The cracks begin to show

Hillary Clinton no longer looks inevitable

ON December 8th Hillary Clinton received what should have been a boost from Andrew Young, one of the giants of the civil-rights movement. Mr Young pronounced that he wants her chief rival, Barack Obama, to be president—but in 2016, not 2008.

The 46-year-old Mr Obama is just too green about the gills for the highest office in the land, Mr Young argued, and lacks a network of political allies that could sustain him in times of trouble. “To put a brother in there by himself is to set him up for crucifixion,” he said. But he could not resist adding a kicker. “Bill [Clinton] is every bit as black as Barack—he's probably gone with more black women than Barack.”

Mr Young's faux pas is a small symptom of the Clinton campaign's troubles. Mrs Clinton's commanding leads in the make-or-break states of Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina have evaporated. And the much-vaunted Hillary machine is looking, for the moment at least, more Heath Robinson than Vorsprung durch Technik. The bad news keeps coming, and even the good news has a way of turning bad.

Mr Obama is proving to be Mrs Clinton's perfect nightmare. He has not only neutralised her most compelling claim for attention—the first black president is a more momentous prospect than the first woman president. He has also shaped the race. His early entry into the contest forced Mrs Clinton to declare her candidacy sooner than she had planned. His fund-raising prowess forced her to make much more use of her husband than she had intended. Last weekend stadium-sized crowds turned up to watch Oprah Winfrey, the only woman in America who can turn “Anna Karenina” into a bestseller, stumping for Mr Obama. Mrs Clinton was reduced to touring Iowa with her daughter, Chelsea, and her mother, Dorothy.

Mrs Clinton's problems have forced her to abandon the high horse of inevitability for the boxing ring. Yet so far she has proved to be no great shakes as a pugilist. She excused her poor performance in a debate in Philadelphia by accusing her fellow (male) candidates of “piling on”. This feebly suggested that she wanted to be given special treatment because of her gender. Then she threw a succession of wild punches that made her look like an amateur. The Clinton campaign's decision to dredge up the fact that Mr Obama had written an essay in kindergarten on how he wanted to be president was particularly misguided. What sort of person quotes a kindergarten essay against a rival?

Mrs Clinton's recent troubles have raised questions about what is arguably her most important selling-point, her competence. The Clintonistas have always presented her as a woman who is “tough enough” to deal with anything that is thrown at her—trained in the Clinton wars of the 1990s and always ready with a counter-punch. She is certainly one of America's most accomplished practitioners of the politics of personal destruction. But the skills that she perfected behind the scenes seem to be far less effective when they are practised in the limelight.

Same old dirty politics

Mrs Clinton's troubles have also reminded people of what they most disliked about the politics of the Clinton-Bush era. “She's run what Washington would call a textbook campaign,” Mr Obama argues. “But the problem is the textbook itself.” This is self-serving: all campaigns employ the dark arts of polls, story-planting and character assassination, and Mr Obama is no exception. But Mrs Clinton is vulnerable to the charge that she uses them more than most. She is surrounded by veteran pollsters and lobbyists from her husband's administration. She seems to delight in political warfare—“Now the fun part starts,” she stupidly declared about her battle with Mr Obama. And her campaign seems addicted to spin. Mr Clinton did his wife no favours when he recently declared, despite evidence to the contrary, that he had opposed the Iraq war from the start.

Mrs Clinton's style inevitably raises questions about her character. Discuss her with voters and the same words keep cropping up—“disciplined”, “robotic”, “cold”, “scripted”, “calculating” (if childhoods are to be invoked, even her mother once said that “she just does everything she has to do to get along and get ahead”). Large numbers of voters regard her as slippery and untrustworthy. This inevitably raises questions about her electability. Mrs Clinton sometimes manages to lose in head-to-head polls against leading Republicans, despite a tidal wave of anti-Republican sentiment. A recent Gallup poll showed that, with 47% of people favourably disposed to her and 50% unfavourably disposed, she had the highest “negatives” of any candidate in the race, Democratic or Republican. Those negatives are particularly high in swing states such as Colorado.

None of this means that the former first lady's goose is cooked. Mrs Clinton is still well ahead in national polls and in the often overlooked early state of Nevada. Americans do not necessarily feel that they need to like their presidents. Richard Nixon won a resounding victory in 1972. Nearly as many Americans disliked Bill Clinton as liked him when he ran for the White House. And the (just about) Republican front-runner, Rudy Giuliani, is hardly a likeable chap. Ed Koch once wrote a book about his fellow mayor simply entitled “Giuliani: Nasty Man”.

But Mrs Clinton's problems are slowly shifting the calculus at the heart of the Democratic race. Hitherto most Democrats have calculated, or perhaps been resigned to thinking, that she is the safest bet. The young Mr Obama might deliver a spectacular victory, but he might equally well flame out spectacularly. Mrs Clinton may always have high negatives but, in an anti-Republican year, she would be wily and experienced enough to take on the Republican machine and eke out a victory in the electoral college. The past few weeks have made Mr Obama look a bit less risky—and Mrs Clinton a lot less safe.

Economics focus

The uncomfortable rise of the rupee

Is India suffocating from too much foreign attention?

INDIA, it is fair to say, is not yet reconciled to the new-found strength of its currency. One poor wretch, pressed against the car window at a Delhi traffic light, tries to change a dollar bill she presumably cadged off a tourist. She wants 50 rupees for it.

Alas, the dollar now fetches less than 40 rupees (see left-hand chart). India's currency has strengthened by about 15% against the greenback in the past year and by over 10%, on an inflation-adjusted, trade-weighted basis, since August 2006. The rupee's rise may be less dramatic than that of the Philippine peso, Brazilian real or Turkish lira. But it is uncomfortable nonetheless.

This vigour is due to a strong inflow of foreign capital, some of it enticed by India's promise, the rest disillusioned by the rich world's financial troubles. The net inflow amounted to almost $45 billion in the year to March, compared with $23.4 billion a year earlier (see right-hand chart).

Street children are not the only ones regretting this influx. India's IT industry, which first advertised India's virtues to the outside world, is now suffering more than most from the avid interest in the rupee. Worst hit, however, are India's labour-intensive manufacturers. Textile exports, for example, fell by 11.7% in the year to April. Kamal Nath, India's minister of commerce and industry, fears that exporters may shed 2m jobs.

The Reserve Bank of India (RBI), the country's central bank, has done its best to resist the appreciation, and, at the same time, contain inflation at home. As any student of macroeconomics knows, central banks struggle to achieve both objectives simultaneously in the face of strong inflows of capital. Printing rupees to buy the incoming dollars keeps the currency cheap but also adds to the money supply, stoking inflation.

To avert this danger, the RBI has tried to claw back the extra money by selling “sterilisation” bonds to banks and raising the reserves they must lock up in its vaults. But this sterilisation effort is hard to maintain. The RBI intermittently pauses for breath, letting go of the rupee. The market, anticipating its exhaustion, only tests it all the harder.

India's currency dilemma is also a deeper philosophical one. Just as the Reserve Bank straddles two objectives, so India is torn between competing visions of its future.

On the one hand, the country envies China its export success. The yuan remains keenly priced and closely shepherded. Why, then, reason many Indians, should their country handicap itself with a stubbornly strong exchange rate.

On the other hand, India has spent at least 15 years tentatively opening its capital account and liberalising its financial markets. It has had particular success in attracting foreign interest in its companies' shares, rather than the bonds or loans that got so many emerging economies into trouble in the past. Why not take advantage of this foreign money to pay for the investment the country so sorely needs? Ila Patnaik and Ajay Shah, of New Delhi's National Institute of Public Finance and Policy, point out that India has long yearned for a sustainable flow of foreign finance to supplement its domestic saving. Indeed, in 2002 its planning commission complained that the country's current-account deficit was less than half the size it had envisaged.

Nonetheless, some fear—and others hope—that the dearer rupee will prompt India to take a step backwards and tighten its controls on capital inflows. The RBI already circumscribes the freedom of firms to raise money abroad, and in October the regulator put a freeze on “participatory notes”, an indirect way for foreigners to play the Indian stockmarket.

Might it go further? In the 1990s Chile threw some “sand in the wheels” of international finance by forcing foreign investors to deposit a fraction of their money directed toward the country in an interest-free account. The encaje, as it was called, remains the most fashionable and widely studied experiment in capital controls. It probably helped to deter short-term investments. But the overall volume of inflows did not slow and Chile's real exchange rate continued to appreciate.

The other Chilean lesson from that period is more orthodox and thus less talked about. The government showed admirable fiscal restraint, which relieved some of the upward pressure on domestic prices, and also left the exchequer with enough money and credibility to cushion the economic downturn when foreign capital eventually turned tail in 1998.

Control freak

Such controls might buy India a temporary respite, but they will hardly convert it into a Chinese export powerhouse. Ms Patnaik thinks India has already gone too far down the road of financial liberalisation to emulate the exchange-rate policies of its bigger neighbour. China can accomplish its feats of reserve accumulation and sterilisation only because the country's banks are so docile and its savers captive. The banks are force-fed sterilisation bills, which yield even less than the central bank earns on its foreign reserves. They nonetheless survive because they rely on a steady supply of deposits from China's savers, who have few other places to put their money.

In India, on the other hand, banks are less compliant and savers are more choosy. If the banks do not offer them an attractive interest rate, they will buy shares, property or jewellery instead. Hence the banks, in turn, will not buy the RBI's sterilisation bonds unless it offers them an adequate return.

The migration of capital from the rich world to the poorer one is a sign of a bleaker season to come in the world's biggest markets. This would, then, seem an inauspicious moment for India to bet its future on export-led growth. If it cannot resist the inflow of foreign capital, it should try instead to make room for it—by observing fiscal restraint—and to make the most of it—by investing it wisely. India may then have an economy worthy of a more expensive rupee; and its children may have better things to do than hang around at traffic lights trying to change a buck.

United States approves FTA

Democratically-controlled Congress satisfied with labor, environmental issues and approves trade pact.

The United States Senate approved the free trade pact with Peru 77-18 Dec. 4, the final step in the controversial agreement’s passage since negotiations began in May 2004.

US President George W. Bush pressured the US Congress hard to pass the deal before Christmas break. The administration has made such bilateral agreements a central part of its trade policy, but it appears unlikely that similar deals with Colombia and Panama will pass before Bush leaves office in early 2009.

Peru and the United States signed the agreement in April 2006, and Peru’s unicameral Congress approved the pact in a late-night session in June of that year.

But the agreement was held up by the US Congress. When the Democratic Party won control of both houses of the US Congress in the November 2006 election, the agreement was held up by Democratic lawmakers who feared it the bill was lacking sufficient labor and environmental protection.

Critics have slammed the trade agreement for its lack of symmetry — they say that the monster economy of the United States, especially its heavily subsidized agricultural industry, would dwarf the Peruvian economy, despite its eight consecutive years of economic growth.

“…What the US wasn’t able to do regionally, for instance the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas, the FTAA, they’ll be able to do bilaterally, one by one, locking in these countries into trade rules that aren’t necessarily beneficial to the people,” said Vicki Gass, a senior associate on rights and development at the Washington Office on Latin America, a US-based think tank.

Pushing agreement along
In June, Peru’s Congress passed a series of amendments to appease Democratic lawmakers on environmental and labor protection.

“I think there were some advancement in the labor and environmental clauses, it’s a little stronger, but … in the case of Peru, even with the new labor regulation, you have 80 percent if not more of the population working on subcontracting or in the informal market.

They don’t enjoy labor rights. This is what was seen in the CAFTA+DR countries,” she said, referring to the Free Trade Agreement between the United States and Central America and the Dominican Republic.

“I think in many ways, the labor rights issues is a red herring because it ignores the other issues starting with the impact on agriculture and the end of democratic governance,” she added.

Gass said the bill breezed through the Senate, and was passed in the House of Representatives for political reasons, not economic ones, particularly the 2008 presidential election, with Democratic lawmakers eager to win support from big business.

The Council on Hemispheric Affairs (COHA), another Washington-based think tank warns that the new deal is just a repetition of NAFTA, which in the nearly 14 years since it has gone into effect has devastated the Mexican agricultural industry.

“…It is clear that Mexican farmers were not ready to compete with a Washington subsidized, ‘factory in the field’ US-style agricultural economy,” Manuel Trujillo wrote in a recent COHA report.

“The Bush Administration is either too narrow-minded or grossly uninterested with the negative aspects of the recent history of US-backed FTAs in the region to claim that any refusal to approve the pending FTAs with Colombia and Panama would be a slap in the face for democracy in Latin America.”

Tech.view

GPS changes direction

It's the journey, not the destination

PERSONAL navigators—those turn-by-turn digital finders usually mounted on car dashboards, with touch screens and pre-loaded maps—have become this holiday season’s must-have gizmo. They account for seven of Amazon.com’s 20 top-selling electronic products this month.

Over the past year, global sales of such gadgets have doubled to 30m units. That’s small beer compared with annual sales of mobile phones or MP3 players. But with prices tumbling 20% annually, GPS (global positioning system) devices have reached a “tipping point” that has pitched them into mainstream acceptance.

Jupiter imagesBring it with you

This has happened faster than anyone expected, and for one simple reason: they’ve become small and light enough to make them portable. Untethered from the dashboard, personal navigators now travel as much with the owner on foot as with the car on the highway. In so doing, the device is morphing into something different and even more useful.

Thank Moore’s Law for a start. The relentless doubling of processor power every 18 months or so has endowed such devices with enough speed and storage to cope with ever-richer mapping tasks. Meanwhile, battery developments pioneered by mobile-phone makers have allowed portable navigators to run all day on a single charge.

Add a broadband wireless connection to location data from GPS satellites, digital maps packed with millions of “points of interest”, spoken street names and directions, and the navigation gizmo ceases to be a passive tool. Instead, it becomes alive with real-time information about where precisely (within 15 yards) you are on the planet and what’s happening nearby.

With a wireless connection, a portable navigator can add additional content to its map, such as minute-by-minute changes in traffic and weather conditions. Dynamic data like that then make it easy to provide alternative routes.

Last month, TomTom, a Dutch GPS-maker, launched a product that routes cars around traffic jams. Using a wireless connection, the subscription-based service collects traffic data by anonymously tracking the movement of mobile phones through their cellular network. Where the phone bleeps concentrate is where the snarl-ups are.

Adding connectivity to navigation doesn’t stop there. It can also be used to search the internet for local content while on the move. Input your likes and dislikes beforehand, and the device will search for things you might find interesting en route—an outlet of your favourite coffee chain, record store or Japanese restaurant, an old movie you’ve been meaning to see, or a popular hangout for folks your own age and inclination. Users have barely begun to tap navigation tools for their social-networking potential.

Also, instead of showing merely generic icons for hotels, restaurants, petrol stations and stores, mobile maps with broadband connections can be fed specific logos for, say, McDonald's, Shell or Gap. Even better, outlets can embed their latest offerings, discounts or seasonal menus within their clickable logos displayed on the map. Suddenly it becomes easy to find the cheapest place to gas up or have lunch.

Real-time parking information is another service that’s set to change our driving habits. Merely showing the location of a car park is useless if the lot is full. What motorists need to know beforehand is whether there are any empty slots, and does the lot accept validation from nearby stores and restaurants. Adding such features to personal navigation gear is relatively easy once the device is connected to the internet.

As navigation technology broadens its scope, it is changing its role. Until now, it has been used to guide people to their destinations. These innovations are turning it into a mobile tool to find things of personal interest along the way. That makes the route as much an input as an output—and the journey at least as important as the destination.

Other things change once mobile navigation steps out of the car and takes a hike. For instance, the “granularity” of the information displayed has to be finer. The kind of information that’s perfectly adequate for driving along the highway at 30mph is nowhere near detailed enough for walking at 3mph. In a car, “coming up soon” means in the next mile or so; on foot, it means literally the next block.

In addition, the nature of the route becomes as important as the distance. Motorists can use service roads and side streets as well as main roads and freeways without hesitation. By contrast, pedestrians can’t use freeways, but they can take short-cuts up steps, along walkways and footpaths, and across parks, plazas and open ground.

Pedestrians also need to know more about the “topology” of the route they’re being told to follow. Where hills barely bother motorists, they are a serious concern for people on foot. Where motorists look out for street signs, pedestrians watch for landmarks and special buildings like post offices, libraries, schools and petrol stations.

A mapping company called Tele Atlas uses a fleet of vans equipped with GPS and video cameras to record how individual streets actually look to walkers. Enriching maps with a worm’s (rather than bird’s) eye view—with real 3D images of stores and other roadside features—makes life easier for pedestrians and motorists alike.

All of which suggests map-making is the key to this rapidly changing field. Knowing where precisely individuals are at any given instant—and what retail outlets and other establishments they are near—is central to mobile searching and to location-based advertising. That’s why the two leading digital-mapping companies, Tele Atlas and Navteq, have lately been the target of takeover bids.

Earlier this week, Navteq, based in Chicago, formally accepted an $8.1 billion offer from Nokia, the world’s largest mobile-phone maker. Last month, Garmin, a Kansas City-based GPS-maker, withdrew its $3.3 billion hostile bid for Tele Atlas, leaving the map-maker to rival TomTom.

That Nokia paid so much for Navteq shows how important location-based information is becoming to mobile-phone companies. In a recent survey by J.D. Power and Associates, over 40% of respondents wanted GPS on their phones. Only 26% thought WiFi would be handy, and 19% would opt for television.

Mobile phones and navigation gear are clearly converging. By offering connectivity, mobile-search and location-based services (including route directions), both are chasing the same market: a rising generation of footloose, gregarious and acquisitive consumers.

Is there room for both platforms? Possibly. Their different strengths and forms should continue to differentiate them.

Smart phones will always be more compact and provide better voice connections, thanks to their proprietary cellular networks. By contrast, personal navigators will continue to offer bigger touch-sensitive screens, larger hard-drives and faster broadband connections. That will make them better for watching streaming video and television as well reading the fine-grained information and 3D imagery now being packed into navigation maps.

Enthusiasts will presumably want both. Having dropped enough hints over the past few weeks, your correspondent hopes to be opening a new one of each on Christmas Day.

Old Europe on show

THE latest European Union leaders' summit began this morning, in the aggressively modern Justus Lipsius complex at the heart of the (aggressively ugly) European quarter of Brussels. The whole ritual of European diplomacy is so technocratic and shiny, that it is a small shock when European culture and history suddenly intrude.

Take the young female intern who popped out of the Swedish prime minister's limousine, when his motorcade pulled up at the summit site this morning. Her face seemed vaguely familiar, and a passing Swedish official was happy to explain. Oh that is Crown Princess Victoria, he said. The princess, who is 30, has been working as a trainee at the foreign ministry, it seems. Unlike your regular intern or trainee, she has been sitting in on EU ministerial meetings, including some of the most sensitive meetings of foreign ministers to discuss topics like Iran or Kosovo. For a moment, this seemed slightly outrageous, like seeing Jenna [corrected in response to comment below] Bush sitting in the UN Security Council. A diplomat from another Nordic nation tells me he asked the Swedes what he should call the princess if he met her at a meeting: the Swedes being famously egalitarian people, they tend to use first names and the familiar form of you, almost universally. But not this time. "You call her Crown Princess," the Nordic diplomat was told.

Is this silly? It depends on what the Swedes think, perhaps. They still have a monarchy, and they are a kingdom. Princess Victoria will one day be a queen, and head of state. So there you go.

Mike Huckabee

Slim chance

Mike Huckabee is gaining support but the primaries will be a tough contest

TWO months ago most Americans knew nothing of Mike Huckabee. If they knew anything it was that he was running for president, was from the South and had once been very fat but had lost a lot of weight. Now, anyone with an interest has heard of the Republican former governor of Arkansas. He is leading polls in Iowa, the first state to vote for presidential candidates. And he is surging in South Carolina, which holds an early primary, and other big states. The former Baptist minister is giving another social conservative, Mitt Romney, a fight. And the prominent duel between these two is making life increasingly difficult for the national front-runner, Rudy Giuliani, who is behind in most polls across early-voting states.

Mr Huckabee has changed the fight for the nomination. He combines extremely conservative Christian politics with a gentle and warm personality—he even charms reporters. He has enlivened debates with amusing or memorable lines (America must unleash “weapons of mass instruction” in schools). He even plays bass guitar with some skill. Astonishingly, he has tied with Mr Giuliani for the lead in some national pools.

Though he may have made the race unpredictable, he has not yet made it his own. Contrary to all predictions a month ago, he may win Iowa. And he is popular in other states with large numbers of religious conservatives. But his national honeymoon seems to be over, as reporters start digging into his past.

His charming exterior hides a man who might be too religiously conservative, even for America. The litany of new Huckabee revelations makes for uncomfortable reading. In 1992 he said that AIDS sufferers should be “isolated” from society. In 1998 he agreed that a woman should “submit herself to the servant leadership of her husband”. In the same year he told a group of preachers that he had entered politics to “take back this nation for Christ”.

If these past utterances are not enough to trip up the surging governor his policies might do the job. A day after a remarkable new National Intelligence Estimate was released that sharply revised the thinking of American intelligence agencies about Iran’s work on atomic weapons, Mr Huckabee had not heard of it. As governor, he seemed soft on immigration, now an important Republican issue. And on the economy he seems to promise George Bush’s “compassionate” (and free-spending) conservatism while endorsing a “fair” (flat) tax on consumption in place of income tax, to the alarm of many conservative economists.

But the Republican faithful in a small number of states, not the country at large, will make the nomination. Mr Huckabee’s chances with this group are not as good as widely assumed. It is not entirely true that religious conservatives determine the nomination. The first vote, in Iowa, is dominated by religious types. But next comes New Hampshire—a bastion of small-government conservatism but not the religious sort. There, Mr Romney (who hails from nearby Massachusetts) has a lead approaching of some 16 points. Mr Huckabee may do no better than fourth, draining any momentum from Iowa. Mr Huckabee, short of money and staff, can ill-afford an early setback.

In the next few states Mr Huckabee’s fortunes are mixed; South Carolina, religious and southern, bodes well; northern, rust-belt Michigan does not. Mr Giuliani is sure to win in Florida though Mr Huckabee might do reasonably. If Mr Huckabee remains in the race for a month with Messrs Giuliani and Romney and possibly Mr McCain he faces “super-duper-Tuesday”. On February 5th more than 20 states across the country hold primaries.

Mr Huckabee’s populism and Christianity may help in Georgia, Alabama and the like. But other conservative states will surely plump for local favourites: Utah for Mr Romney, a Mormon, and Tennessee for its former senator, Fred Thompson. Mr Giuliani dominates in the huge states of California and New York.

So Mr Huckabee needs everything to go smoothly until February. Then he must hope for Mr Thompson to flop and give him Tennessee, and a few other breaks besides. Mr Huckabee has compared his swelling support to the miracle of the loaves and fishes. He probably needs another miracle if he is to run off with the nomination.

THE WEEK'S HEADLINES

A Summary of the week's headlines by Jerusalem Post editor-in-chief David Horovitz.

A Week's Summary with Jerusalem Post Editor-In-Chief David H

Conventionally Ignorant
The same old simplicities about Iraq.

By Victor Davis Hanson

Washington is an echo chamber. One pundit, one senator, one reporter proclaim a snazzy “truth” and almost immediately it reverberates as gospel. Conventional wisdom about Iraq is rarely questioned. A notion seems to find validity not on its logic or through empirical evidence, but simply by the degree to which it is repeated and felt to resonate.

Take the following often repeated statements.

“There is no military solution to Iraq.”

Well, obviously it is true in the sense that in this postmodern age we were not going to see another Curtis LeMay flatten a Fallujah or Ramadi.

But the miraculous political achievement of postwar Japan or Europe was the dividend of a military solution: the destruction of wartime fascism and the prevention of its reemergence by vigilant military policing.

Likewise, there will only be peace in a constitutional Iraq when citizens believe that they can safely participate in government, express themselves somewhat freely, prosper economically, and feel safe from internal and external threats.

In order to do this, an army and a national police force that purport to prevent thugs, militias, and terrorists from killing those with whom they disagree, are required. In war-torn Iraq, such forces will only emerge as confident and capable when they know that the U.S. is stronger than their enemies, and can offer them a window of security to train and strengthen.

So a political solution is only possible if there is security — and security is only likely if someone first kills, defeats, or routs the enemy. True, the promise of political equity and stability is a carrot that eases the military’s task by winning hearts and minds to enlist in the requisite armed effort. But at some point early in the process, some very brave souls in the U.S. Marine Corps and Army have had to wade into the swamp of the seventh century to stop frightening killers from plying their craft against the weak and helpless.

“We haven’t tried regional diplomacy.”

This is another red herring. Regional players all had interests in Iraq. The problem was that they were never quite our own.

So before talking, they first wanted to try their hand at mischief and advantage, and only later, when and if forced, would resort to diplomacy. Iran wanted to create a Shiite buffer state; the Gulf monarchies and Jordan to ensure that Sunni insurgents won and thereby to remind their own dissident minorities to respect the status quo; Turkey to thwart an independent Kurdistan; and Syria to do anything that caused the United States trouble.

In 2003, and again in 2007, these regional powers wanted to talk with the United States since they had a hunch we were winning — and thus they might be able to find advantage from, or were terrified of, the local power broker. But in 2004-6 we were perceived as mired in Iraq, weak, and not worth the verbiage.

Then again, as the volatile battlefield changed once more, suddenly we had some renewed clout with the Saudis to cut off the money to Sunni extremists; likewise with the Jordanians and Syrians to monitor their borders with Iraq; and similarly with the Iranians to reduce their shipments of weapons into Iraq. If there is a shred of truth in the latest National Intelligence Estimate which alleges that Iran ceased its nuclear bomb program in 2003, it was not because of some miraculous “diplomacy,” but only because of the fear that the mullahs (cf. the contemporary about-face of Libya’s Col. Gaddafi) might end up like the recently deposed Saddam Hussein.

Whatever the Bush administration’s own druthers, the United States is always engaged in some sort of regional diplomacy on the periphery of Iraq. Yet its success is predicated largely on constantly changing perceptions of our relative clout — itself since 2003 hinging on the progress of the war and our relative strength. Iraq was always a great gamble, since success there would amplify our diplomatic options in the Middle East as much as defeat would diminish it.

“We need to talk to Iran.”

We always have had some sort of dialogue ongoing in a backchannel capacity with Iran. But mostly these negotiations over the last thirty years have centered on problems caused by Iranians: they take hostages — and want to discuss the price of their release; they send out terrorists — and want to discuss the price to call them off; they cheat on international accords — and want to discuss the price to comply.

Iranians are friendly with what otherwise would be satanic atheistic North Koreans not just to buy missiles and nuclear technology, but also in admiration of what they see as successful North Korean cheat/get rewarded diplomacy — energized by a nuclear deterrent.

Please don’t suggest that we “once” had more contact under prior administrations than now. If true, it was only because Iran’s enemies (the Taliban and Saddam) were then still around. Such nostalgia is like saying we used to have good relations with the Soviets in the mid-1940s because we both hated Hitler and Hitler was next door to them. True, to some extent — but then who would wish to bring Hitler back?

The problem of structuring formal talks about substantive issues, however, is largely with Iran, not us. Bill Clinton learned that well enough when his rapprochement with the theocracy was cut short by the terrifying specter of an American president shaking hands with a theocrat. Such cozying up to the Great Satan apparently was perceived as fatal to the Iranian image of a revolutionary jihadist state.

If the surrounding Iraqi, Afghan, and Lebanese democracies stabilize, and the Sunni world coalesces into a general anti-Iranian bloc, then Iran will be more than eager for serious talks at any level it can get them. If we fail in Iraq, or Iran gets the bomb — as Teheran thought between 2004-6 would soon be likely — then they will show little interest in conversation. History suggests that democratic states are initially always the more eager for engagement than tyrannies that talk only when their backs are against the wall or their appetites are for a time sated.

“We can’t impose democracy on anyone.”

Two points need to be made about this canard. First, it is hard to think of too many democracies that did not emerge out of some sort of violence or the threat of such. Constitutional systems in Argentina, the Balkans, Germany, Italy, Japan, South Africa, South Korea, Taiwan — and the United States — to name only a few, all followed an armed conflict or at least the specter of force. The end of the Cold War — i.e. the defeat of the Soviet Union — alone freed Eastern Europe.

War is not the only catalyst for a new democracy, but there is a common enough connection. Anti-democratic forces, both internal and external, are usually the more plentiful and they don’t like to surrender their power unless they are forced to.

Second, for all the charges of institutionalized preemption and unilateral cowboyism, after six years we are still talking about attacks on just two countries — Afghanistan and Iraq. Both had a uniquely bad history with the United States, whether as the placenta of Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda, or as an on again/off again adversary dating back to 1991.

We haven’t invaded anyone else. We did not bomb or attack odious regimes like Syria or Iran — and aren’t very likely to. The anomaly is not that we are force-feeding democracy down the throat of the Middle East, but rather that lately we quit promoting it to allies such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt, even when we know that ultimately such liberalization is the only way to defuse tension on their Arab Streets and disrupt the symbiosis between terrorism and dictatorship.

“Iraq is the worst (fill in the blanks) in American history.”

Critics are not allowed to stop history at a convenient point — at Abu Ghraib, the pull-back from Fallujah, or the bombing of the dome at Samara — and then pass final judgment whenever they wish. If Lincoln had quit after Cold Harbor, Wilson after the German Spring offensive of 1918, or Roosevelt after the fall of the Philippines, then their presidencies would have failed and the U.S. today would be a far weaker — or perhaps nonexistent — country.

History instead will assess Iraq when it ends — either in defeat through a precipitous American withdrawal and collapse of Iraq, or in victory after a gradual redeployment of American troops as Iraqi forces step in to ensure the stability and security of a constitutional state.

We don’t yet know the verdict on the American investment in the war, since its aggregate costs and its aftermath are obviously not yet over. But already we sense that the worst thing our enemies — al Qaeda, Iran, Libya, or Syria — feared was the establishment of a constitutional government in place of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and the accompanying principle that autocratic governments of the region cannot acquire dangerous arsenals to support terror and to bully their neighbors.

That we haven’t had another September 11th, while bin Laden’s popularity has plummeted in the Islamic Middle East — if both trends continue — will factor positively in any analysis. Again, how much blood and treasure were worth the thwarting of the Taliban and Saddam Hussein in a post-9/11 landscape won’t be adjudicated for years to come. But we should remember that such an assessment won’t hinge on the difference between war and peace per se, but rather between having the Taliban and Saddam Hussein in power, and the costs and benefits of getting them out and replacing them with something far better.

In conclusion, we do know of one assertion about Iraq that really is true. The conventional wisdom of pundits, reporters, and politicians is predicated on their own daily perceptions of whether we are winning or losing the war — and thus what they say is true today they may well say is not tomorrow.

SPLENDID VALOR

HEROES NEED OUR SUPPORT

Not a quitter: Staff Sgt. Nick McCoy, US Army, is working with his dad on a book on Iraq.

December 14, 2007 -- FORT SAM HOUSTON,

SAN ANTONIO

AS I wrap up a week of columns dedicated to our wounded veterans, I have one great regret: We could only tell a limited number of stories in these pages, but every one of our wounded warriors deserves to have his or her tale told.

The soldiers and Marines who took a break from their therapy sessions to talk to The Post last week all have compelling histories; here are sketches of just a few more:

Airborne Infantryman Staff Sgt. Nick McCoy was on patrol in Iskandariyah when a roadside bomb took off his legs and left him with severe upper-body injuries. A rigorous soldier who took pride in his physical fitness, he's seen his life change profoundly.

But Nick just won't quit. The Mt. Penn, Pa., native is working on a book with his dad, exploring the personal side of the war from Iraq and from the home front. He's thinking about a journalism degree, too. (I warned him it means a vow of poverty.)

During her second tour in Iraq, Sgt. Lilina Benning was driving her sergeant-major on the "safe" circular road at Camp Victory outside of Baghdad. A random terrorist rocket hit her SUV. Lilina lost her foot, but not her dedication to the Army. She's determined to remain on active duty. Oh, and her brother's in Iraq right now - on his second tour.

On the day I met Lilina, she was ecstatic - she'd just left her wheelchair and walked from the main hospital to the rehab center with only a cane.

Army medic Spec. Greg Dotson was on a bomb-clearing patrol north of Baqubah when an improvised explosive device got the drop on the convoy. He'll never be able to serve as a combat medic again, but he'd like to share his battlefield expertise by teaching at the Army's school for medics at Ft. Sam Houston. If that doesn't work out, Greg's going to finish college, teach school - and coach basketball.

These men and women aren't going to be burdens on their communities. They're going to become community leaders.

Man of the Year

Time magazine hasn’t announced its pick for “man of the year” yet, but we certainly know ours: Gen. David Petraeus, commander of the multinational force in Iraq and architect of the surge strategy that is turning the tide in the war. Petraeus formulated a brilliant counterinsurgency plan. He executed it with care and diligence. And when much of the country didn’t want to notice the security gains that the surge had wrought, he took the national media spotlight to defend his strategy and his honor. In all this, he was nothing less than masterly.

When Petraues testified on Capitol Hill in early September, much of the media and the Left simply refused to believe that violence in Iraq was down. The Government Accountability Office’s comptroller general had appeared before Congress to ask why the Pentagon was reporting much lower numbers of Iraqi civilian deaths than the GAO had (answer: the GAO assessment was based on incomplete figures). And the day Petraeus’s testimony began, MoveOn.org ran its infamous “General Petraeus or General Betray Us?” ad. It said that “every independent report on the ground situation in Iraq shows that the surge strategy has failed”; that Petraeus “is constantly at war with the facts”; and that the general “is cooking the books for the White House.” Throughout his testimony, Petraeus continued to suffer slanders from members of Congress who cared about politics more than truth. Hillary Rodham Clinton stopped just short of calling him a liar, saying that to believe his report required “a willing suspension of disbelief.”

Less than a month later, however, Petraeus’s critics had been effectively silenced. To its great credit, the Washington Post acknowledged this in a blistering editorial:

In September, Iraqi civilian deaths were down 52 percent from August and 77 percent from September 2006, according to the Web site icasualties.org. The Iraqi Health Ministry and the Associated Press reported similar results. U.S. soldiers killed in action numbered 43 — down 43 percent from August and 64 percent from May, which had the highest monthly figure so far this year. The American combat death total was the lowest since July 2006 and was one of the five lowest monthly counts since the insurgency in Iraq took off in April 2004. . . . It’s looking more and more as though those in and outside of Congress who last month were assailing Gen. Petraeus’s credibility and insisting that there was no letup in Iraq’s bloodshed were — to put it simply — wrong.

That the surge has worked is no longer up for debate. On a trip to Iraq the week after Thanksgiving, even John Murtha stated flatly, “I think the surge is working.” And in recent months the Democratic presidential candidates have accepted this reality too, sparring more over health-care plans than over who will pull out troops fastest.

Of course, the situation in Iraq is still parlous, and military successes will not automatically produce the national reconciliation necessary for long-term peace and stability. No one knows this better than Petraeus, who has forthrightly admitted that political progress in Iraq has been disappointing. That Petraeus has achieved so much in such a short time despite the frustrations of Iraqi politics is a testament to his skill as a strategist and a leader of men.

For making victory in Iraq look possible again, and for pulling a nation back from the brink of civil war, Petraeus deserves the praise and thanks of all Americans. With or without a Time cover, he is the man of the year.