Letter From The Capitol

Iraq: Maliki Enters Our 2008 Race

Iraqi PM Nuri al-Maliki is playing a dangerous game, supporting both Obama's "troops out by 2010" + McCain's George M. Cohan "Over There" Iraq policy--"and we're not coming home 'til it's over over there!"  Charles Krauthammer speculates that Maliki thinks, once gain, that his troops will be ready to hold the fort by then, despite a record of prior miscalculations as to the readiness of Iraqi troops to take the lead.  Perhaps, or perhaps Maliki merely wishes to avoid being seen as favoring either candidate, as he does not know who will win.

Worse for McCain, argues Jonah Goldberg, Big Mac cannot win using the surge, as its success takes it off the table as a political issue.  This, of course, is what happened to Britain's wartime Prime Minister, Winston Churchill; voters chose Labor Party leader Clement Atlee in July 1945, and Churchill was recalled halfway through the Potsdam peace parley.  Goldberg says Mac must look ahead; presumably, this means Iran & Afghanistan, not Iraq, are the foreign policy election keys.

Obama, incredibly, stuck to his guns about opposing the surge, a strategy that, to anyone intellectually sentient and not imprisoned by ideology or a political base white-hot over Iraq, clearly succeeded in creating the secure space that was universally understood as a predicate for political reform, now well underway.  We are to believe that without the surge, a negotiations strategy as championed by the Iraq Study Group would have reached the same result via a regional parley.  Iran and Syria, which had been destabilizing Iraq, would suddenly discover the virtue of a stable Iraq if we left, and given America a graceful exit, head held high.  Right.  And Madonna will give up all her dough and relocate to a desert island.

Yet Obama, at his July 22 press conference in Amman (hard to follow because there was no microphone picking up questions), tacked toward Mac by conceding that yes, the surge has produced positive results.  So as Obama narrows the distance between his position and Mac's, Maliki can safely draw away from Mac & Bush 43 and closer to Obama.  Perhaps Mac's best hope, then, is that Obama continues to say that although the surge succeeded he still would have opposed it from the start.  If enough voters digest that one, Obama's halo--what is left of it--could disappear for the mass of voters in the center.

There is a more straightforward solution: Obama should pick Maliki as his vice-presidential running mate.

Pakistan: Democracy Disappoints

Con Coughlin pinpoints the Achilles' heel of democracy promotion: unhelpful democratic leaders.  Pakistan's coalition government is not fighting the terrorists.  Now, Pervez Musharraf was no bargain, either, and the United States could not simply place its entire wager on Musharraf.  Fact is, we had no good options in Pakistan, a grim reality that will prevail for the foreseeable future.

Dancing Around Death in Darfur

A Wall Street Journal editorial dismisses the indictment of Sudan's president for war crimes, noting that the indictment will accomplish little. The WSJ notes, rightly, that only regime change will make Sudan's thug-leader accountable.

Which brings us to a realization: International law is a set of unilateral constraints adopted by western countries, and ignored by the world's evil regimes.  Unless someone puts a bullet between the eyes of thugs misruling their countries, nothing will happen, or regime change comes about peacefully (as in South Africa, where white leader F. W. DeKlerk's acceptance of change made Nelson Mandela's triumph possible), nothing will happen.  But what of Nuremberg, you ask?  Nuremberg's trials came after the Holocaust, punishing some Nazis who perpetrated it; stopping it was the work of allied troops.

Russia: "Henry the K" Speaks

Henry Kissinger writes in the Washington Post that beliefs that Tsar Vlad the Bad has completed a coup are premature.  New President Dmitri Medvedev is, in HK's view, no Putin puppet.  HK argues that America should--he is more polite but I shall be blunt--shut up, lest its public pronouncements spur Russian nationalist fervor.  Russia, HK writes, finds stronger neighbors, and faces three issues: security, Iran, and Russia's border countries (the "Near Abroad").  His strongest, most credible warning: Do not put Ukraine into NATO--EU, yes, but not a military alliance.  Ukraine should be "Finlandized"--like Finland during the Cold War, whose foreign policy was subject to Moscow's veto.  This is reasonable realism.  Keep Ukraine free, and do not expect it to be a military spearhead.  But I am not as sanguine as HK about Russia's turn.  To be fair, HK has met with Putin numerous times, and has far better and more sources than do I, and far better credentials.  Stay tuned.

Caanadian Court Coup

Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water, after Canada's Human Rights Commission dropped its absurd non-case against writer Mark Steyn for allegedly hurting Islamists' feelings, comes now a Canadian judge, who rules that an American Army deserter may have the right to win refugee status.  The case was remanded for further legal proceedings.  Fortunately, the Canadian government stepped in, and will repatriate the deserter.

London's New Mayor: Boris Isn't Boring

Human Events ran a mini-profile of Boris Johnson, London's new, high-octane Conservative mayor.  It's a nice read.  A classics scholar, fluent in Latin & Greek, with press credentials as an EU correspondent for the Daily Telegraph, Johnson is, unlike the Governator, eligible to run for President, as he was born in the Big Apple.

Cross-Hairs for Osama

A Washington Times front-pager informs us that we have a deal with Pakistan that we can shoot on sight if we get Osama in the cross-hairs of a Predator, without obtaining prior clearance from the Pakistani government.  Columnist Robert Novak reports that new Pakistani PM (from Benazir Bhutto's party) Yousef Raza Gillani (sounds like Rudy, doesn't it?) has sidelined President Pervez Musharraf, and is pushing a recalcitrant military to shift from confronting India to fighting Islamists.  This is our only realistic chance to nail Osama and Zawahiri, and it only can work if we can streamline our operation to allow rapid decisions.  Translation: contain the lawyers.  Osama does not play golf.  We will get a brief look only.  Twice already, a knowledgeable source vouchsafed to me, we had Osama in the sights of a Predator, only to lose the chance because we could not decide quickly enough.

Much was made in the NY Times Monday, about how we should have special ops traipsing about ISO Osama.  Anyone who believes this is realistic should first read Lone Survivor, by Navy SEAL Marcus Luttrell.  Parachuted a few years ago with three comrades into the Afghan Highlands ISO an al-Qaeda bigwig, his group was spotted by three goatherds, one a 14-year old boy.  Their evident hostility led the SEALs to weigh killing them to escape detection, but humanity won over.  For that 3 of the 4 SEALs lost their lives, when the goatherds sicced Taliban on them.  Outnumbered about 35 to 1, the SEALs fought with incredible bravery, going down fighting only after being wounded multiple times.  One of their number, Michael Murphy, won the Congressional Medal of Honor for standing up, braving enemy fire, to make a cell call for rescue.  Two others, Matthew Axelson and Danny Dietz, perished, along with Murphy. Luttrell was rescued by friendly tribesmen, sheltered, at great risk to the tribe, and finally picked up by Army Rangers, but not before the first rescue attempt failed, with 8 SEALs killed in a helicopter hit by a Taliban RPG, along with 8 others.  Luttrell, in a scene right out of Hollywood, found himself face to face with the leader whom he was tasked with assassinating, just before departing the village, whose members had sworn, per ancient custom, to protect him to the death.  Luttrell relented, so that the villagers would not be massacred in revenge.  Luttrell, Axelson and Dietz all were awarded the Navy Cross, the service's highest combat decoration.  Meanwhile, dozens of SEALs gravitated to the Luttrell ranch in Texas, awaiting word of Luttrell's fate, standing by his family.

In all, a tale for Hollywood, were Tinseltown not too busy making antiwar flicks on torture, Iraq, rendition, etc.  But it is also a cautionary tale, as to the extreme difficulty of inserting teams to find Osama.  Getting local intel from tribesmen sworn by ancient custom to shelter visitors is well-nigh impossible.  And getting discovered by unfriendly locals is all too possible.

Put your money on the Predator, as our best chance to nail Osama & Zawahiri--if, that is, we can contain the hyper-legalists once and for all.  We cannot get rid of lawyers entirely, but unless their instincts can be restrained they will inflict on any quick-decision assassination window the death of a thousand cuts.

"Suicide Pact" Diplomacy & Law (Here & Abroad)

Columnist Caroline Glick eviscerates the awful hostage swap Israel just made: live terrorists for corpses.  The human desire to give "closure" to the parents of the two Israeli soldiers, Eldad Regev & Ehud Goldwasser, kidnapped two years ago, a kidnapping that ignited the Israeli - Lebanon War of 2006, is understandable.  But the Lebanese terrorist, Samir Kuntar who along with three Hezbollah terrorists wins his utterly undeserved freedom, is contemptible even by standards of a contemptible breed.  Kuntar was jailed for an April 21, 1979 atrocity in which he and four fellow terrorists assaulted an Israeli home--parents and two daughters.  He killed the father, Danny, and 4-month-old daughter, Einat, while the wife, Smadar, hid with her two-year-old daughter, Yael, whom she accidentally suffocated while trying to silence her.  He killed the baby by smashing her head with his rifle butt while she was propped against a rock.  Kuntar is unrepentant and intends to rejoin the fight against the Jewish state.

Media pressure, plus familial pressure, as recounted by Glick, helped push this outrage.  Benny Morris provides added instructive historical context.  All this to get a couple of corpses and thus appease the sentiment of their families.  The cost of is appalling: allowing a butcher who crushed an infant's skull to go free, and thus endangering innocent lives in the future.  Mawkish sentimentality wins again, at the expense of future peril.  Is there a victim's family that will refuse such an empty gesture in the context of this kind of trade?  It may be too much to ask a family to waive concern for relatives who are alive, but on behalf of the dead?  Such sentimentality must amuse our adversaries, and encourage them to try bolder terrorist acts.

Author Melanie Phillips exposes the absurdity of British judges denying the government the ability to deport released (or detained) terrorists to their native countries on the grounds that those countries--usually, Islamic countries that are dictatorships--might harm them upon their return.  So what?  The idea that a Western country is morally or legally obligated to harbor those who seek actively to kill its people, en masse if possible, is stupefying.  We seem unable to tell such folks: If you face problems at home, that is your problem, not ours.

The real-world wages of legalism in the US are rising, too: the leading federal appeals court (D.C Circuit), in Parhat v. Gates (6/30/08), has overturned a Combat Status Review Tribunal decision in the case of a Muslim Uighur detained at Guantanamo, citing want of adequate evidentiary justification.  In rejecting the administration's claims, the Court resorted to no less than Lewis Carroll: "Lewis Carroll notwithstanding, the fact that the government has 'said it thrice' does not make an allegation true."  Generic allegations by the government, the Court held, amount to the government asking that its word be automatically accepted as true, which the Court (predictably) expressly declined to do.  And Parhat is also free, after the Supreme Court's recent ruling, to file a petition in federal district court for a writ of habeas corpus.

As a Wall Street Journal editorial notes today, it is now clear that the military will be unable to sustain the burden of case by case litigation for each detainee it captures on foreign battlefields, and holds for more than 6 months.  We will simply have to let most of them go.  We will wind up taking only senior detainees prisoner, and compensate partially by killing more terrorists on the spot, or rendering them to the locals for extended  incarceration and interrogation.  Commanders, the WSJ editors writes, will rightly decline to order their charges to collect shell casings under sniper fire, risking their lives to satisfy the likes of Justice Kennedy.  There is, the editors sum up, no "C.S.I. Kandahar."  Already, lawyers for alien detainees held as unlawful combatants at the US military base in Bagram, Afghanistan, are filing habeas petitions in our federal courts.  ABC News Supreme Court reporter Jan Crawford Greenberg reports that President Bush is considering closing Guantanamo, in light of these court rulings, possibly announcing this before he leaves this Saturday for the G8 summit.

Thus is our military ever more deeply enmeshed in a legal quagmire, which will engage it, case by case, for every clown picked up in Asia wandering around with an AK-47, unless rapidly released.  Lawyers David Rivkin & Lee Casey offer suggestions for coping with the 2009 closing of Gitmo (both presidential candidates intend to do this) and how best to cope with the mess the Supremes have given us.

Such are the wages of "suicide pact" diplomacy and "suicide pact" legalism.

Pakistan: Islamists Regroup

Ralph Peters reports that Islamists have resurgent in Pakistan.  Basically, the military is the only reasonably honest institution there (Peters rejects, implicitly, Robert Novak's view given above, of the new Pakistani gov't), and Islamist sentiment feeds upon corruption, propaganda and the like.  Islamists are trying to cut the supply line to Peshawar, that crosses into Afghanistan and supports NATO troops.  Peters provides lots of detail in a small column, well worth a read.  In all, it is a sobering reminder that in war the enemy has a vote.

Mussolini's Gaza Trains

Mideast maven Barry Rubin dissects the performance of Hamas in running Gaza.  Seems lots of folks praise their administrative acumen in running the place.  A few thousand rockets fired into Israel?  Well, as Joe E. Brown said to Jack Lemmon at the end of Some Like It Hot (1958): "Nobody's perfect."