I think that we are seeing demonstrable, often positive changes in Iraq--changes that came from Iraqis weary of war and the excesses of thuggish “insurgents”, the creative leadership of General Petraeus, more troops, the the aggressive tactics of the surge. Iraq isn’t won, but these changes do seem to be creating an environment where the political victory can incubate. A real victory seems more possible now than it did less than a year ago; nothing is guaranteed, I realize, but if we continue to let the military do its job we can give the diplomats and politicians the time to do theirs.

Which is why I am surprised by this from Nancy Pelosi--a move that seems calculated to toss some red meat to the Kossacks and progressives, but which might just confound the general public.

“This is not a blank check for the president,” she said at a Capitol Hill news conference. “This is providing funding for the troops limited to a particular purpose, for a short time frame.”

The bill would set the requirement that troop withdrawals begin immediately and that soldiers and Marines spend as much time at home as they do in combat.

The measure also sets a goal that combat end by December 2008. After that, troops left behind should be restricted to a narrow sets of missions, namely counterterrorism, training Iraqi security forces and protecting U.S. assets.

I’ll be curious to see what support she gets from the Democrat candidates for the presidency--obviously Kucinich will like the legislation, but what will Edwards, Clinton, and Obama say publicly? This does seem to confirm that ensuring defeat is the policy of at least some of the Democrats’ leadership. Announcing to the world that we are no longer willing to support our troops or our mission will send a message of abandonment to our friends and encouragement to our enemies. Brilliant.

And, no, I’m not an absolutist. There is a time when a nation must face up to defeat and failure. You can’t fight a war forever. It’s just better to make that choice when you’re actually losing.

Read the story.

It was at a party where an angry anti-war type confronted me about the drug trade in Afghanistan that I discovered a really great idea: make the Afghan drug trade into something legal and positive for the country. Instead of funding a drug war that would be, probably, about as successful as our other drug wars, instead of throwing money at a fight that would target the only reliable economic driver in a country that desperately needed money and industry, we should legitimize that industry and use it to help re-build the country.

My version had tax credits as incentives for pharma companies to source their opiates through some as yet unnamed and uncreated Afghani bureau of Good Drug Development. I won’t pretend to be the first to have the idea, but it was new to me at the time. All this to say: I’m glad that someone else is working on toward the same goal.

The council, a Paris-based body of politicians, experts and academics, said the current policy of trying to eradicate the fields of poppies that yield opium, which makes up about half of Afghanistan’s income, was a costly failure.

The policy had little impact while demonising Afghan farmers and destroying “a valuable natural resource rather than turning it into a powerful driver for economic development,” the study said.

“The illegal heroin trade is the largest and fastest growing business sector in Afghanistan, accounting for a 2.7 billion US dollars’ profit a year,” it said.

But while it provided jobs for thousands of Afghans, it was only enriching a few while possibly feeding militant and terror networks that could be involved in the drugs industry, it said.

And as the illegal opium exports were untaxed, the public sector was deprived of income that could be used to build much-needed infrastructure.

However a “system of licenced opium production can form the basis for an open-minded and above all realistic debate on how to remove Afghanistan from its immediate development crisis and its imminent descent into a narco-state,” it said.

The council recommended the government fast-track the establishment of a national authority to licence opium producers and research an amnesty that would “integrate illegal actors into the opium licencing system”.

Aside from the economic benefit, it might also pull more people (and more powerful people) into the legitimate political system, reducing the violence and helping speed Afghanistan’s recovery.

Sounds like a damned fine idea to me.

Read the story.

Update: Kindly linked by John Hays.

From Salon’s War Room (subscription or willingness to watch an ad required) :

We’re sure that the president, like all of us, is deeply concerned for the victims of the attacks—the families who have lost loved ones, the hundreds of bus passengers and train riders who have suffered injuries, and the 7 million Londoners who are suddenly feeling the kind of shock and vulnerability that the residents of New York and Madrid know all too well. And yet, it’s hard to imagine that Bush and his advisors aren’t feeling something like a sense of relief this morning, too.

I find it highly unlikely that any American President would be feeling relief at any attack on a friend. I find it unlikely that he is finding some happy silver lining in an attack engineered that left innocent civilians dead and hundreds injured. I can’t even fathom that he would take a single moment of joy from the thought that we still have so far to go in our battle with the murderers and thugs.

Any suggestion otherwise is offensive.

“The war on terror goes on,” Bush said, and it was hard not to think that he likes it that way.

People forget that this President was something closer to being an isolationist than an imperialist when he first stepped into office. His instinct seemed to be to follow in Clinton’s footsteps when it came to questions of the Middle East: leave it alone as much as possible and hope that the problems don’t require much in the way of American attention. That only changed following 9/11--and, regardless of how history will remember W, I’m also convinced that he would give up that place in history if he could have been a President that presided over 8 years of peace instead of having to send young men and women to fight and die far from home.

No, the President doesn’t “like” the continuing war any more than Tony Blair does; he just recognizes the necessity of fighting back against the threat. Suggesting otherwise is just trying to score cheap political points

A bit ago, Shawn Macomber wrote a story about women’s progress in Afghanistan. Forget which side of the aisle you sit on, it should be celebrated that women can now attend school and enjoy even the most basic of freedoms in a country where they so recently suffered. But for some, that just isn’t possible.

Take this response, from “Ryd” on a discussion board, to some of what Macomber had to say:

I think this writer overreacted to the situation. Afghani women may have been subject to some heavy-handed treatment on a few occasions but overall, the women were not complaining. So, what was the problem? Just a trendy concern, is all people had for the women.

What happened to the idea of giving a voice to the voiceless? “Women were not complaining” so they must have been awfully happy, right? Of course, with no voice in their political system, no free and open press to express or explain the horrors of many of the women’s’ lives, and no government protection, it’s highly unlikely that this little fool would ever have heard their complaints to begin with.

The rest of Ryd’s comments are just as hilarious, and the pose of superiority that he adopts is laughable. In fact, arguing against someone as ill-suited to actual thought as Ryd is probably just a waste of time and effort. So why am I doing so? Because one good thing came out of his idiotic commentary.

Shawn’s reply.

And don’t forget to put Shawn’s Return of the Primitive on your blogroll.