Peter Mulhern

What Price Error?

The Democrat party got the war on terror fundamentally wrong.  This mistake compounds a disgraceful performance with respect to the Cold War, at least after 1968.  Twice in the last forty years America has faced an existential challenge.  Both times the Democrat Party was institutionally committed to obstructing every effort to rise to that challenge.  What political price will Democrats pay for their mistakes?

It may seem that Democrats have escaped any serious consequences from their Cold War fecklessness.  Shortly after the Berlin wall came down they elected a Democrat president who turned out to be every bit as useless as his pre-presidential record suggested he would be.  He was nonetheless reelected.  This may give Democrats hope that, once our victory against the Islamo-fascists is assured, voters will forget their juvenile carping about Iraq and avoid drawing the obvious conclusions about their fitness for positions of public trust. 

I doubt it will work out like that.  Democrats rely on a coalition of lefty lunatics and sensible people who are not aware enough of national politics to notice that the lunatics run the Democrat asylum.  The anti-war movement has done a great deal to make everyone with a grain of sense notice the leftist rot at the core of the Democrat Party. 

John Kerry ran as a mainstream politician and, by and large, Republicans let him get away with it.  He kept the Democrat coalition together.  His people didn't blame him for getting the Cold War wrong, even those who are sensible enough to notice that he did. 

The end-game of the Cold War was terrifying.  The calls for peaceful coexistence were bipartisan.  Traditional Democrats are liable to see those like Kerry who tried to lose the Cold War as well-intentioned and their errors as understandable. 

The war on terror is something else again.  The Democrats have created a clear partisan divide over whether we should try to drain the Arab swamp.  It is now quite clear both that we need to drain it and that we can do so.  A small but growing number of the remaining sensible Democrats will notice that the party made a terrible mistake.  They will see that leftist rot that gave rise to that mistake and they will be alienated from their party. 

Democrats have steadily lost ground in American politics since their last high water mark in 1964 as sensible people gravitate toward sensible politicians.  The Democrat Party's refusal to cooperate in the fight against terrorism will enhance this trend.

This has happened to Democrats once before.  They got the issues of slavery and union wrong in 1860.  It took them 72 years to recover.  With any luck at all they're in for another long drought. 

The Democrats Quagmire

The Democrat Party is in dire circumstances; a large part of its problem stems from catastrophic rhetorical success.  The left in general and the Democrats in particular have made it impossible for public figures to discuss geopolitics honestly.  Political correctness makes an ethnic and religious war both unthinkable and unmentionable.  For a nation in midst of just such a war, this is a serious intellectual handicap.

This handicap is a problem, both for the government and for the opposition.  President Bush has more difficulty rallying public support for military action in Iraq than he otherwise might because he cannot address the reasons for that action directly.  But the Democrats are suffering more acutely from their own political correctness.  The President can't talk about embarrassing reality; Democrats can't see it.  They are blundering about in the dark and wandering further into a quagmire of foolishness and irrelevance with every passing week. 

The reality is that since September 11, 2001 we have been at war with an entity that does not belong to the United Nations or appear on any map.  That entity is far larger than a few madmen holed up in Afghanistan.  It is Islamic Arabia.  Ours is a classic ethnic and religious war.  It is the same conflict that engaged Charles Martel, Richard I, and El Cid.  The more things change, the more they stay the same.   

Al Qaeda and the rest of the Islamist lunatic fringe exist because the Arab world want them and need them.  They are the most threatening manifestation of a mad dream.  Arabs are pained by their own irrelevance and they soothe the pain by dreaming that they can contend with the West on the world stage.  They will be a deadly danger to us until we succeed in crushing that dream. 

Iraq was a sensible place to start the process of bringing Arabia to heel.  We had an unimpeachable legal basis for war there.  We were, in fact, already at war with Iraq when George W. Bush took office.  Iraq was also a good place to start because a majority of Iraqis come from groups that are oppressed minorities in the Arab world as a whole (Shites and Kurds).  This gives us natural allies who have an incentive to help us with the project of starting to impose our will on the Arab mainstream. 

Anyone who understands the nature of the larger war we are fighting also understands that the war in Iraq is a strategic triumph.  Most Americans either understand that or will come to understand it as all the noise generated by American casualties starts to fade into the background.  Democrats, meanwhile, are stuck in a posture of blind opposition that is comically separated from reality. 

Can they recover?  Not with Howard Dean at the helm.  Democrats are almost pitiable; almost, but not quite.

A Tale of Two Elections

Most of the commentary after the Iraqi election misses the point.  Of course, Iraq is not magically free, democratic and peaceful merely because it held one successful election.  There will be more violence and more lives will be lost, including some American lives.  But, in combination with our own election before it, the Iraqi election is still an historical watershed.

The election last November established that we will not abandon Iraq.  The Iraqi election established that our perseverance will be rewarded.  George W. Bush's excellent Iraqi adventure is doomed to success. 

If the terrorists had at their command any force that could deflect our purpose and disrupt our plans they would have deployed it in time to make the events of last weekend impossible.  If the Iraqi population resented their liberators/occupiers enough to embrace terrorism it would have shown up in the election results. 

After the electoral test we know that the terrorists have only very limited capacity for violence and no significant base of popular support.  They are revealed as impotent, which is fatal to their ambitions.  To borrow a phrase from Osama Bin Laden, the terrorists are a weak horse and we are a strong horse.  Iraqis, together with the rest of the Arab world, will choose the strong horse. 

The election is just as devastating to the disloyal opposition here in America as it is to the terrorists abroad.  Everything they have said about Iraq since before the invasion is revealed as nonsense.  The bedrock of every attack on our actions in Iraq has been the notion that the violence in Iraq was the understandable expression of nationalist resentment of the coalition occupation.  Abu Musab al-ZarKennedy (D. MA) made this argument forcefully just days before the election. 

Nobody with eyes, a brain and a television set will ever again believe that our occupation of Iraq is more a problem than a solution.  If the Iraqis are seething with resentment they have a funny way of showing it.

Our work in Iraq is just beginning.  But whatever happens in Iraq the doomsayers have already been proved wrong.  The Iraqis, as it turns out, love freedom more than they hate the forces that are bringing it to them.  Bush's vision for post-war Iraq is vindicated and the Democrats have a serious political and intellectual problem.

John Kerry's graceless performance on Meet the Press last weekend put a spotlight on that problem.  Not since Richard Nixon announced in 1962 that the press wouldn't have him to kick around anymore has a public figure done so much to discredit himself so quickly.  Kerry and his cohorts are going to keep on looking inane as long as they are unable to admit the obvious -- that the Bush administration has the power and the Iraqi support necessary to see our involvement there through to a successful conclusion.

There are some other things they will have to accept as well.  Democrats who are demanding a time table for our withdrawal are wildly unrealistic.  Nobody alive today will see the end of America's military commitment in Iraq.  For the foreseeable future any conceivable government in Iraq will depend on American power for its survival.  I'm not referring to political survival here.  I have physical survival in mind. 

Our troops make civil war in Iraq impossible.  Without them such a war would be inevitable.  Given the regional power realities, no Iraqi faction could be confident of winning such a war.  That makes us indispensable to Iraq's emerging political class. 

By the time our departure is possible it will be unthinkable, like an American withdrawal from Western Europe.  Iraq is a foothold on the Arabian peninsula.  Our position there is a major strategic gain and, whatever the White House may say for public consumption, we won't give it up as long as there is a threat to American interests from the Arab world. 

Iraq is a done deal.  The Democrats are in a deep hole and still digging.  What's our next move?  Maybe the State of the Union Adress will contain some hints.

Freedom on the Home Front

The world has little noted the dramatic fusion of matters foreign and domestic in President Bush's second inaugural address.  All the buzz is about the President's vision of America as the friend of all democrats and the enemy of all tyrants.  Nobody seems to have noticed that he tied his domestic political opponents to America's foreign enemies and laid a solid rhetorical foundation for significant domestic reforms.

Freedom was the President's theme and he followed a long discussion of our place in the world with the observation that we must lead by perfecting freedom at home.  He made it very plain that making our own people freer means turning away from the 1930's style collectivism which lives on in the form of Social Security.  Perfecting freedom at home, he said, means realizing his vision of an "ownership society." 

The clear implication of all this is that those who don't want an ownership society are allied with Al Qaeda in a global rearguard action against liberty.  Democrats pine for the dated socialism of the 30's; Bin Laden looks a bit further back for his authoritarian ideal.  But they are united in the effort to suppress the basic human urge to be free. 

This captures an essential truth about the domestic left.  It is powerful stuff.  Expect to hear much more of it in the next four years. 

Four More Years

President Bush's inaugural address is controversial.  This is hardly surprising, but the primary sources of the controversy are not the usual suspects. 

The sweep of the President's vision makes many conservative intellectuals nervous.  Peggy Noonan, David Frum and William F. Buckley are just a few of the luminaries who fret that the President has embraced obligations that we cannot hope to meet.

The luminaries need to lighten up.  The heart of President Bush's second inaugural address (pause to savor that phrase "second inaugural address) was a truism -- freedom serves America's interests everywhere and always.  This doesn't mean that we have to fight a limitless war to establish freedom everywhere and always.  The President himself said as much when he observed that promoting freedom is not "primarily the task of arms."

The second Bush inaugural doesn't commit us to any inconvenience.  It calls us to a better, more consistent, understanding of the role we already play in the world.  It suggests that some of the nations we count as allies are not friends -- Saudi Arabia, for example.  It suggests that certain other nations are destined to be our enemies, regardless of our diplomatic initiatives -- Iran leaps to mind.  All this is nothing more than common sense.

We are embarked on changing the tyrannical status quo in Arabia because September 11, 2001 showed us that we have an urgent need to change it.   Nothing in Bush's second inaugural suggests we have to approach liberation with the same urgency and energy everywhere. 

The President is just trying to help us keep our friends distinguished from our enemies.  This should be trivial but it isn't.  The Department of State is notorious for confusing friend and foe.  Maybe the President's rhetoric has been clear enough to squelch any more talk from high-ranking diplomats about the democratic virtues of the regime in Iran. 

The President was very careful to avoid the claim that the U.S. is or should be the force behind history's movement toward greater liberty.  He sees the movement and calls on us to paddle downstream.  This is a far cry from Woodrow Wilson's idealistic hubris.  George W. Bush is not carving up a map to divide populations into makeshift nations.  He just wants us to be more receptive to democratically inclined dissidents and less so to tyrants. 

Reorganizing our foreign policy around hostility to tyrants will cost us next to nothing and may have far reaching effects on the shape of the world over the long haul.  This is not something conservatives should be biting their nails about. 

The second inaugural isn't worrisome, but it is interesting.  It tells us a great deal about what we can expect in the next four years and some of what it tells us will shock a lot of people. The President's critics tried to use Iraq as a lever to defeat him.  When that didn't work they consoled themselves with the thought that Iraq had damaged the President enough to make him very cautious about any further efforts at regime change.  That thought stands revealed as the pious hope it always was.

My guess is that the Mullah's in Tehran are soiling their robes.  Their grip on power has long been tenuous at best.  If President Bush gets serious about supporting Iranian dissent, their days are numbered.  The speech he gave yesterday leaves him with little choice in the matter.  He will have to get serious or look like a buffoon.   

The left is still wallowing in Iraq.  Bush, by contrast is already moving on.  He knows what they don't.  Iraq is yesterday's news.  Our enemies there tried to keep us from constituting a new government and holding elections.  They are on the verge of catastrophic failure.  They can still be a deadly nuisance but they are demonstrably unable to affect the course of events. 

Things will still blow up in Iraq from time to time.  People will still die hunting terrorists there, although the number of American casualties will dwindle as Iraqi forces do more and more of the hard work.  Iraq will follow Afghanistan onto page A-24.

The important message of yesterday's speech is that President Bush is ready for the next set of challenges.  He has four years to face them.

Filibusters and the Constitution II

There is a precedent that should help make unconstitutionality of requiring presidential appointees to run the gauntlet of a filibuster clear.  In the aftermath of the Civil War Congress passed the Tenure of Office Act which purported to forbid the removal of cabinet officers without the consent of the Senate.  Andrew Johnson considered this Act an unconstitutional infringement on his power as Chief Executive.  He was impeached for violating it by removing the Secretary of War in defiance of a clear Senate majority. 

Johnson was acquitted in his impeachment trial, which cast doubt on the constitutionality of the law he defied.  Many years later, in Myers v. U.S., the U.S. Supreme court cleared the matter up, declaring Johnson's view of the Tenure of Office Act had been correct.

It is now settled that Congress cannot interpret the Senate's power to advise and consent so as to restrict the executive's power of appointment and removal.  It cannot pass a law providing for the retention of officers the President wants to fire.  Nor can it pass a law providing for the termination of federal officials whenever the Senate votes to withdraw its consent to his appointment (which is a very good thing, both for Donald Rumsfeld and for the common defense.)   

Using a procedural rule to prevent any judicial nominee who cannot command a supermajority from obtaining the Senate's approval is the same sort of encroachment on presidential power as the Tenure of Office Act.

In this area of the law there are very few judicial decisions.  In accord with the political question doctrine, the courts leave Congress and the President to settle the boundaries between their powers on their own.  The best precedents are found in the practices they have settled on. 

For many years it has been the settled expectation of everyone concerned that a president who commands a majority of the Senate can appoint whomever he pleases to the federal bench.  This is an executive prerogative, as clearly as commanding the armed forces and granting pardons.  The Democrats have used the filibuster rule in unprecedented fashion to restrict this prerogative and they intend to go on doing so until somebody stops them.  They make no bones about it. 

Just as Congress couldn't properly restrict Andrew Johnson's appointment power it can't properly restrict George Bush's.   

This is not something conservatives- or anyone else for that matter -- should be arguing about.  The Democrats have been up to anti-constitutional mischief and it is long past time for the Republicans to spank them for it. 

Filibusters and the Constitution

Mark Levin and Ramesh Ponnuru have gotten into a dust up over the constitutionality of filibustering judicial nominees.  Their debate unfolds in The Corner over at NRO.  Ramesh can't see any sound basis for concluding that there are constitutional limits on the degree to which the Senate rules can properly limit the President's power of appointment.

Ramesh is a very smart guy, but I don't believe he is a lawyer.  In any case he hasn't given this question anywhere near enough thought; his position is ridiculous.  The constitutional scheme of separate and balancing legislative, executive and judicial powers is plainly inconsistent with the use of a filibuster to block the Senate from voting to confirm a judicial nominee. 

The Senate is free to adopt its own rules but it cannot interpret its power to "advise and consent" so as to erode the President's appointment power.  That, of course, is precisely what the Democrats are trying to do.  They are using extra-constitutional parliamentary maneuvers in an effort to restrict President Bush's constitutional authority and insulate the judiciary from the election returns.  This is a deliberate disruption of the balance of powers.  It is an unconstitutional encroachment by the legislative branch into an executive prerogative.  The Senate majority has a constitutional duty to bring their institution back within its proper bounds. 

There's really no room for rational argument on this point.  Ramesh shouldn't waste his time and talent muddying crystal clear waters.

Rumsfeld's Enemies

There's a lot of buzz around Washington about the Republican Senators who have declared themselves EOR (enemies of Rumsfeld).  The list includes the usual suspects, John McCain and Chuck Hagel.  More recently Susan Collins and Trent Lott have enlisted as EOR.

By their enemies shall ye know them.  Rumsfeld has clearly made all the right enemies.  With the exception of Trent Lott, his Republican senatorial foes are all reliable mouthpieces for liberal conventional wisdom.  Lott, as he demonstrated when he took up the cause of the adulterous pilot Kelly Flynn, loves to curry favor with the conventional left by tossing it the occasional high-profile bone. 

Rumsfeld came by his enemies in the best possible way.  He doesn't suffer fools gladly.  Consequently the fools don't suffer him gladly. 

The EOR's are extremely unlikely to bring Rumsfeld down.  Rumsfeld is useful to the President right where he is.  Bush needs somebody to take the heat for defying conventional wisdom and his Secretary of Defense is made to order for that role. 

Rock on Rummy.

Et Tu, Kristol

Most of the sound and fury among pundits these days has a common source.  The people lambasting Donald Rumsfeld for every procurement glitch and every casualty have, metaphorically, joined hands with those who are complaining vociferously that Paul Bremer and Tommy Franks don't deserve their shiny new Presidential Medals of Freedom. 

What all these pundits have in common is a nearly psychotic need to portray Operation Iraqi Freedom as a failure regardless of the facts.  Most of the critics are people of the left who have been peddling prophesies of disaster since before we began our operations in Afghanistan.  They need a failure because, without one, their entire world view will stand discredited.  They won't recognize success even when it grabs them by the throat and hangs on like a bulldog.

William Kristol is not a man of the left, but sometimes he sings from the same hymnal as the other critics.  Yesterday he published a piece in the Washington Post bitterly criticizing The Secretary of Defense.  He had two points.  First, Secretary Rumsfeld has failed to overcome more than 200 years of Army tradition and ensure that procurement of supplemental armor for Humvees runs with perfect efficiency.  Kristol knows better than to commit such foolishness to print.  The course of military procurement never runs smooth and no Secretary of Defense has ever done more than Rumsfeld to make the armed forces rational and efficient.

Kristol's second point is the old chestnut about our supposedly inadequate troop commitment to Iraq.  This has become an article of faith in anti-Bush circles.  But nobody has ever explained how an additional hundred thousand troops (to pick a number at random) would have improved our situation.  More troops would have given our enemies more targets, but unless we used them to kill more hostile Arabs they would have done no good. 

We decided early on to emphasize the political aspects of our Iraqi involvement.  That meant avoiding confrontations so as to kill as few natives as possible.  The troops we had were grossly underemployed. They watched and waited as terrorists took refuge in Fallujah and turned it into a theocratic city state.  Watching and waiting isn't particularly labor intensive.  A small force can watch and wait just as well as a large one. 

When, quite recently, we got around to fighting our post-Saddam enemies in Iraq, the force available proved to be more than sufficient.  We can operate anywhere and destroy any target that our intelligence can identify.  Where is the evidence that more troops would have been useful, let alone decisive?  There is none.

From Alexander to William I to Cortes to Lord Kitchener to Tommy Franks in Afghanistan, the history of conquest teaches that small, lethal forces can control large populations and territories.  The key to a successful occupation has always been ruthless determination not large troop deployments. 

Maybe we need a bigger Army.  Maybe we need more troops in Iraq.  But if we do, neither Bill Kristol nor anyone else has ever explained why.  Kristol has been calling for more troops, both in general and in Iraq, for years.  But he never makes a convincing case that more troops will solve more problems than they create.  He seems to think the need for more troops is self-evident, as if he received a stone tablet about military manpower on some mountaintop. 

It is silly to criticize Rumsfeld merely because he hasn't conformed our military to some mystic vision Bill Kristol shares with John McCain.  In fact, it's silly for the likes of Bill Kristol to criticize Rumsfeld at all.  Rumsfeld is the architect of a war effort that, so far, has succeeded in liberating both Afghanistan and Iraq from brutal dictatorships and putting our terrorist enemies on the defensive in the Arabian heartland.  Bill Kristol publishes a magazine that is highly influential among the dozens of conservatives who supported John McCain in 2000.   

This brings us to the $64,000 question:  Why is Bill Kristol putting his reputation at risk by writing nonsense and placing it in the Washington Post where people are bound to notice?  The only likely explanation is that Kristol is a bitterly disappointed man who can't help striking out at the administration that is the source of his disappointment. 

Kristol was a player in the first Bush administration as Vice President Quayle's chief of staff.  He might have been an insider once again after the Republican restoration of 2000, but he wasn't.  When he backed McCain he fell from grace.  Bush loyalists are likely to be running the Republican Party for the rest of Kristol's life and they will neither forgive nor forget.

Bill Kristol, in sum, is a man with a great future behind him.  Maybe that's got something to do with his petty, shallow attack on Rumsfeld. 

Go Ahead, Bust the Filibuster

Front page and above the fold in today's Washington Post there is an ominous sounding headline:  "GOP May Target Use of Filibuster."  The thrust of the piece is that Democrats in the new Senate probably won't have the votes to continue their pattern of obstructing conservative judicial nominees.  Either they won't be able to muster 40 votes it takes to maintain a filibuster or the Republicans will come up with the 51 votes they need to rule that the filibuster of judicial nominees is unconstitutional. 

The article doesn't say anything new about the politics of judicial nominations in the new Congress.  It does, however, offer a rare glimpse of the hysteria that prevails in the Democrat bunker. 

For Democrats nothing is as important as preserving the leftward tilt of the judiciary.  A small modification of the balance on the Supreme Court would deprive the left of it's only base of operations in the national government.  Democrats have deployed the last vestige of their legislative power, the Senate filibuster, to preserve that base.  Now they are likely to lose both the filibuster and the judiciary, which brings them face-to-face with the full implications of all their recent electoral defeats. 

This is a tough situation and the Democrats aren't handling it well.  Harry Reid reacts to the prospect that Republicans might brush the Democrat filibusters aside with a dire warning:  "If they, for whatever reason, decide to do this, it's not only wrong, they will rue the day the did it, because we will do whatever we can to strike back."

This is 2004.  Who uses the phrase "rue the day?"  It has such a Victorian ring to it.  What is Reid talking about when he threatens to "strike back?"  He sounds like he's about to cut the head off a live chicken as part of an elaborate cursing ritual.   

What he presumably has in mind is that the Democrats will curtail their legendary cooperation with the Bush administration if they have to give up filibustering judicial nominees.  Social Security and tax reform would die for want of Democrat support.

Both Reid and the Washington Post seem to take this threat seriously which is strong evidence that they are both lost in the dementia of losers in denial.  If I understand him correctly Harry Reid is trying to tell Republicans that if they beat him badly on his number one priority he will be so mad that they'll really have a fight on their hands when they address his next priority.  That's like saying the Red Sox should have thrown the first game of the World Series for fear that a victory might have made their opponent angry enough to sweep the next four games. 

The judge wars will set the tone for everything else the Senate does in the coming Congress.  If Reid doesn't have the horses to keep conservative justices off the Supreme Court he is powerless and it just doesn't matter how angry he and his cohorts get.  Angry impotence is a lot like placid impotence, only funnier. If the President can confirm the judges he wants then he is master of the Senate and he most of the legislation he lobbies for will pass.

Democrats will fight hard against anything the President proposes.  That's what they do.  There is no percentage in passing up victories in an effort to build good will.   Let's hope Senator Frist and his troops understand this.