The Administration’s plan to name Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps as a terrorist group should not surprise anyone. The move appears to be part of an effort to ratchet up pressure on the Iranian regime in order to force it to accede to western demands that it stop trying to build a nuclear bomb as well as halt its meddling in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The United States has decided to designate Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, the country’s 125,000-strong elite military branch, as a “specially designated global terrorist,” according to U.S. officials, a move that allows Washington to target the group’s business operations and finances.

The Bush administration has chosen to move against the Revolutionary Guard Corps because of what U.S. officials have described as its growing involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as its support for extremists throughout the Middle East, the sources said. The decision follows congressional pressure on the administration to toughen its stance against Tehran, as well as U.S. frustration with the ineffectiveness of U.N. resolutions against Iran’s nuclear program, officials said.

I don’t think there is much doubt that this Administration has decided that if they can’t get satisfaction on Iraq and the nukes, then there will be some kind of military action taken against the Iranian regime. It appears that there has been a concerted effort over the last couple of months to point the finger at Iranian interference in Iraq. It has all the earmarks of a public relations campaign to sell the idea that the Iranians are killing Americans by supporting some Shia militias with arms and explosive devices.

If this were true, it might be reason enough to support a strike – at the very least against bases used by the Qods Force, the elite group of IRGC operatives who operate extra-territorially. In addition to their bases, I’m sure we’ve identified some other targets involving their economic interests that could be hit.

But nagging at the back of my mind is the question, “Are the Iranians that stupid?” Greg Djerjian:

So let us not, as proud Americans who care about the future of our country (or other concerned individuals besides), let us dare not allow again a growing drum-beat of vague allegations to gather momentum, with the attendant formation of a new consensus among group-thinking Beltway agitators whose strategic lens have proven disastrously faulty, but nonetheless still have the President’s ear (mostly via Cheney), so that launching of attacks on Iran gains traction as a plausible policy option. And even if you were to be tempted by some of these gung-ho chest-beaters on the Potomac, do you genuinely believe this grossly incompetent national security team would be able to handle the potential fall-out of such an operation…

[snip]

The real danger we face as this criminally incompetent Administration winds through its final days is compounding the Iraq imbroglio by a catastrophic intervention in Iran. Any American concerned about this possibility needs to remind their representatives of the possible ramifications thereto and suggest to the Democratic Presidential candidates (on the Republican side, all but Ron Paul and Chuck Hagel on the side-lines have evinced a smidgen of sanity on foreign policy matters of late) that they cease their petty internecine skirmishing (at least occasionally, if possible) and focus on the danger of the Iraq conflict spreading to Iran (it is quite clear Shi’a-U.S. relations are set to deteriorate significantly in Iraq in the coming months, adding more fuel to the fire, and margin for error leading to a wider conflagration). Meantime, all of us must demand unimpeachable evidence about Iranian activity in Iraq rather than relatively thin gruel, to include summoning journalists to, if they are capable of it at least, digging into this story as genuine truth-seekers who skeptically monitor MNF claims rather than report them as undisputed fact. We’re tired of lackadaisical hoodwinking, aren’t we?

Djerjian (who is becoming unreadable as the above paragraph shows) nevertheless offers up a little sanity to inject in what appears to me to be nothing less than a march to war with Iran. For make no mistake, we won’t be able to stop by simply punishing the Rev Guards or the Qods Force for their meddling in Iraq and Afghanistan. Once the die is cast, it will be tit for tat, response and counter response. We bomb them. They fire at our ships or close the straits of Hormuz. We bomb their refineries. They unleash the Mahdi in Iraq.

Before you know it, the only way to stop it is to either not respond to a serious provocation or invade and overthrow the regime. Classic escalation scenario that perhaps the Administration is fully aware of and is seeking to implement.

I’ve discussed many times my opposition to either bombing Iran or invasion. Especially since the real problem is not with what Iran is doing in Iraq but what they are doing at Nantanz – working like hell to perfect the large scale nuclear enrichment program that will allow them to build the bomb. The only bright spot in this entire mess is that we still have some time to pressure the Iranians to accept stringent international safeguards on their nuclear program – perhaps even convince them to forgo it altogether although that seems unlikely at this point. Sanctions have been in place only a few months. And despite China and Russia’s foot dragging, patient and insistent diplomacy can almost certainly win them over to the idea that it would be better if Iran did not achieve the capability to construct nuclear weapons and that therefore, even tougher sanctions are necessary.

Even the paltry, fig leaf sanctions that we’ve imposed so far have had a big effect on the Iranian economy (due to concerns that stricter sanctions are on the way) and caused President Ahmadinejad’s popularity numbers to plummet to levels even below Bush territory. The people are chafing under the recent crackdown on western dress and manners by Ahmadinejad and actually rioted when gas rationing was announced.

The corruption of the regime’s leaders, who have their fingers in every economic pie in the country not to mention the incredible graft and kickbacks that are killing domestic oil production, is building a towering resentment in the middle class. And the economic minister just announced that 13% of the Iranian people live below the poverty line – surely understating the number by a factor of 4 according to some experts what with massive unemployment approaching 25% of all working age Iranians.

There is constant violence in the hinterlands where the non-Persian minorities are agitating for more autonomy or outright separation for the regime. And on top of all this, Iran is spending an enormous amount of money to keep their proxies in Lebanon (Hizbullah) and the West Bank (Hamas) armed and dangerous to western interests and Israel. This support is draining the treasury and causing even more resentment among the Iranian people who feel that money would be better spent at home.

All of these problems disappear with the first bomb dropped on Iran by the United States.

At this point, there is so little upside and such a huge downside to taking military action against Iran that for the life of me, I can’t understand why we are even discussing it. To my mind, it borders on madness. We are heavily engaged in Iraq and losing – more slowly than before but we are still losing. We and NATO are heavily engaged in Afghanistan and are losing there as well.

Does the Administration want to try for 3 straight? A perfect record of incompetence and futility? It simply boggles my mind the way many on the right are so cavalier about attacking Iran and getting ourselves embroiled in yet another conflict. As I said, it won’t stop with a bombing campaign. We will eventually be forced to go in and effect regime change.

I would hope that there are enough sane people left in Washington to prevent this catastrophe in the making. The Gordian Knot of war is beginning to tighten. And no one in the Administration seems willing or able to stop it.

The Rick Moran Show on Blog Talk Radio will go live today at 3:00 PM. My special guest today is Rick Calvert, CEO of the upcoming Blog World Expo in Las Vegas. We’ll get an overview of the conference and take a peek behind the scenes of how things are shaping up for this seminal event in the history of blogs.

You can access the stream here:

Don’t miss it!

UPDATE

You can stream the podcast here or go here and download it.

Via the Asia Times, we discover that it is probable Pakistani President Musharraf gave a green light to the American military to go into Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier Provinces and take out the nearly 30 Taliban bases and severely curtail the incursions by enemy fighters into Afghanistan.

Alas, as has been the case many times it seems, we are too late:

The ongoing three-day peace jirga (council) involving hundreds of tribal leaders from Pakistan and Afghanistan is aimed at identifying and rooting out Taliban and al-Qaeda militancy on both sides of the border.

This was to be followed up with military strikes at militant bases in Pakistan, either by the Pakistani armed forces in conjunction with the United States, or even by US forces alone.

The trouble is, the bases the US had meticulously identified no longer exist. The naive, rustic but battle-hardened Taliban still want a fight, but it will be fought on the Taliban’s chosen battlegrounds.

Twenty-nine bases in the tribal areas of North Waziristan and South Waziristan on the border with Afghanistan that were used to train militants have simply fallen off the radar.

The US had presented Islamabad with a dossier detailing the location of the bases as advance information on likely US targets. But Asia Times Online has learned that since early this month, neither the North Atlantic Treaty Organization-led coalition in Afghanistan nor Pakistan intelligence has detected any movement in the camps.

The jirga involved the leaders of the Pashtun tribes in northwest Pakistan and Afghanistan. Pakistani and Afghan officials have been trying to convince the tribes to stop allying themselves with the Taliban who have used a combination of bribes, religious fervor, and terror to operate in their territory.

StrategyPage reports the effort is not going well:

With increasing amounts of drug cash pouring into southern Afghanistan, comes more government, NATO and American troops. And more Taliban as well. This has sharply increased the level of violence in the area, partly because over the last two years, there have been more government officials around to record it all. It’s all about tribal politics. The Pushtun tribes on both sides of the border form a population of some twenty million of the poorest, and most heavily armed, people in the region. Leaders in Afghanistan and Pakistan are trying to convince the tribal chiefs that it’s time to pay more attention to education and economic development. Many of the chiefs are willing to listen, but many others are siding with the Taliban, and a return to a mythical past. Pakistan has admitted it has been the source of most Taliban activity, because Pakistan has been less successful taking on the Taliban in Pushtun tribal areas, than has the Afghan government.

Taking into account the way Afghan politics works, the U.S. is offering a new anti-drug strategy that would involve financial incentives to provincial governors who reduce drug activity. That would mean the drug lords would have to pay higher bribes as well.

Rivalry with the dominant Punjabs in Pakistan is one reason for the Pashtun’s reluctance to abandon the Taliban and join with Islamabad in forging stronger ties with the central government. But now that it appears President Musharraf is dead serious about going after the Taliban and their al-Qaeda allies in the NWFP - including the Waziristans – the Pashtuns don’t want to be on the losing side and appear ready to deal.

So where have al-Qaeda and the Taliban gone to?

The al-Qaeda leadership (shura) has apparently now installed itself in Jani Khel village in the Bannu district of North-West Frontier Province (NWFP). This includes Osama bin Laden’s deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri.

The Taliban leadership, most prominently Haqqani, is concentrated in the Afghan provinces of Khost and Gardez, where much fighting is expected to take place.

A spillover of al-Qaeda’s presence in Jani Khel is likely to spread to Karak, Kohat, Tank, Laki Marwat and Dera Ismail Khan in Pakistan. Kohat in NWFP is tipped to become a central city in the upcoming battle, as the office of the Pakistani Garrison commanding officer is there and all operations will be directed through this area. In addition, Kohat is directly linked with a US airfield in Khost for supplies and logistics.

A second war corridor is expected to be in the Waziristans, the Khyber Agency, the Kurram Agency, Bajaur Agency, Dir, Mohmand Agency and Chitral in Pakistan and Nanagarhar, Kunar and Nooristan in Afghanistan.

The fiercest battleground, however, will be in Khost and Gardez, making the previous Taliban successes in Helmand and Kandahar during the spring offensive of 2006 a distant memory.

Here’s a link to a full page map showing the cities and provinces in question.

As has recently been reported, the Taliban has changed tactics thanks to successful strikes on their military leadership in the past few months. It appears that local Taliban commanders will be given much more autonomy to carry out attacks on NATO forces with more resources going to the most successful among them.

Will this make it harder to fight them? Not if we get more boots on the ground, as the excellent Canadian general Lewis Mackenzie says in this Op Ed:

Recent announcements indicate that Canada hopes to have 3,000 to 5,000 Afghan troops trained by the end of the year and that they will be able to conduct combat operations on their own. That is all well and good but it will not ensure victory, particularly with Taliban reinforcements readily available across the border in Pakistan and having easy access to unguarded border crossing points into Afghanistan.

If you add up the total regular army troops available to NATO, it comes to roughly 2.24 million soldiers. All we need in Afghanistan to reinforce the troops currently in theatre and win this thing is half of one per cent of that figure.

Where the hell are they?

Good question, general. I wrote about NATO’s lack of enthusiasm for putting their troops into harms way here. Basically, the NATO charter gives each country an “out” by allowing the individual governments to attach “caveats” to the use of their forces that would keep them out of combat zones. “How many battalions does it take to protect Kabul airport?” asked Colonel Fred Lewis, the deputy contingent commander. Indeed, the International Crisis Group concluded that NATO simply must do more:

“Only a handful of NATO members are prepared to go to the south and east and to go robustly—mainly the U.S., U.K., Canada, the Netherlands, Romania, Australia and Denmark,” the International Crisis Group concludes in a blunt report published this month.

“Hard questions need to be asked of those such as Germany, Spain, France, Turkey and Italy who are not, and who sometimes appear to put force protection, not mission needs, at the fore.”

This may be the crucial period in the Afghanistan War – or perhaps we should redefine that war to include Pakistan as well now that Musharraf has reluctantly concluded to accept the help of the Americans in trying to defeat the Taliban. Be prepared for growing conflict in the south of Afghanistan where the Canadians and Dutch are currently operating. One of the goals of the aborted 2007 Taliban spring offensive was to inflict large numbers of casualties on the Canadians in hopes that the Canadian people – already ambivalent at best about the commitment of their troops to Afghanistan – would demand the return of their soldiers thus knocking Canada out of the war. They didn’t succeed thanks to some brilliant pre-emptive strikes by US, Canadian, and NATO forces on Taliban positions in Afghanistan where they were massing for their offensive. But they have hardly given up the fight.

The New York Times says we are losing the war in Afghanistan. Even Michael Yon, pointing to this report about our bases being attacked, says we are “losing in Afghanistan.” General Mackenzie says we need 10,000 troops immediately to stabilize the south. And the Musharraf-Taliban showdown is taking place amidst immense political turmoil in Pakistan where it is not even clear that the Pakistani president is committed to the long haul of fighting Islamic radicals in his midst.

Time for NATO to crap or get off the pot in Afghanistan. Time for Musharraf to throw caution to the winds and call upon American help for his war in the tribal areas. And it is long past time for the press to start paying attention to this conflict and inform the American people of the seriousness of the situation so that we all don’t wake up one morning and find the Taliban re-ensconced in Kabul with al-Qaeda right on their heels.

This article originally appears in The American Thinker.

It is an axiom in politics that “Winning is better than losing.” That obvious conclusion can be deceptive in certain circumstances – such as when finishing second or third is just as good as winning. Or not playing the game at all is as good as losing. All depends on perception – that artificially generated instant conventional wisdom bequeathed to the public by people who think they know more about politics than the rest of us.

But do they? The trick in being a good political pundit is not in formulating wildly original analysis or penetrating insights into “what it all means.” Rather, it is much better to say exactly what everyone else is saying except be meaner, or funnier, or more serious, or more dismissive than the next fellow. A good turn of the phrase and an attitude will bring you stardom in punditland.

This is important to keep in mind when looking at the gigantic block party the Republicans threw in Ames, Iowa on Saturday. Known by pundits as the Ames Straw Poll, it pitted Mitt Romney not against any other candidate but against the expectations set up beforehand by the punditocracy. What were those expectations? Romney must “do well.”

Okay, can we define “do well?” In order to “do well,” Romney must “exceed expectations.”

See how easy it is to be a political pundit?

A little more serious pre-block party analysis would be that Romney should receive at least as much of the vote at the straw poll as he was getting statewide. In this. Mr. Romney succeeded in exceeding expectations. The latest University of Iowa poll has Romney getting 27% of the vote, comfortably ahead of Rudy Giuliani who trails with 18%. At the Ames Hoe Down, Romney walked away with 31% of the 14,000 votes cast. And since his two main rivals – Giuliani and former Senator Fred Thompson – weren’t competing, it could be said that Romney won big in Ames while Giuliani lost. Thompson, not formally declared as a candidate yet, gets a pass from pundits on this one.

So what to make of Romney’s win. The clever pundit will point out that Romney spent scads of money on advertising and to bus thousands of his supporters to the party – probably in excess of $3 million. It works out to more than $600 per voter which is a steep price to pay in order to “exceed expectations.”

But hold on for a minute. Finishing second in Ames was none other than the former governor of Arkansas Mike Huckabee. The Huckster spent next to nothing and captured 18% of the vote. To say Mr. Huckabee “exceeded expectations” is just not good enough, not if you want to be a complete pundit. The correct response when querried as to how Mr. Huckabee did in the Ames Straw Poll is he pulled off “a surprise.” This is one step below “a shocker” which is a rarely used term in the pundit vocabulary. “A shocker” is reserved for those delicious circumstances when the front runner fails to exceed expectations and is defeated by someone the punditocracy had previously considered “a surprise.”

Then there are those who exceed expectations but nobody cares. Third place finisher in Ames Sam Brownback fills the bill perfectly there. Brownback mounted a negative telephone campaign against front runner Mitt Romney, accusing him of flip flopping on abortion and touting his own credentials as the truest social conservative available. Governor Huckabee might have something to say about that claim but the tactic worked. Brownback finished with 15% and while he was hoping for second place, he crowed about his 3rd place finish that it made him a “viable” candidate. The term “viable” is used by politicians when they don’t think the pundits take them seriously. In Brownback’s case, he is correct.

Finally, there are those politicians who don’t exceed expectations, don’t meet expectations, and don’t even get a whiff of what an expectation might be. They are not important enough for pundits to bother with setting expectations. They have no chance of being a surprise or a shocker.

They are the walking dead of the campaign, zombies who don’t even rate a press pool on when they’re going to drop out – that is, if anyone is covering them. Poor Tommy Thompson, former governor of Wisconsin and one of the smartest pols running for president in either party was the designated wraith at this event. His 5th place finish put him behind GOP gadfly Ron Paul and just in front of Fred Thompson who hasn’t even been to Iowa yet. Not even able to exceed his own expectations of finishing first or second, Thompson gracefully bowed out of the race on Sunday.

And after all the analyzing and judging, all the serious and unserious dissections of what happened and what it all means, the pundits all got together and decided that the entire exercise was a waste of time. It doesn’t mean anything they assure us. We’re still five months from the caucuses. Plenty of time for one or more of the also rans to challenge Romney and his deep pockets in Iowa.

To sum up; after creating expectations for the candidates and giving plenty of ink to both the build up to Ames and the aftermath, the pundits have sagely informed us that it doesn’t mean squat.

See? Anyone can be a pundit. All you need is unbelievable arrogance and the ability to take yourself too seriously.

Bill O’Reilly was in high dudgeon over the weekend, writing an Op-Ed in the Boston Herald in which he takes Hollywood to task for being “anti-American” based on his take of the new Jason Bourne flick that just opened:

I knew this movie was trouble when I read the reviews. Almost all the critics liked it. The only way American movie critics would like a violent car-chase film like this was if it bashed the USA, which, of course, it does.

The CIA guys are bad, bad, bad. And just to make sure Indonesian and Pakistani audiences get the picture, the CIA chief issues his evil orders with the American flag clearly seen on his desk. No language barrier here, no sir. The U.S. intelligence agencies are fiendish enterprises that want to hurt Damon and actually force Stiles to cut her own hair. How could they?

Actually, neither Damon nor Stiles has to do much acting. Damon does work for the far-left MoveOn organization and is on record as requesting that the Bush daughters serve in Iraq. The actor also told the Idaho Statesman that the CIA’s use of water boarding is an erosion of our American values.

Guess what? There’s a water-boarding scene in the flick. What a coincidence!

Stiles is also down with the far left. On a cable program she explained why she missed a MoveOn event by saying: “I was afraid that Bill O’Reilly would come with a shotgun at my front door and shoot me for being unpatriotic.”

First, for all you Ludlum fans out there, I will not name this new flick because you and I both know that the only relationship between the movie and anything Robert Ludlum ever wrote is the name of the title character. It is an insult to fans of that excellent series of novels to title those films the way they have. What happened to that extraordinarily rich and complex relationship with Marie? And what happened to The Jackal? How could you even think of doing a movie on the Bourne series without including Carlos the Jackal – the nemesis and motivation for everything he does? What about the settings from the novels? Expect Kowloon and you get Berlin.

Perhaps most egregiously, it is the character of Jason Bourne himself that, in typical Hollywood fashion, was absolutely butchered. For those not familiar with the novels, Bourne was never an assassin! He was trained as one but he was created for the sole and exclusive purpose of bringing Carlos the Jackal out of hiding by taking false credit for his kills! To make the man Marie fell in love with an assassin who loses his memory and then upon reacquiring his mind regrets his past life is outrageous even for Hollywood.

Yeah…but Matt Damon is cute.

At any rate, Bill O’Reilly must not have gotten out much lately. Perhaps he’s been taking care of a sick aunt for the last 50 years or so for him not to have noticed that there are precious few movies where the CIA aren’t the bad guys. Or the military. Or conservatives. Or religious people. Or CEO’s of big businesses. Or anyone and everyone in American society that might be admired by conservatives.

Is it that Hollywood is anti-American as Billy O says? Or anti-Conservative?

No to the first, although their idea of what sort of nation America actually is might be a little hazy – or wrongheaded. As for Hollywood being anti-conservative, surely you jest. Conservative heroes like Rambo or Arnie Schwarzenegger are always portrayed as not part of any ideological movement but rather loners who kill bad guys that threaten America, or little kids, or puppy dogs. They are also very careful to utter at least one, vapid, liberalesque line in every movie – just to show they’re human.

The answer to the question is not whether Hollywood hates America. The answer is Hollywood hates to lose money much, much, more.

Ask the average American and they are completely unaware that the CIA is forbidden by law to spy on Americans here in America. It might surprise most moviegoers that the CIA is also prevented from killing Americans in this country. But to Hollywood, those strictures don’t apply and they have the CIA murdering more Americans than Osama Bin Laden.

Why? Because it sells. It feeds the popular perception of the CIA as a bunch of cowboys who have nothing better to do with their time than kill you if you threaten to expose one of their nefarious plots by taking the story to the newspapers. Chances are that the New York Times or Washington Post would have already published every detail of those plots in real life but that doesn’t seem to count for much in Hollywood.

About the only films I can think of that have a positive portrayal of our intel agencies are those based on books by Tom Clancy; honorable men doing an honorable job of protecting the country. But those Clancy films are certainly the exception to the rule.

Then there are the films that portray an intel agency so secret, so evil, that no one knows about them. And they will kill to keep that secret. Usually, the more improbable the film’s premise, the more powerful this super secret organization is.

I’ll leave it to some of the intel experts who comment here (Andy? Dale?), but I find it highly implausible that such organizations exist in real life. Rogue elements of one agency or another I can believe. We’ve seen them in the news. But whole agencies not on the books? To my mind, its laughable.

Clearly, Hollywood has a grudge against the CIA. But does that make them anti-American? As I said, if Hollywood could make a lot of money with a picture that features conservatives as heroes and businessmen as the good guys, they would do it in a heartbeat. There is no red or blue in Tinseltown, only green. And this singular fact seems to escape Mr. O’Reilly who seems concerned that moviegoers in Pakistan will get the wrong idea about the CIA.

If they’re stupid enough to believe any old thing about the CIA, the flip side of that coin is that they would stay away from a film with a positive portrayal of our intel agencies in droves. It doesn’t fit their worldview ergo, it doesn’t exist. Same holds true for the more “sophisticated” audiences in Europe.

Hollywood has been making money for a very long time and they’re very good at it. They anticipate trends and movement in the electorate better than politicians. O’Reilly believes they should stop all that and simply make good old fashioned propaganda films as they did in World War II or at least ones that have a pro-American story and characters.

He and I would go so a film like that. But how many others? The director of the new Bourne film, Paul Greengrass, is also the director of United 93, the best movie about 9/11 to date and which portrayed those ordinary American heroes on Flight 93 in a positive and uplifting light. But Greengrass’s searing film experience made only $30 million at the box office. In these days where blockbusters rule Hollywood, that kind of box office doesn’t generate any excitement at all.

It’s not bias, Bill. It’s the money. It’s all about the money. These are people who would sell their grandmothers for money. Selling out their political principles would be nothing. For that reason, you know that if they believed that Bill’s kind of movie would be a blockbuster, they’d be rushing the projects into the theater as fast as possible.

Instead, we have bad guys who in real life are good guys. Par for the course in a place that for the last 40 years or so has had an enemy identification problem.

PJ Media engaged my services this morning to write about Karl Rove’s impending resignation. You can find it here.

A sample:

But why the hate directed toward Karl Rove by the left? Rove may be the toughest political operative produced by either major party in quite a while. He was a combination hatchet man and back alley brawler. I disagree with those who believe he politicized the War on Terror. Certainly he didn’t hesitate to exploit the political advantages presented by the domestic obsession with security following 9/11. But there is a fine line between creating fear and using it for political purposes.

Rove did not create the threats we face. But he never hesitated to remind people of the differences between how the Democrats wanted to fight the War on Terror and how Republicans were managing the threats we face. I challenge any Democrat to say with a straight face that a president from their party would have acted any differently as far as exploiting the philosophical and political differences between the parties on the war. Terrorism is too easy an issue to hit a home run with the public. And like a batter who gets thrown a hanging curve ball, the temptation to swing and knock one out of the park is just too great. If the next president is a Democrat, watch for many of the same charges hurled by the left against Bush about politicizing the War on Terror to be echoed by the right. It probably can’t be helped in this age of polarized, partisan politics – something Rove rarely if ever tried to address in a positive way.

Mitt Romney spent about $660 per voter to win the Ames Straw Poll held yesterday on the campus of Iowa State University. And that might be low balling the amount. Rudy Giuliana said he didn’t want to spend the $3 million it would take to be competitive at the event which means Mitt spent at least that much and probably much more. The long and short of it is that Romney could not afford anything less than a big win in Ames and he got it.

Let’s hope Mitt can make some economies between now and election day (if he gets the nomination). Spending $600 bucks a voter might not be too bad for a straw poll but when you multiply it by the 60 million votes that Bush got in 2004, you’re talking about spending an amount equal to the national debt of most countries on earth.

Romney had the most to lose at this straw poll. The question being asked today is does his victory matter? And does the non-participation of Giuliani, McCain, and Thompson hurt their chances when it will count next January?

The answer to both questions is not much. The most recent polls have Romney ahead by 10 points in Iowa. If he can maintain or expand that lead for another 2 or 3 months, look for Giuiani and McCain to pull out of Iowa to concentrate on later primaries. In the game of expectations – which is what the Iowa caucuses are all about – leaving the field to Romney will blunt some of the momentum he would ordinarily get coming out of the Hawkeye state. In fact, it may put pressure on Romney to “run up the score” in Iowa as anything less than a big win without the presence of the other frontrunners will not give him any momentum at all.

Finishing second in the straw poll was Mike Huckawho…or is it Huckawhat. I’ve said it before and I will say it again. If the American people elect a man named Huckabee president, I will move to Australia. Or maybe Montana.

The former Arkansas governor benefited from the absence of 3 of the top 4 candidates, including Fred Thompson who garnered 200 votes without even showing his face in Iowa. The former Tennessee Senator plans on visiting the state this week but it is unclear if he will spend his limited funds in mounting a challenge to Romney.

Finishing 3rd was Senator Sam Brownback, darling of the social conservatives, who closed fast the last two weeks by mounting a negative telephone campaign against Romney, accusing the former Massachusetts governor of switching his position on abortion.

Big surprise since this is where both Romney and Giuliani are most vulnerable; not their positions on abortion but the fact that they’ve changed their minds about the issue. One can just see Hillary and James Carville salivating over running against either one of those flip floppers.

Perhaps the least newsworthy item to come out of the straw poll was the probability of Tommy Thompson withdrawing from the race. Most Americans didn’t even know he was running, don’t know who he is, and could care less. That just about sums up my feelings on the matter as well.

So Romney in a walk with Huckathing crowing that he’s the shocker of the day and Tommy Thompson crying in his beer over what might have been (What might have been if his name was Kennedy and he had a gazillion dollars.)

And many of us could really care less. I don’t think it shows much of anything to hire a couple of hundred buses to get people who may or may not be your supporters to a straw vote. Getting them to caucus sites in the dead of winter will be the real trick. And Romney appears to have the organization, the money, and the strength to carry that off as well.

My latest sports column is up at Pajamas Media. It’s about the dog days of summer and the players who toil away in the heat and humidity:

These are the dog days of summer, the period 20 days before and 20 days after the dog star Sirius and the sun are in conjunction, according to the ancients. That may be. But here in the Midwest, we’ve always seen the dog days as a time that only a dog could love. Life draining, oppressive heat, sauna-like humidity and the phenomena of the late afternoon thunderstorm that appears regularly, coming out of nowhere and disappears almost as quickly, leaving behind those jaw dropping, horizon to horizon rainbows that appear so close at times that you can almost hear the laughing Leprechaun guarding his pot of gold.

In the world of sports, the dog days mean toiling away, pushing oneself physically to perform even while common sense and the thermometer tell you to sit back and take it easy. For professional baseball players, it is the period after the All Star game and before the pennant races heat up in September when going out day after day in the heat and humidity takes not only a physical toll but makes the player pay a psychic cost as well. The mental stress, the little aches and pains all players experience during the course of a season that challenge their physical stamina, and the inexorable grind of a 162 game schedule all combine to make the dog days a test of professionalism and character.

Army Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute is the Czar of all the Wars here in the United States. You can be forgiven if you’ve never heard of him or from him. He is the most invisible of the President’s national security team.

His official title is “Assistant to the President and Deputy National Security Advisor for Iraq and Afghanistan.” You can see why with a handle like that, they decided to christen him “The War Czar.” But the kicker is in a description of his responsibilities:

In the newly created position, Lute will coordinate often disjointed military and civilian operations and manage the Washington side of the same troop increase he resisted before Bush announced the plan in January. Bush hopes an empowered aide working in the White House and answering directly to him will be able to cut through bureaucracy that has hindered efforts in Iraq.

The selection capped a difficult recruitment process for the White House, as its initial candidates rejected the job. At least five retired four-star generals approached by the White House or intermediaries refused to be considered. Lute, a three-star general now serving as chief operations officer on the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in effect will jump over many superiors as he moves to the West Wing and assumes authority to deal directly with Cabinet secretaries and top commanders.

I never knew that it was “bureaucracy” that was hindering our war effort in Iraq. Is that shorthand for stupidity? Incompetence? Lack of planning? Myopia? Ideology supplanting military common sense?

Who would’ve known?

And the fact that 5 retired generals with nothing better to do decided to turn the job down does not give me a lot of confidence in the abilities of General Lute, although I’m sure he’s a competent enough fellow. He certainly can’t do anything to make things worse in Iraq. No one could.

Unable to cause too much mischief overseas, General Lute decided to make some headlines here at home.

Frequent tours for U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan have stressed the all-volunteer force and made it worth considering a return to a military draft, President Bush’s new war adviser said Friday.

“I think it makes sense to certainly consider it,” Army Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute said in an interview with National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered.”

“And I can tell you, this has always been an option on the table. But ultimately, this is a policy matter between meeting the demands for the nation’s security by one means or another,” said Lute, who is sometimes referred to as the “Iraq war czar.” It was his first interview since he was confirmed by the Senate in June.

President Nixon abolished the draft in 1973. Restoring it, Lute said, would be a “major policy shift” and Bush has made it clear that he doesn’t think it’s necessary.

“The president’s position is that the all-volunteer military meets the needs of the country and there is no discussion of a draft. Gen. Lute made that point as well,” National Security Council spokesman Gordon Johndroe said.

In the interview, Lute also said that “Today, the current means of the all-volunteer force is serving us exceptionally well.”

Obviously, anyone with half a brain (and judging by the number of lefty sites that have picked up on these comments, we can exclude them) knows full well that there is a better chance of a George Bush pictorial in Playgirl Magazine than there is for a draft. It isn’t going to happen in this war or any other war America will ever fight. For better or worse, our military will remain all volunteer, all the time. If Viet Nam taught us anything about domestic politics, it is that there will always be a sizable, vocal segment of young people who will refuse to be drafted for a variety of reasons, not always because they would refuse to defend America or her interests. This is the lay of the political landscape and I doubt even an invasion by a foreign power or powers would change it.

As for those with half a brain (or less), leave it to Kos himself to bring up the chickenhawk argument:

There’s only so much that war supporters are willing to do in their might and heroic struggle against Islamofacism. For example, they’re willing to endlessly talk macho. But they’re not willing to, you know, actually wear combat boots.

This clash of civilizations is only the Most Important Struggle Of Our Time as long as they don’t actually have to do anything about it. That’s for the poor shlubs who signed up to deal with.

So does Kos support a draft? In order to make his chickenhawk smear stick, he has to. He supports the idea of sending war supporters to Iraq so I guess he’s for a draft to accomplish that, right?

Watch the 26%ers, who support the occupation of Iraq from afar by buying car stickers, jump to agree with Bush and suggest Lute was a bad choice…while quietly checking out entry requirements for Canada.

As for us lefties? We’ll just smugly point out that a draft wouldn’t need even passing consideration if Bush hadn’t wasted all that time and all those resources, as well as exhausting the Army, by invading Iraq instead of concentrating on Afghanistan.

But we should “consider” a draft, right Cernig? Since you don’t come out against it, you must be for it.

Actually, a draft might be just what this country needs to finally – finally get these lazy ass lefties off their fat behinds and get them in the streets so that they can put something on the line to end this war besides their hurt feelings when righty bloggers insult them. Their fathers and mothers (or older brothers and sisters) stopped a much larger war that was much more popular than the Iraq conflict (support for the Viet Nam war never fell below 50%). And they did it in a nation much less tolerant of dissent

I have made the point several times that it is ridiculous for the left to castigate Iraq war supporters for not putting their money where their mouths are when they themselves sit safely behind their monitors, allowing the war to go on. This is a war they claim to hate with a passion. A war that is ruining the country. A war that is leading to dictatorship. A war that is destroying our standing in the world. A war for oil or to satisfy the bloodlust of the President and Vice President. An evil, despicable, unnecessary, unjust, war started by evil, despicable men, right?

Holy Jesus! And the best you can do is sit in your parent’s basement writing not very clever slop about “chickenhawks?” Get up off your ample behinds and CONFRONT the “evil” if that is what you believe. How much courage does it take to talk a good game when you have the example of the Berrigans, David Sloane Coffin, Martin Luther King, and thousands like them who went to jail in order to stop a war.

Your ideological ancestors were getting clubbed over the head or hauled off to jail 35 years ago. But the best these anti-war “heroes” can do today is stay safely hunched over their keyboards, writing idiotic, exaggerated, diatribes against a president they hate while engaging in childish name calling. It is truly pathetic. And speaking as someone who marched against the Viet Nam War many times, getting a whiff of tear gas on more than one occasion (I was too much of a coward to get myself arrested back then), you make me sick.

General Lute is right that the military is near the breaking point. God knows our soldiers have given their all and then some and have been ill-served by both their civilian and military commanders. But there will not be a draft. And my advice to Lute is that he go back to his bureaucratic cubbyhole in the basement of the White House and keep his mouth shut.

Bill Ardolino of INDC Journal is planning on going to back to Iraq later this month to assess the surge and report in advance of General Petreaus and Ambassador Crocker’s appearance before Congress.

He will be embedded courtesy of Bill Roggio’s Public Multimedia and needs our help to to get there.

In case you are unfamiliar with Bill’s excellent work, follow the links in this post and then make a donation to support on line media efforts to tell the story in Iraq.