Here's what I thought you'd like to hear about today:

1. Bolton & Gillerman at the UN - Fighting Back
2. Hope is not a Strategy ... Despair is Not a Method - Senators vs. The General at the Armed Services Committee

Bolton & Gillerman at the UN - Fighting Back

The UN General Assembly met last weekend in an emergency session. Allahpundit, writing at HotAir, had this to say:

The topic is the UN resolution drafted by Qatar and championed by France that "deeply deplore[d]" the accidental Israeli shelling of an apartment building in Beit Hanoun that killed 19 people. Bolton vetoed an earlier draft when it came before the Security Council but the General Assembly passed it late Friday afternoon as a symbolic, non-binding rebuke. Language was apparently inserted at the last minute, merely as an afterthought, calling on the Palestinians to halt the firing of Qassams into Israel.

Voting no on the measure: the United States, Israel, Australia, the Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Nauru and Palau. Canada abstained.

Play clip of Bolton

Without prompt action by the Senate during their lame duck session, Bolton will be gone, a victim of a feckless set of Republican Senators, including "Loser" Lincoln Caffee of Rhode Island. Also at the UN last weekend, Israeli Ambassador Dan Gillerman addressed the resolution "deeply deploring" Israel for defending itself against the rocket fire. Here are some of his remarks.

Play clip of Gillerman

A State of Emergency indeed. It will be a while yet before we can have peace over there. I "deeply deplore" the UN General Assembly.

Hope is not a Strategy ... Despair is Not a Method

RedState.com had a great post this week that reviewed testimony at the Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on November 15. This committee has Hillary Clinton, John McCain, Lindsay Graham, Mark Dayton, and Carl Levin, with John Warner as current and outgoing Chairman. Here is some of the RedState post, with the actual testimony quoted in their post, thanks to C-SPAN and some heavy editing by yours truly.

Last week, General John Abizaid, the top US general in the Middle East, testified before sessions of the Senate Armed Services committee and the House Armed Services committee. Some might argue that the General has better things to do with his time than be dragged back to Washington for this dog and pony show, but I think in the long term, it was worth it. Given the recent announcement of Secretary Rumsfeld's resignation, these hearings provided an opportunity to see how a top military officer rumored to be among the free thinkers who disagree in private with the Secretary handled himself without Mr. Rumsfeld sitting beside him. Would he show a crack between the civilian and military approach to Iraq and provide, at last, an honest assessment confirming conventional wisdom that the Iraq campaign, if not already lost, is failing? The assembled senators certainly seemed to hope so...

Senator John Warner, the outgoing chairman of the ASC, led off by asking General Abizaid about his now-famous "civil war" prognostication in August:

Play clip of Warner & Abizaid

RedState comments:

Given the exhaustive treatment of General Abizaid's ominous comment in both the old and new media in August, wouldn't you expect to see corresponding coverage of this reassessment of the situation? You might hope so, but your hopes would be in vain. A Google news search of "abizaid iraq civil war" suggests that there was virtually none.

There was, however, considerable attention paid to the General's subsequent exchange with Senator Lindsay Graham (R-SC), who asked a series of rapid-fire, short-answer questions:

Play clip of Graham & Abizaid

RedState goes on:

For those interested in the contentious issue of troop levels, it's a fascinating exchange. Senator Graham, along with Senator John McCain (R-AZ), has long been a strong proponent of the more troops camp--an approach tagged "Go Big" in today's Washington Post--for whom the testimony of General Eric Shinseki in February 25, 2003 has become the hallmark. General Shinseki suggested that several hundred thousand American troops would be necessary to stabilize post-war Iraq. As I have noted elsewhere, I have no doubt that those troops would have had an immediate pacifying effect on Iraq, but I remain concerned about the aftermath of this artificial calm when those very high troop numbers were withdrawn, as they would have had to have been in fairly short order. And you might notice that General Abizaid did not endorse General Shinseki's full assessment here--he noted that in hindsight, a larger force of unspecified numbers but made up not just of Americans but of Iraqis and coalition members would have been desirable right after major combat operations concluded. But, and this is a very big but, they are not desirable now. He would like to see a small uptick in the numbers of troops we have engaged in training, but he does not support either a Shinseki-scale build up or a Murtha-style withdrawal at this point. No matter for those whose minds are already made up on this topic. Coverage of this exchange focused on the isolated phrase "General Shinseki was right." But in the context of the hearing, General Shinseki's supporters clearly did not think that the issue had been satisfactorily resolved, as Senator McCain quickly returned to the topic when his turn came, and the two wrestled the issue around the dance floor once again:

Play clip of McCain & Abizaid

Here's more from RedState on this:

Senator McCain gave General Abizaid every opportunity to allow that he would like more troops; he practically begged the General to concur with this assessment, but even when confronted with the sage consul of Generals Zinni and Batiste, General Abizaid remained obstinate. More troops, per se, are not going to make a difference in his opinion. Switching the focus of our troops to training and embedding with the Iraqi Security Forces, a shift in policy that has been developing over the past six weeks, will. Mr. McCain was clearly disappointed that the General he claimed to "respect" could not see the wisdom of his position, as well he might--what a great thing it would be for the Senator's presidential ambitions to get General Abizaid on board with his proposed change in strategy for Iraq. That way, if things start to improve in Iraq over the next six to eight months, Mr. McCain could claim it was his vision and leadership that saved the day--which would be a powerful argument to make to primary voters in 2008. If General Abizaid was considering this from a such an angle, it might have occurred to him that it would be politic to play along with one of the leading contenders to be Commander in Chief. But he didn't. He stuck to his guns and pointed out that Senator McCain's "go big" silver bullet would be just a temporary stop gap. A band-aid, not a solution. Later, in response to questions by Senator Joe Lieberman (I-CT) and John Thune (R-ND), General Abizaid would not rule out increasing troop levels at any future date and given unforeseen circumstances, but he reiterated that did not consider such a build up an effective policy in and of itself.

Finally, General Abizaid had a heated exchange with Senator Hillary Clinton (D-NY), who has a vested political interest in establishing the failure of the Iraq campaign. As a self-appointed hawk, Mrs. Clinton wants to look tough on the GWoT, but her early support for the war is a potential Achilles heel for her party's base to pepper with arrows. All her pandering to Ned Lamont has not mollified the hard left anti-war crowd, which she will need in order to win in the primaries that are now just a little over a year away. If she can establish herself as a strong critic of Iraq policy she can make the argument that she may have supported the move to go to war (after all, she wasn't the only one taken in by Bush's lies), but that she has condemned the failed strategy of this administration. As an alternative to this debacle, Mrs. Clinton proposes a phased troop withdrawal and possibly partitioning Iraq, two ideas that perhaps not coincidentally are rumored to be among those under consideration by James Baker's Iraq Study Group.

Play clip of Clinton & Abizaid

More from RedState now:

As is her want, Mrs. Clinton treated this hearing as an opportunity to make a short prepared speech that would get optimum media attention. "Hope is not a strategy" makes for a good, pithy line, and so it was dutifully regurgitated in isolation by the press. But for those who want to know what the military brass in the field, not a senator in Washington, thinks about such strategy, General Abizaid's riposte should be food for thought. He talked of despair in secure, prosperous Washington and hope in dangerous, war-torn Iraq. Indeed, the "despair" the General encounters when he returns to our nation's capital is emerging as the primary obstacle to our success in the Iraq phase of the war...

Henry Kissinger, in his widely-misquoted BBC interview on Sunday did not say that a military victory in Iraq was in and of itself impossible--he said such a victory could not be achieved in the "time period that the political processes of the democracies will support." That's very different from saying we can't win. Dr. Kissinger is saying we are choosing to lose. And that is a choice General Abizaid will not endorse.

Here is the relevant section from the BBC interview that RedState refers to:

Play clip of Kissinger on BBC

As Sydney Blumenthal says, that very well may be his testimony to the Baker Commission, and as such is no strong call for withdrawal. It is instead an indictment of the Washington media driven culture of "despair" as Abizaid calls it. As he said: "Hope is not a strategy but despair is not a method." Go get 'em, General.