The initial stage of Operation Khanjar (”Strike of the Sword”) appears to be going well in Afghanistan — but that doesn’t mean much.

Some 4,000 marines and 650 Afghan soldiers are sweeping into insurgent strongholds in Helmand Province. They have encountered little resistance so far, which suggests that Taliban fighters are doing what smart guerrillas always do: melting away in the face of superior enemy forces. The pattern in Afghanistan has always been that NATO forces march into villages then march out, leaving the Taliban to regain effective control.

The difference this time is that the marines don’t plan to leave. Just as in Iraq, they are planning to establish small combat outposts next to villages that will allow them to dominate the terrain they are now occupying. That will present insurgents with a difficult choice: either (a) cede the ground to the marines or (b) attack them and try to dislodge them. The likelihood is that they will soon try option B. That will mean heavy fighting and more casualties than the marines have so far suffered. (One marine was killed in the initial operation.)

But assuming that marines stick it out — and with the marines that’s a pretty safe assumption — they will inflict heavy casualties on their attackers and gradually gain control of the situation. The Taliban will have to shift their operations to other areas — and then those too will be targeted by NATO forces.

That is, in essence, the classic “spreading oil spot” strategy of counterinsurgency. It is a slow, difficult process, and we shouldn’t read too much into early reports of success. There will be much hard fighting ahead, but the likely result will be, just as in Iraq, a gradual extension of governmental control and eventually a decrease in violence. The key to success is to deploy enough forces to drive out the Taliban altogether from substantial swathes of the countryside rather than simply pushing them from one area to another. Whether there are enough troops on the ground to attain that goal remains to be seen, even with a total of 21,000 American reinforcements on the way. But the strategy is a sound one and should over time gradually improve the situation.

John Bolton has a compelling and courageous analysis in the Washington Post today, making the case that Israel should bomb Iran’s nuclear installations and do so quickly. He argues that diplomacy has no chance of working, leaving only one serious option on the table if Iran is to be prevented from going nuclear. He adds a new and important point:

Significantly, the uprising in Iran also makes it more likely that an effective public diplomacy campaign could be waged in the country to explain to Iranians that such an attack is directed against the regime, not against the Iranian people. This was always true, but it has become even more important to make this case emphatically, when the gulf between the Islamic revolution of 1979 and the citizens of Iran has never been clearer or wider. Military action against Iran’s nuclear program and the ultimate goal of regime change can be worked together consistently.

The only variable he doesn’t mention is whether Israel has the intelligence necessary to inflict significant, long-term damage on Iran’s nuclear program. Israeli aircraft surely have the capacity to reach Iranian installations (though it would be interesting to speculate on what route the Israeli Air Force would take: Saudi Arabia? Iraq? Turkey?). But does Israel know where the key Iranian facilities are located and does it have munitions that can put deeply-buried Iranian bunkers out of action? Those seem like the most important factors to me — more important than the possibility of Iranian retaliation or of deteriorating relations with the Obama administration — for prime minister Netanyahu and Israel’s Security Cabinet to consider as they contemplate the possibility of action.

If Israel’s intelligence agencies can provide reasonable assurance that the Israeli Air Force can derail the Iranian program for, say, six years, then the case for action becomes inescapable. But if they can only delay Iran for six months, is it really worthwhile to risk all the consequences that would come from an air strike? Perhaps so; perhaps the loss of Israeli prestige and deterrence advantage from Iran going nuclear would be so great that even a symbolic strike is worthwhile. But obviously, the case for action becomes much stronger if the Israeli Air Force can cripple the Iranian program rather than simply delay it for a very short time.

Of course, no intelligence agency can answer such questions with any precision. Certainly America’s intelligence agencies, with their terrible track record regarding WMD in Iraq and other countries, cannot be counted upon to give an answer that will provide much assurance to policymakers. We can only hope the Israelis have better information to allow them to reasonably assess the situation and act accordingly. Bolton is certainly right that counting on negotiations under the present circumstances is to admit defeat and allow Iran to go nuclear — a scenario far more terrifying than the threat of Israeli military action.

Amid the hullabaloo regarding the handover of Iraqi cities to Iraqi security forces yesterday, it is easy to lose sight of the war still going on. Despite dramatic drops in violence in Iraq since 2006-2007 — and a corresponding increase in violence in Afghanistan — Iraq remains by several statistical measures the more violent of the two.

So far this year 101 U.S. soldiers have been killed in Iraq versus 86 in Afghanistan. Figures for civilian casualties are less exact but they also indicate more deaths in Iraq — 893 in Iraq compared to 680 in Afghanistan.

It is hard to get too worked up over statistics so it helps to put a human face on them — a face like Tim Karcher’s. A lieutenant colonel and battalion commander, Karcher had only recently handed over control of his Area of Operations in Sadr City to the Iraqis. On Sunday he was riding through Baghdad in his heavily-armored MRAP vehicle when he was hit by a devastating EFP (explosively formed penetrator). MRAP’s are some of the best armored vehicles that we have, but EFP’s can punch through anything. As ABC’s Martha Raddatz relates in this moving dispatch, Karcher wound up losing both his legs. Sandstorms made it impossible to medivac him by air, so his command sergeant major, Richard Franklin, drove him to the hospital where doctors managed to save his life. On the way back from the hospital, the sergeant-major’s convoy was hit by another EFP, this one killing a sergeant.

Those EFP’s could have come from only one place — Iran. These tragic and maddening incidents are further confirmation, if any were needed, that Iran has not given up destabilizing Iraq and fighting our troops (and those of Iraq by proxy). The remnants of al Qaeda in Iraq also continue to fight. Their capabilities are thankfully much reduced from what they were several years ago, but they remain a formidable threat.

As long as we have 130,000 troops in Iraq, there is little doubt that we can help the Iraqis maintain the progress that has been made in recent years — although that task becomes a bit harder now that most of our troops have left urban centers. The real test will come in a 18 months’ time when under the terms of the Status of Forces agreement, U.S. troops are due to leave Iraq altogether.

Until recently I had expected that this deadline would not be binding, and there is still a chance that it won’t be, but the zeal with which the Maliki government has insisted on a real (if far from complete) pullout of U.S. troops from Iraqi cities suggests that there will not be many U.S. troops left in Iraq after 2010. That is a worrisome prospect because, for all the gains made by Iraqi security forces, they still have a long way to go before they can police their country entirely by themselves — especially when they face such a potent threat emanating from across the border with Iran.

How desperate are Iranian demonstrators for outside support? So desperate some are not afraid to beseech the Little Satan for aid. The Wall Street Journal reports on Israel’s Farsi-language radio broadcast:

On a recent day, as Mr. Amir sat in his tiny studio in Kol Israel’s Jerusalem offices, one caller from Iran, his voice trembling with emotion, recounted how “there’s blood on the streets and people are being killed like butterflies.” Another urged the world to help the protesters-reminding that Persian emperor Cyrus the Great protected and aided the Jews two and a half millennia ago, and asking the Jewish state to repay the favor by supporting Iranian demonstrators today.

Actually perhaps that’s not so unexpected given the long history of amity between Israel and Iran prior to Iran’s Revolution. But it is certainly at odds with the popular conception that all Iranians have been brainwashed since 1979 into becoming violently anti-Jewish and anti-Israel. That stereotype is as inaccurate as the view that all, or even most, Iranians hate the United States and would view any support for their cause from that quarter as the kiss of death. In fact, as numerous visitors have noted over the years (I heard Nick Kristof of the New York Times make this point on TV just a few days ago), ordinary Iranians hold the U.S. in very high regard. And needless to say, Barack Obama has to be as popular in Iran as he is everywhere else around the world — at least he would have been, before his failure to make his voice heard on the regime’s recent atrocities. So why is it again that President Obama thinks support from him will harm the demonstrators’ cause? Heck, if he’s not willing to step forward, perhaps Prime Minister Netanyahu will have to emerge as their champion. (I’m kidding — but only just.)

This is truly sick:

The United States said Monday its invitations were still standing for Iranian diplomats to attend July 4 celebrations at US embassies despite the crackdown on opposition supporters.

President Barack Obama’s administration said earlier this month it would invite Iran to US embassy barbecues for the national holiday for the first time since the two nations severed relations following the 1979 Islamic revolution.

“There’s no thought to rescinding the invitations to Iranian diplomats,” State Department spokesman Ian Kelly told reporters.

“We have made a strategic decision to engage on a number of fronts with Iran,” Kelly said. “We tried many years of isolation, and we’re pursuing a different path now.”

It’s bad enough that the president is deliberately refraining from being too outspoken in favor of the freedom fighters who are being beaten, shot, and tear-gassed in the streets of Tehran. But that he’s still prepared to have America’s diplomats break bread with representatives of the very regime responsible for this terrible oppression, and to do it on the holiday that celebrates our own struggle for freedom — that’s too nauseating for words.

It essentially confirms the analysis of those who have suggested that Obama is not going to deviate one iota from his previous course of “engagement” with Iran, no matter how absurd and immoral that course now appears to be. For a candidate who mocked the previous president for his supposed adherence to ideology over reality, Obama is displaying that very tendency — only, of course, his ideology is not the advancement of freedom but the advancement of negotiations in the vain hope that somehow we can find common ground with the world’s vilest regimes.

(h/t: the Weekly Standard)

I am very relieved that daredevil New York Times reporter David Rohde has managed to escape his Taliban kidnappers. I am also very impressed that the Times managed to keep news of his kidnapping a secret for seven months. I had actually heard of his kidnapping months ago, but it was scrupulously kept out of print not only by the Times but also by competing news organizations that also had heard of it. The logic behind this policy is explained in the Times today:

“From the early days of this ordeal, the prevailing view among David’s family, experts in kidnapping cases, officials of several governments and others we consulted was that going public could increase the danger to David and the other hostages,” said Bill Keller, the executive editor of The Times. “The kidnappers initially said as much. We decided to respect that advice, as we have in other kidnapping cases, and a number of other news organizations that learned of David’s plight have done the same. We are enormously grateful for their support.”

I don’t have any quibble with the Times’s decision to keep the lid on the kidnapping. It was clearly the right thing to do.

I only wish the Times and other news organizations displayed as much regard for the nation’s secrets as they do for their own. The Times has no problem disclosing secret wiretapping of terrorists notwithstanding arguments from senior government officials that this would compromise vital programs. So the secrecy pleas which the Times took so seriously in the case of David Rohde were completely disregarded in the case of al Qaeda surveillance even though experts warned that the Times’s disclosure could increase the danger not just to one person but to millions. Perhaps in the future when deciding whether or not to publish details of covert government programs, the Times and other media organizations should keep in mind that among the millions of Americans whose safety could be compromised by their disclosures are thousands of their own employees.

Not from the Onion…. honest:

The group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals wants the flyswatter in chief to try taking a more humane attitude the next time he’s bedeviled by a fly in the White House.

PETA is sending President Barack Obama a Katcha Bug Humane Bug Catcher, a device that allows users to trap a house fly and then release it outside.

“We support compassion even for the most curious, smallest and least sympathetic animals,” PETA spokesman Bruce Friedrich said Wednesday.

“We believe that people, where they can be compassionate, should be, for all animals.”

During an interview for CNBC at the White House on Tuesday, a fly intruded on Obama’s conversation with correspondent John Harwood.

“Get out of here,” the president told the pesky insect. When it didn’t, he waited for the fly to settle, put his hand up and then smacked it dead.

“Now, where were we?” Obama asked Harwood. Then he added: “That was pretty impressive, wasn’t it? I got the sucker.”

David, as someone who has previously written “the worse the better” for our enemies, I want to make clear that, while still holding to that position, I completely agree with your arguments in favor of supporting the “Green Revolution” (If that’s not a premature label).

I still believe that the Moussavi who ran in the election would have been a terrible leader from our perspective (and from the perspective of ordinary Iranians) — someone who would not, could not, have made real changes in the nature of Iran’s regime but would have camouflaged its true nature to the West. I still believe that the ham-handed repression and vote stealing of recent days have been a positive development insofar as they have opened the eyes of the Roger Cohens and Fred Kaplans of this world to what the mullahs are all about.

But I also believe that it is imperative to support the protesters even though Moussavi is their head. The protesters’ demands, after all, have escalated: They are now calling for not just Ahmadinejad’s dismissal but also for Ayatollah Khamenei’s. In addition, they want to revise the constitution, release all political prisoners, and dissolve “all organs of repression.” That’s a revolutionary agenda and if Moussavi is cool with that, then he is moving, Gorbachev-like, to become much more of a challenge to the regime than he had been before the vote.

This is a situation in which we should all “think green.” Wasn’t green Obama’s favorite color before this weekend?

Methinks that the normally astute Ben Smith of Politico is trying a little too hard to parse supposed disagreement on the right concerning Iran. He writes:

The Iranian election has produced a deep division on the American right, clarifying a rift between those forcefully backing the opposition and those who view the election as a sham and its outcome as an irrelevance in a irremediable conflict between the U.S. and Iran.

The split has elements of the old neoconservative/realist divide, but it doesn’t break down that simply. Congressional Iran hawks like Joe Lieberman, Eric Cantor, John McCain, and Mike Pence are arguing for, if anything, more vocal American support for the Mousavi-led opposition. Pat Buchanan is with Obama. Michael Ledeen is out-and-out hopemongering. Instapundit turned his website green.

The group United Against Nuclear Iran — which also has neocon credentials — by contrast, sees the election as just a symptom of the country’s deeper problems, and is taking the opportunity to make that public point. Max Boot is in that camp. John Bolton dismisses the election, and its “‘moderates,’” as a “sham,” and Dan Pipes was “rooting for Ahmadinejad.”

Rather than a split, this is an example of different analysts offering slightly different shades of analysis. I very much doubt that anyone on this list — other than possibly Pat Buchanan, who isn’t a conservative at all in the American sense (more like a populist reactionary a la William Jennings Bryan or Father Coughlin) — is against “forcefully backing the opposition.” I certainly am not. I think we should do a lot more to help the opposition and that Obama should speak out forcefully on its behalf. But I am against holding up Mousavi as a “reformer” or a “moderate,” because I don’t think he is. (Eric Trager makes the point well.)

Despite my doubts about Mousavi, I very much admire the people of Iran and hope that they will succeed — not in changing the face of the theocratic dictatorship but in overthrowing the dictatorship altogether. Unfortunately I think that’s unlikely, so my second-best choice is that at least they will succeed in undermining and discrediting the system, especially among Western lefties who thought, for reasons escaping me, that Iran was a “democracy.” As I’ve noted before, watching the back-flips among Iran’s apologists, has been grimly satisfying.

President Obama’s unwillingness to offer full-throated support to the people of Iran against their theocratic masters wins kudos from (what must surely be) an unwelcome source: Chas Freeman, whose nomination to head the National Intelligence Council was withdrawn after the unearthing of a whole series of bizarre and offensive comments he had made over the years. The Financial Times quotes him as follows:

“I think they’ve responded in just the right way — neither swallowing the election results nor rejecting them,” says Chas Freeman, a former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia. “The administration will still want to talk to Iran, and it cannot afford to close down that possibility.”

Naturally, Chas Freeman — who applauded the massacre at Tienanmen Square and denounced the supposedly insidious influence of Israel — would think so. But the Obama-ites should stop to ask themselves what they’re doing wrong if they’re winning Chas Freeman’s approbation.

Another liberal has been mugged by Iran’s unpleasant reality; Fred Kaplan writes in Slate:

It’s time for President Obama to rethink his policy of “engagement” with Iran.

Given the near-certainty that Iran’s election was fixed and the documented fact that protesters are being brutalized, there is no way that Obama or Secretary of State Hillary Clinton could go to Tehran and shake hands with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, much less to expect that any talks would be worthwhile.

He’s absolutely right. The question is how long it will take Obama & Co. to realize that. So far they are still sticking to their pre-election “we look forward to negotiating with any Iranian government” stance. If they don’t adjust their position, the obscenity of talks with the current regime will be too much even for stalwart liberals like Kaplan.

I had a chuckle this morning reading the faux outrage on Daily Koz in reaction to my posting yesterday, “The Bright Side of Ahmadinejad’s ‘Win.’” I had suggested that this blatant act of election theft would undermine the fading credibility of the Iranian regime and thereby make more likely a robust response from the West to its attempt to acquire nuclear weapons. The Kossacks, who normally condemn any attempt to pressure the Iranian regime (or any other member of the “Axis of Evil”), much less to overthrow it, as “neocon warmongering,” now shed crocodile tears over my analysis:

Boot shows no concern for the people of Iran who went and voted and saw their vote discarded.  The people who are being beaten like dogs tonight by Ansar-e Hezbollah’s thugs at Iran’s universities and on Iran’s city streets.  … But Max Boot doesn’t care about them.  He blithely assumes that Ahmadinejad will succeed in his coup d’etat, and he’s damn happy about it because he thinks it will give Israel the right to bomb these democrats.

Imagine if Max Boot had decided it was a bad thing for Poland to earn their freedom from Soviet domination because it would make it harder to sustain our immense defense budgets.  That’s the kind of cynical callousness Mr. Boot is displaying…

Suffice it to say, I am not applauding the repressive character of the Iranian regime. I have always abhorred the theocracy in Tehran and have always believed the U.S. should do more to try to bring about peaceful regime change. I continue to believe and hope that the Iranian people will be so enraged by this stolen election that they will overthrow their dictators. That is, admittedly, unlikely, but certainly president Obama should do everything possible — overtly and covertly — to aid the demonstrators. My point was simply that, even if the Iranian theocrats outlast the current protests (as seems likely but not certain), they will be in a  weaker position to continue their campaign of terror and their attempts to acquire a nuclear weapon: weakened both externally and internally. And that’s not a bad thing.

Likewise, the imposition of martial law in Poland in 1981, while a short-term tragedy for the people of Poland, brought about their long-term liberation by undermining the legitimacy of the communist regime. Of course if the Kossacks had been around in the 1980s they would have been arguing that it would be “destabilizing” to support Solidarity and that instead we should reach an accommodation with the communist world, that only simpletons like Ronald Reagan could imagine that we could consign the Soviet Empire to the ash-heap of history. Just as today the Kossacks argue — at least they do in other contexts — that any attempts to undermine the Iranian regime are misguided and that we should reach an accommodation with the mullahs at any cost.

Personally I’m against accommodation with evil unless it’s absolutely unavoidable — and in this case I don’t believe it is. My concern was that Moussavi’s election would not have changed the fundamentals of the Iranian regime but would have added a veneer of “reasonableness” that would have allowed the world to pretend that “moderates” were finally in control. What is good about the last few days — the only good development — is that the theocratic bullies of Tehran are showing their true face to the world. Now even the most dovish leftists have to condemn the government of Iran. That may be faint progress but progress it is.

On the principle of “the worse the better” for our enemies–and, make no mistake, Iran is our enemy–it is possible to take some small degree of satisfaction from the outcome of Iran’s elections.

If the mullahs were really canny, they would have let Mousavi win. He would have presented a more reasonable face to the world without changing the grim underlying realities of Iran’s regime–the oppression, the support for terrorism, the nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs. He is the kind of “moderate” with whom the Obama administration could happily engage in endless negotiations which probably would not accomplish anything except to buy time for Iran to weaponize its fissile material.

But instead it appears that the mullahocracy was determined to anoint Ahmadinejad the winner–and by a margin which no one can take seriously as a true representation of Iranian popular will. Ahmadinejad is about the worst spokesman possible to make Iran’s case to the West–a president who denies the Holocaust, calls for Israel’s eradication, claims there are no homosexuals in Iran, and generally comes off like a denizen of an alternative universe. Even the Obama administration will be hard put to enter into serious negotiations with Ahmadinejad, especially when his scant credibility has been undermined by these utterly fraudulent elections and the resulting street protests.

That doesn’t mean that Obama won’t try–but he will have a lot less patience with Ahmadinejad than he would have had with Mousavi. And that in turn means there is a greater probability that eventually Obama may do something serious to stop the Iranian nuclear program–whether by embargoing Iranian refined-petroleum imports or by tacitly giving the go-ahead to Israel to attack its nuclear installations.

So in an odd sort of way a win for Ahmadinejad is also a win for those of us who are seriously alarmed about Iranian capabilities and intentions. With crazy Mahmoud in office–and his patron, Ayatollah Khameini, looming in the background–it will be harder for Iranian apologists to deny the reality of this terrorist regime.

Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the new commander in Afghanistan, is a widely acclaimed veteran of the Special Operations community. In Iraq he led the Joint Special Operations Command, which was in charge of hunting down high-value targets. He is generally acknowledged to be a brilliant, driven officer. The only doubt about his appointment has been: Will he be overly focused on taking down terrorist kingpins in Afghanistan? That strategy has never produced success in a counterinsurgency, which requires using plain old conventional troops to produce a sense of security among the populace. In this Wall Street Journal interview, he lays those doubts to rest. The key quotes:

After watching the U.S. try and fail for years to put down insurgencies in both countries, Gen. McChrystal said he believes that to win in Afghanistan, “You’re going to have to convince people, not kill them.”

“Since 9/11, I have watched as America tried to first put out this fire with a hammer, and it doesn’t work,” he said last week at his home at Fort McNair in Washington. “Decapitation strategies don’t work”….

“I know that I want it to be an effective traditional or classic counterinsurgency campaign by getting people down in among the population.”

That’s a pretty stunning — and encouraging — statement coming from the former JSOC commander whose job was to pursue a “decapitation strategy” in Iraq by killing Abu Musab al Zarqawi, capturing Saddam Hussein, and other high-profile coups. But it’s a testament to McChrystal’s depth of strategic vision that he realizes something more is called for to win the war in Afghanistan. Whether he will be able to successfully carry out this strategy is another question; but at least he’s on the right track.

With the press all aflutter about the possibility of “reform” and “change” in Iran as a result of its presidential elections, Rep. Mark Kirk, Republican of Illinois (and a naval reserve officer), provides a useful corrective with a “Dear Colleague” letter he has just sent around the House. He makes the point about how close Iran is to producing nuclear weapons, citing reports of the International Atomic Energy Agency. Just as importantly, he points out that even if Mir-Hossein Mousavi, the supposed “reformer,” wins the election, little is likely to change with regard to Iran’s  nuclear program. The key points:

On April 27, 2009, Mr. Mousavi told Der Spiegel, “We will not abandon the great achievements of Iranian scientists. I too will not suspend uranium enrichment.” Der Spiegel asked if he would at least consider the outsourcing of uranium enrichment, as proposed by Russia. Mr. Mousavi responded simply, “No.”

On April 13, 2009, Mr. Mousavi told the Financial Times, “No one in Iran would accept suspension. Progress in nuclear technology and its peaceful use is the right of all countries and nations. This is what we have painfully achieved with our own efforts. No one will retreat.”

On April 6, 2009, according to the Associated Press, Mr. Mousavi said, “We have to have the technology,” adding that “the consequences of giving up the country’s nuclear program would be ‘irreparable’ and that the Iranian people support the nuclear program.”

On March 11, 2009, the Washington Post quoted Mr. Mousavi as saying, “The nuclear technology is one of the examples of the achievements of our youth.”

In any case, even if Moussavi wanted to stop the nuclear program, he couldn’t. As Elliott Abrams points out in this New York Times op-ed, “Mr. Ahmadinejad’s defeat would probably be welcomed abroad as a sign that Iran is moving away from his policies, but Iran’s policies aren’t his — they are dictated by Ayatollah Khamenei and his supporters in the Revolutionary Guard and Basij paramilitary.”

So please let’s put a moratorium on talk about Iranian moderates. We’ve heard it all before.

Barack Obama, we know, is a big believer in the power of his words. And there is no doubt he is a persuasive speaker; he wouldn’t have become president otherwise. But is he so influential that by delivering a speech in Cairo he can change the outcome of the elections in Lebanon? That’s what a lot of commentators are claiming.

See, for example, this Cynthia Tucker column: “Obama changed Lebanese minds.” Or this New York Times “news analysis“: “There were many domestic reasons voters handed an American-backed coalition a victory in Lebanese parliamentary elections on Sunday — but political analysts also attribute it in part to President Obama’s campaign of outreach to the Arab and Muslim world.”

Really? Just by reaching out to the Muslim voters, Obama can make Lebanese voters reject Hezbollah and its allies and vote instead for the pro-Western March 14 coalition? That interpretation seems a bit implausible to me, but just to be sure I queried a couple of Lebanese friends who are both involved in the March 14th movement. One of them wrote back: “Obama’s speech had no effect on the results of the elections, other factors were at play but certainly not Obama’s speech.” Another emailed me:

In fact few of the candidates had the time to follow up on Obama’s speech. Notwithstanding that it was highly covered in the press here in Beirut. Take for example my friend Samy Gemayel who was running for elections and is now an MP, I asked him in one of our talking-points sessions (on Friday 5th ) if he heard Obama’s talk of ‘…religious diversity from the Copts of Egypt to the Maronites of Lebanon…’ and his response was negative. I guess you can multiply this among other candidates who were just too busy being on the ground doing last-minute campaigning.

That is not to say that the posture of the Obama administration was irrelevant to the outcome. Kudos to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Vice President Joe Biden for visiting Beirut and reaffirming their support for Lebanese independence. The Obama administration, as Michael Totten noted, has made clear that it will not sell out Lebanon to reach a deal with Syria or Hezbollah. The Obama administration deserves credit for that stance, which is a continuation of the previous Bush policy which made possible the 2005 Cedar Revolution that forced Syrian troops out of the country.

American support perhaps emboldened some Christian voters to vote for anti-Syrian, anti-Hezbollah candidates. Certainly they rejected the blandishments of Michel Aoun, the Christian candidate who aligned himself with Hezbollah. But it seems like a stretch to claim that Obama’s soothing words in Cairo produced an immediate reaction in Lebanon. Not that that will stop the president’s supporters from claiming magical powers for his rhetoric.

It’s nice to see that the scales have fallen from the Obama administration’s eyes when it comes to North Korea. The New York Times, which in this case serves as the semi-official government mouthpiece (just as the Times of London once did for the British government), reports:

Mr. Obama, aides say, has decided that he will not offer North Korea new incentives to dismantle the nuclear complex at Yongbyon that the North previously promised to abandon.

“I’m tired of buying the same horse twice,” Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates said last week while touring an antimissile site in Alaska that the Bush administration built to demonstrate its preparedness to destroy North Korean missiles headed toward the United
States.

Instead, the administration is trying to figure out how to get tough with North Korea — even to the point of reversing some of President Bush’s unwarranted concessions:

The Obama administration signaled Sunday that it was seeking a way to interdict, possibly with China’s help, North Korean sea and air shipments suspected of carrying weapons or nuclear technology.

The administration also said it was examining whether there was a legal basis to reverse former President George W. Bush’s decision last year to remove the North from a list of states that sponsor terrorism.

Behind this shift of policy is a growing realization that the assumptions made by preceding administrations about North Korea are incorrect:

While Mr. Obama was in the Middle East and Europe last week, several senior officials said the president’s national security team had all but set aside the central assumption that guided American policy toward North Korea over the past 16 years and two presidencies: that the North would be willing to ultimately abandon its small arsenal of nuclear weapons in return for some combination of oil, nuclear power plants, money, food and guarantees that the United States would not topple its government, the world’s last Stalinesque regime.

Now, after examining the still-inconclusive evidence about the results of North Korea’s second nuclear test, the administration has come to different conclusions: that Pyonyang’s top priority is to be recognized as a nuclear state, that it is unwilling to bargain away its weapons and that it sees tests as a way to help sell its nuclear technology.

The administration is to be commended for its realism in this case and its realization that there are, after all, limits to what diplomacy can achieve if not backed up by credible threats. The question is why, having seen the light on North Korea, the administration is now about to commit the same mistake that its predecessors made in dealings with Pyongyang in its own relations with Tehran?

What makes the administration think Iran is any more open to giving up its nuclear weapons program than North Korea is? All the evidence indicates that Iran is dead-set on going nuclear — just as North Korea was. If they undertake negotiations it will be as a smokescreen and delaying mechanism to give them time to weaponize. And by all indications Obama is going to play right into their hands.

I confess to never having read Harlan Ellison’s novels but he has just become my hero — and a hero to all professional writers everywhere — since I watched this A-plus rant of his against all those who expect writers to offer their work gratis. This has happened to me a few times in the past few weeks — I have gotten inquiries from websites (both run by massive media corporations!) asking me to write up my thoughts on some subject. I asked how much they were paying and the answer was: nothing. My reply was that if you pay nothing you will get nothing from me; I don’t work for free. But Harlan Ellison has said it much more eloquently than I can. In the future, if anyone asks me to write for free I think I will just share with them a link to his video. Best line: “I sell my soul but at the highest rates.”

(h/t Elizabeth Eaves of Forbes)

The topic of North Korea isn’t usually a thousand yuks but it was parodied pretty effectively in “Team America.” Now comes Andy Borowitz with a great mock-announcement on the succession announcement: “Kim Jong-Il: ‘Time to Pass Torch to New Generation of Madmen.’” Somehow this beats all the learned analysis I read in the supposedly serious papers.

Having just read Obama’s Cairo speech, my reaction is: Not bad. It could have been better. But it also could have been a lot worse.

Steve Hayes is right in noting that Obama could have talked more pointedly about the relative success of Iraqi democracy and the shocking denial of women’s rights in many Muslim countries, which is no way equivalent to “the struggle for women’s equality … in many aspects of American life.”

There were other examples of attempts to build false equivalence between the Western and Muslim worlds. For instance, he said: “Israelis must acknowledge that just as Israel’s right to exist cannot be denied, neither can Palestine’s.” Of course most Israelis don’t deny Palestine’s right to exist as a Muslim state as long as it is willing to live in peace, whereas Palestinian leaders have shown no comparable willingness to recognize Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state.

Another example of moral equivalency: “In the middle of the Cold War, the United States played a role in the overthrow of a democratically-elected Iranian government. Since the Islamic Revolution, Iran has played a role in acts of hostage-taking and violence against U.S. troops and civilians.” That is accepting the (false) narrative of the Iranian Revolution, which holds that America’s role in overthrowing Mossadeq more than half a century ago — a development that would not have been possible had the leftist prime minister not lost support in the Iranian street — is just as bad as the campaign of mass murder and kidnapping that Iran continues to support at this very moment.

Obama also twisted history when, for example, he mentioned how “Islam has always been a part of America’s story.” He said: “In signing the Treaty of Tripoli in 1796, our second President John Adams wrote, ‘The United States has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion or tranquility of Muslims.’ ” That made the treaty sound like a celebration of American-Muslim partnership when in reality it was a treaty whereby the U.S. paid substantial bribes to the ruler of Tripoli in return for a cessation of attacks on American shipping by his corsairs. Tripoli didn’t keep its promises, and the result was America’s first overseas conflict — the Barbary Wars fought against the Muslim states of North Africa.

Should Obama have summarized the real — as opposed to the air-brushed — history? Probably not. His point wasn’t to settle historical accounts but to put the best face forward to the Muslim world, and he did that, while still tactfully criticizing Muslim countries and defending the United States. Some passages that I particularly liked:

The United States has been one of the greatest sources of progress that the world has ever known. …

Much has been made of the fact that an African-American with the name Barack Hussein Obama could be elected President. But my personal story is not so unique. The dream of opportunity for all people has not come true for everyone in America but its promise exists for all who come to our shores.

I also liked it that the first issue he addressed was that “we must finally confront together… is violent extremism in all of its forms.” And he didn’t mention anti-abortion extremists as an example. He made clear that the “violent extremism” he was concerned about was perpetrated by Islamic terrorists and that “we will… relentlessly confront violent extremists who pose a grave threat to our security.”

I liked his attack on Holocaust deniers and anti-Semites who are pervasive in the Muslim world “Denying that fact [of the six million Jews killed] is baseless, ignorant, and hateful. Threatening Israel with destruction — or repeating vile stereotypes about Jews — is deeply wrong, and only serves to evoke in the minds of Israelis this most painful of memories while preventing the peace that the people of this region deserve.”

And I liked the fact that he put in a Bush-like plug for democracy:

America does not presume to know what is best for everyone, just as we would not presume to pick the outcome of a peaceful election. But I do have an unyielding belief that all people yearn for certain things: the ability to speak your mind and have a say in how you are governed; confidence in the rule of law and the equal administration of justice; government that is transparent and doesn’t steal from the people; the freedom to live as you choose. Those are not just American ideas, they are human rights, and that is why we will support them everywhere.

In the course of talking about democracy Obama even mentioned discrimination against Copts in Egypt (”Among some Muslims, there is a disturbing tendency to measure one’s own faith by the rejection of another’s”). This was the extent of his (indirect) criticism of his host, the dictator Hosni Mubarak. Perhaps he should have said more about Egypt’s denial of basic human rights to its people as Bush once did. The problem, however, is that if you talk about human rights in Egypt, the question becomes: What are you willing to do to back it up? Personally, I thought the U.S. should have made Mubarak pay for such outrageous actions as the jailing of liberal opposition leader Ayman Nour by cutting his subsidies. But there was no appetite in the Bush administration for such action and there isn’t in the Obama administration either. If we are going to support the Mubarak regime, it makes sense to soft-pedal criticism of it — a point that even Bush tacitly acknowledged in his second term.

I realize that the Obama speech isn’t going to satisfy those (like me) who once thrilled to Bush’s unapologetic pro-democracy rhetoric but, for all of Obama’s rhetorical sleight of hands and elisions, I thought he did an effective job of making America’s case to the Muslim world. No question: He is a more effective salesman than his predecessor was. Which doesn’t mean that his audience will buy the message.

President Obama has many fine qualities but obviously a sense of humor isn’t one of them. From Tom Friedman’s column:

“We have a joke around the White House,” the president said. “We’re just going to keep on telling the truth until it stops working — and nowhere is truth-telling more important than the Middle East.

A real knee-slapper.

At first blush this Wall Street Journal article by Michael Phillips, one of their excellent military correspondents, might be cause for concern. It reports, after all, on the revival of “body counts” in Afghanistan — a metric of counterinsurgency success that was discredited in Vietnam.

But in the current context the release of information on enemy casualties actually makes sense. Too often media reports out of Afghanistan focus only on coalition or civilian casualties. By releasing numbers on enemy killed, U.S. forces can counter the wrongful impressions that the enemy is defeating our troops or that our troops are killing more civilians than enemy combatants.

The use of body counts only becomes problematic if they are viewed by commanders as a key metric of success. That’s what happened in Vietnam where General Westmoreland focused U.S. strategy on achieving the mythical “crossover point” where communist casualties would outpace their ability to field replacements. That point was never reached because the communists had a substantial population pool and a willingness to suffer losses that would be considered unthinkable for Americans. The same is true with the Taliban and related groups. We are never going to kill more of them than they can replace.

The key to success in any counterinsurgency is securing the population, not wiping out the enemy. But casualty counts can tell you something about the conduct of tactical operations even if they are of not much use for broader strategic assessments. Senior American commanders at Central Command, NATO, and in Kabul are well aware of this. They are not suppressing “body counts” (as some European contingents do) but nor are they fixated on them. So far I’d say they’ve struck the right balance.

Lt. Gen. Stan McChrystal’s nomination to head coalition forces in Afghanistan is once again reviving the Pat Tillman controversy.

Tillman, you will recall, was an NFL player who became an Army Ranger and was killed in Afghanistan in 2004. McChrystal was the head of the Joint Special Operations Command at the time and as such he approved a Silver Star citation for Tillman which said he had died “in the line of devastating enemy fire.” Subsequently it emerged that he had been killed not by enemy fire but by “friendly fire”– that grotesque term for accidental casualties inflicted by one’s own forces.

Tillman’s parents and numerous others accused the Army of a cover-up designed to protect its own image. There may be an element of truth here, but so what? In addition to protecting the Army, Tillman’s superior officers were also protecting his own reputation. Much better to die at the hands of the enemy, after all, than at the hands of one’s own mates.

Since time immemorial soldiers have been dying by accident — sometimes because of their own stupidity, sometimes because of the stupidity of their fellow soldiers, more often because a battlefield is a terrifying and uncertain environment and mistakes get made in the heat of action. And since time immemorial commanders have been tidying up accounts of soldiers’ deaths to spare the feelings of their families.

Traditionally, officers will tell parents that their sons died “instantly,” “without feeling any pain,” and that they were heroic defenders of their nation’s honor. Often the reality is otherwise. A soldier may have died a long agonizing death after considerable suffering, and his actions may not have affected the outcome of the battle one iota. But why inflict the ugly truth on the home front?

What purpose does it serve? The only impact of publishing the truth, as the Tillman case demonstrates, is that it leads to hurt feelings all around and somehow diminishes the fallen soldier.

In the end, unless homicide is involved, it really doesn’t matter who fired the weapon that killed a soldier. Simply by being on the battlefield and putting himself (or herself) in harm’s way, the deceased is a hero and deserves to be remembered as such. Personally I would give Tillman’s commanders a medal — not a dressing down — for trying to prettify this typically terrible incident that occurred in the fog of war.

This USA Today article provides a splendid example of the potential benefits of a reform I have long advocated — making it easier to enroll foreigners in the U.S. military. It describes the experience of Forat Aldawoodi, who served as an interpreter for U.S. forces in Iraq, then immigrated to the U.S., joined the Army, and went back to Iraq as a soldier patrolling the very neighborhood he once lived in.

Here is how his commanding officer, Lt. Col. Dave Bair of the 82^nd Airborne Division, describes Aldwadoodi’s contributions:

What makes Aldawoodi so valuable is his familiarity with the area and a native understanding of Iraqi culture, Bair said. On almost every mission, Aldawoodi accompanies him, according to Bair. After meeting with a community leader or local Iraqi security force commander, Bair usually calls Aldawoodi into his office to get his impressions and thoughts on what was said between the lines.

When not on patrol, Aldawoodi spends much of his time on the phone, reaching out to Iraqi leaders on behalf of Bair or calling friends to get a better sense of the mood on the street.

Though Aldawoodi is barely a year out of boot camp and holds a junior rank, Bair said he considers him a trusted adviser. “I have to remind myself that he’s just an E-4 (specialist),” Bair said. “I load him up just as much as I do some of my officers. I can’t stress how valuable he’s been to us here.”

There are lots of people like Aldawoodi around the world who have great respect for America and would be eager to join our armed forces for a chance at citizenship. If we facilitate that process — as the armed forces are starting to — we will in return get many valuable members of the military and of society in general.

I am not much swayed by diatribes about how Rome fell because of its supposed overreliance on mercenaries. That’s not true and even if it were it’s of no relevance today because I am not suggesting turning over our defense to mercenaries. All I am suggesting is that we supplement our existing soldiery with more foreign-born volunteers who, like many illustrious predecessors, aspire to become Americans. One of Rome’s strengths was actually its ability to assimilate foreigners and that is one of America’s strengths as well — one we should do more to take advantage of.

Jen, thank you for essentially confirming my point that “much of the change from the Bush administrative has been rhetorical not substantive.” In fact, most of what you complain about is Obama’s rhetoric: that he has “pursued a campaign of rhetorical apology and meekness,” while inflating his own ability to reach out to those hostile to America. In terms of Obama’s more substantive moves, your concern is that:

He has chosen to dismantle missile defense programs at precisely the time we and our allies are confronting rogue states bent on acquiring nuclear weapons. He is forcing the military to make a series of “hard choices” in its budget while domestic spending runs wild. He not only discontinued enhanced interrogation techniques but released memos detailing those methods which now serve as a guide to terrorists. And his position on the truth commission and potential punishment for Bush administration officials is such a muddle it has, at the very least, unnerved those in the intelligence community who now, out of a normal sense self-preservation, will undoubtedly prize caution and inaction above all else.

I agree with many of these points — although it’s important to keep some perspective. For instance, as this article notes:

The Defense Department’s fiscal 2010 budget request would reduce funding for the Missile Defense Agency by $1.2 billion, eliminate the Multiple Kill Vehicle and Kinetic Energy Interceptor programs, and halt plans for a second aircraft carrying Airborne Laser technology. However, the plan includes $700 million in new funds for the Terminal High-Altitude Area Defense system and the Standard Missile 3 program.

So Obama is hardly gutting or dismantling missile defense; rather he is cutting the overall program by about 13% from the Bush level — which was elevated last year precisely in the expectation that a Democratic president would trim a bit. That doesn’t mean I agree with his decision but let’s not exaggerate how dangerous it is.

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