I can’t decide who I want to lose.

May they die in each others arms. Soon.

Witness the triumph of western value importation.

Andrew Sullivan has the transcript for Obama’s speech. If there was any doubt that the man is merry leagues ahead of any other politician active in the Anglosphere a read of that ought to dispell it.

A relief.

I had feared that his firm line was softening (which would have not only been a true pity but also politically opened him up to the same “Flip-flop” claim that hounded John Kerry. As it is he is actually attacking The Surge outright, an unexpected angle given the quantity of good press that this strategic measure has been given. His criticisms are sound though: Afghanistan does seem to have suffered from neglect (having been mostly forgotten, it seems at times) and the massive scale investment and resulting permanant killing of resentment which The Surge was supposed to have achieved by now simply happened.

John McCain appears to be deeming it a success purely because less American troops are now dying. This disregards the civilian death count and the fact that The Surge had goals which it has failed to achieve. Simply to prevent further hæmorrhaging does not make the conditions ripe for continued presence in the fashion which McCain suggests. Unless, of course, Iraq is to be treated like an imperial conquest.

Less pleasing is Obama’s continued commitment to troop deployment in Afghanistan. Although things are far more clear here in terms of the American’s foes (the Taliban wish to cease control of the country and implement once again the truly grim conditions that they previously enjoyed) the extent to which such a force can be defeated by the present tactics used is unclear. Should the present approach of the former regime of engaging in pitched battles continue it is likely that the Americans shall continue to win but fighting such an extensive force when it takes up insurgency tactics will be difficult.

More than military might is required to win Afghanistan and safeguard it from re-conquest by theocracy. What must be won over is the people. Through allowing the seminal education of girls there is a start towards this underway but there must be other ways in which the repuganancy of the Taliban’s return can be demonstrated. A viable alternative would be pleasing but the extent to which any American president can forge such a movement is strictly limited. We must hope for an Afghan alternative to theocrats or American puppet rule to emerge. For the time being more troops being present to stop, for instance, the murder of teachers educating both genders for the first time in Afghanistan’s history does not seem displeasing.

Certainly more good can be done there than in Iraq.

I do my best to avoid posting links to Trotskyites and the like. Not because it only encourages them {given that they’ve put up with everyone else ignoring them I doubt they’ll mind me doing the same} but because political extremists are so easy to ignore.

When they pick up on stuff that other’s won’t, though, it has to be done.

That the amount of birth defects have increased hardly surprises me. I recall going to see a play and meeting a chap who had been briefly exposed to “Spent” uranium during his service in the British Army in the first Gulf War. He later discovered, many years later, that the quantity of radiation in his blood was a few hundred times over that which would be safe. That his health was crippled as a consequence is perhaps surprising only in that he managed to stay alive. Now imagine the consequences for those residing in civilian areas struck by these substances. Imagine people who are not briefly in contact but return to their homes in areas hit by this stuff.

There has been copious evidence collected demonstrating the deleterious of these substances, but both the US and UK exempted themselves from any negative effects when writing up the laws concerning such matters.

Or perhaps it was the white phosperous.

Either way, we can but hope that the unhappy city of Fallujah is freed soon from the ill health and oppression that presently blight it and that the tyrants who struck it are tried as the war criminals that they are unquestionably are. Any apologist for this atrocity is either ignorant or an intellectual coward and callous whelp of the highest order.

Gerard Baker really is a lousy American correspondent.

Why? Because he understands half of America fine. Really well, in fact. There are better but he does an immensely decent job at reporting the right side, he has quite a feel for them and although he occasionally gets carried away {see: ham-fisted jingoism when it mattered} he actually seems to know nothing at all about the other side of America, about the left.

This article today simply confirmed it.

It dubbed Obama a “Dangerous Leftwinger” in a fashion that was positively McCarthian in the headline and then got worse from there:

He began with a jab at Obama’s wife, attempting to stage a critique-via-proxy to mask his real offensive on her husband, stating:

In what might be the most revealing statement made by any political figure so far in this campaign season…

in reference towards her views on America and pride. Apparently John McCain’s infamous “Iraq for 10,000 years” is effectively negligible. He then acted as the Thought Police and stated that she had a “remarkably narrow view”. I suspect that it was simply her breadth allowing her to note all of the atrocities that he acted as an apologist for.

He then proceeded to tout the moronic “Messianic” line, when Obama’s speeches have always told the American People that it would be a collective effort {perhaps something that Baker has trouble understanding} and been far from technocratic.

But then the idiocy gets further:

Secondly, and more importantly, I suspect it reveals much about what the Obama family really thinks about the kind of nation that America is.

It seems that Baker, although encouraging us to listen to Obama’s speeches has really never done so himself. Obama’s passion for America is blatant and only somebody lacking both internal ears and eyeballs could fail to observe it. Her view is her view, she will not be president. Barack’s is obvious.

He attempts to get around this by saying that he is on the “Wing” of the party that hates America {since obviously trying to get a country’s children educated and attended to by doctors is the signature for somebody who loathes it} but it here that Baker is worst of all.

I have observed a phenomenon amongst American correspondents that I dub the “Defensive Snarl”, usually accompanied by its applied aural form the “Hypocrite’s slur”. America is the target of a good deal of leftist bile and those who are in America tend to enjoy at least some element of their existence. Accordingly their tendency is to smear all of these critics as ferociously I can, in the most disingeious approach imaginable.

Calling all Americans “A bunch of bigots” is immensely ironic. Calling all critics of America those that call all Americans “A bunch of bigots” greater still.

Observe:

There is a caste of left-wing Americans who wish essentially and in all honesty that their country was much more like France.

I am almost in tears by this stage.

They wish it had much higher levels of taxation and government intervention, that it had much higher levels of welfare, that it did not have such a “militaristic” approach to foreign policy.

Yes, they do. Note the way that the use of ” ” to enclose the word militaristic. Why are they there? Presumably Gerard considers the USA’s foreign policy to be other than militaristic, and wants to let us know that he does not endorse such crazy traitor-talk as alleged that a President waddling around in an airforce jump-suit and beginning and then sustaining wars that cause a deranged amount of damage to entirely innocent people is something other than militaristic.

If that is his view then he should damn well say so and write a proper article explaining this idiocy.

But this has never been Baker’s style.  He prefers to keep himself in a rush, thinking that so long as he keeps on churning out the nonsense he can excuse not backing a word of it up.

Above all, that its national goals were dictated, not by the dreadful halfwits who inhabit godforsaken places like Kansas and Mississippi, but by the counsels of the United Nations.

This is the part where I began to imagine that Baker’s understanding of leftism and its priorities consisted of reading a few Those T-shirts and setting finger to key while still chuckling. I’ve read a good deal of leftist material over the past few years, much of it originating from America, and the one argument that I have not seen is the case for the UN taking over US foreign policy.

I am shocked that I have seen no blog, article or website promoting this cause if it really is as prominent a thing that we lefties covet. Strangely the impression that I got was that what the American Left really wanted was an end to torture, an end to the absurdity of an industrialised nation in the 21st century having citizens dying for want of healthcare or, oh, an end to the War?

This supports my long-held view that Baker really has no idea who the left are and what they believe in and as such his articles on them are bound to be that of a blind-man staggering about and bumping into things. Obviously he never reads any of their output since he has failed to note that the left really barely ever talks about the UN any more, perhaps because it now seems like the majority of Americans are coming around to its stance on the War. The American people, just like the majority of the American left always has, wants the troops out and wants it now. That’s what is spoken about, not the UN. Why would that be advocated when it looks like a President who agrees with them stands a strong {perhaps the strongest} of getting elected?

Ah, but what a fool I was to imagine that Baker would leave that uncovered:

He continues to insist, despite the growing evidence that this left-wing nostrum would be lunacy, that the US must pull its troops out of Iraq with the utmost dispatch.

Yes, nevermind the growth of actual Americans of the view that we need to leave, the lack of consensus towards remaining embedded in a country where we are causing damage to all democrats by associating western values with the presence of a unwanted military force is no concern for dear Gerard, for he can simply generate one from his mind’s never-ending fantastical capacity.

It is “Lunacy” to depart from a country that does not want us, where we are confined to a fortress city-within-a-city euphemistically termed “The Green Zone” to contrast it to the colour the streets turn whenever American soldiers try and travel anywhere else. Utterly absurd, of course. What could Barack be thinking? It is so beyond the pale, so in opposition to the almighty empirical data that I allude to but never cite, that we must not address his actual argument. Far better to dismiss him off hand, far better to use this as fodder for further idiocy.

Let the Fisking continue:

There was no shortage of proposals. He plans large increases in government spending on health and education.

As did Bush and as Bush did. If Baker is arguing that this is somehow still an approach advocated solely by the far left he has clearly not even heard of Huckabee, let alone noted that there is a candidate suggesting we shrink the state, Ron Paul, and that he has rarely received the support of more than 10% of Republican voters, often much less.

And we would have to overlook the trillions of dollars spent by Bush {indeed, the billions he has taken from China in order to stage Baker’s beloved war} as well. Of course.

He wants to tax the rich more to pay for it. He is against companies using the opportunities of free markets to restructure their operations in the US. He is vehemently protectionist.

These are policies of the left. However Baker is wrong in that he botches his follow through:

 when you cut through the verbiage there is nothing to suggest he believes anything that is seriously at odds with the far Left of his party.

Where he is utterly wrong.

Firstly he seems to have conflated verbiage with eloquence, when they are two clearly distinct concepts. When eloquent you say something with the same clarity but superior aesthetics to the most basic form that meaning could be gleaned from, while with verbiage the meaning is obscured by unnecessary clutter.

Baker is also wrong in that the left is actually considerably wary of Obama. He is barely distinct from Hillary but where he is it is to the right. The choice of the left would have been Edwards, by a merry mile, but in his stead they balked from Clinton owing largely to her blatant lack of integrity and ruthless opportunism. Obama is clearly a winner and the left are rather keen on enjoying a spot of that, since it really has been quite a while.

In a sentence less cloying than nauseating, he continues:

If you think about it for a second, it’s not really an accident that he has been endorsed by the likes of Ted Kennedy and Jesse Jackson.

Which makes it a mystery how he had such an easy time carrying all of the Red States, does it not? A total enigma, given that he is really a being of the hard-left.

Hang on though, I haven’t thought for a second…

Alright.

A second’s thought leads me to conclude that Obama is a centrist.

Though he talks with great eloquence about the future, he sounds for all the world like one of the long line of Democrats from George McGovern to Walter Mondale to Michael Dukakis, who became history by espousing policies and striking a rhetorical pose that was well out of the mainstream of American politics.

The absurdity of Obama being at all like McGovern, Mondale or Dukakis is just one that I am going to disregard entirely. I would feel defiled even debating that point.

Note, however, that he thinks that his perception is “For all the world”. Baker lives in his own fantastical planet, this much is clear, one with it’s own Iraq, not to mention its own America where the “Ordinary” American is in favour of remaining engaged within the aforementioned fantasy Iraq {and why not? It sounds like such a nice place} and now, it seems, Obama’s talk of working with Republicans, his strictly limited {but still utterly shocking to almost all leftists} praise of Reagen and his flanking of Hillary over healthcare from the Right simply never occurred.

This is a fantasy world where amongst the “real causes for American pride in the past 25 years” is “the victory in the first Gulf War in 1991″, where Suddam was left to slaughter the Kurdish rebels rising against him at his own leisure with helicopter gunships and other weaponry bought by the US as GIs stood by and did not even blast those airborne artillery batteries flying through their no-fly zone. A true triumph, that was.

This is a world where when an American sees an American will

fill up with understandable emotion whenever they see a report on television about the tragic heroics of some soldier or Marine who gave his life in Iraq or Afghanistan.

and amongst those feelings will not be blood-curdling rage at the pointless death of someone killed for no cause at all or remorse that this absurd spectacle of aimless carnage had been permitted to continue.

I could caustically rant on for hours about this fool and his distorted vision of an already warped country that deserves far more hatred than its earned yet at times seems defended solely by the blind to the bloodstains rather than those who can accept the horrors it has committed yet do not consider it the Great Satan but this commenteer on the Times website has already done my job for me:

What you claim as the “mainstream of American politics” is neither mainstream nor American. You are simply expressing the age old fear of the status quo, a fear of loosing the lucrative control the status quo has over Americans….You are afraid of Obama and what he stands for and frankly you should be.

Between 1 and 2 million people marched on the streets of London on 15 February 2003.  3 million in Rome.  Conservative estimates say 10 million took to the streets in 300 cities around the world.

Five years later, and the British public has not been motivated like this since.  Your thoughts in the comments section,  please.

Update: Well, would you look at that?

Ali has posted about the importance of remaining in Iraq. I find this pragmatic case against immediate departure dubious, but it is one that I held myself until a short while ago so I can understand the reasoning perfectly.

The problem with it is that the very fact that this happened shows that the presence of US troops is ineffectual. Whether the use of women unaware of what they were being used to achieve {Kant has some worth, at least: that people should be considered ends in themselves rather than a means to an end is a doctrine that could end much woe} were opted for to evade incinerating worthwhile jihadis or because it was problematic to use shifty men is something that I am not certain of but the fact remains that it did happen.

This does not really seem to be something that the US troops can avert and it would appear that they are inflaming the situation through their presence alone.

I doubt that they will mind but without the coalition presence these proxy mass murderers truly have no excuse and since our attendance appears to have no influence in terms of actual prevention this leaves the road clear, and it leads out of the country which we so thoroughly shattered.

Soldiers are ultimately trained to kill. They are not suitable for reconstruction.

I am concerned about troop withdrawals from Iraq.  I opposed the invasion in 2003 (an early display of political campaigning) and still believe it was wrong to invade when we did in the way we did.  However, that does not come close to justifying fleeing the scene of the crime.  We will leave few established authority structures in place in Iraq, and the general population will be subject to militant anarchy.  The suicide bombings may be a response to occupying forces, but it is naive in the highest to pretend that fewer bombs will be detonated if the troops leave.

There are no easy solutions to Iraq, but it seems very clear that a quick get-away will do far more damage to the global community than some form of rebuilding.  In a country where remote detonators are used to explode bombs attached to mentally disabled women, the mere notion of “law and order” is a sick joke.  Leaving Iraq in chaos is a cowardly response: Lady Macbeth may scrub her hands all she likes, but the damned spot will not wash away.