Hewitt Blog

As John Murtha and others in government and media rushed to convict the Haditha Marines of an atrocity, many of us said wait for the evidence to be accumulated, and if charges are brought, the court martial to be conducted and verdicts rendered.

There has been very little restraint on the left, which seems eager to add Haditha to the same sentence as Abu Graib and Gitmo which introduces the argument that America has lost its way.

Now, at The American Thinker, Clarice Feldman has produced a first cut at a critique of the Haditha indictment circulating in the media. It seems to me that Murtha et al should read it closely and respond to it, and that MSM should provide coverage of these doubts especially if a particular paper or program has covered Haditha in a way that suggested or concluded the Marines were guilty of atrocities.

Again, no one in media knows whether the Marines are innocent of these charges or guilty, and fair reporting requires that critiques like Feldman's be considered and reported upon widely.

Washington Post blogger Joel Achenbach was my guest today --The Scratching Post live blogged the interview-- and the transcript is up at Radioblogger. He seems like a very nice guy, and Lileks swears he's a very talented humorist, but he seems surprised that people take seriously what he writes about the war.

He agreed to come back next week. That's a point in his favor. Defensiveness about questions isn't, but that may fade. There aren't any trick questions, just bad answers.

UPDATE: Or, no answers at all.

And the best blog post of all on Zarqawi's death is here. It would be a good practice for all bloggers to consult at least a couple of the milblogs before opining on military matters.

I wrote up sheep-herder turned WaPo culture critic Phillip Kennicott's column this morning. Others have weighed in:

Mark in Mexico

Verum Serum

Macsmind

Newsbusters

Black Cat Bone

PlanetMoron

Q. If a tree falls in a forest and nobody hears it, did it make a sound?

A. That wasn't a tree. That was a Steve Lopez column.

The Washington Post's Philip Kennicott's reflections on the end of Zarqawi are third-tier high school paper and armband level. His sentiments are not limited to nearly-anonymous newspaper pundits, however, but are widely shared on the left and within the Democratic Party and require a reply. Here are his closing paragraphs:

We may not have victory. Iraq may be a living hell both for those who are fighting to make it better and for those who live there. But we bring home the occasional politically expedient marker of "progress." Major combat operations are over. We got Saddam's sons. We got Saddam. Now we have Zarqawi. The trophy case fills: elections, a constitution, a new government -- everything but peace and stability for an exhausted nation of Iraqis who have died by the tens of thousands during the evolution of this war.

Zarqawi is gone and good riddance. But there's nothing in the image of his face that deserves a frame. It's a small thing, to be sure. But it suggests a cynicism about this war that is profoundly distressing. Our political and military leaders simply can't resist packaging the war and wrapping it up in a bow.

Sometimes a frame is just a frame, and a dead killer a dead killer. Focusing on the frame as a means of getting into a slashing attack on the Bush Adminsitration and the military is a transparent reach, but the defeatism in the column is virulent.

On yesterday's program, Christopher Hitchens said this about Joel Achenbach's Zarqawi's musings:

Where do you start with so blasé, half-baked journalism. And I don't want to be in the same profession as someone who writes that way. I mean...well, I don't think I need to add. All you need to do is quote it, right?...

People who think like this, and talk like that, they're perfectly entitled to do it, but they have to live with having said it. And that must be, it ought to be hard. It really ought to be hard.

(Lileks posts a defense of Achebach here.)

It is hard to say something important and unique after a major event, say like Victor Davis Hanson does here:

[I]f you look at something comparable, like the insurrectionists that tried to destroy Rome, people like Vercingetorix, the Gaulish popular leader, or Mithridates, or Jagurtha, any time these people were captured or humiliated or killed, the popular uprising usually lost steam and petered out. And I think that we in the modern, sophisticated, technological age don't look at things in this emotional sense of honor and pride and spirit. And yet, wars are so often, they so often hinge on just these factors. So I think there's going to be a lot of intangible benefits to the United States that we'll see in the next six months...

Lacking the writing ability or the knowledge base necessary to draw parallels or consider events carefully, writers who rush in throw off idiocies like Kennicott's perfect indifference to the death or removal of killers:

But we bring home the occasional politically expedient marker of "progress." Major combat operations are over. We got Saddam's sons. We got Saddam. Now we have Zarqawi. The trophy case fills: elections, a constitution, a new government -- everything but peace and stability for an exhausted nation of Iraqis who have died by the tens of thousands during the evolution of this war.

This is an echo of Richard Clarke's complaint yesterday that of course Zarqawi's death didn't mean that the troops would be home soon, to which Mark Steyn replied:

[T]hat is pathetic, because the point of this is that it is good news. You can say that about any stage in the war. You could have said all through the Second World War, you could have said when we liberated the Solomon Islands...well, this isn't going to make a great deal of difference to those of us who are waiting for our troops to come home from Europe. You could say that about every victory in a war. In that sense, every victory is just a pause to take a breath, to cheer the great work that's been done, and then on to the next stage. I mean, this man, Richard Clarke, he's so corroded by bitterness, basically, because people didn't do what he said. And there's no reason to pay any attention to him, as far as I can see.

Kennicott is trying to say that nothing matters in Iraq because killing goes on, and though a new, democratically-elected government exists and is gaining confidence and greater strength by the day, that it can never succeed. Behind Kennicott's words is either a view that the Arab world cannot handle freedom or that Islamofascism cannot be beaten. Of course Kennicott lacks the courage to state as much, and so his musings are limited to blasting away at those who are waging the war.

It is a war. Killing Zarqawi was a victory, and his death may have saved thousands of lives in the short run and hundreds of thousands of lives in the long run. But just, as Mark Steyn argued, the success at Midway didn't obviate the need for Iwo Jima or Okinawa, or the landings at Normandy remove the necessity of crossing Europe to Berlin, killing Zarqawi didn't end the war. I asked Deputy National Security Advisor J.D. Crouch yesterday about the other major news --the Islamists' seizure of Mogadishu, which raises the prospect of an enemy's safe haven right where American retreat in the '90s began:

HH: Yesterday, the news came that Islamists in Somalia are declaring that Mogadishu is now under their operational control, and of course, the threat arises that that could become the new Kandahar, the new Kabul. What are we doing about that?

JDC: Well, obviously, we've got to...and this is a problem of safe havens, obviously that the President and Secretary Rumsfeld and others have talked about. We have defense relationships in the region that we will be exploiting. We obviously have contacts along the border. We do not have diplomatic relations with Somalia. We're not a...this is not a country that we could have direct relationship with. So we're having to exert pressure and exert influence from basically around and outside the country.

HH: But it is indeed a serious threat, isn't it, that you have Islamists in charge of a major port city with some industrial base?

JDC: Absolutely. It's something we're going to have to deal with, and as I said, we've got an approach to that, and we're working not only with the countries in the region, but we also have, as you know, we also have military forces in the region from a Naval perspective that are in and around that area.

What, I wonder, does Mr. Kennicott think of the threat now lodged in Mogadishu? Judging from his column today, my guess is nothing at all. He can't see past the picture frame, much less past the borders of Iraq, to the much greater battlefield on which this war is being waged, and which includes the American media. Mr. Kennicott worries that critics of the war raise doubts at the "peril of having their patriotism questioned," though no citation is offered, and this is a convenient dodge and shield.

I am sure Mr. Kennicott is a fine American, patriotic and loyal.

But his take on Zarqawi's death is sophomoric, a pose struck for his friends on the left, and deserving of the same contempt he displays towards the military.

UPDATE:

You ask, "Who is Phillip Kennicott?":

Philip Kennicott is the culture critic for the Washington Post, which he joined in August 1999. In 2000, he was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for editorial writing. He has also covered city politics and urban development. He served as classical music critic for the Detroit News and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, were he also worked for two years as an editorial writer.

Mr. Kennicott has served as senior editor of Musical America and editor of Chamber Music Magazine, which he redesigned and expanded from a quarterly to bimonthly publication. He is a reviewer and former columnist for Gramophone. His introduction to the University of Nebraska publication of Music and the Fiction of Willa Cather was published in 2001. In recent years, his collaboration with videographers from WashingtonPost.com has taken him to Afghanistan, Syria, Lebanon, and Azerbaijan. He received a Cine Golden Eagle for his latest video, Fueling Azerbaijan's Future. Mr. Kennicott graduated summa cum laude with a degree in philosophy from Yale in 1988. Prior to Yale, he spent two years at Deep Springs College in California and worked on a sheep ranch in New Zealand.

Tom DeLay exits with a flourish, and a sophisticated defense of partisanship. Key graphs:

The point is, we disagree. On first principles, Mr. Speaker, we disagree. And so we debate, often loudly, and often in vain, to convince our opponents and the American people of our point of view.

We debate here on the House floor, we debate in committees, we debate on television and on radio and on the Internet and in the newspapers and then every two years, we have a huge debate. And then in November, we see who won. That is not rancor, that is democracy.

You show me a nation without partisanship, and I'll show you a tyranny. For all its faults, it is partisanship, based on core principles, that clarifies our debates, that prevents one party from straying too far from the mainstream, and that constantly refreshes our politics with new ideas and new leaders.

Indeed, whatever role partisanship may have played in my own retirement today or in the unfriendliness heaped upon other leaders in other times, Republican or Democrat, however unjust, all we can say is that partisanship is the worst means of settling fundamental political differences -- except for all the others.

Now, politics demands compromise. And Mr. Speaker, and even the most partisan among us have to understand that, but we must never forget that compromise and bipartisanship are means, not ends, and are properly employed only in the service of higher principles.

DELAY: It is not the principled partisan, however obnoxious he may seem to his opponents, who degrades our public debate, but the preening, self-styled statesman who elevates compromise to a first principle .

For the true statesman, Mr. Speaker, we are not defined by what they compromise, but by what they don't.

The concluding chapters of Painting the Map Red draw heavily on Disraeli's spirited defense of party and partisanship as among the handful of reasons behind the great success of Great Britain in the 19th century. Tom DeLay understands the role of party as few do, and hopefully the leadership and the rank-and-file of the GOP will keep in mind that their majority is what allows the agenda to move forward, though slowly and in fits and starts. Majorities are tremendously difficult to build and easy to throw away. Partisanship means appreciating that central truth and conducting politics with an eye on the prize of governing, and not just governing, but governing rightly over time.

A superb post from Pastor Sensing:

The death of Zarqawi does nothing to make Islamism's vision of utopia appear more likely in the eyes of the hundreds of millions of Muslims who are sitting on the fence, waiting to see which side to step off to. If al Qaeda et. al. really are the keepers of the true faith of Islam, as they insist they are, then it's reasonable for other Muslims to ask just when Allah will finally get in the game.

I think that more and more Muslims will decide that Ashraf al-Akhras is right: Allah is in the game, but not on al Qaeda's side.

(HT: BlueCrabBoulevard, who along with Soxblog, continue to run rings around most of the blogosphere when it comes to posting judgment.)

Confederate Yankee draws our attention to Pat Dollard's forthcoming documentary, "Young Americans." I hope all bloggers will link to this post and view the trailer. If Dollard needs funds to invest in finishing production, I am committed to helping him raise those monies, and perhaps other bloggers will join in that effort as well.

Joel Achenbach is the Washington Post's most popular blogger. This is how he begins his morning blog on the death of Zarqawi:

The military briefing this morning featured footage of the bombing of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's hideout. We've become familiar with this kind of image, the jet-fighter's view of the terrain, the target in the middle of the screen, the flash of light, the erupting cloud of smoke and dust. American fighters hit Zarqawi's lair with a 500-pound bomb, and then, after pondering the situation, sent in another 500-pounder to bounce the rubble. Six bodies were later found, including that of an unidentified child. One body definitely belonged to Zarqawi: American soliders identified him every which way, from scars to fingerprints.

But no human beings are visible in that jet-fighter footage. I actually couldn't tell what I was looking at -- it could have been a warehouse demolition in Tulsa. It was an impersonal obliteration. You could argue that it was the opposite of Zarqawi's style of killing -- he preferred to murder hostages by beheading them in front of a video camera.

My producer invited Mr. Achenbach to appear on today's program, and he declined. I have already asked Mark Steyn and will ask Christopher Hitchens about these paragraphs. Their responses will be transcribed at Radioblogger.com.

I don't see how these paragraphs can easily be read as anything other than an assertion of moral equivalence between the American pilot who deliver the bombs and Zarqawi.

The Post accepts comments at Achenblog. They make for interesting reading.

The Post needs a milblogger, one with as much opportunity to defend the military and the war as Achenbach has to sideswipe both. I suggest Austin Bay, Froggy, Smash or Blackfive as four very experienced, retired military men who are also excellent bloggers. I hope Jim Brady brings someone on soon to fill this glaring gap.

UPDATE: Here's Steyn's take on Achenbach's commentary:

MS: Well, this man is disgusting. And to hell with him, frankly. I find it harder and harder as the days go by to take this kind of talk. You know, the Archbishop of Canterbury made this point. He said that the terrorists and the United States Air Force were both equivalent. They were only capable of viewing people at a distance. The guy in the plane, with all those anonymous buildings as little blips on the radar screen, on the GPS positioning thing way below him, he has more understanding of the humanity there. He knows which is the schoolhouse. He knows which is the hospital. He knows which is the restaurant. And he knows which is the one building he's allowed to hit. What's interesting to me about the people we're up against is they look you in your eyes. Zarqawi can look American hostages, British hostages...poor Margaret Hassan, an Iraqi aid worker, he can look these people in the eye and he fails to recognize their common humanity, and he reaches for his scimitar, and he cuts their throat. The guys at the Beslan school massacre...they looked those kids in the eye, and then they killed them. And the guy in the plane dropping the 500 pound bomb has more understanding of the common humanity that links us and the Iraqis and all peoples on this Earth than Zarqawi does. So to hell with that twerp at the Washington Post. I've got no time for him on a day like this.

From the WSJ.com Avian Flu News Tracker:

9:10 a.m.: A new U.S. rule published Wednesday means that, in the event of a public health emergency, suspected victims will no longer have to grant permission before experimental tests can be run to determine why they're sick. Privacy experts called the exception unnecessary, ripe for abuse and an override of state informed-consent laws.

Here's a link to yesterday's Federal Register, but I haven't found the actual rule yet.

UPDATE: Here it is. The rule's summary:

SUMMARY: The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is issuing this interim final rule to amend its regulations to establish a new exception from the general requirements for informed consent, to permit the use of investigational in vitro diagnostic devices to identify chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear agents without informed consent in certain circumstances. The agency is taking this action because it is concerned that, during a potential terrorism event or other potential public health emergency, delaying the testing of specimens to obtain informed consent may threaten the life of the subject. In many instances, there may also be others who have been exposed to, or who may be at risk of exposure to, a dangerous chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear agent, thus necessitating identification of the agent as soon as possible. FDA is creating this exception to help ensure that individuals who may have been exposed to a chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear agent are able to benefit from the timely use of the most appropriate diagnostic devices, including those that are investigational.

Clearly the FDA has avian flu on its mind:

FDA is proceeding without notice and comment rulemaking because the
Nation needs to have this regulation in place immediately to be
prepared to deal effectively with a terrorism event or other potential public health emergency. Under the provisions of the Administrative Procedure Act at 5 U.S.C. 553(b)(B), FDA finds for good cause that prior notice and comment on this rule are impracticable and contrary to the public interest. The absence of this exception was an impediment to the most efficient and effective public health response to the SARS outbreak. We do not want the absence of such an exception to be an impediment to our response to an outbreak of Avian flu or some other public health emergency. It is critical that FDA act quickly now to ensure that, in the future, individuals who may have been exposed to a chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear agent have the benefit of the timely use of the most appropriate diagnostic devices, including those that are investigational. For the same reasons, the agency is making this interim final rule effective as of the date of publication.