Never Missing An Opportunity

To miss an opportunity. That has pretty well described the Democrat's uncanny ability to turn silk purses into sow's ears year after year. They are doing it to themselves again right now in Tennessee. If they had simply kept quiet about the television ad paid for by the RNC that skewers Harold Ford, Jr., it would have been a mildly successful ad that might have changed a few minds to vote for Corker. Instead they have pulled out all the stops going on a full-fledged frontal assault on the ad. The usual voices are piping up saying the ad has "racist" implications. The ad does not, but now the people on the attack have ensured that the ad will go viral and be seen by far, far more voters. Those voters will be able to see that a) the ad is funny, b) the ad is NOT racist and c) that there are serious reasons not to vote for Ford.

So the attackers have virtually guaranteed that what might have been a mildly successful ad that changed a few minds will become a wildly successful ad that will devastate Ford at the ballot box. Furthermore, it may well cause damage for Democrats elsewhere.

Running as the party of the perpetually outraged is not going to convince people to vote for you.

UPDATE: The Corner agrees this was a bad, bad move.

They’re Number One!

And number two has something to do with it. A study released by an environmental group concludes that Los Angeles county has the dirtiest water at their beaches in the entire state of California. Whoo hoo! Bragging rights all around.

"We're number one," said Mark Gold, executive director of Heal the Bay, which oversees the annual report. "It seems to be the same overall result, but this year the story is different. Usually you can point to Santa Monica Bay as the problem but we've never seen what we saw in Long Beach this summer."

The Santa Monica-based clean water group released its annual end-of-summer beach report card, which grades beaches from Humboldt County to the Mexican border.

Water samples collected between Memorial Day and Sept. 30 were analyzed for bacteria. The better the grade, the lower the risk of illness to beachgoers. Overall the state's water quality looked good, the report said.

Long Beach traditionally scores well during the summer months, Gold said. This year, however, only 12 percent of the water samples taken in the area got high clean-water marks, in comparison to 91 percent last year. City officials who are still investigating the source of the pollution, say part of the problem may have been a leaking pump station used by several boats.

The city's low grade contributed to the county's overall poor showing.

For the most part, beaches in Santa Monica Bay did a little better than last summer. The underachievers include: Santa Monica Pier, Dockweiler State Beach at Ballona Creek mouth, part of Manhattan Beach and the Redondo Municipal Pier.

Pollutants in Santa Monica Bay have been a problem for years and some of the area's most famous beaches have repeatedly received poor grades from Heal the Bay. Most contamination occurs during winter when heavy rains overload storm drain and sewage systems, washing waste directly into the sea. Swimming in such waters can cause gastrointestinal, respiratory and other illnesses.

Regional water officials decided in September to begin a process of fining cities surrounding Santa Monica Bay up to $10,000 a day if beaches do not meet clean-water standards. Los Angeles County is spending $1 million to try and pinpoint the pollution sources in Malibu that end up in the bay.

That last sentence gives us an opportunity to point out, once again, that the Malibu beach problems are possibly the result of the Sewage of the Stars™. But the stars are much to busy manning the barricades to allow a sewer line to run through Malibu. The stars care about the little people, so long as it doesn't inconvenience them in any way. And so long as they can dump their sewage where they please.

Here's the map of the area.

The Last Thing We Want To Do

Today's Opinion Journal points out the problems facing Iraq. One of the biggest ones is American defeatists. The more it looks like American politicians are going to cut and run from Iraq, the worse the situation will become for everyone concerned.

Yes, the Iraq project is difficult, and its outcome dangerously uncertain. The Bush Administration and its military generals have so far failed to stem insurgent attacks or pacify Baghdad, and the factions comprising Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's government have so far failed to make essential political compromises. But the American response to this should be to change military tactics or deployments until they do succeed, and to reassure Iraqi leaders that their hard political choices will result in U.S. support, not precipitous withdrawal.

The current American panic, by contrast, is precisely what the insurgents intend with their surge of October violence. The Baathists and Sadrists can read the U.S. political calendar, and they'd like nothing better than to feed the perception that the violence is intractable. They want our election to be perceived as a referendum on Iraq that will speed the pace of American withdrawal.

The Bush Administration hasn't helped matters of late with its own appearance of indecision, asserting on one day that we must avoid "cut-and-run" while leaking on another that the forthcoming Baker-Hamilton report might be an opportunity for a strategic retreat. President Bush has sounded resolute himself, but many of his own advisers seem to be well along in their own electoral run for cover.

A measure of rationality at least came yesterday out of Baghdad, where General George Casey and U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad tried to put the violence in some larger context. The Iraq government is in fact "functioning," as Iraqis continue to get their food rations, and as more than a million civil servants, Iraqi security force members and teachers continue to show up for work every day and get paid. Just this weekend, Iraq's oil minister announced that production had surpassed pre-war levels.

"Economically, I see an Iraq every day that I do not think the American people know about–where cell phones and satellite dishes, once forbidden, are now common, where economic reform takes place on a regular basis, where agricultural production is rising dramatically, and where the overall economy and the consumer sector is growing," said Mr. Khalilzad, who for this attempt at hopeful realism will be derided in some quarters as a Pollyanna.

The advocates of precipitous withdrawal need to understand what they outcome of such a course will be. They also have to be ready to bear the responsibility for what follows. Because those advocates will be to blame for what follows. Nobody else. They will be. We, as a nation, cannot afford to abandon these people. We cannot afford to abandon ourselves, either.

Not Likely

(T)Hugo Chavez has been effectively stymied at the UN in his bid to buy a seat on the UN Security Council. Pretty much everyone knows at this point that Venezuela will not be taking that seat. But if Chavez's protégé thinks Guatemala will step aside for him to step in and be Venezuela's proxy, he's been chewing too much of his famous coca.

Venezuelan officials on Tuesday denied Bolivian President Evo Morales's claim that Venezuela had decided to withdraw from the competition for a seat on the U.N. Security Council and would instead nominate his country as a candidate.

Foreign Minister Nicolas Maduro demanded that Guatemala, its rival for the position, and the United States meet three conditions before Venezuela would drop its bid.

Guatemalan Foreign Minister Gert Rosenthal said a Bolivian compromise candidacy "was apparently a unilateral decision by Venezuela, because they have not notified me." He rejected the idea that Guatemala would step aside in favor of Bolivia.

"We have not pulled out, and we have no intention of doing so," he said in Guatemala City.

…..

"Comandante Chávez called me this morning and said he could not get the two-thirds he needed for the Security Council," Morales said from El Alto, Bolivia, referring to Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez. "Chávez said he will leave the candidacy to Bolivia."

Comandante? I think that tells you all you need to know about Bolivia's "president". He's nothing but a tool of (T)Hugo's and everyone in the world will see that one coming. Just not going to happen. (You know, if I was a Bolivian, I'd be asking myself, quite seriously, if we really wanted a president who openly declares himself to be at the command of another country. Not an ally, a servant).

UPDATE: More from the New York Times. They are reporting that Venezeula's candidacy is essentially regarded as dead in the UN. And Chavez is in trouble in the region.

“The speech played the most important role in what happened,” said Riordan Roett, the director of the Latin American Studies Program at Johns Hopkins University. “You can talk like that in Latin America, and people will have a chuckle, but there is traditional respect for protocol, and it was not amusing to a lot of people who see the U.N. as the forum for expressing third world views.”

“The speech really hurt his case,” said Enrique Berruga, the ambassador of Mexico. “Most members don’t want this place to be turned into a mockery. In the General Assembly, there are limits, and he went way beyond them.”

Another Latin ambassador, who said he knew of many countries that voted against Venezuela because of the speech, agreed that Mr. Chávez had stepped over a line.

“U.S.-bashing is acceptable, but not the U.N.-bashing that they thought Chávez’s speech amounted to because in the end this is everyone’s house, and a speech like that goes down the same dirty drain as the bitter criticisms of the U.S.,” the envoy said. He asked not to be identified because he was commenting on the leader of another South American country.

Asked if Mr. Chávez’s popularity might be flagging closer to home, Mr. Roett pointed out that presidential candidates who have been identified with Mr. Chávez in recent elections in Ecuador, Peru and Mexico all did badly. “For sure he’s not gone as a force, but people are less impressed with him than they were four or five years ago,” he said.

Doing The Wrong Thing Again

Frederick Kagan writes an op-ed in the Washington Post that clearly points to mistakes made in Iraq. He also clearly points out the fallacies of those who argue for a precipitous withdrawal. There are dark parallels to Vietnam, but not the ones the left and the media are trying to sell to the American public..

A rapid U.S. withdrawal would lead to catastrophe in Iraq. The presence of American troops is vital to restraining Iraqi soldiers — the Iraqis know not to participate in death squad activities when Americans are around. The fact that large numbers of U.S. troops are not embedded with the Iraqi police is a main reason for the participation of those forces in the killings. When the U.S. troops go, the Iraqi army will probably go the same way.

Nor is there any likelihood that Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki will be able to simultaneously accomplish all the tasks now demanded of him, especially without American help. These include reforming the Interior Ministry and the police, disarming Shiite militias, fighting Sunni Arab insurgents, establishing functioning local and regional governments connected to the central government, and rooting out corruption. What are his chances if U.S. forces leave, sectarian violence rises and Iraqis grow ever more pessimistic about the success of their democratic experiment?

Americans believe that all problems are soluble and therefore that people who aren't solving their problems must not be trying. They need to be "incentivized," either through promises or threats. Many on the left have long been advocating a withdrawal of U.S. forces, or the threat of it, as just such an incentive for the Iraqis. But what if even then Iraqis cannot accomplish the goals we have set for them? Can we then declare that, by establishing the Iraqi army and helping Iraq elect and establish its government, we have done all that honor requires?

No, we can't. Both honor and our vital national interest require establishing conditions in Iraq that will allow the government to consolidate and maintain civil peace and good governance. It doesn't matter how many "trained and ready" Iraqi soldiers there are, nor how many provinces are nominally under Iraqi control. If America withdraws its forces before setting the conditions for the success of the Iraqi government, we will have failed in our mission and been defeated in the eyes of our enemies. We will have dishonored ourselves.

Have there been mistakes? Sure. Does that justify making another, bigger mistake? No, it does not. The fact of the matter is that abandoning the Iraqis will be a defeat for America, not for George Bush alone. The fact is that if we leave a disaster behind us, we'll end up having to clean up much worse disasters in the future.

The comparison is often made between Iraq and Vietnam. One implication is that just as it was possible to lose Vietnam and still win the Cold War, so it is acceptable to lose Iraq. But in the Cold War, Vietnam was a sideshow. Iraq is in the heart of the Muslim world and at the center of the struggle against radical Islamism.

It is also worth keeping in mind that as indirect consequences of America's defeat in Vietnam, the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, the Sandinistas seized power in Nicaragua and Ayatollah Khomeini seized Tehran and American hostages. The "decent interval" between our withdrawal and the collapse of South Vietnam didn't help. Neither will the implausible deniability the Pentagon is now trying to establish in Iraq.

Kagan reminds people that past mistakes are not justification for making another, more serious mistake. He's right.

Some Ideas

Even though I don't agree with David Ignatius all that often, I will give him credit for at least not following the rest of the mindless media on Iraq. In this case, rather than a mindless whine about pulling the troops out, Ignatius at least admits that there are severe penalties to doing so. Both for the Iraqi people and for the US. Now he does not see any way out that is a s success, but at least he admits that there are better ways and much, much worse ways. And he points out that the partisan screeching has to stop - at once - or things are going to get much, much worse.

A starting point is to understand what the United States is actually doing in Iraq now. A strategy of phased withdrawal is already underway — on paper. The latest affirmation was yesterday's proposal by Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad and Gen. George Casey of a security timetable to transfer control to the Iraqis in 12 to 18 months. The plan envisions a "national compact" among Iraq's different factions. By the end of this year, they would agree on terms for demobilizing militias, sharing oil revenue and easing de-Baathification rules. It all looks sensible — on paper.

The problem is that this approach hasn't been working. Since January Khalilzad has been prodding Iraqi leaders in the Green Zone to make precisely these compromises. But out in the real world, the hopes for reconciliation have fallen apart, for a simple but terrifying reason: Iraq's Sunnis and Shiites are so enraged that they have stopped believing compromise is possible.

How will withdrawal plans deal with the reality of this sectarian hatred? The administration's answer has been to try to build up the Iraqi military so it can impose a monopoly of force. But that hasn't been working, either. The Iraqi troops simply can't match the brutality of the insurgents and death squads. The U.S. military can do the job, but the cost in American lives is becoming unacceptable. If we are serious about a withdrawal timetable, we will have to accept Iraqi solutions, ragged and violent though they may be.

In the weeks after the election, the debate in Washington will focus on two promising exit ramps. But it's important not to attach unrealistic hopes to either one.

Ignatius is the second writer I have seen flying the trial balloon of getting Syria ans Iran involved. This is not, I think, at all a good solution. Those two countries are the wrong choice entirely. But I would think it is time, and past time, for some of the other nations in the Middle East to start paying attention to the fact that an unstable Iraq is a disaster for them. Expanding Iranian influence in the area is a disaster for the Saudis and for the Jordanians and for the Turks, etc.

Right now, the Islamists are waging an all out information war against the US. The Western media is cheerfully cooperating. It is time for that "mutually beneficial spiral of death" to stop. The only ones who can stop it now are the media themselves. Right now our own partisan politics are playing along with the propaganda the Islamists are pumping out and the media is over-hyping. That has to stop.