WTF is a Tentative Milestone?

The New York Times dug deep into its rhetorical bag of tricks Sunday for this front-pager on the “remarkable change” sweeping through Shiite-controlled portions of Baghdad.

BAGHDAD — The militia that was once the biggest defender of poor Shiites in Iraq, the Mahdi Army, has been profoundly weakened in a number of neighborhoods across Baghdad, in an important, if tentative, milestone for stability in Iraq.

First off, how many unimportant milestones have you ever encountered? But, more to the point, how would you define a tentative milestone? Here’s how I’d describe it: A steaming load of CYA.

Maybe someone lost the Green Zone’s only dictionary, so let me help a little:

mile•stone: 1. A stone marker set up on a roadside to indicate the distance in miles from a given point. 2. An important event, as in a person's career, the history of a nation, or the advancement of knowledge in a field; a turning point.

Can you imagine driving along the highway and seeing a sign that says you are tentatively five miles from town? Or can you imagine Winston Churchill proclaiming that, “This is not the end, nor the beginning of the end, but it is tentatively the end of the beginning?” And, as for turning points, we have seen where that gets us (hint: after a few turns—right back where you started).

I guess my big question is: When did hypotheticals become front-page news?

I suppose one could write a news story here about the shifting, unpredictable landscape in the Shiite neighborhoods in and around Baghdad, but reporter Sabrina Tavernise and the Times did not structure this article that way. This is an article with a premise (a premise strikingly similar to the line put forth by the US-backed Iraqi government of Nuri al-Maliki, I might add), and the author attempts to string together anecdotes and predictions to confirm that supposition.

How did Tavernise come to substantiate her tentative claim about the downgraded influence of Mahdi leader Moktada al-Sadr?

In interviews, 17 Iraqis, including municipal officials, gas station workers and residents, described a pattern in which the militia’s control over the local economy and public services had ebbed.

And those interviews, I should point out, were likely not conducted by Tavernise, herself, but, because of safety concerns, were instead done via Iraqi stringers. (I admit that this is a supposition on my part—the NYT and most papers do not make a habit of differentiating between direct reporting and information gathered through proxies—most parts of the area in question in this article are almost certainly not safe for western reporters.) I do not envy the conditions under which reporters have to work in Iraq, but I do have a problem with secondhand accounts from a small, unscientific sample being magically transformed by the of the New York Times into a seemingly certain evaluation of conditions on the ground, and by direct inference, an endorsement of what from my point of view (and I reiterate that this is my point of view) was factional bloodletting rather than a well-orchestrated security operation by a legitimate Iraqi government. Four paragraphs toward the very end of the story seem to lend credence to my take:

The shift comes at a crucial moment: Iraqis will vote in provincial elections in December. The weakening of the Sadrists in national politics clears the stage for the group’s most bitter rival — a Shiite party led by another cleric, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim. One of the party’s members, Jalal al-Din al-Sagheer, a sheik and a member of Parliament, is arranging state aid for Sunni families willing to move back to Topchi.

The timing was not missed by the Sadr movement’s spokesman, who said the government had recently warned the group to vacate its office. He blames Mr. Hakim’s party for the attempts to marginalize his movement, whose members have also been targets of a political crackdown in southern Iraq.

“Some parties are occupying large buildings in Jadriya,” he said, referring indirectly to the headquarters of Mr. Hakim’s party. “That’s what makes us suspicious. Why only us?”

He added, “The main motive is to exclude the Sadr movement from politics.”

Again, this is in no way to be read as an endorsement of the Mahdi faction or their brutal tactics—but I think short passages like the one above show the situation to be more complicated than the tale of a good government forcing out a bad criminal syndicate.

Also missing from the Times piece is any consideration that at least some of the lull might be the result of an intentional pulling back by Moktada al-Sadr or an effort by the Shiite cleric to contain the worst elements of his movement himself.

However, there are these two lines at the very end of the article:

The militia is painting its response on Sadr City walls: “We will be back, after this break.”

The Iraqi Army is painting over it.

Which is perhaps the best metaphor for what is happening in Baghdad: a superficial improvement. It is possible that this is not the story of a strong government that has been battling organized crime now reaching a milestone (however tentative), but rather a tangled tale of a weak political faction’s whitewashing of a long and dirty picket fence. This makes the Iraqi government look less like Elliot Ness, and more like Tom Sawyer. It would great if New York Times reporters weren’t so eager to grab a brush.


(cross-posted on The Seminal and Daily Kos)

Urgent plea: John McCain caught in endless loop of his own circular logic—can you help?

Some jokes, as they say, write themselves. . .

The Politico has posted the new! improved! Jobs for America: The McCain Economic Plan, and this can be found on page four:

The McCain administration would reserve all savings from victory in the Iraq and Afghanistan operations in the fight against Islamic extremists for reducing the deficit. Since all their costs were financed with deficit spending, all their savings must go to deficit reduction.

So, let me see if I have this right: assuming he can claim victory in this long struggle where victory cannot be defined, and McCain ends a deployment that he believes might require another 100 years, he is going to take the money not added to the deficit that was never included in the annual budget to pay down the budget deficit.

This is an argument so absurdly twisted back on itself that it almost lies outside the bounds of basic written language to debunk it. (At this moment, I have an image of comedian Lewis Black shivering with rage, screaming, “If it weren’t for my horse, I wouldn’t have spent that year in college!” But, honestly, that statement contains far more logic than McCain’s.)

Let’s put it this way: If all of the wars’ “costs” have been “financed with deficit spending” (“costs” “financed” by “spending”? oh, never mind) and you somehow miraculously end the wars (even though you have no intent to do so, and no plan as to how if you did), then you don’t actually get money back—you just stop adding to the deficit!

Now I guess you could call that deficit reduction of a sort—stopping the making it larger—if those expenditures had actually ever been counted against the revenue stream in the annual budget. . . except, of course, they never were. The Bush Administration has financed its folly via supplementals—which, at the president’s insistence, have never been included in the calculations of the annual federal budget.

And who voted for those supplementals every single time? Who never so much as made a peep or raised a finger in protest? Who went along with the Bush Administration’s irresponsible and dishonest ploy every step of the way and, even today, continues to tow the Bush line on the Iraq fiasco?

For the sake of the rhetorical device and “the google,” I will tell you. The man who has supported the Bush war and the Bush budget the last five years, and has pledged to carry on the occupation with no new plan to end it and no meaningful pledge to honestly finance it, is none other than long-time Republican Senator and presidential wannabe John McCain.

And you know, as comical as that first plank up there is, the next paragraph is perhaps just as stupid:

A one-year spending pause. Freeze non-defense, non-veterans discretionary spending for a year and use those savings for deficit reduction. A one-year pause in the growth of discretionary spending will be imposed to allow for a comprehensive review of all spending programs. After the completion of a comprehensive review of all programs, projects and activities of the federal government, we will propose a plan to modernize, streamline, consolidate, reprioritize and, where needed, terminate individual programs.

A pause? You mean like the pause we’re supposedly enjoying in Iraq these days? Will the jobless rate, inflation, the crumbling infrastructure, Medicare costs, or a host of other national priorities too long ignored pause while you waste the first year of your presidency (and all of our time) figuring out what you are going to do?

What has John McCain been thinking about during the last year while he ran to take over for George W. Bush—not to mention what was he thinking about over the last eight years? Did he not think that maybe Americans might want to know what he planned to do before they voted? After he’s sworn in, he expects us to wait another year while he studies the situation—man, talk about not being ready on “day one.”

Besides, while he pauses, the military budget will continue to grow—he says so right there—and since there is no actual plan in the McCain “plan” to increase revenue (beyond the cutting of waste that apparently he plans to add to his own budget in order to cut it—yes, this sounds like paragraph one to me, too), the deficit will grow larger than the one his review will be studying. . . unless, of course, they plan to “finance” the extra spending with additional pork inserted into the budget in advance of the cut.

Hey, don’t laugh—it’s not really a joke. . .

. . . it’s actually his plan!

If John McCain isn’t willing to propose a serious solution during his remaining time in the Senate, I see no reason to consider him as a leader somewhere down the line.

But that’s linear thinking, a form of logic apparently alien to John McCain.


(cross-posted on Daily Kos and The Seminal)

McCain on Iraq War:“I’m Running Out of Funny Lines”

Presidential wannabe John McCain took Bush’s his economic “plan” to the National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB) on Tuesday. McCain wanted to talk about out-of-control government spending, but it just seemed that something was missing. . . .

What could it be, what could it be? A big government boondoggle sucking billions upon billions out of the American economy. . . oh, yeah, that would be Iraq.

McSame didn’t want to talk about his support for Bush’s war and occupation, but enquiring minds in the audience at NFIB wanted to know: when was Johnny Mac going get the US out of Iraq?

Some might call it heckling, I suppose, but McCain just wasn’t getting to the heart of the matter. The Arizona Senator was interrupted repeatedly by protestors wanting him to speak about the occupation.

“I’m tempted to use my favorite line from President Reagan, ‘There you go again,’” McCain said with his characteristically creepy forced laugh.

Yeah, OK, John. Not sure what that has to do with anything exactly. Were you expecting Iraq to just get lost in a summer of rising unemployment and soaring gas prices? Yeah, oh, well, um, talk about being caught between Iraq and a hard place.

Does this “devil or the deep blue” problem that he has while running on Bush’s record bother McCain? Just maybe. After being interrupted yet again by questions about the Iraq war, McCain, exasperated, declared, “I’m running out of funny lines.”

Watch it:




Again, just to get this, uh, you know, straight—John McCain’s final answer after being repeatedly challenged on his support for Bush’s Iraq fiasco was, “I’m running out of funny lines.”

So, I’m wondering, John, what’s so funny? Is it the 4,094 dead US troops? Or is it the 30,333 that have come home wounded?

Maybe it’s the 90,000 - 1.2 million dead Iraqi civilians. Or the 2.2 million Iraqis displaced by your beloved war.

Or perhaps you are laughing about the thousands of suicides among Iraq war veterans—or the thousands more to come. Or maybe you just can’t help but smile when you think about the 320,000 brain injuries or the estimated 300,000 now suffering with PTSD or major depression.

Or might it just be the trillions of dollars that you won’t have to spend on the things that could help Americans in this time of economic desperation—because you helped squander all that money in Iraq—that’s gotta get a guy like you whose “never run a small, struggling enterprise” all giggly, right?

Maybe, but nothing could be more wrong. The Bush-Cheney-McCain Iraq war is not a cheap laugh for a septuagenarian’s presidential campaign; it’s an expensive disaster that has scarred a generation.

Memo to John McCain: You’re not running out of funny lines. When it comes to Iraq, there are no funny lines. There never were.


(cross-posted on guy2k, Daily Kos, and The Seminal)

McCain “Smitten with the Celebrity of Power”

As I remarked in a couple of posts last week, I often find attempts to limn Republican presidential wannabe John McCain’s motivations to be overly complex. Most notably was Matt Bai’s NYT Magazine piece that tried to somehow link McCain’s experience as a POW with his ridiculous embrace of Bush’s war in Iraq. My response was that there really is no complex worldview when it comes to McSame, no nuanced position on the use of American military might, and certainly no sense of honor bound duty to his fellow fighters.

Rather, McCain’s “positions”—if you can dignify his empty posturing as such—are the result of political expedience. John McCain, though touted as a maverick, just put his “Straight Talk Express” on what he thought was the straightest road to the White House—if he wanted the Republican nomination, he had to go along not just to get along, but to get the financing he needed, too. What motivates this third generation Navy man to embrace a “strategy” that continues to send his brothers and sisters to their needless deaths? Naked ambition, pure and simple.

Many who have crossed paths with McCain in the last few decades have observed as much, though some try to put in nicer terms. Now, writing in the New York Times, David D. Kirkpatrick has given us more evidence of McCain’s lust for power. . . not to mention his penchant for hypocrisy.

Mr. McCain has often said he decided to run for office because he felt his war injuries would make attaining the same rank as his father and grandfather “impossible.” But Mr. Lehman, now an adviser to the McCain campaign, and two other top Navy officers familiar with Mr. McCain’s file insist that was not the case.

Instead, many who knew him say, Mr. McCain seemed bored by Navy life. “Sitting down with Anwar Sadat or Deng Xiaoping and being treated as an equal — that is pretty heady stuff,” said Rhett Dawson, a former aide to Mr. Tower who is now president of an electronics trade group. “It had opened his eyes to a much broader world.”

Mr. McCain was captivated, recalled Jeffrey Record, then an aide to former Senator Sam Nunn, the hawkish Georgia Democrat. “He thrives on competition, and he thrives on political combat,” Mr. Record said. “He saw the glamour of it. I think he really got smitten with the celebrity of power.”

Considering that former Press Secretary Scott McClellan, who is now making the rounds promoting his book, attributes much of what went wrong during the Bush Administration to what’s been called the “permanent campaign”—using the authority of the office for partisan gain—and the president himself becoming overly impressed with his own power, does America really want another chief executive that thrives on political combat? And can we survive another four years of a man so taken with the idea of power for power’s sake?

I think the whole world—from the sultans to the serfs, from the admirals to the GIs, from the celebrities to the wannabes—knows the answer. Well, the whole world minus one, I guess.


(cross-posted on guy2k and The Seminal)

Bush: For Troops this Memorial Day, Time = Money

Fresh off Thursday’s rejection of an additional 0.5 percent pay increase for America’s active military, President George W. Bush has a better idea for how this country might honor our troops: A “moment of remembrance.”

President Bush asked Americans to pay tribute to veterans by pausing on Memorial Day for "a moment of remembrance."

Bush had several suggestions for how to honor the sacrifices of those who have fought for the United States -- place a flag at a veteran's grave, go to a battlefield or say a prayer. He said the moment of remembrance would be marked Monday at 3 p.m. local time.

"At that moment, Major League Baseball games will pause, the National Memorial Day parade will halt, Amtrak trains will blow their whistles and buglers in military cemeteries will play taps," he said in his weekly radio address.

The president said that as people "fire up the grill" and mark the unofficial beginning of summer, they need to honor the sacrifices that make freedom possible.

"No words are adequate to console those who have lost a loved one serving our nation," Bush said. "We can only offer our prayers and join in their grief."

No, Mr. Bush, sir, I believe we can offer a heck of a lot more than “our prayers.” You could start by paying the living that you and your folly have so needlessly placed in harms’ way something close to what they deserve. I don’t expect you to go so far as to pay the troops as much as you dole out to your elite mercenaries at Blackwater and the like, but surely you could spare the extra half-point approved by the Congress in the recent Defense Authorization Bill—an increase that would bring the entire raise up to a whopping 3.9 percent.

According to the Congressional Budget Office, that tiny added increase in troop pay would mean spending an extra $324 million next year—or less than the cost of one day of war in Iraq. It is 0.2 percent of the $165 billion requested by the White House for continuing the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

To put it another way, that money amounts to roughly a quarter- less than four percent of what a recent pentagon audit found was paid by the Army to private contractors—and for much of what was purchased with that $8.2 billion, there is no record that anything was received.

Or, Mr. President, you could drop your opposition to the new GI Bill that just overwhelmingly passed both houses of Congress. That small expenditure would offer much deserved medical and education benefits to returning veterans.

While you’re at it, you could really fix the VA. You could de-privatize all the programs you farmed out to your cronies and political benefactors. You could clean up and repair the hospitals and clinics, you could expand mental health services, you could stop your minions from purposefully minimizing the number of PTSD diagnoses, and stop them from classifying those still hampered by mental or physical injuries as fit for combat so that they can be sent back into your meat grinder.

Or, I’ve got an even better idea still. You could start bringing the troops home—for once, for all, for good. You could admit your mistake and end the occupation that needlessly adds—each and every day—to the list of those that we must memorialize.

Do that, and I’ll make you a deal—I’ll not only forgive you your patronizing, fatuous, callous, insulting “moment of remembrance,” I’ll agree to let you go back to your golf game.


(cross-posted on guy2k, The Seminal, and Daily Kos)

McCain: I’ve earned the right to screw the troops

The US Senate passed Jim Webb’s (D-VA) update of the GI Bill yesterday by a vote of 75 – 22. The Math will tell you that three senators did not cast a vote on this measure: one was Senator Ted Kennedy (D-MA), who was just this week diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor after suffering a seizure, one was Oklahoma’s own Tom Coburn (R)—and, honestly, who knows what’s going on inside his head—and the third? That would be presumptive Republican presidential nominee, part-time Arizona senator, and full-time asshole John W. McCain.

McCain—who, by the way, did you know, was a POW in Vietnam—was too busy insulting Ellen DeGeneres and attending two big-ticket Silicon Valley fundraisers to make it back to Washington to do his job vote. However, Johnny Mad Cow—who absolutely does NOT have anger-management problems, and I don’t give a FUCK who says otherwise!!!—still had time to dash off one of his patented vitriol-laced, uh, I mean, straight-talking missives to his likely opponent in November, Senator Barack Obama.

It is typical, but no less offensive that Senator Obama uses the Senate floor to take cheap shots at an opponent and easy advantage of an issue he has less than zero understanding of. Let me say first in response to Senator Obama, running for President is different than serving as President. The office comes with responsibilities so serious that the occupant can't always take the politically easy route without hurting the country he is sworn to defend. Unlike Senator Obama, my admiration, respect and deep gratitude for America's veterans is something more than a convenient campaign pledge. I think I have earned the right to make that claim.

. . . .

But I am running for the office of Commander-in-Chief. That is the highest privilege in this country, and it imposes the greatest responsibilities. It would be easier politically for me to have joined Senator Webb in offering his legislation. More importantly, I feel just as he does, that we owe veterans the respect and generosity of a great nation because no matter how generously we show our gratitude it will never compensate them fully for all the sacrifices they have borne on our behalf.

. . . .

I know that my friend and fellow veteran, Senator Jim Webb, an honorable man who takes his responsibility to veterans very seriously, has offered legislation with very generous benefits. I respect and admire his position, and I would never suggest that he has anything other than the best of intentions to honor the service of deserving veterans. Both Senator Webb and I are united in our deep appreciation for the men and women who risk their lives so that the rest of us may be secure in our freedom. And I take a backseat to no one in my affection, respect and devotion to veterans. And I will not accept from Senator Obama, who did not feel it was his responsibility to serve our country in uniform, any lectures on my regard for those who did.

Now, Mc—wait, excuse me one second, can I just say, What an A-Hole!—sorry, where was I? Oh, yes, now McCain not only doesn’t take a backseat to anyone on military issues, he doesn’t take any seat at all! McCain not only missed the GI Bill vote, and multiple other votes concerning military matters, he was also absent from Thursday’s confirmation hearings for Generals David Patraeus and Ray Odierno before the Senate Armed Services Committee—a committee of which McCain is Ranking Member!

Did McCain have nothing to ask of or say to the next head of CENTCOM? Did the highest ranking Republican on the Armed Services Committee have no questions for the next guy to run the pig circus we call the war in Iraq?

But hey, OK, little John, you were busy with things that were more important to you—it’s just one day, right?

Not right.

It was just last February when McCain chose to skip a vote that could have provided additional assistance for a quarter-million disabled veterans. He apparently couldn’t squeeze it in, even though he was in DC at the time, on his way to speak at the ultra conservative CPAC conference.

And then there was last year, where, by May, McCain had missed 10 of the first 14 votes on the Iraq War. (There is a partial list of important votes that McCain missed or used to vote against aid for troops or veterans here.)

And don’t forget, I’m just talking about military matters, here. McCain has missed any number of important votes (like every important environmental vote this session).

But, credit where credit is due—McCain is right: running for president is different from being president. You see, running for president is something you choose to do. How you run your campaign, where you go, whose endorsements you seek, whose money you take, how much time you spend campaigning and fundraising, those are all choices you get to make. Running for office is not a job.

Being president, however, is a job. One to which you are elected, sure, but once sworn in, you do have an obligation to show up and do what is expected by your constituents.

Why, it’s kind of like being a senator! Yeah, that’s it, it’s like being senator of the whole country. And if that is the case, then it looks like Senator Obama has McCain beat—Obama showed up for the GI Bill vote, and most of the other important military votes this Congress. (Hell, Johnny, even Senator Clinton—who we all know needs to do as much campaigning and fundraising as she can these days—took the time on Thursday to both vote on the GI Bill and other Iraq-related measures and fulfill her duties as a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee by sticking around to question Patraeus and Odierno.)

All of which leaves me wondering where McNasty gets off attacking Obama about responsibility. . . specifically about the responsibility to serve his country.

It seems McCain is now implying that you can only serve your country as a member of the military—ridiculous on its face, but let me make one more point.

Since just after the end of the Vietnam War, the United States has had an all-volunteer force. That means (unlike a job to which you are elected) you can choose whether or not to serve. Of course, there are circumstances that might arise that make it seem like it would be the duty of most patriotic Americans to enlist, but these are (and should be) rare.

Senator Obama is considerably younger than John McCain. Born in 1961, Obama would have been eligible to enlist starting in 1979, and would have been of prime service age (18 – 27) through the end of the Reagan Administration. What great causes, what threats to our democracy might have convinced a young man to give up college, law school, or his work with the urban poor to join the US military?

Lebanon? Grenada?

Bueller?

So what comparison is McCain seeking to draw here exactly? Is he really telling all of America that unless we have served in the military—maybe unless we’ve seen combat—we are not qualified to question candidate and/or President McCain? Not that there aren’t plenty of active and retired military personnel who have big problems with McCain, but really, if they’re the only ones that McCain will tolerate, then, uh, wow!

No wonder he likes to say that he’s running for “Commander-in-Chief”—which is not a real position, just a nice turn of phrase—“president” sounds just way too, you know, civilian.

The last eight years have been scary enough with a guy who once went AWOL using the authority of the presidency to politicize the military and then have it serve his partisan domestic agenda. And this decade has been more than sad enough because the result of that misuse is a military stressed to the breaking point—and countless men and women who have been killed, maimed, or just ill-served by a Republican government that will not pony up to really support our troops. But imagine a “commander” that won’t countenance the counsel of civilians and can’t be bothered to do the minimum required of him to care for his fellow servicemen and women.

Imagine a president that, by virtue of his experience, believes he has earned the right to discount everyone else’s.


(cross-posted on The Seminal and Daily Kos)

The Other McCain Doctrine

Here’s my biggest problem with Matt Bai’s longwinded window on the mad cow mind of presidential wannabe John W. McCain: it’s complete and utter hogwash.

Desperately seeking an angle by which to sell editors and America alike on yet another feature article on the faux-maverick of the moment, Bai rolls out this theory at the beginning of his Sunday New York Times Magazine cover story:

There is a feeling among some of McCain’s fellow [Vietnam] veterans that his break with them on Iraq can be traced, at least partly, to his markedly different experience in Vietnam. McCain’s comrades in the Senate will not talk about this publicly. They are wary of seeming to denigrate McCain’s service, marked by his legendary endurance in a Hanoi prison camp, when in fact they remain, to this day, in awe of it. And yet in private discussions with friends and colleagues, some of them have pointed out that McCain, who was shot down and captured in 1967, spent the worst and most costly years of the war sealed away, both from the rice paddies of Indochina and from the outside world. During those years, McCain did not share the disillusioning and morally jarring experiences of soldiers like Kerry, Webb and Hagel, who found themselves unable to recognize their enemy in the confusion of the jungle; he never underwent the conversion that caused Kerry, for one, to toss away some of his war decorations during a protest at the Capitol. Whatever anger McCain felt remained focused on his captors, not on his own superiors back in Washington.

Net-net: McCain, locked up and tortured to his breaking point by what he understood to be his country’s enemy, never got to see for himself that quagmires like the war in Indochina cannot be “won” in any meaningful way through the use of any amount of US military force. Senators John Kerry, Jim Webb, and Chuck Hagel (and former Senator Max Cleland), having stayed out of North Vietnamese hands, can now understand the futility of the Bush-McCain approach to the Iraqi war and occupation.

That former Nebraska Senator Bob Kerrey (who is quoted in the article dismissing the “McCain sees it differently because of his war experience” theory) was a hawk on Iraq, despite serving all of his time in Vietnam outside of a POW camp, is not broached by Bai.

I do not mean to dispute the idea that a man’s experiences in war might color his worldview from there on out, or even that Senator McCain’s view might be different because of his imprisonment. Rather, I take issue with the premise that McCain’s stance on matters Iraq can be explained through this particular glossy, psych-lite analysis.

And I’m not alone in my doubts. Beyond the aforementioned disbelief from Senator Kerrey, Bai himself seems to abandon the thesis by midway through the article—or earlier—ping-ponging between the notion that McCain has been erratic in his approach to the use of US military force, and the Senator’s own protestations that he has been nothing but consistent throughout his public life.

Bai does mention how the returning POW chose to study at the Naval War College—implying (to my way of seeing it) that a man whose “experience” we are supposed to favor over his election year competitors actually got his ideas from books. But Bai then explains that the intellectual history of the Republican Party breaks it into three groups—the isolationists, the realists, and the idealists—and then helps to burnish McCain’s “maverick” status by basically taking the Senator at his word when he infers that McCain’s views on military force don’t neatly fit into any camp (though Bai does write that he believes McCain to be closer to the idealists—those that would use military force to promote what they call democracy).

That the article’s central theory (theories?) serves as nothing more than a structure awkwardly wrapped around an excuse for a (another) canned and detail-deficient McCain peroration is made abundantly clear by one of Bai’s own realizations:

What was startling about this conversation was that, while McCain was talking about the dangers of intervening in a Zimbabwe or a Burma, he might just as well have been talking about the invasion of Iraq. Didn’t that country, too, have a colonial history that had been carelessly considered, to say the least? Didn’t the war’s proponents fail to plan more than a few weeks out or to ask the hard questions about how their soldiers might be greeted in the streets?

McCain disarmingly agrees with Bai, but then goes on to perpetuate the lie that Iraq was different because everyone believed at the start of the war that the alleged existence of WMD justified invasion. Bai, to his credit, mentions that this is an arguable point. Sadly, rather than argue it, though, Bai contends that the 2008 election is not about why we invaded, but whether we should stay.

That is convenient for the candidate, since avoiding the first five years of this war’s history allows McCain to skirt accountability for a long list of proclamations about Iraq—many of them contradictory, and all of them wrong.

As if to underscore that point, Bai mentions to McCain that he received a 10-page booklet from the Center for American Progress filled with the Senator’s unimpressive prognostications on Iraq.

McCain shrugs this off and insists that he will never waver from his support of the war, no matter what the personal cost. “As I said a year ago,” he told me, “I would rather lose a campaign than a war.” If he doesn’t make the most persuasive argument of his life, he risks losing both

And that’s the final line of the article—that’s where Bai leaves it. And, no doubt, Bai would like that to tie a nice little bow on his thesis—the steadfast candidate with the consistent worldview shaped by time spent as a POW 40 years ago.

Well, the quote, and, even more to the point, Bai’s last line, are revealing, but not of anything that Bai discusses in his long story.

If there is a constancy to be gleaned here, if there is a motivation that is uncovered by McCain’s current conversation and his various political conversions, it is, to me, the most obvious one: ambition.

What runs consistently through John McCain’s lifetime of discourse on the use of his country’s military might is his own desire to win—not any war, but his own, personal battles. And, since the early 1980’s, those battles have been for higher and higher public office. If there appear to be inconsistencies in McCain’s positions, it is because deep down, at his core, John McCain is a man that wants above all else to be president—and his positions need to serve that ambition. McCain might rather lose a war than a campaign (though I would dispute even that), but the war in Iraq has already been lost, while the campaign is technically still an open question.

That the war was lost by the men that McCain was forced to embrace in order to win his party’s nomination just makes his true motivations more obvious. That the presumptive Republican nominee must now try to shoehorn that bear hug into a respectable narrative makes him rather pathetic.

Pathetic, too, is the way Bai and many of his establishment media cohorts can’t quite bring themselves to report on the obvious. The title of this article is The McCain Doctrines—plural—so Bai is apparently open to the idea that the POW theory is rife with inconsistencies. Granted, my take on this McMess is also psychoanalysis of the most amateur rank, but it seems just as plausible, and, being far more simple, much more likely.

Alas, Occam’s razor would probably not get Bai on the cover of the Times Magazine—and, if experience is any guide, it might get him thrown off the “Straight Talk Express.”

Which, of course, would not serve Bai’s ambition in the least.


(cross-posted on The Seminal and Daily Kos)

It looks bad, but really, it’s worse

Much of the “success” that is often attributed to the surge escalation by administration mouthpieces and the rah-rah chorus in the establishment media can actually be traced to a truce called by Moqtada al Sadr, and a “strategy” that has US forces paying protection money to assorted Sunni militias.

But we knew that.

However, now that fighting in Basra is reaching pre-surgescalation levels and violence is heating up around Baghdad, here are a couple of things that we are just learning.

First, to Basra:

Since August 2007, Moqtada al Sadr has established a cease fire and held back his forces from attacks but he has never denied their right to self defense. This cease fire is the primary cause of decreased casualties in Iraq.

. . . .

With upcoming provincial elections likely to show serious losses for both Maliki’s Dahwa party and Hakim’s SIIC and growing support for Mahdi associated representatives, it’s not surprising that Cheney and our occupation allies were deep in talks last week – nor is it surprising that we now see a dramatic push by green zone forces on Basra where Sadrist forces had been gaining power where Hakim's SIIC used to have considerable power.

. . . .

[During his visit, Cheney] reported[ly] gained agreement from al Hakim for provincial elections, elections in which Hakim’s SIIC is expected to do poorly given popular support for al Sadr. As Badger writes today:

These are two of the famous Bush "benchmarks": Oil and Gas Law, and progress toward provincial elections. In the case of Barzani and the Oil law, the quid pro quo was obvious. But what was the quid pro quo for the Supreme Council? One possible--I would say obvious--answer now suggests itself: In exchange for the Supreme Council dropping its obstruction of the Provincial Powers law, the US would tolerate, and provide air-support for, a campaign against the Sadrists in the Basra region.

The gains for George and Dick are clear - weaken or distract those pesky nationalist forces, justify continued troop surge and presence, gain "approval" of US benchmarks (though not popular approval) and keep control of Iraqi oil in the hands of men like Hakim.

And, literally breaking as I write this, al Maliki has given the Mahdi militias 72 hours to lay down their weapons or face unspecified serious consequences.


As for the Sunni “awakening”/bribery:

. . . a strike by (formerly) pro-American members of an Awakening council in Diyala reveals a country-wide frustration with the US, even among its allies. The men of Diyala say they have not received pay they were promised, and feel that the US does not appreciate the sacrifices they have made for the surge. They have buried over 400 of their own, and now some feel they are just being manipulated to advance an American political agenda. Of 49 groups the Guardian spoke with across Iraq, most reported not being paid. In Hillah, discontented fighters spoke of organizing a nation-wide strike.

It is discouraging enough that these “truces” are now falling apart—for Iraqis and Americans alike—but it is disgusting to realize that, once again, what little good might have come of the recent “breathing space” will now be fouled by typical Bush-Cheney greed and cynical political gamesmanship.


(cross-posted on The Seminal)

By any other name

When five US combat brigades depart Iraq in July—because their over-long, 15-month rotations are up, and not because of any actual strategic decision—it will represent the end and sum total of what George W. Bush not-too-long-ago called our “return on success.” As reported in today’s New York Times (via Think Progress), it “now appears likely that any decision on major reductions in American troops from Iraq will be left to the next president.”

In other words, what the Bush Administration successfully branded as a “surge” proves to be exactly what I insisted it was over a year ago, an escalation.

Even though most of this escalation in forces will remain in Iraq through the end of Bush’s term, I will bet that most in the establishment media will continue to call it a “surge”—just as the same scribe corps continues to parrot and push the never true and constantly disproved myth that “the surge is working.”

Just to reiterate, because it seems that we all have to, the latest escalation has not worked. It certainly didn’t promote any kind of grand political reconciliation—its purported strategic goal—and even the claim that it decreased overall violence is extremely suspect.

After fourteen months of this tactic, the occasion of reaching 4,000 dead troops serves to underscore the escalation’s abject failure. Not only does that number promise to go ever higher for the rest of Bush’s reign, the last two weeks got us to this tragic milestone much faster than expected. The 25 killed in the last fortnight represents the highest death rate for a two-week period since September 2007 (which came at the end of the bloodiest summer of the war).

Iraqi deaths are also creeping back up, Sunni and Shiite militias appear to be growing restless, and the US still has no set plan for transitioning out of this occupation.

Presidential candidates Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have both proposed more rapid US troop redeployments, but John W. McCain has a different idea. . . or, rather, he has the most un-different idea. To quote the Times: “The Republican candidate, Senator John McCain, has advocated following a policy close to that of President Bush’s.”

Four more years of an over-stretched military, mission drift, and continued escalation—overseen by a guy that doesn’t even seem to understand the conflict? Sounds like the Republicans are offering McMore of McSame.

. . . .

For a different—as in better—way to deescalate the occupation, please check out A Responsible Plan to End the War in Iraq (this is my review, or click below to read about the full plan and who is supporting it).




(cross-posted on guy2k and The Seminal)

Five years + one day

In a discussion about five years of war, permanent bases, and impeachment appended to my cross-post over at The Seminal, I wound up adding a rather lengthy addendum. Since I don’t think that I have a lot of crossover readers, I am going to take the liberty of posting the comment here.

I was at a talk about impeachment that included, among others, Liz Holtzman and Bruce Fein, and Fein, a veteran of the Reagan administration, is, as you might know, apoplectic about this issue. He has a list of impeachable offenses a mile long, but chose at this event to cite the Bush/Cheney pursuit of permanent bases in Iraq, as outlined in a signing statement, in direct defiance of the law passed by Congress and signed by the president.

What’s amazing is that Congress passed this law, but it is a retired Reaganite that’s doing the screaming.

The Democratic leadership still doesn’t seem to understand that impeachment hearings—and it starts with hearings, not a vote—are a great teaching opportunity. America needs to hear about all the ways the Bush/Cheney Administration subverted the Constitution and broke US Criminal Code, or the very next president will feel free to do some of the same things (and we will have to hear for the rest of our lives about what a saint and hero GWB was as we name every airport after him and carve his face into Mount Rushmore).

Further, Congress needs to reassert its role in our tripartite system. No president is going to willingly give up power—not even a Democratic one; it is up to Congress to take back the authority granted it under the Constitution and affirmed in the courts from the earliest days of our history.

As Holtzman, an HJC member in 1974, noted, the Nixon impeachment hearings were completed in three months. This summer would be a perfect time for our Congress to start the process. Former presidents and vice presidents receive all kinds of perks and big federal pension that would go away with impeachment (one of the reasons that Nixon resigned before a Senate impeachment vote was to save his pension), so even after November/January, impeachment hearings would still be a practical exercise of Congressional power.

Congress must publicly dispel and destroy the myth of the “unitary executive.” If we are to form a more perfect union, to borrow a phrase, then we have no choice. If this administration is allowed to go gently, then we have likely cemented our transition from republic to empire.

Five years—what have we got?

It was March 19th, 2003, when George W. Bush let slip the dogs of war on Iraq. I seem to remember something about “Shock and Awe,” something about WMDs, something about being “welcomed as liberators” with candy and flowers, and something about the war paying for itself.

Ohhhhh Kayyyyyyyyyy. . . .

Well, five years and over one-half trillion dollars (and counting) later, what do we really have? This is just a sample.

Nearly 4,000 US troops killed in combat; over 29,000 wounded.
At least 145 deaths by suicide (thousands more have attempted suicide).
Over 500 amputees (not counting fingers and toes).
Over 7,500 with Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI).
An estimated 28% of troops that see combat return with PTSD.
Upwards of 300,000 Iraq veterans are expected to develop some sort of mental health problem requiring treatment.
Divorces, spousal abuse, alcoholism and drug abuse—all on the rise in the veteran population.

(sources here, here, here, and here)


Somewhere between 600,000 and 1.2 million Iraqi civilian dead.
One in five Iraqis are considered displaced.
Four-and-a-half million Iraqis are uprooted.
Two-and-a-half million are displaced inside Iraq.
Two million Iraqi refugees are in neighboring countries.
The number of Iraqis seeking asylum is at an all-time high.

(sources here, here, and here)


Over 70% of Iraqi women say they don’t have enough to feed their family.
Two-thirds say that violence against women has increased in the last five years.
Over three-quarters say that girls in their family are not allowed to attend school.
Only about a quarter of Iraqi women are optimistic about the future.

(source)

But things are getting better, right? Let’s take a look at some of the latest news:

The death toll from a suicide bombing near the Shrine of Imam Hussein has risen above 50.

An epidemiologist estimates that Iraq (which had roughly the same size population as the greater New York metropolitan area when the war began) has suffered the equivalent of six 9/11 attacks per month.

The Iraqi National Museum—the one looted after the fall of Baghdad—is still closed, and will remain closed after it is renovated because of continued security fears.

The latest in a long list of conferences designed to reconcile Iraq’s warring political factions has begun to unravel before it even begins.

Top US commander in Iraq, Gen. David Patreus, says that the Iraqis have not taken advantage of the “surge,” and are not making “sufficient progress” toward national reconciliation.

VP Dick Cheney is in Iraq crafting a deal to guarantee that the US military is committed in Iraq beyond the end of his administration. (Without Congressional approval, such a deal would of course be illegal, as in, impeachable.)

Cheney and Bush’s good friend, John W. McCain (Asshole-AZ), is also in Iraq, routinely confusing Sunni and Shiite factions in the region while trying to stoke the fires for war with Iran. . . and, of course, promote another 95 years of Iraqi occupation.

Something to look forward to. . . as if looking back on the last five years weren’t depressing enough.


(cross-posted on The Seminal and Daily Kos)

Ending this war, and preventing the next

If you were in Washington, DC, on Monday evening, perhaps you were lucky enough to attend the official release of A Responsible Plan to End the War in Iraq (h/t Jason).

I know what you’re thinking: another plan, another press event, another way to say nothing and do less. . . but in this case, you are quite possibly thinking wrong.

You might want to read the whole report (available as a pdf—see link on this page) and decide for yourself, but let me try to quickly explain why I think this plan might be different.

It understands that there is no “military solution” to the Iraq crisis. With this understanding, the plan does not tell us how to “win the war,” but instead lays out a path toward a rapid, responsible troop withdrawal coupled with a multilateral diplomatic effort that will end US military involvement in Iraq while attempting to rebuild US power of the non-lethal sort.

It puts humanitarian concerns front and center. By providing for humanitarian aid inside Iraq, as well as for the displaced Iraqis scattered worldwide, this plan makes it clear that it is not about washing our hands of the matter, or leaving the Iraqis to bloodily sort things out for themselves. It is a plan that respects the so-called “Pottery Barn rule” more than Colin Powell ever pretended to.

By acknowledging that the war was a mistake to begin with, it frees the people behind this plan to address a very important question: How can we prevent this type of fiasco from ever happening again?

It is in that last point that we find what makes this plan so refreshing—and so bold. For the authors of this plan understand that Bush’s Iraq War, at its inception, was not so much a geopolitical crisis as it was a US domestic crisis.

To that end, the Responsible Plan calls for measures that at first blush don’t necessarily seem to be about “Iraq.” Yes, it calls for a total renunciation of torture, but it also calls for the re-establishment of the constitutionally prescribed balance of power between the three branches of US government. It calls for the reinstatement of protections allotted under the Fourth Amendment, and for the restoration of Habeas rights. (That’s a lot of “re’s.”) The plan also specifically demands an end to presidential signing statements.

The Responsible Plan also deals with the fallout of Bush’s folly by addressing current recruiting shortfalls and the care of our military families—now, and long into the future—with a “GI Bill for Life.” Further, it exhibits an important degree of fiscal responsibility by advocating for the integration of Iraq expenditures into the normal budget process.

And there are a few additional proposals that I find truly remarkable, considering that this plan had to not only meet with the approval of strategists, policy wonks, and retired military professionals, but had to gain the endorsement of current candidates for Congress, as well.

This plan calls for three things that seem to fly directly in the face of traditional campaign fundraising:

Contractor “reform”:

The need for contracting reform is substantial. Private militias have direct incentives to prolong the conflict rather than resolve it; their use needs to be phased out. Contractors must be legally accountable for their actions. War profiteering must be stopped, and those who have engaged in it need to answer for their actions.

Media independence:

The consolidation of our news media into the control of a relatively few corporate entities stifled a full and fair discussion and debate around Iraq. A more robust debate could be encouraged by expanding access to media.

And, last, but certainly not least, the plan acknowledges the link between the war in Iraq and our oil addiction, and calls for a domestic, non-oil solution:

[W]e are clearly tied to Iraq through our dependence on oil, which makes us vulnerable. Moving away from that dependence is necessary for strategic, economic, and environmental reasons.

Responsible—and comprehensive. Or, perhaps I should say, responsible because it’s comprehensive.

And I should also mention one more rather remarkable component to this proposal: A roadmap for implementation. Dive into the plan, and you will find a host of bills already pending in Congress—complete with lists of co-sponsors—bills that could be debated and maybe even passed this very summer if the Democratic leadership had the inclination, resolve, and, I will add, political savvy. (Sure, much of this legislation would get vetoed by Bush, or bottlenecked in the Senate by obstructionist Republicans and Liebercrats, but by putting it up there and out there, Democrats would show the voters that they are trying to do the people’s bidding, and it would further tie Republican candidates to an unpopular president and his failed and costly war.)

Should, however, our current crop of elected representatives fail to get the job done, the Responsible Plan has a plan for that, too. This proposal rolled out with the endorsement of multiple Democratic congressional candidates—and it is actively calling on more to jump on board. (Campaign fundraising is also being organized around support for the Responsible Plan.)

These Democratic candidates now have something to run on—which is a fabulous way to get out ahead of the competition and frame the debate. I challenge any Republican to present such a comprehensive and wide-ranging plan. But, even better, the Democrats as a party now have something to offer America. Should the bulk of the party—and, indeed, its presidential standard-bearer—endorse this proposal, Democrats could not only claim to be the party of ideas, they could be the party of solutions.

Comprehensive, responsible solutions.





(cross-posted on The Seminal and Daily Kos)

Packer: "Hillary Clinton will hedge her bets on Iraq"

(I was going to work this into a bigger piece on JRE and Iraq, but, well, events got ahead of me, so I’ll just report on this point that seems to have, like so many substantive points in this race, gone underreported.)

Appearing on WNYC’s The Brian Lehrer Show last week, George Packer, New Yorker writer and author of The Assassins' Gate, got to comparing the (then) three major Democrats left in the race. He had these two things to say (transcribed from the audio):

If a Democratic primary voter is concerned with getting out of Iraq as quickly as possible, then there is only one clear choice, and that is John Edwards.

. . . .

If you want to get out of Iraq as quickly as possible and you are trying to choose between Obama and Clinton—there is no way to choose.

I should note that Packer was not explaining his take on Edwards as a way of promoting him—quite the contrary. Indeed, Packer (a semi-repentant advocate of the 2003 invasion) believes US troops should not leave, as best I can tell, any time soon.

Instead, the man who just completed a multi-thousand word piece on Hillary Clinton sought to pay an odd compliment to the New York Senator by saying this: “Hillary Clinton will hedge her bets on Iraq.”

In other words, Packer thinks Clinton will campaign on a relatively quick withdrawal plan as a path to the nomination, but she will leave herself enough room to provide for an extended US presence should she find herself elected president.

After reading that New Yorker piece (which focuses on Clinton, but also devotes a good amount of space to her now one remaining rival), I get the sense that he expects Obama to also “wake up” to what Packer sees as the necessity of an extended military commitment. Apparently, as he explained on the radio, because the US has enlisted so many collaborators that our government will not now—to any meaningful extent—allow to immigrate here, Packer thinks that we need to stay and protect them there.

I’m all for aiding the people who have risked so much in service to the US, but I question how much we are helping anyone by maintaining our current posture.

Alas, after listening to him on WNYC, and reading his New Yorker article “The Choice,” Packer has made the choice now thrust upon me very much harder.

As if it weren’t hard enough.

(cross-posted on guy2k, The Seminal, and Daily Kos)

Profiles in cowardice

As I walked down Broadway in the pouring rain on Saturday, marching with somewhere between 10,000 and 45,000 others to protest the ongoing US military action in Iraq, I talked with one of my fellow peace-loving patriots about the next Bush Administration debacle. New York Times columnist Paul Krugman wasn’t in my little group, but he might as well have been.

In his Monday commentary, Krugman slices and dices the current crop of fearmongers running around trying to gin up a war with Iran—especially neocon Svengali Norman Podhoretz and his favorite Trilby, Rudy Giuliani.

Rudy Giuliani is taking foreign policy advice from Norman Podhoretz, who wants us to start bombing Iran “as soon as it is logistically possible.”

Mr. Podhoretz, the editor of Commentary and a founding neoconservative, tells us that Iran is the “main center of the Islamofascist ideology against which we have been fighting since 9/11.” The Islamofascists, he tells us, are well on their way toward creating a world “shaped by their will and tailored to their wishes.” Indeed, “Already, some observers are warning that by the end of the 21st century the whole of Europe will be transformed into a place to which they give the name Eurabia.”

Do I have to point out that none of this makes a bit of sense?

For one thing, there isn’t actually any such thing as Islamofascism — it’s not an ideology; it’s a figment of the neocon imagination. The term came into vogue only because it was a way for Iraq hawks to gloss over the awkward transition from pursuing Osama bin Laden, who attacked America, to Saddam Hussein, who didn’t. And Iran had nothing whatsoever to do with 9/11 — in fact, the Iranian regime was quite helpful to the United States when it went after Al Qaeda and its Taliban allies in Afghanistan.

Beyond that, the claim that Iran is on the path to global domination is beyond ludicrous. Yes, the Iranian regime is a nasty piece of work in many ways, and it would be a bad thing if that regime acquired nuclear weapons. But let’s have some perspective, please: we’re talking about a country with roughly the G.D.P. of Connecticut, and a government whose military budget is roughly the same as Sweden’s.

It is that last point, especially, that resonates re: my rain-soaked rant from the weekend. While Krugman lays out the case against the Republican’s running for president, the same evidence is as damning for the current residents of the West Wing and the OEOB (or some undisclosed bunker). Calling a country like Iran a direct threat to the existence of the United States is, as Krugman’s relatives call it, “crazy talk,” and going on like that from the bully pulpit of the presidency is, at the least, irresponsible.

But, then again, Bush and Cheney have never been big on responsibility, have they?

It is, of course, beyond irresponsible. In the terms put forward by Krugman, it is also likely cynical. Framing it, as he does, with FDR’s apt admonition that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself, Krugman accuses the Republicans of fearmongering, and, by easy inference, racism.

But I’m willing to give those so funhouse-mirror-large and in charge the benefit of the doubt. Let’s say, just for the hell of it, that Bush, Cheney, Giuliani, Podhoretz, et al., are not cynical; let’s say that the fear that they broadcast is the fear that’s inside. Let’s say that all of these men are really afraid. Very, very afraid.

That the men who control, or seek to control, the full economic and military might of the United States are so desperate to risk what is left of US credibility or regional stability on a showy and likely ineffective air war against a country as small as Krugman details shows these men to be cowards—and “cowards” was the word I was using while marching on Saturday.

Sure, I also believe that these neo-conmen are cynical bastards, but I guess I can’t help but feel that given the craziness and cravenness, some of that cynicism is rooted in cowardice. For, as it has gone down, altering the course and progress of the entire country because of one day’s criminal act, as tragic and terrifying as it was, makes us as a nation appear weak. The need to unleash our expensive and mechanized dogs of war on millions of innocents, killing hundreds of thousands, in order to convince others of the superiority of our way of life, makes our ideals appear weaker. The Republicans (and a few Democrats, too) that cynically like to wrap themselves in the flag are, quite frankly, cowering behind it.

I would like to believe that America is tougher than that. I would like to believe that as a society we are stronger, and that our ideals are more attractive. I would like to believe that we can do better. And, though I don’t often think of myself as a “patriot,” that, to my mind, is patriotism.

The Republicans that offer us cynical and cowardly crazy talk are espousing something else—rather than appeal to the better angels of our nature, they exploit and expose some of our most devilish flaws.

If there were an ideology we could label “terrorist”—that is pretty much how I would describe it.


(PS Yes, I admit it, I have used this headline before.)


(cross-posted to The Seminal and Daily Kos)

When Bush pulls the trigger, remember who helped load the gun

As despicable as the lopsided vote on Lieberman-Kyl seemed last week, it seems altogether ominous now.

Though much was made of how the first paragraph of the amendment was “watered down” (it originally stated that US forces were to “combat, contain, and roll back” Iranian forces allegedly destabilizing Iraq, but this was seen as a too-thinly-veiled thumbs up to send troops over the border, so it was changed to the cumbersome “it should be the policy of the United States to stop inside Iraq the violent activities and destabilizing influence of the Government of the Islamic Republic of Iran, its foreign facilitators such as Lebanese Hezbollah, and its indigenous Iraqi proxies,” which is, frankly, comedic and not much better), it is the second paragraph that truly stands as a senatorial love letter to Dick Cheney.

After L+K gets done pandering to the fiction that there is some hegemonic transnational Islamic threat to the existence of the United States/Israel™, it sets about to “approve the listing of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard of Iran as a ‘foreign terrorist organization.’”

As stupid as it sounds to lump a sovereign nation’s largest military force in with the various designated non-state antagonists in the GWOT™, when read in tandem with the latest revelations by reporter Seymour Hersh, the Lieberman-Kyl Amendment is the perfect method for Bush/Cheney madness.

Writing in the October 6 issue of The New Yorker, Hersh explains that White House warriors, seeing limited traction for their original reason for war with Iran—that being to prevent Iran from building a nuclear weapon—have shifted the strategic rationale to counter-insurgency. Under the new “plan,” US and British forces would conduct “surgical air strikes” against Revolutionary Guard headquarters and training camps, while American special forces would work inside Iran to disable antiaircraft weapons and Iranian command and control.

A few points:

• Moving goals posts—changing the rationale for war from destroying weapons of mass destruction to counter-insurgency to part of the GWOT™—whoever heard of such a thing???
  
  
• If surgical strikes with special forces behind the lines sounds a bit like war to you, that’s because it is war. As even a first term President John Kennedy realized before the October 1963 missile crisis, there is no such thing as a surgical air strike. Even today, aerial bombing is far from a precise tactic—collateral damage deaths of innocents have been manifold during Iraqi and Afghani raids—and few battlefield objectives can be accomplished with airpower alone. Air strikes will not completely immobilize Iranian forces, and they will likely provoke more of the behavior that Bush/Cheney and Lieberman-Kyl label as destabilizing influences—they are not the final battle, but, more likely (and intentionally) a prelude to a broader war.
  
  
• And, most importantly, by declaring Iran’s Revolutionary Guard a terrorist organization—right here, right now—Congress has given Bush and Cheney all the “authority” that they need to attack them. . . anywhere. . . even inside Iran.
  
  According to Hersh, that’s exactly what they plan to do.

Make no mistake, as much as some senators, oh, say, like Hillary Clinton, want to argue that this resolution “gives us options to impose sanctions,” it is, in cold, clear fact, all that the current inhabitants of the White House need to start their next war. . . and claim that they have a congressional blessing—and the blessing of a Democrat running for president—to do so.

Bush may pull the trigger on a new round of bloodshed, but several Democrats—Sens. Hillary Clinton and Harry Reid, most notably—helped load the gun.


(And a PS to Sen. Barack Obama: Don’t think that skipping the vote on Lieberman-Kyl while making noise about how you would have voted against it lets you off the hook—it doesn’t. If convenient absence is your idea of leadership, then I suggest you lead yourself right off of the national stage.)


(cross-posted to Daily Kos)

Q.E.D.

I have always liked the P.J. O’Rourke quote about how “The Republicans are the party that says government doesn't work, and then they get elected and prove it.” Sadly, I now see a grotesque corollary unfolding in Iraq.

Basically, it goes like this: President Bush and his pro-war chorus have made a habit of late of warning us that if the US withdraws its troops from Iraq, a horrible bloodbath will ensue. . . and the administration is now doing everything they can to make sure that it happens.

I am reminded of this unfortunate parallel by recent revelations about the massive amounts of rifles and side arms quickly and recklessly distributed in Iraq on Gen. David Petraeus’s watch—and the extremely disturbing number of those weapons that have now gone missing.

It all began earlier this summer, with a General Accountability Office report that more than 110,000 AK-47 assault rifles, 80,000 Glock pistols, 135,000 pieces of body armor and 115,000 Kevlar helmets issued to Iraqi security forces could not be accounted for.

Later, Amnesty International researchers found that hundreds of thousands of U.S.-approved arms transfers from Bosnia-Herzegovina to Iraq - more than 90 tons of AK-47s - could also be missing

Those Iraqi security forces that are “losing” their weapons are predominantly Shiite; meanwhile, the US continues to aggressively arm Sunni groups that have purportedly vowed to use the weapons against what we call “Al-Qaeda” (or is it “Al-Qaeda in Iraq,” or just a whole lot of other hostile groups?). As I’ve mentioned before, those Sunnis now receiving US aid in places like Anbar have sworn allegiance to Coalition forces, not to the Iraqi government, and I’m sure that those same Sunnis are all too aware of the ethnic cleansing perpetrated by Shiite militias in Baghdad and the south. As the Center for American Progress noted, this “strategy” is contributing to deteriorating security in Iraq: “the United States is arming up different sides in multiple civil wars that could turn even more vicious in the coming years.”

CAP’s “Strategic Reset” actually documents that the more the US equips and trains Iraqi security forces, the more violence there increases.

You’d think that somebody might notice.

Or, maybe they have. . . .

It is more than obvious at this point that the Bush plan for “victory” in Iraq is to pass the fiasco on to his successor and then spend the next several election cycles criticizing the Democrats for “losing” Iraq. The administration and its handpicked yes-men in the field will try to play prevent defense until January of 2009, keeping something between 100,000 and 140,000 troops in country, as rotations will allow. Meanwhile, Bush, Cheney, their families, and cronies will continue to reap the financial rewards of arms trafficking, privatized security and support, and regional (not national) oil deals, all at the expense of Iraqi unity (such that it is), regional security, and civilian safety.

When the next president redeploys US forces out of Iraq—and the next president will have to do this due to the depleted readiness of our military and reserves, and the untenable economic and diplomatic costs of this situation—there will, by many assessments, be some terrible consequences in some parts of the country (not that things are not thoroughly terrible now). But, how terrible things will get is still an open question.

If the situation in Iraq were to get precipitously worse when a Democratic president and Congress tries disengage, it could actually help Republicans (at least in their view and the view of likeminded media outlets) make their argument that their plan—whatever the hell that was—was actually superior to that of the Democrats. And if all of this comes to pass, you will suddenly see Republicans, who don’t really want Iraq to be a factor in the coming election cycle, suddenly revive the issue for future cycles, and wave the bloody shirt at the Democrats and the country. . . and the bloodier the shirt, the better.

After all, Republicans have something to prove.


(cross-posted to Daily Kos)