Hindsight Is 20/20

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Hindsight is a wonderful thing. It really is. I believe it is an extremely good quality for a person to possess, to be able to look back at a decision that turned out to be the wrong one and learn from it.

The decision to invade Iraq in 2003 was the wrong decision. I believed it was the wrong decision at the time, but that was not a popular position to take. It took a certain amount of courage, back in those post–September 11 days, to tell one's friends and co–workers, many of whom supported the decision to invade Iraq, that it was a bad decision, and I did not always have the strength of will to argue with people about it, especially as confident as supporters of the invasion were that weapons of mass destruction would be found.

After a certain amount of time had passed and it became clear that the pretext for the invasion — the alleged existence of those weapons of mass destruction — was based on faulty information, public opinion began to sour on the war. But I think it is important to remember that a lot of people supported the invasion initially — including Hillary Clinton, the presumptive Democratic nominee for president in 2016 — no matter how much they may pretend otherwise today.

Mrs. Clinton wasn't the only Democrat who voted to authorize George W. Bush to use force against Iraq. When the Senate voted on Oct. 11, 2002, 29 of 50 Democrats joined 48 Republicans in a 77–23 vote giving Bush the authority he sought. Her colleague from New York, Chuck Schumer, voted to authorize the use of force. So did Joe Biden and Dianne Feinstein and Harry Reid.

In my lifetime, I have had the opportunity to vote for national tickets with a Bush on them half a dozen times. I have never voted for one and, if Jeb is nominated next year, it will make seven times I have refused to lend my support to a Bush in a national campaign.

But I find myself sympathizing — to an extent — with his recent stumble on the question of invading Iraq.

Fox News' Megyn Kelly asked him, "Knowing what we know now, would you have authorized the invasion?"

Bush tried to answer a different question. "I would've, and so would've Hillary Clinton, just to remind everybody, and so would have almost everybody that was confronted with the intelligence they got."

He kind of got back to what Kelly was getting at when he elaborated: "In retrospect, the intelligence that everybody saw, that the world saw, not just the United States, was faulty. And in retrospect, once we … invaded and took out Saddam Hussein, we didn't focus on security first. And the Iraqis, in this incredibly insecure environment, turned on the United States military because there was no security for themselves and their families."

Kelly was dealing in hypotheticals, and what Bush should have said — but, obviously, did not — was that he won't answer hypothetical questions. I'm an amateur historian, and what–if is the kind of game historians love to play. But it is a game that really cannot be won because the past is what it is. It's no trick to look back on a bad decision and know it was a mistake, but human beings are not blessed with the ability to see the future. If they were, I guess many would not marry the people they married or invest in companies that go belly up.

Or bet on the wrong horse at the racetrack.

There seems to be an impression among many Americans these days that a president must be infallible, that he must be capable of all things — including superhuman stuff like seeing the future. But anyone who looks for an infallible leader, someone around whom everyone can rally, is just asking to be disappointed. In the life of every presidency, there will be those who think the president does everything right and those who think the president does everything wrong — and everyone else who falls in between those two extremes. To misquote Abraham Lincoln, you can please some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time, but you can't please all the people all the time.

A president can only act within the reality of his times — and hope, at the end of the day, that he made the right decision. Seems to me that the best presidents have been the ones who second–guessed themselves and tried to learn from each decision they made — and the worst presidents were the ones who would not admit to having made a mistake.

If one is going to answer Kelly's question, though, it would have to be something like this: "In hindsight, it was a mistake to invade Iraq." That's it. Bush's inclination to defend his brother is admirable, but it does not have to be part of his answer to that question.

It can be the answer to another question if it is asked. He is right when he observes that a president must act on the information he has. But that is not the question that was asked. So don't answer it.

Better still, though, not to answer hypothetical questions at all. Politicians can't win hypotheticals, and politicians always want to play games they can win. Hypotheticals require proving a negative, and that cannot be done.

One time, I saw illusionist Penn Jillette talking about Nostradamus' prophecies that supposedly predicted Napoleon and Hitler and many other events that occurred long after his death. Jillette complained that the prophecies, which were apparently written in a deliberately obscure way, never named names, places or dates. What good is that, he wanted to know, if we want to prevent or avoid a certain event?

It's a fair point.

Let me ask you something. If time travel was possible, and you could go back in time, would you kill an infant Adolf Hitler sleeping in his crib? It is safe to say, I believe, that nazism would not have seized control of Germany without a charismatic leader at the helm. Snuffing out an infant who, knowing what we know now, grew up to plunge the world into a war that claimed millions of lives could be seen as heroic.

But could you take the life of a baby? You might say now that you could, but, when the chips were down, you might find it incredibly difficult to kill a small child, even knowing that, by doing so, you could save millions of others.

In the two decades between his resignation and his death, Richard Nixon might have said that, in hindsight, having the taping system installed in the Oval Office was a mistake — but that would have been with the benefit of knowing how it eventually played out, producing the evidence that brought his presidency to an end. But when the system was installed, his motivation (ostensibly) was the preservation of the historical record.

As Dr. Phil would say, how did that work out for ya?

Between a Rock and a Hard Place

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There were times — not many but a few — in my college days when I played some poker with my friends.

I was never very good at it, especially the art of bluffing — and I say that with all due respect because I'm sure those guys who were good at bluffing have gone on to enjoy great success in whichever career paths they followed.

Especially if their career paths were political. Politics frequently requires good bluffing — in other words, having what is known as a "poker face." I've heard it said that Richard Nixon developed quite a poker face from playing poker in the service during World War II. Apparently, it served him well in negotiations he had as president with the Russians and Chinese.

I believe effective bluffing can be boiled down to two parts — 1) plausibly asserting that something is true, whether it is or not, and 2) successfully backing it up when challenged (i.e., when one's bluff is called).

I'm no lawyer, but, in my mind, I equate it with the legal distinction between assault and battery. It's been my experience that a lot of people think assault and battery is a single crime. It isn't.

I don't remember now when I first heard this explained, whether it was during my reporting days when I covered the police beat or on some occasion when I reported for jury duty and a lawyer was questioning prospective jurors.

It might have been something I heard when I was studying communications law in college although that is probably unlikely since neither legal term would have had much to do with communications — directly, anyway.

In case you don't know, an assault is basically a threat, presumably of physical harm (although, in the modern world, I guess you would have to define a threat of computer hacking as an assault as well — not necessarily a physical threat but a financial one, which can, in due course, threaten life).

If the person who is being threatened believes the other person is capable of carrying out the threat, that is assault. If the threat is actually carried out, that is battery.

Barack Obama did the bluffing part last year when he declared that there was a "red line" in Syria — no chemical weapons use would be tolerated.

Now there are reports that Obama's bluff has been called. Apparently, Syria has used chemical weapons on its people. Recently.

Tom Foreman of CNN writes that this has left Obama with three options: "Bad, worse, and horrible."

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Actually, Foreman outlines more than three options, but, at the end of his piece, he acknowledges that, for a variety of reasons, it all comes down to one — firing cruise missiles from ships in the Mediterranean.

Such missiles, he writes, "are magnificent, virtually unstoppable weapons capable of pinpoint, devastating strikes." But the delay in using them complicates matters. The Syrians have had plenty of time already "to hide their own weapons, secure their airplanes and disperse critical command and control assets."

That sounds like what some of George W. Bush's defenders still say about the invasion of Iraq. That invasion, if you recall, was predicated on the belief that Iraq had stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction it would use against the United States, and it was necessary to eliminate them.

To many people, that sounded plausible in the immediate aftermath of 9–11, but no such weapons were found.

Supporters of the invasion insisted Iraq's leaders had moved the stockpiles of weapons. If they did, those weapons still have not been located.

Anyway, at that point, the objective changed from rooting out dangerous weapons to nation building, which was not an original objective of the mission.

In recent days, I have heard supporters of this president justify his taking unilateral action in Syria because other presidents have been launching undeclared wars (and conveniently bypassing the Constitution in the process) since the end of World War II.

But let's get back to our current predicament. I can't speak for anyone else, but I do not blame Obama for this mess — well, not entirely.

Any president who faced these circumstances would be between a rock and a hard place. There are no good options to take, only bad ones and worse ones. I realize that the option I advocate is a bad one, but, in the absence of any good ones ...

At least a portion of these circumstances, however, is Obama's fault. He is the one who drew the red line and told Syria not to cross it. He did that a year ago.

A prudent president would have devoted the past year to building a congressional consensus to authorize him to attack — just in case. Instead, he spent much of that time demonizing the opposition party rather than seeking common ground, knowing full well that he would need the cooperation of the Republican–controlled House to do anything if Syria called his bluff.

None of the polls I saw last year — including the most important one, the one on Election Day — suggested that Obama's party had a prayer of retaking the House. He must have known long before the election that, if he did win, he would have to deal with a Republican–controlled House for at least the first two years of his second term.

As a former constitutional law professor, he should have known that he would need to curry favor with influential Republicans in the House.

And a prudent president would have been building a coalition of American allies. This president has not been doing that, and now it appears we must do whatever we are going to do alone — or practically so.

He says he will consult Congress when it returns from its Labor Day recess, but Congress won't be in session again for a week. That is even more time for Syria to prepare for missile strikes.

Obama is more concerned, it seems, with public opinion polls that suggest that, by margins of 39% to 52%, a majority of Americans opposes military intervention in Syria.

If at last Obama is paying attention to the concerns of the voters, that isn't a bad thing. The American people have witnessed a decade of war that has cost them much but gained them little. The president should consider them, the sacrifices they already have made and the additional sacrifices they are being asked to make, before taking any action — assuming that Congress gives him the green light.

But he should have been laying the groundwork for this for months. He and his secretary of state made naive, false — and dangerous — assumptions about the people with whom they were dealing, and now the global credibility of the United States is at stake. If we do not enforce Obama's red line, what does anyone else have to fear from us?

Polling data suggest that most Americans oppose the idea of an attack, but a majority would support a limited strike.

I think that would be worse than doing nothing (which I believe is the least bad option). A limited strike, lasting a day or two — or perhaps an hour or two — instead of a few weeks (or even months) would be symbolic at best, a virtual slap on the wrist.

Syria (and others like it, in the region and elsewhere) would be emboldened. They would know that there is a price to be paid for using chemical weapons — but that price would be negligible, one that they would willingly pay.

For a missile strike to be more than symbolic, for it to inflict a lesson on Syria that will be felt throughout the region and beyond, it cannot be a limited strike. It cannot be a slap on the wrist that is really intended to give Obama political cover.

To be effective, it must be relentless. It must be decisive. And I don't believe the American people have the stomach for that right now.

I am inclined to sympathize with Obama. He is truly between a rock and a hard place.

But he got there mostly on his own — and now, after nearly five years in the White House, it is high time he learned what leadership is about.

When Clinton Hit Back

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"What we're doing is sending a message against the people who were responsible for planning this operation. ... [If] anybody asks the same people to do it again, they will remember this message."

Secretary of Defense Les Aspin
Washington Post
June 1993

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Believe it or not, there was a time — not so long ago — when American presidents wouldn't hesitate to act if a single American was threatened, much less actually injured or killed.

Such a case occurred 20 years ago today.

To put it in context: A couple of months earlier, former President George H.W. Bush — the man Bill Clinton had beaten in the previous year's presidential election — was in Kuwait to commemorate the conclusion of the Persian Gulf War. Seventeen people were arrested and charged with conspiring to kill Bush with explosives that were hidden in a vehicle.

No explosions occurred. No one was hurt. But Clinton was convinced, largely because of information gathered and analyzed by American foreign and domestic intelligence operatives, that the plot originated in Iraq — and 20 years ago today, he used American military might for the first time, ordering nearly two dozen cruise missile strikes on Iraqi intelligence facilities.

The strikes were meant both as retaliation for the plot and warning not to attempt anything like it again. But Clinton didn't shoot first and ask questions afterward. He explored numerous options, even those he felt did not go far enough. Eventually he selected one on the recommendation of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

"I felt we would have been justified in hitting Iraq harder," Clinton wrote in his presidential memoirs, "but [Colin] Powell made a persuasive case that the attack would deter further Iraqi terrorism and that dropping bombs on more targets, including presidential palaces, would have been unlikely to kill Saddam Hussein and almost certain to kill more innocent people."

Most of the missiles hit their intended targets, but a few overshot, and eight civilians were killed.

"It was a stark reminder," Clinton wrote, "that no matter how careful the planning and how accurate the weapons, when that kind of firepower is unleashed, there are usually unintended consequences."

The occasion of this anniversary has led me to think about two recent events that tell me much of what I need to know about U.S. policy in the 21st century.

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First, the evasive stance taken by Barack Obama and the members of his administration after the deadly attacks on the embassy in Benghazi last year tells me the executive branch is not willing to stand up for Americans abroad, be they dead or alive — unless there are clear benefits in doing so.

Second, Obama's recent argument in a speech at the National Defense University that the war on terror must end as all wars do shows a staggering naivete. Rhetorically, it sounds good, but the problem is that the war on terror is not a conventional war with armies and generals. It cannot be resolved in conventional ways — if, in fact, it can be resolved at all.

When you are dealing with terrorists, you are not dealing with anything as organized or concentrated as a single army or nation. Your enemies could be from anywhere on the globe — including your own back yard — and as long as even one is on the loose, so is the danger.

Sympathizers with the opposition have always been around — there were Nazi and Japanese sympathizers in America during World War II — but they weren't generally viewed as combatants unless they took some kind of aggressive action.

By the very nature of their activities, terrorists must be regarded — automatically — as combatants.

The idea that America can arbitrarily declare the war on terror over is as imperialistic as any I have heard, and it tells terrorists around the world, OK, we're going back to sleep now. It harkens back to a time when the prevailing attitude was that we were always in the right; therefore, we were entitled to impose our will on others. We — and only we — could decide when a war began and when it ended.

It was the same attitude — the concept of manifest destiny — that directed the westward expansion in the 19th century. America is entitled to seize what it wants.

American imperialism — as well as hubris — is what the terrorists really would like to see destroyed.

Patriotism

I must possess an odd brand of patriotism. I never thought I did when I was growing up, but now, in the early years of the 21st century, it has become increasingly clear to me.

Maybe my mind processes things in ways that others do not.

A few years ago, I heard arguments from Republicans that suggested I wasn't supporting the troops if I wasn't supporting the war in Iraq — and, therefore, I wasn't patriotic.

George W. Bush and the Republicans set themselves up for criticism when they smugly and self–assuredly told Americans that there were stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and they were aimed at America. It was easy to frighten Americans in those days. The September 11 attacks were still a fresh memory.

But it never was that simple for me.

My counter–argument was that I was supporting the troops, that it was possible to support the troops and oppose the policy they were required to carry out.

It is the same — in my mind — as a law that is passed by the state legislature. I may not agree with that law. In fact, there may be some in law enforcement who do not agree with the law. But it is their job to enforce the law.

Policy makers and policy enforcers are rarely, if ever, the same people.

For a long time, that attitude seemed rare, almost nonexistent, but in the last couple of years, I have seen more and more people who feel that way.

Barack Obama's trip to Copenhagen last week to lobby — unsuccessfully — for the 2016 Olympics to come to Chicago has produced the flip side to the patriotism argument.

"Whenever President Obama has traveled overseas and offered pointed and direct assessments of the United States, some of them critical, Republicans have ripped him for criticizing America, saying a president should always defend the United States," writes Roland Martin for CNN.com.

"So I want to hear the explanation by these so–called patriots of their giddy behavior over the United States losing the 2016 Olympic Games."

It is a valid complaint, and it is one to which I tend to feel vulnerable — to a degree.

But the facts are more complicated.

For starters, I am not a Republican, but one does not have to be a Republican to disagree with a Democratic president. I know independents and Democrats who did not think Obama should make the trip to Copenhagen, and I am one of them.

Yes, I have criticized Obama when I felt he made mistakes. But I have never joined in the chorus that has accused him of being anti–America. And I don't believe anyone who wants to bring the Olympics to America can be anti–America.

I've never really understood the anti–America argument. I am not so cynical that I believe someone who hates this country could run for its highest office, fool a majority of its adults and be elected to lead it when his real objective was to destroy it.

Americans on both sides of the political spectrum can be quite superficial, but most aren't that gullible that they would willingly hand over power to a smooth–talking shyster or truly believe others had done so. Are they?

Having said that, yes, I was critical of the decision to go to Copenhagen. But I didn't mind if Chicago was awarded the Olympics for 2016, and I was not glad Chicago lost its bid to host the Olympics. I simply felt Obama had more important things to do right here.

The decision to go to Copenhagen has set off a firestorm of sorts. In Commentary, Jennifer Rubin wrote that Obama received a lesson in the "limits of egomania." Clarence Page observed, in the Chicago Tribune, that Obama's "magic" has its restrictions. For others, like Edward Luce of Financial Times, the fruitless trip breathed new life into questions about Chicago cronyism.

Clearly, there are many ways to look at this. And I am inclined to think Martin is right when he urges those who have celebrated the loss as Obama's loss to "turn in your flag lapel pins and stop boasting of being so patriotic." It was a loss for America.

But Obama set himself up for all this — in the exasperatingly casual way that he so often does. And that may be the thing about him that many Americans find refreshing. He doesn't do things in the typically presidential way.

But not everyone finds that reassuring. In fact, some were alarmed that Obama wasn't content to delegate the authority for that task to his wife and remain in Washington while the unemployment rate went up and his health care plan became watered down faster than the Titanic.

Obama became president during the greatest economic crisis this country has faced in three–quarters of a century. A president can't choose the conditions that exist when he takes office, but he can choose how he will respond to them.

Filling out his NCAA brackets or making the rounds of the late night talk shows or presiding over a couple of beers and a "teachable moment" or traveling to Copenhagen may seem worthwhile, but they lack the urgency of rising unemployment. At some point, a president must decide what his priority will be.

After that, worthwhile (but lesser) goals must be turned over to others.

I believed last week — and I believe today — that Obama needed to make joblessness his priority.

The Thousand-Yard Stare

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In many ways, I guess, it was timely that Robert McNamara died earlier this week.

Some of you may not know the name, but he was the secretary of Defense during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations in the 1960s. In fact, it was often said that the Vietnam War was McNamara's war — not unlike the way that the Iraq War has been linked to Donald Rumsfeld, although George Bush and Dick Cheney deserve their portion of the blame, as does Colin Powell.

McNamara defended the U.S. presence in Vietnam for a long time, but late in his life, he sought to atone, in an interview and the voiceovers for archival footage in a 2003 documentary about his time as secretary of Defense called "The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara."

I saw that movie a few years ago, and I can recommend it. When I saw it, we were still about two years away from the next presidential election, and I felt that the people who had the most to gain from seeing it, the ones who could influence U.S. policy right away, probably would never watch it.

McNamara's atonement came too late for many Vietnam vets, but his death reminded me of something that I used to hear mentioned fairly frequently during the days of Vietnam — the "Thousand–Yard Stare." That's the phrase that was given to the somewhat vacant stare that one often sees in a serviceman who has been through a horrific battle.

I think it was first widely used to describe veterans suffering from "battle fatigue" (now called "post–traumatic stress disorder") during World War II. As a child, I heard the phrase used to describe Vietnam vets.

Since McNamara's death — in between network reports on Michael Jackson — I've been thinking about the "Thousand–Yard Stare" — and I have been wondering if it is due for a comeback. Perhaps it will be applicable to many of those who have had to serve in Iraq or Afghanistan, but the phrase actually refers to a reaction to intense stress, which is not necessarily confined to combat.

So it's my guess that we'll start seeing the "Thousand–Yard Stare" in the faces of people who have been unemployed for a long time or who have lost their homes.

I'm sure Barack Obama and Joe Biden have been trying, and I know that improvements in the employment picture typically lag behind everything else, but after six months and the passage of an economic stimulus package with a price tag of nearly $800 billion, I had hoped to see better than a one–month reversal of the hemorrhaging of jobs from the economy.

Am I expecting too much? Maybe. But, when Biden tells a Sunday TV audience that the administration "misread" the economy and Obama says they received incomplete information, I just can't help feeling Obama and Biden are in over their heads. Maybe anyone would be.

I hope I'm wrong. Dear God, I hope I'm wrong.

Have the Terrorists Won?

It seems to me that truly historic days live on beyond their normal 24–hour lifespans and continue to influence our lives indefinitely, in ways that are seen and unseen, even if the public's attention has moved on to something else.

In fact, it reminds me of a pebble tossed into a pond or a lake. From that one tiny point of impact, the ripples fan out in ever–expanding circles, affecting everything they touch, until they are stopped by the distant shorelines.

Need a bigger, grander example? Think of the 2004 tsunami that began with an undersea earthquake in the Indian Ocean and led to the deaths of more than 225,000 people in nearly a dozen countries.

It was, in fact, months before the scope of the tsunami was understood. Indeed, it often seems to take the distance that time can provide before the full impact of an historic event can be comprehended.

I was thinking about this the other night while I watched a four–hour program on 9/11. That's an event that has been particularly fascinating for me because, at the time it happened, the office in which I worked had no TV set. Unlike most Americans, I didn't see the events as they unfolded.

I've only seen video footage of the planes crashing into the Twin Towers and the bodies plummeting to earth from great heights. As appalling as those images are, it's one thing to have seen them as they happened, raw and uncensored, playing out in real time, and it's quite another to see film footage of something that has already occurred.

It's kind of like watching the Zapruder film, knowing that President Kennedy's head is about to be engulfed in a bloody halo and being powerless to do anything about it. You may want to yell at the screen, "Don't make that turn!" but you know that Kennedy's limousine will drive down Elm Street past the Texas Schoolbook Depository into history — and there isn't a thing you can do about it.

It's the same with the hijacked planes on September 11, I suppose. You can see the surveillance film of some of the hijackers being briefly detained at the security checkpoints. You can see footage of at least one of the hijackers with what appears to be a box cutter in his hip pocket, and you may feel tempted to yell at the screen, "Don't let him board the plane!" but you know he will, anyway.

And you know that the four planes will be hijacked and nearly 3,000 people will be killed on a crystal clear, early autumn morning.

Sept. 11, 2001, will always be a significant day in American history. But, once the shock from the attacks wore off and the stock market reopened and planes were allowed to fly again, life began to return to normal.

Even so, I think it can be argued that, as meticulous and methodical as the terrorists' planning was, those hijackings had consequences that the terrorists did not anticipate, consequences that continue to influence American life.

In the months after the attacks, for example, Osama bin Laden reportedly told some of his supporters that he didn't foresee the collapse of the Twin Towers. Is that credible? Bin Laden's academic credentials are unclear, but some have said he earned a degree in civil engineering. If that is so, he must have had some idea of what a fire fed by thousands of gallons of jet fuel could do to a skyscraper.

Whether bin Laden believed the towers would fall, his objective seems more certain. He was driven by a desire to bring jihad to American soil. Thus far, that has not happened. We've been told that additional terrorist attacks were thwarted by policies that were followed during the Bush administration, but we've seen no evidence to support that claim. There are those who believe al–Qaeda has been biding its time before striking again, similar to the eight–year gap that passed between the attacks on the World Trade Center.

But, while bin Laden apparently sought to engage the United States in a bloody conflict, he may not have anticipated the direction it would take.

He may not have realized how obsessed the neocons in the Bush administration were with Saddam Hussein, even a decade after the end of the Gulf War, or that they would use the terrorist attacks to justify an invasion of Iraq that continues to claim American lives and money at a time when both could be used more effectively.

But, from bin Laden's perspective, the terrorist attacks may have succeeded in achieving his goal, albeit in unexpected ways. His words may be contradictory, but I think we can agree that his goal seems to be toppling the United States. Al–Qaeda and the Islamic extremists may have a Dark Ages mentality and their objective may be predicated on the use of force, but in the 21st century, the best strategy for destroying a foe is to undermine that foe's economy.

I'm not suggesting that economists sympathetic to Islamic extremism infiltrated the American economy and proceeded to sabotage it. The greed at the top of America's economic food chain owes no allegiance to any faith — only money.

So what is the relationship between the Iraq war, now more than 6 years old, and the recession?

Clearly, many factors have been involved in the recession. But it can be plausibly argued that the combined cost of sustaining the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq since 2001 — more than $860 billion so far — has made things much worse than they might have been.

And that begs the question — Have the terrorists won?

The Domino Theory

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On this day in 1954, President Eisenhower put into words the philosophy that has guided American foreign policy for more or less half a century — the "domino theory:"

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"Finally, you have broader considerations that might follow what you would call the 'falling domino' principle. You have a row of dominoes set up, you knock over the first one, and what will happen to the last one is the certainty that it will go over very quickly. So you could have a beginning of a disintegration that would have the most profound influences."

Dwight Eisenhower

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This theory was certainly prevalent during the Cold War. The belief that, if one nation fell to the Communists, other nations in the region would quickly follow was a popular one. But it did not originate with Eisenhower. It has its roots in the early post–WWII era. Sir Winston Churchill warned, in his famous "Iron Curtain" speech in 1946, of the threat posed by the Soviets.

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The "domino theory" had not yet been given a name, but it had been given a face — communism and Stalin.

When I was a teenager, many of my friends laughed at the "domino theory," dismissing it as simplistic and ludicrous, but, secretly, we all worried that the war in Vietnam might not end before we were old enough to be pressed into service. The war had been raging since we were small and, when I was 13 or 14, it was not unrealistic to think the war might continue for a few more years, just long enough for us to be whisked away to the rice paddies and jungles of South Vietnam — making premature death a distinct possibility.

American involvement in Vietnam finally ended when I was 15, but not before two American presidents, Johnson and Nixon, had devoted much of their presidencies to promoting the idea that more and more Americans had to be sent there so the thousands who had already died would not have died in vain.

The same mindset permitted the American occupation of Iraq to continue, sucking up billions of dollars and thousands of lives — in spite of the assurances by those in power that the war would be over quickly and Americans would be greeted as liberators with flowers thrown at their feet.

Earlier this year, Barack Obama pledged that the American presence in Iraq would be over before Labor Day 2010. Opponents of the war would like for all Americans to be brought home from that country right away, but the realists understand that to arbitrarily remove all of our troops at this point would invite chaos to that war–torn land.

Cynics have observed that there are political implications in ending the American presence in Iraq a couple of months before the next election, but it is the only responsible way to handle the situation.

South Vietnam eventually fell to the Communist North, but the other "dominoes" in the region did not fall, as Johnson and Nixon and the many devotees of the theory expected.

Iraq, too, seems to stand as a testimonial against the validity of the "domino theory." The Iraqis may have cast aside the yoke of Saddam Hussein's tyranny, but that has not encouraged the other nations of the Middle East to follow suit and embrace democracy.

Hastily removing the troops from Iraq, however, might produce the domino effect in reverse. A chaotic Iraq, unprepared to defend its borders, might be prone to fall under the influence of its regional neighbors.

And that might trigger a fresh round of "domino theory" advocacy.

The Fate of the Stimulus Package

Democrats do not have enough votes to pass the economic stimulus package as it currently is written, report Shailagh Murray and Paul Kane in the Washington Post.

My parents raised me to try to see both sides of an issue and to be tolerant of the other guy's opinion, even when it differs from my own.

But the economic package is about more than opinions and mathematical formulas. It's about people.

I understand that the cost of the stimulus has roughly tripled since the election. We've also been adding more than half a million people to the ranks of the unemployed each month.

Currently, the estimate is that the economy is losing 20,000 jobs a day. If that is the case — and I have no reason to think it is not — that's an average of 400 jobs lost per state per day. Given the population differences between states, some states are losing more, some states are losing fewer.

I imagine that means the average daily job loss in California is probably around 2,000, maybe more.

I also understand that three-fifths of the senators must support the package in order for it to pass, and Democrats do not have 60 votes — even if the apparent victor in Minnesota, Al Franken, were to be allowed to take his seat before the vote.

So Democrats are trying to trim up to $200 billion from the package to make it more palatable to Republican members.

Under ordinary circumstances, I would encourage the Senate's Democrats to make whatever compromises are necessary to bring some of the Republican members over to their side. Bipartisan support would be preferable — and, in order to pass the package, at least a few Republican votes will be necessary.

Under ordinary circumstances, I would encourage the Senate to take as much time as it needs to make sure a package is passed that is pleasing to at least 60 members of the Senate.

But these aren't ordinary circumstances. And it isn't possible to produce an economic stimulus package that is satisfactory to everyone.

Yet it seems the Republican members haven't learned their lesson. Many seem prepared to hold the package hostage. Six years of marching in lockstep behind a "my way or the highway" Republican administration led this country to the situation it now faces. That administration has gone now, and it has been replaced by a Democratic administration. Democrats took control of both houses of Congress two years ago.

Taking an obstructionist position — and forcing an extended debate now — will do the Republicans' constituents no good. Regardless of their individual beliefs, both Republicans and Democrats are unemployed today. And both Republicans and Democrats are losing their homes.

The stimulus package is not perfect. But it's what we have. If you're going to delay its passage — or you're dead set against its passage at all — you'd better have a constructive alternative to suggest. And you'd better be able to prove that it's preferable to what has been proposed.

What's more, you'd better make your case quickly. There is literally no time to waste.

Want to save money? OK. Why don't we trim a significant chunk of the billions that are being thrown away in Iraq and go ahead and bring a large portion of our troops home? Many of them have already more than done their share. And it was the absence of so many National Guardsmen nearly four years ago that (to a great extent) prevented an effective federal response to Hurricane Katrina. Let's bring those Guardsmen home so they can be here, ready to spring into action, if another Katrina strikes.

I have advocated a gradual withdrawal, to allow the Iraqis enough time to take control of their own affairs, but we've been there for nearly six years. Enough is enough. Iraq was the last administration's mistake. No sense in making it this administration's mistake as well.

If we're going to have real change we can believe in, let's start with Iraq.

The times demand immediate action. This crisis is too severe to allow for the luxury of standing on political dogma. People are dying, and more people will die unless the government does everything it can now. We cannot be penny wise and pound foolish.

The Talmud says, "Whoever saves one life, saves the world entire." There are millions of lives that need saving today.

There's a high price to be paid for doing nothing. The people who have been hurt by the economy are running out of patience — with big corporations that accept billions in bailout money and then buy private corporate jets instead of finding ways to use that money to preserve jobs and with lawmakers who give that money to the fatcats while nitpicking over elements of the stimulus package that will help ordinary citizens.

And the voters will have long memories when it comes time to vote on whether to return you to the Senate. Of that, you may be sure.

The Hard Work Begins

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Tuesday may have been the day for poetry. It has given way to the prose.

While President Obama, his family, his friends and his supporters were celebrating in Washington, the stock market lost more than 300 points on Wall Street. Just a little reality check there.

Obama, of course, is not the one who created the economic conditions — he inherited them. And they're his to deal with now. It would be a tough assignment for anyone, and it probably isn't made any easier by the additional pressure he feels, rightly or wrongly, as the first black president.

During the campaign, there were many in the media and the public at large who treated any criticism of Obama as if it were some sort of thinly concealed form of racism when often it was merely the way the game is played. The rules didn't change just because one of the major contestants was black.

In a political campaign, a candidate's words and actions frequently come back to haunt him/her, yet Obama often appeared to get a free ride from those who never seemed to hesitate to slam other candidates in both parties.

I remember a "Saturday Night Live" skit in which a debate questioner grilled Hillary Clinton on the names of foreign leaders. When she failed to answer correctly, the questioner gave her the answer, then turned to Obama and said, "Senator Obama, same question!"

There were relatively few occasions when Obama's statements or policy positions received the kind of intense scrutiny that others' did. Bill Clinton, I recall, was harshly criticized for saying Obama's claims of opposing the Iraq War amounted to a "fairy tale" — although he was right when he said that there was almost no difference between Obama's voting record on the war as a senator and Hillary Clinton's Senate voting record on the same issue during the same time frame.

When Obama entered the Senate, the war was nearly 2 years old. Few, if any, journalists pointed out that Obama did not bear the responsibility for casting a vote in the U.S. Senate when that body addressed the original question of whether to give George W. Bush the authority to invade Iraq. He did not have to weigh the political consequences the way Clinton, John Edwards, even Obama's eventual running mate did.

Now, as president, he must provide leadership on foreign affairs, and that includes the handling of the war. He cannot arbitrarily withdraw all the troops from Iraq and leave that country to the mercy of the terrorists in the region. Does that mean he now supports a war he said he initially opposed? No. It means he comprehends the reality of the situation.

The withdrawal must be done gradually. Iraq must be encouraged to take responsibility for itself. Bush liked to talk about how Iraq became free under his watch, but Iraq will never be truly free until that happens. How it is achieved is now Obama's problem.

He has already taken an important first step in suspending prosecutions at Guantanamo Bay. That's encouraging. But there is so much more that needs to be done.

It is no different with today's economy. Obama enters office facing a situation that is not of his making but nevertheless it is one he must deal with. No truer test of his leadership skills may face him as president than his decisions on that matter. In recent months, the economy has been losing half a million jobs a month, and all indications are that it will continue to be bleak for most of 2009.

Job creation will be a real test of Obama's leadership abilities.

In fact, each day in the Oval Office will be a test for Obama. He will learn there are restrictions in that job, imposed by many sources. That's the way it is in a republic.

Americans can't afford to handle Obama with kid gloves. There are urgent problems facing America today. His diehard supporters must understand that criticism of him is not racist, that people's lives and futures depend on the decisions he makes.

His words in his Inaugural Address implied that he understands that (although, not meaning to quibble, but he was incorrect when he said he was the 44th man to take the oath of office — Grover Cleveland was the 22nd and 24th president, so actually Obama is the 43rd man to be sworn in). His actions will confirm whether he really does.

The Verdict of History

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Iranians staged a demonstration after prayers Friday.

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With less than a month to go until the end of his presidency, it is appropriate to wonder where George W. Bush will stand among the rest of the presidents.

A verdict — of sorts — apparently has already been rendered. When the Iraqi journalist threw his shoes at Bush during the president's recent farewell visit to the country he ordered U.S. troops to invade five years ago, that journalist was merely acting out the greatest insult in the Arab world, which is to slap your shoe against somebody.

It's debatable whether Bush knew what it meant. His reaction was to shrug it off.

It's not so easy to shrug off what public opinion surveys have been saying for a long time.

Bush's most recent approval ratings, according to PollingReport.com, are 24% in the CBS News poll, 27% in the NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, 29% in the USA Today/Gallup Poll, 30% in the ABC News/Washington Post poll and 30% in the FOX News/Opinion Dynamics poll.

Significantly, these are not his lowest readings ever. That distinction belongs to October of this year, when his approval numbers fell to the mid- and low 20s following the economic meltdown. He seems to have bounced back slightly since then.

Nearly three years ago, in April 2006, historian Sean Wilentz wrote an assessment of the Bush presidency, then barely into the second year of its second term, in Rolling Stone. In hindsight, it seems almost prescient.

"Bush's presidency appears headed for colossal historical disgrace," Wilentz wrote. "Barring a cataclysmic event on the order of the terrorist attacks of September 11th … there seems to be little the administration can do to avoid being ranked on the lowest tier of U.S. presidents."

And that, Wilentz warned, was a "best-case scenario."

"Many historians are now wondering whether Bush, in fact, will be remembered as the very worst president in all of American history," Wilentz wrote.

Less than a year later — after Democrats had seized control of both houses of Congress for the first time since the mid-1990s — journalist Nicholas von Hoffman examined the question for The Nation.

"How do you judge?" he asked thoughtfully. His article was critical — and rightfully so — of the presidents who served in the decades leading up to the Civil War — especially Abraham Lincoln's immediate predecessor, James Buchanan, who, "[a]side from being a dull, unimaginative, dray horse of a politician, he was the president whose cowardice in handling the South and slavery ended the remotest possibility that the United States would be spared the horrors of the Civil War."

But the 20th century's presidents were not given a pass.

"Ever since the atom bomb was dropped," he observed, "we've had a whole string of bozos who cannot pronounce the word 'nuclear.' How much should that count against them?"

Herbert Hoover, he insisted, was the "unluckiest president," and "it's still too early to tell" about Richard Nixon.

As for Bush, von Hoffman wrote, it's also too early to tell. "One of the criteria for being worst is how much lasting damage the president did," he wrote. "Buchanan, for instance, did more than words can convey. With Bush II the reckoning is yet to be made."

In April of this year, after John McCain had secured the nomination of Bush's party, Scott Horton of Harper's Magazine observed that a majority of historians surveyed by George Mason University's History News Network were ready to proclaim him the "worst ever" president.

This, Horton wrote, was a "dramatic deterioration" for Bush. The president "wasn't viewed in the most positive terms" in the spring of 2004, when he was unable, in response to a question at a press conference, to identify a mistake he had made in his first term, "but there was a consensus that he wasn't the 'worst of the worst' either."

Since that time, Horton wrote, "Bush has established himself as the torture president, the basis for his invasion of Iraq has been exposed as a fraud, the Iraq War itself has gone disastrously, the nation's network of alliances has faded, and the economy has gone into a tailspin — not to mention the bungled handling of relief for victims of hurricane Katrina."

As a matter of fact, I have often wondered what Bush's approval ratings might have looked like if his own father and his predecessor had not teamed up to raise relief funds for the victims of both Katrina and the 2004 tsunami.

How much worse could things have been following both disasters if those two former presidents had not become involved?

In the aftermath of one of the worst holiday retail sales periods in decades, one can only wonder how much lower Bush's ratings can fall before he leaves the White House.

But a sure sign that he is rapidly becoming irrelevant is the proliferation of web-based games inspired by the shoe-throwing incident. This holiday season, they seem to have replaced the Christmas-oriented bowling games and similar seasonal activities that circulate on the web.

• Sock and Awe! is a nice play on the phrase that was associated with the invasion of Iraq.
• Can YOU throw a shoe at Bush? is a pleasant diversion. Bush keeps moving and ducking, so you won't hit him every time. And the graphic is kind of cheesy. Most players will get their fill of this game in no time.
• Shoe Bush Worldwide isn't so much a game as it is therapy for all the frustrated Bush haters. It might provide some satisfaction — as Bush gets more and more bruised each time he's hit with a shoe.
• Kast En Sko På Bush, which apparently is a Norwegian site, is about the right angle and acceleration to throw a shoe and make a direct hit. If you were a physics major in college, you can probably figure this out quickly — and move on to something more challenging.
• I'm not sure where the Bush Shoe Throwing Game originates, but, although it seems fairly simple, I give it a certain amount of credit for using what seems to be an authentic screen capture from the actual event in Iraq.
• Flying babush invites visitors to play the role of Bush and try to duck flying shoes as long as possible. The more sadistic visitors will put Bush in one spot and leave him there to get pelted by shoes.
• There are other games in which the player assumes the role of Bush, some better than others. Returning to games in which visitors can be the shoe thrower instead of the shoe dodger, GamePro's Hit Bush With Shoe gives players additional time with each successful strike.

I also wonder how much Bush's failure — or, in the view of his supporters, his perceived failure — may influence the next administration.

USA Today reported this week that, by a very wide margin, Barack Obama is the man who is admired most by Americans.

That can mean an extended "honeymoon" with Congress — or an impatient public.

If Obama is dealing with an impatient public, that may mean a short honeymoon — and lots of pressure to accomplish something quickly.

Dowd On Cheney

Maureen Dowd of the New York Times says Vice President Dick Cheney has a new strategy for shaping foreign policy (borrowed from the Richard Nixon playbook).