"From each according to his ability, to each according to his need" is, in fact, just.
But men are, alas, unjust. So we do the best we can.
So said Plato, anyway. Or words to that effect.
It needs a little work. But go to Democracy in America.
:: Gaius Sempronius Gracchus 7:24 AM [+] ::
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Saturday, January 13, 2007
When it is not necessary to change, it is necessary not to change.
Why did the new Bond abandon 007’s traditional Walther PPK in favor of the larger, and hence less suitable for concealed carry, 9mm, something like this?
:: Gaius Sempronius Gracchus 8:37 PM [+] ::
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Still a kid, after all. Only forty. Who expects him to know what he’s talking about? How can we treat him like a real adult, responsible for his own follies?
Oh. Humans only live maybe 80 some years? They’re physically mature at about 18, you say? And have full political and social rights by 21, in America?
And start insisting they know more than their elders about virtually everything at about 16, anyway?
Oh.
And he still absurdly conflates hippies with lots of other, very different 60’s folks. So many do, on the right. It’s part of their patter.
Still, there is not the least reason why his disillusionment with the globalism essential to conservatism since the replacement of the Old Right by the Cold Warriors of the National Review back in the McCarthy era should do much of anything but push him toward a more paleocon or libertarian outlook.
“Up from conservatism”? Nah. He says not. Just “up from” Reaganism, maybe. Or the more vainly delusional conservatism that thinks we can or should conquer the world. Up from neoconservatism, maybe.
John Derbyshire, right there at the National Review, was never so sanguine about the huge neocon adventure and its stupid Wilsonian commitments to spreading The American Way.
It appears RD opened a can of worms, there, all the same.
Links at Greenwald’s post. Good further observations and comments, too.
The Mahablog » Betrayal, in particular, is quite perceptive. As are the posts on the history of the decline of liberalism on that blog, presenting an analysis that differs from my own principally by emphasizing race a little more and class a little less.
This is the Mahablogger, and I already regret not finding her earlier.
:: Gaius Sempronius Gracchus 12:16 PM [+] ::
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It all began with one faulty premise. The attack on the World Trade Center was carried out by a single organization, al-Qaeda. Hamas had not attacked us; Islamic Jihad had not attacked us; the Taliban had not attacked us; the guerrillas in the Philippines, Somalia, Colombia and wherever else in the world they exist had not attacked us. We had been attacked by one single organization, which had publicly declared war on us and had attacked us before overseas.
President Bush had a choice. He could have retaliated against the people who had attacked us. If he had done that, we would have had one enemy to deal with. Instead, Bush declared a global war on global terrorism. He was, in effect, declaring war on the world. That was the keystone stupid mistake. Invading Iraq, which had nothing to do with the attack on us, was a second stupid mistake.
Bosh. He chose a global war exclusively on Muslim terrorism, this born-again Christian man who readily accepted the neocon, Christian Zionist ideology of a new Crusade against the world-wide Muslim jihad.
And the world, as any number of informed protestant, more or less fundamentalist or conservative American missionary organizations will tell you, includes Africa, where Christians are in great numbers subject to massacre, enslavement, and slaughter at the hands of jihaders.
GW instantly saw the whole as a single global struggle in which Israel, the US, and pretty much everybody who isn’t a Muslim is, like it or not, united in victim-hood, under relentless and bloody attack by militant Islam.
From that perspective, he saw the neocons’ plan for a war on Iraq and eventual “regime change” in Iran as perfectly sensible ingredients of the common struggle.
He even looked in Putin’s eyes and saw a soul-mate, and had plenty of natural sympathy for a Christian leader with a crucifix under his shirt facing outrageous Chechen Muslim terrorism.
(It took a while for the Administration neocons to convince him American dominance in the Baltic and among the breakaway states of the former Soviet Union was more important than Christian solidarity in the global war against the Muslims. But they did.)
Charley Reese sees the enemy of 9/11 as Al-Qaeda, as do I and, I suppose, most, if not all, anti-warriors. He thinks and we think US retaliation could and should have been confined to Al-Qaeda, possibly including punitive attacks on their Taliban enablers.
There was no need at all to commit to a global struggle against all Muslim terrorist movements, everywhere, we think. And certainly none to adopt the neocon plan to make war on Iraq, Iran, and Syria, attempting a cultural revolution in those countries to make Israel safe by installing Western bourgeois democracies and soccer-mom values in the homelands of the burka.
In our eyes, when GW de-emphasized the hunt for Al-Qaeda in the mountainous border area linking Afghanistan and Pakistan, telling the world he was not much concerned with Osama Bin Laden and did not think the effort to track down that one individual terrorist leader very important, he abandoned the war on terrorism legitimated by 9/11 in favor of a gratuitous attack on a country, Iraq, that was not our enemy and had had nothing to do with 9/11.
In his eyes and those of his supporters, however, he had made a realistic and correct judgment about the relative importance of different players in the seamless global war uniting American interests with Israeli interests and those of anybody, anywhere – partly excepting Russia – combating any Muslim enemies, at all. Saddam, after all, was publicly paying bounties to the families of suicide bombers attacking Israel and killing Israeli civilians.
For more than a year, many anti-warriors have been writing of the decline of the neocons. Mostly this has been sheer propaganda and wishful thinking. Mostly, it still is. But with the failure of Iraq it is becoming obvious to at least some of their supporters that the US cannot or will not accept the sacrifices that would, or at least might, make anything remotely like the full-scale neocon agenda for the Middle East a success.
Start with the fact that the people will not accept a draft to send millions of Americans in uniform to conquer, occupy, and pacify the whole Levant, the Arabian Peninsula, and a good part of Central Asia.
Too, the rich of America, having already refused to pay their fair share of the cost of anything at all done by the American government, and having gone so far as to insist on radical cuts in their tax bills in “a time of war” decided upon by their own party and their own Maximum Leader, will certainly not sign on for anything remotely like their share of the necessary economic burdens of a new, full-scale “World War Three” (or is IV, now?) against global Islam.
The American people, full of enthusiasm in late 2001 and early 2002 for quick and firm military action to avenge 9/11, were by a very narrow margin talked into accepting the invasion of Iraq and continuing to support it as late as the election period of 2004.
That was not because they accepted GW’s neocon and radical Christian right vision of a global war of Christians, Jews, and everybody else (even heathen Hindoos?) against the evil and uniquely violent religion of Islam.
Americans are aware that Muslims do not generally love us, and generally oppose our policies of rigid support for Israel. But that is not at all the same thing.
Americans initially supported and continued to support GW in Iraq for so long because the Administration blinded them with a dense smoke-screen of deliberate lies to the effect that Saddam’s Iraq was directly connected with 9/11, and that there was a very real threat he would make nuclear weapons and give them to terrorists for the purpose of destroying American cities.
But America never signed on for World War Three (or IV), and now has been disabused of GW’s lies about Saddam and Iraq, and has no confidence in the Administration’s ability to even bring domestic peace to that country, let alone accomplish the much vaunted, neo-Wilsonian democratic and cultural revolutions needed to make Iraq a country full of America lovers and, if not Zionists, then at least people friendly toward Israel.
There is plenty of support in America for continued pursuit of Al-Qaeda and for some domestic precautions against terrorism – more than really necessary, in fact, in the opinion of most anti-warriors not affiliated with the Democratic Party or personally committed to the success of Democrat candidates.
And, since the minority that still supports GW and at least staying the course in Iraq, if not the whole neocon World War Three thing, includes the bulk of American Zionists, the majority of the country that opposes continuing in Iraq would also support, and may to an extent desire (if asked), a marked lessening of US support for Israel.
They were not the ones most gratified, after all, by GW’s insistence that the US was publicly and firmly committed to the defense of Israel, come what may, should that ever be necessary. Nor by the Israeli attacks on Hezbollah and Lebanon this past summer.
In the face of the evaporation of public support for the portion of their agenda that has actually been attempted, we may expect to see the neocons more and more publicly recognize that America is not prepared and never was prepared to carry out their maximal program of World War Three.
It is true that Americans continue to overestimate the dangers Muslim terrorists pose to this country, even supposing we do not relent in our openly anti-Arab and pro-Israeli policies.
But America has never been the least willing to accept a universal draft, military forces in the millions committed to conquest of the whole Levant, the Arabian Peninsula, and parts of Central Asia, high war taxes, blatant and World War II-style sacrifices in the civilian economy, and the decades of occupation and savage, bloody counter-insurgency needed for the called-for, far-reaching anti-Muslim cultural revolution.
Ann Coulter was essentially telling the truth about this agenda in early days when she urged that we conquer the whole region and forcibly convert them all to Christianity. This has been a religious culture war from the beginning. But most people were shocked by her remarks, and that neocon organ, the National Review, had to fire her for going a tad too far in public.
The Hell of it is that the neocons knew all that from the first day. Many repeatedly said we would need to start up the draft and do all that I have described above to carry out their agenda. And they knew full well that America did not see things that way, and would not do it.
Hence the need for a campaign of lies to get America to buy into the invasion of Iraq. Hence the repeated Republican assurances that no draft was on the table. Hence GW telling America the best way to fight terrorism was to go shopping at the mall or fly off on vacation. Hence official endorsement of the cliché that if we had to change our lives “the terrorists would have won.” Hence the Republican refusal to pay for Iraq. Hence the massive wave of tax cuts for GW’s “base” of Wall Street zillionaires.
All of that is the most obvious and blatant proof that the neocons knew from the first day there has always been zilch public support for their Maximal Plan, World War Three.
But they did not, either publicly or privately, think through a Plan B incorporating measures to secure Israel and fight the enemies they claimed to see around the whole world that America was really prepared to support.
Expect them to do it as soon as the debacle of Iraq is played out. Expect to see the neocons resurgent with a Plan B on the pages of the Wall Street Journal, the Weekly Standard, and the National Review.
It might even turn out to be the basis for some kind of bipartisan, consensus thing the whole establishment will buy in on, like World War Two or the Cold War.
It’ll be a lot less ambitious than the Maximal Plan. But it will still be a long way from principled non-interventionism.
No peace dividend is in the cards, folks.
:: Gaius Sempronius Gracchus 10:42 AM [+] ::
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Friday, January 12, 2007
Box in a box?
Why are we supposed to take Olberman seriously?
:: Gaius Sempronius Gracchus 8:57 PM [+] ::
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Can you say 'Noo-Klee-Ar'?
Joe Sestak can't. Apparently. Not sure Chris Matthews can, either.
GW is such a bad influence.
'Noo-cue-lar.' Sheez.
Were all politcians - and newsies, too - C students?
:: Gaius Sempronius Gracchus 7:22 PM [+] ::
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Out of the frying pan into a frying pan
Democrat Governor and maybe presidential candidate Bill Richardson wants US troops out of Iraq so they can be sent to Afghanistan.
Said so just now on Hardball.
Where do we get these idiots?
Well, at least he thinks there is no military option against Iran. None at all.
But he says he doesn't want Congress to pass anything expressly forbidding any American attack on or incursion into Iran.
Doesn't want to limit the options of the Commander in Chief. Says it wouldn't be proper.
Jeez.
As for Afghanistan, we have got to stop adopting enemy countries. We have got to stop trying to save these people from themselves. It never can work, it costs endless lives and fortune, and it's too stupid for words.
Just leave, for gosh sakes.
OK, the Taliban will take over again. Who the Hell cares? If they make the mistake of harboring terrorists who strike at us, again, we can blow them to bits, again.
They kill 3,000 of us, we kill 30,000 of them. Get it? We can never make them love us or be us. We can make them fear us. And we can make them dead.
We don't need to occupy the place or take it over or try to save all their souls or make them into soccer moms.
Ohmigosh, Howard Dean just told Chris Matthews Iraq was never an enemy or danger to the US, but Iran is both. He regrets the US army is 'in the wrong country' and the people have now been made 'sick of war.'
These people are all so completely nuts.
What a swell Duopoly.
:: Gaius Sempronius Gracchus 7:10 PM [+] ::
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Easier than you might think, what with our policy being run by stupid bastards who believe their own nitwit propaganda.
You know. “World’s only superpower,” and bosh like that.
If the U.S. were to lose the army it has in Iraq to Iraqi militias, Iranian regular forces, or a combination of both, cutting our one line of supply and then encircling us, the world would change. It would be our Adrianople, our Rocroi, our Stalingrad. American power and prestige would never recover. Nothing, not even Israel’s demands, should lead us to run this risk, which is inherent in any attack on Iran.
Why don't people who claim to be anti-imperialists and anti-interventionists and outright isolationists think, and dare to say, that such an outcome, though terrible for the all the dead and their families, would actually be a good thing for the country?
Much better than victory, in fact, no?
A bigger and better "Vietnam syndrome" having the effect of deeply chastening our rulers, pretty much putting them off unnecessary wars for long, long time?
And a very useful object lesson to states around the world, teaching them that it might be best NOT to seek the protection of the US?
Wouldn't that be all to the good, too?
Wouldn't it be good, for instance, if the Baltic states and the Ukraine and lots of other places told us thanks but no thanks, they won't be joining NATO after all?
Of if South Korea and Japan told us it was time to steam out of their waters?
If it's true that the loss in Vietnam spared us from stupid optional wars for a decade, then . . . ?
Of course, a relatively bloodless defeat, which is what we will have in Iraq if we do NOT involve Iran, would be much better, if not quite so potent a public lesson in humility.
Goes without saying.
But what Mr. Lind is worried about is not the loss of life. It's the impact on American power and prestige of a crushing American military defeat.
But that would be the good part.
In truth, however, all of this is an absurd fantasy.
Who does not know that if Iran were stupid enough to actually attack us in Iraq, the more damaging the attack the more likely the American people would respond by demanding the destruction of Iran?
Not the occupation. Not regime change. Not American adoption followed by imposed freedom, blah, blah, blah.
Destruction.
And GW would give it to them, to the utter delight of the neocons and the Israelis.
And maybe a forever occupation, too.
:: Gaius Sempronius Gracchus 3:46 PM [+] ::
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They didn’t get any of the Al-Qaeda leaders they were trying for, but they did manage to kill some hundred or so innocent civilians.
That number is not very firm.
I believe Drudge or somebody previously reported they got a Comoran Al-Qaeda bigshot. This story reports an American official on the spots says not. No biggees bagged. Maybe 8 or 10 small fry.
War on terror, indeed.
:: Gaius Sempronius Gracchus 2:47 PM [+] ::
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Molly Ivins forgets herself. Or she lives in some other country.
She writes, A surge is not acceptable to the people in this country -- we have voted overwhelmingly against this war in polls (about 80 percent of the public is against escalation, and a recent Military Times poll shows only 38 percent of active military want more troops sent) and at the polls. We know this is wrong.
So far, so good. But then she goes on, The people understand, the people have the right to make this decision, and the people have the obligation to make sure our will is implemented.
No to both, thanks.
Under the US Constitution, the people have no say in the matter, at all.
The Congress had its chance, but chose to abandon its constitutional power and duty to decide whether to go to war into the hands of the all-too-willing “decider.”
The Congress has a chance, now, to intervene in a variety of ways; or even to demand that GW give it up and get our troops out of Iraq.
But the people have already done all they are allowed to do, under our constitution. They voted in November. That was the whole extent of their lawful input into the governance of this country.
As for her supposed “obligation to make sure our will is implemented,” I have no idea what she can be thinking of. Where did that alleged obligation come from?
And how, in our notorious undemocracy, does she expect us to do it, anyway?
She says,
We are the people who run this country. We are the deciders.
No, we’re not. That’s the problem. But, anyway, she goes on.
And every single day, every single one of us needs to step outside and take some action to help stop this war. Raise hell.
Throw rolls of toilet paper out the window? Scream “I’m mad as Hell and I’m not going to take it any more”?
Think of something to make the ridiculous look ridiculous.
Ah, well. We’re not all gifted at stand-up comedy.
Make our troops know we're for them and trying to get them out of there.
Sure, Molly. I can do that. Yes, I can. The little engine that could. That’s me. Uh huh.
Hit the streets to protest Bush's proposed surge. If you can, go to the peace march in Washington on Jan. 27. We need people in the streets, banging pots and pans and demanding, "Stop it, now!"
Ah. Well, we could certainly try publicly venting. Couldn’t hurt.
:: Gaius Sempronius Gracchus 9:19 AM [+] ::
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Whenever the crunch approaches – like, uh, at election times; or when it looks like the Democrats will actually grow a pair and, with Republican assistance, force an end to a war he has opposed for years and warned can only end in disaster – the Republicans can count on their little lost sheep to come home.
True to his history in Vietnam days and sounding like a neocon, PB, far from being the isolationist (OK, “non-interventionist”) he often pretends to be, exaggerates the importance of the issue while putting the onus for debacle on the American people, who, having seen too much death and too many criticisms of GW’s policy, are sick of it and don’t understand the realities of the situation.
In truth, this unreconstructed Cold Warrior is a Cap Weinberger style “realist” who comes very close to thinking the US has vital interests all over the globe, supplying plenty of valid reason for many, many elite-sponsored wars very far from our borders, indeed.
He differs from the neocons only in that he saw Iraq as the stupid play it is, primarily motivated by imaginary Israeli interests and real Israeli agents of influence.
Like many, he sees the neocons’ neo-Wilsonian goals as stupid in themselves and, in reality, smoke. But that doesn’t make him a real soul mate for Justin Raimondo.
US strategic interests in the Middle East are indeed at risk because of the hubristic folly of our political elite in putting them there, when they launched this insane war. But Bush cannot now commit to fight to victory, because the war is lost in the United States. Two-thirds of the American people are unwilling to make the sacrifices to save Iraq. Though they do not want a defeat and may not realize the consequences of a defeat, they are willing to risk a defeat, rather than continue to read of American kids being IED'ed to death and dismemberment in Baghdad and Anbar. The people want out and are saying to hell with the consequences.
He thinks GW is going to attack Iran.
What Bush signaled in the clear Wednesday is that air strikes on Iranian "networks" are being planned. That would produce an Iranian response. That response would trigger US strikes on Iran's nuclear facilities, for which Israel and the neocons are howling. And should this scenario play out, what would Hillary, Biden, Kerry, McCain, Giuliani, and even Pelosi and Obama do? Hail Bush as a Churchill. At first.
A lot of people think so. Joe Biden told Condi Rice yesterday that GW does not have authorization to attack Iran, and will face a “constitutional crisis” if he does. No doubt GW said to himself, “Bring it on.”
Commenting on the speech on MSNBC, where he is a regular these days, Pat went so far as to say that, on this basis, if he were a sitting Senator, he would vote "aye" on the surge.
JR, of course, would not. Live and learn, JR. You are not PB’s true love. Whenever the crunch comes, he abandons you and your true-blue isolationist friends, paleocons and libertarians, and returns to the “realist” conservatives just in time to support the Republicans and keep his street cred.
You and the anti-warriors are just "the little something on the side."
All the same, PB might be right about what GW is thinking. Go out with a blaze of glory, celebrated by Bibi, AIPAC, the Christian Zionists, and the Likudniks with cast-iron yarmulkes at National Review and the Weekly Standard. Iran next.
He doesn't care that much about Iraq, either.
Paul Craig Roberts thinks the surge is a fake and the real play is Iran, too.
:: Gaius Sempronius Gracchus 6:05 AM [+] ::
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Overall, 52 percent of Republicans support an increase in troops, although some key GOP constituencies are opposed. For example, 60 percent of white evangelical Christians oppose the idea and 56 percent of self-described conservatives are opposed.
So which Republicans like the idea? Not the Christian right? Not the movement conservatives? Who?
:: Gaius Sempronius Gracchus 1:43 PM [+] ::
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Get over yourselves!
Both "the Greatest Generation" and their parents fought wars the American people loathed and opposed, on the other side of the planet, in which the US had no vital interests, at enormous cost in blood and treasure, at the behest of a fathead ruling class that wanted things that way.
So did the generation of Korea.
All these obedient patriots taught the false lesson that the US ruling class could drag the people into any war of their choosing, anywhere in the world, at any cost to America and Americans, forever after.
They taught the false lesson that the US could be the globe's only hyper-puissance, the necessary nation, the biggest muscle-bound idiot on the block, a colossal club in the hands of vainglorious fools.
They taught delusions of grandeur to our rulers.
When the American people balked in Vietnam, the wrath and embarassment of our rulers was more than a lot of them could stand.
You would have thought they would have learned, but they did not.
Now the American people are teaching them, and the whole world, again, that we will not let them squander our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honors indefinitely in idiotic, unnecessary, and meaningless wars of vanity of their choosing, anywhere in the world, any time they want to play.
Again, they just can't stand the humiliation. All that egg on their faces in front of people like Putin, or Blair, or Chirac. Or, worse yet, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
That smirk on all their faces just drives our rulers totally bonkers.
They badly need to get over themselves. Very, very badly.
Think about NATO. About all those other agreements to go to war very far away for other people's interests.
Those are all promises the ruling class made that they might very well not be able to keep.
If only the whole world would disbelieve, and so stop asking for, such promises! If only our rulers would behave just a little bit responsibly and not make such promises!
:: Gaius Sempronius Gracchus 11:31 AM [+] ::
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"We cannot afford to fail," said Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.
Actually, we can. And thank God for that, since we have already failed.
Truth to tell, we could and should have skipped the whole thing, and we can, in fact, just walk away.
No vital US interests are at stake in this conflict. That’s why it should never have happened. That’s why we will not be significantly hurt by losing.
To successfully put an end to this conflict, the Democrats and any Republicans who choose to join them must give the lie to the claim that vital US interests are at stake.
It was a lie when they said that about Vietnam, and it is a lie today about Iraq.
Most of America knows that, just as most of America knew Vietnam was just about pride and Cold War lunacy, by the end.
Anti-war pols like Kennedy need to trumpet the good news that most Americans are, in fact, right. We can afford to fail.
(He may not want to put it quite that way, though.)
House Republican Leader John Boehner (news, bio, voting record), R-Ohio, chided Democrats. "If Democrat leaders don't support the president's plan," he said, "it's their responsibility to put forward a plan of their own for achieving victory."
No, it's not.
:: Gaius Sempronius Gracchus 11:00 AM [+] ::
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What is victory?
What’s failure according to everybody? Chaos continues, the Iraqi government falls, and we keep getting attacked until we withdraw fully, leaving behind no bases, no embassy, and maybe not even a consulate.
What’s success according to GW? The sectarian and factional violence ends, the present government stands and remains at least neutral toward us and toward Israel, and we get to pull out, leaving behind the biggest American embassy and the biggest American bases in the world.
Near as I can see, GW’s understanding of success is all about Israel’s interests, and not ours. As far as our own interests – our own legitimate interests – go, we could and should have skipped the whole affair, and can and should evacuate the Middle East while closing bases and evacuating all our troops to the western hemisphere.
If we stay out of everybody’s hair and just trade peaceably and sensible, we’ll get all the oil we need. We should be working hard to get off fossil fuels, anyway.
What about failure? Well, the mess left behind would be a problem primarily for the Iraqis, create by the Iraqis’ own continuing refusal to cut it out and play nice. Any order eventually emerging from the mess would likely involve at least one state unfriendly toward Israel. Tough break for them. Maybe the EU or the UN would like to help them out.
Would it be a loss for us? Only to our pride, or our rulers’ pride. It would be a real blow to neocon aspirations to global hegemony by the World’s Only Superpower. But not really a significant loss for us, measured in terms of our real and legitimate national interests.
After all, the neocons’ aspirations toward globo-kinghood were silly, vain, contrary to our real interests, and immoral into the bargain.
Their later alleged aspirations to spreading democratic capitalism with the sword, thus making the world safe for Wall Street, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization, aiming at what for the right would be the real ultimate consummation of Cold War victory, were even stupider and less plausible.
Besides, that was and is an aspiration no progressive should share, anyway. The model of democracy being spread was and remains one of increasingly successful, increasingly ruthless, and increasingly undemocratic international oligarchy, while the version of capitalism being pushed around the globe was and is a shameless reversion to everything most awful, criminal, vicious, selfish, and irresponsible in the “free market” economy of the 19th and early 20th Centuries.
Despite what some true believers still seem to think, success according the GW’s understanding thereof is not in the cards. Failure is pretty much a sure thing. It’s only a question when the government faces it and withdraws our troops, at least from Iraq.
Since nobody contemplating a run for the presidency in ’08 wants the debacle to happen on his watch, and the Republicans don’t want to have to face this mess as an issue again if they can help it, it’s really in the interests of lots of people for GW to bite the bullet and get us out.
So far as that goes, GW has less to lose than anybody else would. He can’t run again. His reputation is already as bad as it could possibly be. What the heck? Why not take the fall like a man?
But GW is either a true believer or just a stubborn loser. He won’t do it. Never. Not unless forced.
Nobody can force him but the Congress.
The Democrats in Congress fear getting stuck with the blame for the inevitably ensuing disaster if they force GW out. They are unlikely to do it alone.
But since both the Democrats and the Republicans have an interest in getting this thing done with and off the table for the ’08 elections, is there a basis for the emergence of a bipartisan Congressional policy of pushing GW? Sure.
Democrats would want it to be as humiliating for GW as possible, with blame spreading in an ugly and deep smear all over the Republicans. The Republicans would want to be shielded, and to shield GW as far as possible, from blame. They have a need for a denouement as little damaging to their reputations as possible.
This would require the Republicans to abandon their current strategy of digging in their heels and fighting on forever, refusing blame for failure, figuring they can eventually let the Democrats force and end to things and take all the blame alone. Maybe that would eventually work. But not in time to get Iraq over with before ’08.
So maybe that will happen. Maybe enough Congressional Republicans will see the light for an emerging majority of them to work with the Democrats to force GW into finishing up in his term.
Maybe.
:: Gaius Sempronius Gracchus 6:45 AM [+] ::
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What American accent do you have?
Your Result: Boston
You definitely have a Boston accent, even if you think you don't. Of course, that doesn't mean you are from the Boston area, you may also be from New Hampshire or Maine.
Looks like a lot of people are upset with Joe Klein.
I guess he means nothing to me because I get my news on the Internet and commentary too, as well as from Liberal Opinion and The Progressive.
The feuds seem to be getting personal.
But JK is far from the only one telling the Democrats to back off on opposition to the war. We see plenty of that on the web, too, among fairly well-known folks like Bill Sher.
What a pain.
:: Gaius Sempronius Gracchus 4:24 AM [+] ::
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Antiwar activists, who believe that Democrats owe their 2006 election victories to voter discontent with the Iraq war, are thrilled that most congressional Democrats oppose Bush's proposed troop increase. But lawmakers are divided over how far to go in fighting the plan, and activists worry that the party will not have the political stamina to block the escalation and, beyond that, force a withdrawal of all troops.
Not your Bill Sher kind of Democrats, eh?
Some moderate Democrats worry that the pressure being applied by the antiwar left is misguided, arguing that voters want a change of course in Iraq but not a rapid withdrawal.
Ah. Now that’s Bill Sher. A “moderate Democrat.”
"Conventional wisdom says that presidential candidates who want to be responsible on this are going to hurt themselves with the angry, impassioned activist left," said Will Marshall, president of the Progressive Policy Institute, a centrist Democratic think tank. "But the activist left is out of sync with the American public. Americans don't want to concede this is a total debacle."
I think I told you long ago their moniker is a misnomer. Way, way off!
"We understand the concerns [of antiwar activists] and we'll agree with them to the extent possible," said Jim Manley, Reid's spokesman. "But Democrats feel we need to do everything we can to give the troops what they need."
That kind of talk is a signal to the pro-warriors they can continue to successfully use the troops as hostages to get their way. Phooey. Give the troops all they need to get home. But that’s and end of it.
Interestingly, I know long-time Democrats who have been consistently against the war who insist the President has a legitimate free hand in foreign policy and in use of the military because he is constitutionally Commander in Chief.
I am not kidding. They think that makes him a monarch in foreign affairs, or at least in war once the Congress has somehow given him the OK.
They think a Declaration is not constitutionally necessary. Resolutions telling the pres he can do whatever he thinks best pass constitutional muster in their eyes.
They think that, once at war, the Congress cannot even constitutionally just cut off the money, or impose a troop cap, much less tell the president to knock it off and end the fighting.
I am not kidding. That is the Constitution in their heads, and they claim the Supremes would back the president on all these things.
They might be right about the Supremes. Just more reason to disempower the bastards. Just further proof we need a far more democratic reading of the Constitution – or a more democratic Constitution!
:: Gaius Sempronius Gracchus 12:47 PM [+] ::
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Here’s the thing. If we knew it could be done in 5 years with 200,000 troops and another trillion dollars I would still say, “Get out now!”
So would a whole lot of other people.
America accepted a “cake walk” that “would pay for itself out of Iraqi oil” to stop Saddam getting the bomb and giving it to his chums, Al-Qaeda, to use against us.
There was no cake walk, it didn’t and won’t pay for itself, there was no bomb, and Saddam was never chums with Al-Qaeda. It was all bullshit.
America now is being offered NO inducement to spend a trillion dollars and fight a 5-year war to stop Iraqis butchering each other and wrecking their own country. None at all.
Phooey and to Hell with it.
Time to leave.
If the war is still happening in ’08 then anybody who says “I’ll get us out now” will win. If he then doesn’t get us out it’ll be his party’s war for the next time. People will start running with "secret plans" for "peace with honor," for cryin' out loud!
And all this bullshitting around, year after year and futile election after futile election, will be total and conspicuous proof of the lie of American democracy and the futility of voting within the framework of this stupid, stupid Duopoly.
:: Gaius Sempronius Gracchus 12:19 PM [+] ::
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Bill Sher wants to know the Democrats’ long-term vision for the region. He thinks they need to formulate such a thing and sell it to the voters.
Bosh.
Wait for that before doing anything and you’ll wait forever. And the discussion would just divide the party into a million fragments, anyway.
All the Democrats need to do now is get us the heck out of Iraq. Just do that. That’s what the voters want.
And let the collapse come. Of course the Republicans will blame it on the Democrats. So what?
Deny everything and blame it back on them for getting us into such a mess there was no good way out possible.
Tell the public straight out: disaster is bound to ensue when we leave, no matter when we leave, any time in the foreseeable and not absurdly distant future and no matter what we do in the meantime.
Hence, sooner is better. Time to cut our losses.
If you don't understand this you are NOT opposed to "staying the course." You are only looking for "a new, winning strategy," some way to achieve a US-designed, acceptable denouement, just like that bonehead GW.
Why the Hell do you think we don't want to "stay the course"? Because we don't see any way to achieve a sufficiently better outcome by staying to justify the further costs.
Joe Biden was right. So is Ted Kennedy. This is GW's Vietnam. The Democrats need to force him to face it and take his medicine like a man.
The debacle will be a spectacle that reminds us, in one way or another, of helicopters taking people off the embassy roof in Saigon.
Not literally. I think a perfectly safe evacuation of the troops is quite possible.
But disaster will certainly engulf the country when we leave, and that just isn’t our problem.
Why not?
Because it will be entirely the result of Iraqis tearing into each other as bloodily as they can, with their own evident will to destroy their legitimate government and their country, each tribe or group or private army or sect or ethnic group slashing and killing and destroying for its own purposes.
Waiting around until we can somehow magically make an acceptable arrangement so that these folks WON’T wreck their own country is what we have already been doing for far too long.
Screw it. They don't want to do it. Time to leave.
If somebody else – the UN, the EU, Egypt, or whoever – wants to stick his finger into the dike after we pull ours out, good luck to them.
Failing that, apres nous, le deluge.
And that’s all the Democrats need to tell the American people. The Republicans and the conservatives will deny it, insisting we could have won if only we had fought on, most of them with cynical mendacity and some with sincerity.
McCain will say that. Lieberman will say that. GW will say that. Every neocon in the world will say that.
Too bad. Get used to it. “If you can’t stand the heat . . .”
But I’m sure Bill S doesn’t see it that way. He’s a responsible Democrat globo-interventionist. His problem isn’t that we intervened in Iraq, but that we didn’t do it the right way.
And he sure doesn't want the Democrats to be blamed for disaster in Iraq. Oh, my, no. Joe Biden's remarks about the GOP being into blame-avoidance apply equally to Democrats like Bill S.
People who think like that, whose first rule is 'No disaster on my watch,' will keep us there for many more years and many thousands more dead and many hundreds of billions more squandered, if we go along with them.
As for me, I think capping troop levels is a step in the right direction, which is the direction out of Iraq.
Every journey of a thousand miles . . .
PS. As Chris Matthews said last night - but only once, and not too loud - Iran is Israel's problem. Not ours.
Time to get the Hell out.
:: Gaius Sempronius Gracchus 11:46 AM [+] ::
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