral analysis I have one word: Ha!

Bush will win only if the Republicans steal the election again."

Howard Dean?, no wonder he seemed a little testy.

Freedman

Here we are engaged in a struggle with utterly savage people who used to rule Iraq and the utterly depraved people that used to rule Afghanistan and the world’s excuse for sitting it out is that we hurt their feelings.

The hegemonic power of the intellectual world, the liberals, are like ruling classes in all times. They always get to define the boundaries of debate. The get to decide which of the many ways a remark or statement can be interpreted is the right one.

Thomas Freedman writes that if the elections turn out decently then maybe the middle ground of Europe can be pulled back in and enticed to help. Now think about that. If we defeat the Nazis then the great and good of the world might consider helping us out but if we don’t then it proves that we should have left the Nazi’s in power in the first place. That is the European morality. Join a fight after it is already won. Ask them to join in when victory is anything less than certain is to force them to take a risk for their principles, to hurt their feelings.

The truly strange thing is how they get it turned around so that if they bug out of a fight it is our fault because we must have hurt their feelings. This is the trick the hegemon can always seem to pull off. Point to their pique as evidence, no proof, of your insensitivity. It was the same with Howard Dean last night. He talks about how divisive the Republicans are and them compares him to Hitler. Of course, he doesn’t exactly compare him to Hitler. “It is not enough to have military power, Hitler had military power, Stalin had military power, you have to have moral power.” Now of course the liberals that interpret this give it the most benign interpretation possible. He is merely making the perfectly sound argument that While Bush’s policy has military strength it is somehow deficient in moral standing in the eyes of the world. An example of this would be Hitler.

Well logically you can put him on a continuum with Hitler, but do you want to? Isn’t that a rather divisive way to make your point? Isn’t there a slightly less pejorative example of an historical figure that could be used as an example of alienating allies or gaining military strength at the expense of moral standing in the world?

And do you really want to make that analogy when our troops are dying in Iraq? As a man that claims we have to stay there and finish the job no matter what happens does it really help to compare the war as somehow being on a moral continuum with Hitler’s actions?

What is harder to understand is the position of someone like Freedman. If he believes that Sadaam was as bad as he appears to believe then why does he make excuses for Russia and France, nations that profited from his regime and maneuvered to protect it? who have since shown more interest in collecting their outstanding loans for weapons and palaces than they have been in helping the people of Iraq. And what, besides the Kyoto treaty, do they have as evidence that the Bush administration is at fault in our relations with the petulant powers? To make this argument it seems to me that you have to have be saying that the bush administration could have pursued the policy of removing Sadaam without alienating these so-called moderate powers. But what if it is not the way in which the policy was implemented but the very fact of the policy itself that is the problem? What if, aside from leaving Sadaam Hussein in power in Iraq, there is nothing they could have done to keep the Europeans sweet? Did they not go through all the motions the liberals said would add legitimacy to the enterprise? Go to the UN, hear everyone out respectfully? Except for not going into Iraq what could have been done to not make us “radio active”?

I hear the litany, something about Kyoto treaty, the apparently all important treaty that no one besides Romania had ratified, that our own Senate voted 97 to nothing not to ratify while Clinton was negotiating it, that Clinton himself never bothered to submit to the Senate? Our stand on global warming is so shocking to the moral sensibilities of the world that they take the side of these terrorists against us and the 90% of the people in Iraq that want the elections? Oh, the old Europe comment? Well, the intelligentsia wants Europe defined as France and Germany and Belgium to wield as a rhetorical weapon against the administration but I don’t see why the Administration should cooperate. And I think it was fair to point out that the nations that had recently been living under dictatorship were the ones that were willing to step up. And how does the Rumsfeld comment compare to the comment made a week later by the moderate soul that we are guilty of offending? Can you imagine Rumsfeld saying the Europeans had ‘missed a good opportunity to shut up?’

It is really quite fascinating. Freedman goes through a whole article making the argument that the administration’s boorish behavior has caused a rift with our allies, but every example of boorish behavior he gives is of the anti-Americans saying something vile. And yet, amazingly, this is offered as evidence of the Bush administration’s lack of tact.

“Europe, for its part, has gone so crazy over the Bush administration that the normally thoughtful Guardian newspaper completely lost its mind last week and published a column that openly hoped for the assassination of President Bush, saying: "John Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald, John Hinckley Jr. - where are you now that we need you?"

Now remember, that is being offered as evidence of how bad Bush is. Shouldn’t an essay that purports to show how the Bush administration’s behavior has caused something be filled with examples of the Bush administration’s behavior? Don’t examples of European’s “loosing their minds” support an argument about, I don’t know, the mental instability of Europeans? Of course, this difficulty is dealt with by the slick appositive “the normally thoughtful Guardian newspaper.” Well, yes, if we start with the presumption that the Europeans are thoughtful and sensible then the cause of anything they do unworthy of those adjectives must be found outside of them. Usually this is America, though sometimes for variety we can use Israel. Too bad the normally valiant Europeans are prevented from confronting Arab terrorism by the morally questionable policies of the Israelis. It is the liberal worldview in a nutshell. The actor actually doing the bad behavior is naturally good and so the ‘root cause’ must be found somewhere else, unless, of course, the actor is America.

Dean

So Howard Dean came to Gettysburg and I worked up the nerve to ask him a challenging question.

First thing to say is that the guy is really smart. You forget how smart and quick on his feet he is. When I was listening to him talk at first I remembered how sad it was the night he lost and both he and Kerry were interviewed on TV. The contrast between Kerry’s ponderous prevaricating and Dean’s crisp and intellectually hones answers was painful.

But anyway, I am listening and he first starts out about how Bust promised to be a uniter and he turns out to be a horrible divider. Then he goes on and a little later says: He is divisive, that is not what we do, that is was Milosovich did, that is wrong.

So I couldn’t take it (I haven’t ‘come out’ to the faculty yet, though I think they are starting to get suspicious). I say, “Didn’t you just compare the President to a mass murderer? Isn’t that divisive?”

And here he turns full body to me and I am expecting him to say something like, “well, maybe that was a poor choice of analogy but I think the point stands,” or something but no. He says “No, I didn’t”

That is what you have to admire. He gives his answer and waits for my reply, actually willing to engage in an intellectual discussion. It is then that I feel really nervous. It is just the strange sensation that everyone is listening and you suddenly feel really self conscious and worried about how much time you should take.

So I say, “well, you’re saying he is using the same tactics and the thing is that Milosovich’s tactics are mass murder, and surely if your are saying that they are using the same tactics you are making the parallel (at least that is what I think I said)”

Dean: I did not say that he was like Milosovich, I said he was using the same tactic of heightening ethnic tensions (he referred earlier to Bush’s use of the word ‘quotas’ do describe the Michigan decision, which is a well know racial code word according to Dean). And that is the same thing the Milosovich did.

I was kind of intimidated I hate to say. I replied by saying “well, you could say that Hitler kind of heightened ethnic divisions, so you could on that basis compare anyone to Hitler (the point I was trying to make was that on Dean’s argument he could just as validly have said that Bush was doing the same thing as Hitler was doing, substituting Hitler’s name for Milosovich’s name and then surely he would admit that the comparison whether valid or not would have been excessively divisive, but I am not sure I made the point clearly). At that point Dean graciously accepted victory and frankly I have to admit he had won the argument.

Afterwards he came by and shook my hand and was very nice. Someone got a picture I think.

Anyway, afterwards he is making a speech to a larger crowd and he does the same thing again, only worse. He says: We have a president whose only foreign policy is to be strong militarily. Stalin and Hitler were strong militarily. It is not enough to be strong militarily, you have to have moral leadership.

Now that is really breath-taking. Imagine if a Republican said in a debate about health care: You have to be about more than universal access. Mao and Stalin had universal access to health care, you also have to research and development.

Do you think that Dean himself wouldn’t be howling about the ‘code-words,’ the McCarthism, the Divisiveness? Even though the point is logically unassailable.

Still, I have to say that he was altogether impressive and intellectually engaging and I think it is a real shame that the democrats went with the cipher Kerry instead of the real guy Dean.

Dionne

E.J. Dionne tries to justify the hateful campaign of the democrats by pointing out that many moderate republicans—who remain nameless apparently—are worried about the prospect of a bush second term.

“But it's worth considering why so many moderates in particular are alarmed at the prospect of a second Bush term.
They are, of course, affected by many specific issues. There is the fiscal mess created by Bush's oversized tax cuts and the president's insistence that we push on with the same approach. There is the prospect of a Supreme Court dominated not even by moderate conservatives but by a judicial approach rooted in right-leaning judicial activism. Add in Bush's permissive approach to environmental regulation, his anti-union approach to labor regulation, his dismissal of even the mildest civil libertarian criticisms of the Patriot Act. Most important, there is the question of the administration's incompetence in Iraq. Even among the war's supporters, many now doubt the president's capacity to deliver a successful outcome.
For those who favor moderation in governing, two questions predominate. The first is the president's conscious choice to divide a country that had been so united after the attacks of Sept. 11. He signaled the course for the rest of his term when, in a September 2002 speech aimed at electing Republicans to Congress, he said that the U.S. Senate -- meaning its then-Democratic majority -- was "not interested in the security of the American people." If you say your opponents don't care about the nation's security, aren't you accusing them of being traitors?”

Well well. So it is all issues driving this inordinate hatred of Bush. Issues, like tax cuts. Well, tax cuts drive personal hatred? If it weren’t for those deficits we would be civil? And the then the truly gratin sentence: the insistence that we push on with the same approach? From the party that still believe socialism will work if we just try it on a broad enough scale?
I think they do feel this hatred and they are trying justify it to themselves.
Supreme court. Yes, you can see why liberals would be quite angry about that. An ‘activist conservative court’ means that voters will actually have a say on things that used to be settled by the intelligentsia. Things like gay marriage will no longer be shoved down the throat of the country because the arguments against it are not heard at the right dinner parties. That ‘all important image’, i.e., what the kind of people that attend dinner parties with Sandra Day O’Connor and go to the right graduate schools will no longer be able to over rule the people in whose name their beneficences rewrite our constitution. Having to make your case in front of real live voters would indeed be a daunting prospect for the social engineers who hitherto have found it sufficient to gain the approval of the smart dinner party set. Still, can the prospect of democracy be that terrifying to liberals. After-all, on some battles like gay marriage they appear to be winning. The actual policy consequences of having voter input into abortion policy are likely to be rather modest. What is really galling is the questioning of their legitimacy. The idea that their place in society and their learning does not entitle them to a disproportionate share of power in social policy. That is the key thing to remember when anyone complains about conservative judicial activism—the most it can do is put things in the hands of democratic institutions. (that was not true in the early 20th century when conservatives used the constitution to create new laws the same way liberals have done since the 1950s).
The other policy disagreements that drive otherwise peaceable and loving democrats to such levels of hatred—excuse me—intensity—are rather pedestrian. Bush's permissive approach to environmental regulation—some regulations that bureaucrats wanted will not go in as fast as they had hoped; his anti-union approach to labor regulation—I’m sorry, did I miss something? There were goons breaking up strikes somewhere? Has Bush done something that ever so slightly increases the death-tailspin of the American labor movement? Isn’t that a bit 1930ish?; his dismissal of even the mildest civil libertarian criticisms of the Patriot Act—what ‘mild’ criticism has there been of the patriot act? Can a liberal put together two sentences on the subject before lapsing into concentration camp blather? The main provisions simply give those fighting terrorism the same powers those fighting the mob have had for decades apparently without bringing about a police state. The act does give to the US government the right to pretty much decide to keep people out of this country at will, something which offends the sensibility of people who are one-world governmenters at heart. Their idea is that every person in the world has an equal right to come here and it is up to the government to prove that they are a danger, preferably by having a tape-recorded meeting of a plan to blow up the Washington monument which the terrorists have foolishly talked about in one of those rooms that we kindly informed them that we have bugged (no sneak and peak now—not cricket).
But where ever you stand on these things it has to be admitted that these are no more than the standard disagreements that have separated the parties since these issues were issues. Bush’s positions are as close or closer to the center on any of these issues than any republican president would be. And yet he is come in for a level of criticism that we never saw with them. What is the explanation?
I have done enough on Iraq lately.

The last paragraph gets to the real issue. That Bush has accused the democrats of being traitors. He has never done any such thing. But I will.

Dionne’s argument is that Bush has said that the democrats have put their political interests above the security of the country. That, argues Dionne, is tantamount to calling them traitors. The democrats were kind enough to go along with Bush in the aftermath of 9/11 and then he turns on them, impugns their patriotism (in code of course, only democrats actually use the word unpatriotic, since they only do it answer the coded attacks of the right) and actually has the gall to add republican seats during an off year election.

The causus belli in this is the senate seat of Max Cleland. He went along with his fellow democrats in trying to hold up the homeland security bill in order to get more union protections in. The problem was that the typical American didn’t see having to huddle with a union shop steward every time you had to ask the people charged with fighting a war to work overtime was a good idea. As the American people saw it, that was putting the interests of unions above the interests of security. Thus, when President Bush said that their position on the issue amounted to not being interested in the security of the American people, the American people agreed. The Democrats had a real point of course. Maybe Union protections would have made the homeland security department more efficient in the long run. I doubt it, but who knows. The point is they lost the argument and instead of changing their deeply unpopular position they tried to tough it out by plying the McCarthism card, saying you can’t criticize us on this or you are challenging our patriotism. They pushed an unpopular position and paid for it at the polls. Grow up.

Now of course left out of this is the Democratic attacks on the president early on when they opposed the government take over of the TSA. The Republicans thought that private businesses with the freedom to hire and fire would do a better job at managing people in what was essentially a boring task. But the democrats accused them of caring more about their fat-cat security company running friends than they did about the security of the American people. Did the Republicans whine about how their patriotism was being challenged? No, they just changed their position. The Democrats always complain that Bush gets credit for backing things he originally opposed—TSA, homeland security department, going to the UN for backing, creation of the 9/11 commission—all the while they complain about him never changing his mind, never admitting he is wrong. You can’t have it both ways. In reality it is just the opposite. He changes his mind all the time, whenever he realizes his position is a loser. The Democrats haven’t and that is whey they are angry. What they are doing when complaining about Bush is projecting their anger at their own lack of acumen on to Bush. In reality it is they who have been unwilling to change.

idiots

A bunch of butt scratching idiots!!
I can’t believe it. I knew this would happen when I left civilization. Pennsylvania. Jeez, no wonder they had to be fed by the Indians. (MA?) They won’t let me vote. I just found out that you have to register 30 days before the election!! What do they do? Check the roles before the vote? No wonder election night is no fun here.

The thing that galls me is that I went down there over a month ago. No one told me about a deadline then. They told me to go to another office. This was the Bush reelection campaign that sent me to another office! In Chicago if you mentioned you wanted to register in causally conversation in the checkout line three people would turn around and try to claim that they saw you first. Now that is a machine. That is what politics is like for professionals, people who realize they are just one vote away from having to find a real job. Now, after I call to complain they tell me, well I can still vote by absentee ballot in Illinois!! Oh good, I can still do my civic duty. I can still have the satisfaction of participating in the democratic process. I can once again be part of the 10% of Chicago that doesn’t have a blood relative on the payroll and that lodges his protest against one party government. Oh yeah, and this year I have the extra satisfaction of being able to vote for Alan—repent now—Keyes, who is, by the way, black. I wonder if Republicans are really serious about being the governing party of this country.

I told you so

On the charge that the conduct of the war has been incompetent because we did not bring in enough troops: it is true that we don’t have enough to hold what we take after we take it. That is a strong point in favor of those who say we should have gone in stronger. But is can hardly be used by those that say we shouldn’t have gone in the first place. The reason we don’t have enough to hold is that the people we are fighting are terrorists. We have plenty to hold against conventional forces. We only are short handed when we try to hold against people that target civilians, i.e., terrorists. The reason we have to have more on the ground is not to take cities in the first place but to protect people from assassinations after we take something. The big problem for the interim government is that the insurgents kill anyone that cooperates, including people that just keep the water running.

And this is why the anti-war forces have no right to say I told you so. They didn’t say, “See, the people we would be fighting are terrorists and you can’t protect people from terrorists. Their argument is that the forces we would be fighting would be the legitimate rulers of the country, that they would be strong because they in some sense had the support of the population. They can hardly turn around and use as an argument for their position the murderous contempt the insurgents have for the lives of the people of Iraq as an argument for leaving Iraq under their control.

This is the great paradox of fighting insurgents. The competition is for legitimacy. The left and international opinion somehow confers legitimacy on the side that displays the most contempt for the lives of the people in a country. Unlike the old Geneva Convention type rules that penalized those who fought unconventionally, the new ‘international law’ (really the twisted interpretations of it from the international lawyerocracy) confers legitimacy on the side that creates chaos and kills civilians through Guerilla war.

It is true that a good plan for removing the insurgency should have been developed before going in. But what makes this insurgency strong is not its popular support but its utter contempt for the populace. The observations that we don’t have enough people to stay behind to protect the people from murders and kidnappings after we win is a tacit admission of this. The international community that opposed the invasion didn’t say don’t invade because the you won’t be able to protect the people of Iraq from the terrorists you throw out of power, they said that we shouldn’t invade because we would be violating the rights of the Iraqis. They didn’t say don’t invade because you won’t be able to protect their rights afterward, that would have been an admission that the then government of Iraq was not legitimate. If you are arguing that the invading force has to have enough to protect the people from the murder squads of the deposed government after the invasion what are you saying about the nature of the pre-invasion government? The people that say we should have foreseen this didn’t foresee it themselves. If they had they could never have made the argument that the invasion of Iraq was immoral on the grounds that it violated the rights of the people of Iraq. Can you call a government legitimate whose threat against a potential invader is, “don’t topple my government because if you do I will make it ungovernable by murdering school kids and anyone else that tries to keep the lights on?”

infiltration

Was it Something I Said?
The ambush and murder of 50 Iraqi recruits is said to reinforce suspicions that Iraqi security forces have been penetrated. Now of the many whinges that the fair weather hawks have put out is that we should kept the Iraqi army in tact.
Suppose that we had kept them intact and this had happened, wouldn't the same people be saying that we should have disbanded them and started fresh to make sure that we had troops loyal to the new government? Does anyone imagine that the problem of infiltration would actually be less if we had kept Sadaam's army on the job?

Worth Dying For

Was it Something I Said?
Think about this. What defines your loyalty in the end is what you are willing to die for. John Kerry answering a question about whether troops should be in Bosinia (from today's Washington Post):

'In 1994, discussing the possibility of U.S. troops being killed in Bosnia, he said, "If you mean dying in the course of the United Nations effort, yes, it is worth that. If you mean dying American troops unilaterally going in with some false presumption that we can affect the outcome, the answer is unequivocally no."'

Same war, only thing different is whether or not we have UN backing. So it is worth dying for is whether we have the approval of the UN? The people that put Sudan at the head of thier human rights commission (to replace Libiya!) are now the standard of what is worth dying for.

This is a question of loyalty. What is patriotism but the institution, the group, that you are going to place your final faith in? Your highest authority? For Kerry it really is the UN. And what is even stranger is that the liberals listening probably agreed. I don't think the challenges to liberals' patriotism are off base after all.

Bad News

Was it Something I Said?
I think that things look a lot worse for Bush that polls might suggest. Everyone (among Republicans) is happy becuase he is ahead in all of these polls. But if you look at these polls he is almost never over 50%. That is bad news for an incumbent. People look at an election with an incumbent as a referndum on him. People either want to keep him or not. The 'or nots' may not be ready to go for the other guy but if they aren't ready to pull the lever for Bush now there is little that could happen in the next two weeks that could move them in Bush's direction. The Nader/undecideds at this point are just waiting to see if they can stomach Kerry. After the debates it seems to me that Kerry looks reasonably presidential. Indeed, the whole flip-flop tactic may have backfired. He seemed very consistent in the debates. The real criticism that could have been leveled against him was being consistently liberal, but that would have required a degree of mental agility beyond what the incumbent could manage.

How much is it worth?

Was it Something I Said?

The next time someone asks how many American lives is this Iraq war worth ask them how many the good opinion of the international community is. For to believe that we should have waited to go into Iraq, you have to believe that looking good at the UN is worth at least some solders’ lives.

If you believe the report just out now that there were no stockpiles of WMD then you have to also believe the rest of the report: that 1) Hussein intentionally deceived the world and his own generals that he did still have them and that 2) he had every intention of getting them again as soon as he could get out from under the sanctions. How does one argue against the war if those two things are true?

If we had walked away in spite of everyone—and this includes the two democratic challengers from their own statements on the Senate floor—thinking that he still had them then what do we do with the next dictator that tries to acquire them? Having in effect said to Sadaam that “I got rid of them but I can’t tell you there because I forgot where,” what is to stop any dictator from building such an arsenal? Imagine how our negotiations with the North Koreans would go. “Oh, we got rid of them somewhere, don’t worry.” These rules, to have any meaning, must require the burden of proof to be on the rogue state to prove that it doesn’t have them in a publicly observable way. It is no good to say that that isn’t fair. There is no way to be sure they don’t have them but by full compliance with obtrusive measures. Indeed, even after he was the nominee Kerry was still keeping his options open when on Meet the Press he felt it necessary to add that we may still find WMD, and this over a year after the war is over. To say that going two months and ‘a dog ate my homework’ excuse is enough to give a dictator a clean slate on WMD is to say that there will never be any meaningful sanctions ever.

But the really important thing is the second thing the report has proven. That Hussein fully intended to go back into the WMD business as soon as he was out from under the sanctions. If that is true—and have you heard anyone deny it?—then what really would have been gained by waiting? Would it be preferable to have waited till he actually had some to use on us or his own people? Why isn’t it good news that we finally acted before he could really do us harm?

The real strength of the anti-war party is that they don’t have to say what they would have done otherwise. The ‘last resort’ argument covers everything. Maybe he would have became a nicer person, maybe he would have had them but have been deterred, maybe he would have been deposed. The ‘war as a last resort’ seems to give license to avoid thinking about what the world would have looked like had we not gone to war.

But if those who want to use the report to damn Bush are honest they owe us an answer to the question of what would you have done two years down the road? Presumably Kerry would say that if Hussein really did have WMD he would lead the US to go to war, so all the report really tells us is that with Kerry we could have put the war off two years—till he actually had weapons. Of course under that scenario we would have been a lot better off in world public opinion, who knows, maybe a few Americans dead of Mustard gas would have rekindled that precious international pity that Kerry feels we squandered after 9/11. Personally, the good opinion of Sadaam’s arms dealers and creditors is not worth a single American service man.

Comments on Comments

Was it Something I Said?

Finally a comment! Thanks so much whoever you are.

I have been away defending my thesis. I am now a real Doctor. Don't worry, I won't change. I will continue to be the same pontificating ass I was before I was officially smarter than everyone else.

I recieved this interesting comment on my posting on the French:

"how do you define terrorism? I can say bombing a hospital or a wedding is also terrorism. oh, but those were done by mistake. sure, but no bombing whatsoever would have resulted in no mistakes. collateral damage terrorism is no less terrorism than an intended one. after all it is the number of graves and crying mothers in the end that counts.

also I thought democracy is about representing all people in a country not only the ones that someone from outside picks as representable. who is usa anyway to decide who is terrorist and who is not in iraq? i don't call that democracy."

Two things:
Bombing a wedding party unintentionally is terrorism the same way that hitting someone with a car accidentally is murder. It may not make a difference to the greiving family whether thier loved one was killed intentionally or not but it certainly makes a big differnce to a country if thier leaders kill people as a way of maintaining power or, in Sadaam's case, as a way of making home entertainment movies. In any case, the number of graves for mothers to weep besides is placed somewhere between 100,000 and 300,000--the EU won't help with the investigation because Iraq has the death penalty: they will sell him weapons to murder people with and bill his victims but they won't dirty thier hands by helping his victims gather evidence.
As far as representing all the people I think we are confused. The terrorists in Falluja, etc., aren't fighting so that the people in those cities can participate in the elections, the terrorists are fighting so the people in those cities can't participate in the elections. And by the way, our 'puppet' in Afganastan appears to have just won the first elections in that nation's history by a landslide. Can we pick'em or what?

Eject

Great article from 'larval liberal' turned conservative Bill Whittle. Among the many great quotes:

"There are people who are determined to kill us for who we are and what we believe. They can not be deterred.

But they can be defeated. And the people they depend on for survival can be deterred."

Long essay that repays reading.

Antcipation

The failure to anticipate the enemy's tactics in Iraq is a big failure. We should foreseen that they would start going around to the homes of anyone that cooperated in keeping the lights on or the country running and kill their famlies. We should have foreseen that our standard practice of handing out candy to children would be used by our enemies as an opportunity to kill chidren. We should have foreseen that allowing people to have boxcutters on airplanes would give our enemies the chance to cut the throats of the stewardess's and pilots to take over airplanes and crash them into buildings.

We should have but we didn't. We are handicapped by being civilized men and so have trouble anticipating what our enemies will do in novel circumstances. But the fact that in confronting our enemies we have been met with horrors that no civilized human being would have imagined should not be used as an argument for not confronting them. It is because we cannot anticipate what monsters will do that we must not wait, we must not sit back and wait for the next attack, because they will find a way. Their depravity gives them a source of innovation that we cannot and should not hope to match. The fact that the enemy comes up with new ways to hurt us that we can never anticipate is not a reason to wait, it is reason that we should aggressively seek them out and kill them first.

Dred Scott

Well, I am glad that has been cleared up. Hear that, everybody, we are against slavery. So if you bring your slave over here and he decides not to go back to the Sudan with you (curious that the nation chairing the UN human rights commission is one of the few left in the world that can still be said to have actual human slavery) don't expect us to catch him and send him back.

Now you see? You complain about all these focus grouped tested, canned answers but when you actually get to see the guy think on his feet what do you get? I mean as inane as the specticle of a US President denouncing slavery in answer to the question of how he would pick future judges (shouldn't we be complaining about litmus tests here?) you can't accuse him of not thinking for himself. This is what he thinks. "What do I think about judges? Well, I certainly don't want any of that Dred Scott sort of nonsense."

There is a serious point about this decision. It is an example of judges using a general principle that is present in the background but not made specific in the Constitution--the idea of property rights--and applying that principle in a novel way to in effect make a new law. This is of course exactly what liberal judges have done in the post-war era to strike down abortion and expand criminal legal protections. As such, bringing up Dred Scott is a sensible thing to do, but Bush just wasn't firm enough in his grasp of the argument to make the connection explicit. So he ends up saying something insipid like, "and people aren't property, so that is just wrong," as if there was someone proposing that they were. Remember this the next time you hear a complaint about politicians having set answers to everything and answering the question they wished they had been asked instead of the one they were asked.

Which brings me to my main impression about this debate. I had the feeling that they really did try to ansswer the questions they were asked. That is why Bush, at least, ends up saying some slightly goofy things. I think part of this is that people justed asked really good questions for the most part. They asked about things that mattered to them and they posed them in a way that really forced the guy to address the nub of the problem. Who needs these journalists, anyway?

Swati

I got this from a former student:

"Also I cannot wait for the debates! I am so excited to see what is going to happen tonite. I think Bush will get his act together, especially since it is going to be a open community forum
I doubt the questions will be as probing, unfortunately, this is not the rest of the world, where indepth political coverage is front page, news headlines (rather we care more about who got fired on the Apprentice 2). Did you see that ridiculous JibJab second internet cartoon parody? I read that the site got more hits then the Bush or Kerry campaign sites combined! How pathetic!!"

Well, having seen the two candidate websites I can only say that anyone who prefers them to JibJab has a serious judgment problem. Gee, Swati, I hope this isn't due to anything I taught you. I think the analysis on JibJab is as accurate an anlysis of American politics as anything that has appeared on the candidates' websites, let alone a European paper.

Was it Something I Said?

Was it Something I Said?

The interesting thing about the failure to find stockpiles is that there is no one out there in a responsible position that can say I told you so. There are a lot of people saying we shouldn't have done it but almost no one out there saying you aren't going to find WMD. One could always say that the President mislead the public, but the protagonists in the debate were on the Senate Select Intellegence Committee and are hardly in a position to say the President knew something they didn't have access to. Moreover, as I recall, both Kerry and Edwards are in the difficult position of having missed most of the meetings (quite understandably given that they were running for President) and never, apparently, took advantage of thier priviledge to view documents in the Classified Document Room.

The last man

How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake? You don’t, you ask someone from the international community to do it. And they will say yes, because “I know and understand foreign leaders and can work with them and…"

How will he bring these new allies along? We can assume that Kerry has ruled out coercion and bribery since these resources were presumably tapped out used by the current administration to get those international whores the Australians, the Poles and, of course, the great rent-a-thugs of the British Royal Marines. So, how does he get new allies?—by sticking it to the old allies. He has already done the hard part—dismissing allies like the British and the Australians entails a bit of political risk. Compared to that feeding the Kurds to the Wahabbis and Baathists will be a political gimme.

Some are worried that Kerry’s promises of an international conference to get more support for the Iraq effort will not pan out. I have the opposite worry. It will be all too successful. I am afraid that Kerry can make it work for precisely the reasons he states, that he does understand foreign leaders and agrees with them about the main problem facing the world: American power. And I am afraid he will be more than willing to pay the price the international community will demand: the humiliation and neutering of American power.

Of course it won’t be stated like that. The ostensible aim will be to bring Iraq back into the community of nations under the auspices of legitimate international bodies like the UN human rights commission and the Arab league—in other words, back under the control of Sunni thugs. It will not be because the international community is less than enthusiastic about democracy, just that the Iraqis aren’t ready for it. The Sunni thugs that are blowing up any groups of children gathered in a public place are proof of that? And who better to get these Sunni thugs under control than the Sunni thugs that ran such a tight ship under Sadaam? And if both groups of Sunni thugs seem to have an undecorously high degree of dual membership, well, that will only make them that much more efficient. Who can control a group of criminals better than another group of criminals? The same group of criminals!

It is so simple, why didn’t we see it before? There is really no excuse for missing such a simple solution, particularly when we see such fine examples of the process at work right in New York at the UN. Notice how subtle and nuanced way the UN is going about getting a handle on things in Dafur. Some dim-witted unilateralist like Bush might be tempted to barge in, but not the trained minds of the UN. They had the foresight to make the Sudanese the chair of the human rights commission. Now, when the human rights commission’s indignation boils over to a strongly worded rebuke all the tricky questions of implementation can be done away with. If only they had had the foresight to put Rwanda in the chair of the human rights commission before Rwanda decided to divest itself of its ethnic overachievers. The Rwandan government could have done a much better job of disarming itself (though the UN peacekeepers were not totally impotent, managing to disarm the victims that had taken the UN up on its invitation to take up residence in UN protective camps just in time to avoid some nasty gun battles).

That is the great thing about making the international test the loadstone of your foreign policy. Honor and principle and simple self-preservation are likely to oblige one to have to undertake some unpleasant tasks form time to time. With the international test you can always go with the flow. Bunch of Africans slaughtering unarmed civilians? A sternly worded resolution and some third world peacekeepers will keep the cameras away. A bunch of Arabs slaughtering African Christians? Elect the Arabs to the human rights commission, problem goes away and big multicultural brownie points in the bargain. The UN allows you to appease the powerful under the respectable banner of multilateralism. And if you get into real trouble we can always call on America…oh wait...

And there is the rub. We are the last man. If anyone takes this 'international law' business--I mean international law in its current meaning, not of treaties that are written down and signed by sovereign nations but of supra-national authorites with discretionary authority--seriously owes it to himself to really take a look at what the 'international community' is. The world is full of the graves of those who had no choice but to rely on the UN's decisions to protect them from genocidal governments whose representatives were seated at the UN. Other nations can afford to pretend to take the UN seriously in the knowlege at some level that the US is there to not take it seriously should the need arise. But who is our US?

flip-flopping

The real problem with the debate is that Kerry is not a flip-flopper. He is a political opportunist but who cares? What Senator isn't to some degree. What is really troubling is that he does have sincere convictions. The global test he talked about in the debate is the real Kerry. Indeed, there is a core set of convictions that guides his voting record: appeasement. How else to explain his love for multilateralism on all occassions except for the case of North Korea? The Bush campaign makes a real mistake when they focus on vacilation. The really frightening thing about Kerry is his consistency. Of course, the Bush campaign doesn't like to take on someone's ideas directly; that would require too much abstract thought on W's part.

I suppose

I suppose we should have forseen that the regime in Iraq would defend itself by hiding behind its own civilian population. I suppose we might even have forseen that they would attack their own civilians to make the country ungovernable. I guess we should even have figured that since the enemy would count dead children, thier own dead children, as a propaganda victory that we should have modified our longstanding custom passing out candy to the children of countries our army is in. And, given the decades of propaganda and infantile facist fantansy that the people of Iraq have lived under for so long, we might even have forseen that the Iraqi people themselves would blame us when thier own former rulers kill Iraqi children. But I really don't see how we could have been expected to forsee that there would be people in our own society who, on seeing that our enemies murder scores of children gathered for free candy, would count this as evidence that we should have left Iraq in the hands of those same murderers.

The long Holiday

The long holiday from history is coming to an end. Those days when we could imagine that all our problems could be solved if we just were a little nicer, a little more tolerant. We have an enemy that doesn't want to cut a deal, doesn't want to live side by side, that we are going to have to fight and defeat or be conquered by. In Europe it is slowly sinking in that they are being eaten away from within by a minority that doesn't want to assimilate, that doesn't want to become Europeans, that wants Western power without Western values. Here we are momentarily flirting with the idea that maybe the we could protect ourselves through the UN, through patching things up with the French. But does anyone really believe that?

The French

The French foreign Minister has just said that he would not attend a conference on Iraq unless elements of "La Resistance" are invited. Now someone should ask Kerry, if this conference is going to be the centerpiece of his new approach on Iraq, if he is going to invite Zarqawi to sit down at the table with him. Is he going to ask the fellows that took Americans passing out candy the other day as a opportunity to 'resist' the occupation by blowing up thier own children what they want? Are we going to let people that are committing terrorism to prevent the people of Iraq from letting thier voice be heard in an election have a voice at the negotiating table? Look for the 'resistance' to develop a 'political' wing. After all, no American President would sit down with a terrorist organization till they had at least had the decency to set up an internal division of labor. Why even the mafia has the decency to offer local merchants have a way to pretend that they are not paying protection money by setting up inflated price service vendors. When there is a political wing of Zarkawi's organization we will know the terrorists have won.

Told you so

The consensus seems to be now that the war was mismanaged even if it was a reasonable decision. The big mistake the Bush administration is supposed to have made is that they didn’t have enough troops to stabilize the situation after winning.

Two things that must be said to the 'I told you so' crowd.

1) You only get to say I told you so if you give the right reasons. The people saying I told you so have to have said it was because of the aftermath that more troops would be needed. All I remember is that people were saying we would have house to house fighting against the Iraqi army like in Europe in WWII. That never happened. What is happening now is not, to my knowledge, what people that wanted more troops were warning about. They were warning about protecting supply lines and the drive to take over Baghdad. Since none of that was a problem the administration made the right decision from among the options they were presented with. What is happening now is random terrorism. It is not clear that having more troops on the ground would decrease random terrorism or not. It might prevent some incidents but it would offer targets for more. It would also offer more opportunities to incur resentment. If 500,000 troops had been sent the same people would be arguing that the huge amount of American troops is what is causing the problem.
2) Random terrorism. The people that are giving us trouble in the Sunni triangle are Sunni’s that want to bring back a Sunni regime and are willing to kill children to do it. They are trying to prevent an election because they know they have no chance to win it. It is true the Administration underestimated how vile were the means that the enemy was willing to employ, but the anti-war people can hardly take an ‘I told you so,’ here. The people protesting war with Iraq weren’t saying, “leave them in the hands of the terrorists because if you try to free them the old regime will just start randomly murdering civilians till we are forced to leave.” All of the horror in Iraq is being caused by people that want to go back to a Sunni military dictatorship. Can the monstrous things those people who want the old regime back really be used as an argument for having left the old regime in place?

Disaster? Americans have a really low threshold for using this word. We have lost 1,000 troops. That slow day in WWII. We have taken over the seat of the Caliphate and are about to set up a democracy, the first ever, in the Arab world. A man that people describe as an American puppet has a 67% approval rating—and that is with bus loads of kids getting blown up in the streets. Imagine what it could be if we can get the terrorists. A prosperous, pro-American democracy in the middle-east? That is worth almost anything.

too nice

The problem is that we have forgotten some lessons from early on. We have had the good fortune of living in a democracy for so long that we have forgotten that democracy can't be established democratically. You have to be willing to abide by the majority's decision to have the right to take part in majority rule. People that aren't willing to do that, like the minorities that are attacking the provisional government in Iraq don't have the right to vote and have to be paid out in thier own coin--force.

We have also had the good fortune to live in a civilized society that can afford elaborate protections for the accused. These are luxury that only comes with a high degree of consensus and safety. The specific arrangements we have for protecting the rights of the accused are not moral absolutes to be abided by at all times and all places but arrangements specific to a particular time and place. In another time and place they may make no sense and make a society worse off. Our system of criminal law is predicated on the notion that it is better to let a hundred guilty go free rather than to punish one innocent. That may make sense when you are worried about the occassional highway man or thief. It may not when the guilty you are letting go are mass murderers intent on destroying democracy itself.

The whole idea of judging the intentions of people in a war by the methods they use to fight the war is unreliable. For the most part there was little to recommend our methods in WWII over those of the Nazi's when it came to fighting. In the civil war I think most would judge that the South behaved better--did that make their cause any less unjust?

30 countries

And what about Kerry's comment that there were 30 countries that had greater capacity WMD than Iraq? That can't be right unless he is counting countries like France or Israel. Does he mean we should have invaded them first?

Of course what he means is that the problem is the WMD themselves rather than the regimes that have them. Here is the sharpest difference between the two world views. In one, the problem that we have enemies, in the other it is that some nations break a rules. The conservatives want to use violations of rules to offer an excuse to destroy our enemies. The rule is really secondary. In liberals want to make the rules stronger. Making the rules stronger means being as ready or even more ready to enforce those rules against our freinds as against our enemies.

This is a real philosophical difference with reasonable arguments on either side. The problem is that neither side in the debate is really willing to make its case forthrightly. The reason is that the American public believes that both are right--that it is better to be feared than to be loved and that we can bring about peace through rule-enforcing international organizations--and doesn't want the contradictions between the two views forced into thier consciousness.

And here is the problem. The President really was distorting the truth about his reasons for going into Iraq. He had made the judgment that Iraq was an enemy that would one way or another do us great harm. It was his judgment about the regimes nature and intentions that drove the decision. the WMD (or at least the stockpiles) and the United Nations were just means to eliminating an enemy. Of course the WMD mattered, but not the stockpiles--one or two in the hands of the Al Qaeda agents Iraqi intellegence officers were meeting with were more than enough to make 9/11 look like a picnic. If you believe that the world is a place where you have enemies and that ultimately you are on your own then his decision was the right one. But giving his real reasons for the decision would require him to challenge a belief that the median American voters still rather likes having, thank you, that international institutions mean something.

Kerry's problem is the mirror image of Bush's. If you believe as Kerry does that international institutions and a legals system so administered is the real key to security then you really can't take the law into your own hands. You have to wait till the crime is committed and then wait till an impartial body, one that your enemy has as much right to be a part of as you do, rules that you can do something. You really do need a permission slip.

Of course there are circumstances under which Kerry would act without international sanction, just as there are plenty of international bodies that Bush is just fine with cooperating with. But ultimately you have to make a choice between the two worldviews. And that is a choice the American public does not want to directly confront.

Iraqis blame US

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/I/IRAQ_THE_AFTERMATH?SITE=DCTMS&SECTION=HOME

Breath taking story in the paper of how Iraqi’s blame US for the attack on Iraqi children. The really striking thing is that there is no dispute about the facts. One person did say that the US wanted intentionally invited the children there to use them as human shields but in the main they were in agreement. They don’t seem to dispute that the Americans did invite the kids to come around just to give them candy. Their complaint is that they should have known better.

Now there is something familiar here. When we have a horrific crime—say a slaying that takes place in a dark alley that should perhaps have been lighted—we complain about the officials that should have protected us from it and focus on things the authorities should have done to prevent it. This doesn’t mean that anyone thinks the officials wanted the crime to happen or that they somehow planned it. They know it is the criminals that are ultimately at fault, but we complain about the authorities because they are the ones that can be made to do something.

Still there is something a bit perverse here. It goes beyond the regular desire to complain to people that will listen. Saying “the killers are the first terrorist and the Americans are the second” is setting up a moral equivalence that is just hard to fathom.

I think part of what is happening is that people there are in a state of denial. They don’t want to think about how depraved their own civilization has become and so want to focus some of their horror at what they have in some sense become on powerful outsiders. This is a central trope of fascism throughout time.

But it is hard to ignore that focusing on how Americans should change their tactics leads us away from a central problem: how utterly depraved the society that we are trying to turn into a democracy has become. We didn’t have to worry about passing out candy in occupied Germany or Japan because the people that were fighting us—and we forget that there was a lot of fighting in occupied Germany against us even years later—were not depraved. Loathsome as the Nazis were it never occurred to them to kill their own children to show the people that the Americans can’t govern. And if they had the people of Germany would hardly have taken it as a sign that the Americans may not be as nice as they thought. We have a very sick enemy, but that is not all. For such tactics to even be conceivable it requires a sick society as well.

The conclusion that some people draw from this is that we shouldn’t try bringing democracy to these people in the first place. There are two lines of reasoning it seems to me.

One comes predominantly form the left. The argument (more like an assumption) is that the only way to explain such irrational hatred—and I think most would agree that blaming Americans for passing out candy to children rather than the people that see children gathered as an opportunity to kill a lot of children—is that the people with such a hatred have been the victims of injustice at the hands of Americans historically. Even if the judgment holding the Americans responsible may, in the immediate instance, be a bit irrational, in historical terms the existence of such terrorists in the first place and the depth of suspicion of America’s motives is rational. We have done so many wrong things to these people that now, even when we try to do the right thing, we will get the blame. Given that history there is nothing to do but leave and give the job to an organization that has historically clean hands, maybe the UN, maybe the Arab league. The specifics of what to do in light of the left’s analysis are unclear but ultimately besides the point. We have done so much wrong that it is too late to start trying to do right.

The other criticism comes from the right. George Will has put the view most forcefully. If the people of Iraq are ready blame people that give out free candy rather than the people that use children gathered as to get free candy as an opportunity to kill them then it is evidence that they are not ready for democracy. The conservative viewpoint would be more inclined to dismiss the hatred of the populace for America as a feature of a primitive political culture rather than as the effect of some specific US actions in the past. These people have always blamed their problems on someone, it happens now to be the US. But the point it is that they deal with their problems not by dealing with them but by blaming someone else for them. That inability to face the real causes of your problems is something that an outside power can’t fix and is the ultimate reason that Bush’s Wilsonian project of democratizing the Middle-East is doomed to failure.

What is common to both views is the idea that hatred for America is deep and an insurmountable obstacle to our progress there. I think that this is a mistake.

First of all we overestimate the hatred for America because of the tacit assumption that widespread violence means widespread support for violence and widespread hatred for the objects of that violence. In fact the number of violent attacks against Americans does not require a large number of people. In absolute numbers the combatants in this conflict really doesn’t have to be, and does not appear to be, that large. The crowds gathered round protesting America and reveling in the burning wreckage of American armored vehicles are made to seem larger than they are because they are constantly replayed and because we assume they are completely spontaneous. But even in Falluja where support for the insurgency seems to be centered there was at most a couple of hundred people in the pictures of crowds celebrating the mutilated corpses of American security guards. The anti-American demonstrations that are whipped up even in the American no-go zones for Al Jazera (spelling?) are surprisingly small. For a country where hatred for American occupiers is so intense that people are driven to spontaneously take up arms and blow up scores of school children for the chance to kill a couple of Americans the inability to get crowds out of the three digit range is quite striking.

The people blaming the Americans for the deaths of their children are being amazingly irresponsible in one way, childish, if you will. But in another way, it is quite heartening. They don’t actually have any doubt about who set off the bombs. Even the outrageous suggestion that the Americans wanted children there for their own protection is predicated on the assumption that Americans don’t do things like this. Even this guy knows that the people who kill Arab children are other Arabs. What the people in this story are angry about is the American failure to realize how utterly evil their enemies—other Arabs—are.

And this is what is heartening. People are angry at Americans for not being ruthless enough. Their criticism is from the right if you will. We have the power to crush armies, why not the terrorists. Part of their anger serves the purpose of deflecting the thought that the terrorists are their fellow Arabs. The argument from the left assumes that the widespread attacks and the widespread criticism after the attacks are from a widespread hatred of Americans. The attacks are from a fringe group that in its Baathist and Shia fundamentalist variants combined commands the support of no more than 20% of the population. The criticism after the attacks is that we aren’t tough enough on the minority that is trying to derail democracy. These attacks are from a fringe that fears democracy precisely because they know how unpopular they are.

The argument from the right assumes that the state of mind of the people of Iraq can’t be changed. It assumes that since democracy took centuries to build here it will take centuries to build there. This is wrong in my opinion but there is a problem with refuting it: there are few counter examples in the Muslim—and none in the Arab—world. That is why I am sort of glad sometimes when Bush gives these simplistic answers, that we will succeed in Iraq because all people in their hearts yearn to be free. If one looked at the social science evidence there would be little to make one optimistic.

costs

And as for getting other countries to pay the costs of the war, is that really a possibility? Afterall, the French already did their part to financially support Iraq--they financed Sadaam's entire army (though here I think we should also give credit to the Russians, who were also very generous with their ___days same as cash policy as long as you were buying guns). To ask them to help pay for deposing a dictator when the dictator still owes them money is a bit unfair.

90%

Ok, so we are 90% of the costs and the casualties. That is a good point as far as the costs go but I wonder if it could ever have been any different on the casualties. I think someone should check on this but if I remember correctly we were 90% of the casualties in the Gulf War and in the Bosnia operation. The reason seems to be that when it comes to real force projection that we and the other three main allies--the British, Australians and, to a lesser extent, the Poles--are the only game in town. I remember in the Gulf War we and the British flew almost all of the sorties (the Italians as I recall had 6 of 7 planes come back for repairs the first night). In the Bosnian war--a war in the Europeans' backyard--we and the British ended up doing all the bombing, though in the Europeans were able to give lots of advice on targeting.

The French do have formidable land forces that they are able to project (as a number of small African nations have been reminded lately), but even when we have UN backing the only thing that changes is financial help, not boots on the ground. And anyway, if we are on the subject of money, isn't the real point that the French and the Russians aren't even forgiving the debt incurred by Sadaam's regime, mainly for weapons? Does it really make sense to talk about how the French aren't helping us pay for liberating a country when their actual main concern is getting paid for the weapons they sold a dictator to keep a country imprisoned?

Answer

Bush should really hit this charge. He should say, "you know, the hardest thing about this job isn't the attacks on me, it is that people, in order to attack me, impune the honor of our armed forces. My opponent has just repeated a charge against American Soldiers that I thought everyone knew by now was false, and that I think most Americans never took seriously in the first place: that American stood gaurd over the oil ministry building while intentionally allowing the city to be looted. That is false. It never happened. I would never order that and American solders, frankly, wouldn't do that. We did not go into Iraq to steal thier oil. We have helped the Iraqi people finally get some of the benefits of thier oil. Our soldiers have helped those people. Dont' slander our soldiers. And don't say it is just something you heard from someone else like the way you explain away your slander of your fellow soldiers in Vietnam. When our soldiers are under fire or being held in enemy prison camps I think you have an obligation not to spread malicious lies about them."

Debate

I haven't heard anyone say anything about the "only building we gaurded was the oil ministry" comment from Kerry. Wasn't that canard shot down? The guy was just parking his tank and it happened to be in front of a building that happened to be the oil ministry? If so, isn't it kind of a big deal that an American Presidential candidate mistates a fact that has been used by a slander against us by our enemies? It seems that at the very least it mark him as predisposed to believe the worst about America. It is one thing to get a jibe about your opponent wrong, it is quite another to get one about our soldiers wrong.

What would it take for an American commander to say, "don't worry about those artifacts, we are here for the oil?" The underlying fact seems implausible to me. How improbably is it that at some point a military vehicle would be parked in front of a building that had some relation to the oil industry? It would seem more surprising if that had not happened at some point during the day.

And why would we care about the oil ministry anyway? If we were there for the oil what would the Sadaam's old paper work matter to us? It is like a burgaler steeling an account ledger instead of the money it records.

But Kerry's restating of this (I believe) discredited and implausible charge fits in with a larger theme that has been used against Kerry: he is not really very loyal to one of our most respected institutions. It fits with a pattern of believing the worst about our armed forces.