… and the award goes to … Bill Kristol:

Bush has two more years. Whatever happens in November’s elections, the country cannot afford his all-U.N.-all-the-time defensive crouch. It is not too late to increase the size of the military; to work with Japan, rather than kowtowing to China, on North Korea; to institute an interdiction regime around that country; to act with a coalition of the willing to bomb airfields and aircraft assisting genocide in Sudan; to help the democrats in and near Russia; to insist on real sanctions and pressure on Iran, backed by the threat of force; and generally to stop huffing and puffing about what is unacceptable and intolerable–only to then accept the unacceptable and tolerate the intolerable.

I’m speechless. Fortunately, I’m throwing a party in about ninety minutes so there’s plenty of booze around the house.

Abdul Rahim Al Ginco flees to Afghanistan in 2000, where he’s taken prisoner by the Taliban, tortured, and under the duress of captivity and torture forced to appear in an al-Qaeda propaganda video. For his trouble he’s spent years as a prisoner of the Bush administration in Guantanamo Bay.

Jim Henley notes an emerging talking point among the “bomb Iran” crowd, focused on the fact that Iran is only very slightly over half Persian. This leads them to conclude that we could, perhaps, try to wreak ethno-sectarian division on Iran and plunge that country into Iraq-style chaos. If you look at living conditions in Iraq, you’ll immediately conclude that this is a pretty immoral approach. If you look at social conditions in Iran, you’ll also conclude that this isn’t going to work.

Iran’s Kurdish minority is legitimately mobilizable, but that’s only 7 percent of the population. The whole game in terms of Iranian ethnic minorities is the Azeri population, which at 25 percent or so of the total is very large and, in fact, exceeds the population of Azerbaijan. The trouble, from a fomenting-dissent point of view, is that Azeris are very well-integrated into Iranian society. You may, for example, have heard of Muhammed Khatami, Iran’s most recent former president. He’s half Azeri. More to the point, you may have heard of Ali Khameini, Supreme Leader of Iran. He’s Azeri. As is the current Minister of Energy, and various leading Iranian cultural figures.

That’s by no means to say that Azeris are all supporters of the regime. Obviously, the regime has many Persian opponents as well as Persian supporters. The Azeris, however, are just like that. Well-integrated into overall Iranian society, with many in various degrees of opposition while many others are leading figures in the regime itself.

“U.S. forces unlawfully fired the heavy-caliber machine-gun bullet that killed British newsman Terry Lloyd after an Iraqi civilian put him in his car and attempted to take him to the hospital when he was wounded shortly after the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, a coroner ruled Friday,” reports the LA Times. “U.S. authorities denied wrongdoing and said the Marines deployed in southern Iraq during the early days of the war were following the rules of engagement.”

It seems worth observing that it’s extremely unlikely we’d be having this discussion or that there would be any sort of investigation at all were the dead person here an ordinary Iraqi rather than a western journalist. Acts of wanton murder against Iraqi civilians do get reported and to some extent investigated, but an Iraqi who’s killed in a firefight is bound to be labeled an insurgent, simply ignored, or written off as “collateral damage.” Meanwhile, the controlling legal issue is not whether or not the dead person was guilty of something, but merely whether or not the troops in question were following the rules of engagement. The highest law of the land is, in effect, “don’t make an American with a gun afraid” under circumstances where the Americans with guns are ill-equipped to actually assess what’s happening because they don’t, for example, speak the local language.

Such is life under foreign military occupation, and it’s no wonder that people don’t enjoy it, whether or not the occupiers come to town professing their sincere desire to help and whether or not the occupiers’ professed desire to help is, in fact, sincere.

Jeffrey Smith in The Washington Post: “In speeches, statements and news conferences this year, the president has repeatedly declared a range of problems “unacceptable,” including rising health costs, immigrants who live outside the law, North Korea’s claimed nuclear test, genocide in Sudan and Iran’s nuclear ambitions.” Unfortunately, he doesn’t actually have any plans to cope with any of these “unacceptable” problems beyond railing at the skies. And the unacceptability of the world is rapidly on the increase:

In the first nine months of this year, Bush declared more than twice as many events or outcomes “unacceptable” or “not acceptable” as he did in all of 2005, and nearly four times as many as he did in 2004. He is, in fact, at a presidential career high in denouncing events he considers intolerable. They number 37 so far this year, as opposed to five in 2003, 18 in 2002 and 14 in 2001.

Which is just to say that willpower, empty rhetoric, and idle threats won’t change the world. You need to be willing to grapple with the actual world. Instead, as things get worse and worse, Bush reacts by escalating his level of self-righteousness.