Iraqis are returning to Iraq from their exile.
What do they know that Harry Reid doesn’t? He must be very disappointed.
[Update a little later]
This isn’t exactly hot off the press (it was posted at the end of August) but David Kilcullen, one of General Petraeus’ advisors, provides a good (but long) description of what was going on in Iraq at that time, that explains much of what we’re seeing today.
[Update later morning]
Ralph Peters: What went right in Iraq.
Ilya Somin explains.
In today’s Wall Street Journal I find this gem:
Maybe home builders should knock off work until spring.
Pillory OPEC for not raising oil production and pillory home builders for producing too much?! And another:
“If people stop cutting prices, that’s actually good [for builders],” says David Goldberg, an analyst with UBS Investment Bank. “If everybody does it, it works. If one builder does it, it doesn’t.”
If OPEC conspires to raise oil prices, it’s evil, but it’s OK to conspire to keep housing prices up? This is bad reporting.
It’s in each builder’s interest to keep building as long as their cost to build is lower than the expected sale price and the cost of capital for keeping the house on the market for longer than historical averages (and at higher interest rates than before the credit crisis). They will continue to build and prices will continue to fall. It probably won’t be a sellers’ market in housing in many parts of the country until 2009 or 2010. While builders continue to build, the 10-month supply of houses will only slowly drop and prices will also only drop slowly. If it made sense to build houses at 50% of current prices in some markets, there will be building for a while especially with labor and materials less scarce given that the peak of the housing boom is over.
Lower housing prices will make houses more affordable and stoke demand. That is what media should anticipate: a smoothly functioning market because the market price isn’t too high to sell anything. Not a way to repeal the Law of Supply and Demand.
The SCOTUS is going to grant cert in DC v. Heller.
This is another huge story (two in one day, with the stem cell breakthrough). They are finally going to resolve, one way or the other, if the purpose clause can allow a government to deprive people of their civil rights. It will be a sad day for liberty if they overrule the appeals court, and essentially eviscerate the Bill of Rights of one of its most powerful one.
The pen is mightier than the sword, so they say, which may be why they made freedom of speech the first amendment, but the fact that the right to bear arms is number two is probably a good indication of the degree of importance attached to it by the Founders. Without that one, all the rest are ultimately at risk to a new tyranny.
Mark Steyn writes about Hollywood, and the war:
Which brings us back to those yelps of delight when the Americans clobbered the jihadists two hours into the test screening of The Kingdom. Pace Peter Berg, it’s not “bloodlust”: if you want that, you’re best to stick to the amoral fetishization of violence in the 3.10 remake. What the preview crowd were telling Berg is, hey, we’d love to see one film where our guys kick serious terrorist butt
Mark Steyn writes about Hollywood, and the war:
Which brings us back to those yelps of delight when the Americans clobbered the jihadists two hours into the test screening of The Kingdom. Pace Peter Berg, it’s not “bloodlust”: if you want that, you’re best to stick to the amoral fetishization of violence in the 3.10 remake. What the preview crowd were telling Berg is, hey, we’d love to see one film where our guys kick serious terrorist butt
Mark Steyn writes about Hollywood, and the war:
Which brings us back to those yelps of delight when the Americans clobbered the jihadists two hours into the test screening of The Kingdom. Pace Peter Berg, it’s not “bloodlust”: if you want that, you’re best to stick to the amoral fetishization of violence in the 3.10 remake. What the preview crowd were telling Berg is, hey, we’d love to see one film where our guys kick serious terrorist butt
That’s what John McCain is saying about his stance on Iraq, and the consistency with which he’s been calling for more troops from the beginning. And he’s right, he has.
The problem is, I remain unconvinced that more troops were the answer, then, or now. I always thought that the surge was misnamed. I think that there are two other factors that are as important, and perhaps much more important, than troop levels per se.
First was the change of tactics, in which rather than hunkering down in bases and training Iraqis to go out and fight the insurgency, Petraeus put the troops out in the field and worked with the locals.
But I think that the most important factor was simply that the Iraqis tired of the insurgency and Al Qaeda. I think that Petraeus was the right man at the right time, but I don’t think that it takes anything away from him to question how well the strategy would have worked two, or three years ago. It probably would have been better than what we were doing at the time, but I think that the time had to be ripe for the awakenings in Anbar and Diyala, and now in Baghdad. It may be that the Iraqis simply had to go through this brutal period to understand the barbarity and viciousness of the fundamentalists that were attempting to colonize them, as they had Afghanistan under the Taliban, and the benefits of working with Americans and each other, rather than trying to fight each other for the spoils of the war.
The Sunnis are probably finally coming to the realization that they are never going to rule over the majority as they had under the Ba’athists, and seem to now be ready to accommodate themselves to the new Iraq, and are trying to cut deals. Again, I don’t think that’s something that could have happened overnight.
I don’t think that it was ever realistic to think that we were going to get a well-functioning democracy quickly in Iraq, even if we managed to get votes much more quickly than most predicted. Anyone who has studied military history knows that wars, and insurrections, are generally long protracted periods of one disaster after another, until one side finally throws in the towel. World War II was a series of bloody blunders, in both theaters, but we had the will and the resources to continue on regardless until the enemy was finally defeated. That’s why I was never as critical of Bush and Rumsfeld as many were. Not to say I think the decisions flawless, but sometimes things have to happen at their own pace, regardless of tactics. The only wars that America has lost are those in which it got tired, and gave up.
One fears that the attention-deficit, teevee-remote, video-game generation won’t have the patience to win the long war against our new ideological enemy, which is likely to continue for decades, as our war against totalitarian communism did. But give the president credit for standing firm in the face of the surrender demands of the Democrats after the election. I think that history, however else it judges him, will be kind to him in that regard, and less so to the Reids and Pelosis.
We’ll never know, of course, if more troops or better tactics would have gotten us to this point sooner, though if we have to do something similar in the future, we may take some lessons from Iraq, and try it. But history doesn’t really allow controlled experiments. In any event, while Senator McCain can be praised for consistency, it remains unobvious to me that his prescriptions would have been as effective at the time as he wants to claim now.
That’s what John McCain is saying about his stance on Iraq, and the consistency with which he’s been calling for more troops from the beginning. And he’s right, he has.
The problem is, I remain unconvinced that more troops were the answer, then, or now. I always thought that the surge was misnamed. I think that there are two other factors that are as important, and perhaps much more important, than troop levels per se.
First was the change of tactics, in which rather than hunkering down in bases and training Iraqis to go out and fight the insurgency, Petraeus put the troops out in the field and worked with the locals.
But I think that the most important factor was simply that the Iraqis tired of the insurgency and Al Qaeda. I think that Petraeus was the right man at the right time, but I don’t think that it takes anything away from him to question how well the strategy would have worked two, or three years ago. It probably would have been better than what we were doing at the time, but I think that the time had to be ripe for the awakenings in Anbar and Diyala, and now in Baghdad. It may be that the Iraqis simply had to go through this brutal period to understand the barbarity and viciousness of the fundamentalists that were attempting to colonize them, as they had Afghanistan under the Taliban, and the benefits of working with Americans and each other, rather than trying to fight each other for the spoils of the war.
The Sunnis are probably finally coming to the realization that they are never going to rule over the majority as they had under the Ba’athists, and seem to now be ready to accommodate themselves to the new Iraq, and are trying to cut deals. Again, I don’t think that’s something that could have happened overnight.
I don’t think that it was ever realistic to think that we were going to get a well-functioning democracy quickly in Iraq, even if we managed to get votes much more quickly than most predicted. Anyone who has studied military history knows that wars, and insurrections, are generally long protracted periods of one disaster after another, until one side finally throws in the towel. World War II was a series of bloody blunders, in both theaters, but we had the will and the resources to continue on regardless until the enemy was finally defeated. That’s why I was never as critical of Bush and Rumsfeld as many were. Not to say I think the decisions flawless, but sometimes things have to happen at their own pace, regardless of tactics. The only wars that America has lost are those in which it got tired, and gave up.
One fears that the attention-deficit, teevee-remote, video-game generation won’t have the patience to win the long war against our new ideological enemy, which is likely to continue for decades, as our war against totalitarian communism did. But give the president credit for standing firm in the face of the surrender demands of the Democrats after the election. I think that history, however else it judges him, will be kind to him in that regard, and less so to the Reids and Pelosis.
We’ll never know, of course, if more troops or better tactics would have gotten us to this point sooner, though if we have to do something similar in the future, we may take some lessons from Iraq, and try it. But history doesn’t really allow controlled experiments. In any event, while Senator McCain can be praised for consistency, it remains unobvious to me that his prescriptions would have been as effective at the time as he wants to claim now.
That’s what John McCain is saying about his stance on Iraq, and the consistency with which he’s been calling for more troops from the beginning. And he’s right, he has.
The problem is, I remain unconvinced that more troops were the answer, then, or now. I always thought that the surge was misnamed. I think that there are two other factors that are as important, and perhaps much more important, than troop levels per se.
First was the change of tactics, in which rather than hunkering down in bases and training Iraqis to go out and fight the insurgency, Petraeus put the troops out in the field and worked with the locals.
But I think that the most important factor was simply that the Iraqis tired of the insurgency and Al Qaeda. I think that Petraeus was the right man at the right time, but I don’t think that it takes anything away from him to question how well the strategy would have worked two, or three years ago. It probably would have been better than what we were doing at the time, but I think that the time had to be ripe for the awakenings in Anbar and Diyala, and now in Baghdad. It may be that the Iraqis simply had to go through this brutal period to understand the barbarity and viciousness of the fundamentalists that were attempting to colonize them, as they had Afghanistan under the Taliban, and the benefits of working with Americans and each other, rather than trying to fight each other for the spoils of the war.
The Sunnis are probably finally coming to the realization that they are never going to rule over the majority as they had under the Ba’athists, and seem to now be ready to accommodate themselves to the new Iraq, and are trying to cut deals. Again, I don’t think that’s something that could have happened overnight.
I don’t think that it was ever realistic to think that we were going to get a well-functioning democracy quickly in Iraq, even if we managed to get votes much more quickly than most predicted. Anyone who has studied military history knows that wars, and insurrections, are generally long protracted periods of one disaster after another, until one side finally throws in the towel. World War II was a series of bloody blunders, in both theaters, but we had the will and the resources to continue on regardless until the enemy was finally defeated. That’s why I was never as critical of Bush and Rumsfeld as many were. Not to say I think the decisions flawless, but sometimes things have to happen at their own pace, regardless of tactics. The only wars that America has lost are those in which it got tired, and gave up.
One fears that the attention-deficit, teevee-remote, video-game generation won’t have the patience to win the long war against our new ideological enemy, which is likely to continue for decades, as our war against totalitarian communism did. But give the president credit for standing firm in the face of the surrender demands of the Democrats after the election. I think that history, however else it judges him, will be kind to him in that regard, and less so to the Reids and Pelosis.
We’ll never know, of course, if more troops or better tactics would have gotten us to this point sooner, though if we have to do something similar in the future, we may take some lessons from Iraq, and try it. But history doesn’t really allow controlled experiments. In any event, while Senator McCain can be praised for consistency, it remains unobvious to me that his prescriptions would have been as effective at the time as he wants to claim now.