The Politics of Change

Part of my thought process during a Thanksgiving holiday is consider the sacrifice of those who serve in harms way with the US military in whatever part of the world they may be struggling to protect our way of life and our safety to enjoy national holidays.

I continue to believe that Afghanistan and Iraq are the right conflicts in the right place to further the safety and interests of the United States and the regions impacted. As events have unfolded, there have been events for which, I believe, we were not properly prepared but I continue to believe that President Bush has acted honorably to pursue the policies that he promised he would pursue and that the ultimate result in these areas of conflict will benefit generations to come of Americans and of the world.

With that picture in mind, it has been difficult for me to understand the news coverage and the political pandering of the left – which has been, in my view, self-defeating and anti-American at its core. It is remarkable to me when the modest gains of the Democrats in the Congressional elections of 2006 are attributed to their fielding a slate of more moderate candidates that they, as the new majority party, have stuffed all leadership positions with the most bizarre caricature of far left ideologues that most closely resemble the Stars Wars Cantina scene.

I feature two articles today which follow from my rambling. The first is Charles Krauthammer’s discussion of the positive progress of the conflict in Iraq – which has finally begun to seep into the New York Times coverage only very recently but which has not yet been acknowledged by the leadership of the left. The second article is provided by Larry Thornberry and presents an uncomfortable view of where the Democrats might take us by describing conditions in England which is a few years ahead of us in terms of social change if we do not take steps to correct our course.

My source: http://www.townhall.com/columnists/CharlesKrauthammer/2007/11/23/turning_tides_in_iraq?page=full&comments=true Turning Tides in Iraq By Charles Krauthammer Friday, November 23, 2007

WASHINGTON -- It does not have the drama of the Inchon landing or the sweep of the Union comeback in the summer of 1864. But the turnabout of American fortunes in Iraq over the last several months is of equal moment -- a war seemingly lost, now winnable. The violence in Iraq has been dramatically reduced. Political allegiances have been radically reversed. The revival of ordinary life in many cities is palpable. Something important is happening.

And what is the reaction of the war critics? Nancy Pelosi stoutly maintains her state of denial, saying this about the war just two weeks ago: "This is not working. ... We must reverse it." A euphemism for "abandon the field," which is what every Democratic presidential candidate is promising, with variations only in how precipitous to make the retreat.

How do they avoid acknowledging the realities on the ground? By asserting that we have not achieved political benchmarks -- mostly legislative actions by the Baghdad government -- that were set months ago. And that these benchmarks are paramount. And that all the current progress is ultimately vitiated by the absence of centrally legislated national reconciliation.

I can understand Lt. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, the No. 2 commander in Iraq, saying that the central government needs to seize the window provided by the surge to achieve political reconciliation. We would all love to have the leaders of the various factions -- Kurd, Shiite, and Sunni -- sign nice pieces of paper tying up all the knotty questions of federalism, de-Baathification and oil revenues.

What commander would not want such a silver bullet that would obviate the need for any further ground action? But it is not going to happen for the same reason it has not already happened: The Maliki government is too sectarian and paralyzed to be able to end the war in a stroke of reconciliation.

But does the absence of this deus ex machina invalidate our hard-won gains? Why does this mean that we cannot achieve success by other means?

Sure, there is no oil law. But the central government is nonetheless distributing oil revenues to the provinces, where the funds are being used for reconstruction.

Sure, the de-Baathification law has not been modified. But the whole purpose of modification was to entice Sunni insurgents to give up the insurgency and join the new order. This is already happening on a widening scale all over the country in the absence of a relaxed de-Baathification law.

As for federalism, the Kurds are running their own region, the Sunni sheiks in Anbar and elsewhere are exercising not just autonomy but control of their own security, and the southern Shiites are essentially governing themselves, the British having withdrawn in all but name.

Yes, a provincial powers law would be nice because it would allow for provincial elections. We should push hard for it. But we already have effective provincial and tribal autonomy in pivotal regions of the country.

Why is top-down national reconciliation as yet unattainable? Because decades of Saddam's totalitarianism followed by the brutality of the post-invasion insurgency destroyed much of the political infrastructure of the country, causing the Iraqis to revert to the most basic political attachment -- tribe and locality. Gen. David Petraeus' genius has been to adapt American strategy to capitalize on that development, encouraging the emergence of and allying ourselves with tribal and provincial leaders -- without waiting for cosmic national deliverance from the newly constructed and still dysfunctional constitutional apparatus in Baghdad.

Al-Qaeda in Iraq is in disarray, the Sunni insurgency in decline, the Shiite militias quiescent, the capital city reviving. Are we now to reverse course and abandon all this because parliament cannot ratify the reconciliation already occurring on the ground?

Do the critics forget their own arguments about the irrelevance of formal political benchmarks? The transfer of power in 2004. The two elections in 2005. The ratification of the constitution. Those were all supposed to be turning points to pacify the country and bring stability -- all blown to smithereens by the Samarra bombing in February 2006, which precipitated an orgy of sectarian violence and a descent into civil war.

So, just as we have learned this hard lesson of the disconnect between political benchmarks and real stability, the critics now claim the reverse -- that benchmarks are what really count.

This is to fundamentally mistake ends and means. The benchmarks would be a wonderful shortcut to success in Iraq. But it is folly to abandon the pursuit of that success when a different route, more arduous but still doable, is at hand and demonstrably working.

My source: http://www.spectator.org/dsp_article.asp?art_id=12331 Another Blight on Old Blighty By Larry Thornberry Published 11/20/2007 12:07:52 AM

How melancholy to see the UK racing pell-mell down the various paths of political correctness, with bizarre hate crimes laws that are a frontal attack on free speech and freedom of religion, gun control laws that would make Fidel Castro proud and contribute to crime, a Home Office that requires police to play Mother May I with local imams before enforcing any law in Muslim areas, the leeching of all Englishness from school curricula in the name of multiculturalism, the attempt to banish all religion from the public square. Except Islam of course; they wouldn't dare.

Clearly it's time to change the words of the song. There won't always be an England. There's barely one now.

In addition to the abominations listed above, the Brits have fallen even further down the environmental rabbit hole than America has. The fads and fetishes of the First Church of The End of the World have taken greater hold in the land of the (formerly) stiff upper lip than it has in the land of the still-relatively-free and the home of the Atlanta Braves.

Reflecting Old Blighty's sensitivity to manufactured environmental alarums, New Labour PM Gordon Brown and Tory leader David Cameron spend a good deal of their time trying to out-green each other. This seems to play pretty well with the candle-in-the-wind crowd.

One of the latest leftist social-engineering scams, designed to save the sceptered isle from a real scam, global warming, is a series of "eco-towns" Brown announced last summer. Town councils and developers are invited to submit proposals for five "environmentally-friendly" towns in the south-east of England containing 100,000 new homes to be completed by 2020.

The eco-towns are to be "carbon-neutral," meaning the document-stampers who approve buildings in the town will react to any use of fossil fuel the same way Count Dracula reacted to sunlight and the True Cross. They'll be powered, so the press releases say, by "renewable energy sources" such as solar and wind. Homes will be provided with biomass boilers that don't use fossil fuels.

These approaches are some of the favorite fantasies of enviros, and will doubtless excite their erogenous zones. The only problem is they almost certainly won't work (anyone with even minimal experience of English weather should have enough sense not to bank much on solar), and will leave a lot of disgruntled bird-watchers with only their granola to keep them warm in winter.

Developers have claimed the enviro-pure homes will cost about 40,000 pounds more than traditional homes. There's some resistance among conservative town councils. But in the finest tradition of leftists who know what's good for us, the government has threatened that it will intervene and impose settlements if town councils don't come up with their own proposals.

Another nanny twist on eco-towns is that they will contribute to physical fitness and health. Or at least according to the headline-hungry politicians who are whooping them up. These planned towns, nanny wet-dreams come true, are laid out with homes and shops and schools and parks and other necessities within walking distance of each other. This and biking lanes are to ensure that residents will have little need for the dreaded automobile. This not only saves pollution from autos, but all this walking, the story goes, will lead to a more physically fit citizenry.

Health secretary Alan Johnson rode this hobby horse late last month, plugging the towns as a weapon against obesity, which he says is at crisis levels in England and getting worse. In remarks with a slightly Orwellian odor to them, Johnson crooned that the brave new towns, with their bike paths (Howard Dean take notice) and fitness centers and large parks will "encourage" healthy life styles. Children will be badgered (my word, not his) to play more sports, eat less junk food, and even learn to cook.

Anytime socialists "encourage" certain lifestyles, it's only a matter of time before the laws and apparatchiks are in place to enforce them. The most chilling hint of this certainty came when Johnson said students in eco-towns will be "regularly weighed at school" to make sure they aren't porking up. We can already picture the sorry scene, Comrade Teacher humiliating pudgy little Nigel who is suspected of eating crisps and of not doing the government-approved number of jumping jacks.

These command and control towns give further evidence, as if more were needed, that George Orwell was right. He just got the year wrong. I suggest the first "eco-town" be named Winston Smith Village.

Perhaps another could be named Prince Charles Village. Many of the crack-pot concepts involved in the eco-villages mirror the ideas coming out of the Prince of Wales' think-tank. Hey, when your entire job description is to wear funny clothes and hang around, you have a lot of time on your hands. And on the evidence of his public remarks, Charles is only slightly brighter than his mother's corgis. So why should we be surprised that he comes up with a phantasm like eco-villages?

The land of Magna Carta, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Dickens, the Common Law, and some really good local ales deserves better than this. And Americans need to pay attention too. Although politically correct elites here would rather shove hot splinters under their fingernails than admit it, America has inherited most of its political institutions from England, the country that practically invented civil liberties. And we're the better for it. But we can surely add eco-towns to the growing list of English political abominations America is well advised not to import.

Larry Thornberry is a writer living in Tampa. His lot started out in Thornbury, just down the road from Bristol.