sisu

An Army of Twitterers

"Sometimes I write a post and think, This is going to get huge traffic. Then I post it and watch in disbelief as people collectively shrug their shoulders and ignore it," writes Michael Hyatt in "The Sovereignty of Readers." Image is from his post "Some Twitterers Worth Following,"

"Do you think he could be blander?' scoffs Ann Althouse regarding the maddeningly bloodless language the Leader of the Free World used today to express "deep concerns" about Iran's hotly disputed election:

What I will repeat … is that when I see violence directed at peaceful protesters, when I see peaceful dissent being suppressed, wherever that takes place, it is of concern to me, and it's of concern to the American people. That is not how governments should interact with their people. And my hope is that the Iranian people will make the right steps in order for them to be able to express their voices, to express their aspirations."

Some swoon at the President's "soaring rhetoric," but "When it comes down to words, our man [McCain] gets to the point three times faster than his opponent," we blogged back in the heat of the fall campaign:

Obama: "I am a person who believes [fill in the blank]" = 6 words

McCain: "I believe [fill in the blank]" = 2 words

"Must be that 'nuance' thing the Democrat elites are forever patting themselves on the back about," we'd chaffed at the time, noting "We ourselves have always been of the brevity-is-the-soul-of-wit school of intelligence assessment." As we wrote in Althouse's comments this afternoon:

Muscular prose reflects muscular thinking (Churchill, Reagan, GW). Flabby prose reflects flabby thinking (Chamberlain, Carter, Obama). Never use one metaphorically-charged noun or active verb when a string of colorless nouns and passive verbs will do.

We're with Frank J of IMHO, who twitters "If you wanted someone to speak forcefully on Iran, you should have elected a president with testicles." But like the White House itself with regard to Iran, "We have to deal with the American president that we have rather than the American president that we wish we had." Speaking of presidents we kind of wish we had, ABC News Senior White House Correspondent Jake Tapper engaged John McCain in an "impromptu twitterview" (140 or fewer characters per tweet) on the Iranian Tea Party this morning:

Tapper: what would u say were u president? how much of a concern wd it be that "the west" supporting protestors cd be demonized? Thx

McCain: we heard that during the Cold War when the left didn't want us criticizing the Soviet Union b/c we could have been "demonized" …

Tapper: So if President Obama called u and asked your advice what would u tell him?

McCain: speak up for these young Iranians who deserve a free and fair election.

While the American President that we do have "chose not to choose on Iran," as Jonah Goldberg put it, the folks at Twitter chose to "put themselves on the side of free expression, to let the battleground of ideas have it out," in the words of Research Director at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society Rob Fari, as Forbes reports:

But when the site's 90-minute maintenance window was announced Monday afternoon — in the midst of the service's use in organizing thousands of Iranian dissidents protesting alleged fraud in the national election — the result was a flood of thousands of requests to the site asking that Twitter delay the maintenance downtime …

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone wrote in a blog post on the site that Twitter had worked out a deal with its network provider, NTT America, to delay the maintenance.

Now we are being told that the State Department put in a word on the side of the angels [good on you, Mr. President, if that's so]. From Reuters:

Confirmation that the U.S. government had contacted Twitter came as the Obama administration sought to avoid suggestions it was meddling in Iran's internal affairs as the Islamic Republic battled to control deadly street protests over the election result.

Meddling while not meddling. Vintage Obama. More from the Washington Times:

State Department spokesman Ian Kelly declined to discuss the department's specific actions regarding Iran, but he said that officials were in touch with Twitter "all weekend." He also said that regular contacts between Foggy Bottom and the site on various issues had taken place long before the Iranian election.

Mary Katharine at the Standard weighs in on the relative weight of Government interference vs the Army of Davids Twitterers and the wisdom of crowds:

Well, if that ain't the cheapest, most effective government intervention I've seen all year …

The #nomaintenance campaign among Twitter's own users likely had something to do with the postponement, as well, especially given than Twitter users, in aggregate, likely pinpointed the problem and communicated it to Twitter's higher-ups much faster and more effectively than the State Department could have.

The bottom line, from that Forbes article:

"The buzzy startup's employees had likely recognized that supporting the dissidents in this case was also a savvy business decision, argues Rafal Rohozinski, a founder of the Infowar Monitor research group.

Unlike other Internet firms like Google, Microsoft  and Yahoo!, which have all been forced to choose in important cases between the interests of their users and those of the authoritarians who limit the rights of those users, Twitter's role as a protest tool fits snugly with its business motives, he contends.

"They're proving that 140 characters can build an instant mass market" he says. "I'm sure that raises their value as a company."

The Invisible Hand. Was there ever a more colorful metaphor for the self-regulating nature of the marketplace?

Update: "Hope is the thing with feathers That perches in the soul,' The Anchoress quotes Emily Dickinson in one of her blockbuster linkathons (including us), "Twittering Liberty … and Hope," calling her readers to "Pray for the people of Iran; pray for good to triumph. Pray for their safety, their fortitude, their energy, their 'thing with feathers,' which is hope."

Update II: "The first female President," The News Junkie at Maggie's quips with a link.

Update III: And the winner is …

"The forty-fifth Best Sentence I’ve Heard Or Read Lately (BSIHORL) Award goes to Sissy Willis of SISU," writes Morgan Freeberg of House of Eratosthenes [via Brutally Honest] re our "Muscular prose reflects muscular thinking (Churchill, Reagan, GW)" paragraph, above.

The man obviously has taste.

"A virtual ticker-tape parade"

The term "ticker-tape parade originated in New York City after a spontaneous celebration held on October 29, 1886 during the dedication of the Statue of Liberty," a fitting precedent to Saturday's virtual ticker-tape parade, Victory in Iraq Day, dedicated to the liberation of the Iraqi people thanks to the hard work and gritty determination of our own US and coalition forces and the Iraqi military under the stalwart leadership of President George W. Bush. (Unattributed photo of ticker-tape parade celebrating the nation's Bicentennial, New York, July 1976)

"We won. The Iraq War is over," writes Zombie Time [via Instapundit], boldly declaring Saturday, November 22, 2008 "Victory in Iraq Day," an opportunity for "us, the people, to arrange a virtual ticker-tape parade. An online victory celebration":

By every measure, The United States and coalition forces have conclusively defeated all enemies in Iraq, pacified the country, deposed the previous regime, successfully helped to establish a new functioning democratic government and suppressed any lingering insurgencies. The war has come to an end. And we won.

What more indication do you need? An announcement from the outgoing Bush administration? It's not gonna happen. An announcement from the incoming Obama administration? That's really not gonna happen. A declaration of victory by the media? Please. Don't make me laugh. A concession of surrender by what few remaining insurgents remain in hiding? Forget about it.

The moment has come to acknowledge the obvious. To overtly declare a fact that has already been true for quite some time now … And since there will never be a ticker-tape parade down Fifth Avenue in New York for our troops, it's up to us, the people, to arrange a virtual ticker-tape parade. An online victory celebration.

"We also no longer hear about 'the Bush-Petraeus surge,' as Sen. Chuck Schumer dubbed it in September 2007," wrote John McCormack in The Weekly Standard last summer, noting that the Democratic opposition — Soviet style — removed the President and his General from the picture once it had become glaringly obvious that the surge had succeeded. (Getty Images photo of General Petraeus and President Bush in the Oval Office last spring as the President "reiterated his vow to veto any spending bill that puts a timetable on withdrawal of troops from Iraq.")

An inspired idea to lift our hearts and reaffirm our conviction that the national "narrative" being promulgated these many years by our betters on the left side of the aisle inside the Beltway and their fellow travelers in the Fourth Estate is a tangled web of lies and half truths, the product of a relentless campaign "to tarnish the Republican brand." Get that jackboot off your neck, fellow bloggers, and celebrate the truth that will make us free! How to participate:

Just make a post on your blog on Saturday, November 22, announcing that the war is over, and declaring that day to be Victory in Iraq Day …

Once you've posted it, email me the link! And I will post a link back to your blog here on this page.

Make sure to make at least two different postings: Make one now to announce your support of VI Day and to spread the word ahead of time, and make another one on November 22 itself, to celebrate!

Free banner design for Victory in Iraq Day by Bryan Taylor of Black Eye Digital.

Lots more info and images at Zombie Time to help you plan your own contribution to Victory in Iraq Day:

Keep reading below to find: evidence that the war is over (for the doubters); an historical discussion of previous postwar occupations and guerrilla violence; a list of blogs which have already joined the VI Day movement; free banners and graphics for you to download and put on your blog, if you so choose; and an invitation to submit your own "victory graphics" for posting here.

Bring 'em on!

"In France, you can't own up to a mistake"

 

Our Heartland professors, nephew and wife Matt and Regan, are immersing themselves in Middlebury's seven-week French-language program, where students "use their target language exclusively in classes, dining halls, dormitories, and co-curricular activities." No English allowed. We've been encouraged to email them early and often, but only in French. 'Were delighted to learn via Yahoo's "Babel Fish" translation program that we are married to a "fold." That's their translation of Tuck. “But friendship is the breathing rose, with sweets in every fold.” Above, two kinds of French fold, the napkin version, left, and the paper one.

"In France, you can't own up to a mistake," writes Anne-Elisabeth Moutet in "L'Affaire Enderlin" at The Weekly Standard. She's talking about the latest wrinkle in the ongoing legal wranglings over al-Dura — blogged here from time to time — a signature episode in the life-and-death struggle for hearts and minds that is the Israeli-Palestinian propaganda wars:

So, in the case of Muhammad al-Dura — a 12-year-old Palestinian boy allegedly killed by Israeli fire during a skirmish in the Gaza strip on September 30, 2000 — it was not really to be expected that the journalist who released the 59-second news report, Charles Enderlin, longtime Jerusalem correspondent for France 2 TV, would immediately admit having hastily slapped together sensational footage supplied by the channel's regular Palestinian stringer, and not checked whose bullets had, in fact, killed, or perhaps even not killed, the boy.

In the ensuing eight years, the small figure of Muhammad al-Dura cowering beside his crouching father became the defining image of the second Intifada. The "child martyr's" picture cropped up on posters, websites, postage stamps, and street names throughout the Muslim world from Mali to Indonesia, fueling lynchings and suicide bombings

Yet another egregious example of the big lie's ability to travel halfway around the world while the truth is either putting on its shoes or getting its pants on, and the court battles to get those shoes and pants on have dragged on for years, giving substance to the old saw that "justice delayed is justice denied." Can anything be done about it? Yes. Dogged determination is where it's at. Our own sub rosa blog friend, the distinguished Boston University professor of medieval history Richard Landes, has been on the case for years. He's the one who coined the term "Pallywood" to refer to "the staging of scenes by Palestinian journalists in order to present the Palestinians as hapless victims of Israeli aggression." As Richard explained at The Second Draft, politically correct, multicultural fellow travelers in the MSM are the Palestinian journalists' willing enablers:

They are able to succeed in this endeavor in large part due to the credulity and eagerness of the Western press to present these images, which reinforce the image of the Palestinian David struggling valiantly against the overpowering Israeli Goliath. Pallywood has led to astonishing lapses in Western journalistic standards in which badly staged scenes regularly appear on the news as "real events."

Then, as we wrote a month back, "the French court pleasantly surprised the seekers-of-wisdom-and-truth community this week by dismissing charges brought against [French media watchdog Philip] Karsenty by truthiness-monger France2." That was a breath of fresh air, but the forces of darkness — the totalitarian instinct that is our birthright — are forever lurking beyond the light of the campfire. No sooner had the court ruled than French journalism's old-cowboy network circled the wagons. More from Moutet's Weekly Standard report:

You might think Enderlin's professional standing would have been damaged by all this. You would be wrong. In less than a week, a petition was whipped up by his friends at Le Nouvel Observateur, France's premier left-wing newsweekly. The petition conceded no gray areas, no hint of doubt. It called Karsenty's vehemently argued but exhaustively documented stance a "seven-year hate-filled smear campaign" aimed at destroying Enderlin's "professional dignity." It flatly stated in the opening paragraph that Muhammad al-Dura was killed "by shots coming from the Israeli position." It expressed rank astonishment at a legal ruling "granting equal credibility to a journalist renowned for his rigorous work, and to willful deniers ignorant of the local realities and with no journalistic experience." It professed concern about a jurisprudence that would — shock! horror! — allow "anyone, in the name of good faith and of a supposed right to criticize and so-called freedom of speech, to smear with impunity the honor and the reputation of news professionals."

Moutet placed calls to a number of the signers, several of whom hadn't even read the petition they signed. One of our favorite responses:

There was the noted Paris-based former Washington Post foreign correspondent, 75-year-old Jon Randal, a Middle East expert I'd looked up to for years as a cub reporter, who trenchantly explained that he was seeing in all this a dangerous American trend of "vindictive pressure groups interfering with news organizations," now unfortunately crossing the Atlantic. (Having lived in Paris for over 40 years, Jon had become alarmingly French.)

"Americans have been under the gun of such people for some time, but France used to be free of this kind of thing. [These groups] are paranoid, they're persistent, they never give up, they sap the energy of good reporters. I can't imagine how much money France 2 has spent defending this case. Charles Enderlin is an excellent journalist! I don't care if it's the Virgin Birth affair, I would tend to believe him. Someone like Charles simply doesn't make a story up."

God bless America and those "vindictive pressure groups" and "such people" as Richard Landes who will call the self-appointed arbiters of "truth" to task.

"Everything you need to know about the way Hillary Clinton will govern"

 

"Tim Russert would never question [Hillary Clinton] about her role in Somalia. But in her book For Love of Politics Sally Bedell Smith reports that it was Hillary who overrode Bill's concerns that his decision to withdraw all American troops within 6 months" following the deadly incidents depicted in the film "Black Hawk Down" (above), "would send the wrong message to US enemies," writes Judith Apter Klinghoffer, adding "It is disconcerting to realize that Hillary has learned nothing from the experience."

We let loose with an uncontrollable barrage of expletives that roused a sleeping Tuck -- who was not amused -- early morning as we heard Miss Hillary in "Meet the Press" reruns tell Tim Russert that any success we were having in Iraq was due primarily to her own cut-and-run rhetoric:

I know very well that they follow everything that I say. And my commitment to begin withdrawing our troops in January of 2009 is a big factor, as it is with Senator Obama, Senator Edwards, those of us on the Democratic side. It is a big factor in pushing the Iraqi government to finally do what they should have been doing all along.

Russert had asked the "Smartest Woman on Earth" what she would say to General Petraeus, now that the surge is working, in light of her having attempted to humiliate and discredit him -- to his face! -- last fall by asserting that his progress report required "a willing suspension of disbelief." As Judith Apter Klinghoffer writes at the History News Network, "Everything you need to know about the way Hillary Clinton will govern" can be found in her response:

Tim, I'm going to go back to what the whole point of the surge was, and the testimony that we heard last fall. The point of the surge was to push the Iraqi government to make these tough choices. Now, if we put in 30,000 of our finest young men and women, who are going to go after the bad guys and quell violence in certain parts of Iraq, there's no doubt that can be done . . . The point of the surge was to quickly move the Iraqi government and Iraqi people. That is only now beginning to happen, and I believe in large measure because the Iraqi government, they watch us, they listen to us.

It was the ignorance and arrogance and hubris of her words -- especially the ones dismissing the hard-fought success of General Petraeus's groundbreaking counterinsurgency strategy as something that 30,000 troops could accomplish with ease -- that had precipitated our above-mentioned profanatory outburst. Klinghoffer's summary is crisp and to the point:

She takes credit for American success achieved despite her opposition and plans to wrangle defeat from the jaws of victory if elected president. Yes, Al Qaeda is watching, and she has just informed them that she had learned nothing from Somalia, where she insisted Bill withdraw precipitously [the weak-horse response that would embolden Osama] to force Somalis and the UN to take responsibility.

'Wonder whether Mrs. Clinton ever even read the General's September report which had caused her to roll her eyes in disbelief? For that matter, has she read his Counterinsurgency manual released in December of 2006? We know she didn't read the 90-page, classified National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq before her 2002 vote to authorize war, as she explained with a straight face to Russert:

Well, actually, not very many people read the whole thing because we were getting constant briefings.

We suggest she get some remedial briefings on how "the experience in Iraq is transforming the miilitary into the force required to help with the Long War," as Marine Eric Swabb explictes in a WSJ Commentary:

The Iraq war is also dramatically improving the military's understanding, training and capabilities in irregular warfare . . .

The blunders of the early years are well-known. Trained for conventional warfare, the Army and Marine Corps were unprepared for the aftermath of the invasion of Iraq. Commanders emphasized killing or capturing insurgents not securing the population as counterinsurgency doctrine emphasizes . . .

Pre-deployment training now includes realistic scenarios that test units' ability to build relationships with local leaders and partner with host-nation forces . . .

Commanders, from the small-unit level to the general ranks, increasingly understand that population security, political reconciliation and economic development create legitimate government, which saps insurgents' strength. As a result, conventional forces are now performing counterinsurgency missions at a level that many experts thought impossible.

The former First Lady's apparent "understanding" that the mission of the surge is to "go after the bad guys and quell violence" isn't even close.

Fiddling while London burns

You think Hillary cries like a girl? Brit dhimmi transvestite Grayson Perry (above) -- AKA Claire -- best known for his ceramics and cross-dressing, runs and hides when the going gets tough (see below for details). Perry won the UKs Turner Prize in 2003 "Not for what she/he calls the 'banal violence' depicted on his vases - which up the ante in the 'taboo factor' stakes - but for the pink genital bows of his/Claire'€™s dress," according to BBC London.

"For me, dressing up when I go out is a political act," prattles transvestite potter Grayson Perry in "Why Men Wear Frocks," a "witty yet frank and revealing [UK Channel 4] look at what drives the compulsion many men feel to wear women's clothing." Perry is one of those "groundbreaking" artists who has been "heralded for his controversial explorations of religious imagery, which include a vase entitled 'Transvestite Brides of Christ,'" writes PJM editor David J. Rusin. But there is a black hole in the heart of the rarefied world of contemporary British art, explains Rusin, who names Perry "the ideal poster boy -- or perhaps poster girl" for "the preemptive surrender of public freedoms in the name of appeasing the continent’s restive Muslim underclass." Let's set the scene with a few exerpts from that Channel 4 interview:

There's still the basic misconceptions about trannies, that they're gay or freaks or whatever. And there probably are gays, and freaks, among trannies, but no more than any other section of the male population' . . .

I'm not expecting everyone to dress up like me, because I adopt quite an extreme style. But I'm kind of saying that if I can do this, it's okay to do what you want to do.

But I think transvestism is a symptom of sexism and lack of tolerance. If the intolerance disappears, and there wasn't this sexism that insisted that men behave in a certain 'male' way, then transvestism would dry up, to an extent. It would still be around, but it would be a lot less common, I think.

"Snow Storm - Steam-Boat off a Harbour's Mouth" by JMW Turner, exhibited 1842. (Oil on canvas. Tate Collection) "It is famously said that Turner conceived this image while lashed to the mast of a ship during an actual storm at sea. This seems to be nothing more than fiction, but the story has endured as a way of demonstrating Turner’s full-blooded engagement with the world around him" according to the Tate, an ironic contrast with the weak-kneed disengagement from the world around them on the part of contemporary Turner Prize winners like Grayson Perry (top photo), the self-absorbed "tranny" iconoclast whose iconoclasm bows down in dhimmitude to Islamicist threats.

Even as he postures for his peers with protests of persecution by traditional British society [Do they still have that? --ed], the artist knowingly avoids confronting the real source of sexism and lack of tolerance in his own backyard. PJMs Rusin explains:

“I’ve censored myself,” Perry told the Times, admitting that he treads lightly around radical Islam. “With other targets you’ve got a better idea of who they are but Islamism is very amorphous. You don’t know what the threshold is. Even what seems an innocuous image might trigger off a really violent reaction so I just play safe all the time.” Self-censorship thus boils down to self-preservation. “The reason I haven’t gone all out attacking Islamism in my art is because I feel real fear that someone will slit my throat.”

Dr. Sanity might diagnose displacement, the "separation of emotion from its real object and redirection of the intense emotion toward someone or something that is less offensive or threatening in order to avoid dealing directly with what is frightening or threatening." And yet, if the Times is to be believed, artists like Perry "are fêted around the world for their willingness to shock." We're shocked, all right, at the dhimmitudinous cowering of self-proclaimed seekers of wisdom and truth. The "regurgitating regurgitations" of the Whitney Biennial on this side of the pond come to mind. How did a proud tradition of artistic engagement with the world come down to this? PajamasXpress blogger Roger Kimball of Roger's Rules has some thoughts. Struck by "the prominence of the word 'change' in the [current presidential] campaign, he ponders the "liberal obsession with change":

One important progenitor is the 19th-century philosopher John Stuart Mill. Mill was an extraordinary and multifaceted figure, but for the catechism of modern liberalism the Mill that matters is the Mill of On Liberty (1859) . . . a masterpiece of liberal polemic. Its core ideas are as the air we breathe: unnoticed because ubiquitous.

Mill’s arguments and pronouncements about man as a “progressive being,” the extent of individual autonomy, the limits of acceptable moral and legal censure, the importance of innovation and (perhaps his most famous phrase) “experiments in living” are all familiar to the point of invisibility. Likewise his corollary insistence on the poverty of custom, prejudice, and tradition . . .

Throughout history, Mill argues, the authors of such innovations have been objects of ridicule, persecution, and oppression; they have been ignored, silenced, exiled, imprisoned, even killed. But (Mill continues) we owe every step of progress, intellectual as well as moral, to the daring of innovators.

"But the success of Mill’s teaching in the court of public sentiment says nothing about the cogency of his arguments," notes Kimball, quoting the philosopher David Stone:

In the intellectual and moral dissolution of the West in the twentieth century, every step has depended on conservatives being disarmed, at some critical point, by the [They all laughed at Christopher] Columbus argument; by revolutionaries claiming that any resistance made to them is only another instance of that undeserved hostility which beneficial innovators have so regularly met with in the past.

Artists like Grayson Perry are the effete heirs of that liberal polemic, grown intellectually soft and lazy in the absence of any serious challenge to their comfortable echo chamber of anti-establishment preening, fiddling while London burns.

Update: Dr. Sanity's Carnival of the Insantities, now open for business, is the perfect antidote to intellectual softness and laziness.

"The improbable is now possible"

"Today is Primary Day, and our momentum has hit New Hampshire," emails a breathless Michelle Obama (we put our name on her hubby's mailing list to keep an eye on what the other side is up to). To liven things up, we tried substituting what's really happening on the ground (red type) for the vapid, empty phrase du jour, "change," in her boilerplate message:

Thousands of people are realizing that fundamental change stopping the Clinton juggernaut is within reach. The improbable is now possible.

My husband is a special leader. He has an amazing ability to bring people to the table and create real change entice them to abandon Hillary.

But he is the first to admit that this is bigger than him. Americans are ready for change an end to the hegemony of the Clinton machine and ready to work together to make it happen. It's humbling and inspiring, but more than anything, it's an awakening for each one of us.

It's a wonderful thing to see what's happening here in New Hampshire.

Indeed. Not that we'd ever vote for a leftie like Obama, of course. As our imail correspondent writes, "Obama scares me to death, but let me have this one day of 'payback is a bitch, huh, Hillary?'" Thomas Sowell explains:

By far the best presentation as a candidate, among all the candidates in both parties, is that of Barack Obama. But if he actually believes even half of the irresponsible nonsense he talks, he would be an utter disaster in the White House.

Among the Democrats, the choice between John Edwards and Barack Obama depends on whether you prefer glib demagoguery in its plain vanilla form or spiced with a little style and color.

The choice between both of them and Hillary Clinton depends on whether you prefer male or female demagoguery.

Exactly. And speaking of demagoguery, you're probably aware that all the candidates on the left side of the aisle are hiding their heads in the sand and pretending, against all evidence, that General Petraeus's counterinsurgency strategy -- the surge -- in Iraq isn't working. Opinion Journal has the gory details:

Barack Obama is of a sudden the front-runner, so his view of the surge merits the closest look. His first assertion echoed what has become a standard line by the war's opponents, that "we have not made ourselves safer as a consequence." What can this possibly mean? In more than six years there hasn't been one successful terrorist attack on the U.S., even as places elsewhere were hit or actively targeted.

Then Senator Obama placidly said that the Sunnis in Anbar Province began to help the U.S."after the Democrats were elected in 2006." What's more, the Democrats' victory showed them they were "going to be left very vulnerable to the Shias." This obviously means the Democrats would abandon them.

But the Sunni Awakening, as it is called, with its fall in bloodshed, occurred only after the Anbar Sunnis were convinced that the U.S. troops would not abandon them to al Qaeda in Iraq. Sunni sheiks have said explicitly it was the new U.S. policy of sustaining the offensive against AQI that made it possible for them to resist the jihadists. The U.S. military has supported the spread of these "awakening councils" in other areas of Iraq. It is navel-gazing in the extreme for Mr. Obama to suggest U.S. Congressional elections caused this turn.

Well, that's what politicians do. Blame opponents when things go wrong and take credit when things go right. We googled one of Obama's foreign policy advisers we'd seen on Fox yesterday, Pulitzer Prizewinner Samantha Power of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government, to try to divine her boss's "thinking" and found her otherwise thoughtful and helpful analysis of "Our War on Terror" -- published in the NYT at the end of July as the surge was starting to show positive results -- laced with reflexive anti-Bush sentiment. Even as she praises General Petraeus and the US Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual, she can't bring herself to give the President credit for having chosen the General to carry out the surge. An excerpt to give you the flavor:

But criticizing the calamities of the last six years of American foreign policy has become all too easy. And it does not itself improve our approach to combating terrorist threats that do in fact loom large -- larger, in fact, because of Bush’s mistakes. The challenge now is to accept that just because George W. Bush hyped the threat does not mean the threat should be played down. Rather, we must urgently set about reversing the harm done to the nation’s standing ['guess she missed what the WSJ recently called the "new generation of European leaders clamoring to make friends with America"] and security by simultaneously reasserting the moral difference between the United States and Islamic terrorists and by developing a 21st-century toolbox to minimize actual terrorist threats . . .

The fundamental premise of the manual is that the key to successful counterinsurgency is protecting civilians. The manual notes: “An operation that kills five insurgents is counterproductive if collateral damage leads to the recruitment of 50 more insurgents.” It suggests that force size be calculated in relation not to the enemy, but to inhabitants (a minimum of 20 counterinsurgents per 1,000 residents). It emphasizes the necessity of coordination with beefed-up civilian agencies, which are needed to take on reconstruction and development tasks . . .

The Bush administration’s unwillingness to admit failure causes it to cling to a flawed approach rather than revisit its premises, adopt a new strategy or experiment with new tactics.

Once you get past the Bush bashing, we're on solid ground with Powers's analysis. Obama could do worse, although he could do better. We would recommend Bill Whittle's latest, BDS-free tour de force, "Forty Second Boyd and the Big Picture":

General Petraeus is not fighting the last war; he is fighting the next one. He did not arrive there and just hope for the best. He observed. He oriented. He decided. And he acted. And then he observed again to see what effect he had. And again. And again.

This is not firepower. This is not attrition. This is, rather, an intelligent, delicate, sophisticated, maneuver-based strategy. A light, but sometimes deadly touch. Fingertip control. Water flowing downhill, into the cracks which our enemy cannot fill.

As Michelle Obama said in her fundraising letter, "the improbable is now possible."

This just in (8:15 p.m.): Fox News projects John McCain will win the New Hampshire primary. Bill Kristol credits McCain's steadfast support of the war and the success of the surge.

Update: Whoops!

Update II: "Hillary Clinton won last night by putting together the voting coalition that has held Democratic frontrunners in good stead for 75 years."

"She was a splendid con"

Lively, witty presentation and totally awesome photos at Catalogue of Organisms' Circus of the Spineless #28. Above, Jennifer Forman Orth's clearwing butterfly. Our fave was the assassin bug's trick of donning the empty exoskeletons of its ant victims to fool predators. There was something so political about it. Say what, Hillary?

"I don't mean to speak ill of the dead, but let's do it anyway," PJM alpha male Richard Miniter is telling a Fox News babe late afternoon [rough drive-by transcript]:

This is a woman who's tied to money scandals, political scandals. Many are asking why is the Bush administration pushing this woman as someone [who could be helpful to Pakistan's future as a democracy]? She was not very popular. That we were trying to impose her [into the electoral landscape] was deeply resented.

That jibes nicely with the post incubating in the febrile blogging mind this very moment. Our gut response when we learned yesterday morning of former Pakistani PM Benazir Bhutto's assassination was -- as we wrote in the comments at Gates of Vienna, who seemed to be on the same page -- WW IV?:

The assassination of the Archduke [considered by historians to have triggered WW I] was the first thing that came to mind. The second was the Taliban's assassination of Ahmad Shah Massoud just before 9/11.

We know as little about Pakistani history and politics as the average bear, but somewhere in our alleged mind there lingered a faded memory of Bhutto's having been a corrupt -- if brilliant -- all-about-me astroturf-roots socialist "savior" of her downtrodden people. Ralph Peters's "Not what she seemed to be" in today's NYPost brought it all into focus. A few excerpts (Be sure to read the whole thing):

For the next several days, you're going to read and hear a great deal of pious nonsense in the wake of the assassination of Pakistan's former prime minister, Benazir Bhutto [See below for a delicious example of the genre, Ariana Huffington's frothy if fascinating homage to her longtime friend].

Her country's better off without her. She may serve Pakistan better after her death than she did in life . . . She was a splendid con, persuading otherwise cynical Western politicians and "hardheaded" journalists that she was not only a brave woman crusading in the Islamic wilderness, but also a thoroughbred democrat.

In fact, Bhutto was a frivolously wealthy feudal landlord amid bleak poverty. The scion of a thieving political dynasty, she was always more concerned with power than with the wellbeing of the average Pakistani. Her program remained one of old-school patronage, not increased productivity or social decency . . .

But she always knew how to work Westerners -- unlike the hapless Gen. Pervez Musharraf, who sought the best for his tormented country but never knew how to package himself.

The undigestible Ariana Huffington, a westerner in thrall to the oft-cited charisma of Benazir Bhutto, nevertheless came by her admiration honestly:

She was at Oxford. I was at Cambridge. And by a strange coincidence I became president of the Cambridge Union and she became president of the Oxford Union. The anomaly of two foreign women heading the two unions meant that we ended up debating each other around England on topics ranging from British politics to broad generalities about the impact of technological advance on mankind.

"I asked her to blog before she returned to Pakistan and blog she did," writes Huffington. Quite a "get," albeit a self-justifying bit of spin on Bhutto's part:

I long ago realized that my personal life was to be subjugated to my political responsibilities. When my democratically elected father, Prime Minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto was arrested in 1977 and subsequently murdered, the mantle of leadership of the Pakistan Peoples Party, our nation's largest, nationwide grassroots political structure, was suddenly thrust upon me. It was not the life I planned, but it is the life I have. My husband and children accept and understand that my political responsibilities to the people of Pakistan come first [God help the children], as painful as that personally is to all of us. I would like to be planning my son's move to his first year at college later this month, but instead I am planning my return to Pakistan and my party's parliamentary election campaign.

I didn't choose this life. It chose me.

Cloying enough for you? Try this for an antidote. Tuck is half way through The Reagan Diaries, a gift from us to Goomp last Father's Day that our hubby dips into whenever we visit Down East:

Boy, the Reagan Diaries are great. I had read Reagan In His Own Hand, and what he had that I'm not convinced the current crop of candidates have is that lifelong commitment -- and commitment to the right things. I mean Hillary's got a lifelong commitment, but."

Commitment to the right things. We suppose it depends upon what your definition of right is.

Update: Maggie's Farm links, and blog bookmarker tags us "brave."

"Just blame it on the Americans"

Don't shoot the messenger. "Now there's an alternative on the horizon that promises to be safer and cheaper by zapping [malaria, dengue feaver and West Nile] germs while sparing the mosquitoes," reports Scientific American. "The technology is hidden in an artificial flower designed to attract mosquitoes and treat them with pathogen-killing drugs that allow the insects to live and continue to perform important functions such as pollinating flowers and serving as food for animals and other insects." (Adult western malaria mosquito, Anopheles freeborni, Jack Kelly Clark photo)

"All you have to do is not screw up, and, even if you do, you just blame it on the Americans," Sgt. First Class Jacob Stockdill tells students at the Army's new Afghanistan Counterinsurgency Academy, reports the Wall Street Journal (subscription only). What works for the Democrats -- Bush's Fault™ -- works for other enemies of victory in the war on terror:

Six years into the Afghan war, the Army has decided its troops on the ground still don't understand well enough how to battle the Taliban insurgency. So since the spring, groups of 60 people have been attending intensive, five-day sessions in plywood classrooms in the corner of a U.S. base here, where they learn to think like a Taliban and counterpunch like a politician.

The academy's principal message: The war that began to oust a regime has evolved into a popularity contest where insurgents and counterinsurgents vie for public support and the right to rule. The implicit critique: Many U.S. and allied soldiers still arrive in the country well-trained to kill, but not to persuade.

All politics is local, and spin wins. The counterinsurgency school was set up at the recommendation of Lt. Col. John Nagl, co-author with General Petraeus of the Army's Counterinsurgency Field Manual. Dan Helmer's the point man:

In April, the Army gave a 26-year-old Rhodes scholar, Capt. Dan Helmer, six weeks to get the school up and running. Capt. Helmer tells his students, who rank as high as colonel, that the important battles here are 80% political and just 20% military. He exhorts them to go to great lengths to understand local politics, culture and history, to make sure actions they take on the battlefield help convince Afghans that the Kabul government will serve and protect them . . .

Capt. Helmer, a West Point graduate from Mantua, N.J., originally deployed to Afghanistan as a mentor for the Afghan National Police. At Oxford, he was author of a study on Israel's fight against Hezbollah guerrillas in Lebanon, where an army with overwhelming conventional superiority found itself mired against insurgents who had the vital support of the locals. Fast-talking, with deep-set eyes, a sunburned neck and a moustache that he grew out of respect for Afghanistan's hairiness-is-next-to-manliness culture, he says he thought from the start that Army training didn't prepare troops well for the intricacies of fighting the Afghan insurgency.

Hearts and minds are where it's at.

In Iraq, the U.S. has set up separate counterinsurgency academies for Iraqi and coalition students. In Afghanistan, Capt. Helmer insisted on putting troops from the 37-nation coalition into the classroom with their counterparts from the Afghan army, police and spy service. One of the school's central tenets is that foreign forces cannot win the war. Afghan security forces and government officials must take the lead in any activity, whether it's an attack on Taliban redoubts or reconstruction of a mosque, in order to increase popular support for President Hamid Karzai's government.

But nobody said it was going to be easy:

Academy instructors teach that counterinsurgents must "clear, hold and build" to insulate the public from insurgent tactics while demonstrating that the government has something better to offer . . . But as the academy students discovered, putting the theory into practice can feel like building a sand castle as the tide is coming in . . . Smaller missteps can undo months of counterinsurgency efforts . . .

As a goodwill gesture in September, coalition soldiers in Khost Province handed out soccer balls decorated with the flags of the world. One of them, the Saudi flag, bears a verse from the Koran. Rumors spread widely that the coalition was, in essence, encouraging Afghan children to put their holy book on the ground and kick it.

Goodwill and good intentions are no excuse. Teddy bears named Mohammed come to mind. Technology almost lost the war. Maybe it's time to call in the marines.

Update: Time to call in the crazies for Dr. Sanity's Carnival of the Insanities.

One picture is worth a thousand blogposts

"While the MSM slept, Michael Yon -- the self-employed, reader-empowered embedded journalist blogger reporting from the front -- captured the spirit of the age in one amateur photograph that has touched the hearts and minds of our fellow citizens in spades," we wrote two years back re the citizen journalist's image of Major Beiger cradling a fatally wounded Iraqi child.

"Our soldiers, those from countries such as the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, Germany, France (yes, France) and the United States, are better in all aspects but one," wrote independent journalist and former Green Beret Michael Yon last March in "Ernie is dead," a FOXNews.com dispatch blogged here:

The terrorists somehow manage to beat us in our respective medias. We may own the air, but terrorists own the airwaves.

I believe we are losing the war in Afghanistan, but I have strong hope for Iraq. Nearly all of America and Europe believe Iraq is a lost cause, but there is hope here, and it lives in the thousands of stories about this place that are never told because they have not been witnessed by our media, or at least not reported.

The surge was just getting under way back then, even as broken-record types like Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, John Murtha & Company were stuck on all is lost, it's time to cut and run, and it's all Bush's fault.

"The Iraqis asked me to convey a message of thanks to the American people," the "blogosphere's own Ernie Pyle," Michael Yon sets the scene for this image of "men and women, both Christians and Muslims, placing a cross atop the St. John’s Church in Baghdad. They had taken the cross from storage and a man washed it before carrying it up to the dome." © Michael Yon 2007*

Now comes Michael Yon's latest photograph (above) to touch the hearts and minds -- and typing fingers -- of the immediate blogosphere. Gaius of  Blue Crab Boulevard has a good roundup of one-liners. Michelle Malkin is calling it an "iconic image of hope and unity in Iraq," and Wretchard of The Belmont Club compares Yon's image to Joe Rosenthal's flag-raising at Iwo Jima, musing "There are times when a single picture captures the essence of an entire campaign. Maybe Michael Yon's picture from Baghdad has done it for the surge":

It's important to remember that the flag raising on Suribachi occurred on the fourth day of a campaign that would last a month longer. In the War against extremism, as in Iwo Jima, the worst may be yet to come. But it's good to take a deep breath and remember what the journey is all about.

Instapundit reader John Ramsay sees "a poignant contrast with this picture":

From the caption of our early-Surge post "A vicious circle of shortsighted sanctimony" of last January: “By the time we reached the embassy, the gates were shuttered and armed Marines were standing guard above the concrete walls . . . Thousands of desperate Vietnamese, screaming and begging, were trying to climb the walls and get through the coils of barbed wire, only to be pushed back into the street by none-too-gentle rifle butts,” wrote Newsweek reporter Loren Jenkins of our countrymen's ignominious cut-and-run exit from Saigon when the city fell to the North Vietnamese in April of 1975. (Photo unattributed)

Indeed. 'Wish we'd thought of that. Great fodder for a new post or even a new category: The Good, the Bad and the Smugly?

"The toppling of Saddam’s statue seemed like the iconic moment, but it proved only to be the first frame," notes Jules Crittenden:

"Unlike the Saddam shot, an image of tearing down the old evil, Yon’s captured the Iraqis putting something up, restoring something good, themselves. There is still a lot of fighting and dying ahead, but here’s an image of hope and determination, a sign that victory might not be too far off.

Fighting with "hope and determination" for "something good" against "the old evil." It sounds downright American. Then there's The Anchoress's deep, dark and delicious take:

What I see in this picture is something more than a historic moment -- I don’t even know if that’s what we should call it -- I see the sort of thing people do when they are neighbors, when they are working together for their neighborhood, for the good of all who live there, and that makes it seem less “historic” than calmly, wonderfully normal, ordinary, wholesome and sane. I see tolerance, which so many are so certain cannot exist in Iraq -- or anywhere in the Middle East.Tolerance in the best sense of the word -- converting no one, insisting on nothing beyond ordinary acceptance; tolerance that gives people room to live their lives.

Day by Day says it all in 3022 words (three pictures = 3000 words + 22 words of text).

One picture is worth a thousand blogposts?

*NOTE. "Michael Yon is making this photograph available to media outlets, such as print publications and cable and television news broadcasts, at no cost for a limited period of time . . . He is entirely reader supported . . . If you value his work, please consider supporting  his mission."

A Jihadi cell in my back yard?

This little critter -- one of two raccoon kits lurking and chirping amongst the plants along the far side of the yard along the house next door early morning -- scrambled up a young Horsechestnut tree (above) to get out of harm's way as Tiny and Baby emerged onto the terrace after breakfast. Had the Chelsea Grays not been constrained by their tethers, they might have felt obliged to take the law into their own paws and run the raccoons off the land. As it was, they listened and stared and sniffed the air and then decided to come back inside and keep an eye on things through the kitchen window screen. Once they were inside, we ran for the camera. Back outside in the half-light of dawn, we set our Optio 450 for flash and started shooting, scaring one of the neighbors -- who rents a first-floor apartment over there -- out of his wits. Tuck, who was awake but still abed at the time, later reported that he himself had been rather startled at the intensity of the flashes and jumped out of bed to see what was going on.

The neighbor, a middle-aged family man of Middle Eastern appearance and accent whom we had occasionally seen moving about his apartment but had never met, appeared at a window near the raccoon tree and started yelling at us hysterically. "What are you doing?" he screamed. As we tried to explain that we were taking pictures of a raccoon -- a what? -- he continued to rant: "You can't do that. This is a private house." Huh? "It's our yard and our tree," we ventured, but he was having none of it. Determined to defuse the situation before it escalated further, we disarmed the fellow by dropping the defensive mode and going dhimmi: "Good-neighbor policy. I apologize. I'm sorry." That seemed to calm him, and he retreated to his chambers.

This first face-to-face with the neighbor set our conspiracy-theory juices flowing. Why would someone be so upset even if we HAD been taking flash pictures of his house at 5:30 in the morning? [Come to think of it, he may have had a point. --ed.] Later, Tuck would suggest that the window near the tree where the flash was aimed probably opened into the neighbor's bedroom, fergossake, but in the immediate aftermath of having been verbally abused at high volume by the Muslim [based upon amateur profiling] next door, we surrendered ourselves to paranoid fantasy and hurried inside to google the local FBI office. Startled neighbor or jihadi making improvised explosive devices in that room behind the window near the tree? We actually started to type out our concerns on the FBIs "Tips and Public Leads" page, where they have a special form for reporting "suspected terrorism or criminal activity." Then Tuck came downstairs, listened to our story and put it all into perspective. Had he been in the neighbor's position, he told us, he would have had very much the same reaction: "What the hell are you DOING?"

Fascinating how easy it is to misunderstand the other guy's intentions, not to mention how easy it is for him to misunderstand yours. No wonder the nations rage so furiously together.