The Free Thinker

This seems classy:

Then, in early 2003, the decision was made to wage a second war in Iraq. The wrenching debate over the Iraq War is well-known and need not be repeated here. It is enough to say that for the next six years, the Iraq War drew the dominant share of our troops, our resources, our diplomacy, and our national attention — and that the decision to go into Iraq caused substantial rifts between America and much of the world.

Today, after extraordinary costs, we are bringing the Iraq war to a responsible end. We will remove our combat brigades from Iraq by the end of next summer, and all of our troops by the end of 2011. That we are doing so is a testament to the character of our men and women in uniform. Thanks to their courage, grit and perseverance, we have given Iraqis a chance to shape their future, and we are successfully leaving Iraq to its people.

But while we have achieved hard-earned milestones in Iraq...

Obama has used crude language in the past, calling Iraq "rash" and "dumb." Hopefully he's grown out of that for good. Of course, he later says:

I opposed the war in Iraq precisely because I believe that we must exercise restraint in the use of military force and always consider the long-term consequences of our actions.

But of course we did "exercise restraint in the use of military force" and "consider the long-term consequences of our actions" in the run-up to and throughout the Iraq war.  We waited over a year between Bush's first signals of possible war and the decision to invade, as we cultivated international support.  During the occupation our military adhered, with some minor lapses such as Abu Ghraib, to civilized norms of conduct.  And the Bush administration had a very clear and publicly proclaimed vision for what it hoped the "long-term consequences of our actions" would be, a vision which has since been vindicated by events.

This is an unfortunate line:

It is easy to forget that when this war began, we were united — bound together by the fresh memory of a horrific attack and by the determination to defend our homeland and the values we hold dear. I refuse to accept the notion that we cannot summon that unity again.

"I refuse to accept the notion..."  Too bad, because the evidence points that way.  That is, points to the country not uniting behind Obama's plan.  Obama should probably not refuse to accept "notions" that are obvious truths.  But also-- and this is important-- the post-9/11 unity was not a good thing.  Democracies are disputatious, full of debate and disagreement; we should not wish that away.  A sinister political correctness set in after 9/11, when Le Monde was writing "we are all Americans," which made it socially hazardous, for example, to admit that while the 9/11 hijackers were misguided, they probably deserve to be described as "brave."  We don't want that shell-shocked, self-defensive, censorious unity back.  And President Obama shouldn't feel the need for it, either.  He should do what he thinks is right, and not mind too much it provokes some fierce opposition.  I'm not convinced that he is right, but I'm willing to root for his Afghan strategy to work.  Just don't try to "summon" me to any "unity."

Mark Steyn:

Last month, during the Vatican’s Easter vigil, Magdi Allam, the deputy editor of Corriere della Sera, converted from Islam to Catholicism. And not for the first time I was reminded of an old joke I modified for America Alone:

A ten-dollar bill is in the center of the crossroads. To the north, there’s Santa Claus. To the west, the Tooth Fairy. To the east, a radical Muslim. To the south, a moderate Muslim. Who reaches the ten-dollar bill first?

Answer: The radical Muslim. All the others are mythical creatures.

Signor Allam is merely the latest mythical “moderate Muslim”. There are, to be sure, millions of Muslims who just want to get on with their lives, raise their families, do their jobs, get a nice house in the suburbs, and practice as much or as little Islam as they can get away with. But there is no “moderate Islam” to provide any institutional support for such individual Muslim moderation, and there is an acute shortage of western Muslims who can plausibly demonstrate to their coreligionists a viable balance between Islam and the western world, and who can act as a counterweight both to the explicitly jihadist radicals and to the lavishly endowed Muslim lobby groups who more discreetly share their aims. Magdi Allam was a key figure in the “Secular Islam” summit held in Florida a year ago, and one of several prominent signatories of the “St Petersburg Declaration” issued at its conclusion. He was by that point being reviled by Tariq Ramadan as a Copt – ie, a Christian – which wasn’t true: On the eve of his 40th birthday, he accompanied his mother on pilgrimage to Mecca. Yet he has now, and very publicly, found Christ, and so retrospectively confirmed Tariq Ramadan’s point – that Magdi Allam was never a credible model for 21st century Islam.

And so it goes. Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a phenomenally brave woman but she is not a “moderate Muslim”: she is an atheist. Irshad Manji is a brilliant dissecter of Islam’s pathologies but she is not a “moderate Muslim”: she is a lesbian and, thus, to almost all her co-religionists, cannot be any kind of Muslim. Dr Wafa Sultan is the Californian psychiatrist who at huge personal risk intellectually clobbered an A-list Sunni scholar live on Al Jazeera, crushed every one of his arguments, and yet nevertheless lost. Why? Here’s the answer:

“I am not a Christian, a Muslim, or a Jew,” Dr Sultan told her interrogator. “I am a secular human being who does not believe in the supernatural…”

“If you are a heretic,” scoffed Dr Ibrahim al-Khouli, “there is no point in rebuking you, since you have blasphemed against Islam, the Prophet, and the Koran.”

In their debate, Wafa Sultan won every point but lost the match. Her innumerable aces only confirmed her opponent’s argument – that to embrace “modernity” (in the western sense) is to lose your faith: Dr Sultan is an incisive intelligent rational woman – and she is no longer Muslim. Signor Allam held out longer than most before concluding that the intellectual straddle required of a “moderate Muslim” is beyond even Larry Craig’s wide stance: “I asked myself how it was possible that those who, like me, sincerely and boldly called for a ‘moderate Islam’,” he said, “ended up being sentenced to death in the name of Islam on the basis of the Koran. I was forced to see that, beyond the contingency of the phenomenon of Islamic extremism and terrorism that has appeared on a global level, the root of evil is inherent in an Islam that is physiologically violent and historically conflictive.” The most “extraordinary and important encounter” in his decision to abandon Islam and embrace Christianity was the Pope’s address at Regensburg – the one that prompted Mr Allam’s (former) co-religionists to demonstrate outside Westminster Abbey calling for the Pontiff’s beheading. The newly baptized Christian knows that he will be targeted for murder, but he was already targeted for murder as a “moderate Muslim”, and, as he sees it, it is better to die for truth than for a tortured contradiction.

I'm not sure whether Steyn is right or not, but the claim is certainly consistent with what I've heard about Islamic law, and its political incorrectness readily explains why you don't hear this kind of thing much in mainstream discourse or from experts.  Joyless Moralist thinks it's possible to dispute the case for Christians to support religious freedom; to me that case seems overwhelming; but surely JM wouldn't deny that it's at least tenable, or suggest that a Christian's support for religious freedom might call into question the sincerity of his Christianity.  It may be that in Islam this just isn't the case.  Muhammad said apostasy = death.  What more can be said?

"Where has the world headed after 1989?" (Ian Buruma):

The way it looks now, liberals, in the "progressive" American sense of the word, may actually have been among the losers of 1989. Social democrats were always despised by communists, and vice versa. But many socialdemocratic ideals, rooted in Marxist notions of social justice and equality, were thrown out, like the proverbial baby, with the bathwater of communism.

This process was already underway before the fall of the Berlin Wall, with the free-market radicalism of the Thatcher-Reagan era. Society, Margaret Thatcher once famously declared, doesn't exist. Only individuals and families counted. It was everyone for themselves.

For many people, this had the ring of liberation - from overregulated markets, overbearing trade unions, and class privilege. That is why it was called neo-liberalism . But free-market radicalism undermined the role of the state in building a better, more just, and more equal society. Neoliberals are not so much interested in justice as in greater efficiency, more productivity, the bottom line.

At the same time that neo-liberals were slashing and burning their way through old social-democratic arrangements , the left was dissipating its energies on cultural politics , "identity," and ideological multiculturalism. Democratic idealism was once the domain of the left, including social democrats and liberals. But, in the late twentieth century, it became more important to many leftists to save "Third World" culture, no matter how barbaric, from "neocolonialism ," than to support equality and democracy. People on the left would defend brutal dictators (Castro, Mao, Pol Pot, Khomeini, et al) simply because they opposed "Western imperialism."

As a result, all politics that were derived, no matter how loosely, from Marxism, lost credibility, and finally died in 1989. This was naturally a disaster for communists and socialists , but also for social democrats, for they had lost an ideological basis for their idealism. And, without idealism, politics becomes a form of accounting, a management of purely material interests.

This explains why Italians, and later Thais, chose business tycoons to lead their countries. They hoped that men who managed to accumulate so much personal wealth could do the same for their voters.

Yet the rhetoric of idealism has not quite disappeared. It merely shifted from left to right. Once the left abandoned the language of internationalism - democratic revolution, national liberation, and so forth - it was taken up by neoconservatives . Their promotion of American military force as the strong arm of democracy may have been misguided, crude, arrogant, ignorant, naïve , and deeply dangerous, but it was indisputably idealistic .

It was none of those things except the last. It was not naive, but shrewd; not crude, but subtle and farsighted; not ignorant, but based on a rich understanding both of the Middle East and, more broadly, of human nature and the meaning of political liberty; not arrogant, but humble enough to do for the other guy what we'd like him to do for us if we were in his situation; not misguided, but vindicated by the event.  It was not even dangerous relative to the alternative, for in the long run allowing totalitarian dictators who owe their rise to the West to oppress their people and defy international law is more dangerous than the short-run risks that were involved in the Iraq War.  But yes, it was idealistic.  And it is because it was idealistic rather than "realist" (i.e., amoralist) that it was shrewd, subtle, humble, courageous, and successful.  To try to deny or marginalize ideas and ideals is to rule out the existence, ab initio, of the main factor that matters in international affairs.  To think straight is to have an ideology.

Hillary Clinton:

The administration is making its intentions quite clear. Over the weekend, top Obama administration officials went on television to "lower the bar for success" in Afghanistan, stressing that the administration is seeking an exit strategy and holds "no illusions" (Fox News).

"We have no illusions. This is not the prior days when people would come on your show and talk about how we were going to help the Afghans build a modern democracy and build a more functioning state and do all of these wonderful things," Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton told ABC's "This Week."

I wonder whether she could actually come up with quotes from the Bush administration to back up this implicit charge.  Of course, it might be smart, in a Machiavellian way, to claim that we were planning to build an Afghan democracy even if privately we had little hope that the task was possible.  But I don't recall the Bush administration putting too much about democracy in Afghanistan as a war objective.  The emphasis was on democracy in Iraq, where the conditions were always far more favorable to the emergence of democracy, as events have proven.  Even if-- and this scenario doesn't seem very likely-- democracy in Iraq ultimately fails, its emergence has had enough success so far to put paid to any notion that democratizing Iraq was a pipe dream.  That, by the way, is why it was always backwards to say that Afghanistan was the good war and Iraq the dumb one.

"Barack Obama criticizes internet censorship at meeting in China" (The Guardian):

Barack Obama criticised internet censorship as he spoke to students in Shanghai today and praised freedom of expression and political participation.

The US president told the gathering of 400 young people that his country regarded such liberties as universal values. But he stopped short of direct reference to human rights abuses in China, as some activists had urged. Aides have said that Obama, who arrived tonight in the capital, Beijing, last night, will raise them in his meetings with Chinese leaders.

He will hold a joint press conference with President Hu Jintao and visit the Forbidden City on a brief sightseeing break in the bilateral discussions. The two men met for dinner tonight.

Sinologists in the US have long encouraged Washington to reach out to the Chinese public, as well as its leaders. But yesterday's meeting underlined the difficulties of doing so.

The event had been billed as a town hall-style meeting, but Chinese officials rejected US proposals that 1,000 people should attend and that it should be broadcast live nationwide.

Instead, it was streamed on the White House site, broadcast live on a local Shanghai television channel and transmitted in text form on state news agency Xinhua's website. Most Chinese citizens will have seen only brief extracts – not including the remarks on censorship.

This is a new departure for a president who has so far been inclined to appease dictators (Ahmadinejad, Putin-Medvedev) and give democrats and human rights the cold shoulder (the Green Revolution, the Dalai Lama, Honduran constitutionalists, Poles and Czechs wanting missile shields, Georgia).  Hopefully this marks a change of direction for Obama foreign policy.

"Mister Tough Guy" (Mark Steyn):

Benjamin Disraeli’s most famous advice to aspiring politicians was: “Never complain and never explain.” For the greatest orator of our time, a man who makes Churchill, Lincoln, and Henry V at Agincourt look like first-round rejects on Orating with the Stars, Barack Obama seems to have pretty much given up on the explaining side. He tried it with health care with speech after speech after exclusive interview for months on end and the more he explained the more unpopular the whole racket got. So he declared that the time for explaining is over, and it’s time to sign on or else. 

Meanwhile, to take the other half of the Disraeli equation, Obama and his officials and their beleaguered band of surrogates never stop complaining. If you express concerns about government health care, they complain about all these “racists” and “domestic terrorists” obstructing his agenda. If you wonder why the president can’t seem to find time in his hectic schedule of international-awards acceptance speeches to make a decision about Afghanistan, they complain that it’s not his fault he “inherited” all these problems. And, if you wonder why his “green jobs” czar is a Communist 9/11 truther and his National Endowment for the Arts guy is leaning on grant recipients to produce Soviet-style propaganda extolling Obama policies, they complain about Fox News...

The most recent whine — the anti-Fox campaign — is, apart from anything else, unbecoming to the office. President Obama is the chief of state of one of the oldest free societies in the world, but his official White House website runs teasers such as: "For even more Fox lies, check out the latest ‘Truth-O-Meter.’” It gives off the air of somebody only marginally less paranoid than this week’s president-for-life in some basket-case banana republic ranting on the palace balcony because his interior security chief isn’t doing a fast enough job of disappearing his enemies.

At a superficial level, this looks tough. A famously fair-minded centrist told me the other day that he’d been taken aback by some of the near parodic examples of leftie radicalism discovered in the White House in recent weeks. I don’t know why he’d be surprised. When a man has spent his entire adult life in the “community organized” precincts of Chicago, it should hardly be news that much of his Rolodex is made up of either loons or thugs. The trick is identifying who falls into which category. Anita Dunn, the communications director commending Mao Zedong as a role model to graduating high school students, would seem an obvious loon. But the point about Mao, as Charles Krauthammer noted, is that he was the most ruthless imposer of mass conformity in modern history: In Mao’s China, everyone wore the same clothes. So when Communications Commissar Mao Ze Dunn starts berating Fox News for not getting into the same Maosketeer costumes as the rest of the press corps, you begin to see why the Chairman might appeal to her as a favorite “political philosopher.”

So the troika of Dunn, Emanuel, and Axelrod were dispatched to the Sunday talk shows to lay down the law. We all know the lines from The Untouchables — “the Chicago way,” don’t bring a knife to a gun fight — and, given the “pay czar”’s instant contract-gutting of executive compensation and the demonization of the health insurers and much else, it’s easy to look on the 44th president as an old-style Cook County operator: You wanna do business in this town, you gotta do it through me. You can take the community organizer out of Chicago, but you can’t take the Chicago out of the community organizer.

The trouble is it isn’t tough, not where toughness counts. Who are the real “Untouchables” here? In Moscow, it’s Putin and his gang, contemptuously mocking U.S. officials even when (as with Secretary Clinton) they’re still on Russian soil. In Tehran, it’s Ahmadinejad and the mullahs openly nuclearizing as ever feebler warnings and woozier deadlines from the Great Powers come and go. Even Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize is an exquisite act of condescension from the Norwegians, a dog biscuit and a pat on the head to the American hyperpower for agreeing to spay itself into a hyperpoodle. We were told that Obama would use “soft power” and “smart diplomacy” to get his way. Russia and Iran are big players with global ambitions, but Obama’s soft power is so soft it doesn’t even work its magic on a client regime in Kabul whose leaders’ very lives are dependent on Western troops. If Obama’s “smart diplomacy” is so smart that even Hamid Karzai ignores it with impunity, why should anyone else pay attention?

The strange disparity between the heavy-handed community organization at home and the ever-cockier untouchables abroad risks making the commander-in-chief look like a weenie — like “President Pantywaist,” as Britain’s Daily Telegraph has taken to calling him.

The Chicago way? Don’t bring a knife to a gun fight? In Iran, this administration won’t bring a knife to a nuke fight. In Eastern Europe, it won’t bring missile defense to a nuke fight. In Sudan, it won’t bring a knife to a machete fight.

But, if you’re doing the overnight show on WZZZ-AM, Mister Tough Guy’s got your number.

Apologies to National Review for quoting almost the whole article, but Steyn is so funny it's a shame to leave anything out, and I wanted to add my punchline. The difference between Bush and Obama is that since Bush possessed a faculty for moral reasoning, he could be tough on really bad guys abroad even if they didn't harm him much personally, whereas perhaps no leader in the history of the world has tolerated such ferocious criticism as George W. Bush while abstaining completely from the use of power to suppress it. Obama, whose ideology seems to be narcissism, can evaluate various actors only by the degree to which they threaten his own popularity. By that standard, Fox News is objectively more dangerous than Putin or Ahmadinejad.

The Putinization of American Politics

"Fox Wars: The Obama Administration Wants to Delegitimize Any Significant Dissent" (Charles Krauthammer, 10/23/2009):

Rahm Emanuel once sent a dead fish to a live pollster. Now he’s put a horse’s head in Roger Ailes’s bed.

Not very subtle. And not very smart. Ailes doesn’t scare easily.

The White House has declared war on Fox News. White House communications director Anita Dunn said that Fox is “opinion journalism masquerading as news.” Patting rival networks on the head for their authenticity (read: docility), senior adviser David Axelrod declared Fox “not really a news station.” And Chief of Staff Emanuel told (warned?) the other networks not to “be led (by) and following Fox.”

Meaning? If Fox runs a story critical of the administration — from exposing White House czar Van Jones as a loony 9/11 “truther” to exhaustively examining the mathematical chicanery and hidden loopholes in proposed health-care legislation — the other news organizations should think twice before following the lead.

The signal to corporations is equally clear: You might have dealings with a federal behemoth that not only disburses more than $3 trillion every year but is extending its reach ever deeper into private industry — finance, autos, soon health care and energy. Think twice before you run an ad on Fox...

Fox and its viewers (numbering more than CNN’s and MSNBC’s combined) need no defense. Defend Fox compared to whom? To CNN — which recently unleashed its fact-checkers on a Saturday Night Live skit mildly critical of President Obama, but did no checking of a grotesquely racist remark CNN falsely attributed to Rush Limbaugh?

Defend Fox from whom? Fox’s flagship 6 o’clock evening news out of Washington (hosted by Bret Baier, formerly by Brit Hume) is, to my mind, the best hour of news on television. (Definitive evidence: My mother watches it even on the odd night when I’m not on.) Defend Fox from the likes of Anita Dunn? She’s been attacked for extolling Mao’s political philosophy in a speech at a high-school graduation. But the critics miss the surpassing stupidity of her larger point: She was invoking Mao as support and authority for her impassioned plea for individuality and trusting one’s own choices. Mao as champion of individuality? Mao, the greatest imposer of mass uniformity in modern history, creator of a slave society of a near-billion worker bees wearing Mao suits and waving the Little Red Book?

The White House communications director cannot be trusted to address high schoolers without uttering inanities. She and her cohorts are now to instruct the country on truth and objectivity?

Nationalization of major companies, attempts to muscle out critics in the press, efforts to rewrite history in favor of mass-murdering Communist tyrants... Wow. Note that Obama and Putin go after TV rather than print media; the National Review is safe. It's OK to have small freethinking cliques, but you can't give the other guy access to public opinion. By the way, I made a break with CNN last fall. The last straw was a story last October about people losing money in non-FDIC-insured banks, which was all fine up to the sting: they mentioned that McCain's nephew worked in one of these banks, or something. It was such a low blow. A mere pundit would have been ashamed to make such an ad hominem attack on a candidate's family. I would have been ashamed to see freerepublic.com sink to that level. That was the end. I will simply never watch CNN. I don't think it should be shown in public places, but it doesn't hurt me, because I can look the other way, and I always have an iPod to drown out the sounds. I never watched Fox News either but now I feel guilty about that. If I want to keep my First Amendment freedoms, shouldn't I support the network that is standing up for them, even if I don't like it?

From The Moscow Times:

In his speech before the United Nations General Assembly last week, U.S. President Barack Obama said we are entering a new historical era. He declared that the United States would cease taking unilateral actions and called on all people of all nations to join together in combating the challenges facing the world. Obama said we need the “cooperative effort of the whole world.” His foreign policy leitmotif has become the call to cooperate based on shared values. He made similar appeals during visits to Prague, Cairo and Moscow...

A recent survey by the Levada Center revealed that only 2.1 percent of all Russians consider the United States a friend, but 50.2 percent see Belarus as one, 17.6 see China that way and 17.4 percent consider Germany a friend. By contrast, 61.8 percent of respondents considered Georgia as Russia’s enemy, with the United States in second place at 45.4 percent.

The survey also found that 50.4 percent of Russians had either a “basically bad” or “very bad” attitude toward the United States, with only 1.4 percent holding a “very good” attitude and 34 percent feeling “basically good” toward Washington. What is most surprising to me is that Russians’ attitudes toward the United States have actually worsened during Obama’s first year in office compared with what they were during the administration of former U.S. President George W. Bush, Russia’s heretofore-favorite whipping boy.

"His foreign policy leitmotif has become the call to cooperate based on shared values."  Wow.  It's the most damning summary I've read yet, precisely because it's so decorous and superficially favorable.  How provincial, how uncurious, how narcissistic, how trapped in an echo chamber of admirers do you have to be not to realize that much of the world doesn't share the values that America has traditionally stood for.  If we want to live by and promote values like freedom, democracy, and peace, that will sometimes bring us into conflict with others.  It would certainly bring us into conflict (though well short of war) with Putin's Russia.

Russians are right to continue mistrusting us.  Obama may wish to conduct an amoral foreign policy for the next four years, but he can't commit America permanently to ignoring democratic freedoms and appeasing aggressors.  The first order of business for the next Republican president will be to apologize for Obama's apologies and for shabby treatment of our allies in eastern Europe and elsewhere.  Then get back to leading the Free World.

The Limits of American Power

"McChrystal: More forces or 'mission failure'" (Washington Post):

The top U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan warns in an urgent, confidential assessment of the war that he needs more forces within the next year and bluntly states that without them, the eight-year conflict "will likely result in failure," according to a copy of the 66-page document obtained by The Washington Post.

Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal says emphatically: "Failure to gain the initiative and reverse insurgent momentum in the near-term (next 12 months) -- while Afghan security capacity matures -- risks an outcome where defeating the insurgency is no longer possible."

His assessment was sent to Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates on Aug. 30 and is now being reviewed by President Obama and his national security team.

McChrystal concludes the document's five-page Commander's Summary on a note of muted optimism: "While the situation is serious, success is still achievable."

But he repeatedly warns that without more forces and the rapid implementation of a genuine counterinsurgency strategy, defeat is likely. McChrystal describes an Afghan government riddled with corruption and an international force undermined by tactics that alienate civilians.

He provides extensive new details about the Taliban insurgency, which he calls a muscular and sophisticated enemy that uses modern propaganda and systematically reaches into Afghanistan's prisons to recruit members and even plan operations.

McChrystal's assessment is one of several options the White House is considering. His plan could intensify a national debate in which leading Democratic lawmakers have expressed reluctance about committing more troops to an increasingly unpopular war. Obama said last week that he will not decide whether to send more troops until he has "absolute clarity about what the strategy is going to be."

'Absolute clarity' sums up in one neat phrase what Obama has shown he can't do...  But it gets even more depressing when you look at the details of McChrystal's critique:

The assessment offers an unsparing critique of the failings of the Afghan government, contending that official corruption is as much of a threat as the insurgency to the mission of the International Security Assistance Force, or ISAF, as the U.S.-led NATO coalition is widely known.

"The weakness of state institutions, malign actions of power-brokers, widespread corruption and abuse of power by various officials, and ISAF's own errors, have given Afghans little reason to support their government," McChrystal says.

The result has been a "crisis of confidence among Afghans," he writes. "Further, a perception that our resolve is uncertain makes Afghans reluctant to align with us against the insurgents."

McChrystal is equally critical of the command he has led since June 15. The key weakness of ISAF, he says, is that it is not aggressively defending the Afghan population. "Pre-occupied with protection of our own forces, we have operated in a manner that distances us -- physically and psychologically -- from the people we seek to protect. . . . The insurgents cannot defeat us militarily; but we can defeat ourselves."

McChrystal continues: "Afghan social, political, economic, and cultural affairs are complex and poorly understood. ISAF does not sufficiently appreciate the dynamics in local communities, nor how the insurgency, corruption, incompetent officials, power-brokers, and criminality all combine to affect the Afghan population."

McChrystal's frankness and demand for a rethink is encouraging.  But 'weakness of state institutions, malign actions of power-brokers, [and] widespread corruption' is not the sort of thing the US-led coalition can do much about.  Nor can we create 'appreciation [of] the dynamics in local communities' out of thin air.  And I presume there's a trade-off between force protection and protecting the population, at least in the short run, in which case McChrystal's strategy implicitly calls for accepting more casualties.

McChrystal is saying to double down or get out.  What Americans seem to want, and what our broader geopolitical needs demand, is some kind of middle way, to try to achieve some kind of peace and avoid outright abandonment of our allies in Afghanistan, without committing a lot more resources to a project that even then is likely to fail, and which is really very marginal to our national security or to the values that we want to promote globally (since democracy in Afghanistan seems extremely unlikely). 

What we need ten times more urgently than success in Afghanistan is to get the Russians out of South Ossetia and Abkhazia.  Every day that the Russia's conquests in the South Caucasus stand, international law is eroded.  We need to get back to basics: make the world safe for democracy, Georgian democracy in particular.

"Adding Fuel to the Russian Fire" (The Corner):

President Obama’s decision not to deploy an anti-missile system in Poland and the Czech Republic is intended to improve U.S.–Russian relations. In fact, it will make them worse.

The missiles were never a threat to Russia. This has been acknowledged by Russia’s own experts. Russia’s ICBM force is designed to attack the U.S. over the North Pole and the missiles intended for deployment in Poland are too slow to catch them and designed for a totally different purpose. The constant anti-western propaganda around this issue was referred to in the Soviet Union as “information for fools.” It served to consolidate the support of the population around a corrupt leadership by directing its frustrations against an external foe.

Russia opposed the missile deployment for a completely different reason. Had they been deployed on the territory of the former Warsaw Pact they would have demonstrated that this region was once and for all part of the defense architecture of the West. By using propaganda to induce Obama to back down, Russia has divided the NATO alliance into those countries where Russia has a veto over deployments and those where it does not with serious negative implications for the cohesion of the West.

The Obama administration undoubtedly hopes that the next step will be Russian cooperation over Iran. But having achieved a major strategic victory at no cost, the Russians are not likely to take steps that would alienate the Iranians and strengthen the West. Support for Iran gives Russia weight in international politics because, in the absence of any willingness on the part of the West to penalize Russia, it compels worried Western countries constantly to court the Kremlin. At the same time, a corrupt and criminalized regime whose stability depends on the price of oil may actually welcome tension in the Middle East capable of raising oil prices to stratospheric levels.

Officials in Washington have insisted that the decision to cancel the missile deployment was dictated by a new understanding of the threat posed by Iran. This is not the way it is being seen in Russia where officials are delighted by the demonstration of Russian strength which they think it represents. Russian news agencies recently reported that Russia will detain Georgian ships off Abkhazia in legally recognized Georgian territorial waters. As Russian “strength” becomes more self confident we can expect more such reactions to Russian success in the months ahead.

Exactly right. It's hard to tell whether this step is more stupid or more disgraceful. Why should anyone be our ally if we're such unprincipled appeasers as this? For shame!

Does Obama not understand that all Russia's demands in eastern Europe are utterly illegitimate? He can't be stupid enough not to see that, can he?