When Barack Obama lands in Europe for his first big international tour this month, the Democratic presidential candidate may be shocked to find himself standing in the middle of a vast, blood-soaked plain littered with the bodies of his political allies.

He will see left-wing parties that have reached their lowest popularity levels in a generation and in most cases have all but slid into non-existence. And it’s getting worse. If he becomes president, by the end of 2009 Mr. Obama almost certainly will be the only left-wing leader remaining among the Group of Eight nations and one of only two or three left-leaning heads of state in the Western world. Once again, America will be going it alone.

It is a darkly ironic reversal of fortunes: At the start of the decade, a conservative such as George W. Bush was almost alone in the world; today, the world is being overtaken by conservative leaders - though not necessarily, as we shall see, by their ideas. Ten years ago, Newsweek magazine proclaimed that, “with the exception of Spain, every major country in Western Europe is now run by a left-of-centre party,” adding tellingly that “conservative political parties keep winning policy debates and then losing elections.” Today, almost the opposite is true. Across Europe, the left is collapsing.

In Germany, Chancellor Angela Merkel’s left-right coalition government has recently seen its left-wing partner, the Social Democratic Party, fall to its lowest popularity level in 40 years and enter an interminable leadership crisis, allowing Ms. Merkel to govern virtually as a lone conservative. In France, conservative President Nicolas Sarkozy has overseen the unravelling of the Socialist Party, which has lost most of its electable leaders and failed to find any inspiring ideas. In Italy, Romano Prodi’s smart but awkward left-wing coalition was bulldozed away in April by Silvio Berlusconi’s angry far-right group.

In Denmark, Sweden, the Netherlands, Belgium and Switzerland, social democrats have been swept out of office by conservatives, and even the traditionally left-wing cities of London and Rome have elected right-wing mayors this year. In Norway and Britain, long-standing left-wing parties are plummeting toward defeat. Among the 27 countries of the European Union, Mr. Obama’s friends are secure only in Spain, Portugal and Austria, where they can wield little wider influence….

Liberalism is a demonstrable failure. That is why Obama is so reluctant to admit his liberal ideology. He is ashamed of it and knows it will cause his rejection by the voters. Only MoveOn and the Kos Kids are willing to admit their affinity for liberalism. They have both been discredited by their attacks on the war in Iraq and specifically the surge that is winning that war. They remain desperate for defeat in Iraq and see Obama as their best chance for achieving defeat.

Source

Like a Gettysburg battlefield tour guide, Ali Kafarna pointed out the scars of war as he walked through the fields between his home and the Israeli border.

“Here’s where the tanks used to stop,” said Ali, 14, as he passed a dirt berm dug into dry grass littered with shrapnel and animal bones. “Here’s where they used to fire rockets,” Ali said of the charred square of earth that Palestinians used as a launching pad to attack Israel.

Until last month, this area was a no-go zone for Ali and his family. Two weeks into a shaky cease-fire, Palestinian families are using the relative calm to visit bullet-scarred homes a few hundred yards from the Israeli border and replant orchards uprooted by the Israeli military.

But the Egyptian-brokered peace is slowly unraveling as Hamas leaders in Gaza struggle to keep militants – especially their Fatah rivals – from firing the occasional rocket at Israel.

It’s an awkward situation for Hamas: After years of derailing Palestinian peace talks with Israel by staging suicide bombings, Hamas is now the one asking rivals to halt their attacks on Israel.

Hamas is using a mix of coercion and shame to try and keep militants from breaking the deal. In the past week, Hamas has arrested two Fatah members and given them stern warnings to fall in line.

Hamas also has directed all militants to get permission before firing any rockets at Israel. If that happens without approval, a Hamas-led crisis management team steps in.

And the Islamist group has publicly accused Gaza rocket launchers of betraying the Palestinian people and playing into Israeli hands by staging their attacks.

So far, it hasn’t been enough.

Since the cease-fire took hold on June 19, Gaza militants have fired 11 rockets and mortars at southern Israel. They caused little damage but Israel used them to justify temporarily blocking the flow of supplies into Gaza.

In response, Hamas leaders have accused Israel of breaking its part of the deal by closing the borders. They’ve also warned that the shutdown could jeopardize the possible release of Gilad Shalit, the Israeli soldier captured by Gaza militants more than two years ago.

“We are trying to do our best here to make sure no one is violating or abusing the agreement,” Hamas political adviser Ahmed Yousef said Thursday.

But for Fatah fighters routed by Hamas forces during the Gaza takeover last summer, there is little incentive to comply: If the cease-fire holds, it’ll make Hamas look even better.

Last week, Fatah militants took credit for one of the rocket volleys that hit Israel – a move that prompted Hamas to threaten arrests.

http://www.sacbee.com/111/story/1062797.html

Lee Bywater recently bought back a chunk of his youth – a motorcycle. A big, loud one.

With a push from his wife – You want it, just do it! – the Elk Grove postal service supervisor plunked down more than $25,000 three months ago for a Harley-Davidson Electra Glide Classic and accessories.

Bywater, 47, thus joins California’s growing “re-entry rider” crowd, guys of a certain age who decide it’s time to feel the wind in their faces again.

“It feels great,” Bywater enthused after a weekend cruising through the Valley and foothills with fellow hog riders. “It’s exciting.”

It’s also, he knows, risky.

Motorcycle crashes and fatalities are on the rise in California, and over the past decade, motorcycle deaths have doubled nationwide.

With a record one million-plus Californians now licensed to ride, and a substantial number of unlicensed motorcyclists on the road, officials say time is overdue to make motorcycling safer.

Higher gas prices have boosted motorcycle sales, some dealers report, and more motorcyclists are pulling their weekend bikes out of the garage for their congested weekday commutes.

“It is just a very dangerous situation,” said Chris Murphy, head of the state Office of Traffic Safety.

Twice in just two months, cars have run Bywater off the road. Now, he says, “I constantly drive defensively. I won’t drive next to a car.”

California roads saw 429 motorcycle fatalities in 2006 – more than any year in more than a decade, the California Highway Patrol reported. Another 9,765 motorcyclists were injured.

The average age of riders in motorcycle fatalities has crept up to about 40, CHP Chief Jim McLaughlin said.

He and others say that’s attributable in part to the increase in middle-aged guys with rusty skills on heavy-duty bikes, some built like living-room lounges – with plush upright seats for aging backs, heated cushions and handlebars, cell phone connections and even cup holders.

A Bee review of recent Sacramento-area crashes, and interviews with dealers, riders and state officials offers a broader view: Motorcycle mishaps happen among riders of all ages and on all sizes of bikes.

Speeding and other risky riding often are key causes, as well as motorcycles mingling in heavy traffic with cars and trucks.

Among the five most recent motorcycle fatalities in Sacramento County, three happened when cars pulled in front of motorcyclists.

In another instance, a 28-year-old Elk Grove motorcyclist died when he hit a truck pulling into a driveway after skidding for 300 feet in a futile braking effort, police said.

One involved a rider reportedly on a stolen motorcycle who careened off the Capital City Freeway while zig-zagging through traffic.

Alcohol also is a worrisome factor, officials said.

In May, a 55-year-old Orangevale man on a Yamaha suffered serious injuries when he hit the center divider on Hazel Avenue and flew off his bike. The man had been drinking, CHP officials said.

Of the nearly 200 motorcycle crashes chronicled this year by the CHP in Sacramento County, motorcyclists were thought to have been at fault slightly more than half the time.

State Office of Traffic Safety and CHP officials are planning a public campaign to encourage new and experienced motorcyclists to voluntarily take classes in basic riding techniques, risk assessment and avoidance skills.

One message will be directed to older riders, CHP’s McLaughlin said: “Hey, you’re not a kid anymore. You’ve got a lot to lose.”

Several veteran motorcyclists say they were surprised at how much they learned from refresher courses.

State worker Ron Miller, 43, rode motorcycles when he was young, then raced bicycles for years. But when he recently bought a 786-pound Harley Street Glide, he failed a self-administered weekend test in the DMV parking lot course.

He took a $250 riding class sponsored by the CHP and Motorcycle Safety Foundation, then tried the slow-speed DMV test again with his Harley.

“I nailed it!” he said.

Motorcyclist rights advocates with ABATE of California say they are leery of moves by the state to increase safety, fearing more “nanny” government restrictions such as the mandatory helmet law.

The group particularly guards against suggestions of banning the controversial maneuver called lane-splitting, where motorcyclists cut between cars in congested traffic.

CHP officials say that maneuver is legal as long as cyclists are not going faster than what is considered safe for the conditions.

BMW rider Dennis Allstead, 54, of the Placerville area, is big on safety gear. He wears a full-face, CHP-style helmet, boots and body armor in his clothes. “If I hit the ground, I’d like to get up.”

But there are limits, he said. “I still wear black, I just can’t wear the yum-yum yellow clothes, sorry.”

Allstead won’t ride his motorcycle to work in Highway 50 traffic, where, a few years ago, a 41-year-old Harley rider died when he clipped a pickup truck changing lanes and fell under a dump truck.

“I take a vanpool,” Allstead said. “I’m better off.”

http://www.sacbee.com/101/story/1062813.html

By Jack Kelly

No president since Dwight Eisenhower has had more military experience than Sen. John McCain, who served 22 years in the Navy, nearly six of them as a prisoner of war in Vietnam. So many people were puzzled by the line of attack chosen by retired Gen. Wesley Clark, a supporter of Barack Obama:

“I don’t think riding in a fighter plane and getting shot down is a qualification to be president,” he said on CBS’ Face the Nation program June 29.

That Sen. McCain once commanded the largest flying squadron in the Navy wasn’t much of a qualification either, Gen. Clark said, because he didn’t have that command in wartime.

Gen. Clark’s larger point — that being a war hero is an insufficient qualification to be president — is reasonable enough, but was lost in his boorish dismissal of Sen. McCain’s military service. And however inadequate Gen. Clark imagines Sen. McCain’s commander in chief credentials to be, they’re certainly superior to those of the candidate he’s backing, as stunned host Bob Schieffer pointed out:

“I have to say, Barack Obama has not had any of those experiences (of major command in war) either, nor has he ridden in a fighter plane and gotten shot down,” Mr. Schieffer said.

Gen. Clark’s remark diverted media attention from Sen. Obama’s speech on patriotism the next day. Sen. Obama first mildly disassociated himself from Gen. Clark’s remarks, and then denied he was criticizing him. Gen. Clark repeated his criticism on other television shows the following day. This turned a one day story which reflects badly on Sen. Obama into a three day story which reflects badly on Sen. Obama.

Gen. Clark was the eighth prominent Democrat to criticize Sen. McCain’s war record.

“McCain was a fighter pilot, who dropped laser guided missiles from 35,000 feet. He was long gone when they hit,” Sen. Jay Rockefeller told the Charleston (W. Va) Gazette in April. “What happened when they get to the ground? He doesn’t know. You have to care about the lives of people. McCain never gets into those issues.”

Sen. McCain’s background as the son and grandson of admirals creates a “dangerous” situation because he can only view the world through the prism of the military, Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin told the Des Moines Register in May.

“He has a hard time thinking beyond that,” Sen. Harkin said. “Everything is looked at from his life experiences, from always having been in the military, and I think that can be pretty dangerous.”

Sen. McCain’s national security experience is “sadly limited” because he was a POW, Obama foreign policy adviser Rand Beers told a liberal group June 30.

“I think the notion that the members of the Senate who were in the ground forces or who were ashore in Vietnam have a very different view of Vietnam and the cost…than John McCain does because he was in isolation essentially for many of those years and did not experience the turmoil here,” Mr. Beers said.

Also that day, Virginia Sen. Jim Webb said Sen. McCain shouldn’t use his military record in politics. When he ran for the Senate two years ago, Sen. Webb cited his record as a Marine in Vietnam as his principal qualification for office. He stomped around the state wearing combat boots. And Gen. Clark, of course, cited his military experience as his principal qualification when he ran for president in 2004.

As Jim Geraghty of National Review Online noted, there are “way too many” of these attacks on Sen. McCain’s war record to be a coincidence. But if it’s a deliberate strategy by the Obama camp, it’s an odd one, because there is no way a comparison between Sen. McCain’s record on national security and his makes Sen. Obama look good.

What’s important about Sen. McCain’s experience as a POW is not what it taught him about conducting foreign policy, but what it teaches us about his character, wrote “Uncle Jimbo,” a former Special Forces soldier, on the milblog “Blackfive.”

“John McCain was so loyal to the men he was imprisoned with he endured torture on their behalf,” Uncle Jimbo said. “Barack Obama associates with those who can help his career, and throws them right under the bus when they become inconvenient to his aspirations.”

“In minimizing the import of McCain’s military service, Clark instead opened the door to the sort of criticism that Obama, who painstakingly praises McCain’s military record at virtually every event, cannot afford,” wrote Jay Newton-Small of Time Magazine.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2008/07/minimizing_mccains_experience.html

A military mastermind who retreated from Iraq, a politician motivated by peace, and a lover of Greek culture and Greek men - there’s more to Hadrian than wall-building, reveals the director of the British Museum

We think we know the Romans. Countless books, films, plays and pieces of music have been inspired by an empire that, at its height, in AD117, stretched from the site of modern Glasgow in the north to the Sahara desert in the south, and from the Atlantic to Basra. Hollywood sword-and-sandal epics from Quo Vadis to Gladiator, as well as the BBC’s Rome, give us the impression of an empire at once brutal and noble, heroic and corrupt, bloody and decadent - an empire of slavery but also of many freedoms, of multiple identities, all drawn together in the service of Rome and its emperors. But how much do we know? It can be hard to glimpse the real empire through the histories that have survived the centuries, histories that are invariably biased depending on who wrote them, when and, above all, for whom.

Sometimes one has a chance to glimpse the real emotions of ordinary Romans, living their lives under this extraordinary empire. The Vindolanda tablets, housed in the British Museum, slightly predate the emperor Hadrian and his instruction to build his eponymous wall separating England from Scotland (Caledonia) in AD122. Vindolanda fort already existed, first constructed in the late first century. Soldiers from all over the empire were billeted there, of Celtic, Germanic, North African or Syrian origins: a multi-national force guarding the extremes of the realm.

Excavations at the fort in 1973 revealed an extraordinary cache of wooden writing tablets, official military documents and personal letters concerning the day-to-day issues of life in the army. They reveal complaints about the cold, illnesses, receipt of care parcels providing socks and underpants, invitations to birthday parties and so on. These truly are the humble building blocks of history and are surely similar to the e-mails and text messages soldiers send home from Iraq today. At their most basic, they show how little has changed in nearly 2,000 years.

There is another connection between these two regions: for the north of England and Mesopotamia (modern-day Iraq) were once the northern and eastern borders of the Roman empire, under the enigmatic emperor Hadrian.

In many ways, Hadrian seems familiar to us. There is a perception of him - given to us via the Victorians and then Marguerite Yourcenar’s ever-popular fictional autobiography of the emperor (1951) - that he was somehow different, a maverick, a Greek-loving peacenik more interested in architecture and boys than in securing the legacy of mighty Rome. But how true is this portrait, and what of Hadrian’s legacy? Why is he still important now? These are the questions an exhibition at the British Museum is seeking to address. A huge number of archeological finds connected to Hadrian and excavated over the past 30 or so years have inspired a new scholarship and allowed a reassessment of his character.

Hadrian, it now appears, was a supremely talented political and military strategist. He was the consummate politician, ruthless but charming, brutal but loving. He was to some extent an imperial upstart who nonetheless gained the ultimate prize. Of Spanish-Roman stock, his family had made a fortune from the olive-oil trade, the key commodity of the Roman empire. His father died when Hadrian was 10, and he was thrust into a military life, gaining hands-on experience of Roman politics, warfare and provincial government, serving in a multitude of military positions. Working closely with the emperor Trajan, his fellow Spaniard, he was officially adopted as his heir when Trajan was on his deathbed.

In the military sphere, he had experienced first-hand the privations of Trajan’s overambitious campaigning and the dangers of imperial overreach. His first act on becoming emperor was to pull the Roman troops out of Mesopotamia and to reestablish the Euphrates frontier, still to this day the frontier between Syria and Iraq. In Germany, he created a limes, or boundary of forts with a turf and timber rampart (evocatively reconstructed at Saalburg by Kaiser Wilhelm II at the beginning of the 20th century); in Britain, he built his wall from the Tyne to the Solway; and in North Africa, he built a frontier against the nomads and goats of the desert fringes.

For those of us who have experienced crossings of the Berlin Wall and the rigours of travelling from the occupied territories to Israel through today’s “security wall”, it is clear that Hadrian’s frontiers were not merely an exercise in military defence. They were also political statements, in the case of Hadrian’s Wall separating Britons within the Roman empire from those outside it. To the south lies the Roman province of Britannia, personified by a warlike woman who first appeared on the coins of Hadrian; to the north lay the wild, untamed lands of the “excluded” Caledonians, still patrolled by forces from outpost forts, but culturally beyond the pale in Roman terms.

As you walk along the wall today, through the often rugged but still idyllic English countryside, it is easy to underestimate the sheer menacing presence that this wall would have had for natives on both sides of the frontier. One of the famous Vindolanda tablets suggests the Romans had a distinct disdain for the natives of Britain, whether north or south of the frontier: they called them Brittunculi - “wretched little Britons”.

This ring of steel around the empire allowed Hadrian to embark upon some grands projets. As emperor, he was free to indulge in his love of architecture and to work on the significant buildings that became a lasting legacy. In Rome, he had constructed some memorable buildings, including the monumental temple of Venus and Rome and the celebrated Pantheon, which not only embodied Hadrian’s desire to unite the empire but also heralded a whole new architectural style that has influenced buildings across the globe, not least the British Museum’s Reading Room - where we shall be presenting Hadrian’s feats over the coming months.

The present Castel Sant’Angelo was originally constructed as Hadrian’s mausoleum. At the same time, the emperor commissioned for himself an enormous and sumptuous residence at Tivoli. Walking around the ruins of the Villa Adriana today, one can still catch a glimpse of the man who created it and how he understood his place in the world.

Hadrian’s famous love of Greek culture is highlighted by his extensive building programme in Athens, completing a huge temple of Zeus, erecting an arch to the cities of Theseus and Hadrian, and patronising a library (which has recently opened to the public once again).

Hadrian’s emotional needs and his love of all things Greek were fused in his relationship with a young man, Antinous, from Bithynia in northwest Turkey. This relationship, although barely recorded in the sources, is one of the most famous of the ancient world. Antinous’s mysterious death in the Nile led to a Graeco-Egyptian hero-cult to surpass all others in the Greek-speaking world, and busts of the young man are now among the most common from antiquity. Wonderful examples, such as the statue of Antinous-Osiris from the Vatican Museums, will appear in the exhibition.

That Hadrian admired Greek culture is not in doubt. But there were strong strategic reasons behind this admiration. At the time of his reign, the Greek-speaking population of the empire was formidable and its loyalty was essential if the eastern frontiers were to be defended. It did Hadrian no political harm to be seen immersing himself in the language and traditions of the Greek world.

In the 1860s, a statue was discovered in Cyrene, North Africa, which seemed to epitomise this view of Hadrian. He stands proudly, clad in Greek mantle, seemingly willing us to see him as a cultured philhellene. The statue has been reproduced in countless books and displayed in the British Museum since the discovery as primary evidence of this Greek-loving aspect of Hadrian.

However, this is yet another example of our misunderstanding of this complex character. In the course of conservation of this sculpture for the exhibition, it was discovered that the head (which is undoubtedly of Hadrian) does not fit the body. The two pieces were put together incorrectly after excavation to conform to received wisdom, a consequence of this view of Hadrian, not evidence for it.

A truer glimpse of Hadrian’s character can be seen in the material borrowed from Israel for the exhibition. These loans include a magnificent bronze head and torso of Hadrian in military uniform; though his pose seems casual, he is every inch the tough military leader, a trait he exhibited to shocking effect during the second Jewish revolt (AD1325). Hadrian’s apparent banning of circumcision and his probable encroachments in Jerusalem unleashed a storm, led by Simeon Bar Kokhba, that cost Rome up to three legions. Hadrian decided to remind Judea that Rome was an imperial power that could brook no dissent: the proud rebels were mercilessly crushed, costing the lives of almost 600,000 Jews. It is no wonder that in the Talmud, Hadrian’s name was followed by the simple injunction “May his bones rot”.

So, what are we to make of Hadrian? His complex character was summed up unhelpfully in the Epitome de Caesaribus as “diverse, manifold and multiform”. I believe we have a ruler who desired, and at a price achieved, peace, prosperity and cultural integration across the Roman world, a man whose legacy may be flawed but remains significant in politics and in architecture. Perhaps our judgment of Hadrian tells us as much about politics in the 21st century as it does in Rome. How many of our leaders genuinely want to create a better society but are ultimately judged on the more sensational aspects of their private life, or on making one enormous and controversial decision that costs the lives of thousands?

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/visual_arts/article4261078.ece

By DOUGLAS J. FEITH

A lot of poor commentary has framed the Iraq war as a conflict of “choice” rather than of “necessity.” In fact, President George W. Bush chose to remove Saddam Hussein from power because he concluded that doing so was necessary.

President Bush inherited a worrisome Iraq problem from Bill Clinton and from his own father. Saddam had systematically undermined the measures the U.N. Security Council put in place after the Gulf War to contain his regime. In the first months of the Bush presidency, officials debated what to do next.

As a participant in the confidential, top-level administration meetings about Iraq, it was clear to me at the time that, had there been a realistic alternative to war to counter the threat from Saddam, Mr. Bush would have chosen it.

In the months before the 9/11 attack, Secretary of State Colin Powell advocated diluting the multinational economic sanctions, in the hope that a weaker set of sanctions could win stronger and more sustained international support. Central Intelligence Agency officials floated the possibility of a coup, though the 1990s showed that Saddam was far better at undoing coup plots than the CIA was at engineering them. Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz asked if the U.S. might create an autonomous area in southern Iraq similar to the autonomous Kurdish region in the north, with the goal of making Saddam little more than the “mayor of Baghdad.” U.S. officials also discussed whether a popular uprising in Iraq should be encouraged, and how we could best work with free Iraqi groups that opposed the Saddam regime.

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld worried particularly about the U.S. and British pilots enforcing the no-fly zones over northern and southern Iraq. Iraqi forces were shooting at the U.S. and British aircraft virtually every day; if a plane went down, the pilot would likely be killed or captured. What then? Mr. Rumsfeld asked. Were the missions worth the risk? How might U.S. and British responses be intensified to deter Saddam from shooting at our planes? Would the intensification trigger a war? What would be the consequences of cutting back on the missions, or ending them?

On July 27, 2001, Mr. Rumsfeld sent a memo to Mr. Powell, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and Vice President Dick Cheney that reviewed U.S. options:

“The U.S. can roll up its tents and end the no-fly zones before someone is killed or captured. . . . We can publicly acknowledge that sanctions don’t work over extended periods and stop the pretense of having a policy that is keeping Saddam ‘in the box,’ when we know he has crawled a good distance out of the box and is currently doing the things that will ultimately be harmful to his neighbors in the region and to U.S. interests – namely developing WMD and the means to deliver them and increasing his strength at home and in the region month-by-month. Within a few years the U.S. will undoubtedly have to confront a Saddam armed with nuclear weapons.

“A second option would be to go to our moderate Arab friends, have a reappraisal, and see whether they are willing to engage in a more robust policy. . . .

“A third possibility perhaps is to take a crack at initiating contact with Saddam Hussein. He has his own interests. It may be that, for whatever reason, at his stage in life he might prefer to not have the hostility of the United States and the West and might be willing to make some accommodation.”

The Iraq policy debate remained unresolved when the September 11 attacks occurred. Like all major national security issues, Iraq policy was re-examined in light of our post-9/11 sense of vulnerability and the heightened worries about terrorism and, especially, about the danger that terrorists might obtain WMD from a nation state.

When the president ultimately decided that the Iraqi regime must be ousted by force, he was influenced by five key factors:

1) Saddam was a threat to U.S. interests before 9/11. The Iraqi dictator had started wars against Iran and Kuwait, and had fired missiles at Saudi Arabia and Israel. Unrepentant about the rape of Kuwait, he remained intensely hostile to the U.S. He provided training, funds, safe haven and political support to various types of terrorists. He had developed WMD and used chemical weapons fatally against Iran and Iraqi Kurds. Iraq’s official press issued statements praising the 9/11 attacks on the U.S.

2) The threat of renewed aggression by Saddam was more troubling and urgent after 9/11. Though Saddam’s regime was not implicated in the 9/11 operation, it was an important state supporter of terrorism. And President Bush’s strategy was not simply retaliation against the group responsible for 9/11. Rather it was to prevent the next major attack. This focused U.S. officials not just on al Qaeda, but on all the terrorist groups and state supporters of terrorism who might be inspired by 9/11 – especially on those with the potential to use weapons of mass destruction.

3) To contain the threat from Saddam, all reasonable means short of war had been tried unsuccessfully for a dozen years. The U.S. did not rush to war. Working mainly through the U.N., we tried a series of measures to contain the Iraqi threat: formal diplomatic censure, weapons inspections, economic sanctions, no-fly zones, no-drive zones and limited military strikes. A defiant Saddam, however, dismantled the containment strategy and the U.N. Security Council had no stomach to sustain its own resolutions, let alone compel Saddam’s compliance.

4) While there were large risks involved in a war, the risks of leaving Saddam in power were even larger. The U.S. and British pilots patrolling the no-fly zones were routinely under enemy fire, and a larger confrontation – over Kuwait again or some other issue – appeared virtually certain to arise once Saddam succeeded in getting out from under the U.N.’s crumbling economic sanctions.

Mr. Bush decided it was unacceptable to wait while Saddam advanced his biological weapons program or possibly developed a nuclear weapon. The CIA was mistaken, we all now know, in its assessment that we would find chemical and biological weapons stockpiles in Iraq. But after the fall of the regime, intelligence officials did find chemical and biological weapons programs structured so that Iraq could produce stockpiles in three to five weeks. They also found that Saddam was intent on having a nuclear weapon. The CIA was wrong in saying just before the war that his nuclear program was active; but Iraq appears to have been in a position to make a nuclear weapon in less than a year if it purchased fissile material from a supplier such as North Korea.

5) America after 9/11 had a lower tolerance for such dangers. It was reasonable – one might say obligatory – for the president to worry about a renewed confrontation with Saddam. Like many others, he feared Saddam might then use weapons of mass destruction again, perhaps deployed against us through a proxy such as one of the many terrorist groups Iraq supported.

Thoughtful, patriotic Americans differed then and now on whether the risk of leaving Saddam in power outweighed the risk of war. But Mr. Bush concluded that it did, and that war therefore was necessary. In Congress, many Democrats as well as Republicans supported that conclusion. Debates will continue over whether the president should have balanced the risks differently. But characterizing the Iraq war as “a war of choice” sheds no light on the issue.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121504452359324921.html

When the founding fathers declared our independence, they could not have imagined that, 232 years later, the United States would be so spectacularly dependent on foreign countries. It would be roughly eight more decades before oil gushed from a well in Titusville, Pa., marking the beginning of the global oil economy; it took eight decades more for the United States to become a net oil importer. But the republic’s disastrous dependence on foreign oil has increased by leaps and bounds ever since.

In 1973, when OPEC imposed its oil embargo, U.S. oil imports composed 30 percent of our needs; today, they make up more than 60 percent, with a growing proportion of that crude coming from the world’s least stable regions. At around $145 a barrel, the United States, by my calculations, will spend more on imported oil this year than it will spend on its own defense budget, and much of that money will flow into the coffers of those who wish us ill.

Since oil dependence is so unappealing, you’d think that energy independence would be an easy sell, especially on this Fourth of July weekend. But in fact, very few policy ideas have been so ridiculed. A 2007 report by the National Petroleum Council, a privately funded group that offers advice from the oil and gas industries to the federal government, calls energy independence “unrealistic”; a recent book, “Gusher of Lies,” by Robert Bryce, a former fellow at a think tank funded in part by energy interests, described energy independence as a “dangerous delusion”; and a 2006 Council on Foreign Relations task force went so far as to accuse those promoting energy independence of “doing the nation a disservice by focusing on a goal that is unachievable over the foreseeable future.”

Ignore them. Energy independence does not mean that the United States must be entirely self-sufficient. It simply means reducing the role of oil in world politics — turning it from a strategic commodity into merely another thing to sell.

Is energy independence a pipe dream? Hardly. In the electricity sector, the mission has already been accomplished. Remember President Jimmy Carter in his cardigan during the oil crises of the 1970s, urging Americans to save electricity? It took us just one decade to wean the electricity sector from oil. Today, only 2 percent of U.S. electricity comes from oil, according to the Energy Department. Could we do something similar with transportation, where American cars and trucks still gulp oil-based fuel greedily? At least four very different countries — dictatorships and democracies alike — are already making serious headway toward that goal. It’s past time to pay attention to their example.

The first country, surprisingly enough, is Iran. The Islamic republic has lots of crude but little capacity to refine it, leaving Tehran heavily dependent on gasoline imports. The country’s blustery president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is fully aware that this is Iran’s Achilles’ heel and worries that a comprehensive gasoline embargo could cause enough social unrest to undermine his regime.

So Ahmadinejad has launched an energy-independence program designed to shift Iran’s transportation system from gasoline to natural gas, which Iran has plenty of. “If we can change our automobiles’ fuel from gasoline to [natural] gas during the next three-four years,” he said last July, “we won’t need gasoline anymore.” His plan includes a mandate for domestic automakers to make “dual-fuel” cars that can run on both gasoline and natural gas, a crash program to convert used vehicles to run on natural gas and a program to convert Iranian gas stations to serve both kinds of fuel. According to the International Association of Natural Gas Vehicles, more than 100 conversion centers have been built throughout the country: Iranians can drive in with their gasoline-only cars, pay a subsidized fee equivalent to $50 and collect their newly dual-fuelled cars several hours later. Ahmadinejad’s plan, which has been largely ignored by the West, means that within five years or so, Iran could be virtually immune to international sanctions.

While Iran is moving quickly toward energy independence, Brazil is already there. It’s a striking turnaround; three decades ago, the country imported 80 percent of its oil supply. But since the 1973 Arab oil embargo, the Brazilians have invested massively in their sugar-based ethanol industry and created a fleet of vehicles that can run on the resulting fuel. According to the Sugar Cane Industry Union (Unica), 90 percent of the new cars sold this year in Brazil will be flexible-fuel vehicles that cost an extra $100 to make but can run on any combination of gasoline and ethanol.

Lest anyone think that can’t be done in the United States, many of those new cars are made by General Motors and Ford. All it really takes to turn a regular car into a flex-fuel one is a fuel sensor and a corrosion-resistant fuel line.

Discovering how to make hydrocarbons and carbohydrates happily cohabit in the same fuel tank isn’t all that Brazil has done; it has also increased domestic oil production. Its efforts have not only broken the yoke of Brazil’s oil dependence but also insulated the country’s economy from the pain of the current spike in global oil prices. Gasoline prices have nearly doubled elsewhere since 2005, but in Brazil, they have been almost frozen. This year, more ethanol will be sold in Brazil than gasoline. Sounds pretty good, doesn’t it?

Like Brazil, China has decided to replace gasoline with alternative fuels. But unlike the United States and Brazil, where the favorite substitute is ethanol, China has embraced a different alcohol: methanol. Several provinces in China already blend their gasoline with methanol, a clear, colorless liquid also known as wood alcohol, and scores of methanol plants are currently under construction there. The Chinese auto industry has already begun to produce flex-fuel models that can run on methanol. Shanxi, a province in central China that produces much of the country’s coal, has even issued stickers granting cars that use pure methanol free passage on the province’s toll roads.

The distinction between methanol and ethanol is just one letter (but then, so is the difference between Iran and Iraq). Both biofuels should be in our basket of options. True, ethanol packs more energy per gallon and is less corrosive than methanol. But methanol is cheaper and far easier to produce in bulk. While ethanol can be made only from agricultural products such as corn and sugar cane, methanol can be made from natural gas, coal, industrial garbage and even recycled carbon dioxide captured from power stations’ smokestacks — an elegant way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Israel offers a fourth testament to what leadership, ingenuity and audacity can achieve. Last year, it launched an electric-car venture designed to turn Israel — which obviously has some tensions with the region’s big oil producers — into an oil-free economy. Israelis will soon be able to replace their gasoline-fueled cars with battery-operated ones, which they’ll plug into the hundreds of thousands of recharging points planned to be erected throughout the country. Israeli motorists, the government hopes, will be able to swap their batteries in a matter of minutes at dedicated stations or recharge them at home or at work. “Oil is the greatest problem of all time — the great polluter and promoter of terror,” said Israeli President Shimon Peres, the project’s political patron. “We should get rid of it.”

For each of the four countries, knocking oil off its pedestal is no longer a theoretical proposition but a reality in the making. But despite the lip service our own politicians pay to the need to reduce our oil dependence, none of the solutions offered by Iran, Brazil, China and Israel are even under consideration in the land of the free and the home of the brave.

Just go down the list. Natural-gas vehicles are nowhere to be seen. Brazilian sugar-cane ethanol is barred from the country by a steep 54-cent-per-gallon import tariff, courtesy of ethanol protectionists and their representatives in Congress. (No tariff is imposed on imported oil, of course.) For similar reasons, flex-fuel cars sold in the United States are certified to run only on ethanol, keeping methanol and other viable biofuels off the market — even though they are cheaper and can be made from a wealth of coal and biomass resources. The kind of electric cars deployed in Israel have never returned to U.S. showrooms since General Motors’ mass crushing of its EV1 — the subject of the documentary “Who Killed the Electric Car?”

It’s time to get serious. Policies such as “drill more” and “drive smaller cars” all keep us running on petroleum. At best, they buy us a few more years of complacency, while ensuring a much worse dependence down the road when America’s conventional oil reserves are even more depleted — whether or not we drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

The hard truth is that real energy independence can be achieved only through fuel choice and competition. That competition cannot take place as long as (according to the Department of Transportation) we continue to put 16 million new cars that run only on petroleum on our roads every year, each with an average street life of 16.8 years — thereby locking ourselves into decades more of petroleum dependence.

So let’s remember the old saying: When in a hole, stop digging. If every new car sold in the United States were a flex-fuel vehicle and if millions of Americans could plug in their electric cars, gasoline would be facing fierce competition at the pump and the socket. Moreover, our money would have migrated from Exxon to Pepco, from the Middle East to the Midwest — as well as to scores of poor, biomass-producing countries in Africa, Latin America and South Asia, including the few countries that don’t yet hate our guts. This, and no other, is the road to independence.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/07/03/AR2008070303250.html

This week’s dismissal of the case against Dick Grasso is sweet vindication for the former New York Stock Exchange CEO. But beyond the debate over his $190 million pay package, there are lessons here about prosecutorial discretion, pack journalism and business courage under political pressure.

These columns defended Mr. Grasso from the beginning, not because we cared a whit about his pay but because it looked like one more case of overreach by Lord High Executioner Eliot Spitzer. Mr. Grasso wasn’t accused of corruption; his sin was making a bundle in a political season when that was déclassé. Moreover, Mr. Grasso hadn’t set his own pay. The NYSE board had signed off on it, and it seemed bizarre to punish a CEO for accepting what his own bosses had legally agreed to pay him.

On the legal merits, we turned out to be right. As was his wont, Mr. Spitzer grasped for a legal theory that didn’t hold up under scrutiny. The state’s highest court last week affirmed the AG had no authority to bring most of the charges. This week an appeals court dismissed the final counts, chastising prosecutors for continuing the suit even after the NYSE had converted to a for-profit company. Current AG Andrew Cuomo finally gave up on this misbegotten exercise.

Mr. Grasso is fortunate he had the resources to fight back. He’s also fortunate he had an ally in Kenneth Langone, who had chaired the NYSE board’s compensation committee and said from the very beginning that Mr. Grasso deserved what he was paid. Mr. Spitzer no doubt figured the pair would settle under his publicity barrage, but Mr. Langone had the guts to defend himself and the principles at stake. This was all the more unusual at the time because Mr. Spitzer was at the height of his power, celebrated by a compliant financial press and unchecked by any other political actors.

The truth began to emerge once Mr. Spitzer was forced to prove his case, and depositions were taken of NYSE officials. Several compensation committee members insisted under oath that the process for awarding Mr. Grasso’s compensation had been above-board, well-vetted and fair. Among the businessmen who risked the Wrath of Spitzer by daring to speak this truth were former Viacom President Mel Karmazin and former Merrill Lynch Chairman David Komansky.

Their grace under pressure contrasts with others on the NYSE board, such as then Goldman Sachs chief (and now Treasury Secretary) Hank Paulson, who seemed only too happy to bend to Mr. Spitzer’s wishes and throw over Mr. Grasso. Interim NYSE chief John Reed also did his reputation no favors by inviting the AG to pursue Mr. Grasso and the Exchange. The episode is a lesson in how a prosecutor who lacks any sense of ethical restraint can intimidate even the most powerful businessmen in America.

As for the media, with one or two exceptions they were as usual Mr. Spitzer’s relentless cheerleaders. They accepted his handouts as gospel, lest the AG’s office cut them off his leak list. The Grasso case shows once again that the media aren’t doing their job when they give elected officials a pass as long as they’re pursuing rich business people.

The shame is that this case took five years to adjudicate, while Mr. Langone has recently estimated that the legal fees of the various parties will total $70 million. Just because a case ends well doesn’t mean it wasn’t a disgrace.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121504391262124771.html

John McCain is a given.  He’s an American hero, a tough, ornery nationalist, a centrist maverick, strongly in support of victory in Iraq, hell on porkbarrel spending, not much on the social conservatism of the evangelicals but against abortion rights and gay marriage.  He’s not, as he likes to joke, as “old as dirt and as scarred as Frankenstein,” but he’s been a force in national politics for nearly three decades, and there is no doubt about his character or his courage, though many conservatives doubt his attachment to issues that drive them.  He will fight for immigration reform, though this time with a much stronger set of border security measures.

The key: McCain will pursue victory in the war, deter our enemies because of his reputation for strength and defend the country via aggressive pursuit of terrorists in Iraq, Afghanistan and wherever they are, and get most of the judicial nominees right.  He’ll keep taxes where they are if he can.

Obama, on the other hand, is just now coming into focus for other than the already committed Obamians.  He had a stumbling, bumbling close to his primary campaign, and the opening weeks of his general campaign have been marked by flip flops and lurches left.

Here’s the core of Obama:

He’s hard left.

He wants the marginal rate on total federal taxes, including his social security tax hike, to immediately rise at least 57% on the highest earners.  Obama wants to raise taxes even in a weak economy, though this is a recipe not just for recession but worse.  Obama also wants to raise taxes on dividend income and to return the death tax to its highs of eight years ago.

Obama has proposed more than a trillion dollars in new spending.

Obama wants to cut and run from Iraq, with withdrawals of crucial forces beginning immediately upon his entry into office.  Obama has never met one on one with General Petraeus and has not been to Iraq in more than 900 days.  He is indifferent to the incredible progress made by our troops and the Iraqi Defense Forces and the Iraqi government in the last 18 months.

He supports the decision extending habeas rights to Gitmo detainees and he thinks the most liberal member of the Supreme Court, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, is a great model for future Supreme Court appointments.

Obama supports gay marriage, and opposes the California constitutional amendment to restore marriage to the definition overturned by a 4-3 vote of the California Supreme Court in May.  He supports abortion on demand, including partial birth abortion.

Obama has the slightest grasp on history, and routinely makes the sort of errors about basic facts that shock knowledgeable observers, like arguing the Kennedy-Khrushchev summit in Vienna was an example of the benefits of one-on-one diplomacy.

Obama is not a strong friend of Israel.  He spent 20 years in a church that was openly hostile to Israel, and he reversed himself on Jerusalem as the undivided capital of Israel after one day of criticism by Palestinians.

Obama is running a dirty campaign, and the serial assaults on John McCain’s service, most visibly by Wesley Clark but by many others closely associated with Obama, is repulsive.  These are not hits by independent 527s but by close associates and advisors of Obama.

Michelle Obama’s campaign rhetoric has been very divisive, is full of anger and resentment about “moving the bar,” and not being proud of the country, and has led to her high negatives with the public.

Obama’s close friends, mentors and associates are deeply troubling: the radical pastor Jeremiah Wright, the unrepentant terrorists William Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn, the convicted swindler Tony Rezko, and now a long line of “public housing developers” who took the money and failed to deliver on promises of safe and secure housing for Obama’s poorest constituents.

Obama’s judgment on key appointees is suspect, and he has had to fire the head of his vice presidential search team because of ties to the subprime mess and dump numerous “foreign policy advisors” for their hostility to Israel.

Obama’s deal with the Teamsters to end federal oversight of the union smells very bad indeed and telegraphs the sort of cronyism we could expect from an Obama Adminsitration. Obama’s mentor and real estate partner is Rezko, who helped the Obama’s buy their home, a home on which the Obamas received a mortgage that looks to many like a sweetheart deal.

Obama, like the other leaders of the Triple D Democrats –the Don’t Drill Democrats– doesn’t care about the price of gas, and refuses every initiative to increase supply and thus bring that price down.

Obama has broken his word on his commitment to public financing of the campaign and to meet John McCain in frequent debates.  Obama can’t be trusted to keep even high-profile promises he made even only weeks ago.

Away from a teleprompter Obama stumbles and stutters and lapses into a closed circle of cliches that betrays almost no reading or curiosity about the world around him,and a massive ignorance of the war in which we find ourselves.  Even when he works from a prompter he says nothing at great length with wonder phrasing but zero substance.

His crowds are enormous and his coffers overflowing, the products of a highly energized and vitriolic left that expects –believes it will be owed, in fact– the spoils of the election.  If Obama wins, the sharpest lurch left in American history is ahead of us.

Barack Obama is not only the most radical nominee of a major American political party in history, he is also the least prepared and the least informed.  He has spent less than four years inside of the United States Senate, and much of those years have been spent away from his job and away from the capital he wants to lead.  But he is protected and his campaign nurtured by a MSM that swooned for him long ago.  The prolonged and serious scrutiny of his background and his proposals will not be forthcoming in any consistent way between now and November.

That’s where we are on the eve of the 4rth of July, 2008.

http://hughhewitt.townhall.com/blog/g/14e4d8a8-6541-4b35-9225-8a23d1b3148f

Yesterday was a good day for justice in Rhode Island, where the state Supreme Court stopped cold an attempt to turn lead paint into the next tobacco or asbestos.

The 4-0 ruling overturned a 2006 jury verdict that was the first court decision swallowing the theory that lead paint is a “public nuisance.” Under that legal reasoning, the state claimed lead paint harmed public health – and companies that once made the product could be held liable whether or not there was even an injured party.

Writing for the court, Chief Justice Frank Williams explained that “the state has not and cannot allege any set of facts to support its public nuisance claim.” When the case came before the court in May, Justice Paul Suttell compared the state’s argument to the story of Seven Blind Men and an Elephant – some of the pieces may make sense, but none of them add up to a coherent whole.

The lead paint as “nuisance” theory was ginned up by Motley Rice, the South Carolina firm famous for its tobacco shakedowns. The law firm found a partner in then-Rhode Island Attorney General (and now U.S. Democratic Senator) Sheldon Whitehouse, who brought the first lead nuisance suit in the country. The theory was picked up by current AG Patrick Lynch, who has worked hand-in-wallet with Motley Rice and others, dishing them a contingency contract worth 16.67% of any settlement.

Yesterday’s decision should deny them that jackpot injustice. But the cost of fighting these suits over nearly a decade has still been steep for the three paint company defendants. Sherwin-Williams Co. saw its stock plummet after the 2006 verdict, erasing about $1.8 billion in market cap, a third of its value at the time. The British “loser pays” rule is designed to deter precisely this kind of legal abuse by making the loser pay for bringing frivolous cases.

Yesterday’s ruling should help guide states like California and Ohio where lead-paint cases are pending. The decision makes Rhode Island the third state Supreme Court – after New Jersey and Missouri – to reject attempts to use the “public nuisance” theory in lieu of more straightforward product liability litigation.

There’s no question that lead paint can be dangerous to children who ingest it, a risk in places where walls are peeling in old and poorly maintained buildings. But there’s also no question the risk has declined precipitously. The Centers for Disease Control noted in 2005 that prevention efforts had produced a “dramatic decline” in the number of children with elevated levels of lead in the blood over the past several decades. By 2007, the incidence of lead exposure in Rhode Island children was 1.3% – below the national average.

Yesterday’s ruling is good news for paint makers and consumers, and even better news as a rebuke to the plaintiffs bar and its political patrons. Industries that make lawful products should not be held hostage to bogus legal theories whose only purpose is looting honest companies.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121495475484821167.html