Category Archives: Congress

No Parades

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E.J. Dionne writes in today’s Washington Post:

Quietly, the real debate over Iraq is beginning.

It’s not about whether the United States should pull out troops. That is now inevitable. The real challenge is to figure out the right timetable for withdrawal, whether a residual force should be left there and which American objectives can still be salvaged.

The Bush Administration, by its own choice, is not taking part in this debate. The Bushies are still playing kick the can, moving the deadlines for making choices ahead into next year, when they hope to run out the clock. If they can’t have victory, the next best thing for the Bushies is to keep the war as it is until January 21, 2009. That’s the first day of work for the next administration. Then it’s somebody else’s war to lose.

E.J. Dionne continues,

The facts are these: We do not have enough troops to commit to Iraq to turn things around militarily, and the political situation is too fractured to give rise to a sudden burst of cooperation between Shiites and Sunnis.

Colin Kahl, a nonresident fellow at the Center for a New American Security (CNAS), a middle-of-the-road think tank that launches formally tomorrow, sees the American saga in Iraq as the Goldilocks story in reverse. We sent a large enough contingent of troops to give the United States responsibility for security but too few to keep order. “Not hot enough, not cold enough, just wrong,” Kahl says.

Time is running out, because most Americans no longer believe the administration’s promises that the commitment in Iraq will turn out well if only we are patient. This is why we need to begin planning our withdrawal now rather than waiting until the Army and the reserves hit the breaking point.

More than two months ago a “WaPo on the web” writer, William Arkin, wrote that the military is at the breaking point. So we can’t wait much longer.

For that reason, and the fact that political support for the war continues to erode, I do not believe the Bushies will be able to kick that can into January 2009, as they hope.

Yesterday Republican Sen. Richard Lugar of Indiana urged the president to change course in Iraq “very soon.”

[CNN] Lugar, the ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, also sounded a pessimistic note on the prospects for internal political progress in Iraq.

He said he sees “no convincing evidence that Iraqis will make the compromises necessary to solidify a functioning government and society, even if we reduce violence to a point that allows for some political and economic normalcy.”

The senator said continuing military operations in Iraq were putting a damaging level of stress on U.S. forces, “taking a toll on recruitment and readiness.”

“The window during which we can continue to employ American troops in Iraqi neighborhoods without damaging our military strength, or our ability to respond to other national security priorities, is closing,” he said. “The United States military remains the strongest fighting force in the world, but we have to be mindful that it is not indestructible.”

If Lugar can say these things without being struck by lightning or abducted by aliens, other Republicans may be emboldened to follow.

Lugar is not yet talking about a “full” withdrawal, however.

Despite his call for a course change, Lugar said he did not support calls by some Democrats for a complete U.S. withdrawal from Iraq, which he said “also fails to meet our security interests.”

Rather, he said a “downsizing and redeployment of United States military forces to more sustainable positions” — in rural locations of Iraq, Kurdish areas or possibly Kuwait — might better serve American security interests.

Kuwait would make it an “over-the-horizon redeployment,” I believe.

Lugar also warned the president that failing to pay heed to domestic political opposition to the war, especially with a presidential campaign approaching, would result in contentiousness that would “greatly increase the chances for a poorly planned withdrawal from Iraq, or possibly the broader Middle East region, that could damage United States interests for decades.”

Translation: Republicans soon will have to choose between propping up Bush’s stupid ass and winning next year’s elections.

Back to E.J. Dionne:

Oddly, President Bush has more of an interest in this than anyone. “The more time passes, the more our options narrow,” says Kurt Campbell, the chief executive and co-founder of CNAS. “Left unchallenged, the president would fight to exhaustion, and we can’t afford to fight to exhaustion.”

E.J. — He doesn’t care. All that matters to Bush is not having to say he lost.

Here’s what’s going to happen: The White House will continue to kick the can and pretend everything in Iraq is going according to plan. But sometime — maybe not September, but before the end of the year — enough Republicans will switch sides on the war that a veto-proof majority will at least seem within reach. At that point the Bushies will scramble to come up with a “new” plan that is either (a) a desperate attempt to redefine the status quo to make it more palatable; or (b) a plan to withdraw some or even most combat troops, accompanied by some bullshit about how this had been Bush’s plan all along, and somehow Democrats are responsible for drawing the war out and making the troops stay in Iraq so long.

Both plans a and b will involve a greater emphasis on the permanent bases. And no, I don’t want permanent bases in Iraq, either. But if some time this fall Congress settles on a troop withdrawal plan that includes permanent bases, remember that such a plan doesn’t mean there really will be permanent bases.

When the last of the combat troops left Vietnam in March 1973, official U.S. policy was that an American “presence” would remain in South Vietnam, in the form of military advisers and permanent U.S. installations, guarded by Marines. Two years and one month later, the last Americans were airlifted out of Saigon.

In effect, once the combat troops were withdrawn almost everyone, including the politicians, just plain lost interest in Vietnam. We had Watergate to keep us entertained, of course. But Congress (in a big reversal from what most of the congress critters had promised to do) stopped throwing money at the South Vietnamese government, and North Vietnam was able to take over, and virtually nobody in the U.S. bleeping cared. Overnight, the nation went from arguing about Vietnam 24/7 to “Vietnam, who?”

That doesn’t mean the same thing will happen with Iraq. However, maybe it’s OK to deal with withdrawal of combat troops separately from the permanent bases issue. Certainly, right now it seems most politicians of both parties in Washington are talking about permanent bases. Some, like Lugar, who are beginning to make noises about withdrawing combat troops seem to think of permanent bases as a condition for withdrawing combat troops.

Once combat troops are withdrawn, however, events on the ground in Iraq and political/economic dynamics here in the U.S. could soften support for permanent bases rather quickly. Or not. Depends on a lot of stuff that hasn’t happened yet. Could go either way. I personally would not insist on an absolutist, everybody-out-at-once position if it means combat troops stay in country longer while we haggle in the U.S. It’s OK to get the combat troops out first, then deal with the bases.

See also: The plan from the Center for American Progress.

Update: Voinovich joins Lugar.

Give Up

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Congress is going to take another shot at a comprehensive immigration bill next week. This is mostly because President Bush wants them to. But no good will come of this, unless it’s a total revolt of the Right against Bush.

No sensible immigration bill can be written in the current political climate. There is way too much hysteria coming from the Right. As it says in an editorial in today’s New York Times:

Congress’s struggle with immigration reform has been a horror movie, with one false ending after another, and there is still no telling what the monster will look like when the lights finally come up. People who have been watching through their fingers are right to be worried; the bill was harsh and has gotten harsher, a reflection of the rigidity of those who have vowed to kill any reform they consider amnesty.

Republicans are playing immigration bill poker, upping the ante by tossing harsher and harsher amendment proposals into the pot.

Lindsey Graham, who has spoken movingly about the need for reasonable, decent treatment of immigrants, especially immigrant families, has been trying to take the debate back to the dark days of Representative Jim Sensenbrenner’s anti-immigrant bill, with an amendment that would turn people who overstay their visas into criminals subject to minimum 60-day prison sentences.

It seems likely that Mr. Graham, who is one of the “grand bargainers” and is up for re-election next year, has been burned by the uproar on the hard right and feels the need to act tough, lest he be saddled — as Representative Steve King of Iowa has urged — with the scarlet letter A, for amnesty.

Any comprehensive immigration bill written by the current Congress is likely to be a monstrosity that future congresses will have dismantle.

CNN reports that rightie bloggers are in maximum snit mode, which of course we all knew. Some of them are asking Congress to secure the borders first, before going on to other immigration measures. That might not be a bad idea. Although normally I’d advocate tackling an issue comprehensively, if that’s not possible now (and it isn’t) it would be better to bite of whatever piece of the bill Congress is able to chew. And rightie fantasies about the Open Borders Lobby aside, securing the borders is, in principle, something both parties can agree on.

How to secure the borders is another matter, of course. But even a stupid border security bill would be less damaging to the nation, long-term, than whatever legislative atrocity the comprehensive immigration bill is likely to become now.

Then, we can hope, in a little while the hysteria will die down and Dems will have a larger majority in Congress. And then maybe it will be possible to create an immigration policy that is not a reflection of our worst xenophobic impulses.

The White House Jive

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Yesterday we learned the “surge” isn’t working. Big surprise. Today, Eugene Robinson says the White House is pulling a bait-and-switch.

White House spokesman Tony Snow was purposeful on Wednesday in stomping, trampling, tap-dancing upon and otherwise giving a definitive beat-down to any expectations of a serious, fact-based reassessment of Iraq policy in the fall. Never mind that the White House raised those expectations in the first place.

The September scenario has been a rhetorical mainstay for the administration and its supporters, a major argument for ignoring all the bad news from Iraq and giving Bush’s troop escalation a chance to work. Let’s wait for Gen. David H. Petraeus, the man who’s now running the war, to submit his progress report. At that point, went the White House argument, the “way forward” would become clear.

The fog of war seems to have closed back in. “I have warned from the very beginning about expecting some sort of magical thing to happen in September,” Snow told the White House press corps, whose collective recollection was somewhat different. “What I’m saying is, in September you’ll have an opportunity to have metrics.”

Just doin’ the White House jive.

This is not about what’s good for America, or for Iraq. It’s not about bringing Democracy to anyone. It’s not about victory. It’s not even about defeating terrorism.

It’s about Bush’s ego. It’s about keeping troops in Iraq as long as he is President so he doesn’t have to admit he has failed.

I’ve said many times that the whole point of the “surge” was to short-circuit support on Capitol Hill for the Baker Iraq Study Group plan. The ISG plan, tepid as it was, might very well have been supported by a veto-proof majority in Congress. If it had, it would have meant that Bush no longer had total control of the U.S. military action in Iraq. And that’s the one and only reason the ISG was kneecapped by the White House.

Now, my suspicion is that at least some Democrats in Congress realize this. I can’t prove it, but I believe it to be so. They just don’t think they have the political capital to come out and say “the President of the United States is a psychopath.” So they keep making speeches about how they hope the President will see reason and start playing well with others, knowing full well he’s not capable of either. These speeches are not for Bush, but for the media and the constituents.

There’s not much else the White House can do to postpone the inevitable except kick the can down the road, and they hope they can keep kicking that can until January 2009. You might recall that less than a month ago the White House was talking about a “post-surge” strategy. And this “new” strategy, as explained by David Ignatius, sounded remarkably like the same shit that was in the old “Strategy for Victory” they trotted out in December 2005. And that strategy was just the same old talking points, warmed over, that they’d been repeating since, oh, about summer of 2003, as I recall.

But this most recent “new” strategy was run up a flagpole just about three weeks ago, and I guess no one saluted. It was so lame even the hawks didn’t pay much attention to it. The terminally clueless David Ignatius wrote on May 22, 2007 (this year, note):

The post-surge policy would, in many ways, track the recommendations of the Baker-Hamilton report, which senior administration officials say the president now supports. It also reflects the administration’s recognition that, given political realities in Washington, some policy adjustments must be made. The goal is an approach that would have sufficient bipartisan support so it could be sustained even after the Bush administration leaves office in early 2009.

Notice they even tried to package the “post-surge” plan as something like ISG Lite (less filling! tastes great!) just to increase its marketing appeal, even though it resembled the Baker-Hamilton report about as much as a table resembles a horse.

Senior officials discussed the outlines of a “post-surge” policy late last week in what they said was an effort to build bipartisan support from Congress and the American public. Their comments appeared to be a trial balloon aimed at testing whether a Baker-Hamilton approach could gain traction in Washington. The description of a post-surge policy focused on elements that Democrats say they would continue to support, such as training the Iraqi military and hunting al-Qaeda, even as they set a timetable for withdrawing combat forces.

As I said, it was so lame, and so obviously just the same old hash in a new can, that even Republicans in Congress brushed it off. So now in less than three weeks the White House has gone from talking “post-surge” to kicking the surge can further down the road. It’s all they’ve got left.

Every now and then someone will demand to know what Petraeus could possibly say in September that will make a dime’s worth of difference to anybody. And the answer is, nothing. The “September strategy” never had anything to do with what Patraeus might say. It’s all just theater.

Waiting for General Petraeus’s September report is a bit like watching the first act of Il barbiere di Siviglia and waiting for the bass/baritone playing Figaro to trot out and sing “Largo al factotum.” Except without the orchestra, of course. You know exactly when he’s supposed to enter and every note he’s supposed to sing. The only question is whether he can get through all the “Pronto prontissimo” stuff without tying his tongue up in knots. It’s just a role, in other words.

I see that Arianna Huffington is writing about Petraeus ex machina. I think it’s closer to say the role was originally envisioned to be ex machina, but the script is already in rewrite. Whatever he says, Bush supporters will spin it as “preliminary” and the detractors will say enough is enough. Harry Reid is already calling Petraeus “out of touch.”

I say the real drama is doing on in the head’s of Republicans in Congress. Will they stand by Bush, or cut him loose? They’ve got the summer to think it over and make up their minds. The bloodshed, of course, continues.

Paternity Tests

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First, if by chance any journalists drop by here, I have a complaint. I’ve been surfing around this morning looking for a news story that explains the main provisions of the immigration bill, in its current form, and the various amendments the Republicans want to attach to it. Haven’t found one.

This is news reporting 101, people. Yes, the lead grafs should be about how the bill was killed in the Senate and how there’s this big political fight over it, but at some point the story should move into an explanation of what’s in the bleeping bill.

The Dallas Morning News offers a sentence:

The legislation would tighten borders and institute a new system to prevent employers from hiring undocumented workers, in addition to giving up to 12 million illegal immigrants a pathway to legal status.

Somehow, I think there’s more to it than that.

Here’s the text of the actual bill if you want to slog through it. I’m a bit short of time this morning and cannot, which is why I was looking for a news story that digested it for me. And then there are the several amendments, which include one sponsored by Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) to “declare English as the national language of the Government of the United States, and for other purposes,” one from Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) requiring that voters must present a photo ID before they’re allowed into the voting booth, and one from Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) preventing some temporary workers and the former illegals receiving amnesty from claiming an earned income tax credit.

I haven’t heard from anyone who actually likes this bill. I’m told by other liberals that the bill’s guest worker program would have instituted a new class of worker with virtually no bargaining powers, and that this almost certainly would suppress the wages of many citizens. Conservatives don’t like the bill because the notion of amnesty for illegal aliens sticks in their craw, and of course they want big fences along the Rio Grande.

The fence issue illustrates how the damnfool politicians can’t even agree on the stuff they agree on. Everyone wants more secure borders. Some on the extreme right claim the Democrats and President Bush are tools of the Open Borders Lobby, but in fact, no one in Congress — not even Ted Kennedy — is in favor of open borders.

The argument is not whether the borders should be more secure, but how to go about making them more secure. My understandng is that the Dems in general favor making smarter use of surveillance technologies. But that will not do for conservatives; they want a fence. I’m sure you already know how that would turn out. We’d spend billions on the bleeping fence, and then in a few months’ time the coyotes will have figured out how to get through it. Then we’d need the surveillance technologies to look for holes in the fence. The fence obviously represents something in rightie minds — something primitive and hostile, of course — that eludes the rest of us.

But President Bush had made a Big Bleeping Deal about immigration reform. So a bipartisan group of a dozen Senators got together a few months ago and wrote a bill that sort of satisfied what Bush wanted and also had a shot, they thought, at passing.

Carl Hulse and Robert Pear write for the New York Times:

The compromise legislation was announced on May 17 by authors who hailed it as a “grand bargain.” It held together through much of the debate because the negotiators — embodied on the right by Senator Jon Kyl of Arizona, a Republican, and on the left by Mr. Kennedy — agreed to block proposals they thought would sink the measure. That led to such odd moments as when Mr. Kyl on Wednesday opposed an amendment he had helped write for last year’s unsuccessful immigration measure.

But the legislation began running into problems late Wednesday night and early Thursday morning as the Senate approved a Democratic proposal to limit a guest-worker program sought by business interests and backed by Republicans. Backers of the bill hoped to reverse that result if the measure moved forward. …

… Democrats were growing increasingly uneasy.

Senator Robert Menendez, Democrat of New Jersey, said the bill had become “more punitive and more onerous” because of amendments adopted in the last few days. Mr. Menendez pointed, for example, to one that denied the earned-income tax credit to illegal immigrants who gain legal status under the bill.

Republicans kept throwing nastier and more punitive amendments at the bill, and Harry Reid thought if the thing had any chance at all of passing he’d better cut off more amendments and try to get the bill voted on. What happened yesterday was that the bill flunked a procedural test that would have allowed it to move forward toward a vote.

After a day of tension and fruitless maneuvering, senators rejected a Democratic call to move toward a final vote on the compromise legislation after Republicans complained that they had not been given enough opportunity to reshape the sprawling bill. Supporters of cutting off debate got only 45 of the 60 votes they needed; 50 senators opposed the cutoff.

“We are finished with this for the time being,” said Senator Harry Reid, Democrat of Nevada and the majority leader, as he turned the Senate to work on energy legislation.

An “inside story” post by rightie blogger John Hawkins suggests that conservative Republicans were trying deliberately to “gum up the works,” and it seems they succeeded.

It gets weirder. This bill was Bush’s baby. But apparently neither he nor anyone else in the White House tried to help it get passed. This week Harry Reid sent all kinds of signals to Bush that if he wanted his bill passed he had better put some pressure on Republican senators. But Bush is in Europe and the G8 summit, and apparently he doesn’t know that you can make overseas phone calls these days.

Some righties, meanwhile, interpreted Reid’s messages to Bush as pleas to help Reid get the bill passed, and yesterday I bounced into all manner of rightie bloggers who referred to the measure as “Reid’s bill.” The other allegations of paternity were made about Ted Kennedy, who is the Author of All Evil, and since Kennedy was one of the senators who worked on the original bill it must have been his fault. In fact, Little Lulu is now referring to Senator Ted as Bush’s “pal.” This is sort of like saying the President is in league with the Devil.

The righties really don’t like Bush any more.

A Jerking Knee Is No Substitute for a Thinking Brain

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This Think Progress post is mildly interesting, but the comments bum me out. Here’s the post:

National Review’s Rich Lowry:“Was talking to an influential Republican strategist who thinks if Iraq looks the way it does now in September, Bush will lose about 25 Senate Republicans on a bill with some sort of timetable for withdrawal.”

Now, if true, which is a big if, that would be grand news. Twenty-five Republican senators is more than enough to make a veto-proof (two thirds) majority in the Senate, even giving away Joe Lieberman. We’ll see.

But the comments worry me — here’s a selection:

Sounds great, but I’m not getting my hopes up again. Even if 25 republicans do switch over, (which I doubt) what is to say the dems won’t just hand him a blank check again?

* * *

As a Democrat, the biggest problem in Washington is the Democrats.

* * *

We can’t even get Democrats to vote for timetables. Why would we think 25 Republicans will?

* * *

Bush has just said he wants a South Korea style presence – superbases and fifty years. What makes anyone think he’ll listen to 25 Republicans?

* * *

Fcuk the Republicans and Fcuk the Democrats. Two hemorrhoids, both part of the same a$$hole.

Some of these comments reflect serious ignorance of the issues. For example, We can’t even get Democrats to vote for timetables is just wrong. An overwhelming majority of Dems did vote for timetables. House Dems voted for the appropriation bill with timetables (H.R. 1591) by 216 to 14. Most of the 14 were from the House Progressive caucus, who voted no because the timetables weren’t strict enough. Senate Dems passed the timetable bill 49-1 (guess who?), with one (the ailing Tim Johnson) absent.

Last week Bob Fertik wrote,

Unfortunately, there are simply not enough Democrats and Republicans in Congress who are willing to join them in standing up to Bush.

What are the numbers? We know them exactly because the Senate and the House just voted on setting a deadline for bringing U.S. troops home from Iraq.

  • In the Senate, the Feingold-Reid Amendment was defeated 67-29, with all Republicans voting no along with 20 “Bush Democrats,” while 29 progressive Democrats voted yes.
  • In the House, the McGovern Amendment was defeated 255-171, with all but two Republicans voting no along with 59 “Bush Democrats,” while 169 progressive Democrats voted yes.

    • The Feingold and McGovern amendments both provided that a troop redeployment out of Iraq begin within a set number of days after the passage of the bill. These were tougher than the timetable bill, in other words. In the Senate, 29 out of 51 Democratic senators voted yes. In the House, 169 out of 233 Democrats voted yes. A glorious total of two Republicans in the entire Congress voted yes.

    Yet some twit commenting on Think Progress wrote We can’t even get Democrats to vote for timetables. Unfortunately, I think this notion is common among a large lump of people who passionately hate the war but aren’t paying close attention to what’s actually happening in Washington to end it.

    Further, the concept of overriding a veto seems to elude some people. Bush has just said he wants a South Korea style presence – superbases and fifty years. What makes anyone think he’ll listen to 25 Republicans? If 25 Senate Republicans voted with the Dems, that would be more than enough to override Bush’s veto in the Senate. By law, Bush would have to comply if Congress overrode a veto. If he didn’t — well, that’s never happened before. It could get interesting.

    I agree there’s plenty of reason to criticize the Dems, but it worries me when large numbers of “progressives” develop knee-jerk antipathy toward the Dems. This is not helpful.

    There’s a middle way between mindless boosterism and mindlessly assuming the worst. This middle way has two steps: First, be informed. Second, think.

    I get the impression that some people think it’s “cool” to run down the Dems or to declare that they’re just like Republicans. Certainly, when Dems do something stupid, speak up. But at the same time, give credit where credit is due. How many people out there really don’t understand that the Dems did vote to end the war? How many don’t understand that the timetables didn’t become law because Bush vetoed it, and there aren’t enough Dems to override a veto? Given the way Dems and Republicans voted on the recent appropriation bills, anyone who says the biggest problem in Washington is the Democrats or that the two parties are Two hemorrhoids, both part of the same a$$hole is being a big-time asshole himself. He’s also standing in the way of the only hope we have of enacting real progressive policy sometime in the future.

    Remember: It’s not about our supporting the Democrats; it’s about training the Democrats to support us. We’re not doing that by treating all Dems as the enemy, indistinguishable from the Republicans.

    Sure there are Dems I’d like to replace. Sure there are times they fall short. Sure they need their feet held to fire sometimes. But when we treat them all like the enemy — even the ones who have worked for issues we care about — then we’re training them to keep ignoring us.

    The Coming Outrage

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    We’ve been so wrapped up in the Iraq funding issue that this bomb is going off nearly unnoticed. Jonathan S. Landay writes for McClatchy Newspapers:

    U.S. intelligence agencies warned the Bush administration before the invasion of Iraq that ousting Saddam Hussein would create a “significant risk” of sectarian strife, encourage al-Qaida attacks and open the way for Iranian interference.

    The Senate Intelligence Committee on Friday released declassified prewar intelligence reports and summaries of others that cautioned that establishing democracy in Iraq would be “long, difficult and probably turbulent” and said that while most Iraqis would welcome elections, the country’s ethnic and religious leaders would be unwilling to share power.

    Nevertheless, President Bush, then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and other top aides decided not to deploy the major occupation that force military planners had recommended, planned to reduce U.S. troops rapidly after the invasion and believed that ousting Saddam would ignite a democratic revolution across the Middle East.

    The Senate Intelligence Committee ought to know better than to dump something like this on the Friday before Memorial Day Weekend. I suspect there’s a story behind that, and I’d like to know what it is.

    You might remember that the Senate Intelligence Committee released its first report dealing with pre-war intelligence assessments about Iraq in July 2004. Then the committee, um, stopped reporting. In November 2005, Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid “shut down” the Senate, forcing it into a rare, secret closed door session, threatening to delay legislative action until the Intelligence Committee followed through on its planned investigation of prewar Iraq intelligence failures.

    In April 2006, Committee Chairman Pat Roberts (R-KS) released a schedule for releasing the rest of the report, in which he declared the remainder of the work had been broken into five parts. The first two reports of Phase II were released in August 2006 (nice dead news time, that) and looked at post-war findings about Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction and links to al Qaeda.

    Yesterday’s was the first of the Phase II reports released since the Democratic takeover of the Senate. As it was, five Republicans on the Senate Intelligence Committee voted to keep sitting on what they knew. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska and Olympia Snowe of Maine joined majority Democrats in approving the release, making the final vote 10-5. Although the Dems were in the majority, I can’t help but wonder if the timing of the release was part of a deal.

    Cliff Schecter has more details about what the report says.

    Walter Pincus and Karen DeYoung write in today’s Washington Post.

    Months before the invasion of Iraq, U.S. intelligence agencies predicted that it would be likely to spark violent sectarian divides and provide al-Qaeda with new opportunities in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to a report released yesterday by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Analysts warned that war in Iraq also could provoke Iran to assert its regional influence and “probably would result in a surge of political Islam and increased funding for terrorist groups” in the Muslim world.

    The intelligence assessments, made in January 2003 and widely circulated within the Bush administration before the war, said that establishing democracy in Iraq would be “a long, difficult and probably turbulent challenge.” The assessments noted that Iraqi political culture was “largely bereft of the social underpinnings” to support democratic development.

    Dan Froomkin dedicated much of yesterday’s column to this issue. Among other things, he quotes an Associated Press report:

    The committee also found that the warnings predicting what would happen after the U.S.-led invasion were circulated widely in government, including to the Defense Department and the Office of the Vice President. It wasn’t clear whether President Bush was briefed.

    Of course it wasn’t.

    I don’t believe this information is entirely new. James Fallows said something like it in the January/February 2004 issue of Atlantic Monthly, in his article “Blind Into Baghdad.” Today’s news stories are about pre-war reports from U.S. intelligence that were studiously ignored, whereas Fallows wrote about studies commissioned by the U.S. Department of State that were studiously ignored. If you’ve never read this article I urge you to do so (the link is to a page outside the Atlantic subscription firewall). Even though it is more than three years old, there’s stuff in it that I bet will make your jaw drop even now. Anyway, one of the pre-war issues Fallows addressed was the absence of Bush:

    … in several months of interviews I never once heard someone say “We took this step because the President indicated …” or “The President really wanted …” Instead I heard “Rumsfeld wanted,” “Powell thought,” “The Vice President pushed,” “Bremer asked,” and so on. One need only compare this with any discussion of foreign policy in Reagan’s or Clinton’s Administration—or Nixon’s, or Kennedy’s, or Johnson’s, or most others—to sense how unusual is the absence of the President as prime mover. The other conspicuously absent figure was Condoleezza Rice, even after she was supposedly put in charge of coordinating Administration policy on Iraq, last October. It is possible that the President’s confidants are so discreet that they have kept all his decisions and instructions secret. But that would run counter to the fundamental nature of bureaucratic Washington, where people cite a President’s authority whenever they possibly can (“The President feels strongly about this, so …”).

    To me, the more likely inference is that Bush took a strong overall position—fighting terrorism is this generation’s challenge—and then was exposed to only a narrow range of options worked out by the contending forces within his Administration. If this interpretation proves to be right, and if Bush did in fact wish to know more, then blame will fall on those whose responsibility it was to present him with the widest range of choices: Cheney and Rice.

    I doubt very much that Bush did want to know more. He had issues with Saddam Hussein, and White House courtiers were all too eager to supply him with justifications to smack the Iraqi dictator down. The details could be left up to the hired help. I say any President of the United States who was so colossally incurious about what Hurricane Katrina had done to New Orleans that his staff had to make him watch a video is perfectly capable of launching a war without thinking about the consequences real hard.

    Anyway, as Fallows documented, all kinds of details had been worked out by armies of experts, including Iraqis. Among other items the report warned of possible looting and lawlessness after the Baathist government fell; of the need to restore water, electricity and jobs as quickly as possible; and not to disband the Iraqi army.

    Two names that come up frequently in the Fallows article are Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld. Rummy actually opposed planning for the post-war period. Here Fallows is talking to Douglas Feith:

    When I asked what had gone better than expected, and what had gone worse, he said, “We don’t exactly deal in ‘expectations.’ Expectations are too close to ‘predictions.’ We’re not comfortable with predictions. It is one of the big strategic premises of the work that we do.”

    The limits of future knowledge, Feith said, were of special importance to Rumsfeld, “who is death to predictions.” “His big strategic theme is uncertainty,” Feith said. “The need to deal strategically with uncertainty. The inability to predict the future. The limits on our knowledge and the limits on our intelligence.”

    In practice, Feith said, this meant being ready for whatever proved to be the situation in postwar Iraq. “You will not find a single piece of paper … If anybody ever went through all of our records—and someday some people will, presumably—nobody will find a single piece of paper that says, ‘Mr. Secretary or Mr. President, let us tell you what postwar Iraq is going to look like, and here is what we need plans for.’ If you tried that, you would get thrown out of Rumsfeld’s office so fast—if you ever went in there and said, ‘Let me tell you what something’s going to look like in the future,’ you wouldn’t get to your next sentence!”

    “This is an important point,” he said, “because of this issue of What did we believe? … The common line is, nobody planned for security because Ahmed Chalabi told us that everything was going to be swell.” Chalabi, the exiled leader of the Iraqi National Congress, has often been blamed for making rosy predictions about the ease of governing postwar Iraq. “So we predicted that everything was going to be swell, and we didn’t plan for things not being swell.” Here Feith paused for a few seconds, raised his hands with both palms up, and put on a “Can you believe it?” expression. “I mean—one would really have to be a simpleton. And whatever people think of me, how can anybody think that Don Rumsfeld is that dumb? He’s so evidently not that dumb, that how can people write things like that?” He sounded amazed rather than angry

    In other words, Rummy et al. were opposed to “expectations,” because expectations become predictions (which are bad), but because Ahmed Chalabi had made rosy predictions about the post-war period, the Defense Department crew didn’t expect it to be all that hard. Got it.

    As for Wolfie’s part, do read Sidney Blumenthal’s recent article, “Wolfowitz’s tomb.”

    With the end of the Cold War the cold warrior without a mission fastened onto a new id´e fixe. As the undersecretary of defense for policy in the first Gulf War, serving under Secretary Dick Cheney, Wolfowitz had concurred in the decision not to pursue Saddam Hussein to Baghdad after expelling him from Kuwait. He had been present at the Feb. 21, 1991, meeting where that policy was approved and uttered not a skeptical or contrary word. But when the elder Bush was defeated, Wolfowitz in exile became the champion of regime change. He developed an elaborate utopian scheme based on the overthrow of Saddam — instant democracy in Iraq, inciting democratic revolutions throughout the Middle East, accompanied by the equally sudden quiescence of the Palestinians, creating peace for Israel while doing away with any negotiations involved in a peace process. And he imagined Saddam, a brutal enough tyrant, as an octopus, his tentacles manipulating nearly every horror. Even after every available piece of evidence and trials proved otherwise, he continued to insist that Saddam was behind the Oklahoma City and 1993 World Trade Center bombings. …

    … [After becoming a deputy to Defense Secretary Rumsfeld] Wolfowitz set to work at once to implement his master plan. He brought up overthrowing Saddam in the first National Security Council meeting with the president, eight months before 9/11. In the immediate aftermath of the terrorist attacks, Wolfowitz hammered on the idea of striking at Iraq.

    Less than a month before the invasion, for which his intelligence operation had provided the justifications (later all disproved as sheer disinformation), Wolfowitz was approaching an ecstatic state of being. He could see the shape of things to come through the fog of war. On Feb. 19, 2003, in an interview with National Public Radio, he held forth on the new dawn: “But we’re not talking about the occupation of Iraq. We’re talking about the liberation of Iraq … Therefore, when that regime is removed we will find one of the most talented populations in the Arab world, perhaps complaining that it took us so long to get there. Perhaps a little unfriendly to the French for making it take so long. But basically welcoming us as liberators … There’s not going to be the hostility … There simply won’t be.”

    Five months later, on July 23, 2003, after his trip to Iraq, Wolfowitz was still in an elevated state. “There is no humanitarian crisis,” he said. “There is no refugee crisis. There is no health crisis. There has been minimal damage to infrastructure — minimal war damage … So, fortunately, much of what … we planned for and budgeted for has not proved necessary.”

    Historians often write about the founding of our country with a reverent wonder — isn’t it remarkable that so many giants among men could have been alive at the same place and the same time? We still defer to the Founders respectfully — Washington. Jefferson. Hamilton. Madison. Franklin. A fortunate confluence. But on 9/11 we had the unfortunate confluence of the worst pack of losers and idiots that ever ran a government — Bush. Cheney. Rumsfeld. Wolfowitz. Rice. Names which will in infamy.

    Update: See “Pat Lang & Lawrence Wilkerson Share Nightmare Encounters with Feith, Wolfowitz, and Tenet.”

    Update 2: Who needs a propaganda machine when the base is this good at lying to itself?

    Excuses

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    Although I disagree with Jonathan Alter that “Democrats in Congress had no choice but to proceed the way they have this week on the war in Iraq,” I suspect he is right when he says “what’s going on inside the Democratic Party now is a family argument about tactics, not principle.”

    I’ve seen many assumptions that the Dems folded because they don’t understand War Is Bad or that they secretly support the war and intend to keep it going. But I think Alter speaks for the Dems (and note that I think the Dems are mistaken) when he writes,

    The whole “support the troops” meme has become a terrible problem for Democrats. Even though, as Glenn Greenwald has argued in Salon, cutting off funding doesn’t mean soldiers will have their guns and bullets and armor taken away in the middle of a battle, Americans have been convinced that it does. They want to end the war and support the troops at the same time—i.e., send back the food and still eat.

    This is not a figment of some spineless Democrat’s imagination but the reality of what he or she will face back in the district over Memorial Day. Democrats who vote to cut funding not only risk getting thrown in the briar patch by Republican hit men in Washington; they also might not be able to satisfy their otherwise antiwar constituents at home.

    Alter seems to be right that there is little public support for cutting off funds, even though sentiment against the war itself is at an all-time high. According to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll:

    Sixty-one percent of Americans say the United States should have stayed out of Iraq and 76 percent say things are going badly there, including 47 percent who say things are going very badly, the poll found.

    Still, the majority of Americans support continuing to finance the war as long as the Iraqi government meets specific goals. …

    … While troops are still in Iraq, Americans overwhelmingly support continuing to finance the war, though most want to do so with conditions. Thirteen percent want Congress to block all money for the war.

    Sixty-nine percent, including 62 percent of Republicans, say Congress should allow financing, but on the condition that the United States sets benchmarks for progress and the Iraqi government meets those goals. Fifteen percent of all respondents want Congress to allow all financing for the war, no matter what.

    Note: Only 13 percent want Congress to cut off funding for the war. Dems look at those numbers and assume that cutting off funds would be political suicide. That, folks, is motivation. That’s why the supplement bill passed both houses yesterday.

    I suspect the Dems have less to fear from “Republican hit men in Washington” than they used to. The days when Republicans could get away with accusing Dems of being allied with Osama bin Laden are long past. The poll also said this:

    More Americans — 72 percent — now say that “generally things in the country are seriously off on the wrong track” than at any other time since the Times/CBS News poll began asking the question in 1983. The number has slowly risen since January 2004. Then, 53 percent said the country was “seriously off on the wrong track,” and by January of this year it was 68 percent.

    I think if the Dems had made an all-out effort to go to the American people and say Bush is bluffing about the troops running out of money. If you want us to end the war we need you to support what we’re doing in Congress, then they could have put up a better fight and rallied more of the public to their side.

    But the Dems aren’t good at doing that. They don’t have the infrastructure of media, “think tanks” and astroturf organizations that the Republicans use to pound their talking points into peoples’ heads. Plus, the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy has been dominating national politics for so long that only the very oldest Washington politicians remember those long-ago days when they weren’t quaking in terror under its shadow. Old dogs, new tricks, and all that.

    I disagree with Kathy that Dems blinked because they are afraid of the President. I think they are afraid of the VRWC, which is still in place, and which will not be leaving Washington when Bush’s term runs out.

    Granted, Tom Hulse wrote a couple of days ago in the New York Times:

    Democrats said they did not relish the prospect of leaving Washington for a Memorial Day break — the second recess since the financing fight began — and leaving themselves vulnerable to White House attacks that they were again on vacation while the troops were wanting. That criticism seemed more politically threatening to them than the anger Democrats knew they would draw from the left by bowing to Mr. Bush.

    Fear of a colossally unpopular White House might seem laughable, but the Wrath of Bush would still be carried and amplified throughout the Republican echo chamber, and Karl’s talking points would be drilled into peoples’ heads by armies of political commentators in newspapers, radio, and television. The White House spin on funding the troops already has been well presented to the public, which has a lot to do with why only 13 percent of the public want the war de-funded.

    I also disagree with Matt Stoller’s take on the Dems’ motivation.

    The crazy thing about the fight is that Democratic insiders are convinced that capitulation is the right strategy. They actually believe that this will put pressure on the Republicans in the fall, and that standing up to Bush is a bad idea.

    Sorta kinda, but not quite. In their public statements Dems may be applying lipstick to the pig, but I don’t think in their minds they thought capitulation now would put pressure on Republicans in the fall. They’re hoping the war’s own [un]popularity will put pressure on Republicans in the fall. Instead, I think the Dems just want to avoid being a big, fat target for the VRWC over the summer.

    It’s been only three years from the time the “Swift Boaters” hijacked the nation’s media and the 2004 election campaign and sold the public a pack of easily debunked whoppers that few in the media bothered to debunk, for example. I don’t think the VRWC could work that same scam quite so easily today. But three years isn’t so long ago that there isn’t reason for concern.

    On the other side of this argument, Kos writes,

    Well, the blood of a few thousand more of our servicemembers in Iraq should be worth avoiding a little criticism! …

    … I’m just wondering when beltway Democrats will realize that no one likes Bush or his war? And when will they realize that every time he opens up his trap, his poll numbers drop another few points?

    However, when Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh and David Broder and Tucker Carlson and Chris Matthews and the rest of the army of tools that dominate mass media spend the summer speaking on Bush’s behalf while Bush happily chainsaws the last bit of vegetation for miles around Crawford, Texas, who knows?

    I’m not saying that the Dems couldn’t and shouldn’t have put up a better fight. I’m saying this is why they didn’t.

    I support efforts to target Steny Hoyer and the Blue Dogs generally in next year’s primaries. Dems need to learn they have more to fear from their base than from Faux Snooze.

    But it’s shortsighted and immature to abandon the entire party. Because, frankly, we need them as much as they need us. Lots of people aren’t going to want to hear that, but it’s the truth. Back in the 1970s progressives and liberals busted up the old New Deal coalition and then walked away from party politics. And for nearly 40 years we liberals have been shoved to the fringes of power, handing out fliers to people who don’t give a shit and sending checks to myriad single-issue advocacy groups, most of which have been stunningly ineffectual at everything but direct mail fundraising.

    The truth is that if you want to have a say in what goes on in government, you have to do it through party politics. And another truth is that there’s not going to be a viable, national third party in my lifetime. Maybe there’ll be one in yours if you are very young, but in any event bolting to a third party is no remedy to our current problems. The practical reality is that our only hope of effecting a progressive agenda in the U.S. in the foreseeable future is to take the Dems into hand and mold it into a party that responds to us.

    It’s not about our supporting the Democrats; it’s about training the Democrats to support us. It’s going to take more than one or two election cycles to accomplish this. I’ve been saying that all along.

    And on that note I will turn to Chris Weigant at Huffington Post, who says:

    Back in January, the tally of hard anti-war Democrats in the House was estimated to be around 70. Recently, though, 171 House members and 29 senators voted for a straight-up “get out now” bill, which shows that the anti-war wing is gaining strength. That’s a good thing.

    Unfortunately, only 142 House representatives voted against yesterday’s bill, and only 14 in the Senate voted likewise. That shows a certain softness to the anti-war caucus. That’s a bad thing.

    Overall, though, this group is gaining in strength, and will continue to do so (in my opinion). And that’s a really good thing, because it’s moving in the right direction.

    The final bill didn’t contain Jack Murtha’s troop readiness language, which is a very bad thing, and which disappointed me personally. While I knew the Democrats were going to eventually cave on the timetable, I was extremely discouraged to see that they didn’t fight harder for Murtha’s language.

    And completely out of left field, Democrats snuck in the minimum wage increase into the final bill. I certainly didn’t see that one coming, but it is indeed a very good thing.

    Go read all of this post. I have some small quibbles with it, but on the whole I think Weigant is right.

    Update: See also E.J. Dionne:

    The decision to drop withdrawal timelines from the Iraq supplemental appropriations bill is not a decisive defeat. It is a temporary setback in a much longer struggle for minds and votes that the administration’s critics are actually winning.

    The progressives’ anger is not hard to fathom. Bush’s botched war has been immensely harmful to our country. Polls show that most Americans want out. Democrats won the 2006 midterm election in significant part because of the public’s exhaustion with the war and with the Bush presidency. According to the Real Clear Politics Web site, the president’s disapproval rating across a series of polls averages 61 percent. Opponents of the war feel the wind at their backs. Why, they ask, did House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid cave in?…

    …Pelosi’s case is that the war’s congressional opponents have already helped move the debate by passing antiwar measures and by prying Republicans loose from the president’s policy. “It is just a matter of time,” she says, before Republicans can “no longer stay with the president.”

    She gets support from one of the House’s most vociferous opponents of the war, Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.), lead sponsor of the strongest House withdrawal proposal. McGovern sees Pelosi as a passionate opponent of the war who is in it to win in the legislative process. “For her, it’s not therapy,” he says.

    He notes that the agreement to go forward with the funding bill passed yesterday (a majority of House Democrats, Pelosi among them, opposed it) included a promise to take up his withdrawal amendment this fall. This gives teeth to Pelosi’s pledge — “we’ll see you in September” — to continue to battle Bush on the war.

    As a tactical matter, it could have been useful for the Democrats to move another bill containing timelines to Bush’s desk for a second veto, simply to underscore the president’s unwillingness to seek bipartisan accord on a change in policy. But these are the brute facts: Democrats narrowly control the House but don’t have an effective majority in the Senate since Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) votes with the Republicans on the war and Tim Johnson (D-S.D.) is still too ill to vote.

    Democrats, in short, have enough power to complicate the president’s life, but not enough to impose their will. Moreover, there is genuine disagreement even among Bush’s Democratic critics over what the pace of withdrawal should be and how to minimize the damage of this war to the country’s long-term interests. That is neither shocking nor appalling, but, yes, it complicates things. So does the fact that the minority wields enormous power in the Senate.

    What was true in January thus remains true today: The president will be forced to change his policy only when enough Republicans tell him he has to. Facing this is no fun; it’s just necessary.

    Rep. Dave Obey (D-Wis.), chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, said recently that no one remembers how long it took to reverse the direction of American policy in Vietnam. Obey is hunkered down for a lengthy struggle.

    In a divided system, democracy can be frustratingly slow. But it usually works. Critics of the war should spend less time mourning the setbacks of May and begin organizing for a showdown in September.

    Update 2: David Sirota

    E.J. Dionne has a piece in the Washington Post saying it’s AOK to wait until September to deal with the Iraq War. “See you in September!” he cheerily tells us. What’s amazing is that he doesn’t take even one line to explore how many American troops will be killed or maimed between now and when we “see you in September!”

    It’s sick – it’s a big game to all these people in Washington. When people use the metaphor “blood on their hands” it is columns like Dionne’s that they are referring to.

    The argument is mostly between people who think the Dems could have stopped the war if they’d tried harder, and those who think the Dems did the best they could and will have a better shot at ending the war in a few months after more Republicans have jumped ship.

    You may have noticed I am right in the middle. I am not persuaded the Dems did everything they could to tie Bush’s hands, but I never believed the showdown over the “emergency” supplement bill by itself was going to end the war.

    Nor do I think E.J. Dionne is “cheerily” saying that we should all just passively wait until September to end the war. I think there is much work to be done by antiwar activists and Democratis senators and representatives to prepare the ground for a successful effort.

    Step one is to find out how your representative and senators voted, and send them either a thank you or a bleep you, according to the vote.

    Keith Smacks Down Dems

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    If you didn’t catch Keith Olbermann’s special comments tonight, don’t worry. I’m sure someone is uploading a video to YouTube even as I keyboard, and soon it will be all over the web.

    [Update: Here ’tis, at Crooks and Liars.]

    He said the Democratic presidential nomination is likely to be decided tomorrow. Not tomorrow as in the future, but tomorrow, May 24. The time has come for them to show us what they’re made of. Have they learned the lesson of October 2002, when Congress passed the war resolution? Or will they make the same damnfool mistake again?

    Sen. Chris Dodd certainly helped himself today by making it clear he didn’t like the new appropriation bill.

    I understand John Edwards has also spoken out against it. But according to Keith Olbermann, Joe Biden is going to vote for it, and the rest of the candidates haven’t been heard from (although I doubt Dennis Kucinich approves).

    In particular I’m thinking about Barack Obama. If Sen. Obama wants to seal the deal and take front runner status away from Hillary Clinton, I think he could do so easily right now by taking a firm stand against the appropriation deal. If he doesn’t, I think he’ll come to regret it.

    Update: Bob Geiger says Kerry, Feingold, and Independent Bernie Sanders are voting no.