Iraq, the Surge, and the Democrats Insistence on Failure

I mean, the Democrats are insistent on snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

Nancy & Harry proclaimed earlier this week that the surge was "a failure." While they just a few weeks ago surprisingly agreed to give Chimpy W. McBushitler until September to implement the new strategery, the moonbats (aka Democratic Primary Voters) have forced their hand on the matter.

This Breitbart article has the details.

[...]
As many had forseen, the escalation has failed to produce the intended results," the two leaders wrote.

"The increase in US forces has had little impact in curbing the violence or fostering political reconciliation.
[...]

Of course, reality in Iraq bears no resemblance and has no impact on the reality in Washington. From an excellent post on Protein Wisdom (read the whole thing), here's the key information:

[...]
So the failed operation has reduced deaths by 33% in its main theater of operations, and reduced deaths by around 8% overall, with the current monthly level about 40% of what it was when the operation started. That’s some failure.
[...]

Indeed.

As we've pointed out several times, the biggest challenge for Chimpy W. McBushitler isn't necessarily the military operation in Iraq (he has excellent soldiers, from the grunts to the Generals to do that). No, his biggest challenge is forcing the MSM and the Dems to admit that something is working. Unfortunately, communication and persuasion are not key strengths of the Bush Presidency.

And I suppose that it's too much to ask for the Dems to at least shut their mouth for 6 months to a year. Can I question their patriotism^TM yet?

Your Co-Conspirator,
ARC: St Wendeler

Libby to Jail. Sort of...

Tom Maguire over at Just One Minute has a synopsis of the bond hearing today. Personally I think this was a forgone conclusion today. From the transcript of the trial and the transcript and from the sentencing hearing its obvious that Judge Reggie Walton wants Libby in jail.

At every turn, Judge Walton has sought to save the prosecutions case. One aspect of today's hearing is highlighted by Tom.

MORE FOR THE LAUGHTRACK: Walton's explanation of his Mitchell ruling is comedy gold (punchline emphasized):

Walton: Problem was asking the jury to draw inference upon inference upon inference that would have, in my view, been rank speculation absent evidence. She would have testified her statement on Imus was off the wall and she would disavow it, and then she would have been impeached. Then your client wanted to say jury shold conclude maybe she’s not being truthful, maybe she did know about Plame. If she did, it’s conceivable she would have told Russert. Therefore Russert could have heard as your client supposed. If that’s the chain of inferences then we may as well throw out rules of evidence. That cannot be the law. If the government had tried to make this kind of case it clearly would be reversible.

Hint to judges everywhere - the American system of jurisprudence is not predicated on the notion that defendants and prosecutors get absolutely equal treatment. This is a trial that might send a man to prison, not a basketball game; defendants routinely get treatment that would not be allowed a prosecutor, starting with "innocent until proven guilty", running past "the right to confront witnesses", and including the right to imply the prosecution witnesses are hiding something even if the incurious prosecutor has not bestirred himself to examine that possibility.

All emphasis mine.

Meanwhile David Schuster of MSNBC is breathlessly announcing every time they give him some camera time, that this is the absolute worse news for Cheney and Bush, and that perhaps Libby will spill his guts to avoid going to jail.

The rest of the media is wondering when or if the pardon will be forthcoming from Bush. But that's oversimplifying things. As Tom points out in his post, Libby still has avenues to appeal the bond motion, which do not require a high standard to meet for someone that is not a flight risk or a risk to harm others. And as pointed out at National Review the President has more arrows in his quiver than a pardon.

Much to the chagrin of the moonbats at DU and elsewhere, Libby will very likely never have to set foot inside a jail cell.

On a personal note, I want this case to go to the appellate court. Without review, the methods utilized by this prosecutor will be used in future issues involving oversight of the executive. Without clear guidelines, we'll be left to the press as sole supervision of a prosecutors actions.

Your Co-Conspirator,
ARC: Brian

Libby Gets Sentenced; Moonbats Rejoice

By making non-too-subtle remarks about prison rape.

You know...

BECAUSE OF THE HYPOCRISY!!!^TM

Here are a few posts which exemplify the thoughts of those on the fringe:

Karmageddon provides this valuable insight into the political ramifications of Libby's sentencing...

Karmageddon (501 posts)
Thu Jun-14-07 02:06 PM
Response to Reply #1

23. With any luck, he'll be drinking plenty of "protein shakes"

HaHa! Yes!!! How witty! Of course, Karma is a neophyte, with only 500+ posts on DU, so we can't be too harsh.

Kikosexy2 is right about one thing, Paris going back to jail was better news.

Kikosexy2 (1000+ posts)
Thu Jun-14-07 02:14 PM
Response to Reply #1

27. The Best news...

since Paris getting dragged back to prison...woo-hoo!! Scooty get ready to give up booty!...to avoid this you can always spill all about Ol' Dickie's and Chimpie's involvement...come on Scoot spill man, spill...clear your conscience....save America!...

Yes, Scooter has a Hobson's Choice - flip on Chimpy W. McBushitler and Sith Lord Cheney or give up his booty.

HappyGoLuckyToYou (another neophyte) provides this narrative, which features Paris at the end:

happygoluckytoyou (94 posts)
Thu Jun-14-07 02:46 PM
Response to Original message

36. PRISONERS EXCITED TO RIDE A NEW SCOOTER

it crazy-time at the gaybar hotel, the prisoners are looking forward to the arrival of "crazy legs" scooter libby.

rumor has it that scooter exercises an open-door policy, and the line is forming at the far right.

cellmate, bubba gozinya, has already posted a new shingle on the wall, and we all know "if it says libby libby libby on the label label label, you can bend him over the table table table.

how did this paragon of american virtue end up in such a sorrowful state?

we interviewed paris hilton, recent guest of the facilities:

"so paris, why do you think scooter is going to prison?"

"I (sob) don't know, they are attacking all of the beautiful people. It's like a prison in there. If it wasn't for the guard-sex I'd have been totally, you know, alone. Scooter!! I dedicate my life to world peace, and praying for you!! If you see a guard named Meat, tell him I said hi."

Comedy GENIOUS!!! Get this guy a sitcom! I mean, the way he weaved the prison sex into the dialogue throughout was just amazing.

The last of the posts which I'll feature is this one, from Tyler Durden (1000+ posts AND a Donating Member, so you know it'll be good - he's a committed guy):

Tyler Durden Donating Member (1000+ posts)
Thu Jun-14-07 03:23 PM
Response to Reply #37

38. I do...Welll, if not HARM at the very least extreme discomfort.

If you catch my drift.

This is a political insider who almost got off with his "I remembered wrong" defense. Time we gave some of the rest of these bastards a preview of what's in store for THEM.

Yes... and, while Tyler can't fathom that Libby may have honestly remembered wrong about the timelines of who he spoke to and when and the various conflicting stories surrounding the case, he obviously thinks that forgetting where/when you had anal-oral sex, expertly manipulated a cohiba cigar, or what the definition of "is" is, are perfectly acceptable before a grand jury.

Perjury (when there are serious questions about the merits of the charge) deserves jail time, protein shakes, and some booty time.

Perjury (which is clearly demonstrated through uncontested evidence) deserves applause.

I know, I know... it all depends on where you stand on the issues.

I could go on and provide more evidence of the childishness and anti-gay predilections of the DUers, but you can click on any one of the above links and see the other responses as well.

These people are the driving force behind the Democratic Party today. They're who Nancy Pelosi & Harry Reid are courting when they say that the Surge Has Failed^TM and The War in Iraq is Lost^TM

BECAUSE OF THE HYPOCRISY!!!

Your Co-Conspirator,
ARC: St Wendeler

My Solution to the Unlawful Enemy Combatant problem

Excellent article at NRO on the recent 4th Circuit decision regarding Unlawful Combatants:

Courting the Enemy
By The Editors

Justice Robert Jackson, the U.S. attorney general before FDR elevated him to the Supreme Court, famously remarked that the Constitution is not a suicide pact. Today, it’s hard to see why not.

The United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit ruled on Monday that Ali Saleh Kalah al-Marri — an alien al Qaeda operative from Qatar, sent to the United States the day before 9/11 to conduct follow-up attacks and explore the potential for electronic disruptions of our reeling nation’s financial system — may not lawfully be detained as an enemy combatant in the war on terror.

According to the court, we have two options: Release al-Marri and thus enable him to rejoin the jihad; or try him in the civilian criminal-justice system, where he’d be entitled to — and able to share with his confederates — the fruits of discovery from U.S. intelligence files detailing the enemy’s capabilities and plans.

The United States is not at war with the uniformed army of a sovereign nation like Germany or Japan. But we are still at war — with a transnational terror network, whose jihadist operatives are often, but not always, abetted by enemy nations.

In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, when common sense and caution still dictated national-security policy, Congress passed the sweeping Authorization for Use of Military Force against this new threat. Adding another layer to the executive branch’s inherent constitutional powers, the AUMF empowered the president to use “all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations or persons” involved in the 9/11 attacks, as necessary to “prevent future acts of international terrorism against the United States[.]”

The wartime use of force obviously includes the detention of enemy combatants, as the Supreme Court found in its 2004 Hamdi decision. Such detentions are sanctioned by laws of war older than the United States, customs that permit the detention of enemy operatives for the collection of intelligence and depletion of enemy assets. These are standards designed to end wars justly, humanely, and more promptly.

As a member of an al Qaeda sleeper cell, al-Marri was just such an enemy combatant, the commander-in-chief had found. Though lawfully in the United States on a student visa, he was in communication with 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, among others.

Since al-Marri’s efforts were acts of war rather than mere crimes, President Bush ordered him held as an alien unlawful enemy combatant. But now the Fourth Circuit has substituted the commander-in-chief’s wartime judgment with its own. Two judges — Diana Gribbon Motz, a Clinton appointee, and Roger Gregory, an unsuccessful Clinton appointee renominated by President Bush in a good-will gesture to Democrats — ordered that al-Marri be released or referred to the civilian-justice system for a full-fledged criminal trial.

Astoundingly, Justices Motz and Gregory did not doubt that al-Marri was just as dangerous as the administration claims him to be. Instead, they found that because al Qaeda is not a traditional national enemy, its operatives — stationed here in the United States to kill Americans — are mere civilians, not combatants.

By their lights, even 9/11 ringleader Mohamed Atta wasn’t a combatant. Despite his enlistment in an organization waging war on America that had trained him and sent him here, he was just a civilian.

Dissenting district judge Henry E. Hudson, sitting by designation from the Eastern District of Virginia, had it right: We are at war and Congress has authorized the president to use force against enemy operatives, including, as necessary, to detain them. Jihadists needn’t be part of a militia attached to a traditional national army to be such operatives. Nor, in this asymmetrical war, need they be captured on a traditional battlefield outside the United States. Indeed, those captured inside our country are the most dangerous of all. In the war on terror, the battlefield is wherever al Qaeda launches its next attack.

The administration is studying the opinion. It should require little study to know this ruling must be appealed, and reversed.

Of course, the Geneva Conventions (at least, those that the US is a signatory to) have specific definition of what an unlawful or illegal combatant should be. And an unlawful combatant does not get the protections of the Geneva convention (since, the whole purpose of the Geneva convention is to limit civilian casualties by forcing combatants to declare and distinguish themselves as such).

So, anyone who's determined to be an unlawful combatant should be shot.

Your Co-Conspirator,
ARC: St Wendeler

One day, this ugly wall will disappear.

“General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization: Come here to this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”

--Ronald Reagan, June 12, 1987

As I'm sure MontereyJohn remembers the media and the Washington intelligentsia laughing at the naive president. They were scared that it would antagonize Gorbachev. That this old man would bring nuclear Armageddon to the world.

At the time it seemed as if the Soviet Union would never end. That the Berlin Wall was something the world (and Berliners) would have to become accustomed. Even Peter Robinson, the speechwriter, was told not to to mention the wall (all emphasis mine).

A stocky man with thick glasses, the diplomat projected an anxious, distracted air throughout our conversation, as if the very prospect of a visit from Ronald Reagan made him nervous. The diplomat gave me quite specific instructions. Almost all were in the negative. He was full of ideas about what the president shouldn't say. The most left-leaning of all West Germans, the diplomat informed me, West Berliners were intellectually and politically sophisticated. The president would therefore have to watch himself. No chest thumping. No Soviet bashing. And no inflammatory statements about the Berlin Wall. West Berliners, he explained, had long ago gotten used to the structure that encircled them.

Encircled... imprisoned... Peter gives a good description of the wall back in 1987.

After I left the diplomat, several members of the advance team and I were given a flight over the city in a U.S. Air Force helicopter. Although all that remains of the wall these days is paving stones to show where it stood, in 1987 the structure dominated Berlin. From the air, the wall seemed less to cut one city in two than to separate two different modes of existence. On one side lay movement, color, modern architecture, crowded sidewalks and traffic. On the other lay a kind of void. Buildings still exhibited pockmarks from shelling during the war. Cars appeared few and decrepit, pedestrians badly dressed. When we hovered over Spandau Prison, the rambling brick structure in which Rudolf Hess was still being detained, East German soldiers peered up at us through binoculars, rifles over their shoulders. The wall itself, which from West Berlin had seemed a simple concrete structure, was now revealed as an intricate complex -- the East Berlin side lined with guard posts, dog runs and row upon row of barbed wire.

Had the Berliner's gotten used to their imprisonment? Was the wall something to just accept?

That evening I broke away from the advance team to join a dozen Berliners for dinner. Our hosts were Dieter and Ingeborg Elz. German themselves, the Elzes [...] We chatted for a while about the weather, German wine and the cost of Berlin housing. Then I related what the diplomat had told me, explaining that after my flight over the city that afternoon I found it difficult to believe. "Is it true?" I asked. "Have you gotten used to the wall?"

The Elzes and their guests glanced at each other uneasily. I assumed I'd proved to be just the sort of brash, tactless American the diplomat was afraid the president might seem. Then one of the men raised his arm and pointed. "My sister lives 20 miles in that direction," he said. "I haven't seen her in more than two decades. Do you think I can get used to that?" Another man spoke. Each morning, he explained, on his way to work he walked past the same guard tower. Each morning the same soldier gazed down at him through binoculars. "That soldier and I speak the same language. We share the same history. But one of us is a zookeeper and the other is an animal, and I am never certain which is which."

Our hostess broke in. A gracious woman, she had grown angry. Her face was red. She made a fist with one hand, then pounded it into the palm of the other. "If this man Gorbachev is serious with his talk of glasnost and perestroika," she said, "he can prove it. He can get rid of this wall."

What is more interesting is that members inside the government were also against the speech, in favor of maintaining the status quo.

With three Weeks to go before it was delivered, the speech was circulated to the State Department and the National Security Council. Both attempted to squelch it. The assistant secretary of state for Eastern European affairs challenged the speech by telephone. A senior member of the National Security Council staff protested the speech in memoranda. The ranking American diplomat in Berlin objected to the speech by cable. The draft was naive. It would raise false hopes. It was clumsy. It was needlessly provocative. State and the NSC submitted their own alternate drafts -- my journal records that there were no fewer than seven, including one written by the diplomat in Berlin. In each, the call to tear down the wall was missing.

Now in principle, State and the NSC had no objection to a call for the destruction of the wall. The draft the diplomat in Berlin submitted, for example, contained the line, "One day, this ugly wall will disappear." If the diplomat's line was acceptable, I wondered at first, what was wrong with mine? Then I looked at the diplomat's line once again. "One day?" One day the lion would lie down with the lamb, too, but you wouldn't want to hold your breath. "This ugly wall will disappear?" What did that mean? That the wall would just get up and slink off of its own accord? The wall would disappear only when the Soviets knocked it down or let somebody else knock it down for them, but "this ugly wall will disappear" ignored the question of human agency altogether. What State and the NSC, I realized, were saying in effect was that the president could go right ahead and issue a call for the destruction of the wall -- but only if he employed language so vague and euphemistic that everybody could see right away he didn't mean it.

It's been 20 years since that speech, and yet similar issues confront the country today. We should accept Islamofacism. Iraq was a sovereign state. Iraqi's had gotten used to Baath party rule. The Middle East will never be able to form a democracy. They are savages. We should have just contained Saddam in his box. He was no threat to us.

How similar that sounds to "One day, this ugly wall will disappear".

*** Update ***

Peter Robinson has posted his condensed account with the Powerline folks as well today. They have pictures.

Your Co-Conspirator,
ARC: Brian