IN THE MAIL, a new book by famed stats-blogger Iain Murray: The Really Inconvenient Truths: Seven Environmental Catastrophes Liberals Don’t Want You to Know About– Because They Helped Cause Them

Plus, Randy Barnett’s new casebook, Constitutional Law: Cases in Context. And yesterday it was Terry Heaton and Michael Yon. Blogger books everywhere!

TALKLEFT: “Where’s Obama on Israel and the Palestinians? On both sides.”

AUSTIN BAY on Petraeus, Iraq, and Congress:

Since Gen. Petraeus’ and Ambassador Ryan Crocker’s September 2007 testimony, “the Anaconda” (the incremental synergy of this complex war-fighting and nation-building process) has dramatically squeezed al Qaeda. No, it hasn’t crushed it — but the organization is physically damaged. Moreover, with the “Sunni Awakening” and similar programs, al Qaeda has suffered extraordinary political and information defeats as Sunnis publicly turned on the jihadis.

Is this victory in Iraq? No. But it suggests we’ve won a major battle with potentially global significance, the kind that in the long term squeezes al Qaeda’s ideological appeal in all corners of the planet. . . .

The Iraqi army and Iraqi government planned and executed the operation themselves. Failure? Don’t think so. This is progress. As time passes, it is increasingly clear the Iraqi army did a far better job than the Shia gangsters.

But we all know why the complex chart gets ignored and successes are glasses half-empty: A presidential election campaign is on, and the Democratic Party has bet its soul on defeat.

“Hear no progress in Iraq, see no progress in Iraq, but most of all speak of no progress in Iraq.” Thus Sen. Joe Lieberman, a member of the Armed Services Committee, deftly summed the last two years of Democratic Party posturing as well as the Democrats’ talking points in the latest hearings.

Mr. Lieberman’s maverick pal, Sen. and Republican presidential nominee John McCain, spoke more bluntly, “Congress should not choose to lose in Iraq, but we should choose to succeed.”

Read the whole thing. And read this report from the New York Times, too, which is at considerable distance from the earlier NYT analysis that Mickey Kaus is mocking today. But then, it involves actual reporting.

And don’t miss these appalled thoughts on the Petraeus hearings from Iraq blogger Alaa. “I was watching the Interrogation of General David Petraeus and the ambassador. What struck me most was the attitude and words from some of the Democratic senators. It seemed as though the enemy for these ladies and gentlemen was not Al-Qaeda, the terrorists or people like that.”

NO DINOCHROME BRIGADE JUST YET:

This is how fragile the robotics industry is: Last year, three armed ground bots were deployed to Iraq. But the remote-operated SWORDS units were almost immediately pulled off the battlefield, before firing a single shot at the enemy. Here at the conference, the Army’s Program Executive Officer for Ground Forces, Kevin Fahey, was asked what happened to SWORDS. After all, no specific reason for the 11th-hour withdrawal ever came from the military or its contractors at Foster-Miller. Fahey’s answer was vague, but he confirmed that the robots never opened fire when they weren’t supposed to. His understanding is that “the gun started moving when it was not intended to move.” In other words, the SWORDS swung around in the wrong direction, and the plug got pulled fast. No humans were hurt, but as Fahey pointed out, “once you’ve done something that’s really bad, it can take 10 or 20 years to try it again.”

So SWORDS was yanked because it made people nervous. Meanwhile, the V-22 Osprey program has killed 30 people during test flights, but the tiltrotor aircraft is currently in active service.

Read the whole thing.

T.J. RODGERS on Green Nukes.

DEBUNKING THE CLIMATE-DISEASE CONNECTION.

ORGANIZATIONAL PROBLEMS for the McCain campaign? They’ve got about a month to get any problems under control. But this passage should serve as a wake-up call: “Regular PW visitors may recognize in this piece many similarities to Hillary Clinton’s dysfunctional organization.” Though fortunately many of these problems have already been addressed, at least to some degree.

MORE ON THE COLOMBIA FREE TRADE AGREEMENT:

DEMOCRATIC presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama may have their hearts in the right place in opposing a trade agreement with Colombia. It’s their better judgment that is mistaken.

The two candidates are wrong about the Colombian human rights violations they cite and the jobs they hope to save for Pennsylvania workers.

The agreement, which President Bush sent this week to Congress for an up or down vote, essentially makes permanent the trade preferences that Colombia has had for 17 years. What is new is that the treaty opens the Colombian market to US exports.

The Colombian government is making the bigger sacrifice because a permanent agreement removes uncertainty for investors. Trade, combined with US support for Colombia’s military and justice system, have helped Colombia beat back a leftist insurgency, largely demobilize right-wing paramilitaries, and spark a boom that has reduced poverty, unemployment, and the economic weight of drug mafias.

Congress has been extending the temporary preferences for months at a time. Kill the trade agreement and the preferences by all logic should be killed, too. That undercuts hundreds of thousands of Colombians who work in the higher-paying new export industries.

But the unions decided that they had to show their ability to stop something, and chose this. Merits don’t matter when it’s all about demonstrating clout.

THE BEST REMEDY FOR RADICAL ISLAM? Exposure to radical Islam:

After almost five years of war, many young people in Iraq, exhausted by constant firsthand exposure to the violence of religious extremism, say they have grown disillusioned with religious leaders and skeptical of the faith that they preach. In two months of interviews with 40 young people in five Iraqi cities, a pattern of disenchantment emerged, in which young Iraqis, both poor and middle class, blamed clerics for the violence and the restrictions that have narrowed their lives.

“I hate Islam and all the clerics because they limit our freedom every day and their instruction became heavy over us,” said Sara, a high school student in Basra. “Most of the girls in my high school hate that Islamic people control the authority because they don’t deserve to be rulers.”

Atheer, a 19-year-old from a poor, heavily Shiite neighborhood in southern Baghdad, said: “The religion men are liars. Young people don’t believe them. Guys my age are not interested in religion anymore.”

Read the whole thing. (Via Classical Values).

IN TODAY’S WALL STREET JOURNAL, AN OPED FROM MICHAEL YON:

It is said that generals always fight the last war. But when David Petraeus came to town it was senators – on both sides of the aisle – who battled over the Iraq war of 2004-2006. That war has little in common with the war we are fighting today.

I may well have spent more time embedded with combat units in Iraq than any other journalist alive. I have seen this war – and our part in it – at its brutal worst. And I say the transformation over the last 14 months is little short of miraculous. . . .

This leads us to the most out-of-date aspect of the Senate debate: the argument about the pace of troop withdrawals. Precisely because we have made so much political progress in the past year, rather than talking about force reduction, Congress should be figuring ways and means to increase troop levels. For all our successes, we still do not have enough troops. This makes the fight longer and more lethal for the troops who are fighting. To give one example, I just returned this week from Nineveh province, where I have spent probably eight months between 2005 to 2008, and it is clear that we remain stretched very thin from the Syrian border and through Mosul. Vast swaths of Nineveh are patrolled mostly by occasional overflights.

We know now that we can pull off a successful counterinsurgency in Iraq. We know that we are working with an increasingly willing citizenry. But counterinsurgency, like community policing, requires lots of boots on the ground. You can’t do it from inside a jet or a tank.

Read the whole thing. And buy his book! Get a second copy to send your congressman.

FEELING RIGHT: A new fitness-and-health blog from Robert Mayer. Here’s one helpful post: 5 Easy Dinner Habits You Didn’t Think Of.

MORE OF THE WRIGHT STUFF: “Just to keep up to date, the noxious Rev. Jeremiah Wright will speak at the Detroit branch of the NAACP 53rd Annual Fight for Freedom Fund dinner. I would have jumped on this one yesterday, but given that NAACP chair Julian Bond has compared the GOP to the Taliban, given an award to someone who called Condoleeza Rice a murderer, and engaged in bizzare conspiracy theories about Hurricane Katrina, it is far more predictable than outrageous (though it is that also).”

UPDATE: Related item here.

IN PHILADELPHIA, “FIGHTING CRIME” BY OPENLY BREAKING THE LAW. They don’t call him “Mayor Nutter” for nothing, I guess.

NYT: Fight For Sadr City a Proving Ground for Iraqi Military.

Plus, was Basra a failed Iranian takeover bid?

DAPHNA ZIMAN RECEIVES A FULL APOLOGY FROM REV. LEE for his anti-semitic rant.

TIGERHAWK: “I have to admit, the evidence that John McCain is a Cylon is fairly persuasive, and that’s without considering his proven ability to withstand both physical and psychological torture.”

MORE ON MINIMUM SOUND LEVELS FOR CARS: I just want mine to make that Jetsons-style warbling noise as I go by.

BLUE-ON-BLUE: Over at Larry Johnson’s No Quarter blog they’re still hammering Obama and Jeremiah Wright. They’re getting so much traffic they were knocked off line for a while today. Some of the comments are kind of ugly.

UPDATE: Oliver Willis: “This is what a small yet vocal sector of the liberal blogosphere has turned into. “ I agree, except for the “small” and “turned into” part . . . .

ANOTHER UPDATE: “Anyone InstaPundit links to is servicing Republicans.” And now I’ve linked to that, so . . . .

Didn’t Captain Kirk freak out an alien supercomputer this way once? . . . .

MORE ON THE CRUSHING OF DISSENT IN CANADA, from Eric Scheie. “So, in fighting the growing censorship movement, every little bit helps. Because it can happen here.” Follow the link to see what you can do.

BOINGBOING TV: The Miss Hooker 2008 beauty pageant. I suppose it’s an honor just to be nominated.

KILLING PEOPLE in the name of safety?

SOME LAST MINUTE tax tips. And more here.

JESSE WALKER: “It might sound odd coming from a libertarian, but I wish the Pelosi-Reid Democrats had more in common with Franklin Roosevelt. Not the Franklin Roosevelt who occupied the White House from 1933 to 1945, but the Franklin Roosevelt who aspired to the White House in the election of 1932. The Democratic platform of that year is a remarkable document, considering the way the party’s candidate went on to govern.” Was it just there to fool the rubes? If so, it worked!

DON’T FORGET: Saturday night is Yuri’s Night. 173 parties in 49 countries on 7 continents!