Kautzman’s AP GO PO Blog

James P. Pinkerton
Newsday
November 25, 2007

Clausewitz is the name and war is my game. You’ll forgive a little levity from a dead Prussian, won’t you?

I, Carl von Clausewitz, wrote the book on war. It’s called “Vom Kriege” (”On War”), and I’m proud to say it’s been required reading at military academies for two centuries.

So when Herr Pinkerton told me he was writing a column about American military strategy in the Middle East, I told him to take the day off.

Ironically, my biggest single point about war was actually a point about peace: winning the peace. As I wrote, “War is a continuation of politics by other means.” That is, if Country A can’t get Country B to do what it wants through diplomacy, well, then, Country A might have to attack. War may or may not be just or glorious; that’s not my concern. I am practical-minded, albeit maybe a little cold-blooded.

So let’s think practically about your various wars, the ones America is fighting, or might be fighting – even the one it’s winning, even if most Americans don’t know about it.

Let’s start with Iraq. A recent front-page headline from the Washington Post – I keep up! – was revealing for its substandard Clausewitzian thinking: “Iraqis Wasting an Opportunity, U.S. Officers Say.” The gist of the story, reflecting the Pentagon’s “spin,” was that the American military had prevailed on the Iraq battlefield, but that squabbling Iraqi politicians, along with incompetent State Department diplomats, were squandering the victory.

Such a newspaper story is good for blame-shifting, but it’s not good for actual war-winning. Smart strategists know – because they read it in my book – that politics and war are a continuum. They are not separate. If you win a war and then lose the politics, well, you have lost the war.

If you don’t believe me, ask the Israelis. They’ve won all their fights against the Arabs, but they haven’t won the politics of the Middle East. And that’s why Israel is still at great risk. This coming week, the Americans are summoning the Israelis to “peace talks” in your town of Annapolis, Md., with foes that don’t really want peace. Why is the Bush administration doing this? Because the Arabs that America is relying on for help in Iraq – and against Iran – have insisted that the United States “do something” about Israel. All of which is a reminder that your country hasn’t won much in Iraq, to say nothing of Iran.

From your point of view, it’s great that the Americans and Israelis can defeat the Arabs. But until you have altered Arab/Muslim political thinking – by breaking or otherwise changing their political will – then peace conferences are mere mirage-castles in the air.

As for Afghanistan and Pakistan, let’s just say this: America sends lots of lawyers, guns and money, but you don’t seem to have true influence on the destiny of 200 million Muslims – including Osama bin Laden, lurking there somewhere.

But it’s not all bleak for America in the region. A bright spot is Sudan, which has long been a haven for Islamic radicalism and terrorism. Yes, I’ll admit, in the western province of Darfur, Muslims are massacring Muslims.

But in the southern part, the Christians have achieved many of their political objectives. How? By fighting! Give war a chance: It works sometimes.

In fact, the Christians – under the charismatic leadership of Salva Kiir, in Washington recently meeting with President Bush at the White House – are inching toward independence from the Khartoum regime.

Breaking up a hostile Muslim country? Carving out a new nation? Liberating millions of African Christians, along with substantial oil deposits, to seek new alignment with the West?

That’s a full politico-military victory, in the Clausewitzian sense, if you can keep it. You Americans should savor that success and, more to the point, study it.

David Broder
Washington Post
November 25, 2007

WASHINGTON – Barack Obama’s rise in the top tier of the Democratic presidential race has been fueled by the voters’ belief that he is a candid, forthright politician. ” ‘Hard truths’ could be the slogan for the restarted Obama campaign,” says the current New Yorker magazine, in a laudatory article. In the Washington Post’s poll last week of Iowa caucus voters, Obama’s biggest lead over Hillary Clinton, John Edwards and Bill Richardson came when voters were rating candidates as honest and trustworthy.

And now comes Shelby Steele, the Hoover Institution scholar and author of “The Content of Our Character,” with a book-length essay arguing that Obama’s public stance is essentially synthetic.

In “A Bound Man,” Steele argues that Obama has adopted “a mask” familiar to other African Americans, designed to appease white America’s fear of being thought racist by offering them the opportunity to embrace a nonthreatening black.

Steele writes that “the Sixties stigmatized white Americans with the racial sins of the past – with the bigotry and hypocrisy that countenanced slavery, segregation and white supremacy. Now, to win back moral authority, whites – and especially American institutions – must prove the negative: that they are not racist. In other words, white America has become a keen market for racial innocence.”

Steele likens Obama’s success to the fame and fortune won by Oprah Winfrey, Bill Cosby, Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods. But the earliest of the crossover heroes he calls “Iconic Negroes” was Sidney Poitier.

And it reminded me that in his political biography of Obama, author David Mendell reported the reaction of a focus group of liberal, North Shore (Chicago area) female voters, middle-aged and elderly, when shown a videotape of Obama speaking in his 2004 Senate campaign. Asked who Obama reminded them of, the answer was “Sidney Poitier.” No wonder Hillary Clinton’s pollster, Mark Penn, is worried by the Post’s report that Obama has tied Clinton among female voters in Iowa.

But while all of the others mentioned by Steele were entertainers of one kind or another, Obama is the first to carry the “masking” technique of the “Iconic Negro” into the realm of politics.

Steele contrasts Obama with “challenger” types such as Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, whose appeal was strictly within the black community, and who were seen as threats to the Democratic establishment.

Steele, who shares with Obama the lineage of having a white mother and a black father, writes sympathetically of the cross-pressures that drove both sons to choose to live their lives as blacks while operating in largely white institutions.

“The problem here for Barack, of course, is that his racial identity commits him to a manipulation of the society he seeks to lead,” Steele writes. “To ‘be black,’ he has to exaggerate black victimization in America. … Worse, his identity will pressure him to see black difficulties – achievement gaps, high illegitimacy rates, high crime rates, family collapse, and so on – in the old framework of racial oppression.”

It strikes me as odd that Steele, who is famously outspoken as a critic of affirmative action and a proponent of “responsibility” for black men and black families, should argue that Obama will be silenced on these issues by his heritage and his ties to the South Side Chicago black community. Obama, he says, dare not deviate from the liberal Democratic line lest black voters turn on him.

As a white reporter, I am not sure I can judge this argument. But I consulted an old and close friend of Obama’s and this was her response:

It is true, as Steele says, that Obama approaches whites with the expectation of a “core of decency” that will give him a warm response. But he is not exploiting any racial guilt feelings. Indeed, he and his wife have both said they want people to see them whole, and not just the color of their skin.

Second, she noted that Obama has said repeatedly that while blacks face real issues of discrimination, they also have responsibility for their own lives. Parents must turn off the TV, he says, and read to their children. Fathers must take responsibility for the children they bring into the world. That is definitely part of his message.

As to whether that message will separate Obama from the black voters he needs, his friend made a point supported by the latest Pew research: The black community is really two societies now, with a middle class whose values are far closer to those of middle-class whites than to those of the black underclass.

Obama, whose constituency is skewed to the middle class, may reflect those values better than Shelby Steele thinks.

Long dismissed, he’s now among top GOP contenders

Presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee, right, campaigns with former pro wrestler Ric Flair outside Williams Brice Stadium before the Clemson-South Carolina football game Saturday in Columbia, S.C. Associated Press (Associated Press) Iowa poll Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee was in a virtual tie in a recent poll in Iowa tracking the popularity of Republican presidential contenders: Mitt Romney, 28 percent Mike Huckabee, 24 percent Fred Thompson, 15 percent Rudy Giuliani, 13 percent John McCain, 6 percent The ABC News/Washington Post telephone poll of 400 adults considered likely to participate in the caucuses was conducted Nov. 14-18. The poll had a margin of error of plus or minus 5 percentage points.

Michael D. Shear and Juliet Eilperin
Washington Post
November 25, 2007

DES MOINES, Iowa – For six months, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney has owned Iowa.

He spent millions on TV and unleashed his extended family to blanket the state. He survived a farm-town blitz by Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kan., and the late entrance of former Tennessee Sen. Fred Thompson into the Republican race. His money and organization bought him a convincing victory at the Ames presidential straw poll and a seemingly unshakable lead in the Iowa survey.

But Romney’s vision of quick, one-two victories here and in New Hampshire is crumbling, suddenly threatened by former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, a candidate who spent most of 2007 out of the spotlight and has struggled to raise money. Polls now show the pair in a virtual tie in Iowa, a development that not only threatens Romney’s carefully laid plans but could reshape the GOP nominating contest.

Huckabee has received glowing reviews for his debate performances, showing off his folksy charm and playing to conservatives. But despite his second-place showing in the straw poll this summer, his campaign didn’t take off until this month, when polls began to show him overtaking everyone but Romney in Iowa. Money started flowing in – $1 million online in less than one week, according to his campaign – and he started to catch the attention of both pundits and rivals.

“There is nothing like winning,” says Bob Vander Plaats, Huckabee’s Iowa chairman. “If we come in second, that’s a story. If we beat Romney, the whole universe just changed.”

Huckabee’s surge here has further scrambled a race that already defied easy prediction. Former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani has consistently led national polls testing the Republican field, drawing on his name recognition and his performance after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. But the GOP contest remains competitive in New Hampshire, wide open in South Carolina and now, Iowa is up for grabs.

Even Huckabee appears to have been caught unprepared for the sudden turn of events. His Iowa state director is in Costa Rica hunting snakes over the Thanksgiving weekend and won’t return to the state until Monday. On Friday afternoon, Huckabee’s Iowa headquarters at the corner of Locust and 6th in downtown Des Moines was locked and deserted.

“How much can you do on America’s number one shopping day?” Vander Plaats explained, saying the staff will gear up the office again on Monday.

With just a few weeks remaining before the caucuses, Huckabee is frantically trying to organize his supporters in the Hawkeye State. They include a network of evangelical Christians who like Huckabee’s pro-life, anti-gay marriage rhetoric, home-school activists who appreciate the work he did for their cause in Arkansas, gun-rights groups, and advocates of replacing the income tax with a national sales tax, an idea that Huckabee has championed.

His political enemies – no shortage of which have popped up in recent days – have gone on the offensive, accusing Huckabee of numerous tax hikes, ethics violations and an ill-advised pardon. The Club for Growth, a conservative anti-tax group in Washington, has all but turned themselves into an anti-Huckabee machine. The Eagle Forum’s Phyllis Schlafly charges that Huckabee “destroyed the conservative movement in Arkansas.”

An ordained Baptist minister with a Southern drawl, much of Huckabee’s newfound support comes from the state’s conservative Christians, many of whom lost their favorite candidate when Brownback dropped out of the race in October. Some estimates say evangelicals could make up as much as 40 percent of GOP caucus attendees.

“That is his base. You consolidate that base in a year when the turnout is going to be pretty low, that’s a pretty good base to have,” said one longtime Iowa Republican who asked to remain anonymous to talk frankly about the candidates. He said religious voters had been disappointed by Thompson’s campaign and the decision of former House Speaker Newt Gingrich of Georgia not to run this year. “Huckabee is kind of what’s left standing.”