The Iraq War had been going badly for a couple of years when President George W. Bush fired Donald Rumsfeld and appointed Robert Gates as Secretary of Defense and General David Petraeus as Commander, Multi-National Force – Iraq. Both men were known not only for professional expertise but also for a willingness to speak truth to power. Bush deliberately selected who he believed were the best men to solve the problem in Iraq. He did not choose people who were slavishly devoted to him. He then approved their new strategy, called “The Surge,” and placed his entire support behind it. Shortly after this, President Bush gave a speech at the U.S. Naval War College at which he laid out the new strategy. I was in the audience at that speech. Prior to it, I had been strongly in opposition to Bush’s Iraq War as much because of the arrogance of the President and his assistants as because of the flaws in his strat...
There is an unspoken reason why the upcoming election must result in Democratic Party control of the House, the Senate, and the Presidency. Such an outcome would permit the Congress to increase the number of Supreme Court justices to eleven and permit a reelected President Biden to appoint two moderate, center-left justices. This would end the conservative supermajority while preserving a conservative majority of one vote. The Supreme Court makes it possible for Congress to avoid difficult political decisions. Rather than carry out their legislative responsibilities, Members of Congress find it easier to punt to a court whose members have lifetime tenure, whose decisions are final, and who, therefore, pay no political price. This is what Congress did following the court’s judgement for the plaintiff in the 1973 case, Roe v. Wade . Congress failed to follow-up by codifying the ruling...
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