Nothing Succeeds Like Success

Americans have regularly changed their minds in the midst of their ongoing wars—and not just once, but often. War is a volatile enterprise. Tactics, strategies, and commanders must be sorted out amid death and destruction before the proper combination is found to defeat the enemy. In the meantime, the reasons for going to war, the manner in which the war is fought, and the objectives for which it is waged are constantly being weighed at home against the costs of conducting it. As a result, impatient democracies—and Americans are nothing if not impatient—are liable to suffer alternating fits of unrestrained optimism and utter despair.

This volatility has certainly characterized our current engagement in Iraq, but it has been no less true before. In the early days of the Civil War, a confident North was sure of quick victory in a righteous cause. After the slaughters of 1862 at Shiloh, Antietam, and Frederickburg, the North then fell into collective querulousness and despair. By the summer of 1863, the North was ebullient again as its armies won crushing, near-simultaneous victories at both Gettysburg and Vicksburg. A year later, after the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, and Cold Harbor, Lincoln and all he stood for were reviled. Stalemate or concession seemed imminent—until General Philip Sheridan ran wild in the Shenandoah Valley and William Tecumseh Sherman took Atlanta on September 2, 1864.

Lincoln’s war aims were largely the same in April 1865 as they had been in April 1861. It was not his policies per se that lost, regained, lost, and once more gained public support but rather the perceived progress, or lack thereof, of Union arms. And these mercurial reactions have likewise been the norm in our later history. In World War II, well after the initial gloom of 1939-42 had disappeared with the turnaround in 1943 and 1944, near-shock set in over the horrendous Allied slaughters at the Bulge and Okinawa—only to be set aside within a matter of months when the war ended victoriously.

In the Korean war, to take another example, Seoul changed hands four times. Harry Truman, who had won support for the deployment of American troops in the summer of 1950 and then lost it with the massive Chinese invasion of December, left office in January 1953 with a 22-percent approval rating. But his successor Dwight Eisenhower, without materially changing American strategy or war aims, mustered fresh support for stabilizing the situation once General Matthew Ridgway had succeeded in restoring an autonomous South Korea below the 38th parallel, and in preventing further Communist aggression.

In the first two years of the Vietnam war (1963-65), the struggle was generally deemed to be essential to our national interest and, what is more, winnable. By 1967, however, the war was beginning to be seen as a quagmire; by mid-1968, it had been written off by many as a disaster. Then, five years later, in 1973, it was grudgingly judged to have been settled by the Paris peace accords—before being lost in 1975.

_____________

And Iraq? Three-quarters of Americans favored the initial decision in October 2002 to remove Saddam Hussein. In the wake of our brilliant three-week victory in April 2003 and the initial, relatively quiet months of the postwar occupation, the public maintained its strong support. This remained the case even after it became clear that we had not found arsenals of weapons of mass destruction (WMD), one of the chief reasons offered by the Bush administration for going to war.

By late 2006, however—after the Abu Ghraib scandal, the pullback from Falluja, the withdrawal of some members of the original coalition, and increased internecine violence between Shiites and Sunnis, and in the face of some 3,000 American combat fatalities—only about a third of Americans still thought the war was worth the price or favored its continuation. By late summer 2007, of the 27 Democratic Senators who had voted to authorize hostilities in October 2002, only one, Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut, was still on record as supporting the effort. Former President Bill Clinton, who in 2002 had boasted, “I don’t think it will be a big military problem if we do it,” and who reiterated his support in May 2003, announced last year that he had been against the war “from the beginning.”

But we appear to have entered lately into still another cycle of re-interpretation, clearly the result of a new array of converging developments. Among these, the successful “surge” of U.S. troops, the appointment of General David Petraeus as senior theater commander, and the tactical switch from counter-terrorism to counter-insurgency are no doubt the most salient. These days, although there is no great public elation at our improved prospects, or appreciation that al Qaeda by its own admission is in disarray in Iraq, we see or hear very little of antiwar groups like Code Pink or the Cindy Sheehan brigades, and none of Hollywood’s recent antiwar movies—Lions for Lambs, Redacted, Rendition, Valley of Elah—has made a dent at the box office. At the very least, many Americans seem tired of being told that the United States is the culpable party in the war.
As we see improved chances for an eventual U.S. victory and a stabilized Iraq, it is therefore worth returning to the most controversial issues of the war—not in order to re-fight it, but to gain some perspective on the relationship between battlefield developments and perceptions of the worthiness and achievability of American aims.

_____________

The Bush administration, like Congress in its authorizations of October 2002, advanced many arguments for going into Iraq: Saddam Hussein’s possession of WMD, his links with al Qaeda, his genocidal actions at home and abroad, his harboring of terrorists, his non-stop violations of UN mandates and of the accords struck after the first Gulf war from 1991 onward. Of these, we may begin with the first two, the only ones to become issues mired in acrimony.

Upon their arrival in Iraq, U.S. forces found no arsenals of WMD. Accordingly, when the occupation took a deadly turn, a new slogan emerged: “Bush lied, thousands died.” The United States, in other words, had gotten itself into a hopeless and vastly destructive war over a nonexistent cause. Yet now that things are improving in Iraq, does that verdict hold up or can we look back and see larger considerations at stake?

The case of Libya offers the most compelling reason to view the question afresh. Only upon our invasion of Iraq did we learn about Libya’s own nuclear-weapons programs, the existence and dangerous extent of which had not been previously discovered by our intelligence services. Instead, we learned about them thanks to Muammar Qaddafi’s sudden promise to give them up. Was Qaddafi’s precipitous action the consequence, as diplomats boasted, of a longstanding Western effort to isolate Libya diplomatically and economically, or was it rather the consequence of the recent and unexpected demonstration of victorious American might in Iraq? The timing of the announcement—in December 2003, a week after the much-photographed capture of a haggard and bedraggled Saddam Hussein—suggests the latter.

Nor was this the only coincidence of timing. Take the case of Iran, which, according to the National Intelligence Estimate of 2007, may have halted elements of its own nuclear-weapons program in the fall of 2003. If that is true—the accuracy of the NIE as a whole is highly questionable—we have here another instance of the inhibiting effect of vigorous American action on the nuclear ambitions of rogue states.

This is not to suggest that the Iraq war was fought in order to pressure Libya and Iran into desisting from their quest for WMD. But had we not gone into Iraq, it is all too easy to envision a scenario in which Libya and Iran would now be proceeding to process weapons-grade uranium and we would still be as unsure about Iraq itself as we and the international community had been throughout the 1990’s. And this is to say nothing of a related development in Pakistan—where, at almost the same moment as Saddam’s capture, Dr. A.Q. Khan was abruptly detained and subsequently confessed to having been involved in the covert international proliferation of nuclear-weapons technology to Libya, Iran, and North Korea.

_____________

In this connection, we might also pause to consider another “lesson” of Iraq that only yesterday was thought to have been resolved for all time. In the heyday following the quick removal of the Taliban and preceding the invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration released a National Security Strategy document embracing the doctrine of preemptive war against suspected enemies, especially those with the capability of developing WMD. “We will not wait,” George Bush declared in his March 6, 2003 address to the nation, “to see what terrorists or terrorist states will do.”

But then, after we failed to find WMD in Iraq, and the violence in that country escalated, preemption, too, was added to the growing indictment sheet of the administration’s supposed record of arrogance and incompetence. Does that charge, in light of where we are today, still stand?

Retrospectively, the legitimacy of preemption can be confirmed (if not precisely in the terms its backers expected) by the Libyan announcement, the possible cessation of enrichment in Iran, and the detention of A.Q. Khan. All three are examples of changes in the balance of power that did not require the direct application of preemptive American force but were the results of its preemptive application elsewhere.

Prospectively, as we ponder Iran’s ongoing violations of the international inspection regime and the failure of diplomatic efforts to prevent Tehran from acquiring nuclear weapons, preemption seems to have become once again thinkable, winning to its side such unlikely converts as French President Nicolas Sarkozy and NATO ministers who recently declared their own willingness to embrace preemptive strategies, including nuclear options, against states that threaten NATO members with state-sponsored terror and deadly new weapons. And as for Pakistan, which already has a sizable nuclear arsenal, political figures as diverse as Barack Obama and Mike Huckabee have suggested preemptive incursions in order to find Osama bin Laden and his lieutenants—a proposal scarcely conceivable just two years ago when our “unnecessary preemptive war” in Iraq had allegedly landed us in a quagmire.

_____________

Which brings us back to the second highly controversial reason adduced for the war in Iraq—namely, the existence of links between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. A loose affinity between the two men was widely accepted as canonical in late 2002. In the words of the joint congressional authorization, bin Laden’s operatives were “known to be in Iraq,” and Senator Hillary Clinton confirmed that “intelligence reports show that Saddam Hussein . . . has given aid, comfort, and sanctuary to terrorists, including al-Qaeda members.” Buttressing this assurance were a number of established facts: Saddam’s knowledge of or assistance to the al-Qaeda affiliate Ansar al-Islam in Kurdistan; the presence in Baghdad of Abdul Rahman Yasin, one of the architects of the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center; and the flight to Iraq of one of bin Laden’s followers, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, after the defeat of the Taliban in Afghanistan.

But when intra-Iraq violence increased in 2004-5, and when the 9/11 commission found no evidence of formal cooperation between al Qaeda and Saddam, the “link” was pronounced another fabrication—more proof that our presence in Iraq had nothing to do with defeating the people who had killed thousands of Americans on September 11. Instead, the new narrative had it that, simply by being in Iraq, we had created an army of terrorists who would have otherwise never existed or never have been drawn there.

Today, the issue is being slowly re-framed. True, there may never have been a formal working relationship between Saddam and al Qaeda, but some natural affinity there was. Certainly, once Saddam’s Baathist remnant found itself without an army, it had no difficulty looking to al Qaeda to import one post-haste. Since 2003, al-Qaeda fighters have operated in conjunction with the Saddamist insurgents. Only now, and with the help of former Baathist and Sunni extremists whom we have persuaded to turn against their erstwhile allies, are American soldiers on the verge of inflicting a thorough defeat on al Qaeda in Iraq—a development with major strategic implications for the war against Islamic terrorists and one, moreover, that is taking place, as originally intended, at a safe distance from our own shores.

_____________

Still another point of reexamination relates to the status and image of the U.S. military. If the spectacular three-week victory over Saddam in 2003 led to a kind of temporary triumphalism, the four years of hard fighting, long rotations, and casualties that followed it prompted a deep-seated revisionist pessimism. Our military was said to be worn out, poorly led, and prone to crimes like Abu Ghraib and the Haditha “massacres.” The Pentagon was indicted as having been fatally blindsided by the ingenuity and ferocity of enemy attacks. Enlistments were said to be to be falling below manpower targets, with no end in sight.

Today’s perception is once again different. Thanks to the success of our counter-insurgency tactics and the consequent drop in violence—during 2007, ethnic fighting in Baghdad decreased by over 90 percent—ordinary Americans are beginning to grasp that our military forces, and especially the Army and Marine corps, are within sight of accomplishing a task that is still confidently pronounced impossible by some prominent public figures.

As of December 2007, enlistments in the four services have exceeded manpower goals, and entirely new combat brigades are being created. Our officers and their troops, however weary they may be from repeated tours, are now acknowledged to be the world’s most sophisticated practitioners of counter-insurgency warfare. Their competence is on display not only in Iraq but also in Afghanistan, where American veterans of the Iraq war have proved far more adroit against the Taliban than their unseasoned NATO allies. Like the emergence of Sherman’s Army of the West in the autumn of 1864, which renewed the North’s faith in its military prowess and in the wisdom of Lincoln’s war planners, the Petraeus command in Iraq has prompted a new appreciation of our military’s talents.

What about troop deployments, an issue much agitated among supporters of the war no less than among opponents? If the 2003 lightning strike on Saddam was tendered as confirmation of the efficacy of Donald Rumsfeld’s “revolution in military affairs,” the subsequent bloody occupation was taken as a rebuke not just to the Rumsfeld doctrine, but also to the entire notion of an expeditionary war conducted with a small local footprint. For much of 2004, former generals, antiwar politicians, and some proponents of the war insisted that too few troops had been committed in 2003 and far too few allotted for the subsequent occupation. Initial calls for a corrective surge in 2004, voiced by stalwarts like John McCain, stipulated reinforcements in numbers ranging from 80,000 to 100,000 troops. But by mid-2007 a much smaller compromise figure of 30,000 was reached—the maximum number considered to be politically palatable, sufficient to support a change in tactics, and, given other American military deployments around the globe, just barely doable.

So we have gone from a general feeling in 2003 that 200,000 was the right number to execute our brilliant defeat of Saddam Hussein, to a subsequent consensus that it was veritable insanity to commit a mere 150,000 troops to pacify a country of 26 million, to an acknowledgment that, after four years of fighting, a surge to 160,000 was large enough. The point is hardly to suggest there is no correct answer to the question of numbers or that manpower needs do not change with the pulse of battle, but rather, in the light of today’s good news, to cast doubt on the fiercely held revisionist orthodoxy of 2004-06 that the total size of the needed deployment of American occupiers lay in several hundreds of thousands.

_____________

Finally, there is the future. As early as April 2003, some observers had begun to speak of an unstoppable American juggernaut, which, having already destroyed two extremist regimes in Afghanistan and Iraq, and on the brink of establishing stable reform governments in those countries, could now quickly shift its attention to such other terrorist-sponsoring states as Syria and Iran.

This confidence, dashed by the insurgency and sectarian strife in Iraq, was soon supplanted by a new conventional wisdom. Far from being able to decapitate other enemy nations, it was said, we had further empowered them. Iran in particular, its regional ambitions no longer checked by Saddam, and newly emboldened by perceived American setbacks, was declared the real “winner” of our folly, carving out a rump Shiite state in southern Iraq, boldly exporting jihadists all over the region from Iraq to Lebanon, and on the verge of acquiring the bomb. Syria under Bashar Assad was proceeding methodically to choke Lebanon to death.

Now all this has begun to be rethought once more. By the end of 2007, Moqtada al-Sadr, the chief local surrogate of the Ayatollahs, evidently sensing a change in the local balance of power, had prudently withdrawn from his violent anti-American and anti-Sunni activity. Meanwhile, the Shiite-dominated government in Baghdad was beginning to restore domestic funding to Sunni communities in Anbar province and to be inching toward a more genuinely representative system. Perhaps, it was being whispered, Iraqi Shiites valued their Iraqi and Arab identity over their sectarian Shiite allegiance after all, and might be prepared to resist Iranian encroachments on their sovereignty. Regionally, too, there have been signs, however halting and uncertain, of a growing Arab desire to contain Iran. Could it be that, provided the nuclear threat can be disposed of, the long-running grip of Khomeinism might be better challenged in the landscape of a post-Saddam Iraq?

_____________

So far, none of these gradual reversals of opinion has affected overall judgments of the Bush administration, whose approval ratings, according to most polls, still hover around 35 percent. This continued unpopularity has prompted some among the President’s supporters to compare his tenure with that of Harry Truman, who as we have seen exited office in 1953 with even lower ratings. Only later, with the dramatic turnabout in Korea and the gradual emergence of a successful South Korea, did Truman achieve his lasting reputation as the executor of the cold-war strategy of containment and a hugely consequential President.

Such positive revisionism can take years to develop. Assessments from the battlefield must be digested, partisan distortions rectified, and volatile news cycles balanced by the more measured perspective that comes only with time.

The optimism of 2003, it is good to remember, was itself not just a product of the spectacular removal of Saddam and the Taliban, but a dividend of other successful interventions dating back decades: Grenada, Panama, the first Gulf war, the successful Balkan bombing campaign against Slobodan Milosevic, and the rapid removal of the Taliban from power in Afghanistan. By the turn of the millennium, an almost antiseptic notion of American war-making had been created in the public mind. In turn, the bitterness over Iraq, whose symptoms peaked last year in the attempt by congressional Democrats to force a precipitous withdrawal of American troops, resulted from four years of unrelievedly pessimistic reporting from Iraq—reporting that itself owed much to a media template forged decades earlier in Vietnam. If the success of the surge continues through 2008, and culminates in a stable Iraqi government, we can assume the gradual emergence of a new consensus, and perhaps, with time, even a change in the current low public regard for the administration and its war aims.

It would be folly to think, however, that one can sit by and wait for history to deliver a smiling verdict. Shifting judgments about the causes, conduct, and consequences of America conflicts are indeed the norm in American history. These ongoing swings depend in large part on whether the United States is thought to be winning or losing, and are finally codified only at war’s end or well afterward. But for the cycle to play out, there must be a persistence of spirit and a willingness to see a war through to the end, as well as a bedrock confidence in both the capabilities of America’s armed forces and the righteousness of the American cause.

After our aberrant defeat in Vietnam, we may have collectively forgotten that even successful wars of long duration undergo many incarnations, with accompanying swings of mood that alternately damn and support aims, methods, costs, and benefits. But this is in fact the pattern, and it has once again been discernible in Iraq. The road to defeat lies only in the willful denial of this elementary fact.

Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the author most recently of A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War (Random House).

Anatomy of the Surge

Peter D. Feaver, a new contributor, is the Alexander F. Hehmeyer professor of political science and public policy at Duke University and director of the Triangle Institute for Security Studies. He is a co-author of Getting the Best Out of College, to be published by Ten Speed Press in June.

Over the past sixteen months, the United States has altered its trajectory in Iraq. We are no longer headed toward a catastrophic defeat and may be on the path to a remarkable victory. As a result, the next President, Democrat or Republican, may well find it easier to adopt the broad contours of this administration’s current strategy than to jeopardize progress by changing course abruptly.

That would be an ironic, but satisfying, outcome to the tortuous journey on which the Bush administration’s policy toward Iraq, and this nation’s views of Iraq, have been traveling over the past three years.

The administration’s description of the long-term American goal—a democratic Iraq that can defend itself, govern itself, and sustain itself, and will be an ally in the war on terror—has remained consistent from the time the war was launched in 2003 until now. What has shifted, due to sobering experience, is its sense of how long it might take to achieve this goal: a time frame that has stretched from months, to years, and even to decades.

I witnessed the shift first-hand. For two years, from June 2005 to July 2007, I left my teaching position at Duke to join the National Security Council staff as a special adviser for strategic planning, and in that capacity I worked closely on Iraq policy. By the middle of 2005, it was painfully obvious to everyone involved that the only decisive outcome that could be achieved during President Bush’s tenure was the triumph of our enemies, America’s withdrawal, and Iraq’s descent into a hellish chaos as yet undreamed of.

The challenge, therefore, was to develop and implement a workable strategy that could be handed over to Bush’s successor. Although important progress could be made on that strategy during Bush’s watch, ultimately it would be carried through by the next President. This was the reality behind the course followed by the administration in 2005-2006, and it remains the reality behind the new and different course the administration has been following since 2007.

This new and different strategy, now called the “surge” but at one point called by insiders the “bridge,” emerged out of a growing recognition over 2006 that our critics were right about one thing: our Iraq policy was not working. At the same time, however, and whether knowingly or ignorantly, many of those same critics were insisting that the answer lay in pursuing precisely the same strategy we already had in place. That is, they were telling us that we needed (a) to push Iraqi government officials to come together politically and (b) to train Iraqi troops so that they could take over from American forces. We had been doing exactly these things for a year, and we had been driven to the brink.

This was no solution at all. The results on the ground in Iraq made it clear that, without a dramatic change, the President would be leaving his successor with an untenable mess, if not the prospect of a catastrophic American rout. A review of administration policy was therefore launched that led to the dramatic course revision we have seen unfolding over the past year-and-a-half.

This month, the military leader of the surge, General David Petraeus, and America’s chief diplomat in Iraq, Ambassador Ryan Crocker, will present their second report to Congress on the surge and its effects. Prudent and circumspect men, they will surely not advance bold claims on behalf of the policy the United States has been following under their leadership. But I expect they will speak more optimistically about the future than many thought possible eighteen months ago. Their testimony will demonstrate that, at last, the United States has a sustainable strategy for Iraq with a reasonable chance of success, and one that George W. Bush will be able to turn over with confidence to the next incumbent of the White House.

How we got here is a story in itself.

_____________

In the summer of 2005, General George Casey, the theater commander in Iraq, was pressing a military campaign whose primary goal was the training and maturing of Iraqi security forces. At the same time, Iraqis had designed a national constitution that would be the subject of a countrywide referendum in October, to be followed (assuming the constitution’s ratification) by national elections in December.

Here at home, administration policy was inundated by criticisms on every front. Much of it was reckless, but not all of it. From “skeptical supporters” of the war like Senator John McCain and the military analyst Fred Kagan came the charge that the number of American “boots on the ground” was far from sufficient to accomplish the mission. Although our military commanders in Iraq kept assuring the White House that this was not the case, the criticism flitted like Banquo’s ghost in the background of every internal discussion about the war.

Some Democrats in the “loyal opposition”—i.e., those who were not simply advocating an irresponsible strategy of defeat and withdrawal—made the same point, but more often they took a different tack. Charging that the administration had no strategy beyond “staying the course,” they proposed instead that the United States pressure the Iraqis to bring the sullen and disaffected Sunni minority into the political sphere. This would siphon support from the insurgency. In addition, the Pentagon needed to accelerate the training of Iraqi security forces to handle more of the load against the enemies of the new Iraq. And the State Department had to lean on Iraq’s neighbors to do more to help.

This counsel seemed maddeningly sensible to us. It was, to the letter, the administration’s strategy at that very moment. Still, exasperating though it may have been to be told that we should do what we were actually doing, this line of criticism also seemed to contain potentially good news. Perhaps, we thought, we could find common ground with these Democratic critics—their number included Senators Hillary Clinton, Joseph Biden, and Carl Levin—and forge a consensus on how to move forward.

That was the background to a decision in the fall of 2005 to release an unclassified version of General Casey’s campaign plan, along with a document explaining how all elements of American power were being mobilized to assist in its realization. The full document was called the National Strategy for Supporting Iraq, the name of which changed somewhere along the way to the National Strategy for Victory in Iraq (NSVI). There was nothing new here. The release of the NSVI, bolstered by a series of frank presidential addresses, was simply an attempt to make public a number of details about our approach and offer a reasonable response to our reasonable critics.

The effort was doomed. It was overtaken by political events or, rather, by one specific event: a press conference, on November 17, 2005, by John Murtha, a Democratic congressman from Pennsylvania.

Murtha was a veteran of the Vietnam war and a hawk on defense spending—someone generally thought to be at home with the old “Scoop” Jackson wing of the Democratic party. When it came to Iraq, he turned out to be something else. “Our military has accomplished its mission and done its duty,” Murtha summarily declared at his press conference, and now it was time to bring the troops home—as soon as possible, but no later than in six months.

Murtha was not calling for a gradual transition to Iraqi control. To the contrary, he was advocating the wholesale abandonment of Iraq. As he well knew, moreover, six months would be the fastest possible withdrawal under the most optimistic timetable, with our forces working 24 hours a day, seven days a week, to pull out all of the equipment and materiel we had brought in over the previous three years. This was not a brief for haste but rather a recipe for panic.

Unlike those critics who lambasted our policy and then commended it to our attention, Murtha was presenting an unambiguous alternative. The left wing of the Democratic party and its supporters in Moveon.org had finally found a spokesman with credentials on national security to make the most extreme case for the war’s end.

The media lauded the Murtha plan, but they did not examine it closely. I spent hours with reporters in a futile effort to persuade them to show Murtha the respect of subjecting his scheme—including his bizarre notion of redeploying troops 5,000 miles away on the island of Okinawa in the Sea of Japan—to the same level of scrutiny they lavished upon administration policy. One key reporter told me, “We don’t scrutinize Murtha’s plan because none of us takes it seriously.”

Inside the White House, we joked bitterly that the only way we could get people to see the flaws in Murtha’s proposal would be to offer it as our own.

_____________

In the end, however, even if we had managed to secure some kind of bipartisan support for our strategy, it would have made little difference. Over the course of 2006, the National Strategy for Victory in Iraq collapsed.

We had assumed that steady political movement would drain Sunni support for the insurgency by giving Sunnis a stake in the new Iraq—and that such political progress could be completed before the safety of the Iraqi population had been secured. Alas, the stunningly successful constitutional referendum of October 2005 and the national election two months later were followed by a dreadful stalemate. It took Sunnis nearly six weeks to acknowledge that the vote had been free and fair, and then squabbling within the Shiite community paralyzed its politicians in turn. Month after month, the nascent Iraqi political class found itself unable to form and seat a government. Almost a half-year of political momentum was forgone.

No less worrisome was the discovery that the Iraqi security forces were not yet in any condition to shoulder an increasing portion of the burden—to “stand up” so that coalition forces could “stand down.” At the same time, the security challenge became far grimmer. In February, al-Qaeda terrorists blew up the Golden Dome mosque in Samarra, one of the holiest Shiite shrines in Iraq. Shiite militia groups responded just as the terrorists had hoped, launching retaliatory strikes against Sunni citizens. A bloody pattern—sectarian atrocity, sectarian reprisal, sectarian counter-reprisal—took hold. Each week, attack levels reached new heights. Since even the vastly more capable U.S. forces seemed unable to tamp down the violence, there was no chance that fledgling Iraqi security forces might do so any time soon.

With the situation deteriorating throughout the spring, the administration might have begun the full-fledged reconsideration of the National Strategy for Victory that it would conduct later in the year. But suddenly the existing strategy appeared to receive a boost. After months of wrangling, the Iraqis finally installed a unity government under the leadership of the little-known Nouri al-Maliki. And U.S. special forces killed Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the charismatic leader of al Qaeda in Iraq and the mastermind behind its strategy of fomenting civil war between Sunnis and Shiites. Hope rekindled that the chaos could be brought under control.

But the boost proved illusory. General Casey launched a new effort to regain control of the capital, but within weeks it foundered when several of the Iraqi units on which it depended simply failed to show up for the fight. A revised version of the Casey plan likewise came a cropper when the new Maliki government interfered with efforts to go after rogue Shiite militias that were now rivaling al Qaeda in Iraq in wreaking havoc.

Over the summer, doubts began to grow among White House officials working on Iraq; by September the NSC staff initiated a quiet but thorough review of strategy with an eye to developing a new way forward. The review, which soon expanded beyond the confines of the National Security Council, became a matter of public knowledge after Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s departure in November, the day after the landslide Democratic victory in the midterm elections. The election underscored the fact that, at a minimum, the administration would have to reposition the Iraq mission in the minds of the American people. Our review confirmed that it would take more than a change of face to rescue the possibility of victory—it would take an entirely new strategy.

The idea was for our proposed change in course to be completed in time to take advantage of the release of another document. This was the much-awaited report of the Iraq Study Group, a bipartisan commission co-chaired by former Secretary of State James Baker and former Congressman Lee Hamilton. Inside the White House, we hoped that the report’s recommendations would be palatable enough to blend with whatever new approach the President decided to adopt. The long-sought holy grail—a bipartisan consensus on the way forward in Iraq—seemed again within reach.

_____________

It was not to be. While sharply criticizing the lack of progress thus far, the Baker-Hamilton commission essentially recommended back to us an accelerated version of the strategy envisioned by the NSVI: stand them up so we can stand down. While there was still some support inside the administration for continuing on that path, the interagency team on which I served was of a different mind. The situation in Iraq had eroded beyond the point envisioned by the Baker-Hamilton report; under the horrific conditions now at play, we concluded, Iraq’s security forces were far more likely to crack under the strain than to “stand up.” And those forces were the essential glue of a stable, unified future. If they went the way of Humpty Dumpty, neither they nor the new Iraq could ever be put back together again.

The Baker-Hamilton report did offer theoretical support for a short-term surge of military forces—something the President and the interagency team were also looking at very closely—but this was mentioned only in a brief passage and was far from the document’s central thrust. The White House never succeeded in shifting the conventional wisdom in Washington that Baker-Hamilton provided an alternative to current policy. Nor, unfortunately, were we ready with our own genuine alternative when the Baker-Hamilton report was released on December 6, 2006. That put paid to the idea that we could use the occasion as a means of securing bipartisan support for a new approach. By the time the President announced the surge in January, the climate had turned frostier still.

By then, the leadership of the newly triumphant Democrats on Capitol Hill had already determined that the war was irretrievably lost and that the only responsible course was to get out as quickly as possible. Signaling the emphasis the Democrats meant to place on ending our involvement in Iraq quickly, Nancy Pelosi, the new speaker of the House, sought to make Jack Murtha her principal deputy.

As for the President’s new strategy, the Democrats labeled it “an escalation”—no doubt because polls and focus groups showed that this would make it seem least palatable to the American public. The administration countered with the proposition that we were sending “reinforcements.” The media settled on “surge.” Each of these labels had the unfortunate side-effect of obscuring the many other changes contained in the new strategy and focusing attention exclusively on the increase in military troops—certainly the gutsiest element in terms of our domestic politics but by no means the only important one.

Week after week, the Democrats attempted to use their control of Congress to suffocate the surge in its cradle. Various proposals were advanced to hobble General Petraeus and render implementation impossible. In April, just as the 30,000 new surge troops were entering the country, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid declared peremptorily: “This war is lost, and this surge is not accomplishing anything.”

Reid was wrong. While the political standoff in Washington worsened, the situation in Iraq began to improve. Not right away or all at once, of course. In fact, to judge by the measures of greatest salience to the American media, the situation only eroded in the first half of 2007. Attacks rose in number, as did American fatalities. But Petraeus was steadily refining and adapting the new strategy, and his efforts became especially productive after the full complement of new forces was on the ground and the “surge in operations” could begin in earnest by the beginning of June.

By September 2007, when Petraeus and Crocker gave their first report to Congress, the trend line toward success was discernible. Still, the matter remained debatable—to the point where Senator Clinton felt confident enough to inform Petraeus and Crocker on national television that “the reports you provided to us require the willing suspension of disbelief” and to characterize the two men as “the de-facto spokesmen of what many of us consider to be a failed policy.”

A few months after that showdown, however, the progress was all but indisputable. By now, indeed, we can see that the surge has bought precious time for the United States and the nascent Iraqi state to progress meaningfully toward five specific objectives.

First is extirpating the inciters of sectarian violence: al Qaeda in Iraq among the Sunnis and the rogue militias among the Shiites. Second is building up a larger, more capable, and more integrated Iraqi Security Force than existed in 2006.

At the same time, Iraqis are being given the opportunity to create the means of political accommodation locally and from the “bottom up,” in ways that reflect the realities of life inside the highly complex mosaic of their country. The achievement of this third goal is the precursor to the fourth, which is to make the central, “top down” government in Baghdad more responsive to the nation’s eighteen provinces by opening its pocketbook for projects that will improve the economic and living conditions of the country’s citizenry at large.

The final goal is, perhaps, the trickiest: pushing Iraqi politicians to pass legislation on a number of important measures, including the sharing of oil revenues, the funding of infrastructure projects, the reform of de-Baathification laws, and the like. These are the notorious “benchmarks” mentioned by the President in his January 2007 speech and subjected to much derision by skeptics.

A year after Bush first announced the new strategy, progress on the first three objectives has exceeded everyone’s expectations, even those who helped design the surge. Al Qaeda in Iraq has been gravely wounded. The rogue elements within the Shiite militias are being pruned away. The Iraq Security Force is growing in size and reliability. And, following the decision of Sunni tribes to turn on al Qaeda and throw in their lot with the United States and the new Iraq, local political accommodation is proceeding at a remarkable pace.

There has also been some movement toward linking the Iraqi parliament’s spending to the needs of localities, but so far this is less impressive. As for the benchmarks on political reconciliation from the top down, it is useful to recall that we once thought such political change should precede everything else. That approach did not work. Our new strategy was based on the contrary assumption that security came first, and that parliamentary progress would lag significantly behind other elements. Of course, this has hardly prevented the President’s critics from seizing on the failure of the Iraqi government to have completed all of it benchmarks as putative evidence of the surge’s overall failure. Even here, however, there has been a measure of progress on the ground: in February, for example, the Iraqi parliament passed legislation addressing several key benchmarks, notably including deBaathification reform and the facilitation of provincial elections as well as of better relations between the provinces and the central government.

_____________

The Petraeus-Crocker report to Congress will no doubt offer further evidence that the new approach is working but is far from having completed its assigned task. No fair-minded observer could conclude otherwise. Petraeus has already indicated that the central military element of the surge—the increase of 30,000 troops—will end by summer 2008. At that point, U.S. forces in Iraq are set to decline to pre-surge levels, roughly 130,000. The question Petraeus will now have to answer is: how long will troop levels need to stay there, and when can they start moving down?

What Petraeus must have uppermost in his mind is the record compiled by his predecessors in trying to produce results with just enough troops to come close but not enough to succeed. A premature drawdown would, by definition, cause the forfeiture of his hard-won gains. And the political reality is that once those troops left Iraq, they would not be coming back.

In a slide presentation that accompanied his September 2007 testimony to Congress, Petraeus gave a picture of what he considered an appropriate drawdown. In his reckoning, after remaining at 130,000 for some time, American troops could decline in number to approximately 115,000, then by slow and measured steps to around 100,000, then perhaps to 85,000, and so onward. The closer the troop levels came to 100,000 (or fewer) the more manageable the deployment would be militarily. At those levels, our ground forces would be able to return to a peacetime rotation schedule, which would put far less strain on the all-volunteer force.

In other words, a substantial American presence in Iraq is sustainable militarily over the long term. The great unknown is whether such a commitment would be sustainable politically here at home.

The evidence of the past sixteen months is that the American people are likely to support, or at least tolerate, a reduction in American numbers gradual enough to preserve the gains of the surge. A President McCain, for example, would probably have no trouble taking advantage of this sustainable strategy and bringing our mission in Iraq to the most successful end achievable.

What of a President Barack Obama or a President Hillary Clinton? If one were to attempt an answer to this question from the two candidates’ words and conduct during the long primary season, one would have reason to conclude that both, in promising a rapid “end” to the war with an equally rapid withdrawal of American forces, are bound and determined to snatch defeat from the jaws of at least partial victory.

But it is not impossible to imagine that these vital matters would appear differently to a Democratic President considering Iraq’s and America’s future from a seat at the desk in the Oval Office rather than from the stage of a college gymnasium filled with delirious Democratic primary voters. One might even permit oneself to hope that, while continuing to speak derogatorily of George Bush’s years as the shepherd of our Iraq policy, such a President would come to know, privately and in time, that he or she had been bequeathed something very different from a fiasco: the promise of a better outcome for Iraq, for the Middle East, and for the American people.

60 Minutes: Bill James

Reds Honor Nuxhall

Members of Cincinnati Reds line up wearing jerseys bearing the name and number of former player and long time Reds radio broadcaster Joe Nuxhall before the start of their game with Arizona Diamondbacks in their opening day MLB National League baseball game at Great American Ball Park in Cincinnati, Ohio, March 31, 2008. Nuxhall passed away during the off season.

Opening Day 2008

Flip through spring training

Enquirer photographer Jeff Swinger compiled nearly 2,700 photographs into this special online presentation.
Interactive: Nine innings with the Reds

The Reds begin the 2008 season with several questions. Take a look at some of the most pressing ones in this interactive graphic.
'The Kid'

Even though there's a 22-year-old pitcher in the Reds' starting rotation, and a 20-year-old center fielder-in-waiting in Louisville, 26-year-old Brandon Phillips is still this club's "Kid."
Young once himself

New Reds manager Dusty Baker was playing in the big leagues by the age of 19. He calls on that experience when dealing with his young players.
A minute with Mr. Redlegs

He's the senior mascot of America's oldest professional baseball team. But how well do you really know Mr. Redlegs?
First pitch

How to get there? Where to watch? Where to park? Here's everything you need to know about Opening Day 2008.



Joe Nuxhall Book

Old School Exhibition: Red Sox vs Dodgers

The baseball diamond at the Los Angeles Coliseum is being prepared for the Los Angeles Dodgers exhibition baseball game against the Boston Red Sox Saturday. The Dodgers are celebrating the 50th anniversary of their move to Los Angeles.

The Dodgers said Friday that the full allotment of 115,300 tickets—with all the proceeds going to ThinkCure, the Dodgers’ official charity—have been sold, including about 25,000 for standing-room only behind the lower fence in right and center fields. Two big-screen TVs will make it possible to watch the action.

Baseball’s current world record is an estimated 114,000 for an exhibition game between the Australian national team and an American services team during the Olympic Games in Melbourne, Australia, in 1956.

Old-school exhibition

March 29, 2008

Ode To A Burrito

"Chipotle Mexican Grill is the Bono of the fast-food business."

The ingredients that make Chipotle the hottest fast-food chain on the planet.

Chipotle Mexican Grill is the Bono of the fast-food business. Hardheaded financial analysts love it; do-gooders do too. "Chipotle has done a wonderful job of meeting people's sociological need to eat food that's healthy for the planet," says Dean Haskell, a senior VP at equity researcher Morgan Joseph. Bernard Rollin, a distinguished professor of animal sciences at Colorado State University, gushes about Chipotle's focus on hormone- and antibiotic-free meat that is humanely raised. Then he adds, "Have you eaten there? It's really good."

Good food wrapped in a socially responsible message has created legions of Chipotle fans -- and a superhot business. Acquired by McDonald's in 1998 when there were only 14 Chipotles, the company went public in 2006 with 500 stores and watched its stock rise from $22 to $110 in 18 months. The now-independent outfit is enjoying an 80% revenue run-up over three years, and by year's end, it will have 840 stores and top $1 billion in annual sales.

A rough day

Handing out the hardware before the season starts

How Apple Got Everything Right By Doing Everything Wrong

RC Sproul interviews Ben Stein

About six weeks ago, Mr. Ben Stein joined Dr. R.C. Sproul for a delightful and stimulating conversation about the current state of free scientific inquiry in academia. We have posted the video below.

Many of you may recognize Mr. Stein as the teacher in the 1986 film, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, but he is also a writer, public speaker, and political activist. Recently, he became deeply involved in a film project that challenges the neo-Darwinian scientific community and exposes their hostility to intelligent design and all those who believe in it. The producers of Renewing Your Mind caught up with Mr. Stein during a preview of his new film entitled Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. The movie opens nationwide April 18. (In this reviewer's opinion, the Stein/Dawkins face off at the end of the film is worth the price of admission.)

More free Tim Keller Sermon Downloads

Redeemer Core Values Sermons related to the Gospel, Changed People, City, Community, Movement, Serving, and Renewing.

The Reason for God Listen to sermons from the series "The Trouble with Christianity: Why It's so Hard to Believe it" and "The Vision of Redeemer"

Parenting Talks about parenting including "It Takes a City to Raise a Child" by Dr. Keller.

Stewardship Sermons on money, generosity and stewardship.

Suffering and Tragedy Listen to the Sunday service immediately following September 11th as well as other sermons related to tragedy.

Q&A Excerpts from Pastor Tim Keller's Question and Answer sessions.

CBS Exposes Hillary Bosnia Trip

The Democrats' Super Disaster

The Pursuit: Every Man's Call to Biblical Masculinity

Be watchful, stand firm in the faith, act like men, be strong. 1 Corinthians 16:13

Paul the apostle called on the men of the early church to turn from sliding through life and instead to act like men. CBMW is issuing the same call to all men in the church today.

In the face of a culture that is unclear about the nature of manhood, actively attempting to feminize manhood, and increasingly denying the very existence of manhood, CBMW's mission is to set forth a biblical vision of vibrant, strong, wise, tender, gutsy manhood.

Sovereign Grace Church of Gilbert, Arizona shares this vision and recently hosted a conference entitled The Pursuit: Every Man's Call to Biblical Masculinity. This week, Gender Blog will be posting two sessions from that conference each day. Each post will provide a written summary of each session and an MP3 audio file to download.

Every Man's Call To Biblical Masculinity, Day 1
Every Man's Call To Biblical Masculinity, Day 2
Every Man's Call To Biblical Masculinity, Day 3
Every Man's Call To Biblical Masculinity, Day 4
Every Man's Call To Biblical Masculinity, Day 5

Tim Keller essays and sermons

A New Kind of Urban Christian As the city goes, so goes the culture.
Moralism Vs, Christ-Centered Exposition
The Gospel Into the 21st Century:
Part I; Part II, Part III; Part IV
Tim Keller's Q&A Sessions (Audio)
All of Life is Repentance (.pdf)
Biblical Mandate for Mercy Ministries
A Biblical Theology of the City
The Centrality of the Gospel
Christ and the City
Church Planting & Giving Portfolios
The Current State of Affairs in America
Deconstructing Defeater Beliefs
Evangelism Through Networking
Evangelistic Worship
Gnostics & Jesus
How Can I know God?
Ministry in the New Global Culture of Major City-Centers Part I
Ministry in the New Global Culture of Major City-Centers Part II
Ministry in the New Global Culture of Major City-Centers Part III
Ministry in the New Global Culture of Major City-Centers Part IV
The Missional Church
Planting a Church in the City
Post-Everythings
Preaching Hell in a Tolerant Age
Preaching Morality in an Amoral Age
Preaching in a Post-Modern City
Part I, Part II
Questions on Everyone's Mind
Religionless Spirituality
What Does it Mean to KNow God?
Why Plant Churches?
Tim Keller's Q&A Sessions The Smart Shepherd By Lisa Miller | NEWSWEEK


Reader's Guide
A terrific guide written by Penguin for book clubs and similar discussions. Download

Exclusivity: How can there be just one true religion?	1 John 4:1-10	Download	Study Guide
Suffering: If God is good, why is there so much evil in the world?	1 Peter 1:3-12	Download	Study Guide
Absolutism: Don't we all have to find truth for ourselves?	Galatians 2:4-16	Download	Study Guide
Injustice: Hasn't Christianity been an instrument for oppression?	James 2:1-17	Download	Study Guide
Hell: Isn't the God of Christianity an angry Judge?	Luke 16:19-31	Download	Study Guide
Doubt: What should I do with my doubts? (AM)	John 20:1-18	Download	Study Guide
Literalism: Isn't the Bible historically unreliable and regressive? (AM)	Luke 1:1-4; 24:13-32	Download	Study Guide

Authors@Google: Tim Keller

Talking About Idolatry in a Postmodern Age, by Tim Keller

Like a Song: U2

This is a series of personal essays by the @U2 staff about songs and/or albums that have had great meaning or impact in our lives. The series will be called "Like A Song," and we aim to continue the series on a monthly basis.

Like a Song: Where The Streets Have No Name
Like a Song: MLK
Like a Song: Elevation
Like a Song: Sometimes You Can't Make It On Your Own
Like a Song: Summer Rain
Like a Song: Mercy
Like a Song: All I Want Is You
Like a Song: Ultraviolet (Light My Way)
Like a Song: Miracle Drug
Like a Song: The Fly
Like a Song: Electrical Storm
Like a Song: Walk On
Like a Song: Bullet the Blue Sky
Like a Song: Bad
Like a Song: Sunday Bloody Sunday
Like a Song: Surrender
Like A Song: Pop Goes My World

Baseball Analysts 2008 NL Central Preview

AL Central
AL West
NL West

...Marc: It's a battle between Cincinnati and Milwaukee for the second best starting rotation in the division. Milwaukee has more experience and a little better depth, but Cincinnati has a higher upside with Homer Bailey, Johnny Cueto and Edinson Volquez. Last season Milwaukee's pitchers allowed 4.79 runs per game (R/G) and Cincinnati's allowed 5.27 R/G in a tough park to pitch in. My feeling is that Gallardo and Parra are closer to taking their games to the next step than Bailey and Volquez.

...Sully: Cincinatti's an interesting team with a stud hitter in Adam Dunn and one of the very best starting pitchers in the game in Aaron Harang. They also boast a number of enticing youngsters. Let's start on the run prevention side. Marc, you have touched on them already but let's talk about the Reds a bit more.

Marc: Every time I get really excited about the Reds' potential, I remember one thing: Dusty Baker. He's not a bad manager but I can't stress enough how wrong he is for this team.

There isn't a starting pitcher in the central that I like more than Harang. He is a workhorse who knows how to get batters out and survives being a flyball pitcher in Cincinnati. Interestingly, half of the flyballs put into the air against Harang are hit to centerfield – the deepest part of the park. For me, Bronson Arroyo is an OK second fiddle. Ideally, he's a No. 3 starter but he's better than his 2007 record of 9-15 indicates.

The additions of Josh Fogg and Jeremy Affeldt are not going to help Cincinnati trim the 5.27 runs allowed per game, especially if they're in the rotation. Fogg's ERA+ has never surpassed 97. I also think Cincinnati is going to rue the day they gave Josh Hamilton away for Volquez… he's just so darn inconsistent. He's turning 25 this year and hasn't proven anything. Cueto… I don't know what to expect from him this year. He's looked good in the spring and could be ready sooner than I – or anyone, really – anticipated.

Early I said I wasn't a fan of the Cordero signing, but he is the best closer in the division – at least until Marmol establishes himself. David Weathers has been good but he's 38 now and shouldn't be relied on as a set-up guy. But the other guys behind him are going to give up a lot of runs.

Al: It's hard to prevent runs when your ballpark is a launching pad. Harang tries really hard, and was one of the best pitchers in the NL last year. But the Reds staff allowed the second-most HR in the NL in 2007. That's not likely to change under the "aggressive" management style of Dusty Baker.

Cincinnati defense could be good -- or it could be injured much of the year, which it was in the second half of 2007.

Sully: This is an offense, where, if each player played his very best for one season together, it would be remarkable. There is nobody bad per se at any position but injuries loom large and questions surround players like Jeff Keppinger, Brandon Phillips and Edwin Encarnacion. These guys might be very good. They might not be.

Al: Prediction: Adam Dunn, who has never walked fewer than 100 times in a season (in a full year) in his career, will draw 80 or fewer in 2008, as Dusty Baker's managing style has him up there being hackalicious. I'll also be interested in seeing what Corey Patterson, who was either helped or hurt by Baker with the Cubs (depending on what story you're believing this week), does as the starting CF in Cincinnati.

The Reds finished 7th in the NL in runs scored in 2007. They will rank lower in 2008. They ranked 6th in the NL in walks in 2007. They will rank lower in 2008.

Marc: I like Cincinnati's offence, but I'd like it better if they'd trust starting jobs to Joey Votto and Jay Bruce… and I don't think that is going to happen in April. Phillips is good… but his numbers are probably going to slip from last year's. Encarnacion should be better this year, which will pick up the slack. If you take out April and June, he had a very nice season and more consistency will come with age and experience.

An outfield of Ken Griffey, Dunn and Bruce (ed note: Bruce has since been sent down) will generate a lot of runs, and I like Corey Patterson as the fourth outfielder – but not the starter in center. Yeah, Dunn scrapes .250 but he has hit at least 40 homers the last four seasons and he has walked at least 100 times five out of the last six seasons. He has also averaged 100 runs scored and 100 runs driven in over the last four years. Griffey is a nice complimentary player in the outfield, but he is definitely no longer a star, even if he remains healthy. He has posted OPS+ of 99 and 119 the last two years. Patterson has only posted an OPS+ over 100 once in his career and that was in 2003.

...

Sully: Predictions, guys?

Marc: I'll go out on a limb and be a little controversial and say: Chicago | Milwaukee | Cincinnati | Pittsburgh | Houston | St. Louis

Al:
Cubs
Brewers
Reds
Pirates
Astros
Cardinals

Sully: I like the same order as you guys but I will flip Milwaukee and Chicago. Weeks goes nuts this season. Thanks, Al, for contributing. It was fun.

The 11 recorded post-resurrection appearances of Jesus in the NT

Did Jesus Spend Saturday in Hell?

Mr. Constitution: Clarence Thomas

Terry Shoffner

A Thinking Man's Speech

Is sin dead?

An attack on Tupac Shakur launched a hip-hop war

Help Wanted: Why can't the president fill two top terror jobs?

The homeland security job is not the only key counterterrorism post the Bush administration is having trouble filling. As NEWSWEEK reported earlier this month, White House officials have spent months searching for a new candidate to head the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC). The previous chief, retired Vice Adm. John Scott Redd, left for health reasons last October. Several highly experienced candidates have turned down invitations to become NCTC director. The center's widely praised acting chief, Michael Leiter, a former federal prosecutor and Navy pilot, is soon expected to be named NCTC's permanent director, though his nomination—which is subject to Senate confirmation—has not yet been officially announced.

Saddam's Dangerous Friends - al Qaeda

Among the study's other notable findings:

In 1993, as Osama bin Laden's fighters battled Americans in Somalia, Saddam Hussein personally ordered the formation of an Iraqi terrorist group to join the battle there.

For more than two decades, the Iraqi regime trained non-Iraqi jihadists in training camps throughout Iraq.

According to a 1993 internal Iraqi intelligence memo, the regime was supporting a secret Islamic Palestinian organization dedicated to "armed jihad against the Americans and Western interests."

In the 1990s, Iraq's military intelligence directorate trained and equipped "Sudanese fighters."

In 1998, the Iraqi regime offered "financial and moral support" to a new group of jihadists in Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq.

In 2002, the year before the war began, the Iraqi regime hosted in Iraq a series of 13 conferences for non-Iraqi jihadist groups.

That same year, a branch of the Iraqi Intelligence Service (IIS) issued hundreds of Iraqi passports for known terrorists.

There is much, much more. Documents reveal that the regime stockpiled bombmaking materials in Iraqi embassies around the world and targeted Western journalists for assassination. In July 2001, an Iraqi Intelligence agent described an al Qaeda affiliate in Bahrain, the Army of Muhammad, as "under the wings of bin Laden." Although the organization "is an offshoot of bin Laden," the fact that it has a different name "can be a way of camouflaging the organization." The agent is told to deal with the al Qaeda group according to "priorities previously established."

The full report, released Thursday night, states, for example, on page 42: "Saddam supported groups that either associated directly with al Qaeda (such as the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, led at one time by bin Laden's deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri) or that generally shared al Qaeda's stated goals and objectives." In fact, as Stephen F. Hayes reports in this issue, the study outlines a startling range of connections between Saddam and various organizations associated with al Qaeda and other terror groups.

You'll see, in the words of the authors, "strong evidence that links the regime of Saddam Hussein to regional and global terrorism." And, from the report's conclusion:

The rise of Islamist fundamentalism in the region gave Saddam the opportunity to make terrorism, one of the few tools remaining in Saddam's "coercion" toolbox, not only cost effective but a formal instrument of state power. Saddam nurtured this capability with an infrastructure supporting (1) his own particular brand of state terrorism against internal and external threats, (2) the state sponsorship of suicide operations, and (3) organizational relationships and "outreach programs" for terrorist groups. Evidence that was uncovered and analyzed attests to the existence of a terrorist capability and a willingness to use it until the day Saddam was forced to flee Baghdad by Coalition forces.

The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism

Tim Keller video - "Belief in an age of skepticism" from UC Berkeley's Veritas Forum and Stanford

He spoke at Stanford the following night and the video of his presentation and q & a are also online:

lecture - http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5014748779594984190&hl=en

q&a - http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6379760306431796019&hl=en

Sexual Sin and the Wider, Deeper Battles, by David Powlison

Jim Cramer On Spitzer

Still batting around those 'Abstract' ideas

Clinton's Exaggerated Foreign Policy Experience

When your entire campaign is based upon a claim of experience, it is important that you have evidence to support that claim. Hillary Clinton's argument that she has passed "the Commander- in-Chief test" is simply not supported by her record.

...When asked to describe her experience, Senator Clinton has cited a handful of international incidents where she says she played a central role. But any fair-minded and objective judge of these claims - i.e., by someone not affiliated with the Clinton campaign - would conclude that Senator Clinton's claims of foreign policy experience are exaggerated.

Hillary's 3am Call, SNL's take

Evangelism in a Post-Modern World, by Tim Keller

Newsweek: For the Record

"Antiterror Help Wanted" (PERISCOPE, March 3) is correct in noting the National Counterterrorism Center as a "bright spot" in intelligence reform but wrong in two other respects. Let me set the record straight. First, I believe we are strategically safer as a result of having gone into Iraq. As I have consistently stated in congressional testimony and interviews, a major reason for our not being attacked since 9/11 has been our strategy of taking the war to the terrorists. That assessment clearly includes Iraq, which Al Qaeda considers a critical battleground. This security has not come without a price. My comment in the 10-second TV sound bite (lifted out of a 40-minute interview) that we were probably not "tactically" safer referred to the loss of life of the courageous members of our military due to Al Qaeda's action on the Iraqi battlefield. Second, the backhanded implication that I was forced to resign is pure poppycock. I left because I had to have total knee-replacement surgery on both knees, period. That decision was discussed with the White House and director of National Intelligence well before the airing of the interview. I left NCTC confident that a strong team with a strong leader in Mike Leiter was in place. The day-to-day performance of NCTC—and, indeed, the entire counterterrorism community—in keeping the country safe for more than six years is the story you should focus on.
Scott Redd, Vice Admiral, U.S. Navy (Ret.)
Former Director, NCTC
Washington, D.C.

One for Freedom - John Ondrasik, Five For Fighting

One for Freedom
Meet a popular musician who says he supports the troops — and means it

JOHN J. MILLER

On the night of February 9, more than a thousand people gathered in tuxes and dresses at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library to pay tribute to Medal of Honor recipients. Forty-three of the 107 living medalists were in attendance, along with assorted dignitaries. The program began when John Ondrasik, a one-man act who goes by the improbable stage name of “Five for Fighting,” sat before a piano and sang about war and patriotism. When he was done, Ondrasik briefly addressed the crowd. “That song, ‘Freedom Never Cries,’ hopefully demonstrates the theme for this evening, which is that freedom isn’t free. But I don’t need to tell you that.”

No, he didn’t. Not to that crowd of heroes and their admirers. But in recent years, Ondrasik has conveyed this message to a broader public that surely can benefit from hearing it. Whereas many celebrities attack the president and bash the war with a relentless and numbing predictability, Ondrasik, the author of hits such as “Superman (It’s Not Easy)” and “100 Years,” stands apart as a popular artist who supports the troops and their cause through his music and actions. And he is without a doubt the only rock star ever to write a song inspired by a lunch with National Review contributor Victor Davis Hanson.

The 43-year-old Vladimir John Ondrasik III was a math major at UCLA who might have led a perfectly comfortable life helping his family run a small business that manufactures shopping carts in Southern California. From an early age, however, his passion was music. Even as an adult, he dreamed of turning it into a career. “I put on a suit by day and went into the studio at night,” he says. “For years, I got nowhere.”

He finally scored a record deal in 1996, but there were problems from the start. An executive told Ondrasik that the days of the singer-songwriter were over and ordered him to come up with a name that sounded like he was a full rock band. Ondrasik proposed “Marketing Ploy,” which apparently wasn’t met with a smile. So he suggested “Five for Fighting,” a reference to the five-minute penalty a hockey player receives for on-ice fisticuffs. It might have been a better fit for head-bangers or punk rockers than for a guy who specializes in soulful vocals and piano-driven ballads, but Ondrasik is a sports nut, and it stuck. Unfortunately, his label didn’t — it shuttered in 1997, just as Five for Fighting’s debut album was coming out. “I think it sold about 500 copies,” he says.

So Ondrasik started over. The experience was agonizing, but he kept writing songs. Ondrasik says he can spend more than a year on a single tune, refining the lyrics and melody until he thinks they’re just right. At one point during this period, however, he composed an entire song in about 45 minutes. “It pretty much wrote itself,” he says. “I got lucky.” The lyrics expressed the vulnerability and frustration he was feeling at the time: “It may sound absurd / But don’t be naïve / Even heroes have the right to bleed.” He called it “Superman,” and he wasn’t sure whether he liked it.

Meanwhile, Ondrasik secured a new record deal — certainly not based on the commercial strength of Five for Fighting’s debut, but because a label thought he showed promise and was willing to take a chance. When choosing from among several dozen songs he had written for what would become his second album, America Town, he couldn’t make up his mind about whether to include “Superman.” At the last moment, he decided to use it.

This was perhaps the best professional choice he ever made. America Town came out in 2000 and produced a minor hit with a song called “Easy Tonight.” The next year saw the release of “Superman” as a single. It turned into a hit as well — not a huge one, but big enough. Then came 9/11.

‘SUPERMAN’ TAKES FLIGHT
“I was in London when it happened,” says Ondrasik. “All I could do was sit in front of a television in a hotel and watch in horror.” Before long, news channels started running montages of rescue workers amid the rubble of the World Trade Center — and they often used “Superman” as the soundtrack. The song went from small success to near-iconic status.

Ondrasik performs in New York.Kristin Callahan/Ace Pictures
Back in the States, Ondrasik was on tour when he received a letter from Earl Holland, a New York City paramedic, who described how much “Superman” meant to him. He asked Ondrasik to dedicate it to those who had died at Ground Zero. Ondrasik obliged and read the letter during a concert in Chicago. The cable channel VH-1 heard about it and invited Ondrasik to perform at the Concert for New York City at Madison Square Garden, alongside some of the biggest names in popular music. “Every one of my living inspirations was on stage — Paul McCartney, Pete Townshend, Billy Joel,” he says. “I still can’t believe I was there.” During the show, held on October 20, Holland introduced Ondrasik, who performed “Superman” to thunderous applause.

By now, Ondrasik was a full-time musician on the periphery of stardom. His third album, The Battle for Everything, came out in 2004 and yielded another smash hit: “100 Years.” A couple of its cuts, such as “NYC Weather Report” and “Infidel,” were more topical — a trend that would continue two years later when his next album, Two Lights, came out.

The title track of Two Lights was born at a lunch with Victor Davis Hanson. “I had enjoyed a lot of his writing on military history and the War on Terror. A mutual friend asked if I wanted to meet him and I said sure,” says Ondrasik. They got together at a coffee shop in Palo Alto, Calif., and Hanson invited Ondrasik to join him for lunch with a former student who was about to deploy to Iraq with the Marines, as well as the young man’s father, a Vietnam veteran.

At lunch, Ondrasik talked to the dad. “I asked him how he was doing,” says Ondrasik. “He sat back, closed his eyes, and said, ‘It’s really hard on his mom.’ It was obviously hard on him, too. I saw the natural fear of a parent as well as pride in a son who is carrying on a tradition.” Afterward, Ondrasik wrote the song “Two Lights,” about a father who hears that a member of his son’s unit has been killed. The man decides to go for a nighttime drive and asks his wife to leave on two lights if she hears their son is alive. When he returns home just before sunup, he looks at his house, hoping for two lights, and says “my eyes burn.” The meaning is ambiguous. “I had to leave it open-ended, because sometimes the news is good and sometimes it’s bad,” says Ondrasik. “The song symbolizes the no man’s land that these families live in every day.”

Ondrasik says he has gained a special sympathy for military families through his work with the USO. He has visited injured soldiers at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center and he has performed for troops at military bases in California, Guam, and Japan — and even at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba. When he tours in the United States, he tries to make free tickets available to soldiers posted at nearby bases. “I don’t like it when artists let politics creep into their performances and I try not to make speeches,” he says. “But in my shows, I always tell the story of ‘Two Lights.’”

So far, Two Lights has produced at least a pair of certified hits, “The Riddle” and “World.” A third song didn’t make the charts but is starting to show staying power: “Freedom Never Cries.” It’s the song Ondrasik recently played for the Medal of Honor recipients. “I wrote it because I was tired of people raising their eyebrows whenever they heard the word ‘freedom,’ as if they don’t appreciate what we have in this country and what allows us to have it.” At the heart of the song is a line that embodies the idea that freedom isn’t free: “I never loved the soldier until there was a war.” The second stanza ties it all to the threat of Islamofascism:

I saw a man on the TV
In a mask with a gun
A man on the TV
He had a 10-year-old son
I saw a man on the TV
His son had a gun
He says that he’s coming for me.

And in case anybody still doesn’t grasp the point, there’s the just-released video, which features images of al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri, Gen. David Petraeus, and purple-fingered Iraqi voters.

Last year, at Grammys on the Hill, a lobbying event for the recording industry, Ondrasik elected to sing “Freedom Never Cries.” “Everyone was expecting me to play ‘Superman’ and ‘100 Years,’ but on my way up to the piano I decided that if there was ever a time to play ‘Freedom Never Cries,’ and if there was ever an audience that ought to hear it, this was it.” As he left the stage, Republican congresswoman Mary Bono Mack of California rushed to him and held up her iPod. By coincidence, she had been listening to the song earlier in the day, while working out in the House gym. “I didn’t even know that he was going to be there that evening,” she says. “I knew a few of his other songs and was listening to this one, trying to figure out if he’s a conservative or a liberal — you know, one of us or one of them.”

A TONIC FOR THE TROOPS
As it happens, Ondrasik calls himself a “moderate Republican.” He has supported John McCain for president through thick and thin, even during the period last year when it looked like McCain’s campaign was on the brink of collapse. On February 5, he attended McCain’s Super Tuesday victory party in Phoenix. “I’d never been to something like that before,” he says. Rather than hopping on anybody’s bandwagon, however, he has tried to support the troops by taking advantage of his new political connections with the likes of Rep. Bono Mack and Minnesota senator Norm Coleman, who hosted Ondrasik at a GOP steering-committee meeting in December. The result is an unlikely musical collaboration between Washington and Hollywood, or at least those parts that are willing to honor military service.

In 2006, a non-profit group called Music for Troops asked Ondrasik to write the liner notes for a compilation of songs by unsigned artists that it was planning to distribute to the military. “That gave me the idea to do the same thing with popular artists and songs we know,” says Ondrasik. It sounded easy, but it turned out to be much harder than he had anticipated and occupied him for most of last year. “I thought we’d find a corporate sponsor, someone who would write us a big check,” he recalls. Instead, he approached about two dozen potential funders and struck out with each one. “After four or five months of this, I was getting frustrated.” Finally, Kraig Kitchin, an executive then with Premiere Radio Networks, convinced his company to pitch in $50,000. Ondrasik agreed to match it, and he began to envision an effort scaled back from his original plans.

But he didn’t give up entirely. Last summer, he sent out an e-mail to a few friends, asking them for assistance. The actor Gary Sinise, who got to know Ondrasik through Rep. Bono Mack and others, received the message. “We both support the troops and I wanted to help out,” says Sinise, who has visited Iraq three times and Afghanistan once through the USO. Sinise contacted David McIntyre, the CEO of TriWest, a company that provides health-care services to the military, and TriWest decided to donate $250,000. Later, Sony offered to press 200,000 copies of For the Troops.

Following this surge of support, Ondrasik still needed to recruit the talent. He had received a few verbal commitments from a handful of artists, but these needed to become formal contracts drawn up by lawyers. Not only did the musicians have to grant permission to give away their songs, so did labels, songwriters, and managers. “The list of who declined is a lot longer than the list of who agreed,” says Ondrasik. He won’t mention which performers turned him down, but he allows that “politics had a lot to do with it.”

The process was intense, and Ondrasik credits Mitch Bainwol of the Recording Industry Association of America with making it run as quickly and smoothly as possible. In the end, 13 artists and groups participated, including Billy Joel, Brooks & Dunn, Jewel, Josh Groban, and the Neville Brothers. “Some of the contributors actually oppose the war, but they all wanted to support the troops without respect to partisanship,” he says. For the Troops came out at Thanksgiving. Most of the compact discs have been distributed through the USO and other organizations. What’s more, a website run by the Army & Air Force Exchange Service allows active-duty personnel to download individual songs for free. So far, that’s happened about 250,000 times.

Ondrasik wants to spend much of 2008 on a new Five for Fighting album. But he’s also thinking about the next thing he’ll do for the troops — possibly another CD, and almost certainly more performances. “I feel an obligation to support the war effort,” he says. “This is the most important cause of our time. I can’t shoot a gun and I’m too old for service. But maybe I can help with morale, and with the morale of the families. We all have to do our part, whatever our skills are.”

Five for Fighting won’t ever earn a Medal of Honor — but at least John Ondrasik is available for encores.

Chamberlin and Margolis Join Manning Selvage & Lee

Bulldog Reporter
March 7, 2008

Manning Selvage & Lee (www.mslpr.com) announced it has added two senior communications professionals to its growing corporate practice in North America: David Chamberlin as senior vice president, based in Dallas, and Karyn Margolis as vice president for corporate social responsibility, based in New York. Both appointments are effective immediately.

At MS&L, Chamberlin will be responsible for managing national programs for three of the agency's Dallas–based clients. He will also be responsible for generating new business and growth opportunities in the southwest market.

Margolis will be responsible for developing CSR platforms, writing CSR reports and related communications materials, stakeholder engagement and media relations strategies, as well as overall program implementation. She will also serve as the New York office's liaison to MS&L's global ECO network.

"David and Karyn's expertise in reputation management, international financial and technology communications, and corporate social responsibility will add tremendous value to our growing corporate practice, clients and staff," said Peter Harris, senior vice president and director of MS&L's NY corporate practice.

U2 on RTE Late Late Show

U2, Elliott Sadler & Nascar

The Ballad of Ronnie Drew

Feminism and the English Language: Can the damage to our mother tongue be undone?

An Interview with Timothy Keller

Antiterror Help Wanted

By Mark Hosenball | NEWSWEEK

Mar 3, 2008 Issue

In October 2007, National Counterterrorism Center director John Scott Redd, a retired Navy vice admiral, told a TV interviewer that the invasion of Iraq "probably" did not make the U.S. safer from terrorism. A few days later, Redd resigned, citing health concerns. Bush administration officials denied that Redd's departure had anything to do with his comments, and the post has remained vacant—which is odd, since the NCTC is one of the few undisputed bright spots of post-9/11 intelligence reform legislation. Since Redd left, the NCTC has been run on an interim basis by one of his deputies, Michael Leiter, a former Navy aviator and federal prosecutor whose leadership has won praise from intel officials and congressional monitors.

But until very recently, the White House has appeared reluctant to name Leiter as permanent NCTC chief. Instead, it spent months on a fruitless search for a higher-profile director, according to two government officials who asked for anonymity when discussing sensitive matters. Several possible candidates, including military officers and CIA executives, turned the job down. Administration officials and Republican congressmen concluded that candidates were scared off by the prospect of the Senate confirmation process—especially since the job could be short-lived, with only a year left in the Bush presidency.

So why hasn't the White House offered the post to Leiter? One factor could be his political credentials. According to his official biography, Leiter, a Harvard law graduate, once clerked for Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, a liberal Bill Clinton appointee. A White House spokesman did not respond to a request for comment; a spokesman for the office of National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell declined to comment. Just hours after NEWSWEEK first inquired about the NCTC position, however, one government official indicated that the White House may well nominate Leiter in the near future.

Taylor University Community Mourns Marilyn Walker

Longtime professor of journalism and communication arts Marilyn Walker died February 18, in Marion. She was 74.

Walker retired from Taylor in 1996 after 30-years as professor of journalism and communication arts. Prior to coming to Taylor, she taught at Anderson Highland and Marion High School. She also taught summer journalism workshops at Indiana University and Ohio University. She was a frequent workshop leader and speaker at national college journalism conferences.

She was a graduate of Alexandria High School and earned a bachelor's degree in English and journalism from Ball State University, where she was editor of The Ball State News. Walker received a master's degree in journalism from Indiana University.

A life member of the College Media Advisers, Walker was also a life member and former president of the Indiana High School Press Association. She was also a member of Delta Kappa Gamma International Educational Society and the Marion Department Club.

Walker was a member of the Marion First United Methodist Church, the Anne Gonger Circle, and the United Methodist Women. She was also a member of the Alexandria Order of the Eastern Star.

Survivors include her husband, Jules Walker, Marion, an aunt and several cousins.

Funeral services are at 1:30 p.m. Tuesday, Feb. 26, in Needham-Storey-Wampner Funeral Service North Chapel, 1341 N. Baldwin Ave., Marion with the Rev. Kaye Patton officiating. Burial is in Grant Memorial Park.

Visitation is from 4:00 to 8:00 p.m. Monday, Feb. 25, 2008 in the funeral home.

Memorial contributions may be directed to the Communication Arts Department, Taylor University, Upland, Ind., 46986 or First United Methodist Church, 624 S. Adams St., Marion, Ind., 46953.

Online condolences may be made at www.nswcares.com.

Jean Ford Murphy,

Jean F. Murphy VIRGINIA BEACH - Jean Ford Murphy, 82, died Feb. 16, 2008. Jean was born in Tiger, Ga., the daughter of Harold and Ora Arrendale. She was a descendent of Dr. Pierre Chastain, a French Huguenot who emigrated to Virginia in the 1680s. This quiet, pretty Georgia farm girl grew up to become a community activist and a world traveler. While attending the University of Georgia, Jean met her first husband John Ellsworth Ford, a dashing young naval aviator on his way to the Pacific in World War II. They were a great team and Jean was an active Navy wife through three decades of Naval service, culminating in Capt. Ford's command of Naval Air Station Oceana in the early 1970s. They were married for 54 years until his death in 1998, and were blessed with three children. Jean married Capt. Joseph J. Murphy, U.S. Navy retired in 2003. They shared a full life of travel, community service and a love of the arts and theater. In recent years, she divided her time between her longtime home in Virginia Beach and The Villages, Fla. Jean was known for her devotion to diverse causes and was active in numerous local and national organizations. She represented Virginia as a delegate at the 2004 Republican National Convention and had served as president of the Virginia Beach Republican Women's Club and the Princess Anne Republican Women's Club. She was active in the Military Officers' Wives Association, the Association of Naval Aviators, Galilee Episcopal Church, Lee's Friends and the Virginia Federation of Republican Women. She was also a talented businesswoman and one of the owners of Braeford's Ltd., a successful Virginia Beach ladies clothing store operated for almost 20 years. Most importantly, she was "Jee Jee" to four generations of family, a wonderful homemaker and beloved wife, mother, grandmother and great-grandmother who shared the joys and events of their lives to her last day. She was dearly loved and will be greatly missed. In addition to her husband, Jean Ford Murphy is survived by her sister, Irma Howell of Alpharetta, Ga.; her daughter, Donna Redd of McLean, Va.; her sons, Anthony Ford of Louisville, Ky., and John Ford of Chevy Chase, Md.; eight grandchildren and eight great-grandchildren. Services will be held at 2 p.m. Friday in Galilee Episcopal Church. In lieu of flowers, the family requests donations be made to Galilee Episcopal Church, 3928 Pacific Ave., Virginia Beach, VA 23451 and Lee's Friends, 618 Stockley Gardens, Norfolk, VA 23507.

How Right Is McCain?

Health Questions for the Candidates

Joe Nuxhall - Roundin' Third and Headin' for Home

Brian Regan on UPS

Bono - In The Name Of The Father

Bono on Good Morning America

PECOTA says Reds to finish third