Uncategorized

If He’d Only Listened To Me

Dick Gephardt says that everything is screwed up in Iraq because President Bush didn’t take his sage advice.

Bush relied too heavily on Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and not enough on moderate voices like Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, Gephardt said, adding that Bush also refused to listen to critics outside of the White House, including Gephardt.

“I told the president four times in the White House that we needed help,” the US representative from Missouri said. “This is going to be difficult. He literally did not answer my questions.

“It’s five months after he landed on that aircraft carrier in his flight suit and we still don’t have the help that we need,” Gephardt said.

What’s missing of course, is any explanation of how having international troops, or even more American troops, would improve the situation, other than increasing the number of targets.

Uncategorized

Where’s The Outrage?

Linda Tripp has won her civil suit against the Pentagon, and will get over half a million dollars in compensation.

As Juan Non-Volokh notes:

Since so much of the blogosphere is outraged by the disclosure of confidential and personally damaging information by government officials in retaliation against political opponents, I assume those obsessed with the Plame affair will not let this story go unmentioned. There was an unquestioned violation of federal law here, leading to a substantial settlement, but the culprit was never identified, let alone punished.

Yes, Ken Bacon was the one who released the information to the public, but we never found out who in the White House gave it to him, and he was never even reprimanded, let alone punished within the law.

But of course, it was OK for the Clinton administration to break the law, because Linda Tripp was “fat,” and “betrayed a friend” (a “friend” who was suborning her perjury and conveying threats against her and her children). So no one pays any price except the taxpayer.

Uncategorized

Where’s The Outrage?

Linda Tripp has won her civil suit against the Pentagon, and will get over half a million dollars in compensation.

As Juan Non-Volokh notes:

Since so much of the blogosphere is outraged by the disclosure of confidential and personally damaging information by government officials in retaliation against political opponents, I assume those obsessed with the Plame affair will not let this story go unmentioned. There was an unquestioned violation of federal law here, leading to a substantial settlement, but the culprit was never identified, let alone punished.

Yes, Ken Bacon was the one who released the information to the public, but we never found out who in the White House gave it to him, and he was never even reprimanded, let alone punished within the law.

But of course, it was OK for the Clinton administration to break the law, because Linda Tripp was “fat,” and “betrayed a friend” (a “friend” who was suborning her perjury and conveying threats against her and her children). So no one pays any price except the taxpayer.

Uncategorized

Where’s The Outrage?

Linda Tripp has won her civil suit against the Pentagon, and will get over half a million dollars in compensation.

As Juan Non-Volokh notes:

Since so much of the blogosphere is outraged by the disclosure of confidential and personally damaging information by government officials in retaliation against political opponents, I assume those obsessed with the Plame affair will not let this story go unmentioned. There was an unquestioned violation of federal law here, leading to a substantial settlement, but the culprit was never identified, let alone punished.

Yes, Ken Bacon was the one who released the information to the public, but we never found out who in the White House gave it to him, and he was never even reprimanded, let alone punished within the law.

But of course, it was OK for the Clinton administration to break the law, because Linda Tripp was “fat,” and “betrayed a friend” (a “friend” who was suborning her perjury and conveying threats against her and her children). So no one pays any price except the taxpayer.

Uncategorized

Zero Tolerance

…is just as stupid a policy in warfighting as it is in policing schoolchildren. Cory Dauber has a good post on the obsession that the media has with daily casualty rates.

Given the caveats that every casualty is a tragic loss, what would be less than one loss a day? The return of the zero casualty policy of the Clinton years — which I thought had been discredited both as something which distorted mission planning and which was ultimately unworkable in a war of wills with terrorists still thinking of Lebanon and Somalia as models for American behavior. So it is worth asking again — did September 11th change our way of thinking about the risks we face and the way we will face them, or not?

Yes. The goal is not to have zero casualties–it’s to win the war. Obviously we want to minimize casualties within the constraints of that goal, and don’t want needless ones, but there’s no right answer to how many there should be, and to focus on that is to lose focus on the real objective.

We need some perspective here. We still lost more men in the first hour of the Normandy landing than we’ve lost since we first went into Iraq, and this notion that the fact that we’ve now lost more soldiers since the end of major combat operations than during the the removal of the government has any significance is simply bizarre numerology.

All that means is that we had amazingly low casualties during that phase, not that the current ones are somehow “too high.”

Political Commentary

“An Attitude Of Look The Other Way”

Rich Lowry describes how we rewarded terror and attacks on us in the nineties, in the Khobar Towers bombing.

When Freeh told national security adviser Sandy Berger there was evidence to indict several suspects, Berger asked, “Who else knows this?” He then proceeded to question the evidence. A reporter for The New Yorker who later interviewed Freeh about the case writes that the FBI Director thought “Berger . . . was not a national security adviser; he was a public-relations hack, interested in how something would play in the press. After more than two years, Freeh had concluded that the administration did not really want to resolve the Khobar bombing.”

The price of not getting to the bottom of the matter ? although the Saudis opened up somewhat in response to Freeh’s proddings and allowed the questioning of suspects ? wasn’t just shrugging off the murderer of 19 Americans. It was failing to understand fully the changing nature of the terror threat. “Khobar provided the keys that unlocked the new terror world,” says one terror expert. “Everything you needed to know about the new terror network, the cooperation between all the different sects and factions, the rise of Wahhabi radicalism in Saudi Arabia, the changing dynamic of the Middle East ? it all was present in that case.”

I would note that, similarly, we’ve never really found all of the perpetrators of the Oklahoma City bombing, for the same reason, with an additional one. Not only would proof of a Middle East connection have required undesired action on the part of the Clinton administration, but it would have diluted the politically-useful message that this was the sole act of “angry white men,” the same ones who’d been stirred up by Rush Limbaugh into giving the Republicans control of Congress the previous fall.

One other interesting parallel.

The pattern of Saudi non-cooperation had been set after the Riyadh bombing, when the Saudis denied FBI agents access to four suspects, and swiftly beheaded them to lend finality to that lack of access.

And interestingly, Tim McVeigh is also no longer around to tell the whole story (had he ever been willing to do so–it appears that he wanted all the credit for himself, and wouldn’t want it to look like he needed foreign assistance).

Political Commentary

“An Attitude Of Look The Other Way”

Rich Lowry describes how we rewarded terror and attacks on us in the nineties, in the Khobar Towers bombing.

When Freeh told national security adviser Sandy Berger there was evidence to indict several suspects, Berger asked, “Who else knows this?” He then proceeded to question the evidence. A reporter for The New Yorker who later interviewed Freeh about the case writes that the FBI Director thought “Berger . . . was not a national security adviser; he was a public-relations hack, interested in how something would play in the press. After more than two years, Freeh had concluded that the administration did not really want to resolve the Khobar bombing.”

The price of not getting to the bottom of the matter ? although the Saudis opened up somewhat in response to Freeh’s proddings and allowed the questioning of suspects ? wasn’t just shrugging off the murderer of 19 Americans. It was failing to understand fully the changing nature of the terror threat. “Khobar provided the keys that unlocked the new terror world,” says one terror expert. “Everything you needed to know about the new terror network, the cooperation between all the different sects and factions, the rise of Wahhabi radicalism in Saudi Arabia, the changing dynamic of the Middle East ? it all was present in that case.”

I would note that, similarly, we’ve never really found all of the perpetrators of the Oklahoma City bombing, for the same reason, with an additional one. Not only would proof of a Middle East connection have required undesired action on the part of the Clinton administration, but it would have diluted the politically-useful message that this was the sole act of “angry white men,” the same ones who’d been stirred up by Rush Limbaugh into giving the Republicans control of Congress the previous fall.

One other interesting parallel.

The pattern of Saudi non-cooperation had been set after the Riyadh bombing, when the Saudis denied FBI agents access to four suspects, and swiftly beheaded them to lend finality to that lack of access.

And interestingly, Tim McVeigh is also no longer around to tell the whole story (had he ever been willing to do so–it appears that he wanted all the credit for himself, and wouldn’t want it to look like he needed foreign assistance).

Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!