10 Tuesday Jun 2003
Posted in Washington Times
The Washington Times
The lesson of the Bush tax-cutting record is that what matters is structural change and political leverage down the line. What matters not so much are the projected dollar “costs” of the tax cuts and, accordingly, the deficit.
03 Tuesday Jun 2003
Posted in Washington Times
The Washington Times
Senior French officialdom now has a consistent message about the diplomatic breakdown prior to the Iraq war. What happened was that in January, French officials first realized that the United States was determined to go war to oust Saddam Hussein. The United States would accept no diplomatic resolution pertaining to the disarmament of Saddam, as called for in U.N. Security Council Resolution 1441.
27 Tuesday May 2003
Posted in Washington Times
The Washington Times
The Senate voted earlier this month to approve admission of seven Central and Eastern European countries from the former Soviet bloc into NATO, the transatlantic alliance. The vote was 96-0, which was testimony not only to the strength of the political case that has been laid out over the years in behalf of a whole, free and secure Europe, but also, no one doubts, to the diplomatic support the United States received from the aspirant countries in the debate that preceded the Iraq war.
13 Tuesday May 2003
Posted in Washington Times
The Washington Times
We have now had the first shakeup in postwar Iraq reconstruction, key changes of top officials mere weeks after they began their tasks. The critical question has always been whether the United States is committed to genuine liberalization in Iraq. That’s because liberalization offers the only hope for a Greater Middle East free of such menaces to the United States and the West as al Qaeda, the Taliban and Saddam Hussein.
06 Tuesday May 2003
Posted in Washington Times
The Washington Times
Let’s go over the possibilities on the question of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Their supposed existence constituted the principal legal rationale for going to war [to disarm Saddam in accordance with U.N. Security Council resolutions] and a major part [but not all] of the strategic case. What would be the implications of failing to turn any up?
29 Tuesday Apr 2003
Posted in Washington Times
The Washington Times
I never quite agreed with George F. Will’s famous line that if there had been television at the time of the Civil War, America would be two countries today. Nevertheless, he perfectly captured a sentiment that is all the more pronounced now that there are not just three television networks, but multiple 24-hour cable channels, talk radio, as well as near-infinite Internet Web sites offering nearly simultaneous discussion of current events. The sentiment is his own exasperation, and in the case of Iraq and before that, Afghanistan and Kosovo, I share it.
22 Tuesday Apr 2003
Posted in Washington Times
The Washington Times
Down at the bottom of the front pages over the past few weeks, well below the war news, was the ongoing story of how President Bush’s tax cut proposal was faring on Capitol Hill. The administration, the story line ran, did fairly well in the House but ran into serious trouble in the Senate, where the defection of a couple Republicans enabled Democrats to cut the size of the tax cut essentially in half.
15 Tuesday Apr 2003
Posted in Washington Times
The Washington Times
Three weeks from the onset of hostilities until the fall of Baghdad has to come as a relief. The reason to pursue “regime change” in Iraq was never that it would be an easy target for regime change, even though some people thought the military action would proceed swiftly to a certain conclusion, namely victory. But, even forecasts of victory made room for any number of nasty sideshow scenarios, from hundreds of burning oil wells, to chemical attacks by Scud on Israel, to a shooting war between Turkey and the Kurds in Northern Iraq to terror attacks in the region and beyond [i.e., in Europe or the United States] by Saddam’s covert operatives. Very rational but unmaterialized fears, all of them. If it wouldn’t upset the Europeans so, one might even be tempted to say “thank God.”
14 Monday Apr 2003
Posted in Weekly Standard
The special difficulties – and urgency – of freedom for a tyrannized people.
View this article at The Weekly Standard
FROM THE CEASELESS and often disgraceful efforts to tease meaning out of the first two weeks of the Iraq war, two serious lessons stand out. The first is a reacquaintance with the contours of modern tyranny. Saddam Hussein is not merely a dictator; he is the head of a police state administered by an elite cadre whose principal means of control from the top down is terror. The second is a reminder of the difficulty of the larger project of which the war in Iraq is a part: the liberalization of the Middle East and the integration of Islamic society there into the modern world.
No, Saddam did not fall instantly, his military forces and his regime collapsing into shambles. Nor were United States and British forces initially greeted as liberators by smiling Iraqis waving American flags. Iraqi resistance was stiffer than anticipated, with fighters in some skirmishes holding out to the last man despite superior U.S. firepower. Irregular resistance took the form of suicide bombing attacks and fake surrenders. And more U.S. forces had to be deployed in preparation for the assault on Baghdad.
The gloom that attended these developments and the unseemly glee with which they were seized upon by the Bush administration’s opponents are clear indications that somewhere along the line, the hope of a swift Iraqi collapse–which one might expect to be fairly widely shared among all those not actually rooting for Saddam–did indeed become an expectation of swift collapse. We need to take a serious look at what gave rise to that expectation and why it was wrong.
10 Thursday Apr 2003
Posted in Weekly Standard
The case for civilian control over the military and the need for reform in the intelligence community.
View this article at The Weekly Standard
THE FOLLOWING are selected quotations (approximately two-thirds of the total) included by Seymour M. Hersh in his New Yorker article Offense and Defense (cover date April 7, 2003, posted on the New Yorker website March 31, 2003, ten days before the fall of Baghdad):
Tod Lindberg 