VICTOR DAVIS HANSON ON POLITICS:

Yet the universal human desire to be associated in the here and now with the assumed winning side — and to shun perceived defeat — trumps them all. Throughout this war, that natural urge explains most of the volatile and shifting views of our politicians, pundits and media as they scramble to readjust to the up-and-down daily news from Iraq.

And so it is with the latest positioning about the surge that to a variety of observers seems successful — at least for now.

A lot of people do seem kind of fickle that way. Related thoughts here: “To paraphrase John Kerry: Who wants to be the last person calling for the U.S. to surrender a war the Army is winning? Apparently not Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, Barack Obama or the New York Times, which just 5 weeks ago said genocide was better than having U.S. troops keep the peace in Iraq.”

And still more here.

UPDATE: Barack Obama’s latest Iraq strategy.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Hmm. The Pajamas Media item above links to this article on Obama from The Guardian, with this passage:

Answering a question on how he would refocus U.S. troops out of Iraq to better fight terrorism, he said, “We’ve to get the job done there and that requires us to have enough troops so that we’re not just air-raiding villages and killing civilians, which is causing enormous pressure over there.”

But if you read this version of the same AP story from Breitbart.com, the passage is different:

Asked whether he would move U.S. troops out of Iraq to better fight terrorism elsewhere, he brought up Afghanistan and said, “We’ve got to get the job done there and that requires us to have enough troops so that we’re not just air-raiding villages and killing civilians, which is causing enormous pressure over there.”

I suspect that the Breitbart version is more accurate than the Guardian version, because when I read it originally in The Guardian I remember thinking that this would have been a marginally plausible criticism of Afghanistan policy (though the “killing civilians” bit is mostly Taliban propaganda) but was utterly nonsensical in the context of Iraq. I assumed Obama was conflating the two, but it appears that the error is the AP’s.

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader D.G. Robertson sends this link to a report from the Nashua Telegraph, which has the Obama quote this way:

“Now you have narco drug lords who are helping to finance the Taliban, so we’ve got to get the job done there, and that requires us to have enough troops that we are not just air raiding villages and killing civilians, which is causing enormous problems there,’’ Obama said.

Well, the narco drug lords are an issue — has he been reading StrategyPage? Actually, probably not, as here’s what StrategyPage says about air raids and “civilian casualties:”

Last week, U.S. forces detected a meeting of Taliban leaders in southern Afghanistan. Smart bombs hit the meeting, which had gathered over a hundred Taliban followers to witness the execution of two men suspected of passing information to the government. Over a hundred people were killed. The Taliban promptly claimed most of the dead were civilians. But they always do that, and no one believes them anymore.

No one but Obama, I guess. Robertson also notes that not long ago Obama was saying that the lives of U.S. troops killed in Iraq were “wasted.”

Meanwhile, also from the Nashua Telegraph, is this rather inflammatory quote:

Campaign spokesman Reid Cherlin said Obama was not endorsing the current Bush policy, which consists solely of air raids and bombing of civilians.

Really? Solely? Evidence that the Obama campaign remains unready for primetime, I’m afraid. Or another botched quote from the press, I guess . . . .

I tried to find an email for inquiries on Obama’s site, but the closest I could come to was an interview request form. If anybody from the campaign is reading this and wants to clarify, you can email me at pundit -at- instapundit.com.

MORE: Allah says I’m wrong about the civilian casualties, last week’s bogus reports notwithstanding. But he doesn’t address the Obama campaign’s charge that our strategy revolves around bombing civilians. Nor have I heard from the Obama campaign on that issue.

MORE CRUSHING OF DISSENT.

RON PAUL’S French fan base. But maybe they have a hidden agenda.

THOUGHTS ON KARL ROVE’S DEPARTURE, from Marc Ambinder.

AMERICAN UNIVERSITIES chastise their British counterparts for their antisemitic boycott of Israel.

WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU DON’T RESIST: And when you do.

Your results may vary, of course.

DETAILS THAT DON’T MATTER, in modern journalism.

MORE ATLANTIC (PROTO) HURRICANE-BLOGGING, from Brendan Loy.

ARMED WOMEN in Kashmir.

DUDE, WHERE’S MY KARMA? The coming shortage of “rapacious oldsters.”

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Foolish myths about Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia.

CANADIAN GENERAL LEWIS MACKENZIE: NATO Countries are Shirking.

It’s good to see the United States, Britain and Canada starting to focus on the shortage of NATO “boots on the ground” in Afghanistan, particularly in the volatile southern part of the country. It has been obvious to anyone with a modicum of operational experience that this was the case shortly after the U.S. had to divide its resources between Afghanistan and Iraq in 2003.

With NATO taking a leading role in Afghanistan, it was assumed that Article 5 of the alliance’s charter that states that an attack against one is to be considered as an attack against all would result in a traffic jam of NATO troops as they deployed in the direction of the threat. Four years later, politically constrained military commanders on the ground are “requesting” the Alliance’s civilian leadership find them 2,500 more troops to secure the south of the country.

You don’t tippy-toe in incremental steps in search of victory.

Nope.

THOUGHTS ON ENEMY COMBATANTS and domestic politics, from Jonah Goldberg.

OSLO’S SAD RESULT: “It was less than two months ago, after the violent takeover of Gaza, that Hamas spokesmen took to the op-ed pages of American newspapers to proclaim that despite all the suicide bombings and summary executions, Hamas intends to create a good-government, pragmatic Islamic state in Gaza. . . . None of this, of course, has happened, and the news that has been trickling out of Gaza over the past few days portends an even bigger horrorshow.”

A 200MPH FUEL-CELL CAR: Well, maybe. There’s video.

SO I FINISHED UP A LAW REVIEW ARTICLE YESTERDAY, and rewarded myself by finishing William Gibson’s Spook Country. I enjoyed it, and it had more connection to his last book, Pattern Recognition, than I had expected. It had a bunch of quotable passages, too. Here are a few:

“The world we walk around in would be channels.”

She cocked her head at him. “Channels?”

“Yes. And given what broadcast television wound up being, that doesn’t sound so good. But think about blogs, how each one is trying to describe reality.”

“They are?” “In theory.” “Okay.”

“But when you look at blogs, where you’re most likely to find the real info is in the links. It’s contextual, and not only who the blog’s linked to, but who’s linked to the blog.”

—–

The old man was as American as it got, but in what she thought of as some very recently archaic way. Someone who would have been in charge of something, in America, when grown-ups still ran things.

—–

Cultural Marxism was what other people called political correctness, according to Brown, but it was really cultural Marxism and had come to the United States from Germany, after World War II, in the cunning skulls of a clutch of youngish professors from Frankfurt. The Frankfurt School, as they’d called themselves, had wasted no time in plunging their intellectual ovipositors repeatedly into the unsuspecting body of old-school American academia. Milgrim always enjoyed this part; it had an appealing vintage sci-fi campiness to it, staccato and exciting, with grainy Eurocommie star-spawn in tweed jackets and knit ties, breeding like Starbucks.

_____

“A nation,” he heard himself say, “consists of its laws. A nation does not consist of its situation at a given time. If an individual’s morals are situational, that individual is without morals. If a nation’s laws are situational, that nation has no laws, and soon isn’t a nation.”

Anyway, I enjoyed it; if you’re a Gibson fan you will too.

JEFF EMANUEL is blogging from Iraq.

RANDY NEAL ON photographing meteors digitally.

THE FLORIDA GOP CONTEMPLATES a rule change on delegates. “Some news that every Republican presidential campaign has taken note of: the winner of the Jan. 29 Republican primary in Florida could get all the delegates. The current winner-take-all-by-congressional-district rules might be jettisoned.”

AL QAEDA FACING problems in Arabia: “Many people in Arabia, especially Saudi Arabia, still support terror attacks on infidels (non-Moslems), but have no patience for terrorists who attack Moslems. While a basic tenet of al Qaeda is deposing the Saudi monarchy, trying to do this only turns the Saudi population against the terrorists. Same problem in Yemen. This has caused quite a bit of debate within al Qaeda, but no consensus yet about what to do. So al Qaeda continues to get hammered in the areas where it has the most potential support.” Hammer away.

UH OH: “A short time from now it is likely that a new form of Internet based warfare will erupt across the globe. The potency of this iWar will grow as the economies of the world steadily embrace the Internet to deliver services. At the same time, iWar will maintain its ease of adoption and low cost. iWar may also maintain its deniability.”

On the upside, however, it doesn’t involve cities getting blown up.

RAND SIMBERG on Karl Rove and the Wall Street Journal.

GOOD NEWS: “The number of truck bombs and other large al-Qaeda-style attacks in Iraq have declined nearly 50% since the United States started increasing troop levels in Iraq about six months ago, according to the U.S. military command in Iraq.” You can make too much of numbers like this — but you can bet that if the trend were going the other way it would be getting a lot more attention.

IN THE MAIL: Mark Tungate’s Adland: A Global History of Advertising. Looks quite interesting.

PORKBUSTERS UPDATE: Robert Novak looks at earmarks and corruption. Excerpt:

With the midnight hour approaching on Saturday, Aug. 4, near the end of a marathon session, Democratic and Republican leaders alike wanted to pass the defense appropriations bill quickly and start their summer recess. But Republican Rep. Jeff Flake’s stubborn adherence to principle forced an hour-long delay that revealed unpleasant realities about Congress.

Flake insisted on debating the most egregious of the 1,300 earmarks placed in the defense money bill by individual House members that authorize spending in their districts. Defending every such earmark was the chairman of the Appropriations defense subcommittee: Democratic Rep. John Murtha, unsmiling and unresponsive to questions posed on the House floor by Flake. Murtha is called “King Corruption” by Republican reformers, but what happened after midnight on Aug. 5 is not a party matter. Democrats and Republicans, as always, locked arms to support every earmark. It makes no difference that at least seven House members are under investigation by the Justice Department. A bipartisan majority insists on sending taxpayers’ money to companies in their districts without competitive bidding or public review.

Claims of newly established transparency were undermined by the late-night follies. Flake, who ran a Phoenix think tank, the Goldwater Institute, before coming to Congress in 2001, is immensely unpopular on both sides of the aisle for forcing votes on his colleagues’ pork. He burnished that reputation by prolonging the marathon Saturday session and challenging selected earmarks.

Flake looks good. Congress as a whole, not so much.

UPDATE: An earmark anecdote.