a Battle of Two Books Rages

The struggle to set the future course of the Afghan war is becoming a battle of two books -- both suddenly popular among White House and Pentagon brain trusts. The two draw decidedly different lessons from the Vietnam War. The first book describes a White House in 1965 being marched into an escalating war by a military viewing the conflict too narrowly to see the perils ahead. President Barack Obama recently finished the book, according to administration officials, and Vice President Joe Biden is reading it now. The second describes a different administration, in 1972, when a U.S. military that has finally figured out how to counter the insurgency is rejected by political leaders who bow to popular opinion and end the fight. It has been recommended in multiple lists put out by military officers, including a former U.S. commander in Afghanistan, who passed it out to his subordinates.

The two books -- "Lessons in Disaster," on Mr. Obama's nightstand, and "A Better War" on the shelves of military gurus -- have become a framework for the debate over what will be one of the most important decisions of Mr. Obama's presidency.

Lesson's call number is 327.7305 G; Better's is 959.7043 S. Interesting divergence in call numbers: 300s are social sciences, 327 international relations; 950s are general history of Asia, 959 Southeast Asia.

I read (most of) "Lessons" and came away with an abiding anger at McGeorge Bundy for his arrogance. Until his very end he refused to admit the mistakes that were made, and his lack of courage in examining his own thinking.

A better war's subject heading is Vietnam War, 1961-1975 -- United States. and that has 265 entries. Lesson has numerous subject headings; the first two are United States -- Foreign relations -- Vietnam (56 entries) and Vietnam -- Foreign relations -- United States.(also 56; duplication?).

The impact of all the book-reading on the Afghanistan decision isn't clear. The administration's review of its Afghan strategy is expected to last until the end of this month, and views are likely to evolve. "A Better War" shaped the debate over the 2007 troop surge in Iraq: Military commanders and top Pentagon civilians pushed the book ardently on surge skeptics, winning important converts.

Oy. Better was written in 1999; Lewis Sorley is described in the book's bio as a "third-generation graduate of West Point" with a Ph.D. from Hopkins, who served in the Army for 20 years, taught at the Point and the Army War College, and had Pentagon staff duty, as well as civilian official duty at the CIA. The book's cover states that tit draws "on newly available information" and "revises our knowledge of the war and its conclusion." Its subtitle is "the unexamined vistories and the final tragedy of America's last years in VietNam."

Sen. John McCain (R., Ariz.), long an advocate of the narrative detailed in "A Better War," warned that while Vietnam may appear to have some parallels to Afghanistan, the better comparison is Iraq, where many of the same commanders now managing the Afghan war learned the value of surging more troops into a battle zone. "Vietnam fell to a conventional invasion of the North Vietnamese military," Mr. McCain said. "The closest parallel to Afghanistan today is Iraq, the strategies that succeeded and the generals that succeeded."

Conventional military invasion? What about the guerrilla war?

There are striking similarities between the debates of today and yesteryear. Now, as in the 1960s, the discussion in the administration is how to best defeat a perceived national-security threat. In both periods, the U.S. had partnered with corrupt governments with tainted leaders.

For opponents of a major troop increase, led by Mr. Biden and Mr. Emanuel, "Lessons in Disaster" -- which traces the hawkish war stance and eventual disavowal of it by Vietnam-era national-security adviser McGeorge Bundy -- encapsulates their concerns about accepting military advice unchallenged.

"Bundy said we debated a number and not a use," said Gordon M. Goldstein, the book's author, referring to troop deployments. "That's a really critical observation which goes to the heart of what's going on right now in the White House."

A shift in focus remains anathema to commanders at the Pentagon. Gen. Stanley McChrystal voiced that view during a speech in London last week, saying he doesn't support a strategy that only focused on using unmanned drones and elite forces to track down al Qaeda terrorists.

[His] view is shared by the bulk of the senior military leadership, which has signed on to Gen. McChrystal's 66-page war assessment that calls for a large increase in force levels.

It is a view echoed by Lewis Sorley, author of "A Better War," which argues that once Gen. William Westmoreland was replaced in 1968 by Gen. Creighton Abrams, the war began to turn.

I'm going to read (some of) the book, and see. The idea that the VietNam War could have been won by the US is, was, and remains, preposterous.

Crew members ride a U.S. Chinook helicopter over the mountains after leaving Cop Cherokee base in Kherwar district in Logar province Tuesday.

A Chili Sauce to Crow About

BY THE BARREL OR BOTTLE David Tran's sriracha sauce in a market in San Gabriel, Calif.

Its own website? Of course.












David Tran, foreground above, with his son, William, at the Huy Fong Foods warehouse in Rosemead, Calif.

Prediction: Taliban Will Cave

Amidst all the noise of people repeating the same three ideas, of media outlets concentrating on the superficial and reporting the noteworthy, is there original thinking and analysis anywhere? Here is some original thinking.

For Gen. Anthony Zinni, one of the country’s most respected military thinkers, Iraq and Afghanistan are already yesterday’s wars. Confident that the Taliban will be at the conference table by the end of the year, he is thinking about how the United States should be preparing for its next conflict.

It is easy to forget that there are some very bright military minds. Sam Grant and Robert E. Lee were intellectually gifted and capable. Even Colin Powell is quite bright, despite his lack of social courage (he has plenty of physical courage, quite a different thing).

He hinted that there had already been backroom talks between the U.S. and the Taliban—“like Kissinger’s with the North Vietnamese”—and predicted that these would lead to formal negotiations by the end of the year. So, he told an audience of several hundred students, academic staff, and visiting military officials, now is the time for the U.S. to consider what it expects from its military in the future.

Well, the US has publicly announced that it will negotiate with "moderate" Taliban elements.

The United States must be prepared to fight both a conventional war and “that other thing,” he said. And how to define “that other thing” will occupy us for the next ten years. His own definition is a nation that needs stabilization and reconstruction because the social institutions can’t cope.

Somalia?

“But our military is not designed to handle this,” Zinni said. He has counted 54 tasks the U.S. Army is performing in Iraq that can not be defined as “military,” including running swimming pools.

Nation-building, which Republicans castigated Bill Clinton for doing.

When we touch something, we own it,” Zinni said, taking Colin Powell’s quote, ‘When we break something, we own it,’ one step further. “And when we own it, we can’t help rebuilding it in our own image. That’s the American way. But we’re not good at it and we can’t afford it.”

We won’t even be able to claim victory when the troops come home, because “we don’t come home anymore,” Zinni said. “Sixty years after the Second World War, there are still American troops in Germany, South Korea. Sixty years from now, will we still have troops in Iraq and Afghanistan?”

A sobering thought.

Indexed Trove of Kissinger Phone Transcripts Is Completed

Richard M. Nixon and Henry A. Kissinger gave secret orders to record their calls, each evidently without the other’s knowledge.

Not at all a surprise that this pair recorded their calls; they were both so untrustworthy they did not even trust each other.

Nixon was a criminal: he broke the Constitution by usurping power, he broke laws by ordering illegal activities for the sake of his own political power, he lied, and then he was stupid enough to not destroy the tapes.

Kissinger was a manipulator, overly impressed with his own power and skills, and, in the end, has been proven to be not much more than a petty jerk: he recorded calls with the President of the United States (even if that was Nixon, it is still an amazing display of hubris, arrogance and distrust).

The words of these two are chilling, even 35 years later.

It was April 1972, and American B-52 bombers were pummeling North Vietnam. President Richard M. Nixon got on the phone with his national security adviser, Henry A. Kissinger, for an update on the air assault on the port city of Haiphong. The men struggled to persuade each other that the war might still be won.

Did they actually believe the war could be won?

“They dropped a million pounds of bombs,” Mr. Kissinger said.

A million pounds of bombs dropped on one city. A million pounds. It staggers the mind that this could be used as a statement meant to impress.

Nixon was pleased. “Goddamn, that must have been a good strike!” he said.

His own words reveal what a depraved human being Nixon was.

Then the president had a moment of doubt, recalling the dismal experience of his immediate predecessor, Lyndon B. Johnson: “Johnson bombed them for years, and it didn’t do any good.”

Exactly: LBJ had Viet Nam bombed for four years, and it did nothing to dissuade the North or the Viet Cong from pursuing their aims. LBJ and his advisers knew that. McNamara would, 30 plus years later, confess how own doubts (In retrospect: the tragedy and lessons of Vietnam is one of his books).

Mr. Kissinger reassured his boss, saying: “But, Mr. President, Johnson never had a strategy. He was sort of picking away at them. He would go in with 50 planes, 20 planes. I bet you we will have had more planes over there in one day than Johnson had in a month.”

Which accomplished absolutely nothing, to just bomb and bomb and bomb. That was no strategy, to simply drop more bombs. Bombing was the same tactic Johnson had used; to simply multiply the amount of bombs did not amount to a strategy.

What the two men said 36 years ago can be known with such precision today because they worked in what was, in retrospect, the golden age of White House taping. Both Nixon and Mr. Kissinger had given secret orders to record their calls, each evidently without the other’s knowledge.

A pair of twits, of criminals.

On Tuesday, the National Security Archive, a nonprofit research group at George Washington University, published an online edition of transcripts of 15,000 Kissinger phone calls from 1969 to 1977, fully indexed and searchable for the first time. A selection was posted on the archive’s Web site, nsarchive.org, and the full collection is available to subscribers, which include many university libraries.

Hyperlinking to the NSA Archive website shows a page with this bon mot: "We can bomb the bejesus out of them all over North Vietnam.".

O, there is no doubt as to the historical import of these tapes and their transcripts; three and a half decades later my animus toward these two human beings remains intense.

The collection covers many serious policy matters, like Vietnam strategy, but includes a few calls memorable because they are so bizarre.

Nixon was bizarre; Kissinger? Ditto.

Lincoln - Obama

There is no shortage of advice, criticism, analysis and expert opinion offered on Barack Obama, eleven days after his election to the presidency. This pundit, labeled a cultural critic and senior editor of the New Republic, has some tough criticisms of Obama's declared kinship with Abraham Lincoln.

Mr. Obama's publicly declared kinship with Lincoln is long-lived and meticulously fashioned.

Imagery plays such an important part in politics: Tippacanoe, Old Hickory were two of the earliest. Lincoln is a near-saint in American politics and society, and to connect oneself with Old Abe is smart.

Mr. Obama's close identification with such an admirable figure is itself admirable, and it seems as sincere as it's calculated to please and impress. And yet there's something puzzling about his obsession with a president whose tenure was entirely taken up with conducting the bloodiest war the modern world had seen, and whose eloquence and intelligence we perhaps would not be aware of if the republic's imminent dissolution hadn't inspired him to remarkable feats of self-mastery and self-expression. For at times, Lincoln's mighty rhetorical gift led him into morally dangerous or emotionally disconnected waters.

Of course it's calculated; Obama is a politician. Puzzling? Abe Lincoln did not become eloquent and intelligent because of the Civil War, but the War did require his intelligence and eloquence to govern a divided nation in the throes of an insurrection based on retaining slavery.

Along with the eloquence, and the geography, there are more than a few social and psychological parallels between Mr. Obama and Lincoln. Aside from the connections Mr. Obama himself likes to point out -- humbly born, adversity-afflicted, self-made men -- there is the unwitting testimony to the two men's affinity made by Lincoln's commentators, and even his friends.

Edmund Wilson and William Herndon are quoted as calling Lincoln "intent, self-controlled, strong in intellect, tenacious of purpose" and "not impulsive, fanciful, or imaginative, but calm and precise."

There is a significant difference, I think of course, between Wilson and Herndon. Herndon was Lincoln's contemporary and law partner; Wilson, an American writer and literary critic, was born in 1895, fully 30 years after Lincoln was assassinated. To couple Wilson and Herndon is a choice some, I among them, would not agree with readily. It seems a slippery choice, a questionable choice, to make: elevating Wilson to the level of Herndon is debetable, to say the least. Herndon knew Lincoln; Wilson wrote about Lincoln.

Yes, Edmund Wilson is venerated by liberal intellectuals, yet that hardly qualifies him to be regarded as an authority. Of course, a mere peek at the Wikipedia article on Wilson reveals much: He was the managing editor of Vanity Fair in 1920 and 1921, and later served as Associate Editor of The New Republic and as a book reviewer for The New Yorker. His works influenced novelists Upton Sinclair, John Dos Passos, Sinclair Lewis, Floyd Dell, and Theodore Dreiser. He wrote plays, poems, and novels, but his greatest strength was literary criticism.

Wilson was an editor at The New Republic; Siegel is a senior editor at the same publication. Seems an almost-incestuous (intellectually) relationship.

My point is that citing Wilson as an authority is, at the least, questionable. Even though Siegel quotes Wilson in a largely innocuous manner, he uses Wilson as a building block in his argument. And just what is that argument?

But it is easy to miss the most significant relationship between Lincoln and Mr. Obama. For Mr. Obama, the most important point of similarity derives from a most fundamental difference.

President-elect Obama will be ruling during a time of economic crisis; President Lincoln ruled during a time of civil war.

The American Civil War ended the institution of slavery in the South: the self-made white president who prosecuted the war created the conditions for the self-made black senator.

To me, this seems quite a stretch; it reaches the level of absurdity. Defeating the Confederacy ended slavery, indeed, yet there would pass another century before an United States Congress would pass legislation explicitly legitimizing the right of blacks to vote. Not to minimize what Abe Lincoln did, for I am an unabashed admirer of Father Abraham, but it bears repeating that a century would pass after Appomattox before the US Congress legislated what Lincoln and Grant (and countless others) fought to make fact.

Yet, I'll follow our editor's logic: No American politician has ever prided himself so self-consciously on his linguistic gifts as did Lincoln, or worked so hard to cultivate them. But his legendary and indisputable eloquence had a double edge.

Granted (no pun intended, yet pun acknowledged), Lincoln worked at his linguistic facility. Of course he did. Let me consider: 1862: telegraph is high-tech; battles rage in Virginia, merely a few miles from the Nation's capital ; newspapers are the only means, other than rumour and gossip, of getting news out to the public. In the middle of this, the President of the not-entirely-United States needs to manage the news spilling out of Manassas and Fredericksburg, all the while contending with only with Lee, but also with Little Napoleon, his own Army's General George B. McClellan (not the one our very own Governor Sarah Palin thought to be the current, circa 2008, commander of U.S. troops in Afghanistan, but the actual Army of the Potomac Commander-in-Chief). Eloquence would seem to be an important attribute, lest fear and misinformation serve to undermine the confidence of the populace in the eventual thriumph of the Union and its Armed Forces in the common struggle against insurrection and the defense of slavery. Lincoln had no radio, no television, no web; he had words as his primary, perhaps only, means of rallying the peoples in the defense of, and abiding solidarity with, the campaign in defense of the Union and battle to defeat civil insurrection.

Mr. Obama, too, can fall into the trap that waits for people to whom words come quickly and easily. So states our editor, to whom words seem, also, to come readily. Is then our editor also possibly a victim of said trap?

Our editor states that Obama writes about how he gazes at Lincoln's portrait, believing that Lincoln "still cherishes his memories -- of an imperfect world and its fleeting, sometimes terrible beauty." But it is difficult to imagine Lincoln cherishing the memories of the deaths of his two beloved sons, or of the incredible carnage that he unleashed in the Civil War. "Imperfect world"; "terrible beauty" -- these are mellifluous yet weak words for such unspeakable experiences.

Our editor supposes a great deal. He implies, nay states, he knows what not only his contemporary is thinking, but also what his antecedent was, or may have been, thinking; seems quite a reach.

Further, and I do not mean to imply I know what Abraham Lincoln was thinking 145 years ago, perhaps the President of the United States in 1863 was considering the world before his Presidential eyes, and not (just) his father eyes. As a father myself, I know I would be devestated by the death of a child of mine; yet I can perceive that, were I not only a father, were I by some miraculous historical happenstance, a President, I might rise beyond my personal tragedy and misfortune, and see the fate of my country. Considering the fate of my Nation, I might well "cherish memories of an imperfect world and its fleeting, sometimes terrible beauty."

In spite of the tragedy of losing two children, I might well cherish, I dare imagine, memories not of the incredible carnage unleashed by the Civil War, but of the Union handed down to us by our forebearers. I vehemently disagree that President Lincoln unleashed the carnage of the Civil War. The States that seceeded from the Union would have fought for slavery no matter who became President of the United States. It fell to Abraham Lincoln of Illinois, the Republican nominee, to defend the legacy of Washington, Jay, Jefferson and Hamilton. Indeed, they of the South, sought to undo the Union. Their actions unleashed that terrible carnage. Abraham Lincoln sought to defend the Union, at all costs. Lee, Beauregard, Stonewall Jackson, Jefferson Davis and that entire clique were the ones that unleashed the terrible carnage by defending slavery and defying the authority and legitimacy of the Union of the United States.

Such unspeakable experiences were unleashed by the Rebels, not by Lincoln. President Lincoln understood that only the utter and complete defeat of the Confederacy, only vanquishing the Rebellion wholly and completely, would end slavery and save the Union. Robert E Lee understood it as well. Mere days after surrendering to General US Grant at Appomattox Courthouse, General Lee urged all other Confederate forces to surrender, and all of the Confederacy to accept defeat, and to accept Federal supremacy and victory.

Mr. Obama, like Lincoln, has a very powerful sense of himself as an agent of historical destiny.

Obama understands the role that the populace carves out for their President: part myth is of it. Abe Lincoln understood it, too, eventually. It is not enough to be Chief Executive, for the Nation is not simply an Organization. The President of the United States is Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces of the Nation, but that is only part of what he is, and the Civil War and the Great Depression-perhaps of 2008 call for more than just occupying the Oval Office.

Indeed, Mr. Obama's words sometimes leap with a degree of vanity beyond a clear meaning, just as Lincoln's own grandiloquence sometimes led him astray.

Yes, even our editor concurs that speech, the very words that our President uses, are subject to very careful and meditated scrutinity. All the more reason, I would argue and contend, for flowery speech and melifluous rhetoric. Times call(ed) for it.

To say, as Mr. Obama did in Grant Park, that Lincoln's America was "far more divided than ours" is to engage in, as the English teachers used to say, invidious comparison. Why compare our America to Lincoln's at all?

Well, hell, for one, I do not recall my English teacher speaking of invidious comparison. Well, that's my problem. But I will say that I see a reason for comparing our 2008 crisi to Lincoln 1861 crisis: our Nation is indeed divided, not between slavers and abolitionists, but between the very few and the very many. We are facing a very severe crisis. We are on the precipice of a calamity equal to, and perhaps greeater than, that faced by our antecedents in 1929. If not for what FDR did, namely Social Security, the SEC and the FDIC, we would now be in a greater shithole than that in which Herbert Hoover put this Nation in 1929.

When Mr. Obama talks about a "divided" country, he seems to mean a country in which critical social and economic issues have yet to be resolved.

That is one man's opinion; I do not agree. I do not see the basis for the arguments our editor is making. To me, he seems to be searching for a basis for arguing, as if arguing is more important than considering that perhaps we might give our new President-elect a bit of time to get his act and Administration going and working.

Some folks simply need to disagree. Our editor seems to fit in with that crowd.

Compared, however, to the politics of the riven 1960s, or the McCarthyite 1950s, or the imploding 1930s, our last few elections have been like springtime walks through the park.

I disagree; Lee Atwater and George HW Bush were no picnic. Willie Horton was a 1980s way of screaming NIGGER without using the word itself. The 1960s were riven, indeed, by the US pursuing a war strategy based on Anti-Communism, predicated on not allowing the VietNamese exercising self-determination after defeating French forces at Dien Bien Phu. And consider that in 2008 the Democratic Party nominee was attacked for "pallying around with terrorists" or being a Socialist or Communist.

Abe Lincoln was called worse, in explicit terms, yet the intent and meaning were similar: do not trust this man to be our leader, for he is evil, and dangerous. Ironically, Abrham Lincoln proved to be the President who saved the Union.

As the 1860 election ran its course, after Lincoln secured the Republican nomination (after ugly and contentious attacks from Seward and Chase, among others), the choice was between the Rpeublican Lincoln who affirmed his defense of the Union, Douglas, who defended slavery, and Breckenridge, a Confederate apologist who would eventually become a military officer of the Rebellion.

Our editor attacks President-elect Obama on numerous counts: Mr. Obama's low threshold for "division" could be the reason why some of his critics claim to see in him a contempt for the sometimes sordid expediencies of mere politics, as if Mr. Obama considered any heated argument, by definition, an aberration of democracy, rather than as one of its essences.

Some of his critics? Doth our esteemed editor include himself therein? If so, why doth he refrain from declaring himself a critic?

Do sordid experiences of mere politics include Willie Horton and John McCain illegitimate dark child? It is difficult to comprehend what our (sarcastic voice) esteemed editor (end of sarcastic voice) means. Does he merely wish to be skeptical, or is there intellectually valid basis to his harangue?

And no one wonders whether blaming principled disagreement on malicious "division" already begs the question of which side is right -- the side crying malicious "division," of course -- and of whether that right, as Lincoln would have said, makes might.

No one wonders? Whom, pray tell, is no one? Lincoln would have said? Is our esteemed editor entitled any more than President-elect Obama to suppose what Old Abe would, or might, have said? Pray tell.

Insofar as Lincoln had ideas about the society and the politics of his day, his questions would have left Mr. Obama disappointed.

Again: is our editor any more knoeledgable of Be's mind than Obama?

Though Lincoln was kind and rich in empathy himself, he would not have cast a sympathetic eye toward redistributing wealth between lucky rich and unlucky poor.

Say what? President Lincoln ruled in an age of concentrated wealth which makes our hedge fund-infested day seem downright democratic, perhaps indeed populist. To cast President Lincoln as a defender of "lucky rich" seems a stretch, at best, perhaps even an absolute falsehood.

No, Mr. Obama's Lincoln is the wartime Lincoln who barely knew a minute's peace; the militant Lincoln who elevated preservation of the Union over his abhorrence of slavery; the Christlike Lincoln who brooded mysteriously over first and last things; the divinely appointed Lincoln who felt that he could not escape history because he embodied history. Calm, precise, and methodical he may have been, but Lincoln was, in his own mind, that very "towering genius" that "thirsts and burns for distinction" of which he spoke when he was a young man. Not everyone, even his supporters, would agree with President-elect Obama that such an image is "soothing."

Lincoln came to see that preservation of the Union and the ending of slavery were one and the same; ending slavery became the reason for waging War against the Rebels. President Lincoln stated that ending slavery and defeating the Rebellion were one and the same. He did not elevate the preservation of the Union over his abhorrence of slavery; he equated the two as one.

Lincoln did not feel that he could not escape history; agreed. He did accept that he embodied history. Calm, precise, and methodical he may have been, but Lincoln was, in his own mind, that very "towering genius" that "thirsts and burns for distinction" of which he spoke when he was a young man. Not everyone, even his supporters, would agree with President-elect Obama that such an image is "soothing."

Well, as a supporter of President-elect Obama, as a student of Lincoln and as a student of the Civil War, as a student of modern Us politics, I do think of Barack Obama, and of Abraham Lincoln, as soothing figures.

Out of the crucible of war comes the leader of peace. Abraham Lincoln waged war to save the Union and for peace. Unlike cheap pretenders such as Nixon and Reagan, to name two of his most reprehensible successors, Lincoln did want and value peace. Not discounting or ignoring his political nature, it is easy to state that Lincoln waged war to make peace, to save the Union.

A centure and a quarte, and then some, after Abraham Lincoln's presidency, it is

Rush hour traffic

Motor bikes rode through Hanoi, Vietnam, during rush hour on Tuesday as the nation is considering banning 'small-chested' drivers from its roads, a proposal that has provoked widespread disbelief in a country of slight people. The proposal is part of an exhaustive list of criteria the health ministry is proposing to ensure Vietnam's drivers are in good health, though it is not clear why it was determined that small people make poor drivers. Vietnam has one of the highest rates of road fatalities per 100,000, according to the World Health Organization, most of which involve motorbikes.

Park Avenue Diplomacy

Maureen Dowd can be tiresome, but she can also be brilliant. Here, she's brilliant.

I don’t agree with those muttering darkly that the picture of Gov. Sarah Palin with a perky smile and shapely gams posing with a pleased Henry Kissinger, famous for calling power the ultimate aphrodisiac, is a sign of the apocalypse. It isn’t even a sign of the apocalipstick.How the mighty 85-year-old Henry the K has fallen from his days chasing Jill St. John and running the world to his hour briefing of a 44-year-old Wasilla hockey mom who may end up running the world.

One can imagine how Dr. K felt: pleased he could get a 44 year0old women in skirts genuflecting to him. yet possibly also incredulous that life has come to this boob running for VP. Well, K did see Spiro Agnew.

After losing its moral superiority abroad with phony evidence for attacking Iraq, the U.S. has now lost its moral superiority in the financial arena. Once more, W. took the ball, carried it off the cliff and went biking. Doctor K prolonged the war in Vietnam to help Nixon get re-elected and then advised W. on Iraq that the only way to beat an insurgency and save face is to stick it out, no matter how many American kids and foreign civilians die.

Once a cynic, always a cynic.

(A senior Palin campaign aide told CBS News’s Scott Conroy that the governor’s foreign-policy experience was atmospheric, akin to the way someone from Miami might obtain a feel for Latin America. “It is very much being able to look off the tip of Alaska,” the aide said. “Metaphorically, I’m talking about.”)

Atmospheric? How much Russian atmosphere is there in Juneau?

Kissinger probably explained détente and Metternich to Palin, while she explained the Iditarod and moose carving to him. They talked Russia, which is relevant.

Metternich and moose; what a combination.

Republicans, who have won so many elections painting Democrats as socialists and pinkos, have now done so much irresponsible deregulating and deficit spending that they have to avoid fiscal Armageddon by turning America into a socialist, pinko society with nationalized financial institutions and a financial czar accountable to no one and no law.

Socialism is dead, and so is the free market. Power to the people!

Even if she blows off the First Amendment — and lets McCain’s Rove, Steve Schmidt, demonize the press even though she disdains women politicians who whine — Bill Clinton is still a fan. Besides talking about what a great man John McCain is on “The View” and “David Letterman,” Bill praised Palin at his Clinton Global Initiative meeting in New York and will receive her there on Thursday.

Bubba gets around.

On “The View,” he said he understood that some women might vote for Palin on the basis of gender, even if it was against their economic interest. “You can’t tell someone else that the ground on which they make their voting decision is irrational,” he said primly. Well, actually you could, if you weren’t still sulking and plotting for 2012.

I began to get that feeling a week or so ago, when Bam's numbers were getting weak. I'd dismissed that, especially after Hill's convention speech, but I'm not dismissing that any longer.

Cellphone Data Track Our Migration Patterns

Fascinating story highlighting the efficacy and ease of using available data, as well as its dangers and potential abuses. I particularly enjoy that the focal point is Flushing.

The one stat that jumps out at me is how significant the percentage of calls to Porto, Portugal is: 9% of calls from Flushing.

Cellphone users are spiders of the electromagnetic spectrum, spinning intricate, invisible threads of data about themselves as they walk and talk throughout the day.

Physicists, urban planners and social scientists are eagerly weaving millions of these electronic threads into patterns of people on the move, through studies that until now were all but impossible.

What makes things possible is that all calls are in the phone companies records: number dialing, number called, minutes spoken. The phone company also knows who owns the calling number, and might known the called number, too.

More than 3.3 billion wireless-phone subscribers world-wide have, in effect, voluntarily adopted devices that record their daily movements in the same way satellite sensors monitor migrating birds, whales, bears and other wildlife. Such precise positioning data, automatically collected by cellphone companies, makes privacy advocates queasy but has social scientists dazzled by the research possibilities.


3.3 billion people voluntarily, perhaps unknowingly or oblivious or indifferent to the consequences of their calling habits being known, allow their privacy to be available. It does, surely, also provide intriguing possibilities.

Why Obama Must Go to Iraq

An interesting article.

Earlier this year, I spent five days in Iraq, walking the same streets in Baghdad where I had served two years earlier as an infantry platoon leader in the 101st Airborne Division. The visit reinforced for me not only the immense complexity of the war – so often lost in our domestic political debate – but also the importance of taking the time to visit Iraq to talk with the soldiers and Marines serving on the front lines in order to grasp the changing dynamics of a fluid battlefield.

Without doubt battlefields are fluid; only General McClellan didn't understand that.

It is for this reason that the failure of Sen. Barack Obama to travel to Iraq over the past two and a half years is worrisome, and a legitimate issue in this presidential election.

Sounds as if a swiftboat is on its way.

Mr. Obama's conduct is strikingly different from that of Sen. John McCain, who has been to Iraq eight times since 2003 – including three times since surge forces began to arrive in Baghdad. The senior senator from Arizona has made it his mission to truly understand what is happening on the ground, in all its messy reality.

Sounds familiar: an attack for not being sufficiently involved militarily.

Mr. Obama has dismissed the value of such trips, suggesting they are stage-managed productions designated to obfuscate, not illuminate, the truth. This has become an all-too-common sentiment within the Democratic Party leadership, especially since the surge began to transform conditions on the ground for the better. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has denied that there is any value in visiting the troops in Iraq, and has never done so.

George Romney, in 1968, came back from Viet Nam and claimed to have been brainwashed by American generals in the field. That is a valuable point to remember. Then again, other points are also important.

As anyone who has spent time on the ground in Iraq – speaking with troops of all ranks and backgrounds – can tell you, it is hardly a mission impossible to get them out to speak bluntly and openly about the problems they face.

Fair enough.

... Mr. McCain's own frequent and vociferous criticisms of former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his warnings, as early as 2003, that the Bush administration was pursuing a flawed strategy in Iraq, were directly informed by his firsthand interactions during his trips to Iraq. Troops and commanders warned him that we lacked sufficient forces to defeat al Qaeda and Iranian-backed militias, and they were correct. In turn, Mr. McCain's early advocacy for the surge and his prescient conviction that it would succeed were rooted not only in his extensive knowledge of military affairs, but in his close consultations with troops serving in the theater. They recognized that the new strategy was succeeding far before the mainstream media in the U.S. was willing to acknowledge these gains.

Easy formula: the former military man knew better than Rumsfeld (sparing Rummy's boss from criticism), criticized the Administration's policy, advocated a different policy (the one that is now working, it is claimed), and the media refuses to report the true story.

Continuing this spin: Obama doubts his ability to distinguish spin from reality, and to draw bad news out of subordinates, which does not bode well for his possible future as our nation's chief executive. Further, Mr. Obama has apparently never sought out a single one-on-one meeting with Gen. Petraeus. The general has made repeated trips back to Washington, but Mr. Obama has shown no interest in meeting privately with him. It's enough to make you wonder who exactly Mr. Obama listens to when it comes to Iraq?

Mr. Obama frequently decries the danger of "dogmatists" and "ideologues" in public policy, yet he himself has proven consistently uninterested in putting himself in situations where he might be confronted with the hard complexities of this war. It suggests a dangerous degree of detachment and overconfidence in his own judgment.

So he has not informed himself, does not seem to need experts, and is naive. That will be front and center part of the right-wing attack on him all autumn.

After all, Mr. Obama was among those in January 2007 who stridently opposed the surge and confidently predicted its failure – even going so far as to vote against funding our soldiers in the field unless the Bush administration abandoned this new approach. It is now clear that Mr. Obama's judgment on the surge was spectacularly wrong. Yet rather than admit his mistake, Mr. Obama has instead tried to downplay or disparage the gains our troops have achieved in the past 12 months, clinging to a set of talking points that increasingly seem as divorced from reality as some in the Bush administration were at the darkest moments of the war.

Nice twist: link Obama and Bush, pardon McCain, even extol him, and break his link to Bush.

Preparing for the wrong war

An editorial in the current issue of Barron's.

THIRTY-THREE YEARS AT LEAST – that's how long the United States military establishment has taken to learn the most important lesson from the Vietnam War. Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates is not the first Pentagon chief to realize that's too long. Even now, Gates says, the entire military hasn't yet learned the lesson.

The military resists and fights change. Bureaucrats resist and fight change. The military bureaucracy resists and fights change. A terrible combination.

The high-ranking officers who set up the curriculum in the staff college in the 1980s were responsible in large measure for the failure of counterinsurgency in the first phase of the war against the Iraqi insurgency. The difficult lessons of the war against the Viet Cong had "withered on the vine," Gates said, warning that it must not happen again after current wars wind down.

Good enough intentions, but one has to wonder how it'll translate. Colin Powell vowed the lessons, as he put it, learned from the Viet Nam War wouldn't be forgotten; he then counseled Bush 1 not to go to Baghdad, leaving that battle to be fought a decade and a half later.

Gates said that even in the middle of the Iraq and Afghan wars, U.S. military leaders are succumbing to what he called "Next-War-itis," which he defined as "the propensity of much of the defense establishment to be in favor of what might be needed in a future conflict" against North Korea, Iran, China or another large national military with conventional arms and conventional war aims. He was being diplomatic: A better description would be "Last-War-itis," or perhaps, "preparing to fight the war we want to fight instead of the war our enemies will choose."

An excellent point, that of wanting to fight the war we want; same is true in diplomacy and international relations: Bush talks of making Iran conform to our expectations and demands, rather than being creative in his thinking and actions.

But the U.S., as Gates said, already has "ample and untapped combat power in our naval and air forces with the capacity to defeat any, repeat any, adversary who committed an act of aggression, whether in the Persian Gulf, on the Korean Peninsula or in the Straits of Taiwan." What it needs are the tools of counterinsurgency and soldiers who can use them, he said.

This is a fundamental mistake, thinking that the US can defeat any adversary with its hardware. If a war started with Iran, say, clearly (to me) the debacle in Iraq has shown that defeating the adversary with hardware; Iran would fight an insurgency that would make Iraq look to be a skirmish.