Hewitt Blog

Posted by Generalissimo

Michael Goldfarb in the Weekly Standard has just broken news on the Weekly Standard that can only result in the firing of, at the minimum, Franklin Foer, editor of the once-respected New Republic. You simply cannot publish anti-military stories, inflammatory and controversial on their face, without subjecting the wild claims to the most strict fact-checking measures possible. Yet Mr. Foer, it now appears, did just that.

Scott Thomas Beauchamp, the husband of a New Republic staffer who previous to his military service posted anti-war material on a weblog, volunteered to recant the stories that were published in The New Republic on the very first day of the military's investigation, according to sources to Goldfarb, the very day that Mr. Foer was simultaenously walking away from one proven Beauchamp lie and doubling down on the rest of the allegations in the three stories. Beauchamp's recant was made under oath.

Now Mr. Foer is in a no-win situation. Either Beauchamp lied under oath to military investigators, making him a liar and destroying his credibility, and taking down the credibility of the editorial staff of the New Republic, and that of the magazine itself.

Or Beauchamp got caught in a lie by military investigators, and when confronted, agreed to recant, making him a liar and destroying his credibility, and taking down the credibility of the editorial staff of the New Republic, and that of the magazine itself.

Whichever is the case, Mr. Foer, as long as he remains editor of TNR, will be the Dan Rather of the political magazine world, a laughing stock caught up in trying to publicly maintain an obvious lie as truth. Mr. Foer complains that the military's investigation process has hampered the magazine's abiltiy to get to the bottom of the scandal and decide for themselves what veracity, if any, there is with Beauchamp's claims, which raise questions that Mr. Foer does not have the standing anymore to be able to answer satisfactorily.

If the magazine didn't get the fact-checking right the first time, how are we to trust that they will get it right the second time, regardless of whether or not the military is "interfering"? Since Beauchamp is now allegedly under oath admitting he fabricated most if not all of his claims, who was in charge of the fact-checking of the story? Who else in Beauchamp's unit corroborated his allegations?

Transparency is the only thing that can save The New Republic, a trait that is not imbued in Franklin Foer as demonstrated by the way he has handled the Beauchamp affair from the beginning. It is time for him to go.

When Representative Jeff Flake, Republican of Arizona, recently ridiculed a provision on the House floor to spend $100,000 on a prison museum near Fort Leavenworth, Kan., Representative Nancy Boyda of Kansas jumped to promote her district’s heritage.

Leavenworth County, she boasted, had more prisons than any other county in America. Its inmates, she added, have included Machine Gun Kelly and the Birdman of Alcatraz (before he was sent to Alcatraz).

“The local residents are proud of their heritage, and rightly so,” Ms. Boyda told Mr. Flake during a debate on the House floor. The House voted 317 to 112 to keep her earmark.

Is this a joke?

Announced Republican candidates in this Bush 57% district include Mike Carey, Jeannette Moll, and Paul Phillips.

HH: Max Boot, among others, John Burns of the New York Times has remarked that a Tet-like offensive by al Qaeda and other elements of the insurgency is to be expected coming up. Is America ready for that? Would it have the same effect that January, ’68 had on the Vietnam war, if in fact, in the march up to the September report by General Petraeus, we see a huge countersurge by the enemy?

MB: That’s a very good question, and I think it’s very hard to anticipate what the response would be. I think a lot of it really depends on the specifics, and how things play out. I mean, obviously, if you have squads of insurgents roaming around the Green Zone, comparable to the VietCong invading the U.S. Embassy compound in 1968 in Saigon, that would be a catastrophic public relations hit. So naturally, you anticipate that that’s exactly what the insurgents want to do. But on the other hand, you know, our soldiers know that as well, and are going to be well-prepared for it. So it’s hard to know how things will play out, but there is no question that because Congress has laid out these 18 benchmarks that we have to meet, that basically creates a roadmap for the insurgents, telling them what they have to do in order to prevent us from meeting those benchmarks, and therefore to prevent us from appearing successful by the criteria set down by Congress.

I will try most broadcast days between now and the report from general Petraeus in September to bring to the program and then to the blog at least one interview with a serious analyst of the war.

Why? Because at least one outlet in all of media ought to do so.

Previous interviews in this series:

General David Petraeus
New York Times reporter John Burns
The Brookings Institution's Michael O'Hanlon
Victor Davis Hanson
AEI's Michael Rubin

I will of course continue to ask regular contributors like Mark Steyn and Christopher Hitchens for their assessment on the war, though I don't think we'll be in a hurry to inquire after the opinions of the staff at The New Republic, committed as they all are by association and silence to the credibility-destroying Private Beauchamp. They all must know by now, but none have penned even a word about the latest injury to the reputation of the venerable magazine.

UPDATE: "Beauchamp Retracts," is up at the WeeklyStandard.com.

To be followed by "Sullivan Retracts" and "Foer Resigns?"

As several critical commenters noted in response to my column earlier today about our progress in Iraq, there will be no lasting solution there until there is a political reconciliation. The critics say either explicitly or implicitly that the Maliki government is not up to the challenge of providing that political solution.

This critique reflects a long-held view of how politics in the Middle East should work. I’ll call it the Peggy Noonan Theorem, since I don’t care for her writings and she put the thought process involved here in particularly ugly Machieavellian terms:

Certain authoritarians and tyrants whose leadership is illegitimate and unjust have functioned in history as--ugly imagery coming--garbage-can lids on their societies. They keep freedom from entering, it is true. But when they are removed, the garbage--the freelance terrorists, the grievance merchants, the ethnic nationalists--pops out all over. Yes, freedom is good and to be strived for. But cleaning up the garbage is not pretty.

Noonan’s not alone in thinking that the people of the Middle East can’t sustain a peaceful democracy aside from the dreaded Zionist entity. Let’s face it – the region hasn’t been full of encouraging signs in that regard. Where democracy has been tried – Iraq and “Palestine” – the results have to date been unsatisfying. Contemplating the results of democratic experiments in places like Egypt and Saudi Arabia is an even more chilling exercise. The point is this – if there is to be a long standing solution to our problems with significant swaths of the Islamic world, it will come from the Islamic people, not strongmen in the House of Saud or diminutive royals in Amman.

And that’s why the graph above (HT: Allah) is such good news. It comes from a University of Michigan study, and it shows how the people living in Iraq have decided in significant numbers over the past two years that they would rather be united as Iraqis than be lethally squabbling as Sunnis and Shiites. Understandably, given their experience with greater Iraq, the Kurds have been slower to warm to the process. But, as Allah notes, the Kurds haven’t been the problem.

The Maliki government definitely has its problems. To once again repeat Allah, it may turn out to be one of the Bush administration’s biggest mistakes to have supported Maliki instead of a more capable leader like Allawi. Regardless, if the Iraqi people (a term that not long ago had no real meaning) have decided they want a peaceful society, then they don’t need one of Peggy Noonan’s metaphorical “garbage-can lids” to keep them in their place.

IT’S INTERESTING TO PONDER WHAT accounts for the change in Iraqi attitudes. Maybe Iraqis are discovering that while all-Jihad-all-the-time sounds great on paper, when you actually have to live that principle it turns out to be less than grand. Perhaps it’s the same sort of thing that’s happening in Iran. Thirty years ago, an insane theocracy swept to power supported by the people; today, broad segments of Iranian society have grown dissatisfied with living under Sharia. We know in Afghanistan the people quickly wearied of the Taliban’s lunacy. Perhaps at some early date, the idea of institutionalized honor killings and the government sponsoring throwing homosexuals off buildings sounded like fun. But the concept didn’t have legs.

In truth, the University of Michigan study points to something that’s potentially seismic. Perhaps we are finally seeing moderate inclinations bubble to the top of a vital part of the Islamic world. Regardless, the most important political benchmark has always been the attitude of the Iraqi people. That’s why it was so disheartening when they did things like lustily engage in a civil war and bring barbarism to Saddam Hussein’s execution.

The Iraqi people have apparently turned a corner. Hopefully the Democrats in congress won’t choose to ignore this vital piece of information.

Compliments? Complaints? Contact me at Soxblog@aol.com.

But that was then and this is now. Since David Petraeus took over operations in Iraq, America has had a clear and coherent strategy. From the top down the American military has functioned more effectively. As a consequence, America as a whole is now feeling better about the war; for obvious reasons, this change scares the stuffing out of the left.

Although it was grossly unfair to our hundreds of thousands of soldiers who served courageously and nobly in Iraq, the Abu Ghraib scandal emerged as the symbol of the first three years of the war effort. Abu Ghraib embodied everything that war critics sometimes rightly laid at the feet of the administration – operational indifference, inattention to detail, and yes, incompetence.

Yesterday, Bill Kristol returned to Fox News Sunday after a couple of weeks away with Fred Barnes stepping in as his understudy. (Cries of “Refund!” could be heard from Fox News viewers across the nation.) Kristol had been in Iraq for almost two weeks. It was a pretty serious trip – he saw much of the country and got to break bread with General Petraeus.

On FNS, Kristol told the story of the improving situation in Iraq. But his spreading that news wasn’t the most interesting aspect of his commentary yesterday. The Brookings duo of Pollack and O’Hanlon not only beat him to the punch on that score with their op-ed last Monday, but also preceded him on the air on FNS.

Kristol’s most interesting remarks came when he discussed what happened in Iraq in 2006. I’m paraphrasing here because I’m too lazy to look for a transcript or re-watch my DVR recording of the show (I golf on summer Sunday mornings, even if the Republicans decide to schedule a debate). Kristol said words to the effect of, “2006 was a disastrous year in Iraq, and for the President and Rumsfeld and Casey to have allowed it to degenerate as much as it did then almost excuses the voters turning Congress over to the Democrats in November.” He said the “almost” with a grin, slyly suggesting that the Bush administration’s multi-year quest to call its competence into question (think Katrina, Harriet Miers, Alberto Gonzales, and most of all Iraq) did indeed justify the electorate’s decision to “throw the bums out.”

Alberto Gonzales is still sadly the attorney general, but David Petraeus has removed the stench of incompetence and indecision from the Iraqi theatre. The American people feel better about the war effort because it has improved markedly. That’s one of the reasons the Beauchamp Diarists so exercised many of us who not only support the troops but also hope they succeed. In addition to containing obvious untruths and exaggerations, the whole Diarist exercise came right out of the outdated My-Lai/Abu Ghraib playbook. The facts on the sand have changed. It’s not too much to expect even the most tendentious of liberals to reflect this in their writings.

SO WHAT’S THIS HAVE TO DO WITH POLITICS? With a disastrous war effort afoot, emotional political appeals to bring the troops home immediately had some resonance and made at least a little sense. But with the war having improved in quantifiable ways and the mission in Iraq progressing, being a knee-jerk anti-war pol has become like so 2006. Ron Paul may rally the 1% of voters who simply adore him, but his irresponsible and shrill demand that the troops instantly come home en masse is becoming increasingly anachronistic.

The leading Democratic candidates know this. Being anti-war as a basic principle never made much more sense than being anti-cancer or anti-male pattern baldness. There are times in human events when war is an unfortunate necessity, even for the most well intentioned nation. When a war is being mismanaged (or non-managed) as the Iraq War was for an extended period, the accompanying stumbling serves to accredit a reactionary sort of peacenik politics that thinks it would be a swell thing to have tea with Ahmadenijad and Kim Jong Il.

Fortunately for us all, the Democratic candidates are now realizing that that kind of breathtaking irresponsibility won’t be a winner at the ballot box. Even among Democratic voters, Barack Obama’s attempt to blend pathetic naivete with vapid hope has gone over like the proverbial lead balloon. According to the latest Rasmussen Poll, the considerably more hawkish Hillary Clinton now leads Obama 43% to 22%.

With the use of American force no longer discredited, the Democrats are going to have to show the ability and willingness to rattle the occasional saber. That’s what Obama tried to do when he picked on our ally in Pakistan. Given the maladroitness of that effort, perhaps the current Democratic field with the exception of Hillary lacks the ability to even talk tough, let alone act tough.

Regardless, it’s heartening to see the most dovish Democrats trying to be more serious about American force and upgrading their rhetoric beyond merely offering the platitudinous mantra of “Bring the kids home!” Right now, they correctly sense they’ll need to do better. Whether or not they’ll be able to is an open question.

Compliments? Complaints? Contact me at Soxblog@aol.com.