evolution

Possibly.

Samantha Power, you’ll recall, was one of Barack Obama’s senior foriegn policy advisers. I say “was” because she was fired after referring to Hillary Clinton as “a monster” to The Scotsman (fired after what, an hour?) and an el foldo by the Obama people.

Turns out, as this Obsidian Wings post shows, she may have formed that opinion long before she ever met Barack Obama, based on her evaluation of how the Clintons, the worthless State Department¹, and the U.S. government dealt with the Rwandan genocide of the 1990s.

The content of the post is shocking (but hardly surprising) if it is an accurate portrayal of events — and I must say that I believe it is. Be sure to read it all.

1. Just because State was staffed by Democrats then isn’t what makes it worthless. It’s headed by Republicans now, and it’s still just as worthless. [↩]

I’m sure the rebel leader appreciates Mia Farrow’s gesture, but she just doesn’t get it:

KHARTOUM (Reuters) - Mia Farrow has offered her freedom in exchange for that of a respected Darfur rebel figure, virtually imprisoned for more than 13 months, in a letter to Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir.

That would be the Omar Hassan al-Bashir who overthrew a democratically-elected president in order to impose an Islamic state by force, while attempting to exterminate other ethnic and religious groups in Sudan.

Sudan Liberation Army (SLA) Humanitarian Coordinator Suleiman Jamous has been confined to a U.N. hospital in Kordofan, neighboring Darfur, since the United Nations moved him there without permission last year.

He needs a stomach biopsy which cannot be performed there.

Khartoum said if he left he would be arrested, but has said it is open to talks on his release.

“Before his seizure, Mr. Jamous played a crucial role in bringing the SLA to the negotiating table and in seeking reconciliation between its divided rival factions,” Farrow said in the letter dated August 5.

“I am therefore offering to take Mr. Jamous’s place, to exchange my freedom for his in the knowledge of his importance to the civilians of Darfur and in the conviction that he will apply his energies toward creating the just and lasting peace that the Sudanese people deserve and hope for.”

This, of course, assumes that all parties want peace. And they do — but on vastly different terms.

NATO: Iran caught red-handed shipping arms to Taliban.

NATO officials say they have caught Iran red-handed, shipping heavy arms, C4 explosives and advanced roadside bombs to the Taliban for use against NATO forces, in what the officials say is a dramatic escalation of Iran’s proxy war against the United States and Great Britain.

“It is inconceivable that it is anyone other than the Iranian government that’s doing it,” said former White House counterterrorism official Richard Clarke, an ABC News consultant.

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates stopped short earlier this week of blaming Iran, saying the U.S. did not have evidence “of the involvement of the Iranian government in support of the Taliban.”

Welcome to the face of post-Iraq “realism”.*

But an analysis by a senior coalition official, obtained by the Blotter on ABCNews.com, concludes there is clear evidence of Iran’s involvement.

“This is part of a considered policy,” says the analysis, “rather than the result of low-level corruption and weapons smuggling.”

Iran and the Taliban had been fierce enemies when the Taliban was in power in Afghanistan, and their apparent collaboration came as a surprise to some in the intelligence community.

The “intelligence community”, at least as pertains to that region and to Islamic extremism, doesn’t seem to be worth a bucket of warm piss over the last fifteen years.

*: I’d love to say years of being addled by transnational leftism and its Orwellian notions of “tolerance” caused this, but as much as anything, George Bush’s incompetence in an astonishing variety of arenas caused it.

Hillary announces effort to revoke war powers.

A cursory scan of the right-o-sphere — which, let’s be honest, is where I hang out most of the time — will show that the British sailors recently captured and then released are alternately objects of pity and objects of scorn. What happened to the “stiff upper lips”, they ask. What happened to standing up for your country, they ask. You should have resisted, they say. What happened to “name, rank, and serial number”?

Leaving aside the question of whether or not England is worth standing up for these days, which is ultimately irrelevant, I don’t blame them one bit.

If you are captured by a regime such as Iran, or any of a dozen other terrorist financiers, you can assume the following (particularly if you are an American, but this applies to any Westerner):

1. That, contra the Geneva Conventions, you will be trotted out and displayed for as many propaganda purposes as your captors can think of;
2. That you will be killed as soon as either these purposes run out or they decide that killing you serves such a purpose (for example, stirring their own people up); and
3. That no one — certainly no Western power — is going to come to your aid, unless that “aid” comes in the form of toast points and shrimp cocktails. Their own politics at this point preclude it.

And what about “name, rank, and serial number?” As every teacher knows, the key to expecting a certain behavior is to a) clearly define what is acceptable and b) either demonstrate or provide detailed instruction on how to produce that acceptable result. If none among these sailors demonstrated that, it’s not the fault of the individual sailors — it’s the fault of the Royal Navy. Also the fault of the Royal Navy are whatever rules of engagement that did not allow them to defend themselves when they were clearly not in Iranian waters.

The predictable calculation of someone with a well-developed sense of self-preservation in this situation would be a strictly mercenary one — if no one’s going to bother putting any effort into defending me (or helping me defend myself), why should I bother defending them?

It might be reasonable to ask for at least some stoicism rather than to wave and blow kisses to Ahmadenijad on the way home, but that too is irrelevant on balance.

So under those conditions (and for civilians under any conditions), the sailors have my blessing, for whatever that may be worth, to lie, grovel, and schmooze their way to survival. They weren’t equipped to do any other.

Never as little as you think, never as much as you think. Rich Lowry in NRO:

The conservative campaign against the mainstream media has scored notable successes. It exposed Dan Rather’s forged National Guard memo and jumped all over Newsweek’s absurd report of a Koran-flushing incident at Guantanamo Bay. The mainstream media is biased, arrogant, prone to stultifying group-think and much more fallible than its exalted self-image allows it to admit. It also, however, can be right, and this is most confounding to conservatives.

Cold reality is here now for all those who’d care to look at it. It’s painful, but a large majority of it is also true. And I’m sure none of you reading this are getting your hopes up too high that either President Bush or the tragicomedy known as the Iraq Study Group are going to stay out in the cold long enough to take that long overdue look.

… I’ll have a lot to say tomorrow and Sunday, as I am working on a couple of lengthy posts: one a request for comment on this review of a KU student’s documentary on the life and times of Fred Phelps and his spawn; the other a post on the report of the Iraq Study Group, which I have only read in small part.

I don’t like posting about the war — although it is the defining issue of the current political climate — because so many others do it, and because of what the effect of reading the posts is on reasonable people (and unreasonable people alike — I have been called names and even falsely accused of a crime because of them). But I have for many months questioned in my own mind the motives and wisdom of our so-called “leaders” who maintain what is now clearly a disastrously-misguided, failed policy — both with regard to Iraq itself and the Middle East in general. I do not support the use of the skills, the talents, and the sacrifices of brave young men and women for a political “face-saving” operation; which is essentially what the ISG recommends.

I believe that, if it had been executed correctly, the removal of Saddam Hussein by military force and subsequent restoration of Iraq to a democratic footing would, while having many bad near-term effects, would have resulted in a long-term gain for the world. I still believe that. I do not take seriously anyone who claims clairvoyance in this regard. Needless to say, it has not been led by the current C-in-C or his advisors to anything remotely approaching correct execution.

And it’s only my first beer. Just think how happy I’ll be after five.

UPDATE [12:46 12.09]: Another thing I’m going to think about is the Nine Wise Persons’ consideration of Parker v. District of Columbia, a brief report on the gist of which you can read here.

Robert Kaplan on Atlantic Online:

Yet for all Kim’s canniness, there is evidence that he may be losing his edge. And that may be reason to worry: totalitarian regimes close to demise are apt to get panicky and do rash things. The weaker North Korea gets, the more dangerous it becomes. The question that should be of greatest concern to the U.S. military in the Pacific—and the question that will likely determine the global balance of power in Asia for generations—is, What happens when North Korea collapses?

The scenarios Kaplan outlines are frightening indeed. It’s too good to excerpt chunks of it here. Just go read it all.

One of my biggest blogging benefactors, the Commissar, wrote this in July:

Iraq is a mess. The current situation is not what we had counted on in 2003. Sunnis and Shia are killing each other on the streets of Baghdad, in what can only be termed “uncontrollable, retaliatory, neighborhood-wrecking, hundred dead a day, but-not-civil-war-yet, sectarian violence.” There is no political will for an increased American troop presence.

So, let’s stop trying to occupy that segment of the population most resistant to our presence - the Sunni. At the same time, let’s permit the de facto separation to happen, as shown on the map.

[Link added by me.] It seems that the Iraq Study Group, led by former SecState James Baker, is considering just that: giving most power and responsibility for security to each of three semi-autonomous regions — the Kurdish region in the north, the Sunni region in the west, and the Shiites in what’s left over:

His group has yet to reach a final conclusion, but there is a growing consensus that America can neither pour more soldiers into Iraq nor suffer mounting casualties without any sign of progress. It is thought to support embedding more high-quality American military advisers in the Iraqi security forces rather than maintaining high troop levels in the country indefinitely.

Frustrated by the failure of a recent so-called “battle of Baghdad” to stem violence in the capital, Zalmay Khalilzad, the US ambassador to Iraq, said last week that the unity government of Nouri al-Maliki, the prime minister, had only two months left to get a grip. Rumours abound that the much-admired ambassador could depart by Christmas.

Khalilzad’s warning was reinforced by John Warner, Republican chairman of the Senate armed services committee, on his return from a visit to Baghdad. “In two to three months’ time, if this thing hasn’t come to fruition and this government (is not) able to function, I think it’s a responsibility of our government internally to determine: is there a change of course we should take?” Warner said.

There are a few problems I see with the idea — a lot of ethnic Kurds live in Turkey, and many entertain notions of separation; notions that will almost certainly be given greater life by the potential for a Kurdish nation. If the borders are drawn around regions where Sunnis predominate, the Sunnis will be surrounded by Shiites and Kurds on three sides, neither of which has any particular affection for them — and with a small fraction of the power they had under Saddam. One has to believe that any Shiite area — which, again drawing borders according to ethnicity of population, will be left with most of Iraq’s natural resources — would be tight with Iran.

The massive counterbalance to those problems is the problem that the two options that the Bush administration is presenting — to “stay the course” or to simply pack up and leave things as they are (also known as “cut and run”) — are unworkable. We’re now finding ourselves retaking ground that we’d already taken, playing “whack-a-mole” with insurgents and terrorists with no end in sight. We can’t do it indefinitely.

If we’re not going to commit the resources necessary — troops, equipment, and knowledge — to make Iraq stable enough for government to take root, we need to get our soldiers out of there. Splitting the region might give each group enough of what it wants at least to make that happen.

UPDATE: Fresh bonus Bush cynicism just across, via Drudge:

“I think the big question is whether we can come up with something before it’s too late,” one member of the commission said late last month, after the group met in Washington. “There’s a real sense that the clock is ticking, that Bush is desperate for a change, but no one in the White House can bring themselves to say so with this election coming. It’s a race between our political calendar and the Iraqis.”

How about that for a warm fuzzy? “Boys, just hang on and try not to have too many of y’all get hurt or killed until we can beat this Foley thing and get re-elected!” If that’s the true reason — and not simple stubbornness and/or incompetence, which is what I suspect — it’s a cynical, immoral one.

It’s not clear whether Veteran’s Affairs will allow it on his headstone — but it has no jurisdiction over a state memorial in Nevada, where the fellow was from:

Sgt. Patrick Stewart, 34, was killed in Afghanistan last September when a rocket-propelled grenade struck his helicopter. Four others also died. Stewart was posthumously awarded the Bronze Star and the Purple Heart.

He was a follower of the Wiccan religion, which the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs does not recognize and therefore prohibits on veterans’ headstones in national cemeteries.

But state officials said they had received a legal opinion from the Nevada attorney general’s office that concluded federal officials have no authority over state veterans’ cemeteries. They now plan to have a contractor construct a plaque with the Wiccan pentacle — a circle around a five-pointed star — to be added to the Veterans’ Memorial Wall in Fernley.

If it is his family’s wish, then his headstone should be allowed to have whatever religious symbol his family thinks he would have wanted. Sgt. Stewart’s country owes him that much.