Keith Devens .com

Wednesday, October 3, 2007

lgf: Prospect: Mission Accomplished. I'm just going to quote the excellent portion quoted at LGF and read the rest later:

The question of what to do in Iraq today must be separated from the decision to topple Saddam Hussein four and a half years ago. That decision is a matter for historians. By any normal ethical standard, the coalition’s current project in Iraq is a just one. Britain, America and Iraq’s other allies are there as the guests of an elected government given a huge mandate by Iraqi voters under a legitimate constitution. The UN approved the coalition’s role in May 2003, and the mandate has been renewed annually since then, most recently this August. Meanwhile, the other side in this war are among the worst people in global politics: Baathists, the Nazis of the middle east; Sunni fundamentalists, the chief opponents of progress in Islam’s struggle with modernity; and the government of Iran. Ethically, causes do not come much clearer than this one.

Some just wars, however, are not worth fighting. There are countries that do not matter very much to the rest of the world. Rwanda is one tragic example; and its case illustrates the immorality of a completely pragmatic foreign policy. But Iraq, the world’s axial country since the beginning of history and all the more important in the current era for probably possessing the world’s largest reserves of oil, is no Rwanda. Nor do two or three improvised explosive devices a day, for all the personal tragedy involved in each casualty, make a Vietnam.

The great question in deciding whether to keep fighting in Iraq is not about the morality and self-interest of supporting a struggling democracy that is also one of the most important countries in the world. The question is whether the war is winnable and whether we can help the winning of it. The answer is made much easier by the fact that three and a half years after the start of the insurgency, most of the big questions in Iraq have been resolved. Moreover, they have been resolved in ways that are mostly towards the positive end of the range of outcomes imagined at the start of the project. The country is whole. It has embraced the ballot box. It has created a fair and popular constitution. It has avoided all-out civil war. It has not been taken over by Iran. It has put an end to Kurdish and marsh Arab genocide, and anti-Shia apartheid. It has rejected mass revenge against the Sunnis. As shown in the great national votes of 2005 and the noisy celebrations of the Iraq football team’s success in July, Iraq survived the Saddam Hussein era with a sense of national unity; even the Kurds—whose reluctant commitment to autonomy rather than full independence is in no danger of changing—celebrated. Iraq’s condition has not caused a sectarian apocalypse across the region. The country has ceased to be a threat to the world or its region. The only neighbours threatened by its status today are the leaders in Damascus, Riyadh and Tehran.

¶ (0) Tags: [Current Events, Opinions/Politics]

Friday, November 10, 2006

Reuters:

TEHRAN (Reuters) - Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Friday called U.S. President George W. Bush's defeat in congressional elections a victory for Iran.

Also see, LGF: Parties Across the Middle East

¶ (0) Tags: [Current Events, Opinions/Politics]

Thursday, September 21, 2006

Friday, September 1, 2006

One more post about Joe Wilson

Because I blogged about it so much back in the day (I'm going to go back tag all relevant posts with Valerie Plame), I'd like to quote some of the Washington Post's conclusion:

It follows that one of the most sensational charges leveled against the Bush White House -- that it orchestrated the leak of Ms. Plame's identity to ruin her career and thus punish Mr. Wilson -- is untrue. The partisan clamor that followed the raising of that allegation by Mr. Wilson in the summer of 2003 led to the appointment of a special prosecutor, a costly and prolonged investigation, and the indictment of Vice President Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, on charges of perjury. All of that might have been avoided had Mr. Armitage's identity been known three years ago.

...

Nevertheless, it now appears that the person most responsible for the end of Ms. Plame's CIA career is Mr. Wilson. Mr. Wilson chose to go public with an explosive charge, claiming -- falsely, as it turned out -- that he had debunked reports of Iraqi uranium-shopping in Niger and that his report had circulated to senior administration officials. He ought to have expected that both those officials and journalists such as Mr. Novak would ask why a retired ambassador would have been sent on such a mission and that the answer would point to his wife. He diverted responsibility from himself and his false charges by claiming that President Bush's closest aides had engaged in an illegal conspiracy. It's unfortunate that so many people took him seriously.

Permalink | 1 Comment | Tags: Valerie Plame | id 8129

11:44 (utc-5)

Saturday, February 18, 2006

Glenn Renyolds on the Canadians wanting to scrap gun registration:

GUN REGISTRATION: Such a bad idea that even the Canadians are scrapping it. "One former Mountie called the registry 'totally useless' because criminals don't register their guns." Too bad they didn't figure that out a few billion dollars ago, but at least it's an object lesson for the United States.

Indeed.

¶ (6) Tags: [Canada, Gun Control, Opinions/Politics]

Thursday, January 19, 2006

Austin Bay on Bin Laden's offer of a truce (via Glenn Reynolds):

Essentially, the new Bin Laden tape says “please don’t wage war on our turf, but let us wage war on yours.”

That's a good way to put it. He continues:

Bringing the War on Terror to the center of the politically dysfunctional Muslim world is absolutely key to obtaining the long term victory Americans expect and the world deserves.

¶ (0) Tags: [Opinions/Politics]

Monday, January 16, 2006

Mark Steyn on the Alito hearings:

The media did their best to neutralize the impact of this pitiful spectacle, with expert commentators on hand to assure us that smart fellows like Chuck Schumer and Joe Biden were only going through the motions for the sake of all that MoveOn.org fund-raising gravy. Don't worry, Ted and Chuck and Pat are way too savvy to believe this junk. Thus democratic politics reaches a new level of circular hell: The spin is that it's only spin.

As I understand it, with the Jack Abramoff dirty-money stuff, lobby groups give big bucks to politicians to advocate various things which, pre-check-cashing, the politicians may or may not have believed in. But this last week of Senate hearings has been so absurd it may bring the whole system into disrepute: Big-time Democrats are out there dancing for dollars in a cause so obviously non-viable that their media buddies feel obliged to signal that it's merely a charade. Does that satisfy anybody?

Via Glenn Reynolds.

¶ (0) Tags: [Opinions/Politics]

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Tag: Opinions/Politics

Tuesday, August 26, 2008

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Wednesday, October 3, 2007

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Tuesday, September 26, 2006

Thursday, September 21, 2006

Friday, September 15, 2006

Friday, September 1, 2006

One more post about Joe Wilson

Tuesday, February 28, 2006

Saturday, February 18, 2006

Tuesday, February 7, 2006

Monday, February 6, 2006

Thursday, January 19, 2006

Wednesday, January 18, 2006

Monday, January 16, 2006

Friday, January 13, 2006

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