Powerline News

All information for this post is taken from the Powerline blog. Actually they're the most current three posts on that site, as of the publication of this post.

This is boring political stuff, and clearly I'm pro-war and mostly Pro-Bush if you've read anything on this blog. I think this question goes to a deeper issue that is not new for the U.S. - how much should the US become involved in international security issues? That is one of the posts that has been brewing in my mind for some time now, and this is so cursory, but I really think that as a nation we will never get away from policing the whole world.

Sometimes it has gone well, and other times it hasn't. I think what is more telling are those times when we didn't get involved and the results for those countries and people were absolutely disastrous - Cambodia, Darfur, among others. I think mostly we have too much of a global economy to ever let the rest of the world go to crap. Plus, we can help. We are in a position of power, and I really think that as a nation, we want to do the right thing. There is a right way of doing things, and we really do have a pretty good idea of what that is. I'm tired of people taking the PC route of always declaring, well you can't force other people to adopt your views just because you think you're right. What about when you are right? I'm not going to pursue this line of thinking right now, just sit on that.

Anyway...what follows is some stuff about Bush and the war.

Here is an article about what will be some of President Bush's most notable accomplishments from Investor's Business Daily. Here are some excerpts:

In the eyes of members of both parties, George W. Bush seems to be the cause of everything from the recent GOP special election losses to a flagging economy to today's bad weather...

How about a dose of reality?

On the economy, there are indications the sun is coming out after a fairly mild economic storm. More data are showing a recession will be avoided, and it
looks like a new bull market in stocks began in March after a short and shallow bear.

The report earlier this month of 20,000 jobs lost in April was far better than had been expected, and unemployment remains low at 5%.

NABE "anticipates a significant pickup in the second half" with real GDP for 2009 projected to be 2.9%. It may not even classify this downturn as a recession at all.

For the resilience of this economy, we can thank the president. He pushed substantial tax cuts on income and investment through Congress, which were followed by four years of growth, generating over 8 million jobs.

As for national security, Obama keeps saying the war in Iraq and the rest of the administration's foreign and defense policy have, as he put it last week in South Dakota, "prevented us from making this country safe." But the country is safer than anyone expected after 9/11.

There has not been a single terrorist attack on the homeland, and we have instead foiled multiple terrorist plots to kill innocent Americans. America has succeeded in foiling these plots because Bush gave the National Security Agency the authority to monitor any and all communications of suspected terrorists, by telephone, e-mail or other means.

When faced with the entire Washington establishment demanding an end to the war — including his own father's secretary of state, James Baker — President Bush stuck to his guns, placed a new general in charge and employed a surge strategy that is now winning the war in Iraq in resounding fashion.

And in war news...Iraqi troops were able to take Sadr City without the aid of American forces. This is the second of back-to-back successes for the Iraqi Army. There really should be very little doubt about how successful the war is going right now over there. If you want some more proof of that, this is an excerpt about an al Qaeda supporter lamenting the disaster that Iraq has become for them:

A prolific jihadist sympathizer has posted an ‘explosive’ study on one of the main jihadist websites in which he laments the dire situation that the mujaheddin find themselves in Iraq by citing the steep drop in the number of insurgent operations conducted by the various jihadist groups, most notably Al-Qaeda’s 94 percent decline in operational ability over the last 12 months when only a year and half ago Al-Qaeda accounted for 60 percent of all jihadist activity!

The author, writing under the pseudonym ‘Dir’a limen wehhed’ [‘A Shield for the Monotheist’], posted his ‘Brief Study on the Consequences of the Division [Among] the [Jihadist] Groups on the Cause of Jihad in Iraq’ on May 12 and it is being displayed by the administration of the Al-Ekhlaas website—one of Al-Qaeda’s chief media outlets—among its more prominent recent posts. He's considered one of Al-Ekhlaas's "esteemed" writers.

The author tallies up and compares the numbers of operations claimed by each insurgent group under four categories: a year and half ago (November 2006), a year ago (May 2007), six months ago (November 2007) and now (May 2008). He demonstrated that while Al-Qaeda’s Islamic State of Iraq could claim 334 operations in Nov. 06 and 292 in May 07, their violent output dropped to 25 in Nov. 07 and 16 so far in May 08. Keep in mind that these assessments are based on Al-Qaeda's own numbers.

The author also shows that similar steep drops were exhibited by other jihadist groups.