The Next Hurrah

Light At The End Of The Tunnel?

by DemFromCT

Not, alas, the end of the war. But at least Dems seem to have gotten the message that they need to get their act together on Iraq.

Twelve Democratic leaders of the House and Senate have urged President Bush in a strongly worded letter to begin withdrawing the 130,000 U.S. troops from Iraq by year's end, a sign that Democrats may be uniting on a key election-year issue that has divided the party...

Bush's "open-ended commitment" to Iraq should be abandoned, the letter asserted, in the interest of "American national security, our troops, and our taxpayers."...

The letter suggests that Democratic leaders have overcome divisions in how to respond to the growing cost of military operations in Iraq.

Leaders like Biden and Murtha and the others were able to find common ground and sign the letter.

We believe that a phased redeployment of U.S. forces from Iraq should begin before the end of 2006. U.S. forces in Iraq should transition to a more limited mission focused on counterterrorism, training and logistical support of Iraqi security forces, and force protection of U.S. personnel.

It's not just a key election-year issue, it's THE key election year issue. Ignoring it was the dumbest thing Democrats could have done, sending a message they couldn't deal with tough problems. That charge may not be taken off the table completely with moves like this, but I like the idea of communicating the idea that 'I voted not the cut the President's feet from under him - unfortunately, despite this bipartisan support, Bush screwed up. And now we have to clean up.' That doesn't automatically translate to pull out immediately. that's a discussion to come. But it sure as hell means not 'staying the course'.

Of course, if you really want something other than 'stay the course', we'll need more than letters. We'll need a Democratic 110th Congress .

The long, lonely summer of New Hampshire Republicans.

by Kagro X

Word is that while almost all of the potential Democratic presidential field has made at least one expected trek to New Hampshire so far, visibility for the Republican field has been considerably less pronounced. What's going on?

Well, here's a guess: the presidential election of 2008 will present some very unique circumstances, particularly for Republicans, and that's making it tough for GOP contenders to feel comfortable in their own skins -- an essential element for the retail-style, door-to-door and hand-to-hand campaigning that gets done in New Hampshire.

The Pause That Is Not a Cease Fire

by emptywheel

Via Laura Rozen, I found this Haaretz article to be full of amazing details. It offers an explanation of the difference between a "pause" and a "cease fire."

The government source said that the IAF had been told to continue acting against "targets that present a threat to Israel and its troops, including rocket launchers, vehicles transporting ammunition, Hezbollah fighters, weapons stores and Hezbollah assets."

The term "Hezbollah assets" refers to people identified with the organization, including those who do not pose an immediate threat. "If they are identified with Hassan Nasrallah, we will hit them," the source said.

Regarding the instructions to the IAF, the source said, however, "there will be no attacks on buildings that had not been identified" as part of efforts to strike Israel, and held, for example, ammunition, Hezbollah fighters or their commanders."

The Birth Pangs of a New World

by emptywheel

One of my favorite books with which I disagree strongly is Philip Bobbitt's The Shield of Achilles. Bobbitt elaborates on the old equation between predominant military strategy and the form of the state to argue we're entering a new age, with a new type of state, the market-state.

This book ... is principally concerned with the relationship between strategy and the legal order as this relationship has shaped and transformed the modern state and the society composed of these states. A new form of the State--the market-state--is emerging from this relationship in much the same way that earlier forms since the fifteenth century have emerged, as a consequence of war. ... the State is being transformed, and this transformation is constitutional in nature, by which I mean we will change our views as to the basic raison d'etre of the State, the legitimating purpose that animates the State and sets the terms of the State's strategic endeavors.

My dispute with Bobbitt is threefold. First, his argument is fundamentally tautological. By defining the temporal (post-Westphalia) and geographical (Europe) scope of his book as he does, he eliminates the governing entities like the Catholic Church, the Mongols, China, and the Arab empire that might trouble his neat conclusions that assume the continual existing of what he calls States. By limiting his inquiry to things that look like States, he ensures that his end-point will also look like a State.

Incompetence

by DemFromCT

This isn't schedenfreude. And it isn't good.

With each new scene of carnage in southern Lebanon, outrage in the Arab world and Europe has intensified against Israel and its prime sponsor, raising the prospect of a backlash resulting in a new Middle East quagmire for the United States, according to regional specialists, diplomats and former U.S. officials.

Although the United States has urged Israel to use restraint, it has also strongly defended the military assaults as a reasonable response to Hezbollah rocket attacks, a position increasingly at odds with allies that see a deadly overreaction. Analysts think that if the war drags on, as appears likely, it could leave the United States more isolated than at any time since the Iraq invasion three years ago and hindered in its foreign policy goals such as shutting down Iran's nuclear program and spreading democracy around the world.

The WH thinks everything is just going according to plan.

Others are not so hopeful. Outside the White House, the mood among many foreign policy veterans in Washington is strikingly pessimistic, especially as leaders of Hezbollah and al-Qaeda, traditional rivals based in different Islamic sects, began calling for followers to take the fight to the enemy.

Analysts foresee a muddled outcome at best, in which Hezbollah survives Israel's airstrikes, foreign peacekeepers become bogged down, and U.S. relations with allies are severely strained. At worst, they said, Hezbollah and Iran feel emboldened, Islamic radicalism spreads, and a region smuggling fighters and weapons into Iraq fractures further along sectarian lines.

Please, please , please. Where are the grown-ups?

Haass, the former Bush aide who leads the Council on Foreign Relations, laughed at the president's public optimism. "An opportunity?" Haass said with an incredulous tone. "Lord, spare me. I don't laugh a lot. That's the funniest thing I've heard in a long time. If this is an opportunity, what's Iraq? A once-in-a-lifetime chance?"

Save us from Condi and these airheads substituting for foreign policy experts. F-16s make poor diplomacy tools, and not seeing what everyone else in the world did, in terms of the inevitable PR outcome, is just stupid. it actually got to the point where Condi had to make the temporary cessation of airstrikes announcement rather than the israelis to show some "progress''. It may be the only thing her trip accomplishes.

Ladies and gentleman, these are the architects of the war on terror. Do you feel safer yet?

Lieberman-Lamont: The Pundits Pontificate

by DemFromCT

UPDATE: excellent post from Mark Schmitt on checklist liberalism and politics.

It's been an interesting weekend, as pundits of all stripes begin to digest the idea that Lieberman can actually lose next week. The reports range from the interesting to the inane, in which category Jonathan Alter in Newsweek leads the pack. The thinking, according to Alter, is that even though it's not the blogs, it's the blogs.

The bloggers who have noisily intervened deny they're interested in ideological purity. They point to their support in Senate races for pro-life candidates. But on Iraq, the liberal blogs brook no dissent. Not that it matters in Connecticut. If Lamont wins, only the laziest analysts can attribute it to the Netroots. Daily Kos is not exactly Topic A in the diners and union halls of the Nutmeg State.

That's true. So what's the beef? Ah, it's that bloggers are the rebirth of the McGovernites that gave us Richard Nixon (honestly, I'm not making this up -it's in the article). But the other issue for Alter is that Dems are somehow purging Lieberman, despitr admitting that it's local issues that'll drive the primary results, not the blogs.

But if the blogs aren't a force on the ground, they are becoming a powerful factor in directing the passions (and pocketbooks) of far-flung Democratic activists. They're helping fuel a collective version of what shrinks call "projection," where the anger of Democrats at Bush is projected on a handy target, in this case Lieberman. But in doing so, they have neglected what FDR called "the putting of first things first." Job one for Democrats is identifying which Republican House incumbents are vulnerable in their own states and directing all available energy against them. Savaging fellow Democrats (except those who cannot win) should come after taking control, not before.

Hmm. Are there Dem-Repub elections in August we're ignoring? To read Alter, it sounds like a purge, no? Yet David Greenberg (a Rutgers media/journalism prof writing in the Globe) points out that the fault is more in Lieberman than the voters... and grasps the point about purges that eludes Alter:

Lieberman is at risk today not because of Internet-based leftists (except insofar as they publicized Lamont's challenge) but because of rank-and-file liberals like those who turned out for the state party's convention in May-where they awarded Lamont enough delegates to force the primary in the first place. These mainstream Democrats have simply grown uncertain whether to return to office someone whose politics no longer seem to reflect their own.

No grass-roots insurgency is implementing a ``purge" in the Democratic Party; purges aren't imposed from the bottom up. Lieberman's possible exit from the Democratic Party is closer to a mutual parting of the ways, a divorce on grounds of irreconcilable differences. Connecticut Democrats may decide-through a democratic vote-that they don't want him, and he may decide that his true support in the state lies with independents and Republicans.

The Skeleton of a Lie

by emptywheel

I have to admit. I'm bored now, by Senator Pat Roberts' continual delays of the Phase II report. Because, let's face it, so long as Pat Roberts remains the Chair of the Senate intelligence committee, we're not going to get a report that will damage the Republicans' chances in an upcoming election. Pat Roberts has proven utterly intransigent in putting his party over the country's right to understand the decision process that brought us to war on a lie.

But I can muster some enthusiasm for Roberts' methods. You see, chink by chink the Democrats have been dismantling the wall Roberts has put up to protect the lies the leaders of his party told. Now, three years after he built this wall, the only things left are the Republicans' most critical defenses.

By looking at precisely what Roberts is staking his final defenses on, we get a pretty good skeleton of how they lied us to war.

"Lieberman's Eroding Base"

by DemFromCT

That's the title Joe and his pals get to read this morning in the WaPo.

Lieberman, the Democrats' 2000 vice presidential nominee and a major player on Capitol Hill for years, seemed invincible until a few months ago. But an insurgency fueled by liberal anger over the senator's support for the Iraq war, coupled with an agile, well-financed campaign by Lamont that capitalizes on that discontent, is threatening to topple Lieberman in the Aug. 8 Connecticut Democratic primary. If he loses, Lieberman is likely to run as an independent in November, drawing on his popularity with Republicans and unaffiliated voters. Yet the stunning turnabout is a cautionary tale of how quickly a political career can unravel.

The strain shows. At campaign events, Lieberman at times appears subdued and weary. He projects little of the cheerful enthusiasm that marked his long-shot presidential bid two years ago. "It's difficult personally," Lieberman said last week of the defections by party veterans such as Stolberg. "I am competing in the most difficult part of the Connecticut electorate for me."

In an editorial published today, the New York Times endorsed Lamont over Lieberman, arguing that the senator had offered the nation a "warped version of bipartisanship" by supporting Bush on national security.

Lieberman is accustomed to the rough and tumble of politics, and can be combative in his own defense, as he showed during a recent debate. But he said he has been jarred by the intensity of Democratic anger toward Bush -- and, by extension, toward him. Liberal bloggers have called Lieberman a "liar" and a "weasel."

We're not that rough on him. We're just in agreement with the NY Times rather than the Hartford Courant. Both papers note Lieberman's long service, good domestic voting record, etc. but the Times gets it right:

If Mr. Lieberman had once stood up and taken the lead in saying that there were some places a president had no right to take his country even during a time of war, neither he nor this page would be where we are today. But by suggesting that there is no principled space for that kind of opposition, he has forfeited his role as a conscience of his party, and has forfeited our support.

One gets the impression, as Chris Matthews points out, that a vote for Joe is a vote for uncritical war (present and future). There are other reasons for Joe's erosion, of course, but until he addresses the 'pink elephant in the room', his base will continue to erode.

And for those who do not understand the significance of a Lamont challenge, the point is that win or lose, the issue of the Iraq War and its descent into chaos, and the enablers in DC who refuse to deal with its reality, become front and center in a political campaign. That's where it has always belonged. Lieberman's eroding base is the war's eroding base. Finally, we may get to have the debate on the war we never had... and it's not going to be pretty for the people that took us there.

Can this possibly be right?

by Kagro X

I know the bill (PDF) obtained by Marty Lederman at Balkinization, which is now making the (hushed-up) rounds of Washington, purports to be just an early draft of the Bush "administration's" draft of post-Hamdan curative legislation for the use of military tribunals. But I also know that the "administration" has little or no intention of conforming to the state of the law as you and I understand it. So I have to ask whether some of the provisions in there are just poorly-drafted mistakes, or intentional short-cuts.

The Hubris of Astroturf

by emptywheel

As Israel is in the process of discovering, cavalierly declaring you'll take One Week or so to achieve victory doesn't always work in your favor when you don't achieve victory. As Billmon predicts,

What is clear is that the failure of Israel's blitzkrieg (and at the moment, it looks like a catastrophic failure, at least politically) will have enormous repercussions in the Middle East, just as the downfall of Louis Napoleon had in late 19th century Europe. By betting the ranch on a quick, decisive victory, the Anglo-Israeli alliance has committed both a crime and a mistake. The architects may escape punishment for the former, but I think the latter is going to come back to haunt them, and probably very soon.

Israel has over-played its strength and in the process will end up damaging itself.

I suspect Israel will suffer the same setback with its attempt to win public opinion via astroturf. As the Independent and--apparently--a number of Israeli newspapers reported today, Israel has a fancy new toy to manage its astroturf campaign.