South Dakota Politics

"Thank you, President Bush"

For those who think we here at SDP are mere shills for sinister Republican interests, let me make a confession.  Our mailbox regular fills up with "White House Communications," which apparently come directly from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.  I think this comes under the heading of "using the blogosphere," or something like that.  Anyway, I rarely read them.  Its just much more fun reading CCK.  But I caught this one. 

Remarks By New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin

May 20, 2006

MAYOR NAGIN: "I want to thank you, Mr. President.  You and I have probably been the most vilified politicians in the country.  But I want to thank you for moving that promise that you made in Jackson Square forward.  We now have $3 billion for levees.  We have $8 billion for incentives.  We have $10 billion for housing.  You are delivering on your promise, and I want to thank you for all the citizens of the City of New Orleans."

I happened to visit New Orleans three times before Katrina did, and I have a very sense of how wonderful a place it is, or was.  Mayor Nagin was recently re-elected, which suggests that there is hope for anyone, even Dubya. 

William Shawcross on Iraq

William Shawcross is, as Powerline puts it, "England's most notable journalist."  He is the author of a number of influential books on American policy in the Middle and Far East, including Sideshow, and The Shah's Last Ride.  He is also, as John Miller points out in National Review, now regarded as a traitor to the left.  Shawcross's earlier books included scathing critiques of Henry Kissinger's policy in Cambodia, but his most recent book, Allies: The U.S., Britain, and Europe, and the War in Iraq,  is passionately pro-war.  His recent piece in the London Times reports from Basra on the training of the Iraqi army.

First Lieutenant Yasser Ahmed Rassol is another young Iraqi army officer in training. He was sent in a group of 40 students on a 13-week course at the Infantry Battle School at Brecon, in Powys. His English is good. “We learnt to fight in built-up areas,” he said. He will soon graduate as a company commander.

The academy was built by the British Army in 1924 and has now been restored by Britain. When I visited it in 2004 it was just a building site. Now it is the best training school in Iraq and is known among the British officers as Sandhurst in the Sand. It has begun to produce 600 young officers a year. Some 250 have already graduated and are out in the field commanding platoons.

Shawcross note the success that the coalition forces and the Iraqis are having in building a new army.

The coalition plan is to create an army of 137,000 men and a police force of 190,000. So far the army has grown to about 115,000 and the police to 138,000.

He also notes the slow but steady political success that the Iraqis alone must be responsible for.

This weekend a new government was very belatedly being formed. It will be vital for this government, under Nouri Maliki, the prime minister, to drag politics off the streets and back into the constitutional process.  . . .

However, if the government is seen as broadly representative of the Shi’ite, Sunni and Kurdish populations and is seen to be effective, it will be much harder for the insurgents.

Shawcross thinks that we are winning in Iraq.  The only question is whether we will stick around long enough for the umpire to call it. 

Even those who were opposed to the invasion of Iraq should recognise that this is a whole new battle — between the values of a liberal civil society and nihilism, sometimes Islamic but always nihilism.

The coalition training of the Iraqi armed forces is proceeding well. The Iraqi army already has the lead in about 60% of the country. We can soon begin to draw down our troops and turn over more power to provincial authorities.

To do so too fast, just because the war is unpopular at home, would be to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. As Jackson said at the end of his trip, our success in Iraq should not be measured by numbers of troops brought home.

It is much more complex than that. The goal is an independent Iraq with a representative government. Part of that goal is to prevent the most bloody and reactionary gangs of killers from destroying the country — and the future of the Middle East.

We can do this and we should be proud of doing it.

I have always thought that this is right.  I think it very likely that the U.S. and Britain will stick around for the finish.  I think we are going to see a republic take root in Iraq.  I do not know, nor do I think we will ever know whether it was worth the sacrifices.  I do not know how to weigh lives against policy goals.  But if Shawcross and I are correct, and the millions of Iraqis who risked their own lives to vote get a permanent stake in their own country, if a moderate democracy is established in the fertile triangle and Arab Muslims can see that self-government and Islam are not mutually exclusive, then we will in fact have won a great victory in Iraq.  Reasonable people will still be able to argue that our soldiers should not have fought and died there.  But no reasonable person will be able to say that they died in vain.

 

History

Kenneth Walsh takes an historical look at three presidents that mirror George W. Bush in a US News & World Report article entitled "What History Has to Say."  He concludes:

President Bush has combined Wilson's evangelical fervor for spreading democracy with Truman's resolve to make tough decisions and bear the opprobrium of critics, and he has emulated Reagan's determination to steer a conservative course with sunny optimism. All these presidents "had significant foreign policy accomplishments in their second terms that were not realized at the time," says Frank Donatelli, who was Reagan's second-term political director. Bush believes he and his deeds will eventually be placed in that category.

What is unclear is whether Bush can be flexible enough to change when he has to and whether there will be any more historic moments for him to seize, as Reagan did. These could be the key factors determining whether Bush's presidency rebounds over the next 2 1/2 years and, more broadly, whether he is judged a success in the history books.

Tom Daschle v. DME

In February it was disclosed that Tom Daschle was appointed to the Mayo Clinic board of directors.  Since then, he has repeatedly made assurances that his appointment has nothing to do with the Dakota, Minnesota, and Eastern railroad project, which Mayo opposes.  Steve Hildebrand, Daschle's former campaign manager, said about his appointment, "I would say it is overstating Mayo Clinic's concern about the DM&E Railroad."  Daschle also told Kevin Woster, "I am not working against it and have nothing to do with the DM&E project now."  But earlier this week Daschle bashed the railroad, the "largest construction project in South Dakota history,"  on the behalf of the Mayo Clinic.  So much for having "nothing to do" with the railroad project. 

Don't forget Daschle's long-time buddy in the Senate, Mark Dayton, and his pretentious remark that "[t]he Mayo Clinic is worth a hell of a lot more than the whole state of South Dakota."  Dayton, like Daschle, stands as a roadblock to a project that would reap enormous economic benefits, preferring to side with Mayo than stand up for their respective states.  Dennis Wiese said the project would "have a lasting and profoundly positive impact on agriculture throughout South Dakota and Minnesota."  Minnesota Public Radio also outlined the benefits of the project for the two states.  The well-being of the state is not the ultimate goal of Tom Daschle and Mark Dayton.

Conservative Speakers Unwelcome

John Leo of Real Clear Politics:

Sen. John McCain had a rough week in New York City, facing protesters who resented his speeches at Columbia University's Class Day and the New School for Social Research commencement ceremony.

The New York Daily News quoted a graduating senior who didn't want him at Columbia. "He encouraged us to speak up, but we still resent that our graduation day was used as a political platform," she said. She has a point, but it is a very small one and not very relevant to McCain's remarks. Yes, he seems to be on track to run for president, but candidates and potential candidates give commencement talks all the time. As long as they seem to be addressing the graduates, rather than their own partisan nostrums and ambitions, that's fine.

The only New York newspaper that gave us any clear idea of what McCain said at Columbia was the conservative New York Sun. A Sun editorial said, "It's hard to remember a more moving moment in college oratory" than the one the senator gave. He talked of his anger, as he sat in a Hanoi prison during the Vietnam War, hearing the piped-in voice of an antiwar American activist. The activist was the late David Ifshin, who had traveled to North Vietnam to denounce the United States. McCain said he and Ifshin later reached out to each other, and by the time Ifshin died of cancer at age 47, they had become friends who worked together toward shared ideals. Tales of political healing and the ability of political adversaries to work together are obviously important these days. McCain also spoke for civility in debate and respect between political adversaries. This is over the line?

Read the whole thing.

Lessons for the Left

This George Will review looks at Peter Beinart's new book, The Good Fight: Why Liberals -- and Only Liberals -- Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again.  Excerpt:

Peter Beinart is an advocate of liberal -- not ``progressive'' -- nostalgia. He wants to turn the clock back to 1947 at Washington's Willard Hotel.

Beinart, who was born in 1971, is editor at large of the liberal New Republic magazine and disdains the label ``progressive'' as a rejection of liberalism's useable past of anti-totalitarianism. An intellectual archaeologist, he excavates that vanished intellectual tradition and sends it into battle in his new book, ``The Good Fight: Why Liberals -- and Only Liberals -- Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again.'' It expresses Beinart's understanding of liberalism in 1948, 1968 and, he hopes, 2008.

...

Liberalism's civil war seemed won after Henry Wallace's Progressive Party candidacy failed to prevent President Truman's 1948 election. But the war broke out again in the Democratic Party's crack-up over Vietnam in 1968. Then, Beinart says, a ``new liberalism'' emerged that ``questioned whether America had much to offer the world.'' Four years later the party nominated George McGovern, who had been a delegate to the 1948 Progressive Party convention that nominated Wallace. McGovern's trumpet sounded retreat: ``Come home, America.''

Since then, Beinart argues, liberals have lacked a narrative of national greatness that links America's missions at home and abroad. It has been said that whereas the right-wing isolationists in the 1930s believed that America was too good for the world, left-wing isolationists in the 1960s believed that the world was too good for America. After Vietnam, Beinart says, liberal foreign policy was ``defined more by fear of American imperialism than fear of totalitarianism.''

...

Beinart worries that ``the elections of 2006 and 2008 could resemble the elections of 1974 and 1976, when foreign policy exhaustion, and Republican scandal, propelled Democrats to big gains.'' If so, those gains will be ``a false dawn.'' The country will eventually turn right because, ``whatever its failings, the right at least knows that America's enemies need to be fought.''

Ronald Reagan said he did not want to return to the past but to the past's way of facing the future. As does Beinart, who locates the pertinent past in 1947.