Wars are costly, and the US has conventionally spent more than its actual revenues in time of war. Say what you will about George W. Bush’s management of the War in Iraq. His domestic tax policies (i.e. tax cuts) combined with the Rumsfeldian parsimony in troop deployments have successfully kept the US economy healthy and avoided customary war-time inflation.

As the New York Sun notes, the deficit is shrinking faster than those glaciers the moonbats are so concerned about.

2004: $413 billion
2005: $318 billion
2006: $248 billion
2007: $158 billion

Close readers of this column may recall the top three numbers in the list above from our editorial of July 12, “Incredible Shrinking Deficit.” It commented on the mid-session review released by President Bush’s Office of Management and Budget, which projected the fourth number, the 2007 federal budget deficit, at $205 billion. Yesterday, the Congressional Budget Office released its own updated estimate for 2007, $158 billion, a deficit even smaller than the White House’s July figure. The CBO yesterday also released its latest estimate of the 2007 deficit as a percentage of the Gross Domestic Product, allowing us to update another list of deficit numbers:

2004: 3.6%
2005: 2.6%
2006: 1.9%
2007: 1.2%

Amy Proctor (via Scott Malensik) offers this August 2005 video from Iraqi television featuring captured Al Qaeda terrorist Ramzi Hashem Abed testifying about his group’s repulsive and blood-curdling activities. (The interrogator indignantly asks him if he thinks kidnapping, raping, and then murdering college students is really jihad.)

What is most significant though is Abed’s frank account of being part of the radical Islamist Ansar al Islam group, connected with Al Qaeda, which seized several Kurdish villages near Halabja and imposed Sharia rule in 2001. Their training area was in Falluja, he recalls, in the time of the former Iraqi regime.

9:49 video

Wesley Pruden admires the consternation of the democrats at the turning of the tide in Iraq.

It’s not easy to pimp surrender, but some of our congressional and media worthies are giving it their best shot.

It won’t be easy. Nobody but the loons think quitters, fakers, surrender monkeys and pessimists of various stripes are good custodians of the national interests, and the men and women who read the newspapers and magazines and watch the television newscasts are smarter than the men and women who write and preen for them. Americans are fed up with the Iraq war not because they think resisting jihad is wrong, but because they think the leaders at the top may not necessarily be serious about winning without apology. Anthony McAuliffe, who answered the German demand for surrender at Bastogne with “nuts” (if not something a little saltier), is the kind of general Americans admire most.

The risks for Democratic doom-criers are becoming evident. The accumulating evidence of progress, little by little, is changing public opinion. Media opinion will follow, slowly as always, and the sluggard notabilities of press and screen will be tugged — “kicking and screaming,” as the liberals once said of conservatives — into reality. The Democrats in Congress, like the embittered losers on the left, will be left behind on the other side of the famous bridge to the 21st century.

Cautious optimism is reflected in curious places. “The new U.S. military strategy in Iraq, unveiled six months ago to little acclaim, is working,” the Associated Press — no particular friend of George W. Bush — reports. The usual caveats follow: “It’s a phase with fresh promise yet the same old worry: Iraq may be too fractured to make whole.” And this: the U.S. military “cannot guarantee victory.” And this: “… it is far from certain that [the Iraqis] are capable of putting this shattered country together again.” American commanders are “clinging to a hope.” And “there is no magic formula for success.” Duh.

Nevertheless and grudging or not, things are reported to be better than they used to be, and seem to be getting a little better every day. It’s enough to make a partisan Democrat weep. Some are. Nancy Boyda of Kansas, a freshman in the House, was so unnerved by good news from the front that she stalked out of a committee hearing when a retired general described developments in Iraq as encouraging. Good news like that, she said, only “further divides the country.” Jim Clyburn of South Carolina, the Democratic majority House whip, was even more revealing: If things improve in Iraq, that would be “a real problem for us.”

Fear began to creep into the Democratic consciousness a fortnight or so ago, replacing the happy confidence that America was taking the licking that would doom Republicans next year.

Read the whole thing.

An Army Ranger Sergeant First Class, who has served 21 months in Iraq, while home on a two week leave, pleads for the US public’s support to let him finish his job on a call to the Neal Boortz show. The video was produced by Noodlehead Studios and SaveTheSoldiers.Com.

7:32 video

Marc Sheppard observes that good news concerning the success of US operations in Iraq and the continuation of British support under new Prime Minister Gordon Brown has made it a bad week for the democrat anti-war left, but the democrats and their media allies are fighting back.

Warfare is the Way of deception – Sun Tzu

The left’s anti-war forces sustained heavy casualties earlier this week. And, judging from both strategy shifts and painful screams heard throughout the liberal blogosphere, many of the fallen were high value propaganda targets.

It’s no secret that Democratic strategists see failure in Iraq as a blood-soaked red carpet leading them to the White House next year. So much so that even before the president officially announced the initial 20,000 troop surge in January, opposition party leaders were scrambling to denounce it as a doomed and desperate last-gasp effort to save a failing policy. …

(various positive news)

..the now fully implemented surge is working to expectation and the misinformed contrarians were wrong.

No problem – Dems and the MSM will simply toggle between denying and ignoring that fact. Just as they’ve denied the nature of Al Qaeda in Iraq and ignored its recent attempts to use chemical weapons against Iraqi civilians. Ditto requests for their plan to prevent the untold civilian casualties of anti-war associated with cutting and running, which may now include a repeat of what happened to the Kurds of Halabja.

Sure enough — with hopes of an unfavorable review quickly fading, a new stratagem has arisen, with anti-war disinformation brigades launching a surge of their own. Suddenly no longer concerned with military matters, today we are being barraged with statements like those from ABC News (“In the critical, political arena, the picture is bleak”) or from Sen. Joe Biden (D-DE), who in April declared “that the troop surge plan in Iraq has failed,” yet today quipped:

“We’ve made some progress in the surge, we’ve made some military progress. But I think [Petraeus will] be honest enough to say we’ve made no political progress.”

As is often said of its counterpart, it’s becoming abundantly clear that truth is the first casualty of anti-war.

Read the whole thing.

Tony Blankley compares the minor setbacks in Iraq with the major setbacks early in the Second World War (and the behavior of the British Opposition then with that of the American defeatists of today). As in 1942, changes in military leadership and growing experience in dealing with the enemy may in 2007 be producing a major change in momentum.

On June 25, the following resolution was tabled in the House:

“That this House, while paying tribute to the heroism and endurance of the Armed Forces, in circumstances of exceptional difficulty, has no confidence in the central direction of the war.”

That would be June 25, 1942. The House would be the House of Commons in London, England. And the government in which no confidence was expressed was that of Winston Churchill.

Almost three years into World War II, repeated military failures had induced considerable war fatigue in Britain. In February 1942, Singapore fell to the Japanese with 25,000 British troops being taken prisoner. In March, Rangoon fell. This was vastly damaging to Churchill’s prestige in Washington as Rangoon was the only port through which aid could be shipped to China’s Chiang Kai-shek — a very high priority for the United States in Asia.

In April, the Japanese Navy drove the Royal Navy all the way back to East Africa and shelled the British Indian coastal cities.

Then on June 21, 1942, Tobruk in North Africa fell to Gen. Rommel, with 33,000 British prisoners taken and the Suez Canal (Britain’s lifeline to her Asian empire and oil) threatened.

A week later, Churchill struggled to win that vote of no confidence. But shrewd political observers in London at the time (very much including Churchill himself) believed he was one more lost battle away from being removed from office — or at best stripped of his Minister of Defense cabinet powers and rendered a mere figurehead leader.

But during those months Churchill had been busy firing or re-assigning the generals who were not bringing victories: including Gens. Wavell, Dill, Auchinleck, Ritchie, Norrie, Brooke-Popham, Messervy and Corbett — among others.

Finally he found a general who could win — Bernard Law Montgomery. And at the second battle of El Alamein in October and November 1942, Montgomery beat Rommel and started the drive west across the rim of Africa — finally driving Rommel and his Afrika Corp clear off the continent. Both for Churchills’ government and the eventual victory in WWII, El Alamein was the “hinge of fate.” As Chuchill said: “Before Alamein we never had a victory. After Alamein we never had a defeat.”

I wonder whether, perhaps, in Gen. Petraeus President Bush has finally found his Gen. Montgomery. And whether Petraeus’s new strategy and success at beating al Qaeda in Iraq and growing success against the Mahdi Army — may be his El Alamein.

Wars are curious things. Certainly, as President Bush and many of his supporters have cruelly learned, victories cannot reliably be predicted. But as Sen. Harry Reid, the congressional Democrats (and a growing number of Republicans) may soon learn — neither can one reliably predict defeat.

Of course, there are vast differences between WWII and the current Iraq Theatre of the War on Terror (ITWOT). For one thing, in 1942, the British Parliamentarians were not proposing bringing the British troops home and surrendering to Hitler and the Japanese. They merely thought another leader (perhaps Sir Stafford Cripps) might better lead Britain to victory.

Were they more patriotic than the current defeatists in Washington? Perhaps. Or perhaps it was just that they understood (at least by that terrible summer of 1942) that for England, it was victory or death — while for many of the Washington defeatists in this dismal summer of ’07 they are under the delusion that America in all its might and glory can simply surrender to al Qaeda without potentially mortal consequences. …

So this week’s New York Times article by Brookings Institute experts arguing that we may yet be able to win the war has sent a tidal wave of hope through the pro-war camp and a chill down the backs of the Democratic Party defeatist. If it’s true, the hinge of fate unexpectedly may be swinging — knocking over many in its great arc.

Read the whole thing.

James Risen, one of the two New York Times journalists who published the leaked story on Counter-Terrorism communications datamining in December of 2005, is in the interesting position this morning of reporting on democrats reversing course and hastening not only to authorize but even to expand the program democrats have been using as a political target since the time of Mr. Risen’s original article. A deliciously ironic development.

Under pressure from President Bush, Democratic leaders in Congress are scrambling to pass legislation this week to expand the government’s electronic wiretapping powers.

Democratic leaders have expressed a new willingness to work with the White House to amend the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to make it easier for the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on some purely foreign telephone calls and e-mail. Such a step now requires court approval.

It would be the first change in the law since the Bush administration’s program of wiretapping without warrants became public in December 2005.

In the past few days, Mr. Bush and Mike McConnell, director of national intelligence, have publicly called on Congress to make the change before its August recess, which could begin this weekend. Democrats appear to be worried that if they block such legislation, the White House will depict them as being weak on terrorism.

David B. Rivkin, Jr. and Lee A. Casey argue, in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, that the real wiretapping scandal ought to be considered the significant degradation of American Counter-Terrorism surveillance capabilities as the result of partisanship and ideological assault.

Last Tuesday’s Senate Judiciary Committee hearing — at which Attorney General Alberto Gonzales was insulted by senators and ridiculed by spectators — was Washington political theater at its lowest. But some significant information did manage to get through the senatorial venom directed at Mr. Gonzales. It now appears certain that the terrorist surveillance program (TSP) authorized by President Bush after 9/11 was even broader than the TSP that the New York Times first revealed in December 2005.

It is also clear that Mr. Gonzales, along with former White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card, tried to preserve that original program with the knowledge and approval of both Republican and Democratic members of key congressional committees. Unfortunately, they failed and the program was narrowed. Today, the continuing viability of even the slimmed-down TSP — an indispensable weapon in the war on terror — remains in serious doubt. …

In December 2005, … a firestorm of controversy erupted when The New York Times published a story describing the TSP. Although it was clear from the beginning that the program targeted al Qaeda — a particular communication was intercepted based on the presence of a suspected al Qaeda operative on at least one end — and not directed at ordinary Americans going about their daily routines, the administration’s critics quickly wove the TSP into their favorite overarching anti-Bush narrative. They cited it as just one more example of a supposedly power-hungry president, the new “king George,” chewing up our civil liberties.

Administration officials, including Attorney General Gonzales, repeatedly explained the TSP to Congress and the public, presumably to an extent consistent with continuing national security imperatives. In particular, they said that only communications where at least one party to the conversation was outside of the U.S. were intercepted; purely domestic calls were not in play. But after months of congressional pressure, and having failed to secure new legislation that would have fundamentally revised FISA, the administration announced in January this year that it had reached an agreement with the special FISA court to bring the TSP under judicial auspices. …

What has gotten lost in all of this increasingly sordid game of political gotcha is the viability of a critical program in the war on terror. The TSP was brought under the FISA court’s jurisdiction this January, allegedly without impairing its effectiveness. But FISA orders are not permanent. They must be periodically reissued, and FISA judges rotate. As an editorial on the facing page of the Journal first reported Friday, well-placed sources say that today’s FISA-compliant TSP is only about “one-third” as effective as the 2005 version — which, in turn, was less comprehensive than the original program. This is shocking during a summer of heightened threat warnings, and should be unacceptable to Congress and the American people.

The problem is particularly acute because FISA’s 1978 framework has been rendered dysfunctional by the evolution of technology. FISA was enacted in a world where intercepts of purely foreign communications were conducted overseas, and were entirely exempt from the statutory strictures. Only true U.S. domestic communications were intercepted on U.S. soil and these intercepts were subjected to FISA’s prescriptive procedures. Yet, with today’s fiber optic networks functioning as the sinews of the global communications system, entirely foreign calls — say between al Qaeda operatives overseas — often flow through U.S. facilities and can be most reliably intercepted on American soil. Subjecting these intercepts to FISA strictures is absurd.

Moreover, the very fact that the intelligence community operates in a state of continued uncertainty about what precise surveillance parameters would be allowed in the future — instead of having the collection efforts driven entirely by the unfolding operational imperatives — is both unprecedented in wartime and highly detrimental. In past wars, as fighting continued, valuable battlefield experience was gathered, causing weapons systems, military organization and combat techniques to improve consistently. In this difficult war with al Qaeda, by contrast, the key battlefield intelligence-gathering program has been repeatedly emasculated.

Congress’ obsession with the TSP’s legal pedigree has become the major threat to its continued viability, rivaling in its deleterious impact the infamous “wall,” much criticized by the 9/11 Commission, which prevented information sharing between the Justice Department’s intelligence and law-enforcement divisions. It is hypocritical for those in Congress who preach fidelity to the 9/11 Commission recommendations to behave so dramatically at odds with their spirit. The question Judiciary Committee members should have been asking Mr. Gonzales was not whether he had misled them — he clearly did not — but whether the TSP is still functioning well. The question the public should be asking those senators — and with not much more civility than the senators showed Mr. Gonzales — is what are they going to do about it if the answer is no.

While Congressional democrats are playing “He said; she said” games on the subject of Counter-Terrorism data-mining in order to bring down Alberto Gonzalez, Newsweek is reporting that US Intelligence Agencies are having difficult keeping up with changes in technology and that all the political games the left and the MSM have played with the Echelon program have also had a real impact, significantly diminishing the program’s effectiveness.

Six years after 9/11 , U.S. intel officials are complaining about the emergence of a major “gap” in their ability to secretly eavesdrop on suspected terrorist plotters. In a series of increasingly anxious pleas to Congress, intel “czar” Mike McConnell has argued that the nation’s spook community is “missing a significant portion of what we should be getting” from electronic eavesdropping on possible terror plots. Rep. Heather Wilson, a GOP member of the House intelligence community, told Newsweek she has learned of “specific cases where U.S. lives have been put at risk” as a result. Intel agency spokespeople declined to elaborate.

The intel gap results partly from rapid changes in the technology carrying much of the world’s message traffic (principally telephone calls and e-mails). The National Security Agency is falling so far behind in upgrading its infrastructure to cope with the digital age that the agency has had problems with its electricity supply, forcing some offices to temporarily shut down. The gap is also partly a result of administration fumbling over legal authorization for eavesdropping by U.S. agencies. …

According to both administration and congressional officials (anonymous when discussing such issues), the White House and intelligence czar’s office are now urgently trying to negotiate a legal fix with Congress that would make it easier for NSA to eavesdrop on e-mails and phone calls where all parties are located outside the U.S., even if at some point the message signal crosses into U.S. territory.

The London Times reports that Pakistan has sent in 80,000 troops into the area it previously surrendered to Al Qaeda with orders to root out the Islamist extremists.

map

Pakistan is still refusing to permit US military actions within its borders, and threatening to withdraw from its American alliance if the US were to act unilaterally, the Chinese Xinhua news agency reports.

Thomas Joscelyn, in the Weekly Standard, refutes the recent democratic justification for defeatism: the claim that “Iraq is the wrong battlefield.”

Those cowards and defeatists would be just as unhappy, and just as eager to press for withdrawal, if the US invaded Waziristan. They just feel safe pointing to it as an alternative, because they feel certain that no US administration would invade Pakistan.

The leading Democratic presidential contenders have voiced a new conventional wisdom in recent weeks: The war in Iraq has little or nothing to do with defeating al Qaeda. Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have embraced this view, as has the New York Times. It is dangerously wrong. …

Just last week, the summary of a new National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) representing the consensus of the U.S. intelligence community was released. It states that the organization “Al Qaeda in Iraq” is the terror network’s “most visible and capable affiliate.” Al Qaeda’s leadership still desires to strike the U.S. homeland and “will probably seek to leverage the contacts and capabilities of Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI)” to do so. “In addition,” the intelligence estimate notes, al Qaeda relies on Al Qaeda in Iraq to “energize the broader Sunni extremist community, raise resources, and to recruit and indoctrinate operatives, including for Homeland attacks.”

These judgments are obviously inconsistent with Obama’s belief that America is fighting on the “wrong battlefield.” But the judgments of the intelligence community have been wrong before–witness the October 2002 NIE on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. So we should be wary of taking this latest pronouncement at face value.

The NIE’s conclusions are, however, supported by a source that cannot be ignored: al Qaeda’s two principal leaders. Osama bin Laden and Ayman al Zawahiri have repeatedly called Iraq the “front line” in their war against Western civilization. Indeed, a review of their statements–readily accessible in translation in the anthologies edited by Bruce Lawrence (Messages to the World: The Statements of Osama bin Laden) and Laura Mans field (His Own Words: Translations and Analysis of the Writings of Dr. Ayman Al Zawahiri) and from other public sources–confirms that they have made Iraq their fight. …

Bin Laden and Zawahiri’s own words tell us that the American project in Iraq jeopardizes everything their group stands for: These two top leaders of al Qaeda have promised the people of the Middle East that al Qaeda will protect Muslim soil from the “Crusader-Zionist” invaders, even if the region’s rulers will not, and even if doing so meant cooperating with the “apostate” Saddam.

Zawahiri believes that Iraq is al Qaeda’s best opportunity for establishing a true Islamist state in the heart of the Middle East. Democracy does not belong in the region, the two men say, and only an Islamic government based on sharia law is acceptable in Iraq. The mujahedeen will drive the Americans out of Iraq using the same tactics they used to drive the Soviets out of Afghanistan. America’s leaders and soldiers are weak, al Qaeda says. They are looking for a way to run from the fight in Iraq, and they will do so, bin Laden exults, while the “whole world is watching.”

The whole world, that is, except the leading Democratic candidates for president.

Read the whole thing.

Michael Totten reports directly from the unbearable fiasco of US military operations in unwinnable Iraq.

82nd Airborne’s Lieutenant William H. Lord from Foxborough, Massachusetts, prepared his company for a dismounted foot patrol in the Graya’at neighborhood of Northern Baghdad’s predominantly Sunni Arab district of Adhamiyah. …

The battalion I’m embedded with here in Baghdad hasn’t suffered a single casualty – not even one soldier wounded – since they arrived in the Red Zone in January. The surge in this part of the city could not possibly be going better than it already is. Most of Graya’at’s insurgents and terrorists who haven’t yet fled are either captured, dormant, or dead. …

Everyone was friendly. No one shot at us or even looked at us funny. Infrastructure problems, not security, were the biggest concerns at the moment. I felt like I was in Iraqi Kurdistan – where the war is already over – not in Baghdad.

It was an edgy “Kurdistan,” though. Every now and then someone drove down the street in a vehicle. If any military-aged males (MAMs as the Army guys call them) were in the car, the soldiers stopped it and made everybody get out. The vehicle and the men were then searched.

Read the whole thing.