This ain't Hell, but you can see it from here

Category: Politics

  • Jack Reed; this drawdown is not a drawdown

    Last night, the President announced, to no surprise, that the surge has worked so well militarily that he’ll begin drawing down our force presence in Iraq (Washington Examiner/AP);

    Bush said 5,700 U.S. forces would be home by Christmas instead of leaving Iraq beginning in the spring as originally planned. Four more combat brigades would pull out of Iraq as currently scheduled by July.

    These troops comprise the troop buildup that Bush ordered in January that boosted U.S. troop strength to 168,000, the highest level of the war. Under the withdrawal plan, troop levels would drop back to around 130,000 by next summer, close to where they were before the buildup.

    Well, it makes sense – since we’ve made places like Anhbar safer and proved to the Iraqis that we’re there to see this through – despite the political rhetoric here, we can reduce our boot prints in Iraq while still being successful.

    But, that’s not good enough for the Democrats, of course. For some reason, Jack Reed, a twelve-year veteran of the armed forces, felt the need to “rebutt” the President’s address (Wall Street Journal Online);

    So tonight, we find ourselves at a critical moment.

    Do we continue to heed the president’s call that all Iraq needs is more time, more money, and the indefinite presence of 130,000 American troops _ the same number as nine months ago? Or do we follow what is in our nation’s best interest and redefine our mission in Iraq?

    Democrats believe it is a time to change course. We think it’s wrong that the president tells us there’s not enough money for our veterans and children’s health care because he is spending $10 billion a month in Iraq. We have put forth a plan to responsibly and rapidly begin a reduction of our troops. Our proposal cannot erase the mistakes of the last four and a half years, but we can chart a better way forward.

    That is why our plan focuses on counterterrorism and training the Iraqi army. It engages in diplomacy to bring warring factions to the table and addresses regional issues that inflame the situation. It begins a responsible and rapid redeployment of our troops out of Iraq. And it returns our focus to those who seek to do us harm: al-Qaida and other terrorist groups.

    An endless and unlimited military presence in Iraq is not an option.

    Like our “endless and unlimited military presence” in Japan, Germany, South Korea, Bosnia and Kosovo? The President is drawing down our combat forces in a safe and timely manner. The Democrats recommend that we negotiate with 12th Century savages who are still cutting off hands and executing criminals in public. Savages who deny that there were millions executed in Europe because of their religion and sexual preferences in the last century. People who execute their own citizens for converting to another religion. How do you negotiate with that culture?

    And of course, the Washington Post snipes at the president from the sidelines;

    For instance, Bush asserted that “Iraq’s national leaders are getting some things done,” such as “sharing oil revenues with the provinces” and allowing “former Baathists to rejoin Iraq’s military or receive government pensions.”

    Yet his statement ignored the fact that U.S. officials have been frustrated that none of those actions have been enshrined into law — and that reports from Baghdad this week indicated that a potential deal on sharing oil revenue is collapsing.

    Well, it’s a work in progress, isn’t it? They’ve been under the jackboot of one thug for nearly thirty years – it takes time to work out details of important issues. How long has Congress been talking about healthcare in this country? Nearly twentyfive years. Saddam’s been gone just over four years. It took us twelve years to get our Constitution done right.

    In another story in the Post, they overplayed the murder of an allied sheik in Anhbar as a blow to the Administration;

    The president’s upbeat assessment of the situation in Iraq during a nationally televised address last night was clouded by the killing earlier in the day of a Sunni sheik who led the turnaround of a key province in alliance with U.S. forces.

    You can almost hear the Post’s reporters dancing with glee over the death of a key player in the surge’s success. Even though AP reports in the Washington Times that the murder has only strengthened the resolve of tribal leaders;

    Mr. Abu Risha’s allies, as well as U.S. and Iraqi officials, insisted the assassination would not deter them from fighting al Qaeda, and the tribal alliance appears to have gained enough momentum to survive the loss of a single figure, no matter how senior. Late yesterday, Mr. Abu Risha’s brother, Ahmed, was selected to replace him as head of the council.

    Reed, ever the whiner, complains that the President has no plan;

    “A nation eager for change in Iraq heard the president speak about his plans for the future. But once again, the president failed to provide either a plan to successfully end the war or a convincing rationale to continue it,” said Sen. Jack Reed, Rhode Island Democrat and a former U.S. Army Ranger and paratrooper.

    But, there’s no plan only if you haven’t listening. Everyone knows the plan – this is the worst case of projection in American history. Reed claims Democrats have a plan – but there is no Democrat plan except pull the troops out now and then work with Iran from a point of weakness – the weakness being that we’ll be gone from the Middle East, while Iran is free to terrorize their neighbors and their population with no fear from retribution. Iran is the problem and the Democrats want to strengthen Iran.

    You’d think a “former Army Ranger” would be jubilant at the successes and accomplishments in Iraq. Instead this particular “former Army Ranger” wants to play political games and draw the war out further and cost more American lives in the interim.

  • The new surge

    Now that the troops are in place and they’re “kickin’ ass”, to borrow a phrase from the President, a new surge is under way – this one in Washington, in the halls of the Capitol and the conference rooms in the White House. The surge to bring the troops home.

    In his testimony, General Petreaus recommended 30,000 troops be withdrawn by July 2008. The Republicans agree – the Democrats would have agreed if hadn’t come from General Petraeus. (S.A. Miller The Washington Times);

    But Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who failed repeatedly to muster enough votes to compel the president to accept a pullout plan, yesterday said he will try again next week with measures to force significantly larger troop reductions.

    “I call on Senate Republicans not to walk lockstep with the president as they have done for years,” the Nevada Democrat said. “It is time to come over and join us.”

    Mr. Reid said Democrats will introduce four to six war bills, including measures for large-scale troop reductions and to transition the mission from combat to training Iraqi forces and conducting counterterrorism operations.

    He did not provide details of the legislation, but the characterization of measures was nearly identical to failed bills from earlier this year.

    It’s like I said in the comments section of a post yesterday, the Democrats are attached to defeat at the forehead – they continue to cling to failed political tactics.

    Roy Blunt, ever the realist, quiped;

    “We’ve taken a different approach than [Democrats] have on Iraq from the very start,” said Mr. Blunt. “They saw Iraq as a political issue, and we saw it as both a security issue and an issue that had to be above politics for our members.”

    The Democrat candidates are trying to get ahead of the administration (Washington Times’ Brian DeBose)

    “We must get out strategically and carefully, removing troops from secure areas first, and keeping troops in more volatile areas until later, but our drawdown should proceed at a steady pace of one or two brigades each month,” Mr. Obama said.

    A day after hearing the progress report from Army Gen. David H. Petraeus to Congress, Mr. Obama rejected the general’s recommendations and said Iraq’s government has failed to meet its own goals.

    His withdrawal proposal reinforces the Iraq war as the major battleground among the Democratic presidential candidates, who have spent the campaign competing with each other for support from the party’s antiwar voters.

    Yesterday, Mr. Obama’s adversaries said his plan doesn’t go far enough, with former Sen. John Edwards saying the pace of withdrawal moves too slowly and sounds too much like the general’s recommendation to President Bush to withdraw 30,000 troops by July.

    “Taking credit for this gradual withdrawal is like taking credit for gravity,” Mr. Edwards said.

    I’d say that about any withdrawal plan at this point. The President was going to withdraw troops when they weren’t needed any longer – we all knew that. The withdrawal might have been complete by now if the Democrats had kept their stupid mouths shut for the last four years and stopped encouraging our enemies.

    It must really gall Democrats that the President has improved even minutely in the polls according to the NBCNews/Wall Street Journal poll taken September 7-10th.

    As Mr. Bush prepares to follow congressional testimony by the top general in Iraq, David Petraeus, with a televised speech to the nation tonight, the poll shows an uptick in support for the president’s handling of the war as well as a small increase in the proportion of Americans who believe the troop surge is helping and that victory remains possible.

    Those shifts in public opinion remain modest. Solid majorities continue to disapprove of the president’s performance and say victory in Iraq isn’t possible and that the war hasn’t been worth its human and financial costs. “There’s been no surge from the American people,” said Democratic pollster Peter Hart, who conducts the Journal/NBC poll with Republican counterpart Neil Newhouse.

    Yet only one in four Americans say troops should leave now regardless of conditions on the ground. The public’s “heads and hearts are going in two different directions,” Mr. Newhouse said. “They want the troops to come home but think we can’t just leave.”

    As hard as the Democrats have tried to take the advice of the netroots, it just doesn’t seem to be working against the President.

    Of course, the Washington Post is betting on Democrats and calling their repeat of failed legislation “modest bipartisan measures” mischaractertizing the Democrats’ intentions completely;

    Democratic leaders in Congress have decided to shift course and pursue modest bipartisan measures to alter U.S. military strategy in Iraq, hoping to use incremental changes instead of aggressive legislation to break the grip Republicans have held over the direction of war policy.

    Standing against them will be President Bush, who intends to use a prime-time address tonight to try to ease concerns that his Iraq strategy will lead to an open-ended military commitment.

    Both efforts share a single target: a handful of Republican moderates in the Senate whose votes the Democrats need to overcome the threat of a GOP filibuster. Should enough Republican moderates sign on to a compromise measure, Democrats could finally pass legislation aimed at changing direction of the war.

    “We’re reaching out to the Republicans to allow them to fulfill their word,” Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (Nev.) said yesterday. “A number of them are quoted significantly saying that come September that there would have to be a change of the course in the war in Iraq.”

    Yeah, we know how Democrats “reach out” – “Our way or the highway”. Mostly because they’ve sold their soul to the netroots – and 30,000 in less than a year isn’t enough to satisfy Nancy Pelosi;

    “President Bush’s policy announced by General Petraeus is a path to 10 more years of war in Iraq. General Petraeus’ testimony to Congress drew a bright line: redeployment is not an option; endless war in Iraq is the Administration’s only option.

    10 more years of war, huh? That’s a bit of hyperbole – it’s 10 more years of a presence in Iraq – like the 11 years of a presence we’ve had in Bosnia, the nine years of a presence in Kosovo, sixty-two years in Japan, sixty-two years in Germany.

    Nor is Harry Reid satisfied with a withdrawal without his consent and blessing;

    “This is unacceptable to me, it’s unacceptable to the American people,” said Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev.

    Reid said the recommendation by Gen. David Petraeus, expected to be embraced by President Bush in a speech to the nation on Thursday, “is neither a drawdown or a change in mission that we need. His plan is just more of the same.”

    Mission? What change in mission have you recommended, Harry? Besides immediate surrender and “redeployment” to the Indian Ocean or some-damn-where. 

    But the Washington Post reports that some Democrats are getting angry at the Leftroots’ unprecedented pressure to end the war against terror;

    MoveOn.org, a liberal activist group that has spent months pressuring Republicans to turn against the war, is now threatening to turn on Democrats who temper their positions.

    But moderate Democrats are feeling emboldened, after nearly nine months of taking their marching orders from the more liberal wing of the party. Rep. Neil Abercrombie (Hawaii), who is pushing a more bipartisan approach, said the antiwar wing has badly overplayed its hand.

    But the Post tries to alienate General Petraeus from the President by putting the war entirely on his shoulders;

    When he testified before the Senate for his confirmation hearing in January, Petraeus was widely regarded as the quintessential military professional, a credible, independent voice who stood above the political fray.

    But when he returned to Capitol Hill this week for marathon hearings and a media blitz, the general labored to retain that image. Partisans sought to portray him either as a politicized officer carrying water for the White House or as the only possible savior of an increasingly unpopular war.

    The war in Iraq has diminished the reputations of many of its generals. As Petraeus returns to Baghdad to continue carrying out President Bush’s strategy, his image has changed as well. Like it or not, he has become a political player, and more than ever before, the U.S. venture in Iraq has become his own.

    “Up until this week, it was Rumsfeld’s war,” said retired Army Lt. Col. James Jay Carafano, referring to former defense secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld. “Now, for better or worse, it’s Dave’s war.”

    Funny, the netroots have been calling it Bush’s War – now all of a sudden it’s “Dave’s War”? Why don’t they just call it a war against common sense?

    The truth is; the Democrats aren’t interested in ending the war – they need it as an issue next November. That’s why they’re presenting the same tired old failed legislation – they know it won’t pass because it contains draconian reductions in forces. It’s a plan for failure and they know the President is too far above plotics and poll numbers to accept it just to save his legacy.

    Like I said yesterday, the Democrats don’t learn from their failures. They think they deserve accolades for being hardheaded, stubborn jackasses. Their bipartisan solutions are nothing more than threats and intimidation. If only they would get as tough and stubborn with our nation’s enemies as they are for purely political reasons.

    But, then, simply by the nature of their political beings, Democrats can’t find it within themselves to be leaders – since they live and die by polls, they are followers.

  • Chavez plans a “Simon Bolivar Satellite”

    Over the past few weeks, I written about Hugo Chavez squandering his petro dollars on 5000 sniper rifles from Russia, subsidizing bus fares for Londoners and paying for elections in Argentina. Today he announced that China is building a “Simon Bolivar satellite” (Washington Times’ Martin Arostegui);

    Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez says his nation plans to launch “the Simon Bolivar satellite” now being built in China as part of plans to develop an integrated ground- and space-based air defense — presumably against the United States.

    “We have 100 satellite technicians training in China who be back in the next few months. The radars, tracking stations and air defenses are being installed right now,” Mr. Chavez said this week on his television talk show, “Hello President.”

    With the Chinese ambassador present for the performance, Mr. Chavez made extensive comments on Venezuela’s growing ties with China in areas such as oil exports and national defense.

    But that’s not all;

    Mr. Chavez, who claims the U.S. has attempted to assassinate him and often warns of an Iraq-style U.S. invasion of Venezuela, already has the most powerful air force in South America with his recent acquisition of 24 Sukhoi Su-30 fighters from Russia.

    He also is negotiating the purchase of nine Russian submarines.

    So with children starving, staples absent from supermarket shelves, and Venezuela’s trading paper struggling, Chavez is investing his new ill-gotten wealth in strengthening his military position in a relatively calm region – and attempting to strengthen ties with China in South America – all so he can stick his finger in the eye of the United States (which by the way is no threat to him) and wave the Uncle Sam boogeyman in the faces of his chavistas.

    China has invested heavily in Venezuela’s oil industry as part of efforts to gain ever greater access to energy sources.

    They are jointly planning a pipeline through Panama to pump 800,000 barrels of oil a day to Pacific ports. This would allow a vast increase in Venezuelan exports to China at the possible expense of the U.S.

    China is also assisting Cuba in oil exploration off the coast of Florida – another reason for them to build a pipeline through Panama. In Panama, they already control about 40% of the ports through their COSCO company (according my source there) and they’re assisting Panama in their endeavor to widen the Canal over the next 5 years.

  • New Converts to the Truthers

    I’ve bumped into a couple of foamy-mouthed conspiracy-theorists in my day, most recently at the anti-Israel demonstration a few months ago. The 9-11 variety are an especially heavily-spittled breed – probably because their theories are so outside of the realm of probablity that they figure emotion can replace actual facts.

    Well they’ve gotten some notable converts to their cause recently.

    Kamangir reports that the official Iranian government’s position is that it was an inside job. And they didn’t arrive at that decision without some hefty credentials;

    Fars News writes “130 American Experts: 9/11 was an inside Job.” Quoting an unknown Russian “expert”, the website writes “It is not imaginable that Muslim terrorists have been able to prepare in six months”

    Well, a Russian expert – that cinches it. Them Russians know stuff.

    Sweetness and Light’s Steve Gilbert reports that Fidel Castro is also a recent convert to the “Truther” cause;

    “Today one knows there was deliberate misinformation,” wrote Castro…

    “Studying the impact of planes, similar to those that hit the Twin Towers, that had accidentally fallen on densely populated cities, one concludes that it was not a plane that crashed into the Pentagon,” Castro said.

    “Only a projectile could have caused the geometrically round hole that allegedly was made by the plane,” he said.

    Science from a guy who has locked his country in a time warp that can’t progress past 1959. Babalu Blog’s George Moneo quips that the 4200-word dissertation is pretty ambitious for a guy who can’t summon the good health to appear in public for more than a year.

  • Rice vs. Pelosi

    I just saw this picture in the Washington Examiner and I wished I could be a fly and listen to that discussion;

    Hoyer looks worried.

  • Tell Democrats that Bush will not run in 2008

    I know it’s hard for Democrats to understand, but they won’t be able to run against President Bush next year in November. I don’t who they’ll be running against, but it won’t be President Bush  – so the fact that they’re campaigning based on their opposition to the Bush Administration’s policy in Iraq is fruitless. From the Wall Street Journal:

    The second day of congressional testimony by the two top U.S. officials in Iraq, Gen. David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker, gave presidential contenders from both parties a chance to serve up views on Mr. Bush’s troop surge. Mr. Bush is expected to endorse the general’s plan for troop reduction in Iraq in a White House speech tomorrow night.

    After a relatively mild reception Monday in the House, Gen. Petraeus and Mr. Crocker yesterday faced heavy bipartisan skepticism in the Senate as they outlined plans to reduce U.S. troop levels in Iraq gradually through July. They reiterated hopes that Iraq’s warring factions will find ways to reconcile.

    The men went before two Senate panels heavy with presidential contenders. Three Democratic hopefuls — Sens. Joseph Biden of Delaware, Christopher Dodd of Connecticut and Barack Obama of Illinois — didn’t question Gen. Petraeus’s assessment that the larger presence of U.S. troops has lowered violence. Rather, they suggested that the American sacrifices were being made in the service of an overall strategy that has little chance of success. Sen. Hillary Clinton of New York was the most critical of Gen. Petraeus, saying his report on improving security conditions “required a willing suspension of disbelief.” She then cited other statistics that suggested little to no progress.

    Yeah, we get it, Democrats, you don’t like the War in Iraq – so what’s YOUR plan? All we hear is criticism and about plans for withdrawal (Gateway Pundit reports Bush is even ahead of them on that) – but how do we defeat the scourge of radical Islam? I know Democrats have been running against Bush for the last seven years, but now it’s time to run FOR something because president Bush isn’t going to be the opponent next year. I can’t emphasize that enough.

    Dana Milbank of the Washington Post tells us that even though Hillary opposes the Bush Administration and the Petraeus report, she doesn’t mind getting in on the photo ops that go along with them;

    Clinton, herself a member of the Armed Services Committee, at first entered the hearing room largely unnoticed; she then left and reentered moments later as part of Petraeus’s entourage — basking in the clicks of hundreds of camera shutters.

    Pretty damn petty and opportunistic if you ask me. And Obama used his seven minutes for a speech;

    In his seven minutes of questioning time, Obama seemed to be practicing for today’s speech. “This continues to be a disastrous foreign policy mistake,” he said. “And we are now confronted with the question: How do we clean up the mess and make the best out of a situation in which there are no good options?”

    He then ridiculed President Bush for “suggesting somehow that we are . . . kicking A-S-S. How can we have a president making that assessment?”

    Stump speech over, Obama observed that he was left with “very little time to ask questions.”

    So instead of asking questions, becoming informed, and appearing like he was interested in what the General had to say, Obama decided to perform for the cameras instead. Good move, Rock Star.

    Joe Biden, the only Democrat with a plan, a plan that harkens back to the days of the British Empire’s partitioning of the whole of the Middle East, but a plan nonetheless, couldn’t help but drag out the GAO report, leaked last week (S.A. Miller, Washington Times);

    Mr. Biden, who has proposed partitioning the country to separate Sunni, Shi’ites and Kurds prior to a U.S. troop withdrawal rather than a rapid pullout, challenged the general’s report of decreased sectarian violence.

    The senator pointed to a Government Accountability Office (GAO) report last week that disputed Army statistics showing such a decrease.

    Gen. Petraeus said the GAO findings were based on data that were at least five weeks old, compared with his report, which used statistics compiled up until Friday.

    At least the general was kind enough to Joe Hairplugs not to mention that the GAO report was written from statistics by math geeks, not written by experienced warriors with dusty boots.

    Like I said, the Democrats have been running AGAINST Republicans so long, they still haven’t figured out that at some point they need to be FOR something. Simply saying that withdrawing a brigade every month will get us out of Iraq by the end of next year isn’t a plan – it isn’t a strategy.

    If the Democrats want to prove that they really are concerned about national security, we need to see particulars with hard facts that show us they know what they’re talking about.

    At this point, while they’re apparently getting their strategic advice from the Code Pinkazoids (commentary and photos courtesy of Wordsmith at Flopping Aces) and the Kozbots, they’d do well to stay away from anyone in uniform above the rank of recruit to keep from looking like idiots.

  • Vietnam Wall defaced; consider that shark jumped (Updated)

    SCROLL TO THE BOTTOM FOR UPDATE 

    My first task every morning (after a Winston and some coffee) is to check this corner of the internet for comments to my posts. This morning I found one from Robin at Chickenhawk Express who left this;

    Jonn – I don’t want to fire you up to much but you REALLY need to see this;

    The Vietnam Memorial Wall in DC Has Been Defaced

     

    Well, I went into a funk that I really can’t shake this morning. After I sent the links from Robin’s post and the post from tgslTakoma at Free Republic to several bloggers to get the word out, I tried to write on another subject but I just can’t assemble a coherent thought. I checked the Gathering of Eagles website and they have a link to the Free Republic report. 

    I’m writing this in hopes that the word gets out, I haven’t seen anything on the local news or in the local papers. This should be the death knell of the anti-war movement. This what they came to town to do back in March, and they finally got their opportunity before the Patriots came to town. I suspect that it was those idiot Black Bloc creeps – but really any of those cretins on the Left are capable of such sociopathic behavior.

    Redstate’s Bluey interviewed some park Service employee who claims the damage may be permanent;

    I spoke to a National Park Service employee who was livid that someone would vandalize the memorial. “It’s like defacing a grave,” he told me. When I asked if there were any clues as to who was responsible, he told me videotape was being reviewed. It is believed the damage was done on Friday night. Because the monument never closes, it could have taken place late in the evening when no one was around.

    I remember the email I got back when I covered the Gathering of Eagles I in March from some little immature weasel who claimed that the Left had a right to do what they want to the Vietnam Memorial because it was their monument, too. There are no monuments to cowardice in this country and there are no names of draft evaders or protesters on the Wall.

    As I predicted yesterday, the Left is pulling out all of the stops. They’ve begun their disparaging of the troops – it began this past weekend with our honored dead, and our hallowed ground. This weekend on Pennsylvania Avenue between 12th and 7th Streets, this crap ends. 

    UPDATE: Michele Malkin has an update that the Park Service has admitted that the Wall has been defaced. Funny how they denied it before the protest this weekend and then suddenly, the protest ends and they fess up.

  • War against terror; the 800 pound gorilla

    Washington Times’ Christina Bellantoni writes this morning how the Democrat presidential candidates are doing their best to make the war against terror a non-issue in the campaign;

    Six years after the September 11 attacks, the Democrats running for president have drastically different ways of addressing terrorism, with one calling the war on terror a “bumper-sticker slogan.”

    Most have avoided the phrase “war on terror” because Democratic primary voters consider it a Republican talking point, but Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York and Barack Obama of Illinois each have a version.

    “Here in New York, nobody needs to tell us that we are in a war against terrorists who seek to do us harm,” Mrs. Clinton said in a foreign-policy address in October.

    “The terrorists are at war with us,” Mr. Obama said in a major policy address last month.

    As the Democrats’ 2004 vice presidential nominee, former Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina criticized the Bush administration for making “the wrong judgment to turn the focus away from the war on terror and the people who attacked us.”

    The closest one to getting it right is Obama – yes, they are at war with us. Too bad we can go to war against them. Edwards, apparently, isn’t even on this planet. If we aren’t killing terrorists in Iraq, then who are we killing? Why is Iran supporting a force of international thugs with training and arms?

    If no one is going to hold the Democrats’ feet to the fire on this issue we might just get a president who ignores the threat – like we did before – and just pays off their political connections with taxpayer money. While the threat remains;

    Chertoff said the bin Laden tape refuted any notion that al-Qaeda had “lost interest” in attacking Americans on their own soil. “The enemy is not standing still; they are constantly revising their tactics and adapting their strategy and their capabilities,” he said.

    Iraq is the central front in the war against terrorists, the folks who want to kill us, whether Democrats want to admit to that or not. Americans are beginning to realize that the Democrats have been fooling us;

    The case for cutting and running from Iraq has become untenable in recent months not just substantively but politically as well. Polls show that Americans increasingly believe not only that the surge is working, but also that permanent success in Iraq is possible. So the more intelligent opponents of the war have shied away from the explicit defeatism of Senator Harry Reid’s statement earlier this year that the war is lost. Instead, Democrats like Senators Carl Levin and Jack Reed are seeking to triangulate between the strategy of General David Petraeus and a complete withdrawal. The armchair generals in the Capitol want to find a course that reduces U.S. forces in Iraq rapidly but that (so they claim) does not assure defeat. Triangulation may be harmless in symbolic matters of domestic politics, but it can be dangerous, even fatal, in war.

    And from the Times’ story, we can see John Edwards inability to formulate a strategy – Hell, he can’t even admit there’s a war;

    He adds in stump speeches an accusation that President Bush uses the “so-called ‘war on terror” ” as an excuse for “trampling on our Constitution, and most perversely, for ignoring the demands of the actual struggle that exists against terrorism.”

    Those three thousand people who died about 6 years ago from the moment I’m typing this, wouldn’t call this a “so-called war”. In fact, six years ago from this very money, I stood in the conference room of this very office watching a replay of the second plane hitting the tower, when a column of smoke rose from the Pentagon out the window of the conference room. It wasn’t a “so-called war” then nor is it now. If Democrats can’t formulate an effective strategy – like the one that has kept the rest of us safe in the last six years – they’re not living in the here-and-now. They’re still living in those decadent 90s – when security was the last thing on anyone’s mind – except bin Laden;

    “So there is a huge difference between the path of the kings, presidents and hypocritical Ulama (Islamic scholars) and the path of these noble young men,” like al-Shehri, bin Laden said. “The formers’ lot is to spoil and enjoy themselves whereas the latters’ lot is to destroy themselves for Allah’s Word to be Supreme.”

    “It remains for us to do our part. So I tell every young man among the youth of Islam: It is your duty to join the caravan (of martyrs) until the sufficiency is complete and the march to aid the High and Omnipotent continues,” he said.

    At the end of his speech, bin Laden also mentions the al-Qaida leader in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who was killed in an U.S. air strike there. Al-Zarqawi followed in the footsteps of al-Shehri and his brothers who “fulfilled their promises to God.”

    “And now it is our turn,” bin Laden says.

    Sounds like it wouldn’t fit on a bumper sticker.