Obsidian Wings

La Chute

by von

Since my flight got canceled this morning, I suppose that I have time to risk some questions to Publius' post:  "Afghanistan as Therapy".  Publius writes:

[O]n the domestic front, the stimulus saved a lot of jobs -- and helped stop the bleeding.  But the opposition was fueled by an ideological aversion to government.  Opposing the stimulus was the GOP's chance to show that they actually believe in "small government," even if it made very little policy sense. ....

Afghanistan, though, is different.  It's frustrates me on a far deeper level to see people advocate for wars just to make themselves feel better. ....

It's important to remember ... that troops aren't "resources" -- they're real humans, with real families, with real children, and with real friends.  If we're going to escalate in Afghanistan, we deserve to give them defined goals. 

You can play therapy session all day with the stimulus opposition if you want.  But not with the lives of troops -- they didn't sign up to make the Kagan family feel good about themselves.

If I thought that the Democrats went the wrong way on the stimulus, was I playing therapy?

If I believe General McCrystal (and others*) that we are likely to cede Afghanistan to the Taliban unless we commit more combat troops, am I playing therapy?

If I am willing to commit those troops because I think that a fractured Afghanistan will destabilize Pakistan, risking the lives of millions and our own national secutiry, is it because I regard our soldiers as playthings?

Let's say that the answer to each of these questions is "yes".  Let's say that I'm arguing for each of my positions in bad faith.  Let's say the Kagans are as well.  All of us want to risk more young lives not because we think that losing to the Taliban is worse, but to work out some testicular need of ours.  War not merely as therapy, but as our personal porno stash.

How does this counter a single one of the arguments put forward by General McChrystal in favor of more troops?  How does it counter a single argument made by any one of the Kagans, for that matter?  Indeed, how does it counter a single one of the arguments put forward by President Obama last year, when he promised to send more combat troops to Afghanistan? 

It doesn't. 

If armchair psychology is all you've got, you don't have any counterargument at all. 

*Who else agrees with General McChrystal that more combat troops are needed in Afghanistan?  Among others, Spanish Prime Minister (and left-wing) Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero and Danish NATO Chief Anders Fogh Rasmussen.  Note, too, that these additional combat troops would be part of a coordinated push that involved social and political adjustments to our counterinsurgency efforts.  It's not just putting in more troops (although, obviously, the "therapeutic" aspect of the plan for us warmongers is the "more dead youngsters" part).

UPDATE:  Kimberly Kagan may have an additional objection to the "testes made us do it" argument.  

Post hoc ergo propter hoc: Torture edition

By Lindsay Beyerstein

Washington Post reporters Peter Finn, Joby Warrick, and Julie Tate lend credence Dick Cheney's fallacious argument that because Khalid Sheik Mohammed began cooperating with U.S. authorities after he was tortured, torture made him cooperate.

The story is based the reminiscences of unnamed intelligence officers who observed Mohammed in 2005 and 2006. They say that he'd evolved from defiance to enthusiastic cooperation. But it's not clear whether any of these anonymous officials watched the metamorphosis from the beginning. The story seems to imply that they showed up 2 or 3 years after he started cooperating. In which case, why should we trust their hunches about what turned the prisoner?

And if they were around for the torture, how much stock should we put in anonymous anecdotes from people who might be facing criminal charges? Of course they're going to say that the program was dazzlingly effective. At this point, good PR is their best chance of staying free and employed.

The WaPo's sources claim to have observed Mohammed directly. Surely, only a handful of people would have been allowed access to the U.S.'s top terror detainee. Chances are, anyone who got that close has a vested interest in presenting the program in the most flattering light. For all we know, the WaPo interviewed Khalid Sheik Mohammed's torturers. If the reporters grappled with this potential conflict of interest, they don't let on. 

Cheney and his allies stress that KSM only started talking after he was waterboarded. The thing is, the CIA waterboarded him as soon as they got their hands on him--183 times during his first month of captivity.  We're supposed to believe that the hundred-and-eighty-third time was the charm? Good thing there was no ticking bomb. 

With no control group, we have no way of knowing whether KSM broke any faster than he would have with traditional rapport-based interrogation tactics. For all we know, torture actually prolonged the process. Torture can harden the victim's resolve to resist the torturer.

Note that torture defenders aren't even trying to argue that KSM gave up valuable information while he was actually being tortured. (He falsely confessed to all kinds of crazy stuff including the murder of Daniel Pearl.) You might think this is evidence against the efficacy of torture. But here's where the Cheney faction does a bit of logical jujitsu: They point to the fact that KSM started talking after he was waterboarded. So, the waterboarding must have softened him up. The more parsimonious hypothesis is that once U.S. stopped torturing the prisoner, the real work of interrogation could begin.

"When I was in Iraq, the few times I saw people use harsh methods [in Iraq in 2006], it was always counterproductive,” explained veteran interrogator Matthew Alexander, author of 'How To Break a Terrorist,' “the person just hunkered down, they were expecting us to do that, and they just shut up. And then I’d have to send somebody in, build back up rapport, reverse that process, and it would take us longer to get information.”

Interestingly, the anecdotes from the anonymous officials who observed KSM suggest that his captors got their best information by exploiting the his intellectual vanity, not by beating confessions out of him.

We learn that KSM's captors shrewdly gave him a blackboard and let him "lecture" CIA agents about terrorism while they took notes. A lot of crazy claims have been made about the efficacy of torture, but no one's going to claim that waterboarding put KSM in the mood to deliver his "Advanced Topics in al Qaeda" talk. That gambit was the result of an astute interrogator who got to know the prisoner well enough to exploit his weaknesses.

[x-post at Majikthise]

Update: Marcy Wheeler notes that after the CIA stopped torturing KSM, they went back to rapport-based interrogation. The WaPo doesn't mention that critical and widely reported fact, of course.

The IG Report and Iraq

by publius

Yesterday's IG Report isn't about Iraq -- it covers surveillance programs that started soon after 9/11.  But I do think the report casts an ugly shadow on the Bush administration's marketing of the war.

One theme that comes through in the IG Report is a total disregard for process and evidence.  The conclusion came first, and the evidence was then twisted and cherry-picked to support that conclusion. 

The Addington/Cheney crew decided that they wanted to do Activity X, and then they had John Yoo secretly approve the program in the bathroom stalls of OLC.  To approve it, Yoo had to ignore law, distort facts, and hide the actual decision-making process from the proper procedural channels -- channels designed to prevent these very errors.

It's hard to believe that a group of people willing to act in this manner would suddenly turn around and view evidence carefully and objectively when it came to Iraq.  The IG Report shows that the administration was willing to distort and ignore evidence to get what they wanted.  That was their MO.  There's no reason to think that this same MO didn't apply in the run-up to war.

(On an aside, Glenn Greenwald has an informative and critical take on the IG Report's inadequacies.)

Shooting

by hilzoy

The victim:

"Colleagues called Stephen T. Johns "Big John," for he was well over 6 feet tall. But mostly friends recalled the security guard's constant courtesy and friendliness.

"A soft-spoken, gentle giant," said Milton Talley, a former employee of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, where Johns was killed yesterday in the line of duty -- shot, authorities said, by an avowed white supremacist who entered the museum with a rifle. (...)

"There are no words to express our grief and shock over these events," the museum said in a statement, describing Johns as "an outstanding colleague who greeted us every day with a smile."

Johns, a 1988 graduate of Crosslands High School in Temple Hills, lived in an apartment in the Temple Hills area. Friends said he had a son."

My thoughts are with his family. May he rest in peace.

The shooter:

"When his ex-wife met him in the mid-1960s, he was a wine swiller consumed by hatred.

"[It] ate him alive like a cancer," said the 69-year-old woman, who did not want her name used. "It's all he would talk about. When I questioned him, he would get angry and abusive.

"He would talk about what the world would become in 20 or 30 years, that most of the country would be governed by black governors and that the Jewish people owned the media."

TPM has a profile and some of his postings, if you have the stomach for them. And this article makes me wonder why he wasn't under surveillance: he wrote a post saying his readers should not expect to hear from him again, gave away his computer, and wrote: "It's time to kill all the Jews." 

For the life of me, I cannot understand people like this. It's not just the completely insane beliefs, and the willingness to kill people, but letting your entire self become warped into pure hatred. As his ex-wife says: this sort of thing eats you alive. And he let it.

As a result, a good man was killed, and a child will grow up without a father. 

The most surreal comment I've read, from a white supremacist who knew von Brunn:

"De Nugent called von Brunn a genius but described the shooting as the act of "a loner and a hothead."

"The responsible white separatist community condemns this," he said. "It makes us look bad.""

Words fail.

In Which I Disagree With Megan McArdle Some More

by hilzoy

Megan McCardle has a rather peculiar response to my last post:

"Listening to the debates about abortion, it seems to me that really broad swathes of the pro-choice movement seem to genuinely not understand that this is a debate about personhood, which is why you get moronic statements like "If you think abortions are wrong, don't have one!"  If you think a fetus is a person, it is not useful to be told that you, personally, are not required to commit murder, as long as you leave the neighbors alone while they do it.

Conversely, if Africans are not people, then slavery is not wrong.  Or at least it's arguably not wrong--if Africans occupy some intermediate status between persons and animals**, then there is at least a legitimate argument for treating them like animals, rather than people."

"The debates about abortion" contain multitudes. I, however, understand perfectly well that the debate about abortion (at its best) is a debate about personhood. That's why I used the example of Iraq to make the point that Megan seems to be responding to:

"I opposed the war in Iraq, but I did not conclude that it would be OK for me to kill soldiers who were shipping out, policy makers with blood on their hands, and so forth. In that case, many more innocent lives were at stake than could possibly have been at stake in Tiller's."

I might be confused about a lot of things, but whether or not our soldiers and the inhabitants of Iraq are persons is not one of them, nor does my thought that killing Donald Rumsfeld would be wrong depend on any such idea. My point, basically, was this:

(a) We have a system for resolving political disputes in this country. We elect people, and those people make laws. When those laws are within the limits set by the Constitution, they are binding. When not, a court can strike them down. When we want to, we can change the Constitution, though it is (rightly) rather difficult.

(b) One inconvenient thing about democracies is that it is very, very unlikely that your own side will prevail all the time. You get a voice, but so does everyone else, and barring stupendous coincidences, this means that things won't always turn out the way you think they should.

(c) It would be naive to think that you will lose only on unimportant questions. Governments make hugely consequential decisions all the time. Sometimes, these decisions lead to the killing of innocent people, in ways that you think are deeply wrong.

(d) If anyone who believes the government had adopted a policy that would lead to the killing of innocent people is justified in killing people to stop this, then we might as well just decide not to have a government at all. During the Bush administration, half the country would have been justified in trying to assassinate the President and members of his administration. Any corporate executive who works for a company that does not adequately protect its workforce from poisoning or injury would have to watch her back. Etc., etc., etc.

(e) If you are committed to our form of government, you must leave some room between (1) the claim that some policy it adopts is wrong, even very wrong, and (2) the claim that you can kill people to prevent this wrong thing from happening. 

***

Steve Waldman writes:

"In a way, conservatives now face a choice similar to what liberals in the late 1960s and early 1970s faced during the hayday of the Weather Underground. Some on the New Left defended them as legitimate-albeit-excitable members of their broad coalition, while other more traditional liberals attacked them as extremists who violated liberal ideals. My sense of the history is that enough on the New Left defended extremists to tar all of liberalism. Will that happen for conservatives now?"

I don't want to engage with his claims about how many people condemned extremism and how many did not. But I absolutely agree that on the most charitable reading of the anti-abortion side, this is the choice they face. And be clear about what that choice was. Opposing the war in Vietnam was not a minor matter, like wearing love beads. The war in Vietnam produced massive casualties , many of whom were innocent civilians. A whole lot of lives were at stake. Despite that, I think the Weather Underground was wrong. Because the fact that lives are at stake is not enough to justify giving up on democracy. And be clear: when you think that when you lose out in a political debate in which lives are at stake, that makes it OK to kill people to get your way, you have given up on democracy.

Megan claims to find "the certainty of the pro-choice side so disturbing". But that's not what is at issue in my post, or publius', or in the comments. What bothered me about Megan's post wasn't anything to do with which side is right in the abortion debate; it was her claim that whenever someone thinks that our government, through its lawful decision procedures, has done something that will result in the deaths of innocents, that person is justified in using lethal force to get her way. 

If someone has a problem with excessive certainty here, it's not those of us who think that when we lose politically, and the stakes are non-negligible, we are not justified in resorting to political violence.

***

And one other thing: it's a bit rich to hear this coming from the right. Here I'll just quote Athenae (with my asterisks):

"For eight f*cking years anybody to the left of Pinochet had to kick back and watch while sensible centrists and the Coalition of the Involuntarily Committable got together and raped the country and f*cked up the whole world. For eight f*cking years we were told that marching in the streets with giant puppets was the most horrific form of treason imaginable, was demoralizing our troops and hurting the debate and making the baby Pope Benedict cry. Not once did I ever in that time hear Megan McArdle or any of her other sensible friends discuss how maybe, just maybe, President Bush and his administration had PUSHED us to the edge, where we HAD to make those puppets because we felt the political process was closed to us.

No, back then it was "elections have consequences" and "you lost" and "look upon my works, ye mighty, and f*ck off," and anytime anybody had the temerity to say, "erm, dude, if you don't mind I'll be over here with this sign on a stick" they might as well have been plotting to shoe-bomb Air Force One the way the whiners in the nuttersphere howled and shrieked. There was none of this, "you just don't know how hard it is to be on the losing end of everything including your soul" back then. Just them, partying with Free Republic on the White House lawn, waving their big foam fingers in our faces going "nyah nyah nyah."

Now that they're out of power, natch, what choice do they have but to go shoot up church lobbies in the hopes of bagging abortion doctors for their trophy wall of American apostates? Really, what else could they do? It's not like they could vote, or convince other people to listen to them, or organize, or do any of the damn things I feel like we've been doing since before there was dirt in order to get a not-entirely-crazy in-another-life-he'd-be-a-moderate-Republican dude finally elected so a third of the country could act like Satan just put his feet up on their mother's white-clothed dinner table."

That is, in fact, the way I felt for much of those eight years. And I had a lot more excuse for feeling that the political process had been closed to me: after all, my candidate for President actually won the election in 2000, for all the good it did him. And yet, somehow, I managed not to kill anyone. Funny thing, that.

In Which I Disagree With Megan McArdle

by hilzoy

Earlier, I argued that we ought to take steps to assure that late-term abortions are available to people who need them, and that one reason to do so was to make it clear that terrorism does not pay. In response, Megan McArdle writes:

"Still, I am shocked to see so many liberals today saying that the correct response is, essentially, doubling down.  Make the law more friendly to abortion!  Show the fundies who's boss!  You know what fixes terrorism?  Bitch slap those bastards until they understand that we'll never compromise!

Well, it sure worked in Iraq.  I think Afghanistan's going pretty well, too, right?

Using the political system to stomp on radicalized fringes does not seem to be very effective in getting them to eschew violence.  In fact, it seems to be a very good way of getting more violence.  Possibly because those fringes have often turned to violence precisely because they feel that the political process has been closed off to them."

I did not advocate "using the political system to stomp on radicalized fringes". There are things I could have advocated that would have met that description: criminalizing certain forms of anti-abortion advocacy, for instance, or loosening the standards that RICO prosecutions of them must meet. Or I could have advocated stomping on them more directly: for instance, by deploying on them the tactics they use on abortion providers and their staff: large trucks parked in front of their houses with pictures of the bodies of murdered doctors; repeating tape loops of women describing what it's like to try to find a doctor to remove their stillborn fetuses from their bodies; asking neighborhood children how they feel about the fact that their neighbors try to keep mommies from seeing a doctor when they're sick...

Any of those things might be described as "stomping on radicalized fringes". (I don't want to get into "bitch-slapping": as an ex-domestic violence worker, I loathe that term.) Trying to ensure that they do not succeed in achieving their goal of depriving women of a right to which they are entitled under our Constitution, as presently interpreted, is not. If, say, a group of anti-immunization fanatics had succeeded in terrorizing doctors to such a degree that almost no one offered children immunization, would trying to ensure that kids had access to their measles vaccines count as "stomping on" anti-immunization groups? Or precluding some "compromise" that one ought to pursue -- like maybe allowing vaccination for measles, but not for mumps or rubella?

I don't think so. I'm surprised that Megan does.

***

I also deeply disagree with this:

"We accept that when the law is powerless, people are entitled to kill in order to prevent other murders--had Tiller whipped out a gun at an elementary school, we would now be applauding his murderer's actions.  In this case, the law was powerless because the law supported late-term abortions.  Moreover, that law had been ruled outside the normal political process by the Supreme Court.  If you think that someone is committing hundreds of gruesome murders a year, and that the law cannot touch him, what is the moral action?  To shrug?  Is that what you think of ordinary Germans who ignored Nazi crimes?  Is it really much of an excuse to say that, well, most of your neighbors didn't seem to mind, so you concluded it must be all right?  We are not morally required to obey an unjust law.  In fact, when the death of innocents is involved, we are required to defy it."

The law is not "powerless" in this case. It is not trying and failing to prevent abortion. On the contrary: our Constitution, as presently interpreted, grants women the right to seek an abortion. In order to conclude that killing people is justified in these circumstances, you need to think not just that the lives of innocents are at stake, but that this is the kind of situation in which you should take the law into your own hands, and thereby undermine our system of law and government.

I do not think that it would be OK for people who oppose the death penalty to kill the people who carry it out. I opposed the war in Iraq, but I did not conclude that it would be OK for me to kill soldiers who were shipping out, policy makers with blood on their hands, and so forth. In that case, many more innocent lives were at stake than could possibly have been at stake in Tiller's.

Deciding to start killing people who are doing things that are legal is deciding to go into full-scale revolt against one's government. There are surely times when it is right to do that, the Nazis being one obvious example. But the question when one ought to do so is a lot more difficult than McArdle makes it out to be, since a basically workable system of laws is a very great good, and it's a lot easier to destroy than it is to create. 

Terror Should Not Pay

by hilzoy

Ezra Klein, about the murder of George Tiller:

"As The American Prospect's Ann Friedman writes, this has to be understood in context. It is the final, decisive act in "an ongoing campaign of intimidation and harassment against someone who was providing completely legal health-care services." That campaign stretched over decades of protests, lawsuits, violence, and, finally, murder. The different elements were not always orchestrated. But the intent remained constant: To counter the absence of a statute that would make Tiller's work illegal with enough intimidation to render it impossible.

This was, in other words, a political act. Tiller was murdered so that those in his line of work would be intimidated. In conversations with folks yesterday, I heard well-meaning variants on the idea that it would be unseemly to push legislation in the emotional aftermath of Tiller's execution. I disagree. Roeder was acting in direct competition with the United States Congress. And it's quite likely that he changed the status quo. Legislative language and judicial rulings had made abortive procedures legal and thus accessible. Yesterday's killing was meant to render abortive procedures unsafe for doctors to conduct and thus inaccessible.

If a woman cannot get an abortion because no nearby providers are willing to assume the risk of performing it, the actual outcome is precisely the same as if the procedure were illegal. Roeder has, in all likelihood, made abortion less accessible. It would be, in my view, a perfectly appropriate response for the Congress to decisively prove his action not only ineffectual, but, in a broad sense, counterproductive."

I agree completely. I would recommend the following:

(a) Repeal the ban on dilation and extraction. The Congress should not get into the specifics of what procedures can be used when. If it must, it should broaden the set of cases in which dilation and extraction can be used to include not only cases in which the life of the mother is in danger, but cases in which her health is in danger, or in which the child has a serious and incurable medical condition that would make its life short and miserable. It ought to be possible to draft this in such a way that Down Syndrome did not count, but the cases I wrote about earlier would: "a brief and painful life filled with surgery and organ transplants"; "her babies developed with no faces, with no way to eat or breathe." 

(b) Require training in late-term abortion techniques for Ob/Gyn certification. Note that these techniques are also used when the fetus has already died. Read this article to see why this matters.

(c) Require that any hospital provide any woman whose fetus has died, whose life is in danger, or whose fetus has developed the kind of medical problem described in (a), with appropriate treatment to remove that fetus, and that that treatment be fully reimbursable by the federal government. If they have no one on staff who can provide that treatment, they should get someone. See (b) above. There should be religious exemptions, but they should not extend to the treatment of women whose fetus has already died.

One way to stop terrorism is by enforcing our laws. We should absolutely do that. But another is to make it clear that terrorism doesn't work. We should do that too. And the best way I can think of is to change our present situation, in which only a handful of doctors perform late-term abortions. We can keep whatever strictures we want* on the cases in which we think abortions should be permissible after viability while also ensuring that no one person has to take on him- or herself the risks that militant anti-abortionists want to subject them to.

Memorial Day

by hilzoy

To all those who died in combat operations -- the 4300 reported dead in Iraq, the 687 reported dead in Afghanistan, those who killed themselves during or because of their service, or whose deaths are in some other way attributable to their service in combat: we honor you, and we will not forget.

Every Memorial Day (and not only then), I try to remind myself of what it means that people who serve in the military are willing to fight and die when our civilian leaders ask them to, whether they agree with those leaders or not. That's a stunning act of faith in American democracy. In return, we owe everyone who serves the effort to be the best citizens we can be, and to elect the people who are most likely to exercise good judgment about whether and when to ask them to risk their lives. 

(We also owe that to the citizens of other countries whom someone might think of invading, and to ourselves, but those are obligations to recall on a different day.)

Why We Fight

by hilzoy

I'm late getting to this, from McClatchy:

"The Bush administration applied relentless pressure on interrogators to use harsh methods on detainees in part to find evidence of cooperation between al Qaida and the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's regime, according to a former senior U.S. intelligence official and a former Army psychiatrist. (...)

A former senior U.S. intelligence official familiar with the interrogation issue said that Cheney and former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld demanded that the interrogators find evidence of al Qaida-Iraq collaboration.

"There were two reasons why these interrogations were so persistent, and why extreme methods were used," the former senior intelligence official said on condition of anonymity because of the issue's sensitivity.

"The main one is that everyone was worried about some kind of follow-up attack (after 9/11). But for most of 2002 and into 2003, Cheney and Rumsfeld, especially, were also demanding proof of the links between al Qaida and Iraq that (former Iraqi exile leader Ahmed) Chalabi and others had told them were there."

It was during this period that CIA interrogators waterboarded two alleged top al Qaida detainees repeatedly -- Abu Zubaydah at least 83 times in August 2002 and Khalid Sheik Muhammed 183 times in March 2003 -- according to a newly released Justice Department document.

"There was constant pressure on the intelligence agencies and the interrogators to do whatever it took to get that information out of the detainees, especially the few high-value ones we had, and when people kept coming up empty, they were told by Cheney's and Rumsfeld's people to push harder," he continued.

"Cheney's and Rumsfeld's people were told repeatedly, by CIA . . . and by others, that there wasn't any reliable intelligence that pointed to operational ties between bin Laden and Saddam, and that no such ties were likely because the two were fundamentally enemies, not allies."

Senior administration officials, however, "blew that off and kept insisting that we'd overlooked something, that the interrogators weren't pushing hard enough, that there had to be something more we could do to get that information," he said."

If I were Dick Cheney or Donald Rumsfeld, the idea that there might be a just God would make my bones freeze with terror.

"We Will Bring Our Troops Home"

by hilzoy

I find it hard to express how happy this makes me:

"Let me say this as plainly as I can: by August 31, 2010, our combat mission in Iraq will end.

As we carry out this drawdown, my highest priority will be the safety and security of our troops and civilians in Iraq. We will proceed carefully, and I will consult closely with my military commanders on the ground and with the Iraqi government. There will surely be difficult periods and tactical adjustments. But our enemies should be left with no doubt: this plan gives our military the forces and the flexibility they need to support our Iraqi partners, and to succeed.

After we remove our combat brigades, our mission will change from combat to supporting the Iraqi government and its Security Forces as they take the absolute lead in securing their country. As I have long said, we will retain a transitional force to carry out three distinct functions: training, equipping, and advising Iraqi Security Forces as long as they remain non-sectarian; conducting targeted counter-terrorism missions; and protecting our ongoing civilian and military efforts within Iraq. Initially, this force will likely be made up of 35-50,000 U.S. troops.

Through this period of transition, we will carry out further redeployments. And under the Status of Forces Agreement with the Iraqi government, I intend to remove all U.S. troops from Iraq by the end of 2011. We will complete this transition to Iraqi responsibility, and we will bring our troops home with the honor that they have earned."

It's worth reading the speech in its entirety, because there are other very good things in it. President Obama addressed the people of Iraq directly, and I thought that both what he said and the fact that he spoke to them were very good. I was moved by his words to the men and women who have served in Iraq, and by this promise: "You and your families have done your duty - now a grateful nation must do ours." I was also very glad that he mentioned the nearly five million Iraqi refugees:

"Diplomacy and assistance is also required to help the millions of displaced Iraqis. These men, women and children are a living consequence of this war and a challenge to stability in the region, and they must become a part of Iraq’s reconciliation and recovery. America has a strategic interest – and a moral responsibility – to act."

But the announcement of a date certain for the withdrawal both of combat troops and of all troops means more to me than anything. This horrible mistake of a war has cost so many people so much. It should never have been started. It will not be over for the Iraqis in 2011. But it will, at last, be over for us.