Sinking in the Polls – Karen Hughes, Washington Post
The video reappearance of Osama bin Laden is a reminder that extremists with murderous methods continue to threaten innocent people worldwide. His emergence after three years of hiding also provides an opportunity to take stock of how differently the world now views the terrorist leader -- and that view is turning darker than bin Laden's newly dyed beard.
People in America and many other Western nations have expressed strong disapproval of bin Laden and al-Qaeda since the Sept. 11 attacks. What's new is the dramatic decline in his standing in majority-Muslim countries. Polls in the two nations that have suffered some of the worst of al-Qaeda's violence -- Afghanistan and Iraq -- show that more than 90 percent of those populations have unfavorable views of al-Qaeda and of bin Laden himself…
Petraeus Makes the Case – Donald Lambro, Washington Times
There is no doubt Gen. David Petraeus won the politically charged slugfest on Capitol Hill last week when he called for withdrawal of 30,000 troops from Iraq between now and early next year.
He won it on his case that, as bad as things are in Iraq, the troop surge of the last six months has made verifiable progress in key battlegrounds now cleansed of terrorists. And he won it by outflanking the Democrats' demands that we begin now precipitously pulling out all our forces by a specific deadline…
Iraqis Show Courage – Jeff Emanuel, Washington Times
The "surge" in Iraq, and the counterinsurgency strategy that the increase in forces was designed to support, have made far more gains in far less time than most who are actually familiar with the situation here ever expected. A large part of the reason for this is the people of Iraq, who have in many different ways displayed a level of bravery that we can only hope Americans, if put into the same situation, would ever dream of showing.
Rather than taking the terrorist presence in their country lying down, Iraqis in many locations have shown amazing courage, not only by providing an ever-increasing amount of information on insurgent activity to coalition forces, but also by working to rebuild what the insurgents have destroyed, as well as by putting their lives on the line to drive terrorists out of their own villages. They do this despite the fact that they do not know whether they will wake up the next day to find that the coalition — currently their best source of protection — has succumbed to the calls from home (which are heard here by civilians and terrorists alike) to leave Iraq, and has abandoned them…
In Iraq, Time to Go Long - Fareed Zakaria, Washington Post
… One point President Bush made last week was important. We have strategic, political and moral reasons to remain involved -- as long as the Iraqis request it. The most significant way we can help Iraq is to be there for the long haul, assisting it economically and politically, but also maintaining a smaller, more enduring military presence. That is a far more strategic role for U.S. troops than policing the streets of Baghdad. Making clear that we aren't going to disappear entirely will change the calculus of all those groups in Iraq that are keeping their "post-American" options open.
Bush has wasted his limited political capital buying the surge six more months. There is a much more important deal to be had: Go down in troop levels, but go long. If you listen to leading Democrats, most recognize the need for a smaller, longer American mission in Iraq. But to get there, the president has to recognize that the mission of 130,000 American troops in Iraq -- for better or worse -- is done.
Iraq Alternative - Elton Gallegly, Washington Times
Despite many mistakes in the execution of the Iraq war after Saddam Hussein's removal, I believe the consequences of failure in that country would be devastating to U.S. national security. We simply cannot allow Iraq to degenerate into a failed state or serve as a safe haven for terrorists.
At the same time, as the brave members of our armed forces pursue our military objectives, we need a plan to couple our military success with a political solution that will resolve the divisions and violence in Iraq.
In my view, the best chance — and maybe the only hope — to achieve peace and stability in Iraq is to recognize that the country's three main groups are unlikely to reach a lasting agreement to share power as part of a centralized government. Nor will the Shi'ites, Sunnis and Kurds agree, at least in the foreseeable future, to be ruled by anyone besides their own leaders…
Heroic Soldiers, Pelosi Slanders – Washington Times editorial
The contrast between the focus-group-driven behavior of Congress and heroic work being performed by American fighting men and women on the ground in Iraq (and increasingly, our Iraqi allies) could hardly be any greater. As Jeff Emanuel, who is embedded with the U.S. military in Iraq, writes today on the facing page, the oft-denigrated troop "surge" led by Gen. David Petraeus is achieving positive results: In particular, it is doing what all the antiwar politicians on Capitol Hill claim they want to see — encouraging Iraqis to "take responsibility" for their own country. Mr. Emanuel, a special operations veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom, writes that Iraqis have "displayed a level of bravery that we can only hope Americans, if put into the same situation, would ever dream of showing." He adds that, increasingly, Iraqis in many locations are risking their lives to provide coalition forces with information on terrorist insurgent activity. And they are doing so despite the risk that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi might be successful in engineering a precipitous withdrawal from Iraq that will leave them to the mercy of al Qaeda and the like…
Staying the Course Ignores Iraq Reality – Miami Herald editorial
President Bush's speech to the nation on Iraq Thursday night was a huge disappointment. Instead of offering a long-term vision for how U.S. forces can make an honorable exit from Iraq, the president raised the prospect of an ''enduring relationship'' that sounds a lot like the open-ended commitment he once disavowed. Instead of holding Iraqi leaders accountable for failing to meet the administration's own benchmarks of progress -- as he promised in January -- the president insisted that Iraqi leaders ``are getting some things done.''
By the next morning, his own administration had undermined that particular claim. In a congressionally mandated report on the progress of the war, the White House was obliged to concede that Iraq's government has gained little ground toward meeting key political and military goals. This discouraging assessment found that Iraqis have done enough to move only one benchmark from the unsatisfactory to satisfactory column: allowing former members of Saddam Hussein's Baath Party to hold government office…
Decency Goes A.W.O.L. – Suzanne Fields, Washington Times
Lying is a moral issue difficult to be absolute about. Most of us accept a little white lie to spare a person's feelings. A roguish Southern politician I know dutifully compliments every baby held out by a beaming mother, but occasionally a child is thrust at him that's so plain he can't think of a single thing to compliment. So with a big smile he exclaims: "That's some baby!" The fib is acceptable because the mother is pleased. No harm is done. We accept a lie that spares a life or a lie that defends a life, including the speaker's own. But a slander is the most grievous sin of all.
In Dante's Inferno, deceivers are dispatched to the eighth circle of hell enduring cruel enough punishment, but traitors, "sowers of schism and of discord," are sent to the ninth circle and suffer even greater torment. The attacks on the character and integrity of Gen. David Petraeus are little short of heinous. If the lie imperils the fighting men and women entrusted to his care the general is a traitor to his country. The lie gives the edge to the enemy…
A Question of Honour – London Times leader
It is six weeks since the Government promised an “urgent review” of the situation of Iraqis whose lives are in danger because of their work as interpreters for the British Army. During that time, the 5,000 British troops have pulled back from central Basra to the airport, mainly for their own safety. Nothing has been done for the interpreters. Several have already been tortured and killed. Some have received death threats from militia thugs who accuse them of collaboration. Their homes are unprotected and their families live in terror. Out of loyalty and honour, they remain at their posts, helping British troops understand the dangers and the confusion. In return, they have been contemptuously brushed aside, as though they were trouble-makers demanding special favours. This is utterly shameful…
Dragged to Death for Helping the British - Martin Fletcher, London Times
A man said to have been an interpreter for the British Army in Basra has been killed by militia gunmen on the very day that his wife learnt she was pregnant with their first child. Nine or ten masked men went to the home of Moayed Ahmed Khalaf in the al-Hayaniah district of Basra and beat him in front of his wife and mother, four sources told The Times. They then dragged him away, telling the frantic women that they would bring him back shortly. Khalaf’s body was found on Al Qa’ed Street later that night. He had been shot multiple times, according to Colonel Ali Manshed, commander of the Shatt-al-Arab police station…
Ramadan’s Peaceful Roots – James Carroll, Boston Globe
“Ramadan is big,” a US general said in Iraq last week, meaning that levels of violence during this year's Muslim holy month will be key. For the 30 days of the ninth month in the Islamic calendar, Muslims fast from dawn to dusk - a time of penitence, care for deeper things, including needs of the poor, and familial solidarity. But Ramadan has come to have less godly significance, as well.
In the four years of the Iraqi war, a so-called "Ramadan spike" has marked the period as among the most deadly. Last week's assassination of Sunni leader Abdul-Sattar Abu Risha, who had recently welcomed President Bush to Anbar Province, was doubly shocking for coming at the start of Ramadan. What began as a manifestation of devotion becomes, in periods of conflict, a prompt to zealotry that can include savage violence…
Overstretched Idea – The Australian leader
They talk as if the US were an empire, and the comparison is always with Rome on its last legs. For people with such tastes for stretching comparisons and conspiracies, it has been a vintage few days. First there was the Petraeus report, in which the general commanding the US garrison in Iraq put the best face he could on progress towards peace, but did not suggest Washington should start planning his triumph. Then on the weekend, former chairman of the US Federal Reserve Alan Greenspan informed us that the war in Iraq was "largely about oil".
But just because Iraq has not turned out to be the easy win that former defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld planned for (or, rather, did not plan at all) does not mean that the US is in global retreat. North Korea did not scrap its nuclear weapons program because it realised the error of its ways. Nor does US involvement in Iraq mean the American republic rates against the Romans. The US is the least imperial of powers. The American people had to be cajoled into saving democracy in both world wars. And none of the presidents who prosecuted wars in Korea, Vietnam and now Iraq were covered in glory in their last years in the White House. In Iraq, the Americans are less fighting a war of conquest as seeking to stabilise that country so that democracy can take hold. If the US is an empire, it is one where its power is based on the ideas of free enterprise and free elections, a combination people always and everywhere embrace when they are given a chance…
The Overlawyered War – Michael Barone, Real Clear Politics
"Never in the history of the United States had lawyers had such extraordinary influence over war policy as they did after 9/11." Those are the words of Jack Goldsmith, the Harvard law professor who was one of those lawyers, as head of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel in 2003 and 2004. They appear in his book "The Terror Presidency," hailed as a criticism of the Bush administration's legal policies, which in part it is.
Believing that some of his predecessor's opinions, particularly two on interrogation techniques, were "deeply flawed," he reversed them. He argues that the administration would have ended up with more latitude in fighting terrorism if it had worked with Congress to get legislation, even if those laws would not have been as expansive as the administration wanted. It's a serious argument, and he also presents fairly, I think, the opposing view that such restrictions would make it harder to protect the American people…
Musharraf Meltdown? - Arnaud de Borchgrave, Washington Times
Some 80,000 Pakistani soldiers manning the nonexistent border between the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) and Afghanistan have stood down, but no one knows who gave the order or whether they are even taking orders.
Taliban and al Qaeda terror training camps are up and running again with the acquiescence — or impotence — of the Pakistani army. That's the word by satellite phone from this reporter's sources in Miranshah and Wana, the capital towns of North and South Waziristan…
Laying the Groundwork for War with Iran – Patrick Buchanan, Miami Herald
… ''It is increasingly apparent,'' said Petraeus, ``that Iran, through the use of the Quds Force, seeks to turn the Iraqi Special Groups into a Hezbollah-like force to serve its interests and fight a proxy war against the Iraqi state and coalition forces in Iraq.''
Petraeus' charge that Iran is fighting a ''proxy war'' against America comports with the new War Party propaganda line that we have been at war with Iran since 1979 and Bush needs no authorization from Congress to fight it more aggressively.
Congress gave Bush a blank check for the Iraq war. Any chance Congress will at least insist the administration come to Capitol Hill to make the case for the next war, on Iran, before Bush launches it? Probably not.
Turkey’s Model of Islamic Democracy - Geneive Abdo, Boston Globe
Can Turkey’s Justice and Development Party become a model for the ideal marriage between Islam and democracy that could be replicated in the Middle East?
Some Muslim intellectuals, politically correct commentators in the West, and officials from the European Union seem to think so. They argue that the recent election of Abdullah Gul as president of Turkey and the success in parliamentary polls last July of his AK Party are sound reasons to believe that a party made up of Islamists can hold free elections, win at the polls, and then run a state that is democratic and secular…
Don’t Abandon Taiwan – Steve Chabot, Shelley Berkley and Dana Rohrabacher, Washington Times
In late July, a quiet diplomatic error was made that could severely undermine U.S. foreign policy and security interests in a potentially volatile region of the world. This did not involve the ongoing conflict in Iraq or sanctions against North Korea, but rather the question of whether Taiwan deserves a seat at the United Nations. While not a new question by any means, it was recently raised anew when, on behalf of its 23 million inhabitants, Taiwanese President Chen Shui-bian formally applied for UN membership under the name "Taiwan." And the implications for U.S. interests came in the answer.
On July 23, U.N, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon rejected Taiwan's application. In doing so, he asserted that the 1971 U.N. General Assembly Resolution 2758 had granted China's seat in the General Assembly to the government of the People's Republic of China (PRC), and he also stated that in the view of the United Nations, Taiwan is considered an integral part of the PRC…
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