There are so many excellent points in here, and if I started quoting the good parts I’d end up with the whole thing, so I’ll include a snippet of the conclusion, and then you need to go and read the whole thing and forward it to your friends and family, especially the ones who still think invading Iraq was a good idea, or that were are well served by the current Administration.

We are not strengthening domestic defenses against terrorism adequately—nor pursuing true global terrorists vigorously—because of the enormous financial drain and military distraction of Iraq. That onerous burden diverts money from causes that could in fact make the world safer.

The war in Iraq is increasing the number of terrorists and the instances of terrorism world-wide because our administration has a misunderstanding of the true nature and causes of this violence.

Because of this same lack of understanding, we are not laying the diplomatic and economic groundwork necessary to reduce terrorism in the future.

Acts of oppression and occupation, the tinder of terrorism, will not quietly disappear. We have the opportunity to make a difference, especially in those areas of the world where population growth soars, economic equality worsens, and the seeds of extremism take root.

Wow. As Matthew Yglesias points out, you have to say something really, really stupid in order to fall on your face while criticzing Thomas Friedman. But Martin Peretz, the co-owner and editor-in-chief of the New Republic, has managed to do the impossible, and in truly spectacular fashion:

Poor Tom Friedman. He is looking for a Muslim Martin Luther King. There is none, Tom. If one were living on earth, they’d break his windows. Imprison him. Or kill him. Finished. And no, there also won’t be that nice banner Tom imagines: “No Shiites, No Sunnis. We are all children of the Prophet Mohammad.” How can anyone dissolve the bitter sectarian enmity of 13 centuries? You have to read this piece by Tom. You really have to. It’s called “Martin Luther Al-King,” and it’s on the op-ed page of Wednesday’s Times. It’s desperate and pointless.

As Yglesias points out, Martin Luther King Jr. was imprisoned and killed right here in America. Seriously, exactly how brain dead do you have to be to say something like this? Futhermore, it wasn’t like King was confronting some recent tussle over zoning laws, but over 500 years of slavery and its aftermath.

It pains me to say this, and I will never forgive TNR for making it necessary for me to do so, but: Friedman is basically right. A charismatic figure that can appeal to multiple sides of the conflict, in a country where most people want peace, would be very, very helpful. He probably would be killed, but so was Gandhi and King.

The author, Jay Carney, starts off with this head scratcher:

When George W. Bush takes the podium in the House tonight, he will peer into an audience of scowling, hostile faces. He will see lawmakers made bitter by the failure of his Iraq gambit, and by his call to risk compounding that failure by adding more U.S. troops to the lethal sectarian stew in Baghdad. He will see members of both the House and the Senate seething over his miscalculations, his six years of contempt for the Congress and his legacy of debt, bloated government and partisan animosity.

Then he’ll look at the Democrats, who will be smiling.

The idea that Congressional Republicans would be seething over Bush’s “miscalculations, his six years of contempt for the Congress and his legacy of debt, bloated government and partisan animosity” is absurd, as each one of those things is almost entirely the fault of the Republican Congress. Some hypocritical Senator may ramble to a reporter about pork or war, but to cast that docile group of free spenders as any kind of fiscally responsible foreign policy experts is inane.

Carrey then goes on to say Bush could deliver some sort of Clinton-esque performance tonight that will captivate Americans “for finally addressing an issue that matters deeply to Americans all across the country…”, i.e., healthcare. There’s two fairly obvious problems with this prediction:

1. The President can’t speak very well and is fundamentally incapable of inspiring all but the most hardcore power-worshipers.

2. Bush has a long history of annoncing ambitious non-warmaking policy initiatives, only to abandon them out of boredom, varying degrees of resistence (usually not all that strong, either), or because he wasn’t actually serious about them in the first place. Think Mars, Social Security, curing our ‘oil addiction’, etc…

My prediction is his speech will be as terrible as all his other speeches or worse. He will try to pander to the left and middle with talk of global warming (though he’ll probably use neutered euphemisms like ‘climate change’ to avoid specifically mentioning ‘global warming’; controlling the language and all that) and healthcare, and will attempt to obfuscate his historic hostility to science, specifically the roadblocks he’s thrown up in front of global warming research. He’ll end up appeasing no one and it will be a flop across the board. The right will feel stabbed in the back, and nobody else gives a shit what he says either way.

The only thing I’m curious about is when discussing our healthcare problems, if he’ll slip in the word ‘folks’.

I didn’t think it was possible for me to despise Thomas Friedman any more than I already do, but I was wrong.

via Chris Hayes.

This is just my two cents, but if you are a news agency and the government loves you you are not doing your job.

He said it was silly to assume we’d be greeted as liberators in Baghdad. O’Reilly said, Well, we went into Kabul and were greeted that way. To which Clark responded, “Yes, but the Afghan people had been oppressed by the Taliban.” O’Reilly then said, You mean people weren’t oppressed in Iraq? Well, yes, there was unhappiness there, said Clark. Or he might have said there was some happiness there, I couldn’t quite tell. Either way, Clark basically just said the people of Iraq weren’t really that oppressed by Saddam’s rule.

Another (obviously biased) summary can be found at News Hounds. I didn’t see the segment, because I absolute refuse to watch Fox News, but what Clark seems to have said isn’t all that stupid. Afghanistan and Iraq are two different places, with two different histories, and two different cultures. Let’s review:

Afghanistan had been torn apart by decades of war, and was very recently mostly conquered by religious zealots, the Taliban (who though composed primarily of Afghanis, grew out of Pakistan). For the next several years, Afghanistan was in a state of civil war with the Taliban on one side and a collection of warlords on the other. When the U.S. came in, Afghanis had no real or imagined reason to hate the United States, and every reason to think things would improve for them, that they would finally see stability and peace.

Iraq had been ruled for decades by a brutal dictator, but could be seen as a relatively prosperous and stable country. Then following the disasterous war with Iran, Iraq attempted to annex Kuwait and it’s oil (possibly under the impression they had tacit U.S. permission) to in part help pay for the aforementioned war. The U.S. then (justly) lead a coalition of nations, including other Arabs, and absolutely crushed the Iraqi Army, killing thousands of Iraqis. This was followed by more than a decade of crippling sanctions that reduced Iraq to a third world nation. Then, following al’Qaeda’s attack on the U.S., America declared war on Iraq again.

Now, Hussein was a monster and Iraqis may have hated him, but why would they like the U.S.? After decades of actively supporting and enabling Hussein’s brutal rule, we followed it with 10+ years of war, devastating sanctions, air strikes, and then another war. It could be argued we had little choice to follow a policy other than we did (which is not my belief), but whatever the case may be it set the stage for a population that would be significantly more hostile to U.S. forces than those of Afghanistan.

Podhoretz is aware of all that. Plus, the events themselves show Wesley Clark is right: Iraqis obviously did not greet the U.S. as liberators (despite U.S. government attempts to show otherwise) as Afghanis did. How exactly does that make Clark (who I am not a fan of) “not all that smart”?

Franklin seems suprised that while Bush’s numbers have more or less bottomed out, his specifical approval ratings on Iraq continues to fall:

The graph above compares approval of Bush’s overall job with approval of his handling of Iraq. The two have generally trended together and mostly “bounced” together. What is interesting is the change over the fall of 2006 when the Iraq job approval declined sharply while the overall job decline was less and has recently been relatively flat. The sharp decline is based on a decent number of polls, so is not likely to be an artifact of a small number of polls.

This is not surprising in the least. That bottom 30% or so that represent the floor for Bush’s overall rating is probably some combination of: 1) hardcore, cult-of-personality Bush worshipers forced to admit the war isn’t going well, but who refuse to admit Bush is a bad president overall, 2) certain conservative social activists and tax-cutting fanatics who Bush has delivered for who, while perhaps critical of the war, consider Bush’s attention to their issues (stem-cell research, the Supreme Court, gay marriage, irresponsible tax cuts, etc…) more important than the war, and 3) people who don’t really follow politics or world events, have a general awareness that some war somewhere isn’t going well, but because of their upbringing they otherwise reflexsively trust the president.

via Andrew Sullivan

For example, in Also, Federal Express Is More Reliable Than the U.S. Postal Service, Jacob Sullen looks at a study that comes to the not-so-surprising conclusion that:

Defendants with private lawyers fare better, as measured by the length of their sentences…than defendants with government-provided lawyers.

Sullen then jumps to the conclusion that this means we should get rid of public defense and privatize the whole thing. I have a couple of problems with this. The first and most obvious is that millions of people cannot afford a lawyer and would be forced to defend themselves, creating an even bigger criminal justice gap between rich and poor. The second is that its not just the quality of the individual, his lawyer skills honed by years of capitalist competition, that makes the lawyers of rich people more successful than public defenders. Thats part of it, but more importantly these lawyers are working in larger teams with access to more specialists, more researches, and generally more resources available. One of the central ideas behind our justice system is that it treats everyone equally. Even though this is not the case now, getting rid of public defense would mean your chances of being found guilty of a crime would be even more tightly tied to your financial worth.

In Is Bush the Son About To Become Like Bush the Father on Taxes?, Nick Gillespie suggests Bush may soon raise taxes:

You gotta wonder: Would Bush see a payroll tax hike as a way of buying some version of support for the war?

I don’t think so. Also, whether or not raising taxes is a good idea or not is irrelevent. He is beyond buying off Democrats with mild tax hikes, and the only part of his legacy that any significant number of people will regard as positive is his tax cuts (I’m not one of those people. Tax cuts are good as a general idea, but not when we keep spending at higher and higher levels, and that missing revenue is just transformed into massive debt accruing interest).

Next, Ronald Bailey writes in Global Warming Could Kill 4.5 Billion by 2012–Does That Have Your Attention?:

Leftwingers would never exaggerate the risks of climate change–would they?

This snarky comment would have a little more impact if Bailey (who lacks scientific credentials, is a paid oil industry shill, and only recently admitted global warming was real after years of making money claiming it was a hoax) had quoted something other than an obscure, socialist newspaper in Canada. The fact is, most of the Left hold positions on global warming in line with the nonpartisan, scientific consensus. This contrasts with Bailey, who is at least honest enough to admit to having an ideological investment in global warming being a myth.

In a post titled L’etat, c’est Hannity, David Weigel has an excellent take on Sean Hannity’s show, Enemy of the State, and how the kind of thinking that allowed for it is also responsible for the ass-backwards arguments we seem to be forced into about Iraq:

This sort of thinking makes our current Iraq debate even more frustrating than it should be. I’d like to discuss how to bring the Iraq conflict to a close - Hannity et al would like to know why we refuse to support our president, our commander in chief, this man who has been tested by fire and has a spine of steel and so on.

Finally, a post by Kerry Howley If Only We’d Built a Fence Around the Towers mocking Tom Tancredo’s idiotic, multi-billion dollar, boondoggle-in-waiting fence plan. It includes this priceless quote from a Tancredo aide:

It’s simple: What did 9/11 cost us versus what would it cost to maintain a fence to help prevent that?

Yeah! If we had a $50 billion fence along the Mexican border, Arab terrorists would never have been able to fly airplanes into New York City!

I’m unconvinced by the more alarmist interpretations of Admiral Fallon’s shift to CENTCOM. SecDef Rumsfeld argued from the beginning of his tenure against the practice of assigning combatant commands to particular services. In this context, the shift can be understood as part of the effort to reduce territoriality and increase “jointness” among the services. Fallon has spent most of his career in the Pacific, but he’s well respected in the service and at State. His work institutionalizing maritime cooperation between the East Asian navies has been very well regarded. I suspect that, rather than preparation for war with Iran, the move of Fallon from PACCOM to CENTCOM is intended to put the best person in the most critical theater.

I “somewhat agree,” in that I don’t believe this is a prelude to airstrikes (though not with Farley’s level of conviction). I disagree that “the move of Fallon from PACCOM to CENTCOM is intended to put the best person in the most critical theater.” This Administration, needless to say, has a terrible record of finding the right man for the job, and I don’t see why they’d suddenly adjust their own political priorities to be in line with broader U.S. interests. I think it’s more likely Fallon is the most respectable commander Bush could find who agrees with his increasingly incoherent war policy, and will pursue it the most vigorously.

As far as the worries about an imminent invasion of Iran: no reasonable person is going to accuse George Bush of being a strategic genius and I’m sure he’d like to start another war, but the elite consensus he depended on for the Iraq invasion has completely turned against him, and the White House’s ability to dictate the narrative to the media has erroded substantially. Just as important, he also no longer possesses a docile, Republican Congress.

Of course, every time I think Bush can’t get any dumber, he moves the goalposts. Massive airstrike against Iran would be a really bad idea. Iran would immediately declare war and flood Iraq with hundreds of thousands of fighters and suicide bombers. We could win a war with Iran, but at what cost in blood and money? And to what benefit? We certainly would not be able to occupy Iran, a country two-and-a-half times the population of Iraq.