…and some of it is good news.

Here’s an announcement of an essay contest run by the American Islamic Congress:

The American Islamic Congress (AIC) has announced its newest project: the “Dream Deferred Essay Contest” on civil rights in the Middle East. The contest, which offers prizes up to $2,000 for top essays on the importance of promoting civil rights, is open to Americans and Middle Easterners under the age of 26.

The AIC is a non-profit dedicated to promoting interfaith understanding and human rights. The essay contest is part of its new program, HAMSA – Hands Across the Mideast Support Alliance. Regional partners in launching the contest include the Cairo-based Ibn Khaldoun Center and the Tharwa Project, a minority rights initiative founded in Damascus.

The essay contest, which takes its name from a poem by Langston Hughes, is the idea of Tharwa Project co-founder Ammar Abdulhamid. He officially announced the contest during a presentation at Harvard University.

They explain it better than I could.

“We need to mobilize a new generation of thinkers and leaders in the Middle East,” Abdulhamid said. “This essay contest is a way to provide incentive for youth to share their ideas for promoting individual liberty and tolerance. We are asking young people to share their frustrations and their dreams, and to stand up for individual rights.”
The contest was formally launched to Middle Eastern audiences by AIC executive director Zainab Al-Suwaij at a conference of female human rights activists in Jordan. Al-Suwaij told conference participants from across the Arab world that effective partnership is key to advancing civil rights.

“Middle Eastern reformers need support from American activists,” Al-Suwaij noted. “We are encouraging young Americans to think about how they can use their freedom to help people their own age in the Middle East. We need to extend our hands in support – and young Americans can play an important role.”

The official website for the contest is http://www.Hamsaweb.org. Essays must address one of several questions posted on the site and can be submitted in English, Arabic, French, or Farsi. The deadline is February 28, 2006. A diverse panel of celebrity judges – including Gloria Steinem and civil rights veteran Normal Hill – will select the winning essays. See the website for a complete list of judges.

A few of our commenters may be young enough to enter, and I’d encourage them to do it. I’d like to read what they have to say.

There’s a huge rumpus about the disclosure that the NSA intercepted various communications within the US. Other people more knowledgeable than I have discussed the legality; I want to add one small point to the discussion.

First, I’m not outraged that they listened in. I hope they got useful intel.

But second, the boneheaded legal and administrative wrapper around this infuriates me and more, it undercuts the prosecution of the war.From what I can tell, the law (FSIA) allows the instant interception of communications – as long as, within 72 hours, a judge approves it. the track record of the judges in approving these things is pretty clear – they approve them. Per Orin Kerr, over at Volokh, what they did probably doesn’t pass the FISA test, although there may be other legally sustainable arguments that defend the Administration’s position. That’s not good enough when there is a clear and clearly legal path to the same result.

Why the heck didn’t the Administration go get those approvals?

It bespeaks either an insane arrogance, or more likely a sense of beleaguered isolation.

Both of those are good explanations of why it is that Bush has done so little, so late to maintain support for the war, and here I have been and am prepared to continue to be critical.

What is inexcusable to me is that no one inside the White House thought for a moment about the impact of revelations like this one on support for the war. It is a truism that this war will be won or lost here, at home, in our willingness to patiently move forward toward success.

Whatever undercuts that patience – whether the mutterings of Michael Moore or the blind arrogance of Administration officials who don’t understand how bad this makes them and the war effort look – deserves to be pushed back.

I don’t think the Administration has been competent enough in key areas like this. Sadly (or gladly, if you’re a Republican) my party doesn’t seem prepared to do any better.

We spent the evening yesterday at Disney Hall, singing the Messiah with two thousand other people in the annual “Messiah Sing-Along.”

It was truly wonderful, as in full-of-wonder, and I can’t completely explain why except to point to the power of mass ritual and of music.

And when we joined those two things together – singing in one slightly off pitch voice – it was a concrete reminder to me that none of us are alone, that we are part of a bigger thing which is shared with other people.

And if you wonder why it is that I feel that we all owe for what we’ve received from it, think for a moment about the message of the holiday, and of the choir.

We’re none of us alone, and we are a part of something bigger, to which we have obligation as we can and should expect it to have debt to us. We exchange gifts – give and are given to. We make concrete gestures to the other people in our lives, as they make them toward each of us.

As noted, I’m not a deeply religious or spiritual man; I just try and lead a good life in my own way. But I am moved by things that remind me that I am a part of something bigger which has given me a lot. And when I look for direction in my own life, I look toward paying off that debt that I owe and leaving more behind than I was given.

That and annoying my children, breaking speed laws, and the occasional other grin-inducing activity.

Sometime Friday, Winds had its 5,000,000th visit.

I’d been keeping an eye on the counter, wondering if it was going to happen this year. Does it mean anything? No, not really. We’re a very small fish in a very large sea of information.

But it’s an occasion to express my appreciation not only to Joe for opening the joint, but to my co-authors for making it consistently interesting to be here, and mostly to all of you – the community of folks who read and comment here.

I get asked why I’m doing this (occasionally by Tenacious G, who asks “Why are you doing that? Weren’t you going to clear the table?”) – and the reason is that I learn a lot by doing it. Writing things I’m thinking down sometimes makes me realize that sometimes they’re just lame – you should see the posts that never get put up – and even when I’m happy with them, folks who comment often make me sharpen my game or change my views.

So if you’re reading this – if you’re one of the 5 million visitors – step up and engage us, become part of the dialog. Because really, at the core, the only reason I’m writing these things down is to start a conversation.

Wizbang’s Weblog Awards have closed, and WoC is the #6 Group Blog – that somehow seems a very Canadian result (sorry, Joe!…couldn’t help that).

So we’re 1/4 as good as Hit and Run.

Thanks to everyone who voted for us, thanks to Kevin at Wizbang for putting the whole thing on, and thanks to Diebold for the software that counted the votes.

And I want to remind you all that I am not a number. I’m a free man.

California may be unhappy with the current Democratic power structure, but it’s in no danger of becoming a Republican state. That’s because the leadership of the California Republican Party are morons.

The California Republican Party Board of Directors met today with Governor Schwarzenegger to have a frank and free flowing discussion about his recent appointment of Susan Kennedy as his new chief of staff.

They have their panties in a twist because the Gov. appointed a Democrat as Chief of Staff.

Schwarzenegger won – as a Republican – by co-opting a number of Democratic issues, interest groups, and practitioners. People like me.I can’t imagine ever calling myself a Republican, but I can’t imagine a California Republican Party that can win statewide elections without the votes of a whole lot of people like me.

But the party is run by clowns with bad haircuts more committed to some fantasy of ideological purity and grade-school sandbox power plays than actually winning elections and serving the people of California.

The best service they could perform would be – simply – to become competitive with the Democrats so that the strident and foolish among the Democratic Party would get shoved far away from the levers of power.

Somehow, I don’t see it happening very soon.

Michelle Malkin and neo-neocon (or “Neo” as we call her when she’s wearing her fashionable sunglasses) have posts up excoriating Jane Fonda for her recent commentary that American troops had been brainwashed into killing machines, and so were relatively blameless for all the atrocities they were committing.

No, really.

“Starting with the Vietnam War we began training soldiers differently,” the anti-American actress says in an email to the Washington Post.

Fonda claims she learned of the policy switch in “secret meetings” she had with military psychologists “who were really worried about what was happening to our combat personnel.”

One doctor, she insists, told her U.S. troops had been deliberately trained to be “killing machines.”

“This began,” Fonda maintained, “because the military discovered that in World War II and Korea, [U.S.] soldiers weren’t killing enough.”

“So they changed training procedures” to teach troops how to commit atrocities.

It’s not for a moment worth taking anything Jane Fonda says about anything more serious than movies, cellulite, and celebrity culture with any seriousness whatsoever. What, in her entire personal history, would demonstrate any measure of historical or political awareness?

The fact that this woman would bloviate about this in the middle of a war where our troops take immense personal risk to avoid killing where they easily could; a war with less collateral damage than any war in recent history; a war where our enemies commit atrocities and run schools to condition their young jihadi to do so – unremarked by Ms. Fonda, unsurprisingly – should remove whatever shred of seriousness people may have foolishly granted her.

Let me offer Ms. Fonda some relatively simple facts.

I’m not a soldier and have never been one. I have shot guns competitively, and trained in places where those who train soldiers train, sometimes alongside those trainers.

The exercises we’ve done – in clearing houses, crossing streets and moving through neighborhoods while engaging targets simulating enemies – are, I’m told, very similar to what troops undergoing training for fighting in urban terrain are given. In fact, they are probably more intensive than what a typical infantry rifleman would get.

One interesting thing that is a factor in all these exercises – not shooting certain targets is as important as shooting others. In my first, untrained exercise in Gunsite’s training house, I did what a lot of novice shooters do when they are adrenalized and ill-trained. I shot everything in the house, often several times. Clint Smith was my training officer, and his sad, laconic question when he stopped me mid-drill – “Marc, why in the world did you shoot Bozo the Clown?” – has pretty much stuck with me.

The reality of it is that someone who is well-trained is likely to do two things that pretty much everyone – including Ms. Fonda, if she’d taken time to actually learn anything – would think are good things. They teach you to shoot the bad folks better and faster, and equally importantly, not to shoot the good folks.

I’ve been through maybe a dozen similar exercises since then, and I’m happy to say that I’ve never shot at a “no shoot” target again. Why? because of that awful “killing machine” training that I went through.

Go read any of the milblogs, or ask anyone who has contact with any of our troops. Go read some history about what war was like in the recent past, or what it’s like in other parts of the world. Then realize that the restraint they take, and the risk they undergo to exercise that restraint, far exceeds that of any other army in history. We are not brainwashing our troops into mindless killing machines anywhere except in the fevered imagination of celebrity salons.

I’ll also note that Fonda is largely basing her fantasy on the work of LTC Dave Grossman, author of “On Killing,” a book I like a lot and which I think makes some interesting points. I also believe that some of the core premises of the book – based as they are on SLA Marshall’s work on World War II – are potentially significantly flawed.

I started work on consolidating the pro-war rationales (well-done by commenter Chris) and then beginning my arguments against the anti-war ones. And I realized that today, of all days – the Iraqi election day – showed this to be a somewhat hollow exercise (as some commenters did point out, I must admit).The only people for whom the pre-war rationales matter are those who believe that the genesis of the war is so tainted that everything that happens – all the fruit of the crime – is irremediably tainted. People who can’t answer whether Iraqis are better off today or not, because to admit that they are better off would make them complicit.

The other people to whom this matters are, sadly, my fellow Democrats, who see it as a lever to move the partisan dial in the country. They intend to do this, in among other ways, by voting pro-war Senator Joe Lieberman out of office.

I’m happy to ignore both groups, to be honest.

I’m more interested in the group with rolled-up sleeves that asks “Where do we go from here?” I’m genuinely interested in what Chris and others have to say in the matter; I’m not likely to change my tune of “We’re In ‘Till We Win” but that begs some critical questions (not to sound too much like a certain good-ole-boy) but … what does “Win” mean? For that matter, what does “In” mean?

There’s probably an interesting talk to have about the leadup to the war; I still believe, strongly that the “pro” arguments outweighed, and outweigh today, that “anti.”

But watching the election news today, I suddenly don’t think it’s the best use of my limited time or your limited attention. I’m sure you’ll let me know if you think I’m wrong.

They are voting in Iraq as I write this (it’s 8:30 am their time), and I’m surprised at how excited I am about it. You’d think that it would have become routine – the notion of a change in power in the Middle East that didn’t involve dungeons, gallows or the firing squad – after the first ones.

We in the West have certainly participated in enough of those kinds of changes of power over there; to me, this one begins the process of wiping the slate clean.

Go read some Iraqi blogs tonight and tomorrow. Start with my friends at Iraq The Model.

Especially this post.

Building a free country takes a long time. You do it one brick at a time.

I invited smart anti-war commenter Chris to mirror what I’d done by compiling what he saw as the best arguments for the war. Here (unedited) is what he sent me, which I’d like to subject to the same process as my own list of antiwar points. Please comment on this post and refine this list; I’ll republish the consensus take (or better, if I can convince Chris to do that much work, ask him to do it).

– A.L.

By way of providing symmetry to Armed Liberal’s post of 12/01/05, he’s asked me to sum up the pro-war arguments as best I can.

However, I should preface this list by pointing out two things. First, in the interests of brevity, I’ve tried to keep the bullet points relatively short, and the arguments limited to what I think are reasonable points that have consistently been made by the hawkish side. This means, for example, that I haven’t included some of the “shifting the political balance to the Shiites” arguments that Jim Peterson has been making over the past couple of days – although this omission should not be taken as an indication that these arguments aren’t interesting or valid.

Second, I should point out that, just as AL’s anti-Iraq war list tended to confuse the issues of “should we be in Iraq” and “how do we win in Iraq”, this list may also confuse certain issues. For example, many people can and have made the argument that while the Iraq war itself was a just and necessary action, the Bush administration’s prosecution of the war has left much to be desired. However, for the purposes of this list, I’ve tried to compile arguments that, by and large, do not make a large distinction between Bush’s leadership and the overall Iraq strategy.
That said…

1. The attacks on September 11 proved that modern technology can act as a tremendous force multiplier, such that even a very small number of relatively unsophisticated enemies can do extraordinary damage to a modern society. By far, the most dangerous such force multipliers are Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs), which can cause catastrophic destruction without relying on large organized support structures, such as nation-states and conventional armies. Once in the hands of terrorists, WMDs would be almost impossible to keep out of a large, open, trade-oriented country such as the United States. Therefore, WMDs must be stopped at their source: namely, nation-states which have the capacity to produce WMDs, and a possible motive for selling/giving said WMDs to terrorists. The nation-states at the top of such a list would be Iraq, Iran, and North Korea, with others such as Libya and Pakistan existing in the second tier. Out of that list, Iraq was the logical best choice to take on because of the following reasons:

1a. We had been in a state of hostilities with Iraq since the end of the Gulf War.
1b. We knew that Saddam continued to hold an animus against the US and its leaders (e.g. the assassination attempt on George Bush Sr.).
1c. We knew that Iraq was not above using unconventional means of attack, as evidenced by his support for various terrorist groups.
1d. Strategically, Iraq was far easier to attack than North Korea and Iran: we believed we could attack on at least two fronts, we had experience fighting the Iraqi army, and the risk of severe blowback was far less than with, say, North Korea.
1e. The plentiful oil reserves of Iraq would both help pay for the invasion, and for the reconstruction of the country.

2. It has been the goal of the United States since WW2 to spread democracy and free markets throughout the world. Our experience thus far has shown that societies which embrace these ideals tend to prosper. However, because of an unfortunate mix of historical accident, dependence on foreign oil, realpolitk and outright cultural prejudice, the US has not only failed to promote western values in the Middle East, but has frequently supported regimes that have, in turn, actively suppressed democratic reforms. From a generational standpoint, our battle with Al Qaeda will only be won when their culture of intolerance (radical Islam) has been supplanted by a culture of tolerance (Western democracy). Again, Iraq was the logical best choice to “flip” over to western values because:

2a. Iraq is centrally located in the Arab world. A democratic, vibrant Iraq would be a far more visible example to the rest of the Middle East than, say, Afghanistan, which is relatively isolated and ethnically dissimilar from much of the rest of the Middle East.
2b. Iraq, although visibly crumbling under Saddam’s rule, still had a good deal of experience with modern technology and other trappings of modern culture. Again, compared to Afghanistan, Iraq would have much less of a distance to travel to be a true economic, cultural, and technological peer of the US and other developed countries.
2c. Iraq has a good deal of historical significance to the Muslim world: a Baghdad once more restored to its rightful place as a center of commerce and learning would be a huge blow to the insular ideals of radical Islam.
2d. A “flipped” Iraq would serve two strategic purposes: it would encourage our ideological allies (i.e. reformers) that positive change is possible, and it would frighten our enemies – neighboring countries would be discouraged from acting out, lest what happened to Saddam happen to them.

3. Simply put, the best defense is a good offense. Anti-US sentiment exists in the Middle East and will not simply go away: far better to focus it towards military forces capable of defending themselves, at a time and place of our choosing, rather than sitting back and waiting for the attacks to come to us.

4. The humanitarian case was extremely straightforward: Saddam was a tyrant who was harming his people, and the US-led sanctions were further penalizing the innocent victims in Iraq. Freeing Iraq in 2003 would both do a great deal of good, and make up for our failure to properly liberate the country in 1991.

5. Criticism of the war as “unjust” is misguided: Iraq was unquestionably guilty of several offences (firing on US fighter jets, attempted assassination of political leaders, a history of aggression against its neighbors, funding Palestinian terrorists), any one of which legitimately qualified as a casus belli. The presence of WMDs is beside the point: Saddam was unquestionably evil, and Iraq is better off without him. To complain that the war was justified to the American people on the basis of WMDs and not on other reasons is like complaining that Al Capone was jailed on tax evasion charges rather than murder, etc. Either way the formal reason is less important than the fact that the bad guy is gone.

6. Criticism of the war as poorly fought is likewise misguided. Comparing the traditional aims of virtually every war ever fought (“Kill ’em all until they can’t possibly fight back, then dictate terms of surrender”) vs. the goals of the US in Iraq (“Disable the command and control structure while taking great care not to harm civilians, destroy important infrastructure, or look particularly bad to the world media”) indicates that by any reasonable standard, the Iraq war was a smashing success.

7. Current political, military, and logistical difficulties in Iraq are laughably light compared to what the US has had to deal with historically (say, in WW2). By far the greatest threat to the rebuilding enterprise is not internal or foreign insurgents or hostile governments (Iran and Syria), but a loss of political will here in the US. That being the case, the anti-war left and mainstream media have not been helpful in the slightest.

8. The Iraq war has freed the United States from outdated organizations that had essentially become antagonistic to US interests, such as the United Nations. By invading Iraq with the help of truly loyal allies, we have reaffirmed our national sovereignty and our right of self-defense. We have likewise reminded the world that nations are powerful because of their current vitality, and not because of the diplomatic respect historically accorded to them (i.e. France).

9. The attacks of 9/11 represented not merely a few malcontents, but were instead a harbinger of a far greater clash of civilizations that could eventually build to a conflict on the scale of WW2 or the Cold War. That being the case, if a successfully fought war in Iraq can forestall or entirely prevent such a conflagration, then the Iraq war should be embraced as the lesser of two evils by far, even taking the war’s occasionally inept prosecution into account.

Beyond that, I think the arguments tend to get fairly marginal. I hope the pro-war folks find this a relatively accurate expression of their beliefs, and I welcome comments and corrections.