Hillary Says She Won the War in Iraq

This clip from Meet The Press ("Hillary...I am the reason the surge worked") reminds us of those really big, audacious lies that you get when you put Clintons in the White House. Jim Vicevich, a local talk show host in Hartford CT, captures Hillary Clinton telling us that the main reason that the troop surge has succeeded is not the outstanding generalship of David Petraeus, but the response of the Iraqi leadership to her demand that troops be withdrawn by January 2009. The current military success in Iraq is a Democrat victory, ands specifically the fruit of Hillary's wise statesmanship. What is even more amazing is that there are people who will believe this though they are likely already voting Democratic or they are not in the habit of voting at all.

The Old Dragon said:

The point of the surge was to quickly move the Iraqi government and the Iraqi people. That is only now beginning to happen, and I believe in large measure because the Iraqi government ... they watch us, they listen to us, I know very well that they follow everything that I say (she emphasized "I"). And my commitment to begin withdrawing our troops in January of 2009 is a big factor--as it is with Senator Obama, Senator Edwards, those of us on the Democratic side--it is a big factor in pushing the Iraqi government to finally do what they should have been doing all along.

Power Line adds a quote from an American soldier in Iraq sounding off with indignation at Hill's jaw dropping claim.

This is worse than Al Gore's claim that he invented the Internet.

Good News From Iraq

Amir Taheri, in his column today, shares good news from Iraq that goes beyond merely the violence index.

* More than 70 percent of the cells created by al Qaeda in Iraq have been dismantled, with vast amounts of money and arms seized from terrorists and insurgents. The so-called Islamic State in Iraq, set up by al Qaeda in parts of four provinces, has collapsed.

* Iraqis who'd sought temporary refuge in neighboring countries are returning home in large numbers - 1,000 a day returning from Syria alone.

* Thanks to mediation by Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim, leader of the Shiite coalition, the three groups that had withdrawn from Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's coalition government are expected to return to the fold.

* The British forces' handover of Basra to Iraqi authorities was completed without a hitch; Iraq's second largest city is rapidly returning to normal.

* Iraq's national currency, the dinar, is trading at its highest level since 1990 against the Iranian rial, the Kuwaiti dinar and the US dollar.

* Iraqi oil production is at its highest since 2002. Oil Minister Hussein Shahrestani recently notified OPEC that Iraq intends to produce its full quota next year.

* There's a rush of applications to set up small and medium businesses. In Baghdad alone, the figure for October was 400, compared to 80 last August.

* The fourth American university in the Arab world, and the first in Iraq, has started work in Suleymanieh, close to the Iranian border.

He also has bad news to share, and he is not short on it. It should not surprise anyone that there is lots of bad news coming out of Iraq. (There is bad news coming out of America, after all.) But on balance, the news is good.

IRAQ today is a hundred times better than what it would have been under Saddam in any imaginable circumstances. Statistics of violence don't begin to measure the efforts of a whole nation to re-emerge from the darkest night in its history. And in that sense, the news from Iraq since April 2003 has always been more good than bad.

MoveOn.org a Far Left Farce

As you surely recall, back on September 10, coinciding with General Petraeus's report to Congress, those zany madcap fellow citizens over at MoveOn.org published an "over the top" ad in the always obliging New York Times. RedState.com has published a spoof. Touché. Here are both.

General Petraeus or
General Betray Us?
Cooking the books for the White House

General Petraeus is a military man constantly at war with the facts. In 2004, just before the election, he said there was “tangible progress” in Iraq and that “Iraqi leaders are stepping forward.” And last week Petraeus, the architect of the escalation of troops in Iraq, said, “We say we have achieved progress, and we are obviously going to do everything we can to build on that progress.”

Every independent report on the ground situation in Iraq shows that the surge strategy has failed. Yet the General claims a reduction in violence. That’s because, according to the New York Times, the Pentagon has adopted a bizarre formula for keeping tabs on violence. For example, deaths by car bombs don’t count. The Washington Post reported that assassinations only count if you’re shot in the back of the head — not the front. According to the Associated Press, there have been more civilian deaths and more American soldier deaths in the past three months than in any other summer we’ve been there. We’ll hear of neighborhoods where violence has decreased. But we won’t hear that those neighborhoods have been ethnically cleansed.

Most importantly, General Petraeus will not admit what everyone knows: Iraq is mired in an unwinnable religious civil war. We may hear of a plan to withdraw a few thousand American troops. But we won’t hear what Americans are desperate to hear: a timetable for withdrawing all our troops. General Petraeus has actually said American troops will need to stay in Iraq for as long as ten years.

Today, before Congress and before the American people, General Petraeus is likely to become General Betray Us.


Some statements do not merit a reasoned response, for example when a statement demonstrates that the speaker is closed to civil, rational discussion. In such a case, mockery is the suitable response. Here is such a response to MoveOn.org from RedState response. Notice that it did not come from a "blue state" source, such as the Clinton campaign.

source: RedState.com

GENERAL EISENHOWER OR

GENERAL LIES AND POWER?

COOKING THE BOOKS FOR THE WHITE HOUSE

General Eisenhower is a man constantly at war with the facts. He believes that Nazi Germany is a direct threat to the United States. It was Japan that attacked us, not Nazi Germany.

Most importantly, General Eisenhower will not admit what everyone knows: America is in an unwinnable war on two fronts that are thousands of miles away. Even if America could win, we could have to keep thousands of troops in Europe for decades.

General Eisenhower has become General Lies and Power for not retreating and sending our troops home.

Democrats Find Religion and Pray for Defeat

The news these days is that the Democratic Party has found religion. So what do these newly baptized holy rollers pray for? Defeat on the battlefield, it seems...so they can bring home the troops (whom, of course, they fully support) and, on the basis of this victory, ride a wave of public approval into the eventual control of all three branches of government. If don't see the mutilation of human reason in that, you must have just returned from the Yearly Kos Convention.

A week ago, on the New York Times op ed page, Michael E. O'Hanlon and Kenneth M Pollack (both at The Brookings Institution) wrote up their report on the apparent success we (yes, "we") appear to be having in the president's 2007 counterinsurgency, the so-called "surge" ("A War We Just Might Win," July 30, 2007). Dems are panicking at the news. We are not supposed to win. It's supposed to be a quagmire, Vietnam all over again. The reputations of respectable presidential candidates are at stake. Furthermore, if we are to have any hope of liberating America, the liberation of Iraq must fail. And on it goes.

Commenting on the shock waves this report has sent through Washington, Michael Barone says in today's New York Sun ("Shifting Perceptions of the War"), "It's not often that an opinion article shakes up Washington and changes the way a major issue is viewed. But that happened last week, when the New York Times printed an opinion article by analysts of the Brookings Institution, Michael O'Hanlon and Ken Pollack, on the progress of the surge strategy in Iraq."

His basics points are these: In February 2006, Al Qaeda bombed the Shiite mosque in Samarra and something approaching sectarian civil war broke out. Reality changed, and the president's failure was in not responding. Hope springs eternal when things have been going well.

But after the November 2006 election, President Bush changed our approach to the Iraq war, appointing the author of the Army's new counterinsurgency manual, General David Petraeus, to prosecute the war based on a different set of assumptions and with new goals corresponding to actual conditions. Reality changed once again, but the Democratic opponents of the war (what seems like the whole party, except for "independent" Joe Lieberman) are now failing to recognize it and change their approach to the domestic political war.

Barone concludes, "Democrats could find themselves trapped between a base that wants retreat and defeat, and a majority that wants victory." Politics are not the faint hearted.

Also look at Ralph Peters' "Winning in Iraq and Losing in Washington" from the New York Post, July 26, 2007, and, on the same page, Victor Davis Hanson's "Architects of a Poison 'Peace.'"

Troubling Saudi Arms Deal

The proposed $20 billion arms sale to Saudi Arabia raises troubling questions.

First of all, let us all understand that the Middle East is extremely complicated, and so, as I am not a scholar in this area and have not seriously researched this matter, I shy away from bold, bloggish pronouncements. But I have noticed several "dots" which I will pass along for anyone to add whatever other dots needs connecting.

Fifteen of the nineteen 9/11 hijackers were from Saudi Arabia. On its own, perhaps this is not a cause for concern.

The Saudis fund radical, Wahhabist (click here or here) schools worldwide. These are ideological feeder schools for al Qaeda.

Though peace in the middle east is essential to stabilizing the region and winning the war on terror, the Saudi's are doing nothing substantive to advance this. Only now do they "say," according to the Washington Post, that they are "prepared to seriously consider participating in [President Bush's recently announced] push for Arab-Israeli peace" (New York Sun, Aug. 2, 2007).

The Saudis are hindering our efforts to stabilize the new government in Iraq. They have refused to recognize the Iraqi government, and are only now talking about opening an embassy (NYS, 8/2/07). Robin Wright and Josh White report that, "The Sunni-led kingdom has long resisted such a formal step, which would bolster the Shiite-dominated government in Baghdad and signal to Iraq's minority Sunnis that their prospects of returning to power are over." Despite this fact, "the Saudi foreign minister expressed anger" at the suggestion by Zalmay Khalilzad, our UN ambassador, that Saudi Arabia is "not doing enough to help with reconciliation in Iraq," according to Wright and White.

Gary Shapiro of the New York Sun reports that the Saudis are using British courts "to quash discussion of their alleged role in aiding terrorism." The agent in this operation is Sheikh Khalid Bin Mahfouz, a wealthy Saudi businessman. Deborah Lipstadt, a professor at Emory University, herself unsuccessfully sued by Mahfouz, says that the Saudis are "'systematically, case by case, book by book' challenging anything critical of them or anything that links them to terrorism." Of course they are free to sue if they think they are being libeled, but the British libel laws are more generous toward plaintiffs than ours and the aggressive and well funded threat of lawsuits effectively shuts down publisher interest in this topic.

Presumably, we are concerned about the rising power of Iran as a regional hegemon. Arming the Saudis who are mortally hostile to Israel and no help to us in Iraq does not seem to be the best way to deal with that situation, and certainly not without securing concessions on matters of serious foreign policy interest to us. John Edwards is right in saying that, "Saudi Arabia has not done the things that it needs to do in Iraq in controlling terrorism." He should not be the only one saying it.