About the Webb Amendment:

Senator Jim Webb (D-VA) today introduced a bi-partisan amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act requiring that active-duty troops and units have at least equal time at home as the length of their previous tour overseas. The amendment also sets a minimum 1-to-3 year ratio for National Guard and Reserve members and units.

Thirty-one members of the Senate have signed onto Webb’s amendment as original co-sponsors, including Senator Chuck Hagel, the lead Republican cosponsor. …

Senator Webb’s amendment sets a floor for minimum periods between deployments for both units and members. It states that if a unit or member of a regular component of the Armed Forces is deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan, they will have the same time at home –“well time” — before being redeployed. Guard and Reserve units and members will have a minimum floor of three years dwell time prior to being redeployed.

The amendment, however, states that the ideal rotation scenarios are a 1-to-2 deployment-to-dwell ratio for active duty troops and five years between subsequent deployments for the Guard and Reserve. The amendment also states the sense of Congress that units and members of Reserve components should not be mobilized continuously for more than one year.

John Amato:

Jim Webb made an exclusive video to explain why Congress must support the troops and pass the “Webb Amendment,” on Wednesday. He asks us to call our elected officials and tell them to support this very simple, but important measure. It received 56 votes last time it was introduced, but was filibustered by the Rubber Stamp Republicans which included McConnell and Warner.

Digby:

The Webb Amendment is a powerful piece of legislation, backed by the Military Officers Association and many military families who are seeing their loved ones deployed over and over again until their marriages and their finances are at a breaking point. Although it may serve to force the administration to withdraw troops more quickly than they wish to, this is not a political ploy. Even before the surge, experts said that the Iraq war was breaking the military. Now it is far worse. Someone has to step in and do something about this problem and it’s obvious it isn’t going to be the Republican party.

Until today, it was looking very promising that Webb might get the 60 votes needed to override a filibuster. Vulnerable Republicans and those in states with a heavy military presence heard an earful from their constituents on this subject over the summer recess. But with His Eminence Warner now making little whimpering noises that he will accept the useless little Christmas sugar plum from the White House instead of backing it, he may give cover to enough wavering Republicans to derail this popular, necessary legislation.

Act for Change:

There is a lot of rhetorical abuse around the idea of supporting the troops. Well, Senators Webb (D-VA) and Hagel (R-NE) — both decorated veterans — have re-introduced legislation that is unambiguous on the subject. Anyone who votes against this bill is clearly a hypocrite who is simply supporting unending war.

Thanks to President Bush’s ill-conceived troop surge, our soldiers serving in Iraq face the daily stress of maintaining a military occupation under constant attack, all the while being away from their support network of friends and family for multiple — and often suddenly-extended — tours of duty.

Senators Webb and Hagel are introducing an amendment this week to provide relief for our overextended troops. It ensures that active-duty troops spend equal amounts of time at home between deployments as they did in a combat zone; it also mandates that Guard and Reserve units cannot be redeployed until they have been home for three times the length of their first tour of duty. This legislation will not only provide our troops with the rest & recovery periods they need and deserve; it will also clip President Bush’s wings and force him to begin drawing down the number of troops in Iraq.

Mark Kleiman:

The Democrats should offer the Webb Amendment when the Defense Appropriation comes up. If the Republicans want to filibuster, fine. Don’t pull the amendment. Just let them keep filibustering. As long as the amendment is on the floor, there can be no vote on the bill itself. Keep calling cloture votes, one per day. After a few days, start asking how long the Republicans intend to withhold money to fund troops in the field in order to pursue their petty partisan agenda.

If the Republicans in the Senate hold firm, it’s their stubbornness that’s holding up the bill. If they fold, and the bill gets to the President’s desk and he vetoes it, then pass the same damned bill again. And start asking how long the President intends to block funding for troops in the field in order to pursue his petty partisan agenda.

As of October 1, there’s no money to fund the war. So the usual move is to pass a continuing resolution, which keeps the money flowing until the appropriation passes. Fine. Pass a continuing resolution with the Webb Amendment attached. If the CR runs into a filibuster or a veto, ask how long …

Really, this isn’t very hard. With the voters overwhelmingly interested in getting us the hell out of Iraq, the Democrats can make full use of the power of the purse without worrying about a backlash, especially with Webb as the public face of the campaign.

Me: There’s also a “write your senators” form on this page. Do it. Do it this morning.

Please call and ask these senators to support Jim Webb’s pro-troop amendment:

Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska)
DC: 202-224-6665
Anchorage: 907-271-3735

George Voinovich (R-Ohio)
DC: (202) 224-3353
Cleveland: (216) 522-7095

Elizabeth Dole (R-North Carolina)
DC: 202-224-6342
Raleigh: 866-420-6083

John Warner (R-Virginia) *
DC: (202) 224-2023
Roanoke: (540) 857-2676

Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky)
DC: 202-224-2541
Louisville: 502-82-6304

Arlen Specter (R-Pennsylvania)
DC: 202-224-4254
Harrisburg: (717) 782-3951

Bonus – Ask Harry Reid to “don’t let Republicans obstruct – make them stand and filibuster”:

Harry Reid
DC: 202-224-3542
Las Vegas: 702-388-5020

* Warner originally supported the bill, but yesterday word got out that he is reconsidering. The President has made noises about bringing a few thousand troops home by Christmas, and “There is a lot of importance in that,” Warner says. However, the troops designated to come home before Christmas were scheduled to come home before Christmas, anyway. Bush isn’t giving away a damn thing. And the fact that some troops are coming home doesn’t relieve the exhaustion of those who remain. Warner needs to hear that some of us know a scam when we see it.

See also: Taylor Marsh.

Warren P. Strobel writes for McClatchy Newspapers about yesterday’s Senate hearings:

Much to the frustration of the senators — mostly Democrats, but including a few Republicans — who grilled them Tuesday, neither the general nor the diplomat outlined a strategy for putting Iraq back together or a timetable for bringing U.S. troops home. …

… lawmakers complained that neither Petraeus nor Crocker could explain how the Iraq war fits into Bush’s war on terror or how it’s protecting Americans.

One of the most jaw-dropping moments in the hours of back-and-forth came when retiring Sen. John Warner, R-Va., asked Petraeus whether his proposal for Iraq — including a reduction of U.S. troops to pre-surge levels of 130,000 — would make the United States safer.

“Sir, I don’t know, actually,” Petraeus replied.

Fred Kaplan writes,

Two things stand out in Petraeus’ response. First, he refused to indulge in President Bush’s spurious rhetoric about how we’re fighting the terrorists in Iraq so we don’t have to fight them here. Second, he was, in effect, telling the senators: I am doing what soldiers do; I am trying my best to accomplish the mission; the mission is related to the policy, and the policy isn’t mine.

This is what President Bush is hoping no one notices. He speaks of the “commanders on the ground” as if they were the ones setting policy. For example, he said in August 2006:

If we leave before the job will be done, those who sacrificed, those brave volunteers who sacrifice in our United States military will have died in vain. And as General Abizaid has said, if we leave before the job is done — if we leave the streets of Baghdad, the enemy will follow us to our own streets in America. (Applause.)

The stakes are high. I believe the only way we can lose is if we leave before the job is done. That’s what I believe. I’m making decisions based upon the recommendations of commanders on the ground. I want to assure you, polls and focus groups will not decide the Iraq policy in the global war on terror. (Applause.)

He’s saying he is setting policy based on what the commanders tell him. But Petraeus clearly said it’s not up to the military to set policy. His testimony was not about the worthiness of the mission, but about how the mission given him might be achieved (short answer: he’s not sure, but he’ll get back to us in March).

Back to Kaplan:

In one sense, today’s hearings dealt President George W. Bush a harsh blow. Many of the senators’ questions dealt with strategic issues, which Petraeus and Crocker—through no fault of their own—could not really answer to anyone’s full satisfaction. Even the vast majority of Republican senators at least cocked their eyebrows.

Nearly all the senators seemed to recognize that the few, much-vaunted successes—especially in Anbar province, where Sunni tribes have joined with U.S. forces to defeat al-Qaida terrorists—have little to do with the main issues of this war: sectarian violence between Sunnis and Shiites and the failure of the central government to mediate, much less settle, those conflicts. As Richard Lugar, the foreign relations committee’s ranking Republican put it, “The progress may be beside the point.” The U.S. troops may be “like a farmer planting crops on flood plains.”

Yet in another sense, Bush will probably recover from the blow without much damage. As counterinsurgency theorists understand, a combatant can win every battle and still lose the war. Similarly, the Senate Democrats won on points in today’s clashes on the issues, yet Bush will probably win the ultimate contest: the vote, in the coming weeks, on whether to continue with his plan.

In recent weeks, Bush has put all his chips on Petraeus’ testimony. He will no doubt now endorse the commander’s “proposal” for a modest troop reduction and pretend that it constitutes a compromise (even though it was physically inevitable). And he will repeatedly cite the testimony from Petraeus and Crocker that “some progress” is being made and that further withdrawals might be disastrous.

Headlines today say that Bush will announce a troop withdrawal in an address to the nation Thursday night. What this means is that sometime, probably July 2008, the troop levels in Iraq will go back to what they were a year ago, before the “surge.” Some progress. And it’s my understanding that the numbers are being determined by the fact that we’re running out of troops who haven’t been “rotated” past exhaustion, not by any real change in policy.

No More Mr. Nice Blog:

You realize, of course, that President Bush’s planned withdrawal of some troops next summer is going to be all over your TV screen, in an attempt to influence the ’08 election.

Troops rotate into and out of Iraq all the time, but I’m guessing that the Bushies are going to try to make these trips home into big, visually exciting spectacles, preferably featuring him and/or Laura and/or various GOP luminaries, that will be carried live and then rerun endlessly. The White House is going to try to create images that will have the same impact as the pictures of returning Vietnam POWs and the “split-screen” release of the Iranian hostages just as Ronald Reagan was being sworn in as president.

I remember during the Vietnam War, from time to time President Nixon would announce that X number of troops were coming home from Vietnam that month, as if this were an extraordinary thing. This announcement would be followed up by journalists (we still had a few back then) explaining that the number X represented the normal troop rotation. I don’t think Nixon fooled anybody, except those who were predisposed to being fooled. But, like I said, we still had real journalists in those days.

The simple fact is that Petraeus couldn’t say when all troops could be withdrawn, because that’s not a military consideration. It’s a policy consideration. And he doesn’t set the policy.

Back to Warren Strobel of McClatchy:

“Are we going to continue to invest American blood and treasure at the same rate we are doing now, for what? The president said let’s buy time. Buy time? For what?” said Sen. Chuck Hagel, R-Neb., a Vietnam veteran who also will retire next year.

Most experts argue that stabilizing Iraq requires two things above all: political reconciliation among Shiite Muslims, Sunnis and Kurds, and Iraqi security forces that can stand on their own.

Petraeus and Crocker could promise neither.

Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., asked Crocker whether ethnic reconciliation is likely in the 16 months that Bush has left in office.

“Senator, I could not put a timeline on it or a target date,” Crocker replied. There are “hopeful signs,” he said, but “how long that is going to take and, frankly, even ultimately whether it will succeed, I can’t predict.”

Cost-benefit analysis, anyone?

Josh Marshall:

We are bigger than Iraq.

By that I do not mean we, as America, are bigger or better than Iraq as a country. I mean that that sum of our national existence is not bound up in what happens there. The country will go on. Whatever happens, we’ll recover from it. And whatever might happen, there are things that matter much more to this country’s future — like whether we have a functioning military any more, whether our economy is wrecked, whether this country tears itself apart over this catastrophe. But we’ll go on and look back at this and judge what happened.

Not so for the president. For him, this is it. He’s not bigger than this. His entire legacy as president is bound up in Iraq. Which is another way of saying that his legacy is pretty clearly an irrecoverable shambles. That is why, as the folly of the enterprise becomes more clear, he must continually puff it up into more and more melodramatic and world-historical dimensions. A century long ideological struggle and the like. For the president a one in a thousand shot at some better outcome is well worth it, no matter what the cost. Because at least that’s a one in a thousand shot at not ending his presidency with the crushing verdict history now has in store. It’s also worth just letting things keep on going as they are forever because, like Micawber, something better might turn up. Going double or nothing by expanding the war into Iran might be worth it too for the same reason. For him, how can it get worse?

And when you boil all this down what it comes down to is that the president now has very different interests than the country he purports to lead.

Ah, perspective. It’s a beautiful thing.

Josh links to a pretty good Washington Post column by Jim Hoagland, titled “Bush’s Vietnam Blunder.” Among other things, Hoagland thinks the “Vietnam” speech was a political blunder. Maybe; whether the speech makes Bush and his war more or less unpopular than they already were remains to be seen. But here is the critical point:

Some military commanders, CIA agents in Iraq, Republican members of Congress, State Department diplomats and others now make their highest priority the protection of their own reputations, careers and institutions — the three blend seamlessly into a single overriding ambition in Washington — for the post-Bush era, which thus draws closer, in the manner of a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The need to protect the White House, the Pentagon and both major political parties from greater Iraq fallout explains much of the blame being dumped on Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki at this late date — even though his deficiencies and close links to Iran and Syria were clearly visible when the administration helped install him in the job in 2006. As he has been throughout the Iraq experience, Bush is condemned to play the cards he dealt himself.

Our troops are in Iraq not to protect America, but to protect political careers.

And it’s not just Republicans, of course. Democrats are still so afraid of being labeled “soft” on communism crime terrorism that their own positions on the war are nuanced to death. Frankly, I’ve given up trying to understand precisely where some Democrats stand on the war; all over the place, it seems.

E.J. Dionne writes,

The surest sign of how bad our choices in Iraq have become is the eagerness of both of our political parties to blame the entire mess on the man American officials helped install in his job. After all, it was taken as an American victory back in April 2006 when Maliki replaced Ibrahim al-Jafari, who faced many of the same criticisms as prime minister that Maliki does today.

Now, Maliki is the problem. Among Democrats, both Sens. Carl Levin and Hillary Clinton have called for replacing him with “a less divisive and more unifying figure,” as Clinton put it. …

… It’s no accident that American politicians find themselves entangled in Iraqi politics. The president’s troop surge was designed not to achieve some decisive military result but to bring about a political result — to give Iraqis “breathing room” to settle their sectarian differences.

I think the real reason for the surge was to kneecap the Iraq Study Group recommendations that would have taken control of the war away from Bush, but let’s go on …

That’s why both sides in the war debate are talking past each other. Supporters of the administration point to signs of military success and insist that we should keep at it. The administration’s opponents don’t deny some military gains — at considerable cost in American lives. But they argue that the continuing political disarray in Iraq shows that the surge has failed to achieve its primary objective and that we should begin to disentangle our troops from a civil war.

The debate as it’s currently configured puts a much higher short-term political burden on congressional Democrats than on Republicans. The president has the easier political objective: He needs only to block congressional action that would force him to alter his policy. As long as most Republicans stick with him, he wins.

He wins, notice. Not America; just Bush.

Democrats, on the other hand, are in a classic damned-if-they-do, damned-if-they-don’t situation.

So what else is new?

Congress, which has the constitutional authority to end the war, dithers around with halfway measures designed to encourage, but not force, the President to change his policy. Of course, this is a bit like politely asking a fox to please leave the chickens alone.

There’s more going on beneath the surface than merely scapegoating Maliki, as Glenn Greenwald explains today (must read). Politicians in Washington of both parties seem to have forgotten that We, the People, are still here.

At moments like these someone is bound to start squawking about third parties, which is another road to failure. We’re trapped into a two-party system by the way we hold elections. I still see no alternative to reforming the Democrats, eliminating “Bush Dogs” in the primaries and otherwise sending a message to the Washington elites that they really do need to reckon with us. That will take a few election cycles, unfortunately. And the war goes on.