Michael Yon, who has spent more time embedded in Iraq than any other journalist, has something of value to offer to politicians who might care to learn:

One of the biggest problems with the Iraq War is that politics has frequently triumphed over truth. For instance, we went into Iraq with shoddy intelligence (at best), no reconstruction plan, and perhaps half as many troops as were required. We refused to admit that an insurgency was growing, until the country collapsed into anarchy and civil war. Now the truth is that Iraq is showing real progress on many fronts: Al Qaeda is being defeated and violence is down and continuing to decrease. As a result, the militias have lost their reason for existence and are getting beaten back or co-opted. Shia, Sunni and Kurds are coming together — although with various stresses — under the national government.

If progress continues at this rate, it is very possible that before 2008 is out, we can finally say “the war has ended.” Yes, likely there still will be some American casualties, but if the violence continues to drop and the Iraqi government consolidates its gains, we will be able, in good conscience, to begin bringing more of our people home. I will be paying very close attention to the words of Lieutenant General Raymond Odierno, who is replacing General Petraeus as the overall commander in Iraq.

Whatever we do in Iraq from here forward, we must strive to make better decisions than those made between 2003 and 2006. And one way to achieve that is by making certain that our civilian leaders are fully informed. All three candidates for President are extremely intelligent, but that doesn’t mean that all three are tracking the truth on the ground in Iraq. Anyone who wants to be President of the United States needs to see Iraq without the distorting lenses of the media or partisan politics. I would be honored to visit Iraq with Senator Obama, Senator Clinton, Senator McCain or any of their Senate colleagues.

I hereby offer to accompany any Senator to Iraq, whether they are pro-or anti-war, Democrat or Republican. I will make this offer personally to a few select Senators as well. Our conversations during the visit would be on- or off-record, as they wish. Touring Iraq with me, as well as briefings by U.S. officers and meetings with Iraqis, would provide an accurate and nuanced account of the progress and challenges ahead, so that the Senators might have a highly informed perspective on this most critical issue. Our civilian leaders need to make decisions based on the best information available. The only way to learn what is really going on in Iraq is to go there and listen to our ground commanders, who know what they are doing. Generals Petraeus and Odierno have years of experience in Iraq, and vast knowledge of our efforts there. But the young soldiers who have done multiple tours in Iraq also have unique and invaluable perspectives as well. These young soldiers have personally witnessed the trajectory of the war shift dramatically, and can articulate those changes in concrete and specific terms. It doesn’t matter if a soldier is only twenty-something. If he or she spent two or three years in the war, that person is likely to have valuable insights.

The best way to understand what is really going on is to listen closely to a wide range of service members who have done multiple tours in Iraq. Some will be negative, some will be positive, but overall I am certain that the vast majority of multi-tour Iraq veterans will testify that there has been great progress, and now there is hope. Combat veterans don’t tolerate happy talk or wishful thinking. They’ll tell you the raw truth as they see it.

Whether any Senators take advantage of my offer, I do hope that the presidential candidates visit Iraq, not just for a photo opportunity, but to spend time with our commanders and combat veterans, who know the truth and are not afraid to speak it.

Meanwhile, a certain presidential candidate apparently already knows more than he needs to know. Senator Obama is already conducting diplomacy with the Iraqi foreign minister five months before there’s even an election in the US: “I emphasized to him how encouraged I was by the reductions in violence in Iraq, but also insisted that it is important for us to begin the process of withdrawing U.S. troops, making clear that we have no interest in permanent bases in Iraq…My concern is that the Bush administration — in a weakened state politically — ends up trying to rush an agreement that in some ways might be binding to the next administration, whether it was my administration or Sen. McCain’s administration…The foreign minister agreed that the next administration should not be bound by an agreement that’s currently made.”

From the beginning, Haditha looked fishy to us. Now, with Lt. Andrew Grayson being found by the jury in his court martial not guilty on all counts, it looks more and more like the Haditha “massacre” was a put up job of the enemy and some elements in the American media. Grayson commented after his acquittal:

“The Haditha Marines stood resolute to the cause and they knew in the end that their resolve would result in their innocence. Thank God.” Grayson said there were times when he could have taken the “easy way out” by accepting a plea deal that would have spared him jail time in exchange for his testimony against other Haditha suspects. But in the end, he said, “one must do what is right.”…

Wednesday evening, Grayson said court-martialing Wuterich “was questionable at best” because the squad leader was simply following what he was trained to do -– observe the military’s rules of engagement. As for Chessani, Grayson described him as “one of the most steadfast men…He led by example and he knew the difference between right and wrong.”

So far charges against five Marines have been dropped and two cases are still pending. Bruce Kesler has a lot more to say on this troubling detour away from fighting and winning which more and more looks like it was orchestrated by America’s enemies and certain fellow travelers.

The New York Times casually asserted last month that the US had used biological weapons against foreign countries. What the NYT originally said on May 4:

Dr. Cone, the black liberation theology theorist, has known Mr. Wright for decades and says he much admires his provocations. But when Mr. Wright opined recently that the United States government may have used AIDS as a form of biological warfare against black people (Mr. Wright notes, correctly, that the United States has tried biological warfare on foreign nations), Dr. Cone winced.

The NYT piece as corrected on June 1 omitted the original assertion entirely, not just in an appended correction:

Dr. Cone, the black liberation theology theorist, has known Mr. Wright for decades and says he much admires his provocations. But when Mr. Wright opined recently that the United States government may have used AIDS as a form of biological warfare against black people (Mr. Wright alleges that the United States has tried biological warfare on foreign nations), Dr. Cone winced.

We found it interesting that there is no cached version of the original NYT story on Google, so we wanted to see if we could find the wording of the original story, and we did, though it took a while. It had not vanished down the memory hole. It is also interesting how casual was the assertion by the NYT that the US had committed such war crimes. We wonder: did those war crimes in the imagination of the Times occur before or after President Nixon’s executive order in 1969 prohibiting germ warfare under any circumstances whatsoever? (HT: Powerline)

Good news appeared in the editorial pages of the Washington Post, albeit in the form of campaign advice to the prospective Democratic nominee. But good news is still good news:

There’s been a relative lull in news coverage and debate about Iraq in recent weeks — which is odd, because May could turn out to have been one of the most important months of the war. While Washington’s attention has been fixed elsewhere, military analysts have watched with astonishment as the Iraqi government and army have gained control for the first time of the port city of Basra and the sprawling Baghdad neighborhood of Sadr City, routing the Shiite militias that have ruled them for years and sending key militants scurrying to Iran. At the same time, Iraqi and U.S. forces have pushed forward with a long-promised offensive in Mosul, the last urban refuge of al-Qaeda. So many of its leaders have now been captured or killed that U.S. Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker, renowned for his cautious assessments, said that the terrorists have “never been closer to defeat than they are now.”

Iraq passed a turning point last fall when the U.S. counterinsurgency campaign launched in early 2007 produced a dramatic drop in violence and quelled the incipient sectarian war between Sunnis and Shiites. Now, another tipping point may be near, one that sees the Iraqi government and army restoring order in almost all of the country, dispersing both rival militias and the Iranian-trained “special groups” that have used them as cover to wage war against Americans. It is — of course — too early to celebrate; though now in disarray, the Mahdi Army of Moqtada al-Sadr could still regroup, and Iran will almost certainly seek to stir up new violence before the U.S. and Iraqi elections this fall. Still, the rapidly improving conditions should allow U.S. commanders to make some welcome adjustments — and it ought to mandate an already-overdue rethinking by the “this-war-is-lost” caucus in Washington, including Sen. Barack Obama…

the likely Democratic nominee needs a plan for Iraq based on sustaining an improving situation, rather than abandoning a failed enterprise. That will mean tying withdrawals to the evolution of the Iraqi army and government, rather than an arbitrary timetable…

Of course, as Bruce Kesler notes, the NYT still backs the “this-war-is-lost” caucus. Which paper’s line will Senator Obama follow? (Or should he just forget the whole Iraq thing and head straight to Iran?)

The UK Guardian says the Senator Obama is “limping” to the finish line in the Democratic primary season. The New York Times has him “wheezing” as he crosses the tape to become the Democratic nominee. If current trends hold, he could have potentially enough delegates to claim the nomination in the next week or two, but that is not clear at this point

Senator Clinton still has the greatest number of votes in the primaries and caucuses, but the media cut her no slack. She and her allies can point to their fairly compelling demographic arguments, but to no avail, and, increasingly, to no notice. The left in the Democratic Party, and more importantly, the media have made their choice and there’s no stopping them now.

Our view is that Senator Clinton is the stronger candidate against Senator McCain in the general election. Senator Obama seems to have peaked in February, and it remains to be seen if the herculean efforts of the MSM can prop him up all the way through the long months until November. But perhaps that is a mischaracterization. Perhaps the MSM don’t really have their work cut out for them at all.

Perhaps America and Americans have changed. Maybe they want to try a new Age of Foolishness on for size by electing such an inexperienced but glib fellow (Scott Johnson uses a different term at the end of this piece). Perhaps the slow motion train wreck of Senator Obama’s chruchgoing and churchleaving (or was that grandma, not a train?) will not be seen by voters as a relevant insight into the man’s judgment. Perhaps that he is a “peacenik by gut” who has poor instincts when it comes to dealing with adversaries will be seen as irrelevant in November. Perhaps his blessedness will carry him to victory. Or maybe America just wants change, no matter what, instead of more grumpy old men (actually, the Grumpy Old Men promise foolish change too). One way or another, it looks like we’re going to find out.

Azadeh Moaveni is a reporter covering Iran for Time magazine. She went back for a visit recently, and found that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is apparently held in low esteem by his countrymen. WaPo:

On a recent afternoon, while riding a rickety bus down Vali Asr Avenue, Tehran’s main thoroughfare, I overheard two women discussing the grim state of Iranian politics. One of them had reached a rather desperate conclusion. “Let the Americans come,” she said loudly. “Let them sort things out for us once and for all.” Everyone in the women’s section of the bus absorbed this casually, and her friend nodded in assent…

I used to hear similarly pro-American sentiments frequently back in 2001, when Iranians’ romance with the United States was at its most ardent. A poll conducted that same year found that 74 percent of Iranians supported restoring ties with the United States (whereupon the pollster was tossed into prison). You couldn’t attend a dinner party without hearing someone, envious of the recently liberated Afghans, ask, “When will the Americans come save us?”…

I lived in Iran until last summer and experienced all the reasons why Ahmadinejad has replaced the United States as Iranians’ top object of vexation. Under his leadership, inflation has spiked at least 20 percent…My old babysitter, for example, says she can no longer afford to feed her family red meat once a week. When I recently picked up some groceries — a sack of potatoes, some green plums, two cantaloupes and a few tomatoes — the bill came to the equivalent of $40.

Inflation has hit the real estate market particularly hard. Housing prices have surged by nearly 150 percent, according to real estate agents. For most Iranians, previously manageable rents have become tremendous burdens. On one of my first evenings back in Iran, I watched Ahmadinejad on television as he addressed Iranians from the holy city of Qom. He blamed everyone — the hostile West, a domestic “cigarette mafia” — for the economic downturn, just as he had previously claimed that a “housing mafia” was driving up real estate prices. Many Iranians who initially believed this kind of conspiracy talk now admit that the president’s policies and obstinacy are actually at fault…

there are the interminable lines that have accompanied the government’s new gas-rationing scheme. During the busy early evening, it takes an hour to fill up on gas, and policemen are required to direct the snarled traffic. Ahmadinejad has insinuated that the unpopular plan was a precaution against possible Western sanctions, but most people I spoke with considered it another instance of his administration’s mismanagement…

Ahmadinejad has also resurrected unpopular invasions into Iranians’ private lives. On the second day of my trip, newspapers announced that police would begin raiding office buildings and businesses to ensure that women were wearing proper Islamic dress. One of my girlfriends, an executive secretary, told me that as a precaution, her office had set up a coded warning message to be broadcast over the intercom. On the third day, police swept our street to confiscate illegal satellite dishes.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad represents the religious-revolutionary, warlike, and self-destructive side of Iran in its current identity crisis with the modern world. Exactly what would be accomplished by the remarkably foolish idea of meeting with the man and regime that are pushing that country to a precipice?

The US, European, and certain Middle Eastern countries have for years tried to sit down with Iran and come to agreements of various sorts, mostly without any success. Amir Taheri provides some very interesting historical context in a piece in the WSJ that should be read in its entirety:

Iran is gripped by a typical crisis of identity that afflicts most nations that pass through a revolutionary experience. The Islamic Republic does not know how to behave: as a nation-state, or as the embodiment of a revolution with universal messianic pretensions. Is it a country or a cause?

A nation-state wants concrete things such as demarcated borders, markets, access to natural resources, security, influence, and, of course, stability – all things that could be negotiated with other nation-states. A revolution, on the other hand, doesn’t want anything in particular because it wants everything.

In 1802, when Bonaparte embarked on his campaign of world conquest, the threat did not come from France as a nation-state but from the French Revolution in its Napoleonic reincarnation. In 1933, it was Germany as a cause, the Nazi cause, that threatened the world. Under communism, the Soviet Union was a cause and thus a threat. Having ceased to be a cause and re-emerged a nation-state, Russia no longer poses an existential threat to others.

The problem that the world, including the U.S., has today is not with Iran as a nation-state but with the Islamic Republic as a revolutionary cause bent on world conquest under the guidance of the “Hidden Imam.” The following statement by the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the “Supreme leader” of the Islamic Republic – who Mr. Obama admits has ultimate power in Iran — exposes the futility of the very talks Mr. Obama proposes: “You have nothing to say to us. We object. We do not agree to a relationship with you! We are not prepared to establish relations with powerful world devourers like you! The Iranian nation has no need of the United States, nor is the Iranian nation afraid of the United States. We . . . do not accept your behavior, your oppression and intervention in various parts of the world.”

So, how should one deal with a regime of this nature? The challenge for the U.S. and the world is finding a way to help Iran absorb its revolutionary experience, stop being a cause, and re-emerge as a nation-state.

Whenever Iran has appeared as a nation-state, others have been able to negotiate with it, occasionally with good results. In Iraq, for example, Iran has successfully negotiated a range of issues with both the Iraqi government and the U.S. Agreement has been reached on conditions under which millions of Iranians visit Iraq each year for pilgrimage. An accord has been worked out to dredge the Shatt al-Arab waterway of three decades of war debris, thus enabling both neighbors to reopen their biggest ports. Again acting as a nation-state, Iran has secured permission for its citizens to invest in Iraq.

When it comes to Iran behaving as the embodiment of a revolutionary cause, however, no agreement is possible. There will be no compromise on Iranian smuggling of weapons into Iraq. Nor will the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps agree to stop training Hezbollah-style terrorists in Shiite parts of Iraq. Iraq and its allies should not allow the mullahs of Tehran to export their sick ideology to the newly liberated country through violence and terror.

As a nation-state, Iran is not concerned with the Palestinian issue and has no reason to be Israel’s enemy. As a revolutionary cause, however, Iran must pose as Israel’s arch-foe to sell the Khomeinist regime’s claim of leadership to the Arabs.

As a nation, Iranians are among the few in the world that still like the U.S. As a revolution, however, Iran is the principal bastion of anti-Americanism. Last month, Tehran hosted an international conference titled “A World Without America.” Indeed, since the election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2005, Iran has returned to a more acute state of revolutionary hysteria. Mr. Ahmadinejad seems to truly believe the “Hidden Imam” is coming to conquer the world for his brand of Islam.

Yet another set of reasons that Senator Obama’s proposal to sit down with Iran and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is a terrible idea. Question: does Senator Obama really understand the history of the Kennedy-Khrushchev meeting he refers to all the time, and does he understand the terrible consequences it led to, up to and perhaps including the origins of the Vietnam War?

Since the 18th century, American combat deaths have totalled about 650,000 — in a way a surprising number. Who would have thought that you could build a nation of 300 million people and keep it free and self governing for three centuries at such a price?

Please don’t misunderstand us. We’re not trying to minimize the losses; we understand, for example, that each of the 269 men from Newton, Massachusetts who died in WWII was a tragedy of heartbreak and grief to their families and friends. And combat deaths are but a fraction of total casualties in all of America’s conflicts. But it is really amazing what these proud few have procured for the many with their sacrifice. As the man said, “the United States is blessed to have such citizens.” Truly.

It’s hard not to notice today the prices that some unfree parts of the world have been paying recently. They say that deaths in Burma, with its corrupt, totalitarian regime, could easily exceed 100,000. China has had 15 million homes destroyed and 80,000 dead, including 10,000 children in rickety, substandard schools, perhaps due to “official negligence, and possibly corruption” in the Communist government. The price paid for freedom is large; apparently, the price paid for the lack of freedom can be larger still.

Senator Obama quotes President Kennedy time and again: “We should never negotiate out of fear, but we should never fear to negotiate,” when describing his willingness to meet with the likes of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and others among America’s adversaries and enemies. (Just what Obama thinks he can accomplish with this disciple of the Mahdi who sees himself bathed in divine light, who repeatedly has called for the destruction of Israel, denies that the Holocaust happened, and proclaims that a conspiracy of 2000 Zionists wants to rule the world, is anyone’s guess.)

It is difficult to overstate just how terrible an idea this notion of Obama’s is, from a variety of perspectives, both strategic and tactical; it certainly did not work out for the original JFK. Nathan Thrall and Jesse James Wilkins in the NYT:

Senator Obama defended his position by again enlisting Kennedy’s legacy: “If George Bush and John McCain have a problem with direct diplomacy led by the president of the United States, then they can explain why they have a problem with John F. Kennedy, because that’s what he did with Khrushchev.”

But Kennedy’s one presidential meeting with Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet premier, suggests that there are legitimate reasons to fear negotiating with one’s adversaries. Although Kennedy was keenly aware of some of the risks of such meetings — his Harvard thesis was titled “Appeasement at Munich” — he embarked on a summit meeting with Khrushchev in Vienna in June 1961, a move that would be recorded as one of the more self-destructive American actions of the cold war, and one that contributed to the most dangerous crisis of the nuclear age…

Paul Nitze, the assistant secretary of defense, said the meeting was “just a disaster.” Khrushchev’s aide, after the first day, said the American president seemed “very inexperienced, even immature.” Khrushchev agreed, noting that the youthful Kennedy was “too intelligent and too weak.” The Soviet leader left Vienna elated — and with a very low opinion of the leader of the free world.

Kennedy’s assessment of his own performance was no less severe. Only a few minutes after parting with Khrushchev, Kennedy, a World War II veteran, told James Reston of The New York Times that the summit meeting had been the “roughest thing in my life.” Kennedy went on: “He just beat the hell out of me. I’ve got a terrible problem if he thinks I’m inexperienced and have no guts. Until we remove those ideas we won’t get anywhere with him.”…A little more than two months later, Khrushchev gave the go-ahead to begin erecting what would become the Berlin Wall.

The consequences of the disastrous summit were not limited to the Berlin Wall, a symbol that became synonymous with Soviet enslavement for three decades. Kennedy’s meeting with Nikita Khrushchev “is generally considered to be one of the major factors leading up to the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962,” possibly the nearest that the world has come to nuclear war.

There is a pattern in Senator Obama’s life that is hard to miss. He has for decades associated himself with, and listened to, family and friends who have bitter grievances against the United States. Perhaps he has regarded listening to such people as in itself salutary or transformational, whether he regards their grievances as legitimate or not. So perhaps he thinks that doing so with Iran and Ahmadinejad would be helpful in some similar way.

Of course one key difference between the former and the latter is that Mr. Ahmadinejad’s Iran has been at war with the US (in one way or another and fairly successfully) since 1979. There is a kind of neo Cold War that exists between the two countries. Thus there would appear to be quite a bit of parallelism between a Kennedy-Khrushchev summit and an Obama-Ahmadinejad meeting — and perhaps the same sort of disastrous consequences could ensue.

Senator Obama would appear to have made a rookie mistake in generalizing from his personal experiences. After all, a Reverend Wright might rant and rave, but he was at one point a US Marine; by contrast Mr. Ahmadinejad’s Iran has made a point of killing US Marines for a quarter century. If Senator Obama is to be the next JFK, he should at least try to learn from the mistakes of the original JFK.

Editorial page columnist Bruce Ramsey in the Seattle Times:

Democrats are rebuking President Bush for saying in his speech to the Knesset, here, that to “negotiate with terrorists and radicals” is “appeasement.” The Democrats took it as a slap at Barack Obama. What bothers me is the continual reference to Hitler and his National Socialists, particularly the British and French accommodation at the Munich Conference of 1938.

What Hitler was demanding was not unreasonable. He wanted the German-speaking areas of Europe under German authority. He had just annexed Austria, which was German-speaking, without bloodshed. There were two more small pieces of Germanic territory: the free city of Danzig and the Sudetenland, a border area of what is now the Czech Republic. We live in an era when you do not change national borders for these sorts of reasons. But in 1938 it was different.

Shades of Marge Schott. What is the world coming to? HT: LGF

The lines between the candidates are becoming more sharply defined than ever, and the MSM are doing their part to shape the debate, without evident consciousness of their self-parody, in articles like this one, entitled “Obama criticizes McCain for ‘naive’ foreign policy.” Two years in the Senate apparently goes a long way towards gravitas these days. AP:

Barack Obama laid into John McCain on Friday for advancing a tough-guy foreign policy that he called “naive and irresponsible”…

Senator Obama added, speaking of President Bush and Senator McCain: “They aren’t telling you the truth. They are trying to fool you and scare you because they can’t win a foreign policy debate on the merits. But it’s not going to work. Not this time, not this year.” It will be a compelling — and disturbing — commentary on the state of mind of America in 2008 if the so-called “realist” Senator Obama is correct about “this time and this year.”

“America’s workers should build America’s defense,” announces the Clinton campaign commercial below. But nothing is quite as simple as it seems.

The Clinton campaign in Indiana is featuring an ad (via Gateway Pundit) of a plant that was closed in 2003. The jobs were outsourced to China, and Clinton blames the Bush administration. Run of the mill trade policy ad, you say. Not quite.

The Magnequench plant that was closed was not making waffle irons. The plant apparently manufactured 80% or more of the sintered NdFeB magnets that are used in the US military’s smart bomb guidance systems. Sounds sinister, yes? And an even better ad for the Clinton campaign. But it gets more complicated. All the transactions that resulted in ownership of the plant by Chinese interests occurred during the Clinton administration.

In 1995, according to ABC, “China National Non-Ferrous Metals…and San Huan New Material High-Tech Inc…joined with other interests to purchase the Anderson, Ind.-based Magnequench…The two Chinese companies were headed by the husbands of the first and second daughters of then-Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping.” The 1995 transaction was approved by CFIUS, the responsible government agency. Then, in 2000, Magnequench bought the factory that appears in the campaign ad. So it would appear that if there is an issue about the transfer of sensitive technology to China, it occurred before George Bush was President, rendering some of Senator Clinton’s claims in the ad moot or ridiculous.

But is there a legitimate national security angle to the story in the first place? Former Magnequench vice president Andy Albers says no, via ABC. “‘Nothing was done by Magnequench that aided the Chinese military program or hurt the U.S. military program,’ says Albers, who adds that Clinton’s focus on his former company ‘concerns me because it doesn’t address the main issue, which is how to make U.S. companies more competitive globally at’s the question we should be asking, that’s what we should be addressing. We should not be twisting the truth about that this is a national security issue, because it’s not a national security issue, it’s about global competitiveness’.” Former counsel to Congressman Duncan Hunter, Jeff Green, agrees that the matter is not a national security issue: “‘I think it’s more accurate to say that all the technology and production of these Neo magnets comes from overseas,’ he says, including Japan, Finland, Germany and China.”

So either both the Bush and Clinton administrations are to blame, or neither one did anything wrong. It’s a bit hard to say at the moment, but it appears from the news reports that, on a micro level, the system apparently functioned normally, although there are dissenting voices on left and right alike. However, on a macro level, the picture looks a little different, and raises the question as to whether the procedures in place at the CFIUS arm of the Treasury Department are adequate in a world that changes rapidly. At first blush, they do not appear to be.

One obvious question: does CFIUS track purchases or consolidations that occur after it has approved the sale of a company? For example, there are apparently sources for the Neo magnets in Japan, Finland and Germany, as well as in China. But what if a Chinese company or companies were to subsequently purchase those operations in Japan, Finland, and Germany? Would we ever know? Before it was too late to do anything about it? How? The current transactional approach of CFIUS, even as modified by FINSA, looks sort of like Hart-Scott-Rodino procedures for defense related industries. CFIUS procedures do not seem to take into consideration certain plausible or likely future events which could render its decisions unwise in retrospect. This would appear to bear looking into.

Senator Obama criticized Senator Clinton’s position on attacking Iran in the wake of an Iranian nuclear attack on Israel. He did so on on MTP, according to AP:

“I want the Iranians to know that if I’m the president, we will attack Iran,” Clinton said April 22 in an interview with ABC. “In the next 10 years, during which they might foolishly consider launching an attack on Israel, we would be able to totally obliterate them.”…On “Meet the Press” Sunday, Obama said: “It’s not the language we need right now, and I think it’s language reflective of George Bush. We have had a foreign policy of bluster and saber rattling and tough talk and in the meantime have made a series strategic decisions that have actually strengthened Iran.”

No wonder Hamas endorsed this fellow.

Noemie Emery sees a changed Hillary Clinton and notes that she has apparently earned “An Exceedingly Strange New Respect” among some conservatives. We’ve noted the same phenomenon, but it doesn’t seem quite as strange to us. Excerpt of the Emery piece:

One observer once said that the main importance of PT-109 in the life of John Kennedy was that it was the only time in his life…when the power and wealth of his father couldn’t help him at all. Hillary in February 2008, after Obama’s stunning string of 10 victories, was like JFK in the water — everything she was used to relying on had proved to be useless…

After March 4, she suddenly seemed to look and sound different: She began to seem real. The shrillness was gone, and so was The Cackle, and so were the forced southern accents that once caused so many so much merriment. Hillary! — whoever that was — never really cohered as a character; her previous poses–the Perfect Wife, the Aggrieved Wife, the Empress-in-Waiting — were all unconvincing, but in her new role — the scrapper, forced to the wall, and hanging in there with ferocious and grim resolution — she is suddenly all of a piece. Along with her inner JFK, she has channeled her inner Robert F. Kennedy (going back to the days when he was still “ruthless”), along with her inner Margaret Thatcher — “No time to go wobbly” — along with echoes of the John McCain who clawed his way out of the grave only last winter, and the George W. Bush who just as tenaciously saved his Iraq policy…

It is a truism that liberals think people are formed by exterior forces around them and are helpless before them, while conservatives think individuals make their own destiny…Hillary may still be a nanny-state type in some of her policies, but in her own life she seems more and more of a Social Darwinian, refusing to lose, and insisting on shaping her destiny. If the fittest survive, she intends to be one of them…

It is no accident that it was just at this juncture that she began to rouse outrage in parts of what once was her base…what caused this display of intense irritation? She’s running a right-wing campaign. She’s running the classic Republican race against her opponent, running on toughness and use-of-force issues, the campaign that the elder George Bush ran against Michael Dukakis, that the younger George Bush waged in 2000 and then again against John Kerry, and that Ronald Reagan — “The Bear in the Forest” — ran against Jimmy Carter and Walter F. Mondale. And she’s doing it with much the same symbols.

We think that a number of Emery’s observations have merit. Senator Clinton is much improved as a speaker and a candidate from the Days of Coronation. Exhaustion, adrenalin, and desperation have a way of concentrating and revealing, indeed, even shaping a person’s core. Until these recent days, we had never heard Senator Clinton referred to as “one tough old broad.” Language aside, it was meant as a compliment.

Senator Clinton revealed something else about herself in April, and it has some significance: she is an incredibly rich woman, with $109 million in recent income, as well as the rest of the family business. It possibly eases some conservative minds to know that the Clintons have earned a fortune of several hundred million dollars (ill-gotten or not) and have quite a stake in the system. And inveighing against the “rich and powerful” can tend to be seen as party-line rhetoric once you’ve earned a checkbook that reaches nine figures. So the Hillary of today might seem safer than the Hillary of past decades to some conservatives.

Finally, it wasn’t so long ago that it was said that the “Clintons” were running for President, that a Hillary victory would be Bill’s third term. But that no longer seems so true, does it? If Hillary Clinton is elected President, it now seems more than likely that it will be Hillary, not Bill, who will be making the decisions. After all, she’s earned the damn thing, not him. That is a big change, perhaps the biggest of all (though of course it is much more worrisome when it comes to her actual policy views). Feeling that you’re not an interloper, that you’ve earned your place in life, is something that conservatives tend to respect quite a lot. Perhaps this new respect that Emery describes is not really “exceedingly strange”; Senator Clinton may well have earned it in the opinions of some conservatives — after all, you don’t have to hate your opponent to disagree with or vote against her.

The Financial Times has an interesting story on the Israeli raid of September 6 last year:

For months, the White House has maintained a shroud of secrecy around the September 6 Israeli strike on the facility, which Syria codenamed “al-Kibar”. The Central Intelligence Agency will on Thursday brief about 200 members of Congress on the mysterious incident. The US official told the Financial Times that North Korea started discussing ways to help Syria build a nuclear reactor in 1997. He said US intelligence believed construction work began in 2003.

The presentations to Congress would provide an ”eye popping, comprehensive briefing that will demonstrate how close Syria came to having a nuclear weapons making capability,” the official added. The CIA will show politicians a video that brings together a compilation of still images, including satellite imagery, ground imagery, and photographs taken inside the facility.

One photograph shows a North Korean nuclear scientist named Chon Chibu standing beside a person believed to be his Syrian counterpart. Mr Chon has worked at North Korea’s Yongbyon nuclear reactor, which produced the material for the bomb North Korea tested in 2006, and has dealt with US officials in the past. The US official said the date of the meeting was unclear, but said the vintage of a car that appears in the background suggests it was sometime after 2005.

The official said North Korea appeared to have provided the designs for the Syrian reactor, which he said was a “dead ringer” for Yongbyon…North Korea is also believed to have probably provided engineering and construction staff for the project…While US and Israeli intelligence suggests Syria was very close to completing the physical reactor, they have no evidence that Syria had obtained plutonium to feed into the reactor.

The last point is odd. It was reported last year that Israel obtained nuclear fuel prior to the raid and presented it to the US as evidence of what was happening in Syria. Questions: what role does or did Iran have in the Syrian project? What is the meaning of the talk of a Syria and Israel peace deal in the light of these disclosures?

The Washington Post has an op-ed from Mahmoud al-Zahar, a founder of Hamas. It contains the following clarifying statement, just in case you harbored any doubt about the group’s objectives:

A “peace process” with Palestinians cannot take even its first tiny step until Israel first withdraws to the borders of 1967; dismantles all settlements; removes all soldiers from Gaza and the West Bank; repudiates its illegal annexation of Jerusalem; releases all prisoners; and ends its blockade of our international borders, our coastline and our airspace permanently. This would provide the starting point for just negotiations and would lay the groundwork for the return of millions of refugees.

The op-ed is unusual for a number of reasons. One of these is that it is the subject of a denunciation in an editorial in the Post the same day. The Post says, referring to Jimmy Carter, but in a way, also to itself: “it is one thing to communicate pragmatically, and quite another to publicly and unconditionally grant recognition and political sanction to a leader or a group that advocates terrorism, mass murder or the extinction of another state. That is what Mr. Carter is doing by lending what is left of his prestige to an avowed terrorist such as Khaled Meshal — or Mahmoud al-Zahar.” But isn’t that what the Post just did too? HT: LGF

The AP reports on some of the interchanges between the Democratic contenders for President during the debate yesterday:

In a 90-minute debate, both rivals pledged not to raise taxes on individuals making less than $200,000, and said they would respond forcefully if Iran obtains nuclear weapons and uses them against Israel. “An attack on Israel would incur massive retaliation by the United States,” said Clinton. Obama said, “The U.S. would take appropriate action.”

Senator Clinton’s answer seems clear enough. But what about Senator Obama? What would constitute “appropriate action”? Food for thought, perhaps, given some of Senator Obama’s support from Hamas.

Michael Yon:

I may well have spent more time embedded with combat units in Iraq than any other journalist alive. I have seen this war – and our part in it – at its brutal worst. And I say the transformation over the last 14 months is little short of miraculous.

The change goes far beyond the statistical decline in casualties or incidents of violence. A young Iraqi translator, wounded in battle and fearing death, asked an American commander to bury his heart in America. Iraqi special forces units took to the streets to track down terrorists who killed American soldiers. The U.S. military is the most respected institution in Iraq, and many Iraqi boys dream of becoming American soldiers. Yes, young Iraqi boys know about “GoArmy.com.”…our soldiers under the Petraeus strategy got off their big bases and out of their tanks and deeper into the neighborhoods, American values began to win the war.

Iraqis came to respect American soldiers as warriors who would protect them from terror gangs. But Iraqis also discovered that these great warriors are even happier helping rebuild a clinic, school or a neighborhood. They learned that the American soldier is not only the most dangerous enemy in the world, but one of the best friends a neighborhood can have.

An Iraqi:

“My dear, brave American soldier, you noble individual who traversed land and sea in order to write the story of Iraqi freedom for the first time in its modern history - you believed, in accordance with logic, self-evident truths, and rational thought, that a people who had been subjected to repression, starvation, and killing would dance for joy, and would thank Allah who sent you to them as a liberating angel…they would strew flowers and break out in songs of joy that would smash the chains of slavery, ignominy, and humiliation.

“Not even a writer of surrealistic or the absurd would have imagined that the Iraqi people would revolt against their liberator and would rush ardently back to a new bondage of a different kind - that of the religious cleric, the tribal sheikh, and the gang leader. It was unthinkable that the people would go against logic, rational thought, and self-evident truths, in a mad rush towards the abyss and total ruin. My beloved, brave American soldier, we apologize to you…

HT: Ace

Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, whom we’ve noted with great approval in the past, has spoken out again:

Sistani spoke through Jalal el Din al Saghier, a senior leader of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, a rival political party to the Sadrist movement. Saghier was clear that Sistani did not sanction the Mahdi Army and called for it to disarm. “Sistani has a clear opinion in this regard; the law is the only authority in the country,” Saghier told Voices of Iraq, indicating Sistani supports Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki and the government in the effort to sideline the Mahdi Army. “Sistani asked the Mahdi army to give in weapons to the government.”

Wretchard has more.

With General Petraeus scheduled to testify before Congress shortly, Iraq has been experiencing a crescendo of attacks in part as a display for the American media. While radical Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr declared victory of course, Austin Bay points out that that was not the case (and Bruce Kesler has more on that). Following are some observations by an American colonel in Baghdad, via Instapundit:

From watching the news, you know Maliki moved to Basrah in a show of force. He made lots of blustery statements about what he was going to do to the Jayesh al Mahdi (JAM). The Baghdad arm of JAM, headquartered in Sadr City, responded with a little fireworks of their own in Maliki’s absence. In hindsight, Mr Maliki may have overplayed a bit, and some feel he lost credibility in the process. Meanwhile, behind the scenes, General Petraeus quietly and deftly encouraged the central government of Iraq to:

(a) concentrate not on JAM, but on the criminal element within JAM. “Anyone on the street with a weapon is a criminal.” This effectively divided the JAM members. Next,
(b) focus on the humanitarian element of the operation. Pushing much-needed food and water to trapped inhabitants encouraged even more JAM members to stay home and take care of family members. Finally,
(c) show that fighting is not going to solve the needs of Iraq.

By addressing the essential services issues and bringing central government people to the provincial sessions to address concerns, people see their government taking an active role in solving the problem.

The effect was that Moqtada al Sadr got to make a point, Maliki demonstrated his resolve, the Iraqi Army and Police showed themselves to be capable and professional, and there’s a sense of a better day coming in Basrah. Without the strong response of the central Government, the militia-led uprising could have very easily led to further lawlessness, mayhem, and devastation. The Coalition trained and helped equip and arm the Iraqi Army. The surge allowed us to clear and hold areas long enough to bring violence levels down, so the government could start focusing on essential services. If anything, the surge came too late because people have been without services for far too long.

There is obviously progress in Iraq, and it is just as obvious that Iraq needs the continuing presence of a steady hand that General Petraeus and the US military provide. If Senator Obama is serious about the detailed plan he has proposed for withdrawing troops (and of course he may simply be pandering to the base), the people of Iraq have a problem, as does the US itself.

The other day Senator Obama criticized John McCain’s position on Iraq as follows: “Success comes to be defined as the ability to maintain a flawed policy indefinitely.” Bret Stephens raised some questions for the Illinois senator in the WSJ: “here are questions for Mr. Obama: Could there be something worse than the indefinite maintenance of a flawed policy? What if, following a U.S. withdrawal, Iraq collapsed into chaos? What if U.S. embassy personnel have to be helicoptered to safety from the roof of the Baghdad embassy? It’s not as if this hasn’t happened before.” Just so. And of course the Viet Cong did not have the global ambitions of our current adversaries.