Herbert Rubin, M.D., on Peter Wehner:

The “Third War” is coming to an end in Iraq, thanks to Gen. Petraeus and his troops. The first was the initial destruction of Saddam and his military, sucessfully concluded in three weeks, by Tommy Franks and his army. “Mission Accomplished”. Not quite.

Then the sectarian war, which has been smoldering since the 7th Century between Shiites and Sunni’s, finally stopped with the exhaustion of the country, and the power of the central government to impose peace. Control from Sadr City to Basra was finally won, the criminals and militias crushed, with American help, air power and logistics, to be sure.

The “Third War” was against the jihadists of Al Quaida, who were systematically hunted down, killed or captured. That war appears to be largely won.

The greatness of Gen. Petraeus rivals that of Grant, Sherman, Patton, and Eisenhower in the pantheon of American military heroes. George Bush will be honored for his tenacity and wisdom, rejecting anything less than victory.

That Dexter Filkins can go for a peaceful evening jog in the park across the street from his hotel, which was a killing field last year, tells us much of what we need to know about normal life returning to Baghdad. That the NYT published the new reality, however reluctantly, marks the dawn of a new day in this country. Sen. McCain, got it right, Sen. Obama got it wildly wrong.

Chris, on Jennifer Rubin:

Speaking of the stadium already being booked, what’s the campaign’s plan for the acceptance speech? The success of the “Celebrity” ad should give them pause about having a big, splashy event, but the stadium is booked. Is there any chance that Obama won’t get carried away by the moment and not reinforce McCain’s narrative?

To quote the Magic 8-Ball™: “Outlook Not So Good.”

J.E. Dyer, on Abe Greenwald:

Of course Georgia is being annexed. Quite a few of us recognized that a week ago. My error was in overestimating how long it would be before Russia was doing it overtly.

Predictably, some people are blaming Georgia; saying that Georgia is not a “real” democracy (neither are we, of course; neither is any nation today); and insisting that we provoked Russia to this by recognizing Kosovo, putting the missile defense system in Eastern Europe, and first considering, then denying a NATO membership track for Georgia and Ukraine.

So apparently, if a nation has a territorial dispute with Russia, and seeks to prevent Russia, which has troops all over the disputed territory, from deciding the dispute by force of arms, the other nation is put in the wrong and can approriately be invaded at any time.

If a nation is not a particular (unspecified) type of democracy, Russia can annex it whenever she wants.

If Russia doesn’t like the boundaries of an emerging nation, it is appropriate to signal that by invading a neighbor.

If Russia doesn’t like a missile defense system being installed in her neighborhood, it is appropriate for Russia to respond by invading a neighbor.

And if you’re going to consider NATO membership for anyone, go ahead and admit the prospective members immediately, lest Russia feel emboldened and invade them.

This seems like an excellent recipe for international stability and harmony. I propose the United States begin operating on these principles soonest. There are a whole lot of things going on that I don’t like, so we should invade and annex Cuba immediately. Venezuela should be next. Haiti has been begging for invasion and regime stabilization forever. We should proclaim that Canada and Mexico are territories of the United States, dispatch territorial governors for them, and put them on a fast track to statehood. I don’t expect much resistance from the Canadians; the Mexicans might kick for a while in those messy, ungovernable areas, but it’s amazing what you can achieve with a few well-placed cruise missiles. Besides, the US Army doesn’t get nearly enough use out of ATACMS these days.

This is the point: if the US and everyone else must constrain our actions to avoid provoking Russia to invade her neighbors, then we are, de facto, recognizing Russia’s perspective as the controlling one for international relations.

Many people here haven’t made these particular arguments. But this was a longstanding Cold War argument as well. It’s a bad one.

Ron Kean, on Peter Wehner:

The argument Mr. Fukuyama makes, like many on the left, relies on reading tea leaves or crystal balls. They say things would have been better if we hadn’t gone there, as if anybody can know that.

They ignore the intelligence. Why do we pay the officers of the CIA anyway? If we don’t err on the side of caution, where should we err? If Americans were hurt or killed by WMD’s from customers of Saddam, it might have been worse.

All war is bad. Provocation is debatable. In the end, is the country free and secure or chaotic and oppressed? I think the Iraqis were given a gift. A nice one.

Ben Reis deserves credit for his nifty new creation–a compilation of all major campaign speeches by Barack Obama and John McCain into a searchable, easy-to-use website. The website, www.speechwars.com, allows one to compare the actual words of debate in this ongoing, verbose election.

One quick observation: A two-word search using using the terms “Iraq” and “surge” reveals that Barack Obama actually mentions this issue more frequently. Odd, considering McCain bet his presidential aspirations on the success of this particular policy.

Politicians grabbing Barack Obama’s coattails should take note: In the Georgia democratic Senatorial primary runoff held yesterday, Jim Martin defeated Vernon Jones by 60% to 40%. Martin will now face the Republican senior Senator from Georgia, Saxby Chambliss, in November’s election. This doesn’t seem to bode well for Obama’s presidential quest. Jones’s campaign hoped to emulate Obama’s impressive primary victory in Georgia (he defeated Senator Hillary Clinton in Georgia, 66.4% to 31.1%), but now he’s failed to even make it to November’s ballot.

In fact, Jones distributed campaign paraphernalia consisting of a picture of himself and Obama, with the words “Yes We Can!” prominently scrawled underneath the photographs. Also, Jones sent a mass email meant to smear his opponent Martin:

My campaign has uncovered evidence that my opponent, Jim Martin, did not want Senator Barack Obama to be President of the United States and that Jim Martin voted against Barack Obama in the February 2008 Presidential Primary election in Georgia. [Emphasis not my own.]

He also used this line of attack in a debate, “You say you support Barack Obama, but you voted against him.” In the first round of the primary election, Jones’s strategy of cozying up to the presumptive democratic presidential candidate paid off. Although he wasn’t able to win the race outright, he came out with the most votes (over 40%) and looked poised for victory

What explains Jones’s sudden decline? Again, it’s difficult to tell, but it makes sense to look at the most recent developments in the campaign of Jones’s political inspiration. It might have been Obama’s grand tour, or it could have been Obama’s (former) opposition to drilling off-shore, or maybe it was Obama’s adoption of whatever-policy-is-popular strategy, or it might have been any one of his many policy changes. These are, after all, issues important to Georgians.

With Obama’s humongous primary victory in Georgia, and with former Georgia Congressman Bob Barr in the presidential race (likely to take many more votes from McCain than Obama), the Obama campaign likes its chances in the Peach state. But I imagine Obama will take a hard look at this race to see what went wrong. Politics has changed even since the primary. A different Obama than the one that faced Clinton has emerged, and his campaign will now have to readjust its strategy.

Current anti-war arguments (specifically, Francis Fukuyama’s) are outdated, dubious, and unreflective of conditions in Iraq, argues Bret Stephens in today’s Wall Street Journal:

Perhaps it’s worth considering what we have gained now that Iraq looks like a winner.

Here’s a partial list: Saddam is dead. Had he remained in power, we would likely still believe he had WMD. He would have been sitting on an oil bonanza priced at $140 a barrel. He would almost certainly have broken free from an already crumbling sanctions regime. The U.S. would be faced with not one, but two, major adversaries in the Persian Gulf. Iraqis would be living under a regime that, in an average year, was at least as murderous as the sectarian violence that followed its collapse. And the U.S. would have seemed powerless to shape events.

Instead, we now have a government that does not threaten its neighbors, does not sponsor terrorism, and is unlikely to again seek WMD. We have a democratic government, a first for the Arab world, and one that is increasingly capable of defending its people and asserting its interests.

It’s a persuasive piece. And just as importantly, this recent upswing in good fortune might explain why the only story on Iraq in the A section of today’s New York Times is about the end of an internal political struggle between Iraqi political leaders and the United Nations and American officials to agree on bylaws for the forthcoming democratic elections. Many suggest that Iraq needs political reconciliation. But an emergent politics itself might be the first sign of this reconciliation.

Network news stations have remarkably few reservations when it comes to replaying video footage obtained from sources close to terrorists. But with recent attention on the Muhammad al-Dura affair (that is, attention paid by the blogosphere and publications like The Weekly Standard, not network news stations), perhaps times are changing. The blog Augean Stables reports that CNN and BBC are–for now–not picking up on footage recently released by Reuters of terrorists in Gaza training and bomb-making:

Interestingly, CNN and BBC seem to have chosen to avoid showing this new Reuters footage, even though they regularly air the anti-Israel footage which Reuters has previously pumped out.

But though CNN and BBC appear to have reservations (at least, with this particular video), Reuters still maintains a healthy enough relationship with terrorists to obtain such a video.

The same Washington Post reporter/columnist who boasts that the National Review describes him as, “The most anti-Bush reporter currently assigned to the White House by a major news organization,” has a heavy-hitting column (already touched on by Jennifer here) accusing Senator Barack Obama of “becoming [his party’s] presumptuous nominee.” It’s a charge levied every few days (the most persuasive piece of late was Charles Krauthammer’s), but it has to hurt more coming from a member of Obama’s choir.

Dana Milbank’s underlying criticism is that Obama’s actions share a peculiar similarity to George W. Bush’s and Dick Cheney’s. Obama commands a “presidential-style” that slows traffic, shuts down hallways, and attracts action-halting attention. Also, Obama has high profile meetings, conducts business in secrecy, frequently reveals his “inexperience,” and has too much “pride.” Milbank’s greatest complaint, however, is about the way the Obama campaign locks out the press.

Obama has run his candidacy on a single issue: his rhetoric suggests that he is campaigning as the anti-Bush candidate. With President Bush’s approval ratings in the pits, it’s an altogether sensible campaign strategy. But if Milbank’s critique is to be taken seriously, what does it say about the all those voting for Obama? If they hated Bush’s tactics, why do they let them slide in Obama? Perhaps the President’s supposedly sinister modus operandi was never really that objectionable after all.

In connection with an article coming out in tomorrow’s New York Times, reporter Jodi Kantor has uploaded materials from Professor Barack Obama’s constitutional law classes at the University of Chicago. Political junkies will find the documents interesting, and they can be accessed here. But most telling are the anecdotes recounted throughout the article. Here are a few:

The Chicago faculty is more rightward-leaning than that of other top law schools, but if teaching alongside some of the most formidable conservative minds in the country had any impact on Mr. Obama, no one can quite point to it.

“I don’t think anything that went on in these chambers affected him,” said Richard Epstein, a libertarian colleague who says he longed for Mr. Obama to venture beyond his ideological and topical comfort zones. “His entire life, as best I can tell, is one in which he’s always been a thoughtful listener and questioner, but he’s never stepped up to the plate and taken full swings.”

[. . .]

In a 1996 interview with the school newspaper, sounded suspicious of President Bill Clinton’s efforts to reach across the aisle.

“On the national level, bipartisanship usually means Democrats ignore the needs of the poor and abandon the idea that government can play a role in issues of poverty, race discrimination, sex discrimination or environmental protection,” Mr. Obama said.

[. . .]

While students appreciated Mr. Obama’s professorial reserve, colleagues sometimes wanted him to take a stand. When two fellow faculty members asked him to support a controversial antigang measure, allowing Chicago police to disperse and eventually arrest loiterers who had no clear reason to gather, Mr. Obama discussed the issue with unusual thoughtfulness, they say, but gave little sign of who should prevail — the American Civil Liberties Union, which opposed the measure, or the community groups that supported it out of concern about crime.

“He just observed it with a kind of interest,” said Daniel Kahan, now a professor at Yale.

Nor could his views be gleaned from law review articles or other scholarship; Mr. Obama has never published any. He was too busy, but also, Mr. Epstein believes, he was unwilling to put his name to anything that could haunt him politically, as Ms. Guinier’s writings had hurt her.

“He figured out, you lay low,” Mr. Epstein said.

Conservative and liberal pundits alike will, of course, glean what they want from this article. But push aside Kantor’s fluff, and I believe one can better understand the workings of “a guy with political ambitions for his entire adult life [who] has not left a paper trail,” as Jim Geraghty wrote on The Campaign Spot.

Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) makes the Senate less efficient, and that’s his political virtue. By clogging the Congressional legislative schedule, Coburn has put into practice a Thoreauian theory of governance: “That government is best which governs least.”

“Mr. Coburn has continued down his singular path, driving Democrats and some Republicans to distraction with his prolific use of the ‘hold’–the ability of a single senator to object to moving ahead on a measure without a debate,” writes Carl Hulse in the New York Times. The article, which mainly focuses on the so called “Tomnibus” (a largesse bill sponsored by the Democratic majority, laden with legislation previously disavowed by Coburn, and primarily created to circumvent Coburn’s stubbornness), should come as no surprise to those who remember columnist George Will’s profile of the Senator over two years ago:

“I’m not liked very well,” he says serenely, “but I’m like the gopher that’s going to keep on digging until someone spears me or traps me. I’m going to keep on digging the tunnel under spending.” Because, he says, large deficits reverse the American tradition of making sacrifices for the benefit of rising generations: “I’m an American long before I’m a Republican, and I’m a granddad before I’m either one of them.”

“If I don’t get reelected? Great. The Republic will live on.” Meanwhile, his mission is the soul of simplicity: “stopping bad things.” For five more years — 11 at the most — Coburn will be the Senate’s stoplight.

To be sure, Coburn has his flaws. But in the 110^th Congress, very few senators so effectively make the Senate run so inefficiently.

While Senator Barack Obama was on his world tour, Senator John McCain should have been busy—neither planning to speak at an Gulf Coast oil rig, visiting with the Dalai Lama, nor whining about his coverage in the press. Instead, McCain should have paid a visit to the Rio Grande Valley. There, of course, fifteen counties have just been declared federal disaster areas, thousands are still without power, and an assessed $750 million dollar clean-up task awaits. All this as a result of Hurricane Dolly.

The two contrasting images of the presidential candidates would have been staggering. Imagine: Obama assuring hordes of Germans that he is “a fellow citizen of the world” in the picturesque Berlin Tiergarten; McCain, donning a slicker, assuring the citizens of South Texas that the federal government will not allow this to be another Hurricane Katrina. It would have contrasted a sprightly Obama with a sober McCain; an arrogant, high-flying orator with a person conscious of the needs of average Americans. This is exactly the message McCain has been unable to send successfully.

In addition to further delineating himself from Obama, McCain could have accomplished something else. By visiting the scene as the disaster unfolded, McCain could have silenced some critics and assured voters that his candidacy is not a continuation of the Bush administration. Bush has to this day not been able to recover from the political hit he took after Hurricane Katrina. McCain would have been politically smart to distance himself from this element of the Bush administration’s legacy.

Barack Obama, always hesitant to make promises he cannot easily keep, had this to say at a press conference in Amman, Jordan:

“Let me be absolutely clear,” Sen. Barack Obama, D-Illinois, said today at a press conference in Amman, Jordan. “Israel is a strong friend of Israel’s. It will be a strong friend of Israel’s under a McCain…administration. It will be a strong friend of Israel’s under an Obama administration. So that policy is not going to change.”

Israel is the Israel Israel has been waiting for.

When I saw this headline, “Pope Warns on Environment,” I automatically assumed the story was about Al Gore . . .

Soon after Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi assumed office, she claimed one of her first victories. At last, low income wage earners were rescued with the passage of an amended Fair Labor Standards Act (or the Fair Pay Act of 2007). Instead of making, at minimum, $5.15 an hour, earners across the nation had to be paid at least $5.85 an hour. Soon to come, however, on July 24, 2008, American wage earners will have to earn no less than $6.55 per hour of labor (and again, on July 24, 2009, the minimum will be raised to $7.25 an hour).

In arguing for passage of the bill, one that many democrats were keen to see succeed, Speaker Pelosi proudly told a crowded National Press Club that “We have begun to make America’s families more economically secure, by raising the minimum wage . . . ”

And later, when the bill finally made it through Congress, Speaker Pelosi was more than eager to praise her own success:

This is a day that signals change . . . It’s not enough, but it’s a great start. And it’s part of a progressive agenda for economic growth in our country that talks about rewarding work, about educating our people . . . This is about the future, it’s about fairness, and it’s about having many more Americans participate in the economic success of our country, where our prosperity is shared because of a progressive economic agenda.

Since the second leg of the minimum wage hike is about to go into effect, and since we are in the middle of presidential and congressional election season that has to a great extent focused on the state of the economy, one cannot help wondering what Speaker Pelosi and the rest of her Democratic cronies have to say about the success of their “progressive economic agenda.” Here is a sampling of Speaker Pelosi’s recent remarks:

• “We will be proceeding with another stimulus package.”

• Legislative intervention is required “to assist consumers and strengthen the economy.”

• “The president has for a long time been in denial on the state of the economy … I don’t think that we have that amount of time … There are indications that this downturn is steeper than it was when we created the first stimulus package.”

• “The purchasing power of the American income is going down.”

• “Democrats in Congress are striving to work in a bipartisan way to address the nation’s serious economic challenges. Our nation has had six straight months of job losses, and we cannot afford any delay in making progress to create jobs and rebuild the American economy.”

Unsurprisingly, I was unable to find any remark from her tying the state of the economy to minimum wage. Of course, personal responsibility isn’t a trait coveted by Democrats; instead, as recently as a couple of weeks ago, Speaker Pelosi still calls the legislation a “victory.”

Today, Israel exchanged Samir Kuntar and other terrorists for two dead soldiers. Another deal brokered by Olmert, with Israel’s enemies, in an attempt to save his political skin. After this, and his recent declaration that “we have never been as close to the possibility of reaching an [peace] agreement,” one can only conclude that he is delusional, self-interested and egomaniacal—but who realized it was to such a disturbing degree? And it’s difficult to imagine Olmert stepping aside. He’s so politically damaged that he could never recover by leaving the political scene now. Instead, it seems that he’s hoping to polish his legacy.

Which is terrible. As veteran COMMENTARY contributor Hillel Halkin writes in the New York Sun:

[Olmert] genuinely seems to believe that if he can convince Israel’s police or attorney general that he “only” broke a few electoral financing laws and wasn’t involved in personal graft, or “only” double or triple-billed various organizations for his travel expenses without pocketing the extra money for himself — two “onlies,” it must be said, that are looking highly unlikely — he is perfectly qualified to remain in office. If he hasn’t done anything that would have landed him in jail as a private individual, why should his public life have to suffer?

New York State Senator George Washington Plunkitt famously said, “Nobody thinks of drawin’ the distinction between honest graft and dishonest graft … There’s an honest graft, and I’m an example of how it works.” If Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert muttered substantively the same lines, I might half-forgive him. But his problem is that he won’t even come close to admitting his indiscretions. Instead, he plunges into political deals of dubious tactical and strategical value. Plunkitt’s quotation, from above, continues:

I see my opportunity and I take it. I go to that place and I buy up all the land I can in the neighborhood. Then the board of this or that makes its plan public, and there is a rush to get my land, which nobody cared particular for.

Ain’t it perfectly honest to charge a good price and make a profit on my investment and foresight? Of course, it is. Well, that’s honest graft and I’m lookin’ for it every day in the year. I will tell you frankly that I’ve got a good lot of it, too.

Plunkitt’s virtue was that he came forward and admitted his own corruption. Olmert’s vice is his complete inability to do the same–and the Israeli electorate’s passivity isn’t helping.

What’s the difference between Iran, the United States, and Israel? Not much, according to Representative Jim Moran (D-VA).

Asked by host Bruce DePuyt about his “reaction to the missile tests this week,” Moran said his reaction “is the same as my reaction to Israel’s provocative display about a week earlier.”

The Politico article goes on:

Last month, The New York Times reported that Israel carried out a military drill over the eastern Mediterranean Sea. Israeli officials have not publicly commented on the exercise, but have expressed serious concerns about Iran’s nuclear program.

“This is saber rattling, and I don’t think it’s responsible or productive for either party, and I don’t think we should be threatened,” Moran said. “We should all sit down and be more adult about this. Iran does not have a nuclear weapon. Iran is very unlikely to attack Israel, there’s no one else in the region that they would have any reason to attack.”

“This is wrong and immature for Iran,” Moran said later, “it’s wrong and immature for the United States, and to some extent Israel to be engaging in this kind of counterproductive saber rattling.”

Moran is simply unable to condemn Iran without condemning America and Israel, too. The Congressman, as his comments indicate, demonstrates a blatant disregard for fact: Iran poses a real existential threat to Israel. What makes its zealous quest for nuclear power frightening is the same reason that Iran must be called what it is: evil. The president of Iran prays for the concomitant death of Jews and destruction of Israel. So for Moran to equate Israel and America with Iran is to suggest that the three have committed just as egregious actions.

Sadly, Moran’s mistake is not exclusive to him; it’s indicative of broader trends of thinking among a certain segment of the Left. This radical sect (like its magazine of opinion, which James Kirchick wrote about earlier this week) has strayed far from its roots.

The BBC’s most recent “Jerusalem Diary” brings its readers Maysoon Zayid, a self-described “Palestinian Muslim virgin with cerebral palsy, from New Jersey, who is an actress, comedian and activist.” (She is in Adam Sandler’s latest flick, You Don’t Mess With the Zohan. Admittedly, I have not seen the film.) When asked by Tim Franks, the column’s author, where comedy fits in to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, she replied:

“I was dating a Lebanese Christian Riverdancer who was gay,” she replies. “And I didn’t know it and I was very upset and I’d tell my friends and they’d crack up, and eventually I would crack up too.”

She believes there is an analogy: “Palestine-Israel is such a ludicrous issue.”

Her point is that the conflict is played out with the sophisticated paraphernalia of the developed world, and yet “everyone approaches it in such an illogical way that it’s almost clown-like.”

Maysoon says that it is not just that the issue can be comedic, but that comedy itself can exert a power. “If you can get the person across from you to laugh, they probably won’t kill you.”

If the Israel-Palestinian conflict can be reduced to incompatibility between a gay “Lebanese Christian Riverdancer” and a “Palestinian Muslim virgin with cerebral palsy, from New Jersey, who is an actress, comedian and activist,” then who is whom? But even Zayid doesn’t take this loose analogy too seriously, at least if this bit from a past routine is to be viewed as congruent with the BBC’s breakdown of her philosop