Roundup: Media's Take
This is where we excerpt articles from the media that take a historical approach to events in the news.
Jay Brookman: Recasting Bush as the hero of Iraq is taking things much too far
Alyssa Battistoni: Glenn Beck's revisionist, apolitical history
Simon Tisdall: Sorry General Petraeus, Iraq and Afghanistan are only too similar
Simon Jenkins: A trillion-dollar catastrophe. Yes, Iraq was a headline war
David Rieff: At Least President Bush Was Sincere About Afghanistan
Mark Helprin: The World Trade Center Mosque and the Constitution
Hayder al-Khoei: Did Iran really do so well out of the Iraq war?
Sunday, September 5, 2010
Jay Brookman: Recasting Bush as the hero of Iraq is taking things much too far
Source: Atlanta Journal-Constitution (8-31-10)
[Jay Bookman is a columnist and blogger at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.]
...“Some Americans ask me, if completing the mission is so important, why don’t you send more troops?” Bush said in a typical speech in 2005. “If our commanders on the ground say we need more troops, I will send them. But our commanders tell me they have the number of troops they need to do their job. Sending more Americans would undermine our strategy of encouraging Iraqis to take the lead in this fight.”
Look, I’m not trying to dredge up ancient disputes here, and I’m not looking for another chance to bash the ex-president. He has left office, and history will now reach its own verdict on his leadership and judgment. I’m fine with that. I will also acknowledge, as I have in the past, that the 2007 surge and the change in military leadership that Bush finally implemented were more successful in rebuilding security than I and many others, including Barack Obama, had expected at the time. As I also noted earlier today, Obama doesn’t deserve a huge amount of credit for this withdrawal process, because he has merely followed the timeline set by Bush.
For that and many other reasons, it was perfectly appropriate for Obama to call Bush today as a matter of courtesy, and I hope and expect that the president will treat his predecessor with grace in tonight’s remarks.
All that said, however, it is also impossible to sit silently by while the Republicans try to rewrite a history that remains so fresh in so many minds. The invasion of Iraq was not a triumph of the Bush years, it was his greatest single mistake and probably the single greatest foreign-policy blunder in U.S. history.
Paul Moses: Islamophobia and Anti-Catholocism
Source: Commonweal (8-26-10)
[Paul Moses teaches journalism at Brooklyn College and CUNY Graduate School of Journalism.]
For the past few months, I’ve been doing some research in New York newspapers on the anti-Catholic vitriol the Irish faced in the nineteenth century. It’s been hard to avoid noticing how similar those attacks are to the biting comments being made against Islam and the backers of a Muslim community center proposed for a lower Manhattan building near the World Trade Center site.
Look, for example, at just one day in the city’s history: Sunday, October 31, 1880. All the “right” people—former President Ulysses S. Grant, for example—filled the pews of Protestant churches to hear accusations from a multitude of ministers that the pope was poised to take over New York if William R. Grace, a Democrat, was elected several days later as the city’s first Catholic mayor.
At Central Methodist Episcopal Church on Fourteenth Street, the Rev. J. P. Newman argued that if Grace was a good Catholic (he attended daily Mass), he was unfit to be mayor. “The Catholic candidate for Mayor is the shadow of a man who is the shadow of another man,” he said, meaning the pope.
At Washington Square Methodist Church, the Rev. W. F. Hatfield proclaimed, “The Roman hierarchy should be dealt such a blow at this time that its encroaching power in this city will be destroyed.”
At the Church of the Disciples of Christ on 28th Street near Broadway, the Rev. Joseph Bradford Cleaver spoke under the title "Crucifix Smiting the Cross; or shall the Papacy govern New York City?" He was among those who saw the opening of the magnificent new St. Patrick's Cathedral on Fifth Avenue in midtown Manhattan the previous year as a dangerous sign of Catholic power and warned that Cardinal John McCloskey, who was "enthroned" there, would rule America as the pope’s viceroy and bring on a new Inquisition if Grace were elected mayor.
At the Church of the Holy Trinity at Madison Avenue and 42nd Street, Rev. Stephen H. Tyng Jr. insisted that the pope would take over New York’s public schools.
A few voices tried to respond. In his homily on the Sunday before the 1880 election, the Rev. Michael J. O’Farrell, pastor of St. Peter’s Roman Catholic Church on Barclay Street, maintained, "The man who declares it to be a Protestant country is a traitor to the Constitution." The pastor said he would have voted for a Jewish candidate who was subjected to religious attacks (and seven hundred Jews rallied on the Lower East Side that evening to protest against those who sought to defeat Grace because he was a Catholic).
Andrew Malcolm: War is hell on presidents' approval ratings
Source: Los Angeles Times (9-4-10)
[Andrew Malcolm is a columnist for the Los Angeles Times.]
No wonder President Obama used only his second Oval Office address to get the Iraq war so publicly off the domestic debate table just nine weeks before his first midterm elections.
He even flew Vice President Joe Biden over for another quick tour of duty in Baghdad to underline for the public (media) the occasion of the end of U.S. combat operations — officially, at least, since 50,000 U.S. troops remain there.
Wizard Gary Langer, the chief numbers-crunching consultant over at ABC News, has been tracking the effect of unpopular wars on presidential approvals. Not surprising, not good.
Harry Truman (Korea) lost 25 points during his conflict. Lyndon Johnson (Vietnam) dropped 32. And George W. Bush ( Iraq) plummeted 43. Even without formal wars, foreign incidents can pummel pols back home; just ask helpless President Carter about the Iranian hostage crisis that helpfully elected Ronald Reagan in 1980.
Four years into peacetime, albeit during the Cold War, Truman had 54% approval in 1949. That fell to the high 20s by 1952, forcing Truman to abandon any reelection plans. Same for LBJ, whose approval slipped to 42% from 74%, causing him to give up on renomination in 1968.
Bush's approvals began up in the 70s, helping him to become only the second president (after FDR) in modern times to increase his party's membership during initial midterms. Eventually, of course, they fell right down there with Truman's. The difference was, because of his team's political skills and John Kerry's campaign ineptness in 2004, Bush already had a second term in the bank before he hit bottom.
Bush's war unpopularity did, however, contribute to the Democrats' recapturing both houses of Congress in 2006 after a 12-year GOP siege. Continuing Bush disenchantment, a lethargic John McCain campaign and Wall Street terror mixed with Obama's millions and magic mouth to grow the Democratic majority even larger in 2008, and also secure the White House.
So, this time it's Obama's turn. Now that he's made the Afghan conflict his own with two surges and three commanders, is he a Carter or a Bush? Obama's approvals began high like Bush's but have now cratered dangerously close to Lyndon Johnson's when he abandoned a reelection bid. Johnson's low, of course, came in the tumultuous election year of 1968 with virulent antiwar fervor.
Albert Hunt: Beck's Pitch Channels Depression-Era Invective
Source: Bloomberg (9-5-10)
[Albert R. Hunt is the executive editor for Washington at Bloomberg News.]
Glenn Beck, at his successful “Restoring America” rally in Washington, wrapped himself in the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. He fits much better with another religious-political figure, the late Charles E. Coughlin, the Catholic priest who led a populist-right crusade against President Franklin Roosevelt in the 1930s.
Beck and King, the erudite civil-rights legend, share little in common. Beck and Coughlin share a great deal: as mesmerizing broadcasters able to articulate the anger and frustration of a flock frightened by economic hard times.
“There are a lot of parallels between Coughlin and Beck,” says Michael Kazin, a professor at Georgetown University in Washington who wrote a book about American populism of the left and right, including a section on the Catholic priest. “They both speak the language of rebellion against the establishment and to bring America back to God, citing a golden era of the past.”
Beck, 46, dismisses these comparisons, citing their differences. Yet substitute Coughlin’s animus for Jews, communists and Franklin Roosevelt for Beck’s toward Muslims, socialists and Barack Obama and the similarities seem greater....
Friday, September 3, 2010
Andrew Leonard: The key to economic growth? Stealing
Source: Salon (8-19-10)
[Andrew Leonard is a staff writer at Salon.]
Der Spiegel alerts us to important news:
Sigismund Hermbstadt ... a chemistry and pharmacy professor in Berlin, who has long since disappeared into the oblivion of history, earned more royalties for his "Principles of Leather Tanning" published in 1806 than British author Mary Shelley did for her horror novel "Frankenstein," which is still famous today.
The explanation for this tidbit may at first seem counterintuitive. In the first half of the 19th century, reports Der Spiegel, relying on the research of economic historian Eckhard Hoffner, Germany paid little attention to copyright law, in sharp contrast to Great Britain. The result, argues Hoffner, was a tremendous increase in the amount of published materials, particularly regarding scientific and technical knowledge, made available to the German public. Less regard for intelletectual property translated into a bigger market for producers of content.
Thursday, September 2, 2010
Steve Kornacki: The GOP's new fake racial history
Source: http://www.salon.com/news/politics/war_room/2010/09/02/haley_barbour_race_history/ (9-2-10)
[Steve Kornacki is Salon's news editor.]
Almost 50 years ago, the Republican Party made a decision to embrace the backlash generated by civil rights among white Southerners.
Traditionally, they had been staunch Democrats, but they were also culturally conservative, and as Lyndon Johnson and the Democratic Party embraced civil rights once and for all, they were up for grabs. The Republican Party offered them a home, a steady, decades-long realignment ensued, and today conservative Southern whites comprise the heart of the GOP -- just as culturally liberal Northerners, who called the GOP home before civil rights, have migrated to the Democratic Party.
There's nothing new about this story. In fact, it's the story LBJ himself predicted when he signed the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and supposedly mused, "There goes the South for a generation."
But it's an inconvenient story for today's Republican Party, which still relies on cultural, racial and ethnic wedge issues to keep its base in line -- but which also needs to win over less conservative suburbanites across the country to compete in national elections. And it's a particularly inconvenient story for Haley Barbour, the 62-year-old Mississippi governor who aspires to run as the Republican nominee against the nation's first black president.
Wednesday, September 1, 2010
Alyssa Battistoni: Glenn Beck's revisionist, apolitical history
Source: Salon (8-27-10)
[Alyssa Battistoni is a writer and graduate student in geography and environment at Oxford University.]
...By invoking great American leaders in a call for apolitical heroism, Beck seeks to whitewash the political struggles and debates of earlier eras: to suggest that our finest leaders have always been above politics, and that to achieve their greatness, we need to rise above politics and do "the right thing."
It's certainly true that Franklin, Jefferson, Washington, Lincoln, King were great orators, philosophers, writers and leaders. But they were also great politicians, and to pretend otherwise is to disown the most enduring legacy of American history: that political expression, action and leadership are essential to the health of our democracy.
Benjamin Franklin was not only an eccentric, bespectacled paragon of virtue and wit, but also an active politician whose career included a stint as a speaker of the Pennsylvania Assembly during which he fought the Penn family for control of the then-colony.
Thomas Jefferson was not only an eloquent writer and great philosopher, but also an ambitious political schemer. During his time as Washington’s secretary of state, Jefferson fought bitterly with Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton over fiscal policy and political philosophy, even seeking, unsuccessfully, to remove Hamilton from office through accusations of corruption and ineptitude. Hamilton’s Federalist Papers, now part of the core curriculum of high school American history classes, were essentially political propaganda, the product of the fierce battles waged between Jefferson and Hamilton in the newspapers and pamphlets that constituted the chief media outlets of the day.
George Washington, however revered, was unable to bring about peace in his Cabinet, and privately worried: "I do not see how the Reins of Government are to be managed, or how the Union of the States can be much longer preserved." Washington, who disliked political parties and political maneuvering, is the only one of Beck’s heroes to whom the term "apolitical" can even remotely be applied. But still, he sided with Hamilton more often than not and feared Jefferson’s rise to power after his resignation.
Abraham Lincoln was politically ambitious, and agonized over his political defeats. He was a product of the party system and an important figure in the Whig Party first, and then the Republican Party. Lincoln used his legendary debating skills to make brilliant -- and political -- arguments against slavery and the dissolution of the Union. But his position on slavery evolved gradually in response to shifting political conditions: He initially opposed only the extension of slavery to new Western states, and only endorsed emancipation outright once he believed it necessary for the restoration of the Union....
Norman Solomon: A Speech for Endless War
Source: Media Beat (column) (9-1-10)
[Norman Solomon is the author of many books including “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.” He is co-chair of the Healthcare Not Warfare campaign, launched by Progressive Democrats of America.]
On the last night of August, the president used an Oval Office speech to boost a policy of perpetual war.
Hours later, the New York Times front page offered a credulous gloss for the end of “the seven-year American combat mission in Iraq.” The first sentence of the coverage described the speech as saying “that it is now time to turn to pressing problems at home.” The story went on to assert that Obama “used the moment to emphasize that he sees his primary job as addressing the weak economy and other domestic issues -- and to make clear that he intends to begin disengaging from the war in Afghanistan next summer.”
But the speech gave no real indication of a shift in priorities from making war to creating jobs. And the oratory “made clear” only the repetition of vague vows to “begin” disengaging from the Afghanistan war next summer. In fact, top administration officials have been signaling that only token military withdrawals are apt to occur in mid-2011, and Obama said nothing to the contrary.
While now trumpeting the nobility of an Iraq war effort that he’d initially disparaged as “dumb,” Barack Obama is polishing a halo over the Afghanistan war, which he touts as very smart. In the process, the Oval Office speech declared that every U.S. war -- no matter how mendacious or horrific -- is worthy of veneration.
Obama closed the speech with a tribute to “an unbroken line of heroes” stretching “from Khe Sanh to Kandahar -- Americans who have fought to see that the lives of our children are better than our own.” His reference to the famous U.S. military outpost in South Vietnam was a chilling expression of affinity for another march of folly.
With his commitment to war in Afghanistan, President Obama is not only on the wrong side of history. He is also now propagating an exculpatory view of any and all U.S. war efforts -- as if the immoral can become the magnificent by virtue of patriotic alchemy.
A century ago, William Dean Howells wrote: “What a thing it is to have a country that can’t be wrong, but if it is, is right, anyway!”
During the presidency of George W. Bush, “the war on terror” served as a rationale for establishing warfare as a perennial necessity. The Obama administration may have shelved the phrase, but the basic underlying rationales are firmly in place. With American troop levels in Afghanistan near 100,000, top U.S. officials are ramping up rhetoric about “taking the fight to” the evildoers.
The day before the Oval Office speech, presidential spokesman Robert Gibbs talked to reporters about “what this drawdown means to our national security efforts in Afghanistan and Southeast Asia and around the world as we take the fight to Al Qaeda.”
The next morning, Obama declared at Fort Bliss: “A lot of families are now being touched in Afghanistan. We’ve seen casualties go up because we’re taking the fight to Al Qaeda and the Taliban and their allies.” And, for good measure, Obama added that “now, under the command of Gen. Petraeus, we have the troops who are there in a position to start taking the fight to the terrorists.”
If, nine years after 9/11, we are supposed to believe that U.S. forces can now “start” taking the fight to “the terrorists,” this is truly war without end. And that’s the idea.
Nearly eight years ago, in November 2002, retired U.S. Army Gen. William Odom appeared on C-SPAN’s “Washington Journal” program and told viewers: “Terrorism is not an enemy. It cannot be defeated. It's a tactic. It's about as sensible to say we declare war on night attacks and expect we're going to win that war. We're not going to win the war on terrorism."
With his Aug. 31 speech, Obama became explicit about the relationship between reduced troop levels in Iraq and escalation in Afghanistan. “We will disrupt, dismantle, and defeat Al Qaeda, while preventing Afghanistan from again serving as a base for terrorists,” he said. “And because of our drawdown in Iraq, we are now able to apply the resources necessary to go on offense.” This is the approach of endless war.
While Obama was declaring that “our most urgent task is to restore our economy and put the millions of Americans who have lost their jobs back to work,” I went to a National Priorities Project webpage and looked at cost-of-war counters spinning like odometers in manic overdrive. The figures for the “Cost of War in Afghanistan” -- already above $329 billion -- are now spinning much faster than the ones for war in Iraq. [www.costofwar.com]
One day in March 1969, a Nobel Prize-winning biologist spoke at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “Our government has become preoccupied with death,” George Wald said, “with the business of killing and being killed.” More than four decades later, how much has really changed?
Stephen M. Walt: Whitewashing the failure in Iraq
Source: Foreign Policy (8-31-10)
[Stephen M. Walt is the Robert and Renée Belfer professor of international relations at Harvard University.]
On the eve of President Obama's speech to the nation on Iraq, some of the people who dreamed up this foolish war or helped persuade the nation that it was a good idea are getting out their paintbrushes and whitewash. I refer, of course, to the twin op-eds in today's New York Times by former Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and neoconservative columnist David Brooks.
Wolfowitz, you will recall, was one of the main architects of the war, having pushed the invasion during the 1990s and as soon as he became Deputy Secretary of Defense in the Bush adminstration. He was the guy who recommended invading Iraq four days after 9/11, even though Osama bin Laden was nowhere near Iraq and there was no evidence that Saddam Hussein had anything to do with it. For his part, Brooks was an enthusiastic cheerleader for the war in the months prior to the invasion, and he continued to defend it long after the original rationale had been exposed as a sham.
The main thrust of Wolfowitz's column is that the United States should remain in Iraq for as long as it takes to yield a "stable country." His analogy is to Korea, where the United States has stationed troops for nearly sixty years. Of course, Wolfowitz ignores the fact that our role in Korea was defensive: we entered the Korean War after North Korea invaded the South (with Soviet help), and we did so with the full authorization of the U.N. Security Council. In Iraq, by contrast, the United States went to war on the basis of bogus evidence, as part of a grand scheme to "transform" the entire Middle East.
Staying in Korea was also part of the broader strategy of containment, which made good sense in that historical epoch. The Soviet Union was a serious great power adversary and North Korea was a close Soviet ally, and there was every reason to think the North might try again if South Korea were left on its own. By contrast, maintaining a semi-permanent military presence in Iraq isn't going to contain anyone, and it is precisely that sort of on-the-ground interference that fuels jihadi narratives about nefarious Western plans to dominate Muslim lands...
Simon Tisdall: Sorry General Petraeus, Iraq and Afghanistan are only too similar
Source: Guardian (UK) (9-1-10)
[Simon Tisdall is an assistant editor of the Guardian and a foreign affairs columnist.]
General David Petraeus, who commanded US forces in Iraq and does so now in Afghanistan, argues the two conflicts differ in key respects. But it was plain from Barack Obama's Oval office speech yesterday that, in the president's mind at least, there are some basic similarities. That's a shift from his 2008 campaign when he contrasted Afghanistan, the "necessary war", with Iraq – George Bush's "war of choice".
Announcing an end to combat operations in Iraq, Obama reiterated his determination to end "open-ended war" in Afghanistan too, by beginning a troop drawdown next summer. "As was the case in Iraq, we can't do for Afghans what they must ultimately do for themselves. That's why we're training Afghan security forces and supporting a political resolution," he said.
Obama drew a parallel with Petraeus's successful 2007 Iraq surge – he gave no credit to Bush – and his own decision to send reinforcements to Afghanistan. "I've ordered the deployment of additional troops ... who are fighting to break the Taliban's momentum. As with the surge in Iraq, these forces will be in place for a limited time to provide space for the Afghans to ... secure their own future."
Politically speaking, these foreign entanglements formed part of Bush's unlovely, unavoidable legacy. But Obama's uneasiness, some would say queasiness, over this poisoned inheritance was evident from the start...
Brad Hirschfeld: Who's Your Nazi?
Source: Washington Post (8-27-10)
[Brad Hirschfeld is an author, rabbi, and columnist for the Washington Post.]
We seem to have a love affair with comparisons to Nazis and Hitler these days, at least when it comes to finding analogies for those with whom we disagree. Some cause or policy we oppose? Compare it to Nazism. Some people whose actions disturb us? Compare them to Hitler. An event that appalls us? It's a Holocaust.
This practice of comparing people and things to Nazis and the Holocaust has been especially noticeable in the controversy surrounding the mosque/community center being planned for the area near the site of the former World Trade Center. Most recently, Newt Gingrich compared the project's backers to Nazis when he declared that they should be blocked from putting up the building, just as Nazis would be barred from "putting up a sign" next to the United States Holocaust Museum and Memorial in the nation's capitol.
The making of such comparisons, however, is not limited to famous and powerful people, who use it for effect in the news. Comparisons to Nazis are tossed off by regular folks just as easily. Witness the recent community meeting on New York's Staten Island - a meeting also devoted to the construction of a mosque, this one on the grounds of a former Catholic church.
Some in attendance at the meeting referred to the need to resist the building of the proposed Islamic center because, "this was the community's D-Day". We all know who the opposition was in the epic battle and once again, comparing those with whom someone diagrees to Nazis was the popular way to go. But such comparisons are not limited to a single issue or party, and they are not a particularly recent phenomenon either.
Last fall, Florida Democrat, Congressman Alan Grayson described the American health care system as a Holocaust. Apparently the congressman failed to distinguish between what many think of as a fatally flawed system for providing medical care and one of the most efficiently run systems, carefully implemented, for the total destruction of entire groups of human beings.
Not to be outdone, Republicans answered back some weeks later with a video in which Adolph Hitler was shown declaring, through creative dubbing, the pleasure he takes in Nancy Pelosi being on his side. I guess the Republicans were not distressed by callous and casual comparisons to the Holocaust and Nazis, as they originally claimed, but simply by who was being compared to them.
My response? We should simply say a pox on both your houses. We are done listening to anyone who makes these ugly and inaccurate comparisons, regardless of whether or not we happen to agree with the policy positions of those who make them....
Simon Jenkins: A trillion-dollar catastrophe. Yes, Iraq was a headline war
Source: Guardian (UK) (8-31-10)
[Simon Jenkins is a journalist and author.]
Today the Iraq war was declared over by Barack Obama. As his troops return home, Iraqis are marginally freer than in 2003, and considerably less secure. Two million remain abroad as refugees from seven years of anarchy, with another 2 million internally displaced. Ironically, almost all Iraqi Christians have had to flee. Under western rule, production of oil – Iraq's staple product – is still below its pre-invasion level, and homes enjoy fewer hours of electricity. This is dreadful.
Some 100,000 civilians are estimated to have lost their lives from occupation-related violence. The country has no stable government, minimal reconstruction, and daily deaths and kidnappings. Endemic corruption is fuelled by unaudited aid. Increasing Islamist rule leaves most women less, not more, liberated. All this is the result of a mind-boggling $751bn of US expenditure, surely the worst value for money in the history of modern diplomacy.
Most failed "liberal" interventions since the second world war at least started with good intentions. Vietnam was to defend a non-communist nation against Chinese expansionism. Lebanon was to protect a pluralist country from a grasping neighbour. Somalia was to repair a failed state.
In Iraq the casus belli was a lie, perpetrated by George Bush and his meek amanuensis, Tony Blair. Saddam Hussein was accused of association with 9/11, and of plotting further attacks with long-range weapons of "mass destruction". Since this was revealed as untrue, the fallback deployed by apologists for Bush and Blair is that Saddam was a bad man and so toppling him was good.
The proper way to assess any war is not some crude "before and after" statistic, but to conjecture the consequence of it not taking place...
Tuesday, August 31, 2010
Bob Herbert: We Owe the Troops an Exit
Source: New York Times (8-30-10)
[Bob Herbert is a columnist for the New York Times.]
Wars are not problems that need managing, which suggests that they will always be with us. They are catastrophes that need to be brought to an end as quickly as possible. Wars consume lives by the thousands (in Iraq, by the scores of thousands) and sometimes, as in World War II, by the millions. The goal when fighting any war should be peace, not a permanent simmer of nonstop maiming and killing. Wars are meant to be won — if they have to be fought at all — not endlessly looked after.
One of the reasons we’re in this state of nonstop warfare is the fact that so few Americans have had any personal stake in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. There is no draft and no direct financial hardship resulting from the wars. So we keep shipping other people’s children off to combat as if they were some sort of commodity, like coal or wheat, with no real regard for the terrible price so many have to pay, physically and psychologically.
Not only is this tragic, it is profoundly disrespectful. These are real men and women, courageous and mostly uncomplaining human beings, that we are sending into the war zones, and we owe them our most careful attention. Above all, we owe them an end to two wars that have gone on much too long.
Paul D. Wolfowitz: In Korea, a Model for Iraq
Source: NYT (8-30-10)
[Paul D. Wolfowitz, a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, was the deputy secretary of defense from 2001 to 2005.]
Vice President Joe Biden, who traveled to Iraq this week to mark the formal end of United States combat operations there, has claimed that peace and stability there could be “one of the great achievements” of the Obama administration. Of course, the largest share of credit belongs to the brave men and women of the American military, who have sacrificed so much and persevered through so much difficulty. Credit also goes to the Iraqi Army and police forces who have fought bravely and increasingly well, and to Iraq’s people, who have borne a heavy burden. But it is good that President Obama and his administration also claim credit, because success in Iraq will need their support.
My hope is that the president understands that success in Iraq will be defined not by what we withdraw, but by what we leave behind. At a minimum, we need Iraq to be a stable country, at peace both within its borders and with its neighbors. And we should help Iraq to one day become a leader of political and economic progress in the Middle East.
The aftermath of another American war is instructive. Fifty-seven years ago, an armistice ended the fighting in Korea — another unpopular conflict, far bloodier than the Iraq war, although shorter. Civilian casualties were horrendous, and the United States and its allies suffered more than half a million military casualties. The South Korean Army took the heaviest losses, but the United States also paid a high price: 33,739 killed or missing in battle and 103,284 wounded.
Gen. Dwight Eisenhower won the 1952 presidential election, in part, on a promise to end the war. According to a poll taken in April 1953, three months before the armistice was signed, 55 percent of the American public thought the war had not been worth fighting, whereas only 36 percent thought that it had.
Yet when the war was over, the United States did not abandon South Korea...
David Rieff: At Least President Bush Was Sincere About Afghanistan
Source: New Republic (8-31-10)
[David Rieff is the author of eight books, including A Bed for the Night: Humanitarianism in Crisis.]
When President Obama named his cabinet, people harkened back to Lincoln and said that he had assembled a team of rivals. To put it charitably, this is an exaggeration. Lincoln brought not just his principal rival, William Seward, into his cabinet as secretary of state, he also brought in his two other main contenders for the Republican nomination for president in 1860. Salmon Chase, the party’s greatest and most uncompromising foe of slavery and an unjustly neglected American hero, was made secretary of the treasury, while Edward Bates became attorney general. In contrast, President Obama named only one rival to his cabinet, Hillary Clinton, and the ideological differences between them were far narrower than the ones that separated Lincoln from his rivals.
A more accurate account would describe the foreign policy of this administration as the work not of a team of rivals but of a coalition government, with, in effect, the president having subcontracted foreign policy to Mrs. Clinton and to Secretary of Defense Gates. An intermittent passivity has been a hallmark of this president from the moment the he stopped campaigning and started to try to govern. Nowhere is it more evident than in the conduct of foreign policy generally, and especially in the conduct of the wars in which the United States is now engaged. But the president is, as the cliché goes, the commander-in-chief. He cannot subcontract; when he tries to do so, the proper expression for what he is doing is abdicating his duty.
There is an old Washington adage that every administration will sooner or later make you nostalgic for its predecessor. I am not yet willing to go that far, if only because of Guantanamo and Katrina, which I do not believe it is hyperbole to say were crimes, not simply policy mistakes or errors in judgment. But the Obama administration’s simultaneous commitment to prosecuting the war in Afghanistan and its inability to define the end state that it is hoping to achieve there in any way that makes strategic let alone moral sense, does make one think of frying pans and fires. I feared George Bush’s strategic vision, and believed that it would lead the United States to disaster. But at least he had one. And there was nothing cynical about President Bush’s moral ambitions. However wrongheaded, at least he was sincere.
Obviously, sincerity is not everything. But insincerity is less than nothing...
Stephen Hadley: Why We Fought and What We Achieved
Source: WSJ (8-31-10)
[Mr. Hadley was national security adviser to President Bush from 2005-2009.]
The U.S. effort in Iraq is not over. Some 50,000 U.S. troops, together with a robust diplomatic presence, continue to train and assist Iraq's security forces and support its democratic progress. The American people, our coalition allies and especially the Iraqi people have paid an enormous price. It is important to remember why.
For over two decades, the regime of Saddam Hussein had threatened the national security of the United States, its key allies and the stability of the Middle East. It had invaded some of its neighbors (Iran and Kuwait) and threatened others (including Saudi Arabia and Israel). It had produced weapons of mass destruction, used them on its own people and the people of Iran, and threatened to use them against others.
It had actively supported terrorist groups of various stripes. It had brutalized and suppressed its own people. It had invaded Kuwait without provocation, leading to the 1991 Gulf War. It had violated the terms of the cease-fire agreement that ended that war. And it had defied the will of the international community by violating no fewer than 16 U.N. Security Council resolutions condemning its activities and calling on it to stop them.
From a national security perspective, the U.S. objective for a post-Saddam Iraq was an Iraqi government that would not pursue weapons of mass destruction, invade its neighbors, support terror, or oppress its people. That objective has been achieved. The governments that have followed Saddam—and those that are likely to govern going forward—have and will continue to meet these criteria because the Iraqi people have concluded that doing so is in their interest.
The U.S. objective was also to leave behind an Iraq that would be able to govern itself, defend itself, sustain itself and be an ally in the war on terror. That objective has also been achieved...
Mark Helprin: The World Trade Center Mosque and the Constitution
Source: WSJ (8-30-10)
[Mr. Helprin, a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute, is the author of, among other works, "Winter's Tale" (Harcourt), "A Soldier of the Great War" (Harcourt) and, most recently, "Digital Barbarism" (HarperCollins).]
The plan to erect a mosque of major proportions in what would have been the shadow of the World Trade Center involves not just the indisputable constitutional rights that sanction it, but, providentially, others that may frustrate it.
Mosques have commemoratively been established upon the ruins or in the shells of the sacred buildings of other religions—most notably but not exclusively in Cordoba, Jerusalem, Istanbul, and India. When sited in this fashion they are monuments to victory, and the chief objection to this one is not to its existence but that it would be near the site of atrocities—not just one—closely associated with mosques because they were planned and at times celebrated in them.
Building close to Ground Zero disregards the passions, grief and preferences not only of most of the families of September 11th but, because we are all the families of September 11th, those of the American people as well, even if not the whole of the American people. If the project is to promote moderate Islam, why have its sponsors so relentlessly, without the slightest compromise, insisted upon such a sensitive and inflammatory setting? That is not moderate. It is aggressively militant.
Disregarding pleas to build it at a sufficient remove so as not to be linked to an abomination committed, widely praised, and throughout the world seldom condemned in the name of Islam, the militant proponents of the World Trade Center mosque are guilty of a poorly concealed provocation. They dare Americans to appear anti-Islamic and intolerant or just to roll over.
But the opposition to what they propose is no more anti-Islamic or intolerant than to protest a Shinto shrine at Pearl Harbor or Nanjing would be anti-Shinto or even anti-Japanese. How about a statue of Wagner at Auschwitz, a Russian war memorial in the Katyn Forest, or a monument to British and American air power at Dresden?..
Hayder al-Khoei: Did Iran really do so well out of the Iraq war?
Source: Guardian (UK) (8-29-10)
[Hayder al-Khoei is a researcher at the Centre for Academic Shi'a Studies in London.]
Many people argue the biggest winner of the 2003 Iraq war is neighbouring Iran. The American-led forces removed one of Iran's bitterest enemies, Saddam Hussein, and paved the way for successive Shia-dominated governments in Baghdad. The Iranians have not shied away from interfering in domestic Iraqi affairs and the power vacuum created by the American administration in Iraq gave them ample room to flex their muscles.
Several Shia political parties have been established and funded in Tehran, or have been given safe haven in Iran. Weapons, military training, millions of dollars and protection have been gifted to these parties and their armed militias, and these valuable resources were used to consolidate their grip on power in Iraq following the demise of the Ba'athist regime.
The Americans, on the other hand, spent over a trillion dollars, lost more than 4,000 people, tarnished their reputation in the region and failed to control Iraq's oil wealth. The Iranians, so the argument goes, have outplayed the Americans in this game of chess.
Proponents of this argument are forgetting one vital ingredient that Iraq has and Iran lacks. Democracy...
Richard Cohen: In the Middle East, it's still 1947
Source: WaPo (8-31-10)
[Richard Cohen is a syndicated columnist for the Washington Post.]
Say what you will about the Arab world, it's hard to earn its gratitude. President Obama went to Egypt and not Israel. He demanded that Israel cease adding new settlements in the West Bank. He treated Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu with a chilling disdain. For all of that, though, Obama's approval rating in Arab countries has sunk. Unlike almost a fifth of Americans, the Arab world clearly knows Obama is no Muslim.
The polls show some startling numbers. When this spring the Pew Global Attitudes Project asked residents of Islamic countries what they thought about Obama, he got good marks when it came to such matters as climate change. But when the question was the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the numbers not only declined in Indonesia and Turkey, they nearly went through the floor in the three Arab countries polled. In Jordan, 84 percent disapproved of the way Obama was handling the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In Egypt, the figure was 88 percent and in Lebanon it was 90 percent.
For Obama, the figures must be disheartening. They strongly suggest that his attempt to woo the Arab world, to convince it that America can be an honest broker between Israel and the Palestinians, has dismally failed. In fact, the extent of this failure is most stark in Lebanon. There, 100 percent of Shiite respondents -- in other words, Hezbollah and others -- have no faith in Obama and his good intentions. This may be a setback for Obama, but it is paradoxically a success for American values.
What the Arab world seems to appreciate is that America will never agree to what the Arab world most wants -- an Islamic state where a Jewish one now exists. This entirely reasonable conclusion is based on what has long been American policy -- not what the State Department wanted but what the American people supported. America has always liked the idea of Israel. The Arab world, for totally understandable reasons, has always hated it. Nothing has changed...
Monday, August 30, 2010
Edward E. Curtis IV: Five Myths About Mosques in America
Source: The Washington Post (8-29-10)
[Edward E. Curtis IV is millennium chair of liberal arts at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis.]
Mosques have been here since the colonial era. A mosque, or masjid, is literally any place where Muslims make salat, the prayer performed in the direction of Mecca; it needn't be a building. One of the first mosques in North American history was on Kent Island, Md.: Between 1731 and 1733, African American Muslim slave and Islamic scholar Job Ben Solomon, a cattle driver, would regularly steal away to the woods there for his prayers -- in spite of a white boy who threw dirt on him as he made his prostrations.
The Midwest was home to the greatest number of permanent U.S. mosques in the first half of the 20th century. In 1921, Sunni, Shiite and Ahmadi Muslims in Detroit celebrated the opening of perhaps the first purpose-built mosque in the nation. Funded by real estate developer Muhammad Karoub, it was just blocks away from Henry Ford's Highland Park automobile factory, which employed hundreds of Arab American men.
Most Midwestern mosques blended into their surroundings. The temples or mosques of the Nation of Islam -- an indigenous form of Islam led by Elijah Muhammad from 1934 to 1975 -- were often converted storefronts and churches. In total, mosques numbered perhaps slightly more than 100 nationwide in 1970. In the last three decades of the 20th century, however, more than 1 million new Muslim immigrants came to the United States and, in tandem with their African American co-religionists, opened hundreds more mosques. Today there are more than 2,000 places of Muslim prayer, most of them mosques, in the United States....
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