Tonight I read this article about the recent protests in Berkeley, CA over Marine recruitment. The group Code Pink had recently convinced the Berkeley City Council to officially come out against military recruitment. Today the pro-military group Move American Forward demonstrated against this decision.

I was particularly struck by this letter signed by about 30 Republican members of Congress encouraging President Bush to rescind earmarks meant for Berkeley (of course all earmarks should be rescinded, but that is a another story)

"The military does not "selectively defend our country, its people, or our freedom. Therefore, we should not reward jurisdictions that selectively support our troops." read more »

In Newsweek, in Baghdad, violence is down 50%.

Key quotes:
IED attacks across the country are at their lowest point since September 2004, down 50 percent just since the surge peaked last summer. There hasn't been a successful suicide car bombing in Baghdad in five weeks, and the few ones in recent months have been small and ineffective. There used to be four a day, many of which claimed scores of lives each.

So the following observations do not come so much from the brass: Al Qaeda in Iraq is starting to look like a spent force, especially in Baghdad. The civil war is in the midst of a huge, though nervous, pause. Most Shiite militias are honoring a truce. Iran appears to have stopped shipping deadly arms to Iraqi militants. The indigenous Sunni insurgency has declared for the Americans across broad swaths of the country, especially in the capital. read more »

Can we agree yet that there is significant military AND political progress in Iraq?

And even if you answer "no" (and I don't see how you could), can we agree that this is a good thing (from frontpagemag.com):

IRAQIS REACH AGREEMENT ON REFORMS

By Ed Morrissey

It looks like the Iraqi political leadership remained on the job during their August recess. Representatives of all main sects in Iraq announced agreement on the most contentious issues, including a deal to initiate revenue sharing on oil production that concerned the American Congress most (via Power Line):

Iraq's top Shi'ite, Sunni Arab and Kurdish political leaders announced on Sunday they had reached consensus on some key measures seen as vital to fostering national reconciliation. read more »

The Wall Street Journal's James Taranto has been mercilessly hammering John Kerry recently for his statement that there was no bloodbath in Southeast Asia after the US exited Vietnam. On Saturday, the Journal (and its opinion website, opinionjournal.com) published a letter from Kerry defending his statement (http://opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110010427). And today, Taranto, in a brilliant stroke, has allowed readers to respond, line by line, to Kerry's letter (http://opinionjournal.com/best/?id=110010435).

The responses themselves are striking, for the most part, in both their clearheadedness and in their civility (though a couple are a bit combative in tone). I wonder if these characteristics are due to Taranto's choices, to the demographics of WSJ readers, or due to constitutional differences between thinking conservatives and thinking liberals. I have long held that while unthinking noisy gongs on both sides are obnoxious, that the thinking conservatives tend to be much more reasonable and accommodating than their liberal counterparts (present website company excluded, of course). At any rate, I don't think the editors of The New Republic or The Nation (or The New York Times/LA Times/other major papers, or CBS/NBC/ABC/MSNBC/CNBC/PBS/NPR) would have gotten the quality of responses shown here. More tellingly, I'm not sure it would have occurred to them to seek those responses. read more »

Daniel Larison wrote a very thought provoking piece yesterday about how his beliefs have changed since the beginning of the Iraq War. Here are some things he believed that he now feels otherwise:

1) First among these was my assumption that most Americans who called themselves conservatives distrusted government and feared the expansion of government power.

2) One of my other false beliefs connected to this was that most conservatives were conservatives first and GOP partisans second (if at all), and would therefore be just as outraged by GOP government activism and overreach as they had been in the 1990s. This was the worst sort of naivete on my part, and it was repeatedly shown to be false. read more »

Good intentions make bad policy, Africans tell Bono.

After his impassioned defense of aid, an African man in the audience asked Bono, "Where do you place the African person as a thinker, a creator of wealth?"

Celebrities make easy targets. Many at TED attacked Bono (ironically the catalyst for holding a conference in Africa in the first place) less for what he has done and more for what he represents. He has done more for raising Africa's profile and our awareness about debt relief, unequal trade, malaria and HIV/AIDS than perhaps any human being in history. He represents a game we have all played for nearly fifty years whose only winners have been corrupt governments and the international development industry.

Oh, you have got to love this.

The Bush administration's efforts to circumvent the Geneva Conventions are well documented. If you recall, the attempts to circumvent the conventions were based on the argument that those held were "unlawful combatants", not prisoners of war, so therefore, the Geneva Conventions did not apply. By transferring detainees to Guantanamo Bay, the theory was that the United States could create an enclave where neither US domestic law nor international law applied, and the US could do at it wished without interference from pesky things like treaties and rights. The plan hit a snag when the US Supreme Court made it clear, in no uncertain terms, that the detainees did have rights in the US Court system. In the wake of the ruling, Congress, which has the power to regulate the jurisdiction of the inferior courts, then drafted and passed Bush's wet dream, the Military Commissions Act of 2006, which attempts to give the illegal treatment of detainees the appearance of fairness. Its a kangaroo court. read more »

John Edwards came out today in a defense policy speech and said that the "global war on terror" is simply a Bush administration ideological doctrine and that there is no GWOT. I can already visualize the mouth-frothing on right-wing sites and the "Amen, he is speaking truth to power" silliness on left-wing sites.

However, this is a worthwhile discussion that deserves some serious thought and dialogue. Is it possible that we can provide a platform here to have that conversation? Prove me right folks.

This one should be fun. I hear an awful lot of criticism of Bush's foreign policy from both the right and the left, but what I seldom hear is any coherent alternative vision. My contention is that, whatever errors were made in the planning of the post-invasion Iraq, the Bush Doctrine is fundamentally sound. To wit, we were attacked on 9/11 by a terrorist organization with no borders, no diplomats, no uniformed personnel. The only way this organization exists as an effective force is with the shelter and succor of rogue regimes. So we gave notice that anyone offering shelter and succor to the enemies who attacked us would be considered enemies as well, and proceeded to enforce that principle on Afghanistan and Iraq. read more »

...what a rational, reasonable, stunningly intelligent supporter of the War in Iraq has to say about it, I strongly urge you to read Victor Davis Hanson's piece in National Review Online.

Hanson founded the Classics Department at Cal-Fresno and is an expert on military history. He's also certainly no shill for Bush, as NRO fans know.

I sincerely doubt anyone here will change anyone's mind on the Iraq war, at least not anytime soon. But it's good for both sides to look beyond their stereotypes about their opponents and see a reasonable case being made.