Irish Political News

In the above short Bloggingheads clip, Paul Berman -- a key proponent of the Saddam/al Qaeda linkage -- concludes by saying "my thoughts and Dick Cheney's thoughts have nothing in common". Even after it was pointed out to him that Cheney uses the expression he (along with Christopher Hitchens and Andrew Sullivan) helped propagate, Islamofascism.

Yet much of his theory of how Islamism is fascist rests precisely on common intellectual influences and common sources, even when Osama bin Laden and Saddam never thought of themselves as fascist, or even like each other.

So Berman, as an intellectual, gets to put ideas out there while disassociating himself from the likes of Cheney when they use them. But his subjects get no such luxury.

George Bush, with Australian PM Kevin Rudd today --

And I haven't spoke to the [Iraqi] Prime Minister [al-Maliki] since he's made his decision, but I suspect that he would say, look, the citizens down there just got sick and tired of this kind of behavior ... And so I'm not exactly sure what triggered the Prime Minister's response. I don't know if it was one phone call. I don't know what -- whether or not the local mayor called up and said, help -- we're sick and tired of dealing with these folks. But nevertheless, he made the decision to move. And we'll help him.

But this was his decision. It was his military planning. It was his causing the troops to go from point A to point B. And it's exactly what a lot of folks here in America were wondering whether or not Iraq would even be able to do in the first place.

If ever there was a passage that signified too much protestation, this would be it. For one thing, why did PM al-Maliki look so distinctly unenthused when Dick Cheney popped up in Baghdad last week -- by pure coincidence, of course, right before al-Maliki is said to have decided on his crackdown on the Basra militias?

There's an event going on the American Enterprise Institute with the key intellectual backers of the invasion of Iraq and then the surge discussing the future of the US occupation. Not surprisingly, they've all zeroed in on the concept of the "second election" (which doesn't come for another 18 months) being more important than the first in a new democracy -- and thus the need for troops to stay at least that long -- notwithstanding all the cheering about purple fingers that went on after the first one.

Anyway the panel is Fred Kagan, Michael O'Hanlon, and Ken Pollack. Kagan went through a list of benchmarks and declared most of them "done". O'Hanlon declared that the group of war architects like the panel and David Petraeus deserved a group name -- not Vulcans, but Lombardis, after the legendary coach of the Green Bay Packers. That's quite an honour to bestow on themselves. Vince Lombardi had won three NFL titles in a shorter time than the war in Iraq.

O'Hanlon seems surprised that things got worse in Mosul during the surge. He never mentioned that troops were reallocated from Mosul to Baghdad for the surge -- and dastardly al-Qaeda moved in the opposite direction. Meanwhile Ken Pollack is complaining that the success of the surge is creating a demand for more troops in the south. "Overstretch through success" or something. He's also claiming that the surge turned Iraq around much more quickly than British military operations in Northern Ireland.

Vince Lombardi had many quotes. O'Hanlon clearly likes the ones about persistence and attention to fundamentals. But Vince also said --

We didn't lose the game; we just ran out of time.

Someone is going to have blow the final whistle on the war, even at the risk of the "Lombardis" thinking that they could have won it.

UPDATE: Things are getting wackier. Fred Kagan is demonstrating that if you can use even slightly technical terminology, everyone thinks you're genius. He was talking about the reduction in brigades in terms of a "delta". He said that each reduction in brigade strength from 20 has exponential effects on military capabilities, so that by the time you're thinking about going from 15 to 14 brigades, the loss is 10⁶. 1 million times less effective? Nobody asked.

FINAL UPDATE: Think Progress has the clip of O'Hanlon's Lombardi discussion.

Dick Cheney, with Israeli president Shimon Peres today --

VICE PRESIDENT CHENEY: I want to thank you, Mr. President, for welcoming me back again to Israel. I remember when we first met many years ago, when you were Defense Minister --

PRESIDENT PERES: Both of us.

VICE PRESIDENT CHENEY: Both of us, yes. This was before I was defense minister. This was Rumsfeld's first time as defense minister.

A reminder of the deep roots of the Iraq fiasco. The photo is Cheney with Gerald Ford and Don Rumsfeld when Rumsfeld was Ford's Chief of Staff. Rummy was later moved to the defence position and Cheney took his Chief of Staff job, which is when he first met Peres.

In what seems to be standard procedure -- and what must drive the neocons up the wall -- a Bush administration visitor finds himself underneath a picture of Yassir Arafat. But, in an indication of the lack of grounding of the de facto partitioned Palestinian state (by Arab standards), the best that Mahmoud Abbas can do is be under a picture of himself.

OK, it's not quite up there with his Auschwitz parka, but Dick Cheney couldn't coordinate his jacket and pants to receive his Islamo-sash and al-bling from Custodian of the 400 Oil Wells, King Abdullah?

The Wall Street Journal editorial page, in a particularly ill-timed rant coming on the evening of news about George Bush's securocrats rummaging through Barack Obama's passport file --

This exercise [blocking "Protect America Act"] shows that the Democratic left that runs the House is a danger to American security.

She has no known government job, no apparent protocol position, no official designation of any kind. But there again on a Dick Cheney Middle East trip is Liz Cheney (right), doing all the expensive travel at taxpayer expense and apparently attending a lot of meetings. Shouldn't someone e.g. the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, care?

UPDATE: More Liz Cheney here .

Photo: AFP/Paul J. Richards

Dick Cheney Iraq event --

Remarks by Vice President Cheney and Sayyed Abdul-Aziz Al-Hakim, Chairman of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq.

That would be the bizarre pal of the neocons, the Iran-linked SCIRI, and part of the evidence for what would be one of history's great ironies, that the whole neocon operation is in fact being run for the benefit of Tehran.

But that's another story. SCIRI changed their name a year ago, to make themselves sound more Iraqi and less revolutionary. So why wasn't the name change reflected for Dick's arrival?

UPDATE: They corrected it.

At the Saint Patrick's Day reception --

President, as we say good-bye on this occasion, but hopefully we'll keep in touch over the years, I will remember -- and I hope that everyone in Ireland will -- how kind, how favorable you've been, how really open you've been to helping us, and the amount of time that the President has given to us.

Of course it's Bush's last St Patrick's Day. But he still has another very scary 10 months on the job. Does Bertie not think he'll see him again as Taoiseach? George seemed to have a similar impression --

Perhaps when we join the ex-leaders club, we'll sit back and put our feet up -- (laughter) -- and talk about the good old times. In the meantime, I know you're going to sprint to the finish, as am I, for the good of our countries.

"Sprint to the finish" was also Bush's formulation for his last press conference with Tony Blair, who by then had a public deadline for quitting.

One other thing Bush mentioned --

It's an interesting poster that somebody brought to my attention that said this: "In the United States, an industrious youth may follow any occupation without being looked down upon, and he may rationally expect to raise himself in the world by his labor." You know, occasionally, people did look down, but not anymore -- because Irish have been unbelievably productive people for the United States of America. They made a huge contribution. They've become an essential thread in the American fabric.

That "somebody" is senior Bush adviser Ed Gillespie, who had used the quote to argue that Ireland's famine emigrants would have favoured Bush's tax cuts.

Alan "Mr Bubble" Greenspan in the Financial Times --

Those of us who look to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholder equity have to be in a state of shocked disbelief.

Andrew Sullivan --

I know it's a stretch, but picture, if you will, Barack Obama* at a Louis Farrakhan event. Farrakhan isn't there, but his acolytes are. Obama -- stay with me a minute -- is shoring up support among blacks in a hard-fought election. His speech is campaign boilerplate, emphasizing themes of black self-reliance, the persistence of white racism and so on, but nowhere does he mention the Nation of Islam's anti-Semitic, anti-gay, racist ideology, let alone condemn it. He is mobbed. The crowds love him. His poll numbers among blacks, already strong, firm up.

This image is a stretch because not even Al Sharpton would be loopy enough to recommend such an event. Within seconds of even the idea of it leaking, Obama's campaign, indeed his political career, would be virtually over. Whoever recommended the speech would be fired; Obama would apologize; the Democratic Party establishment, once it had gotten over the shock, would essentially excommunicate him. For all these reasons, the event is literally unthinkable -- and not least because Barack Obama himself would feel nothing but revulsion at the idea.

*No, wait. That's not Andrew Sullivan writing about such an event -- it's Andrew Sullivan writing about how loony it would be for Al Gore, in 2000, to be (hypothetically) in the vicinity of Afrocentric demagoguery and not condemn it.

But fast forward to 2008, and when it's Barack Obama's pastor of 20 years, Jeremiah Wright, with the dodgy quotes --

I don't think it's racist to understand that the black church has a different cultural style in its preaching and activism style that helps add some dimension to Wright's record. If you read Obama's books and listen to him speak about his church, it's clear that he was not drawn by Wright's more inflammatory and offensive language. His engagement with the Church was an attempt to connect with the life and feelings of a black urban class he had never truly belonged to and whom he intended to represent. We can forget what an outsider Obama was when he first came to Chicago.

Does that mean that in his 2000 example, his Gore scenario would be OK once allowance was made for the "cultural style" of a black event and Gore's attempts to connect with the "black urban class"? Or is it different because, accusations of a double-standard bedamned, Obama is black?

Why would George Bush, without much fanfare, suddenly yank his nomination of Charles Gargano, highly connected New York City property developer, to be his Ambassador to Austria? Usually such jobs are a lock once you've ponied up the requisite Republican fund-raising and/or satisfied the right connections, which as a George Pataki operative, he surely has.

Perish the thought that he's one of those clients with a number.

Dick Cheney continues his tour of safe audiences -- military bases and loyal Bushies -- with a trip to the Heritage Foundation to celebrate the 25th anniversary of Ronald Reagan's announcement of the Strategic Defense ("Star Wars") Initiative. Which 25 years and billions of dollars later, still can't do anything like its original vision of intercepting unannounced ballistic missiles headed towards the USA. But the issue is not whether it felt short of that technological goal, but whether the goal is even relevant now, if it ever was. Dick has no doubts --

But in 2000, George W. Bush campaigned on a promise to build missile defenses, and in 2001, he made the wise decision to withdraw from the ABM Treaty. It was an act of great courage, and it opened the way for major advances in our ability to stand up a defense against missile attack. (Applause.)

The decision made even more sense in light of the attacks of September 11th. As President Bush said, 9/11 "made all too clear [that] the greatest threats to both our countries come not from each other, or other big powers in the world, but from terrorists who strike without warning, or rogue states who seek weapons of mass destruction."

In fact, 9/11 showed the irrelevance of missile defence. The missile was a hijacked plane. No rogue state, no WMDs, nothing. And the biggest threat to life in Iraq now is not Iranian missiles, but simple bombs made from stuff left lying around during the Bush occupation. The one advantage that Reagan and his hare-brained scheme has is that, by the standards of George Bush, it seems like a harmless folly.

Andrew Sullivan, outraged at Geraldine Ferraro's suggestion that Barack Obama's success in the Democratic primary is due to him being black --

So when, one wonders, will Clintonite [Wesley] Clark call for Ferraro to be fired from her campaign position? Or is Rush Limbaugh now held to a higher standard than Geraldine Ferraro? ... The racial polarization in the exit polls is depressing; but when you have Clinton surrogates like Geraldine Ferraro reveling in racist condescension and resentment, as she did today, I can understand a little

Andrew Sullivan, explaining that the redemptive power of an Obama candidacy lies in him being black --

Electing a half-African president, with Hussein as a middle name, who attended school in a Muslim country: it's almost a p.r. agent's dream for America. It would instantly give this country a fresh start in the world after the disaster of the Bush-Cheney years.

It's particularly bizarre for Sullivan to be tossing accusations of racism when someone brings up the topic of race, given his history with The Bell Curve.

UPDATE: For the record, a prediction that we meant to make before -- come the general election, Sully will dump Obama for McCaim, which will be astounding given the way he's made his blog into all-Obama-all-the-time. Here's the latest hint --

I guess I should reiterate that I am undecided about the general election if it turns into a McCain-Obama battle. There are aspects to both men that I deeply admire. Oddly, I find McCain more persuasive on domestic policy and Obama more realistic when it comes to foreign policy.

FINAL UPDATE: Mickey Kaus finds another Sully segment with the same contradiction.

US Admiral William Fallon was forced out of his job as chief of the Pentagon's Central Command because he disagreed with George Bush's policy on Iran and Iraq. The Wall Street Journal ("The Pentagon vs. Petraeus") considers the problem --

A fateful debate is now taking place at the Pentagon that will determine the pace of U.S. military withdrawals for what remains of President Bush's term. Senior Pentagon officials -- including, we hear, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, Joint Chiefs Chairman Mike Mullen, Army Chief of Staff George Casey and Admiral Fallon -- have been urging deeper troop cuts in Iraq beyond the five "surge" combat brigades already scheduled for redeployment this summer.

Last month Mr. Gates agreed to a pause in these withdrawals, so that General David Petraeus could assess whether the impressive security gains achieved by the surge can be maintained with fewer troops. But now the Pentagon seems to be pushing for a pause of no more than four to six weeks before the drawdowns resume.

So everyone who ranks above Petraeus wants more withdrawals from Iraq as soon as possible. A tricky one for Bush who has always talked about listening to the generals, not one subordinate general. For the WSJ, the way forward is clear: Bush must overrule everyone who doesn't agree with him. And/or force them out of their jobs. It's a strange way to run a country.

Incidentally, the aforementioned Bob Gates was forced into at least one misleading statement at the news conference announcing that Fallon was out --

Q Did you discuss this with the president before you accepted it?
SEC. GATES: I had -- the president has made clear all along that these matters are to be handled strictly within the Department of Defense. I communicated -- the president's traveling today; I communicated this morning, through the national security adviser, what Admiral Fallon had informed me and what I intended to do.

By "these matters", Gates can only mean the specific business about offering to retire and it being accepted. The idea that Bush had no role in Fallon quitting, not least given what the WSJ says about the rampant disagreements within the Pentagon, is preposterous.

George Bush -- The Vice President will be taking a very hopeful message to the Middle East ...

Photo source

Bill Kristol's Monday New York Times column starts out as the same analysis he had been giving on Fox News earlier in the day but then descends into his fantasy presidential tickets, disguised as advice to John McCain --

Perhaps the most obvious way McCain could upend the normal dynamics of this year’s election would be a bold vice presidential choice. He could pick a hawkish and principled Democrat like Joe Lieberman. He could reach beyond the usual bevy of elected officials by tapping either David Petraeus or Raymond Odierno — the two generals who together, in an amazing demonstration of leadership and competence, turned the war in Iraq around last year. He could persuade the most impressive conservative in American public life, Clarence Thomas, to join the ticket. There are other unorthodox possibilities.

He grounds "advice" this in a quote from Danton -- another weird choice of quote, since as Wikipedia tells us:

Georges Danton (October 26, 1759 – April 5, 1794) was a leading figure in the early stages of the French Revolution and the first President of the Committee of Public Safety. Danton's role in the onset of the Revolution has been disputed; many historians describe him as "the chief force in the overthrow of the monarchy and the establishment of the First French Republic".[2] A moderating influence on the Jacobins, he was guillotined by the advocates of revolutionary terror after accusations of venality and leniency to the enemies of the Revolution.

What is about these neocons and leftist revolutionaries?

Two electorally chastened conservatives head to vote today -- the ever stylish Jose Maria Aznar and Sarko Junior (Jean), running for mayor in his dad's old fiefdom in the Paris suburbs.

Results due for both tonight. It's interesting that Aznar doesn't seem ready to leave the limelight, even though he's not the party leader anymore.

Photos from El Pais

George Bush has just said that if the US Congress fails to pass the US-Colombia free trade agreement, the FARC would be emboldened. This on the day when the FARC are being accused of hatching a dirty bomb plot, complete with shaky evidence of an attempted uranium purchase. No mention of Niger yet.

Bush also signalled his support for Colombian president Alvaro Uribe by saying that America stands with democratic leaders in the region -- apparently forgetting that Hugo Chavez and Rafael Correa (President of Ecuador) are democratically elected. The GWOT template imposed on yet another complex situation.

Incidentally, lest any readers think we have much sympathy for the FARC, read this.

UPDATE: Bush laughably referred to "provocative maneuvers by the regime in Venezuela" when the cause of the current tension is a Colombian incursion on territory of Ecuador.

Apparel not likely to be seen on the US campaign trail anytime soon, especially on the Republican side: former Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar, defeated in the election following the 11-M bombings, campaigns for his party successor Mariano Rajoy sporting a pink V-neck and quite a mane to go with it. One wonders if his US neocon friends would interpret attention to casual style as a sign of weakness in the face of Islamo-fascism.

Photo: REUTERS/Eloy Alonso

It's time for America's "aid and comfort to the enemy" patrol to censure Matt Drudge for leaking the news of Prince Harry's deployment in Afghanistan. Note that Drudge seems to be especially implicated because the previous leak, via Australia, never got any traction.

One hopes that US Defence Secretary Bob Gates is aware of the irony even if George Bush is not --

"I think they got our message," Gates told reporters after his talks with Turkey's Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and other leaders, including the president and the minister of defense.

Still, Gates said Turkish officials did not discuss any deadline and he said he did not know if they will end the operation in a week as he's asked.

"I stand by where I've been on this. And that is that they should wrap this thing up as soon as they can," Gates said, noting his meetings with Turkish officials did not change his mind.

President Bush, asked about the situation at a White House news conference Thursday, made a similar point.

"It should not be long-lasting," Bush said. "The Turks need to move, move quickly, achieve their objective and get out."

Because of course in the US political context, a timetable for leaving Iraq is surrender to the terrorists, and "the objective" is so open ended as to facilitate that 100 year presence that John McCain says he wants.

Dick "The Snarl" Cheney, in Texas --

And in the struggle against terror, no country has more battlefield deaths, or lost more civilians, than Iraq itself.

While being rare for Cheney -- a true statement -- it only highlights that the main victims of the war on terror were never consulted on the decision to designate their country as the central front in the war on terror. It's strange to be talking about the great benefits that democracy will bring to Iraq when that most important choice is off-limits.

Straight Talking Maverick^TM John McCain has a new index of progress in Iraq --

He said Monday that his close friend and supporter Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, had just returned from Iraq, where he flew over Baghdad and counted “50 soccer games going on.”

A previous Lindsey Graham trip had seen him exult over getting "5 rugs for 5 bucks". But surely all the military sleuths out there have some work to do on this one. Having time to count 50 soccer matches means helicopter, not airplane transport. Is Baghdad airspace safe enough for a helicopter to hang around long enough to count to 50? Or was he in one of those Blackwater helicopters that every so often likes to rake the traffic below with machine gun fire just to keep everyone in line? It's time for some straight talk, my friends.

White House Press Secretary Dana Perino --

There is an old rhetorical tactic in Washington: you repeat something often enough, regardless of whether it's true, and hope people will start to believe it.

Indeed.

With Cindy McCain proving that T-X survived that run-in with Arnie, we're in bigger trouble than we thought.

Perhaps this is the reason that Jonah Goldberg never gets around to classifying George W. Bush as a fascist despite seeing fascism just about everywhere else in America: that Bush's government is so incompetent that he's helped make the argument for less government, and thus, by Goldberg's definition, less fascism. It was actually Glenn Beck making the running with this argument but Goldberg showed no sign of disagreeing it when he was on the show hoping to move some copies of his book --

BECK: Well, just last week they were talking about -- what was it? -- the trailers for Katrina victims.
GOLDBERG: Right, right.
BECK: They have them all in -- and they`re trying to get them out because the air has formaldehyde in it and, you know, people are getting sick, and they said the government is not telling us the truth. They`re telling us it`s no big deal. They`ve been -- they`ve been passing this off.
And I thought to myself, this is a government program. Here it is. This is the way it works. And yet, people still want that nanny state.
GOLDBERG: Right.
BECK: It`s only going to get worse when they control everything.
GOLDBERG: Right, right. And it`s -- you know, what is the old proverb about, you know, if you`re digging -- the sign of insanity is you`re digging a hole and you keep digging to get out of it, you know?

It's interesting that neither of them have any real understanding of why downtrodden people want the government's help. It's also interesting that they ever trusted the government to run a complicated war in Iraq.

Of all the sages who've noted that Balkan wars can get very messy, Chistopher Hitchens approvingly cites ... Leon Trotsky.

One topic in Straight Talking Maverick^TM John McCain's news conference this morning besides the links to lobbyists was his apparent dodge around the public campaign finance law, in which he gave himself a "heads I win, tails the public loses" method of financing his primary campaign. The Federal Election Commission (FEC) is saying that the tails part of that strategy locked him into the public financing system even if the coin showed heads.

As part of his proof that the FEC was wrong, McCain cited the fact that a former FEC official helped him design the strategy. Which is just one example of what appears to be a general philosophy that "good people" like him by definition can't do anything wrong. Which sounds a lot like George Bush.