Don’t you hate it when David Brooks uses his New York Times perch to remind his readers that life is full of unexpected turns, expecially ones that reflect well on BushHitler?

Bush is a stubborn man. Well, without that stubbornness, that unwillingness to accept defeat on his watch, he never would have bucked the opposition to the surge.

Bush is an outrageously self-confident man. Well, without that self-confidence he never would have overruled his generals. … The additional fact is that Bush, who made such bad calls early in the war, made a courageous and astute decision in 2006. More than a year on, the surge has produced large, if tenuous, gains. Violence is down sharply. Daily life has improved. Iraqi security forces have been given time to become a more effective fighting force. The Iraqi government is showing signs of strength and even glimmers of impartiality. Iraq has moved from being a failed state to, as Vali Nasr of the Council on Foreign Relations has put it, merely a fragile one.

The whole episode is a reminder that history is a complicated thing. The traits that lead to disaster in certain circumstances are the very ones that come in handy in others. The people who seem so smart at some moments seem incredibly foolish in others.

Yep. (This also applies to Brooks, by the way, who referred to the Iraq war as “a disaster” many times during what he now refers to as “the dark days of 2006.”) He’s not humble enough to acknowledge his own previous cocksureness and foolishness. But he’s out there on the cutting edge of what should be opinion right now. We’ll see how it plays.

Brooks sets the stage:

The cocksure war supporters learned this humbling lesson [about orthodox thinking] during the dark days of 2006. And now the cocksure surge opponents, drunk on their own vindication, will get to enjoy their season of humility. They have already gone through the stages of intellectual denial. First, they simply disbelieved that the surge and the Petraeus strategy was doing any good. Then they accused people who noticed progress in Iraq of duplicity and derangement. Then they acknowledged military, but not political, progress. Lately they have skipped over to the argument that Iraq is progressing so well that the U.S. forces can quickly come home.

But before long, the more honest among the surge opponents will concede that Bush, that supposed dolt, actually got one right. Some brave souls might even concede that if the U.S. had withdrawn in the depths of the chaos, the world would be in worse shape today.

It’s unlikely that there will be many such souls, but count me among those who grudgingly (grudgingly because we are of a certain [anti-Vietnam War] age) admit that Bush’s stubbornness has, on balance, been a good thing for America in the immediate wake of 9/11. Many of America’s cocksure enemies have stood down in the wake of Bush’s cowboy-like cocksure aggressiveness. Bush himself has said he regrets the language he used; I didn’t hear him say that he regrets his “going on offense” against America’s enemies, as indeed he shouldn’t.

Something else has been gained in these long seven years. Brooks doesn’t mention it, but I will:L Islamism now has many respectable enemies—including several of Britain’s most famous public intellectuals and novelists.

The New York Times doesn’t quite approve of such heterodox thoughts as this one expressed by Ian McEwan, the author of Atonement:

“As soon as a writer expresses an opinion against Islamism, immediately someone on the left leaps to his feet and claims that because the majority of Muslims are dark skinned, he who criticizes it is racist.” He added: “This is logically absurd and morally unacceptable. Martin is not a racist. And I myself despise Islamism, because it wants to create a society that I detest, based on religious belief, on a text, on lack of freedom for women, intolerance towards homosexuality and so on — we know it well.”

The Independent, a British paper, referred to McEwan’s words as

an astonishingly strong attack on Islamism

and pointed out that these words could,

in today’s febrile legalistic climate, lay him open to being investigated for a “hate crime”.

Despite adding to the “febrile” climate surrounding this issue, at least the Independent is honest enough to give a full airing to McEwan’s views, which I reprint here with some emphasis [e.a.]:

McEwan – author of On Chesil Beach and the acclaimed Atonement and Enduring Love – has spoken on the issue of Islamism before, telling The New York Times last December: “All religions make very big claims about the world, and it should be possible in an open society to dispute them. It should be possible to say, ‘I find some ideas in Islam questionable’ without being called a racist.”

But his words in the Corriere interview are far stronger, although they do fall short of the invective deployed by Martin Amis. He has said “the Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order”, and told The Independent’s columnist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, a Muslim, in an open letter: “Islamism, in most of its manifestations, not only wants to kill me – it wants to kill you.”

McEwan’s interviewer pointed out that there exist equally hard-line schools of thought within Christianity, for example in the United States. “I find them equally absurd,” McEwan replied. “I don’t like these medieval visions of the world according to which God is coming to save the faithful and to damn the others. But those American Christians don’t want to kill anyone in my city, that’s the difference.”

But McEwan’s specific irritation is reserved for those who find ideological grounds to condemn his and Amis’s views. “When you ask a novelist or a poet about his vision regarding an aspect of the world, you don’t get the response of a politician or a sociologist, but even if you don’t like what he says you have to accept it, you can’t react with defamation. Martin is not a racist, and neither am I.”

Thank you, Ian McEwan. And may others join you in perpetrating the “hate crime” of speaking out in favor of freedom of expression, even (perhaps especially) when your ideas are out of favor with “expert and elite opinion” [Brooks's phrase].

If I were in the Obama camp, I would quit trying to sell the idea that the “change” he’s offering is generational, because, as I recently noted, the Clinton generation (of which I’m nominally a part) is not exactly ready to hand over the reins (and Obama’s tendency to talk like a punk doesn’t help matters).

But generational change is how some Dems are painting the “differences” between the Clinton and Obama camps—differences that are being elided as Obama “Moves to the Center,” claims Thomas Edsall in the HuffPo [e.a.]:

In the international relations policy arena, sources in and out of the Obama camp described a more subtle process taking place, as Obama is forced to decide which Clinton experts to add to the team, and at what level in the hierarchy.

“While there are exceptions on both sides, one of the key differences between the Clinton and Obama foreign policy gurus is generational. And this generational split has significant consequences,” one knowledgeable expert said, speaking on background. “In the main, the senior folks in the Clinton administration (1993-2001) went with Hillary, while many of the less senior people went with Obama.”

Hillary Clinton’s foreign policy advisers came of political age during the Cold War, in many cases during in the Carter administration, and tend to see the world in terms of states and state conflicts, this source said. In addition, many of Hillary Clinton’s top advisers “spent eight years dealing with Saddam [Hussein's] intransigence in the 90s,” making them more receptive to the arguments for invading Iraq.

Conversely, this expert argued, many of the Obama advisers are post-Cold War theorists who tend to see the world in terms of failed states, the influence of technology, food crises, non-state actors like Osama bin Laden, the spread of nuclear weapons, and the uneven distribution of the benefits of globalization.

Another way of seeing this “generational difference,” of course, is this: having experience (aka coming of political age is a form of experience, which the Clintonistas have) versus having smart-(ass) ideas (aka being post-Cold War “theorists”—which the Obamabots think they have).

Meanwhile, one prominent California family lives out a different kind of drama at home, where it’s not a left-sectarian fight but rather a GOP-vs-Dems debating (sorta) society:

Of all the supporters behind the two presumptive nominees for president this year, none are quite as intriguing as Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican who has thrown his support behind Senator John McCain, and the governor’s wife, Maria Shriver, a Democrat and vocal backer of Senator Barack Obama.

The lawn of their Brentwood home has dueling campaign signs. The breakfast table has become a casual debating society. Ms. Shriver is even threatening to bring a life-size cutout of her preferred candidate into the house, something the governor has seen her do in other elections. “When one of the candidates screws up,” Mr. Schwarzenegger said of the cutouts, “the kids carry them outside.”

And to my great relief, the Dem side in this battle is represented by a fair-minded person—a “little-d democrat” [e.a.]:

“I think there are great benefits to having kids grow up understanding that we do not live in a one-party system,” Ms. Shriver said. “That there are two ways at looking at an issue. To be patient, and to compromise, those are good lessons not just in politics but for life. I grew up believing there was only one way to think. There isn’t.”

All hail the friendly enmity between people with different politics!

The evidence is scant, but it’s there:

 

Ali Yussef / AFP/Getty Images

Children jump and run as Iraqi troops arrive in their neighborhood to distribute food rations in the impoverished Sadr City district of eastern Baghdad. Iraqi troops poured into the Baghdad Shiite bastion of Sadr City three days ago for the first time in eight weeks, without resistance from militias who have fought deadly street battles with US forces.

Iraq violence falls to four-year low, U.S. says

The military says crackdowns by the Iraqi government are working, and that the number of attacks has dropped to about 300 a week from 1,600 in June.

The other day in the Times, Bill Kristol quoted a Marine helicopter pilot:

“I was in Iraq from the 2nd to the 12th this month. In my current job I go over there twice a year for two weeks to collect lessons learned and fly a few sorties …

“The biggest deal for me was the fact that even after we have pulled out thousands of U.S. and Iraqi troops, peace continues to hold in Anbar. In fact, I was shocked by two things when flying over Ramadi and Fallujah. First, the streetlights are back on. It is crazy to see Iraqi cities lit up completely, and since they are all on grid power now, you don’t see the crazy black/brown outs when you fly over and the generators pop like you would back in 2005/6. The power now seems to extend even into the suburbs and light industry on the edges of the major cities as well.

“Second, there are people, regular civilians, walking the streets at night. That was very unusual and got the visitor (me) laughed at when I told our terminal controller that I had personnel walking down a street on the radio.”

Most people would mock such “progress,” and of course they’re right to. No one who refers to it as “progress” would ever consider living under such conditions. It’s the height of arrogance to claim this resumption of some normalcy in some pockets of Iraq as a success. It is only a small half-step up from the hell unleashed by the toppling of Saddam Hussein and the “coalition of the willing’s” occupation of an alien country ruled by tribal passions, located in a region little understood by those who made war on it.

This ignorance is evident from what the locals in Basra have told NYT reporter Stephen Farrell, who also reports on progress but (wisely) never uses that word [e.a.]:

With the death squads in hiding and Islamist militias evicted from their strongholds by the Iraqi Army, few doubt that this once-lawless port is in better shape than it was just two months ago. …

Two months after Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki ordered the military offensive, residents of Basra talk of feeling safer, if not yet entirely safe, after years of oppression by armed gangs and “enforcers” of Shariah, or Islamic law. In the four years that British troops patrolled here, from 2003 to late 2007, the outlaws emerged and preyed on musicians, alcohol sellers, Christians, unveiled women, academics — anyone not embracing their extreme vision of Islam.

Now the shops and restaurants in Basra are open later, and alcohol is back on sale, discreetly. The government’s troops seem to have quelled Moktada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army and other militias. …

In the inevitable post-mortems, a principal question has been whether the multinational troops in southern Iraq, led by the British, should have rid the city of its gangsters long ago. …

But Iraqis are asking why it didn’t happen years ago …

Aside from the fact that it’s ridiculously impertinent and impudent and nervy for Iraqis to ask why, during the hell on earth that was this war in its early years, the coalition didn’t save them from sharia sooner, it turns out that cultural and demographic differences have played a big role in the outcomes in different parts of Iraq:

[In Basra], mafia-style Shiite gangs rose in an overwhelmingly Shiite town; up north, Sunni and Shiite factions waged civil war in divided cities like Baghdad and Baquba.

This is exactly the kind of thing that the coalition forces didn’t know before launching the war.

There’s also the little matter of cultural differences between the British and the Americans:

“I have been very frustrated at the British,” said Brig. Gen. Edan Jaber, a police commander in Basra. He said the British “gave a high priority to their own security” and “were not forceful with the cases they faced in the street.”

It is a common criticism. “The Americans go in with huge force and hit hard, not like the British,” one Iraqi soldier complained.

And then there’s the cultural difference between Iraqis and free Westerners—the one you’re not allowed to say in public in the West without being accused of being a neocon or a warmonger. That same Iraqi soldier elaborated on his complaint, and made an observation [e.a.]:

““The Americans go in with huge force and hit hard, not like the British. Our people need a powerful force, not a weak one. We had just left Saddam Hussein behind. How could anyone be soft after that?”

That’s a good question, particularly as it relates to electoral politics in America in 2008, where one (presumptive) candidate consistently appears soft and the other one doesn’t.

The divisions on the left have left some people feeling smug and self-satisfied.

Here’s Mark Steyn:

Randi Rhodes agrees with Hillary Clinton and Geraldine Ferraro on everything - abortion, health care, climate change, you name it. Yet the first is “a f***ing whore” and the second is “David Duke in drag” merely because they disagree on which Democratic senator would make the best president. …

There’s something rather heartening about this for those of us on the right who’ve been on the receiving end of the left’s vehemence: Apparently there really is nothing personal about it. You can be a chickenhawk warmonger racist homophobe mysogynist Bush shill or a pro-feminist pro-gay pro-black icon of progressive politics for a generation, but, if you cross the likes of Randi Rhodes, you’re all the same and you merit the same four-letter words and KKK slurs.

I can see why Steyn would be comforted to know that his critics are irrational by definition and not just mad at him. But that doesn’t help us, as a country and as a society, deal with the dime-store demagoguery that now characterizes our public “discourse.”

Demagogues of all stripes should be discouraged, marginalized, de-fanged, deligitimized, and brought down. They’re dangerous in any society, because they stir up mob sentiment.

A skeptical climate scientist, John R. Christy, awarded the Nobel Prize along with Al Gore, dissents, in a WSJ op-ed, from the new conventional “wisdom”—and fails to make the news:

I’m sure the majority (but not all) of my IPCC colleagues cringe when I say this, but I see neither the developing catastrophe nor the smoking gun proving that human activity is to blame for most of the warming we see. Rather, I see a reliance on climate models (useful but never “proof”) and the coincidence that changes in carbon dioxide and global temperatures have loose similarity over time. …

It is my turn to cringe when I hear overstated-confidence from those who describe the projected evolution of global weather patterns over the next 100 years, especially when I consider how difficult it is to accurately predict that system’s behavior over the next five days.

Read it. Christy isn’t saying there isn’t climate change. He, like Bjorn Lomborg, is saying that we should first of all address those matters that we can fix:

The uncertain impacts of global warming far in the future must be weighed against disasters at our doorsteps today. Bjorn Lomborg’s Copenhagen Consensus 2004, a cost-benefit analysis of health issues by leading economists (including three Nobelists), calculated that spending on health issues such as micronutrients for children, HIV/AIDS and water purification has benefits 50 to 200 times those of attempting to marginally limit “global warming.”

This makes sense to me, and it’s also the way I act as a Decider/manager in my own life. It’s practical, pragmatic, and effective to do what you can do today rather than sell some pipe dream about tomorrow.

The quote of the day:

Since news of his arrest broke, [Senator Larry] Craig appears to be in deep political trouble.

Read all about the depth of his trouble here, if you care. But you might as well just read what McCain said:

“I believe that he pleaded guilty, and he had the opportunity to plead innocent,” said McCain, of Arizona. “So, I think he should resign. My opinion is that when you plead guilty to a crime you shouldn’t serve.”