I’ll confess to not being an expert about much of anything. And being a “generalist” has many, many drawbacks when trying to write coherently about the War in Iraq. I’ve never served in the military so I can’t speak to what our soldiers are enduring on the ground as they try to stamp out what appears to be a never ending insurgency that continues to take its toll in American lives and treasure. I was never much of a “policy wonk” so it’s difficult for me to write about how the White House and Pentagon are formulating and carrying out our policy there.

All I can do is read. So for 10-12 hours a day I sit in front of my computer as the world tries to squeeze itself through my little 17” monitor and enlighten me. I try to cram as much information and opinion as I can on a wide variety of issues that interest me. But what takes up most of my day is reading about the war.

I don’t write about Iraq as much as I used to because frankly, I’ve been pretty confused. I’ve contented myself with writing about the fight here at home between right and left believing that it’s vitally necessary to counter what Michelle Malkin so aptly describes as “Bush Derangement Syndrome,” seeing in that disease a real danger to both our continuing effort in Iraq and the poisoning of political discourse that makes governing here at home so much the harder.

I think what I am good at is detecting and recognizing trends. It’s quite simple, really. Flood your mind with enough information and the most fantastic computer ever built – the human brain – does the rest. As long as you arm yourself with a good enough bias detector (and B.S. detector) there really is nothing to it. And the trend I’ve been most concerned with lately has a dual track; the progress the anti-war left is making in playing to the war weariness of the American people and the situation on the ground in Iraq that is not improving and, in some ways, is worsening.

I’ve taken the President to task before on this site for not putting the war front and center on his agenda. In fact, the problem the President now has is if he tries to refocus the American people’s attention on Iraq and why we are there, he can rightfully be accused of playing politics with the issue. His approval rating on Iraq is going down because he has abandoned the issue to his political and ideological opponents. You can have administration spokesmen giving speeches all over the country and Congressional Republicans talking about the war until they’‘re blue in the face. But no one can grab the attention of the American people like a President speaking about war. The people are anxious and not a little confused. With the left wing in full cry against the war and the President personally along with continuing and in some respects escalating violence in Iraq, the people need to hear their President constantly, patiently, and doggedly explain why we are there, what losing the war would mean, and defining the rough parameters of victory.

It’s not that the American people don’t know these things already. It’s that they need to hear it again and again to buttress their faith against the faithless and steel their resolve against those whose major domestic concern is a humiliation of the President personally and the United States in general.

The left’s effectiveness in instilling war weariness in the public is the result of a constant drumbeat day after day of saying exactly the same thing; the President lied about WMD in Iraq. From this, all other critiques of the war resonate because, according to polls, people are now convinced this is so. Amplified as it is by a sympathetic media, the left’s message is falling on fertile ground because of the President’s unwillingness to take his critics head on, unashamed and without apology.

Once the President’s honesty about the reasons for going to war is successfully questioned, it’s simply a matter of people picking and choosing what other criticisms of the war they wish to believe. Is this a war for oil? For Haliburton? For Israel? To “finish the work” of his father? Take your pick. Once the President’s credibility is destroyed, anything is possible.

Mark Noonan points out the consequences of the President losing his credibility:

For the longest time I didn’t care much about the conspiracy theorists – putting them down as harmless nuts. This was a mistake on my part: a lie is a lie, and all lies are bad. We’ve become used to lies here in the United States – indeed, in a lot of cases a lie is much more easily believed than the truth. As it relates to our War on Terrorism, there is a built-in ability to believe a story about the President lying to get us into Iraq. We should have resolutely fought against the conspiracy theory lies right from the beginning, rather than allow them to become woven into the fabric of our society.

The price we are paying for allowing lies to gain currency is being paid in blood – the blood of our soldiers, as well as the blood of innocent non-combatants. You see, the people who believe conspiracy theories about the war might seem like laughable lunatics to most of us, but to our enemies they seem rational beings who, because of MSM puff-pieces on them, represent the average American – and in representing the average American, they play up to enemy propaganda about us. Unlike our domestic leftists, our Islamist enemies are not at all shy about stating their conspiracy theories in public – the theory that Mossad carried out 9/11 is underground in the United States, but it is front page news in the Arab world…to have paranoid theories “confirmed” by the statements of Americans protesting against President Bush and the war is like water in the desert to terrorists in Anbar province…and their masters in Damascus and Tehran.

This is why the Cindy Sheehan campaign is starting to pay dividends for the left. Contained in her “plea” for the President to “explain” why her son died is the accusation that he lied in order to start a war. In fact, the Sheehan drama is a two ring circus; one ring is the grieving mother seeking answers to her questions about why her son had to die. The other ring is the fiery, anti-war activist that accuses the President of doing the bidding of Israel and the oil companies. The first ring speaks to the fairness and compassion of the American people. The second ring feeds their doubts about the President’s motives.

I still think Mrs. Sheehan will self-destruct – especially now that apparently every loon who wants to get his face on TV is descending on Crawford. This will turn the “Cindy Sheehan show” into something similar to what happened to the right during the Terri Schiavo tragedy. The extremists will take center stage and the American people will turn away in droves.

This won’t solve the President’s political problem of re-invigorating the war effort here at home. For that, he could use some help with good news about Iraq both from a military and political standpoint. At the moment, neither seems likely.

For the last several months, the analysis I’ve read from people whose opinion is generally respected by both the left and the right has slowly been changing from cautious optimism to growing alarm over several trends in Iraq. They include:

1. An insurgency that is getting more sophisticated in their tactics and more deadly in their ability to inflict casualties. This sophistication includes being able to mount attacks aimed at causing political damage to the new government as well as escalating sectarian tensions.

2. A growing dismay at the lack of concrete progress in the training of the Iraqi army.

3. A deepening worry over sectarian militias that call to mind Lebanon’s fractious past.

4. The real possibility that despite the best efforts of government and religious leaders, civil war is growing more likely.

5. The political struggle over the form and content of the Iraqi Constitution that now appears will result in a delay in approving the document.

6. The battle at home over troop withdrawal which will test both the unity of the Administration as well as the President’s ability to resist the impulse to leave too soon.

Greg Djerjian on many of these trends I outlined above:

But to win this thing we need to be decimating the enemy—not disrupting him—with overwhelming force. And we simply don’t have that amount of force in theater. So we are doing the best we can with the resources at hand (do we really need all those troops in Germany, by the way?), scraping by really, and hoping against hope that the political process will improve and help us turn some corner in the not too distant future.

But hope isn’t a strategy, and to all those (and there are more and more) ready to give up (or fakely declare victory in that we weren’t strictly ‘defeated’ on the battlefield) and say to hell if Iraq degenerates into civil war, we gave it our best shot—let me be clear. An Iraq mired in large-scale sectarian conflict, let alone full-blown civil war, would be a cluster-f*&k of epic proportions. Why? Because it would mean a failed or failing state smack in the center of the Middle East. We would have created an embittered Sunni para-state, a terror haven really, roiling and destabilizing the region (such an unstable state of affairs would help foster radicalization of Shi’a behavior also, of course, in ways not helpful to the U.S. national interest).

Iran, Turkey, Syria and even Saudi Arabia and Jordan would have direct interests implicated too, of course. Need I sketch this out more? (Hint: Borders wouldn’t be treated with any sanctity by the neighbors, friends). The point is, leaving Iraq to fend for itself without a viable, stable polity in place would be a disaster—for the thousands and thousands (coalition and Iraqi alike) who will have died in vain, for the region, for our national prestige, for the war on terror generally.

Does the President have the political courage not to mention the political skills necessary to dramatically increase troop strength in Iraq? What kind of resistance would he get from the military? Would an increase in troop strength only serve to heighten sectarian tensions, feed the insurgency, depress the Iraqi armed forces, and embitter the average Iraqi citizen? Or has the military situation made all those concerns ancillary to the need to establish some semblance of order so that an elected Iraqi government can function?

This is why I think we’re in the biggest crisis of the war. We’re at a crossroads. And the decisions taken over the next few months by the President will determine whether the war is a success or failure. What makes me a little bitter is that this is taking place as the President seeks to put the war to the side as he pursues domestic concerns. The war may be a political downer for the White House. But we’ve got 138,000 men and women in Iraq who don’t give a fig about politics. They only want to get the job done and come home. And if getting the job done means increasing troop strength in the sort term then so be it.

The long and short of it is we need the President to do his job. I find it hard to imagine that FDR or Lincoln could have endured as political leaders if they had sought to sweep the war they were waging under the rug. If the President’s hope is that the American people will forget about the war, someone should dash that hope for him immediately. His opponents and the press won’t let that happen. If that ’s the case then the President has a choice; he can either treat the war with the seriousness and focus that it deserves or he can continue on as he is now.

It’s no longer a question of whether or not he should be more active in dealing with the war. It’s a question only of whether he will attempt to take control of events and guide the country to a far distant shore where Iraq is a peaceful, democratic state or whether events will instead control him. If it’s the latter, we will have no chance of succeeding. The former, we wing big.

There really is no other choice.

It’s a fascinating day here in blogland. We have dueling blogswarms between the left and right, each trying to push a story into prominence in the mainstream media.

On the left, there’s the Cindy Sheehan story and what’s rapidly becoming something known as “Camp Casey.” The lefties believe that the image of a mother who has lost her son in Iraq camped out in front of the President’s ranch in Crawford, Texas begging for an audience (her 2nd) with George Bush is somehow a tipping point in the Iraq War.

On the right, there’s a story that’s getting curiouser and curiouser about a top secret Pentagon intelligence team called Able Danger whose data mining operation apparently uncovered the al Qaeda terror cell of Mohammed Atta a full year before 9/11. This fact, known to the 9/11 Commission staff at least 10 months prior to the issuance of their final report, was inexplicably not included in the 9/11 narrative. Nobody knows why and as I write this, Commission staff – the very same staff who failed to include the information in the first place – is over at the National Archives trying to find out why they were too stupid or too partisan to report it.

For sheer volume, the left wins in a walk. As of 3:00 PM central time, there were 4370 posts on Cindy Sheehan while only 468 posts were on Able Danger. However, most of those posts on Sheehan were written before this last Tuesday when the Able Danger story hit the fan. And many, many more righty bloggers are posting about Cindy Sheehan than lefty bloggers are posting about Able Danger.

In fact, while the left has gone off the deep end with the Sheehan story, calling the disturbed woman the “Rosa Parks” of the anti-war movement and other equally over the top encomiums, the counter reaction from the right has been equally vigorous, albeit with as much hyperbolic rhetoric in opposition to Mrs. Sheehan as can be found in support of her.

By contrast, the reaction on the left to the Able Danger story has been muted and dismissive. None of the top left blogs are even posting on it. Then again, they aren’t doing much Cindy Sheehan coverage either. Why do you suppose that is?

Mrs. Sheehan comes off pretty well in 15-30 second snippetts. But if you sit her down in a chair at CNN or Fox or read an interview with her in a newspaper what emerges is a shrill kook whose anti-semitic rants against Israel and fantastic conspiracy theories involving Bush, the oil companies, and American “colonies” in the middle east mark her as someone the sane left is keeping at arms left. While both Daily Kos and Democratic Underground are wall to wall Sheehan, Josh Marshall, TPM Cafe, Wonkette, and Jerelyn Merritt have all kept their distance from the story. Wonkette even has a plea for sanity:

Is that what the debate has come to? Which side can corral the saddest crop of widows, parents, and orphans? Call it a harms race. Better: an ache-off. We hope the grimly absurd image of two competing camps of mourners illustrates why it is we’ve been somewhat reluctant to weigh in on Sheehan’s cause: Grief can pull a person in any direction, and whatever “moral authority” it imbues, we can’t claim that Sheehan has it and those mothers who still support the war don’t. The Bush administration knows all about exploiting tragedy for its own causes, including re-election. Whatever arguments there are against the war in Iraq, let’s not make “I have more despairing mothers on my side” one of them. The only way to win a grief contest is for more people to die.

Cindy Sheehan is a ticking media time bomb waiting to go off. I find it more than likely that she will eventually say something so grotesque, so outrageous, so off the wall, as to make her damaged goods. At which point of course, the left will abandon her.

That said, there is real danger on the right that instead of criticizing the message (and the people pushing the grieving mother forward) there will be a “piling on” aspect to criticism of Sheehan herself that will generate more sympathy for her. Some of the rhetoric I’ve seen directed against this poor woman has been despicable. This has certainly not been the finest hour for many righty bloggers out there (and you know who you are).

In the meantime, the left has another problem with potential revelations in the Able Danger story. One thing you might notice today is that just about everyone is going back in time examining posts they did last year on the 9/11 Commission. Several interesting tidbits have come to light including some tantalizing clues about what exactly Sandy Berger was stuffing in his socks at the National Archives last year. Did the Clinton Administration know about Able Danger and have Berger purloin documents in order to sanitize the record? A skeptic would want more proof but some timelines I’ve seen out there are compelling. Not proof – but enough questions raised that someone with subpoena power should be looking into the entire matter.

The problem for the left with the Able Danger story is that it may, in fact, reveal connections that destroy the national narrative on 9/11 put forth by the Commission. A re-examination of the record could reveal other tidbits – not the least of which is this eye opener the Captain found today about Atta’s Hamburg cell and a busted Iraqi Intelligence ring. The left’s entire anti-war rationale – that Saddam was not involved in 9/11 – may, in fact get a second hearing. And wouldn’t that cut the anti-war crowd off at the knees if any significant changes are forced upon the Commission.

The power of this new media will be on display over the next few weeks. Will the Sheehan story become more compelling as the hard left makes pilgrimages to Crawford to spout their conspiracy theories and preen for the cameras? Or will new revelations about what the 9/11 Commission knew and when they knew it regarding Mohammed Atta push its way to the forefront of coverage in the MSM and put pressure on Congress to investigate what John Podheretz has termed “the story of the summer” in Washington, D.C?

UPDATE

What better place for a post on blogswarms than the blog trackback party at James Joyner’s Outside the Beltway!

Watching Cindy Sheehan as she carries on outside of the President’s ranch in Crawford, Texas I’ve been struck by her apparent heartfelt sincerity. She really does believe that the President of the United States is personally responsible for the death of her son, Casey. She really does believe that the War in Iraq is a gigantic conspiracy involving Israel, the oil companies, and big business. This is not a bid for publicity on her part, at least not consciously. I believe that she thinks that the best way to honor her son’s memory is to have the United States cut and run in Iraq. And I believe that she’s sincere when she says that she wants to talk to the President and get an “explanation” as to why her son had to die.

Cindy Sheehan is in the grip of some pretty powerful emotions. Grief and anger can play very strange tricks on the mind. I can remember my mother blaming the government for the death of my father in 1981 because of exposure to radiation while he was serving in the army in occupied Japan. She would rail constantly against the government for killing her husband, for knowingly sending him to his death. There was no reasoning with her or talking to her about alternative reasons for the cancer that killed him. So, I just let her go on and on about it, hoping that eventually the grief and hurt would subside and she could move on.

She never really did. In the midst of her grief, Alzheimers disease began its slow, insidious work and I don’t know if she ever really came to terms with her loss.

I think Cindy Sheehan is going through something similar now. Her pain has become such a constant companion that it seems natural, a part of her life. She can’t imagine living without it. In short, in order to feel good, she has to feel bad. Her grief is like a comfortable old blanket that she wraps around herself in order to insulate her from the very scary prospect of moving on in life without her son.

This is why any Gold Star mother deserves our pity and yes, our respect. Losing a child under the circumstances of war is especially hard. And her questions about the government’s plans for the war’s aftermath are legitimate, as pertinent as questions mothers in World War II who lost a son at Anzio or the Battle of Hurtgen Forest, or Kasserine Pass may have asked. Those battles were American blunders that resulted in thousands of needless deaths.

Mothers ask these questions in every war. What makes Mrs. Sheehan’s situation unique is that she has chosen to make her ordeal a public spectacle. She has taken the personal and made it political. And she has made common cause with those whose actions in support of the terrorists in Iraq may have, in fact, assisted in the death of her son.

I’m not talking about the rational anti-war left whose critiques of Administration policy are harsh but do not descend into the kind of exaggerated, conspiratorial hyperbole that Mrs. Sheehan and the crazy left have adopted. The gimlet-eyed anti-Americans who have captured her cause and made it their own know exactly what they’re doing and where they want to go. They want to piggyback their agenda on Mrs. Sheehan’s grief and ride her until the media tires of the spectacle and moves on to something else.

Michelle Malkin calls them “grief pimps.” Somewhat vulgar, but apt. They are without principals and without honor. To try and cash in politically on someone who so obviously is suffering the kind of denial Mrs. Sheehan is going through defies belief. The simple, common decencies normal people take for granted do not apply because to them, the personal is political. This is the foundation of modern leftist ideology. It has brought us multiculturalism, identity politics, and a host of irrational idiocies that threaten to destroy our civilization. What R. Emmett Tyrell has called liberalisms “riot of conceits” now allows for the exploitation of grief. One may ask, well why not? The left has managed to exploit everything else, why not human misery?

There’s an extraordinary picture of National Security Adviser Steve Hadley sitting at the feet of Mrs. Sheehan a few days ago talking to her and listening to what she has to say. Her subsequent recollection of the meeting reveals what happens to mind and memory when grief and anger take over:

Joe Hagin [WH Deputy Chief of Staff] told me that he goes with the president when he meets with families, and that George Bush really cares about the soldiers and the families, and I said, “Don’t even tell me that! Because I met with him before, and that man doesn’t even have an ounce of compassion in his body.” And he looked really surprised. Don’t you think that’s something they would have known about before they had this little tete-a-tete with me yesterday

Contrast what she said there with this snippett from her meeting with the President in June of last year:

THE REPORTER of Vacaville, CA published an account of Cindy Sheehan’s visit with the president at Fort Lewis near Seattle on June 24, 2004:

“’I now know he’s sincere about wanting freedom for the Iraqis,’ Cindy said after their meeting. ‘I know he’s sorry and feels some pain for our loss. And I know he’s a man of faith.’

“The meeting didn’t last long, but in their time with Bush, Cindy spoke about Casey and asked the president to make her son’s sacrifice count for something. They also spoke of their faith.

“The trip had one benefit that none of the Sheehans expected.

“For a moment, life returned to the way it was before Casey died. They laughed, joked and bickered playfully as they briefly toured Seattle.

For the first time in 11 weeks, they felt whole again.

“’That was the gift the president gave us, the gift of happiness, of being together,’ Cindy said.”

I have no doubt that Cindy Sheehan remembers her meeting with the President the way she described it two days ago on Air America. She’s not lying. She has replayed that meeting over and over in her mind and where she first thought the President showed compassion, she now sees flippancy. She re-runs every word, every gesture of the President’s and each time she does, she becomes more convinced that the President is an unfeeling, uncaring monster. The two descriptions may not sound the same, but they relfect what she actually felt back then as well as the way she feels now.

The fact that this has now caused a split in her family is actually feeding the pain she needs to go on. Being encouraged by the left to carry a cross, her martyrdom would be complete if her family abandoned her. And this apparently is what she wants.

I doubt whether Mrs. Sheehan will ever retreat from the precipace that has opened beneath her feet. It remains to be seen whether her friends on the left will push her over the edge or simply abandon her and move on. Either way she’s a lost soul. For that reason, I can’t be too harsh on her. I can only pity her as she wallows in her pain and grief and is exploited by people who aren’t fit to clean her dead son’s army boots.