I was hoping that, since it’s a holiday, the Times would give us a break from that schmuck Kristol, but nooo… He wants us to “Remember to Remember,” and opines that many men and women in the military say that they’re not confident that their fellow citizens are aware of what is being accomplished in Iraq. (The Hazmat suits are over there, next to the brain bleach.) Mr. Cohen writes about “The Obama Connection,” and says that Barack Obama’s grasp of Internet-driven networking comes from his conviction that in a globalized world sociability is a force as strong as sovereignty. Mr. Krugman’s column is titled “Divided They Stand.” He says any lingering bitterness among Hillary Clinton’s supporters about her treatment during the primaries could cost Barack Obama the White House. Here’s that waste of oxygen Kristol:
Last Thursday, the soldiers of the Third United States Infantry Regiment (the Old Guard) placed a small American flag in front of each of the 260,000 or so grave markers in Arlington National Cemetery. The soldiers remained on duty throughout the weekend, replacing flags that had fallen or been removed, to ensure that each grave was appropriately decorated and honored on Memorial Day.
This decades-old tradition exemplifies the attention the military pays to honoring its veterans and, above all of course, its fallen warriors. But what of the rest of us? Most of us in the Washington area didn’t visit Arlington this weekend. Most of us across America aren’t participating in Memorial Day services or commemorations.
This doesn’t mean Americans are indifferent to the sacrifices of our men and women in uniform. In fact, I suspect that many of us feel so much in debt to our servicemen and women, and so much in awe of the ultimate sacrifice some of them have made and all of them are willing to make, that we worry any effort to honor them wouldn’t be commensurate with their deeds.
One retired general I know urges civilians to go out of their way to say thank you to servicemen and women they happen to encounter. At first I thought such a gesture might be intrusive, or awkward, or unwelcome. I was wrong. When civilians walk over to express appreciation to men and women in uniform, in airports or restaurants or the like, the recipients seem a little embarrassed — but grateful. So perhaps we all should be less shy about thanking our troops for their service.
The men and women in the military know their fellow citizens are grateful to them. Many of them say, though, that they’re not confident their countrymen are aware of what they’re accomplishing.
Gen. David Petraeus testified Thursday before the Senate Armed Services Committee. He noted that the number of security incidents in Iraq in the past week had fallen to the lowest level in over four years. And he held out the prospect, despite “tough fights and hard work” that lie ahead, of “an Iraq that is at peace with itself and its neighbors, that is an ally in the war on terror, that has a government that serves all Iraqis.”
Meanwhile, political progress in Iraq has picked up, and provincial elections will likely occur before the end of the year. From Basra in the south to Mosul in the north, the overall situation has improved more than anyone thought possible even a few months ago — let alone a year and a half ago, when President Bush ordered the surge of forces, and Petraeus, Lt. Gen. Raymond Odierno and Ambassador Ryan Crocker began implementing the new counterinsurgency strategy.
This past weekend, a friend forwarded an e-mail message from a Marine helicopter pilot who has done tours in Afghanistan and Iraq. (Because he’s on active duty, I’m not naming him.) He’s now stationed in the U.S., training pilots who are about to deploy to Iraq:
“I was in Iraq from the 2nd to the 12th this month. In my current job I go over there twice a year for two weeks to collect lessons learned and fly a few sorties …
“The biggest deal for me was the fact that even after we have pulled out thousands of U.S. and Iraqi troops, peace continues to hold in Anbar. In fact, I was shocked by two things when flying over Ramadi and Fallujah. First, the streetlights are back on. It is crazy to see Iraqi cities lit up completely, and since they are all on grid power now, you don’t see the crazy black/brown outs when you fly over and the generators pop like you would back in 2005/6. The power now seems to extend even into the suburbs and light industry on the edges of the major cities as well.
“Second, there are people, regular civilians, walking the streets at night. That was very unusual and got the visitor (me) laughed at when I told our terminal controller that I had personnel walking down a street on the radio.”
The Marine major concluded: “May has been ridiculously quiet everywhere.”
“Ridiculously quiet everywhere” is Marine-like hyperbole, of course. And even though May has been very encouraging, there will be upticks of violence and occasional setbacks over the next months. It would be great if the future were in fact “ridiculously quiet” for our men and women in uniform — and for the people of Iraq. This is too much to hope for. But we are on course to win the Iraq war.
This success, if we sustain the will and ability to bring it to fruition, will be an important national achievement. It will be due above all to the remarkable efforts of the men and women of our armed forces. We should stop to thank them — and to pay tribute to their fallen comrades whom we honor this day.
Here’s Mr. Cohen:
It’s the networks, stupid.
More than any other factor, it has been Barack Obama’s grasp of the central place of Internet-driven social networking that has propelled his campaign for the Democratic nomination into a seemingly unassailable lead over Hillary Clinton. Her campaign has been so 20th-century. His has been of the century we’re in.
That’s not surprising. Obama spent only 10 years of his adult life in the split world of the cold war, double that in a post-Berlin Wall world of growing interconnectedness. MAC — mutually assured connectivity — has replaced the MAD — mutually assured destruction — of cold-war days.
For Clinton, born in 1947, that ratio is different. Her mental paradigm is division. When her husband last ran for president in 1996, the Internet was marginal. The thinking and people from that campaign have proved unable to fast-forward a dozen years. They’ve been left like deer blinded by the Webcam lights of the Obama juggernaut.
This cultural failure has been devastating for Clinton. As Joshua Green chronicles in an important piece in The Atlantic, Obama has used social networking and his user-friendly Web site to develop the money machine, and the youthful engagement, that has swept him forward.
Green notes, “Obama’s claim of 1,276,000 donors is so large that Clinton doesn’t bother to compete.” He gives some other Obama campaign numbers: 750,000 active volunteers and 8,000 affinity groups. In February, a month in which he raised $55 million ($45 million over the Internet), 94 percent of donations were of $200 or less, a number dwarfing small contributions to Clinton and John McCain.
Obama has been a classic Internet-start up, a movement spreading with viral intensity and propelled by some of Silicon Valley’s most creative minds. As with any online phenomenon, he has jumped national borders, stirring as much buzz in Berlin as he does back home.
He could not have achieved this without a sense of history, a conviction that the nature of the post-post-9/11 world — the one beyond war without end — is going to be determined by sociability and connectivity. In the globalized world of MySpace, LinkedIn and the rest, sociability is a force as strong as sovereignty.
I’ve searched in vain for a sense of this pivotal historical moment in Clinton. Her threat to “totally obliterate” Iran, her stomach-turning reference to the June 1968 assassination of Robert Kennedy as a reason to stay in the race, her Bosnian fabrications, all reflect a view of history as something that’s there for political ends rather than as a source of inspiration or reflection.
It’s history as “Me, me, me.” That tends to be blinding.
Her most crippling blindness has been to networks, national and global, the threads that bind and have changed society. As David Singh Grewal writes in his excellent new book, “Network Power,” a core tension in the world is that: “Everything is being globalized except politics.”
Grewal continues: “We live in a world in which our relations of sociability — our commerce, culture, ideas, manners — are increasingly shared, coordinated by newly global conversations in these domains, but in which our politics remains inescapably national, centered in the nation states that are the only loci of sovereign decision making.”
The Bush administration has accentuated global awareness of this disjuncture. Connected people around the world were appalled by Bush policies — from the trashing of habeas corpus to renditions — but felt powerless to influence them.
The overwhelming global interest in the current U.S. election is tied in part to a spreading belief that America’s leader may be as important to French lives, for example, as the incumbent in the Élysée Palace.
Obama’s people get that. Connectivity means going it alone is a fool’s errand: that’s a basic lesson of Iraq. If Obama has promised to appoint a chief technology officer, to open up government via the Web, and to make dialogue rather than war a centerpiece of policy, it’s because he knows he must speak to a 21st-century world.
Grewal writes: “Politics is the only effective countervailing power that we have with which to refashion the structures that emerge through sociability.” Accumulated personal choices expressed through networks fashion sociability. Short of global governance, only sovereignty can channel that will.
In concrete terms, you won’t make globalization more equable in its distribution of income without politics. But first you must see sociability for what it is: a form of 21st-century personal sovereignty that rivals national sovereignty.
Clinton never saw this. McCain, whose Internet fund-raising has been negligible, also shows little grasp of MAC.
Of course, connection is no panacea, or guarantee against violent threats: Al Qaeda uses the Web effectively. But without understanding connectivity, you can no more beat terrorism than win an election.
It’s the networks, stupid, and the generations that go with them.
And now here’s Mr. Krugman:
It is, in a way, almost appropriate that the final days of the struggle for the Democratic nomination have been marked by yet another fake Clinton scandal — the latest in a long line that goes all the way back to Whitewater.
This one, in case you missed it, involved an interview Hillary Clinton gave the editorial board of South Dakota’s Argus Leader, in which she tried to make a case for her continuing campaign by pointing out that nomination fights have often gone on into the summer. As one of her illustrations, she mentioned that Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June.
It wasn’t the best example to use, but it’s absurd to suggest, as some Obama supporters immediately did, that Mrs. Clinton was making some kind of dark hint about Barack Obama’s future.
But then, it was equally absurd to portray Mrs. Clinton’s assertion that it took L.B.J.’s political skills to turn Martin Luther King’s vision into legislation as an example of politicizing race. Yet the claim that Mrs. Clinton was playing the race card, which was promoted by some Obama supporters as well as in a memo by a member of Mr. Obama’s staff, achieved wide currency.
Why does all this matter? Not for the nomination: Mr. Obama will be the Democratic nominee. But he has a problem: many grass-roots Clinton supporters feel that she has received unfair, even grotesque treatment. And the lingering bitterness from the primary campaign could cost Mr. Obama the White House.
To the extent that the general election is about the issues, Mr. Obama should have no trouble winning over former Clinton supporters, especially the white working-class voters he lost in the primaries. His health care plan is seriously deficient, but he will nonetheless be running on a far more worker-friendly platform than his opponent.
Indeed, John McCain has shed whatever maverick tendencies he may once have had, and become almost a caricature conservative — an advocate of lower taxes for the rich and corporations, a privatizer and shredder of the safety net.
But elections always involve emotions as well as issues, and there are some ominous signs in the polling data.
In Florida, in particular, the rolling estimate produced by the professionals at Pollster.com shows Mr. McCain running substantially ahead of Mr. Obama, even as he runs significantly behind Mrs. Clinton. Ohio also looks problematic, and Pennsylvania looks closer than it should. It’s true that head-to-head polls five months before the general election have a poor track record. But they certainly give reason to worry.
The point is that Mr. Obama may need those disgruntled Clinton supporters, lest he manage to lose in what ought to be a banner Democratic year.
So what should Mr. Obama and his supporters do?
Most immediately, they should realize that the continuing demonization of Mrs. Clinton serves nobody except Mr. McCain. One more trumped-up scandal won’t persuade the millions of voters who stuck with Mrs. Clinton despite incessant attacks on her character that she really was evil all along. But it might incline a few more of them to stay home in November.
Nor should Obama supporters dismiss Mrs. Clinton’s strength as a purely Appalachian phenomenon, with the implication that Clinton voters are just a bunch of hicks.
So what comes next?
Mrs. Clinton needs to do her part: she needs to be careful not to act as a spoiler during what’s left of the primary, she needs to bow out gracefully if, as seems almost certain, Mr. Obama receives the nod, and she needs to campaign strongly for the nominee once the convention is over. She has said she’ll do that, and there’s no reason to believe that she doesn’t mean it.
But mainly it’s up to Mr. Obama to deliver the unity he has always promised — starting with his own party.
One thing to do would be to make a gesture of respect for Democrats who voted in good faith by recognizing Florida’s primary votes — which at this point wouldn’t change the outcome of the nomination fight.
The only reason I can see for Obama supporters to oppose seating Florida is that it might let Mrs. Clinton claim that she received a majority of the popular vote. But which is more important — denying Mrs. Clinton bragging rights, or possibly forfeiting the general election?
What about offering Mrs. Clinton the vice presidency? If I were Mr. Obama, I’d do it. Adding Mrs. Clinton to the ticket — or at least making the offer — might help heal the wounds of an ugly primary fight.
Here’s the point: the nightmare Mr. Obama and his supporters should fear is that in an election year in which everything favors the Democrats, he will nonetheless manage to lose. He needs to do everything he can to make sure that doesn’t happen.
