Category Archives: Iraq War

Republic or Empire?

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This morning I read the first paragraph of this article by Peter Baker in today’s Washington Post:

President Bush acknowledged for the first time yesterday that the United States is not winning the war in Iraq and said he plans to expand the overall size of the “stressed” U.S. armed forces to meet the challenges of a long-term global struggle against terrorists.

After which enough alarm bells went off in my head to wake the dead.

The January 2007 issue of Harper’s (the cover art is a photograph of a rubber duckie) has an article by Chalmers Johnson titled “Republic or Empire: A National Intelligence Estimate on the United States.” It’s not online and won’t be for awhile (once again, Harper’s policy about not putting articles online until they’re a couple of months old makes me crazy), but reading the article in light of Baker’s news story is guaranteed to scare the living bleep out of you.

In the article, Chalmers discusses “military Keynesianism,” in which “the flow of the nation’s wealth — from taxpayers and (increasingly) foreign lenders through the government to military contractors and (decreasingly) back to the taxpayers.” As a result, “the domestic economy requires sustained military ambition in order to avoid recession or collapse.” Then, he ties military Keynesianism to the “unitary executive” theory and Bush’s increasingly unchecked power. Meanwhile, citizens and media dutifully “abet their government in maintaining a facade of constitutional democracy until the nation drifts into bankruptcy.”

Note that Chalmers is a serious guy with sterling Establishment credentials. Among other things, from 1967 until 1973, Chalmers was was a consultant to the Office of National Estimates (O.N.E.) within the CIA. In that capacity he mostly dealt with issues involving communist China and Maoism. There’s more about Chalmers and his work here.

In 2004 Chalmers told an interviewer he wasn’t always so concerned about military adventurism:

Johnson thought antiwar demonstrators during the Vietnam were naive. He voted for Ronald Reagan. In retrospect, Johnson told John Wilkens of the San Diego Union-Tribune, he was “a spear carrier for the empire.” …

… “I fear that we will lose our country,” Johnson writes in his latest book, “The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic.”

Bush and the Pentagon are bankrupting the nation, dismantling the Constitution, and leading us down the path to endless war. America is afflicted with the same “economic sclerosis of the former USSR,” Chalmers explains in a ZNet interview. But at least Mikhail Gorbachev tried to reform the Soviet Union before it imploded. No such luck with Bush and the neocons. “The United States is not even trying to reform, but it is certain that vested interests here would be as great or greater an obstacle. It is nowhere written that the United States, in its guise as an empire dominating the world, must go on forever. The blowback from the second half of the twentieth century has only just begun.”

In this TomDispatch interview, Chalmers explains how he evolved from being a loyal, spear carrying Cold Warrior to a being a prophet of doom howling in the wilderness. Max B. Sawicky of MaxSpeak wrote of Chalmers,

Johnson remains a conservative, staunchly pro-capitalist, limited government. No goofy Buchanan-type xenophobia. There’s a fair amount of overlap with Chomsky. People type the latter as “left” but I would argue that both of their approaches to U.S. foreign policy are empiricist and Madisonian. I’m no expert, but neither are the loons running this government.

The Johnson analytical framework harkens back to New Left treatments of “Pentagonal capitalism” and “military Keynesianism.” It emphasizes the brute fact of U.S. military outposts around the world, the breadth of resources devoted to imperial overstretch, and the impacts on the locals. I tend to discount the money aspect — what’s $450 billion in a $13 trillion economy? To me the ideology — the thirst for influence, control, and dominance — is most important.

The part about “limited government” sets some alarm belts off, too, but I respect anyone who’s actually thinking. Unlike some of our recent libertarian commenters.

Marc Cooper interviewed Chalmers in 2004 (emphasis added):

So where does that leave today’s authentic patriots?

The role of the citizen now is to be ever better informed. When Benjamin Franklin was asked, “What have we got, a republic or a monarchy?” he replied: “A republic if you can keep it.” We’ve not been paying attention to what we need to do to keep it. I think we made a disastrous error in the classic strategic sense when in 1991 we concluded that we “had won the Cold War.” No. We simply didn’t lose it as badly as the Soviets did. We were both caught up in imperial overreach, in weapons industries that came to dominate our societies. We allowed ideologues to capture our Department of Defense and lead us off — in a phrase they like — into a New Rome. We are no longer a status quo power respectful of international law. We became a revisionist power, one fundamentally opposed to the world as it is organized, much like Nazi Germany, imperial Japan, Bolshevik Russia or Maoist China.

Indeed, your thesis is that since September 11, the U.S. ceased to be a republic and has become an empire.

It’s an extremely open question if we have crossed our Rubicon and there is no going back. Easily the most important right in our Constitution, according to James Madison, who wrote much of the document, is the one giving the right to go to war exclusively to the elected representatives of the people, to the Congress. Never, Madison continued, should that right be given to a single man. But in October 2002, our Congress gave that power to a single man, to exercise whenever he wanted, and with nuclear weapons if he so chose. And the following March, without any international consultation or legitimacy, he exercised that power by staging a unilateral attack on Iraq.

The Bill of Rights — articles 4 and 6 — are now open to question. Do people really have the right to habeas corpus? Are they still secure in their homes from illegal seizures? The answer for the moment is no. We have to wait and see what the Supreme Court will rule as to the powers of this government that it appointed.

Going back to the Harper’s article — Chalmers writes,

Military Keynesianism … creates a feedback loop: American presidents know that military Keynesianism tends to concentrate power in the executive branch, and so presidents who seek greater power have a natural inducement to encourage further growth of the military-industrial complex. As the phenomena feed on each other, the usual outcome is a real war, based not on the needs of national defense but rather on the domestic political logic of military Keynesianism …

… George W. Bush has taken this natural political phenomenon to an extreme never before experienced by the American electorate. Every president has sought greater authority, but Bush … appears to believe that increasing presidential authority is both a birthright and a central component of his historical legacy. …

… John Yoo, Bush’s deputy assistant attorney general from 2001 to 2003, writes in his book War By Other Means, “We are used to a peacetime system in which Congress enacts laws, the President enforces them, and the courts interpret them. In wartime, the gravity shifts to the executive branch.”

Let’s go back to Peter Baker’s article for a moment:

A substantial military expansion will take years and would not immediately affect the war in Iraq. But it would begin to address the growing alarm among commanders about the state of the armed forces. Although the president offered no specifics, other U.S. officials said the administration is preparing plans to bolster the nation’s permanent active-duty military with as many as 70,000 additional troops.

A force structure expansion would accelerate the already-rising costs of war. The administration is drafting a supplemental request for more than $100 billion in additional funds for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, on top of the $70 billion already approved for this fiscal year, according to U.S. officials. That would be over 50 percent more than originally projected for fiscal 2007, making it by far the costliest year since the 2003 invasion.

Since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Congress has approved more than $500 billion for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as for terrorism-related operations elsewhere. An additional $100 billion would bring overall expenditures to $600 billion, exceeding those for the Vietnam War, which, adjusted for inflation, cost $549 billion, according to the Congressional Research Service.

Now, what will Bush not do to pay for all this expansion? Raise taxes, that’s what. Instead, he’s going to borrow more money from China and Japan and who knows who else. In other words, this is a major expansion of military Keynesianism. Which, once again, is what happens when “the flow of the nation’s wealth — from taxpayers and (increasingly) foreign lenders through the government to military contractors and (decreasingly) back to the taxpayers.” As a result, “the domestic economy requires sustained military ambition in order to avoid recession or collapse.”

And I think Chalmers is right about not losing the Cold War as badly as the Soviets did. We could still lose, however. Although a great many factors contributed to the collapse of the Soviet Union, my understanding is that the collapse came about primarily because the Soviet economy just plain couldn’t support the cost of their military, their secret police, and their subsidies to client states like Cuba. Soviet citizens increasingly depended on a black market economy to survive, and Gorbachev’s reforms came way too late to do any good. Eventually the whole business fell like a house of cards.

Now, our economy might be able to pay for all the stuff Bush wants to spend money on — I honestly don’t know — but the plain fact is that it is not paying for those things because of Bush’s tax cuts. Instead, we are borrowing money from foreign countries and going deeper into debt every time we breathe.

And, frankly, this scares the bleep out of me.

It’s probably the case that the military does need the expansion because of the strain Bush’s War has put upon it. But it’s becoming increasingly clear that we must haul our asses out of Iraq to save ourselves. Yes, that will leave a nasty mess behind, and that’s too damn bad. But Bush’s War is itself the greater danger.

See also: Digby, Robert Scheer, and xan at Corrente.

Update: Via Digby — the Associated Press reports —

The Pentagon is still struggling to get a handle on the unprecedented number of contractors now helping run the nation’s wars, losing millions of dollars because it is unable to monitor industry workers stationed in far-flung locations, according to a congressional report.

The investigation by the Government Accountability Office, which released the report Tuesday, found that the Defense Department’s inability to manage contractors effectively has hurt military operations and unit morale and cost the Pentagon money.

“With limited visibility over contractors, military commanders and other senior leaders cannot develop a complete picture of the extent to which they rely on contractors as an asset to support their operations,” said the GAO, the investigative arm of Congress.

“Stop the War by Stopping.”

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James Carroll writes in today’s Boston Globe:

Was the first act of war followed by the first act of denial? The story of Cain (“a tiller of the ground”) and Abel (“a keeper of sheep”) is a parable of primordial conflict between settled farmers and nomadic herders, and the lessons are timeless. Each warring group claims to have justice on its side, and believes that the way to peace is through conquest. War is always fought in the name of justice-and-peace. But peace achieved through war inevitably leads not to justice, but to conditions that cause the next war. History is the record of that succession. Victory through violence is the way to further violence.

I don’t think it’s been true throughout human history that war is always fought in the name of justice-and-peace, but I’m not aware of any war of the past century or so in which the justice-and-peace rationale wasn’t waved about by somebody. That’s not to say that justice-and-peace was the aggressors’ motivation behind all modern wars. In fact, I doubt that justice-and-peace is ever the true motivation behind initiating a war, just the excuse. But most of the time the people making that excuse don’t see that it’s just an excuse. They’ve talked themselves into believing their own excuse.

We might call these people “fools.” We might also call them “neocons.”

I agree with Carroll when he writes, “But peace achieved through war inevitably leads not to justice, but to conditions that cause the next war. History is the record of that succession.” If you step back and look at all of human history, time and time again the seeds of war were sown by a previous war. This is not to say that there aren’t other factors, but nearly always those “other factors” were issues that might have been resolved by other means.

Many who read the sentence “Victory through violence is the way to further violence” will bring up World War II. The victory over Japan, for example, was achieved after terrible violence that included two nuclear bombs. Yet that violence did not result in eternal enmity between the U.S. and Japan. Doesn’t that prove Carroll is wrong? No; it proves that this is one of the greatest anomalies of world history. A great many factors had to come together very precisely to create this anomaly. These factors, IMO, the manner of the U.S. occupation and the Buddhist-Confucian foundations of Japanese ethics. Needless to say, this happy confluence is not present in Iraq.

The lesson to be taken from Japan is not that a violent victory can have a happy result. The lesson is that, after a war, with hard work and a lot of luck the factors that might lead to another war can be substantially reduced. This is a critical distinction.

Our own Civil War was another such anomaly. Long and dear friendships existed across warring lines; officers on both sides knew and actually liked each other even as they tried to kill each other. At Appomattox Ulysses S. Grant ordered his troops not to celebrate the surrender of Robert E. Lee so as not to hurt the Confederates’ feelings. The rebel leaders were not punished for treason but were released on parole. (The only exceptions I’m aware of were the executions of the Lincoln assassination conspirators and the commanding officer of Andersonville Prison.) Compared to the aftermath of any other civil war on this planet, this behavior was downright peculiar. Even so, even though we haven’t had another civil war, there was another kind of violence — the defeated white southerners took their rage out on African Americans, beginning a reign of racial terrorism that has still not completely dissipated.

The truth that countless generations of fools can’t get into their heads is that military victory doesn’t create peace. Sometimes what victors choose to do with the victory can help establish peace, but that’s rare.

Carroll concludes,

The Bush administration embraced the cult of war when it did not have to. Bush re-legitimized that cult, and sponsored it anew. In this, he was supported by the American people, its press and its political establishment. In the beginning, the nation itself re affirmed war as the way to justice-and-peace. We did this. The first fallacy lived. By now, even Washington’s one self-proclaimed “victory” has led to further defeat. The “good” war in Afghanistan put in place structures of oppression that promised an inevitable resumption of savagery, which has begun. …

… Because of the destructiveness of modern weapons, there will be no distant future unless humans, having seen through the congenital illusion of justice-and-peace through violence, come to the rejection of war. That must begin now. Democrats, take heed: Bush must not be allowed to further the chaos. Having led the world into this moral wilderness, America has a grave responsibility to lead the way out. We have to cease killing other people’s children, which is the way to stop them from killing ours. Stop the war by stopping.

Shopping for Approval

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The President searches diligently for experts who will tell him what he wants to hear, and he may have found them. Michael A. Fletcher and Thomas E. Ricks write in today’s Washington Post (emphasis added) —

President Bush heard a blunt and dismal assessment of his handling of Iraq from a group of military experts yesterday, but the advisers shared the White House’s skeptical view of the recommendations made last week by the bipartisan Iraq Study Group, sources said.

The three retired generals and two academics disagreed in particular with the study group’s plans to reduce the number of U.S. combat troops in Iraq and to reach out for help to Iran and Syria, according to sources familiar with the meeting, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the session was private….

…White House officials emphasized that although the experts gave a bleak assessment, they still believe the situation in Iraq is “winnable.”

In other words, the ISG report is dead. The study group might has well not have bothered.

During yesterday’s White House meeting, Bush asked all the questions, except for one at the end from Cheney, a source said. But Cheney took copious notes throughout, filling several pages, he said. “They didn’t really reveal their own views” in their questions, said retired Army Gen. Barry McCaffrey, one of the five participants.

Bush asked questions? Wow.

As a whole, the group of retired generals and academics who met Bush tend to be skeptical of the Iraq Study Group’s proposals, and so were able to give him additional reasons to reject its recommendations.

Which is why they were selected to speak to Dear Leader.

I think the ISG’s recommendations fall way short of a sensible plan, or else I’d be a lot more upset about the President’s intransigence than I am. If it weren’t for the fact that people are actually dying because of this nonsense, it might even be funny. But the point of the ISG was not so much to recommend the best way out of Iraq, which IMO they didn’t, but to give President Bush a means to correct his mistake in the most face-saving way possible. Bush clearly doesn’t see that that the ISG was trying to do him a favor, which is more proof that the boy has completely slipped his tether.

Fletcher and Ricks’s article gives the names of only four of the five advisers. Just for fun I looked for the names of the Fawning Four in the index of Ricks’s book Fiasco. They are:

Gen. John M. Keane, ret. Keane is the general Rumsfeld wanted to replace Gen. Shinseki as head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (p. 69), although Keane declined the offer (p, 169). Shinseki had butted heads with Rumsfeld on a number of issues (pp. 68-69). However, Keane was not keen (heh) on invading Iraq to begin with (p. 33) and he tried to warn Rumsfeld to deal with the growing insurgency before it was too late (p. 172).

Gen. Barry McCaffrey, ret. was critical of Rummy’s invasion plans (p. 119) and was concerned the adventure would turn into another Vietnam (p. 129). Now he is an NBC and MSNBC military analyst, among other things. Since the ISG report was made public, McCaffrey has warned against the ISG’s advice to pull out combat troops from Iraq but leave a large number of “advisers.” “We are setting ourselves up for a potential national disaster in which some Iraqi divisions could flip and take 5,000 Americans hostage, or multiple advisory teams go missing in action,” he said. He could be right about that.

Gen. Wayne A. Downing, ret. Downing allegedly schemed with a staffer of Sen. Jesse Helms to arm Ahmed Chalabi and his followers (p. 23) and also had pushed a plan to invade Iraq with only 10,000 troops (p. 37).

Eliot A. Cohen, an expert in military strategy at Johns Hopkins University, in the past Cohen was a supporter of Paul Wolfowitz (p. 16); he may still be, for all I know.

According to The Armchair Generalist, the fifth advisor is Stephen Biddle, Senior Fellow in Defense Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations. Based on an article by Biddle in Foreign Affairs (“Seeing Baghdad, Thinking Saigon,” March/April 2006) Biddle thinks “Iraqization” is doomed to fail (he makes a good argument on that point) and that America’s only option is to use our military to crack down harder on the Sunnis et al. to make them behave (why that wouldn’t amount to digging the hole we’re in even deeper, Biddle doesn’t say).

More from Fletcher and Ricks:

The White House gathering was part of a series of high-profile meetings Bush is holding to search for “a new way forward” amid the increasing chaos and carnage in Iraq. Earlier in the day, Bush met with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and other high-ranking officials at the State Department, where he was briefed on reconstruction and regional diplomatic efforts in Iraq. …

… The carefully choreographed meetings are coming on the heels of the release last week of the Iraq Study Group’s report, which pronounced the situation in Iraq “grave” and recommended fundamental shifts in how the Bush administration handles the war. To stem the deteriorating situation in Iraq, the report said, the administration should shift the focus of its military mission from direct combat to training Iraqi troops, while pressing harder for a diplomatic solution by engaging Iran and Syria — something Bush has pointedly refused to do.

Yesterday’s meetings are to be followed today by a videoconference with military commanders before Bush receives Iraqi Vice President Tariq al-Hashemi at the White House. On Wednesday, Bush is scheduled to meet with his outgoing defense secretary, Donald H. Rumsfeld, and another group of military experts.

Coming amid growing public discontent with the war and the defeat of his party in last month’s congressional elections, the president’s very public review of his Iraq policy is expected to culminate in a major address in which he will lay out what the administration has billed as a “new way forward” in the nearly four-year-old conflict.

Ooo, wouldn’t it be perfect if he gave that speech in Jackson Square? And does anyone actually think that “the new way forward” will contain anything whatsoever that’s new? And in the outside chance that it does, that Bush will actually follow up and carry through whatever promises he makes and not forget the whole thing in a week or two?

More juicy bits from Fletcher and Ricks:

The military experts met with Bush, Vice President Cheney and about a dozen aides for more than an hour. The visitors told the officials that the situation in Iraq is as dire as the study group had indicated but that alternative approaches must be considered, said one participant in the meeting. In addition, the experts agreed that the president should review his national security team, which several characterized as part of the problem.

“I don’t think there is any doubt in his mind about how bad it is,” the source said. …

… The group suggested the president shake up his national security team. “All of us said they have failed, that you need a new team,” said one participant. That recommendation is likely to fuel Pentagon rumors that Bush and his new defense secretary, Robert M. Gates, may decide to replace Marine Gen. Peter Pace as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

See John Aravosis for more snark on the national security team.

H.D.S. Greenway writes in today’s Boston Globe:

The president says he is disappointed at the slow progress of success. But there isn’t going to be a success in Iraq, and the job now is to manage and mitigate failure. The Iraq Study Group understands that, but there is little evidence that Bush does. He has commissioned other internal reviews to lessen the impact of the study group’s conclusions. He apparently finds it difficult to comply with so many distinguished, bipartisan Americans and senior statesmen, several of whom served his father, who understood what would happen if we occupied Iraq.

Essentially, Bush is going to continue to listen to panels and reviews until there is a sufficient body of recommendations that amount to what he wanted to do, anyway; then he’ll cherry pick out those recommendations and claim he is following expert advise. We all know this already. All of the choreographed meetings and advisory panels and even Cheney’s note-taking are just a charade. I don’t know why they bother; they ain’t foolin’ anybody except the Kool-Aiders.

Related to Iraq — there’s some really good commentary by Avedon at the Sideshow — Stephen Biddle could learn a thing or two from Avedon, IMO — Atrios, Digby, and Poputopian that I recommend highly.

The Twilight Zone II

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Jonathan Chait begins his Los Angeles Times column this way:

THERE IS a famous “Twilight Zone” episode about a little boy in a small town who has fantastical powers. Through the misuse of his powers, the little boy has ruined the lives of everybody in the town — for instance, teleporting them into a cornfield, or summoning a snowstorm that destroys their crops. Because anyone who thinks an unhappy thought will be banished, the adults around him can do nothing but cheerfully praise his decisions while they try to nudge him in a less destructive direction.

This episode kept popping into my head when I was reading about President Bush and the Baker-Hamilton commission. Bush is the president of the United States, which therefore gives him enormous power, but he is treated by everybody around him as if he were a child.

I’ve been thinking of that same episode. I think a lot of people are thinking about that same episode.

Chait continues,

Consider a story in the latest Time magazine, recounting the efforts — before the commission was approved by Congress — of three supporters to enlist Condoleezza Rice to win the administration’s approval for the panel. Here is how Time reports it:

“As the trio departed, a Rice aide asked one of her suitors not to inform anyone at the Pentagon that chairmen had been chosen and the study group was moving forward. If Rumsfeld was alerted to the study group’s potential impact, the aide said, he would quickly tell Cheney, who could, with a few words, scuttle the whole thing. Rice got through to Bush the next day, arguing that the thing was going to happen anyway, so he might as well get on board. To his credit, the President agreed.”

The article treats this exchange in a matter-of-fact way, but, what it suggests is completely horrifying. Rice apparently believed that Bush would simply follow the advice of whoever he spoke with. Therefore the one factor determining whether Bush would support the commission was whether Cheney or Rice managed to get to him first.

The GOP still has plenty of apparatchiks to appear on the cable television politics talk shows and explain to us solemnly that this president is thinking this or considering that or wants some other thing, blah blah blah, and you know it’s a farce, and I assume they know it’s a farce, yet the GOP propaganda machine continues to play pretend that this president is actually doing the job of president and is not, in effect, spending his days in search of a missing quart of strawberries.

Chait continues,

And now that the Baker-Hamilton report is out, the commissioners are carefully patronizing the commander in chief. As this newspaper reported, “Members of the commission said they were pleased that Bush gave them as much attention as he did, a full hour’s worth. ‘He could have scheduled us for 20 minutes plus 10 minutes for the cameras,’ said former Atty. Gen. Edwin M. Meese III.” Wow, a commission devoted hundreds or thousands of man-hours to addressing the central conundrum of U.S. foreign policy, and the president gave them a whole hour of his time!

Buried near the bottom of Dana Milbank’s account of the meeting —

Leon Panetta counseled Bush to “look at the realities of what’s taking place.” Eagleburger said after the event that when the group met with Bush, “I don’t recall, seriously, that he asked any questions.”

No questions?

For a moment let’s skip over to a Eleanor Clift web commentary at Newsweek. She writes (emphasis added),

It’s a statement of the obvious, but when you have a collection of Washington wise men, plus retired Supreme Court justice Sandra Day O’Connor (perhaps doing penance for her vote that put Bush in the White House during the disputed 2000 race), it’s the equivalent of last rites for Bush’s Iraq policy, along with his presidency. It’s not a plan for victory because that doesn’t exist except in Bush’s fantasy. The recommendations Baker and company offer—of more international engagement and shifting U.S. troops to a backup role to Iraqi forces—may help the administration manage and mask defeat. Even so, that may be hard for Bush to accept. His body language when receiving the report, while polite, was dismissive, thanking the eminences assembled for breakfast at the White House for dropping off a copy.

This president has lost all capacity to lead. Eleven American servicemen died in Iraq on the day Bush was presented the report, which calls the situation there “grave and deteriorating.” Events on the ground threaten to overtake even this grim assessment. And we’re left to analyze Bush’s tender ego and whether he can reverse course on the folly that is killing and maiming countless Iraqis along with U.S. troops.

My only quibble with Clift is that when she says “This president has lost all capacity to lead,” she implies that he had a capacity to lead at some point in the past.

This is from William Douglas and Margaret Talev of McClatchy Newspapers (emphasis added):

Bush said he talked about “the need for a new way forward in Iraq” in his morning session with leaders from both parties and chambers of Congress, “and we talked about the need to work together on this important subject.”

But some Democrats came away unconvinced that major changes were coming.

“I just didn’t feel there today, the president in his words or his demeanor, that he is going to do anything right away to change things drastically,” Senate Majority Leader-elect Harry Reid, D-Nev., said following the Oval Office meeting. “He is tepid in what he talks about doing. Someone has to get the message to this man that there have to be significant changes.”

Instead, Bush began his talk by comparing himself to President Harry S Truman, who launched the Truman Doctrine to fight communism, got bogged down in the Korean War and left office unpopular.

Bush said that “in years to come they realized he was right and then his doctrine became the standard for America,” recalled Senate Majority Whip-elect Richard Durbin, D-Ill. “He’s trying to position himself in history and to justify those who continue to stand by him, saying sometimes if you’re right you’re unpopular, and be prepared for criticism.”

Durbin said he challenged Bush’s analogy, reminding him that Truman had the NATO alliance behind him and negotiated with his enemies at the United Nations. Durbin said that’s what the Iraq Study Group is recommending that Bush do now – work more with allies and negotiate with adversaries on Iraq.

Bush, Durbin said, “reacted very strongly. He got very animated in his response” and emphasized that he is “the commander in chief.”

Let’s see — Bush is not interested enough in the ISG report to ask questions, but don’t you dare tell him he’s not Harry Truman or he goes postal. What does that tell us about this president’s priorities?

Most analysis of the ISG report that I’ve seen says pretty plainly that it gives the President about as much butt covering — a way to exit Iraq without looking like a flipflopper — as he is likely to get. In fact, it’s obvious that the report was crafted more as a political gift to Bush than an actual Best Possible Plan for getting out of Iraq (clearly, it isn’t). I can’t think of any president in American history who has been given such a gift when he’s been in trouble.

As Jonathan Chait explains,

In return for these considerations, the commission generously avoided revisiting the whole question of who got us into this fiasco and how. As the Washington Post put it, “The panel appeared to steer away from language that might inflame the Bush administration.” Of course, “inflame” is a word typically associated with street mobs or other irrational actors. The fact that the president can be “inflamed” is no longer considered surprising enough to merit comment.

If Bush had more smarts than he has narcissism he’d find a way to embrace the ISG report and work with what supporters in Congress he still has. Instead, it’s obvious he’s going to blow it off and continue to do whatever it is he’s doing.

A few days before the midterm elections I predicted that Bush would ignore the ISG report recommendations, whatever they were. I also predicted that Congress and the rest of the nation, including most Republicans, would not be willing to sit on their hands for two years while Bush continues his disastrous “course” in Iraq. Sure enough, John Broder and Robin Toner report in today’s New York Times that the Baker report has revealed a rift in the GOP over Iraq. I expect that, once the new Congress goes to work in January, more and more Republicans are going to be moving away from Bush and toward a plan for withdrawal.

In fact, I won’t be surprised if there’s a bipartisan congressional majority agreement on a withdrawal plan before May 1 (Mission Accomplished Day).

The federal government is facing a constitutional crisis. The original idea behind the separation of powers is that Congress sets war (and other) policy and the President executes it. The Founders worked out a plan for governance that was supposed to prevent any one individual from wielding the power that Bush has assumed. Now it’s up to Congress to take back the powers it rightly has.

And if he resists — impeach the bastard. And his veep, too.

Bush to Planet: Bleep Off

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The Guardian reports:

A defiant George Bush today said he and Tony Blair agreed that “victory” in Iraq was important just one day after the Iraq Study Group delivered a withering critique of current policy.

In a joint press conference in Washington, Mr Bush said the recommendations from the Iraq Study Group (ISG) were “worthy of serious recommendation”, but the president sent out a clear signal to his critics that he was still seeking victory.

Which means he’s not even trying to consider the ISG report. Addressing Walter Shapiro’s question — “Will Bush listen to reason?” — the answer appears to be no.

Shapiro writes,

A day after Robert Gates — who left the panel after he was nominated to replace Donald Rumsfeld at the Pentagon — admitted we were not winning the war, the Iraq Study Group upped the ante by beginning its report with this soon-to-be-famous appraisal, “The situation in Iraq is grave and deteriorating.” But the 10-member bipartisan committee also went out of its way to congratulate its own even-handed fair-mindedness, even as former Wyoming Republican Sen. Alan Simpson railed against what he called “the 100-percenters” — ideological warriors whom he described as people who are “not seekers, they’re seethers.” In an earthy counterpart to the high-minded tenor of the proceedings, Simpson also claimed that these zealots of the left and right “have gas, ulcers, heart-burn and B.O.”

Sounds like a trip to the drugstore is in order. Get the dirty hippies some antacid and deodorant!

The significance of the Iraq Study Group has little to do with its actual recommendations, which Baker admitted were not a “magic formula that will solve the problems of Iraq.” Rather its importance rests entirely with the luster of the former officials on the commission, including two secretaries of state (Baker and Lawrence Eagleburger), a secretary of defense (William Perry), an attorney general (Ed Meese) and its only woman, retired Supreme Court justice Sandra Day O’Connor. Baker jokingly described them as “a group of has-beens” — but the reality is this is about as blue-ribbon an assemblage as you get in contemporary America aside, perhaps, from the front row at a state funeral.

But it may not be enough to convince Bush to accept the abject failure of his Iraqi adventure — a message the president has not heeded when it was delivered by press reports, retired generals, think-tank studies, opinion polls and the results of the 2006 congressional elections.

Indeed, it appears the blue-ribbon assemblage was so intent on being bipartisan and reasonable and odor-free that it delivered a tub of tasteless, odorless mush. Fred Kaplan writes,

The report of the Iraq Study Group—which Baker co-chaired with Lee Hamilton, that other Wise Man-wannabe—was doomed to fall short of expectations. But who knew it would amount to such an amorphous, equivocal grab bag.

Its outline of a new “diplomatic offensive” is so disjointed that even a willing president would be left puzzled by what precisely to do, and George W. Bush seems far from willing.

Its scheme for a new military strategy contains so many loopholes that a president could cite its language to justify doing anything (or nothing).

And when you’re dealing with an obstinate blockhead who sees only what he wants to see and does only what he wants to do, the last thing you want to give him are loopholes. This was not the time to be reasonable. This was the time to be very, very clear.

John Dickerson says the message Bush needs to hear is in the report — point 1 is “cut the crap” — but you know Bush isn’t getting that message if he’s still flapping around about “victory.”

David Corn writes that the report “was akin to a no-confidence vote in Bush from leading members of the Republican elite.”

But neither Baker, his fellow commissioners, nor the report confront the implications of this charge: whether Bush is capable of absorbing the proposals of the Iraq Study Group or any ideas beyond a stay-the-course strategy. … They note that Iraq is a broken society, riven with sectarian conflict, and that the Shia, Sunnis, and Kurds have reached a violent standoff. In such circumstances, where – and how – can US military power be applied to good end? The commissioners fixate on the training of Iraqi forces, a failed enterprise to date. But they do not advocate withdrawing combat forces until early 2008 and then only “subject to unexpected developments in the security situation on the ground”. What’s the mission for the combat troops until then? Who’s the enemy? Who are they fighting? The commission offers no insight on this crucial front.

The commissioners also do not grapple with the tough matter of when it might become no longer morally defensible to ask an American soldier to die for Bush’s project in Iraq (if that point hasn’t already been reached). At the press conference, Hamilton said, “We believe that the situation in Iraq today is very, very serious. We do not know if it can be turned around. But we think we have an obligation to try.”

The report is imbued with this one-last-chance tone. But who decides when that chance is gone – if it remains? Over the past three years, pundits, politicians and experts have at various times declared that the Bush administration possessed one final opportunity and that the next few months would be crucial. Yet Iraq has not turned around; it only becomes a more hellish place and presents a more vexing dilemma. Baker’s Iraq Study Group, which will now disband, is not willing to say Iraq is lost. But it tells us – between the lines – that the man in charge has created a problem for which there may be no answer. It is hard to imagine Bush adopting the group’s main proposals, since he has previously dismissed them (including withdrawing troops to pressure the Iraqi government and talking to the Iranians and Syrians about Iraq). So it is hard to fathom this report making a last-chance difference, whether or not the recommendations have any merit. It’s far easier to imagine the need for another Iraq Study Group six months down the line.

The only Iraq Study Group that will matter is the one that takes the keys to the war machine out of Bush’s hands and says, enough. It’s over.

Be sure not to miss Jonathan Steele’s analysis of the ISG report. I don’t agree with Steele entirely, but he’s worth listening to.

The first purpose of the commission, Steele says, was to “provide an alibi for the president ahead of last month’s congressional elections.” That didn’t work.

The second purpose was “to co-opt the Democrats behind Bush’s war.” That probably was a purpose, although one might argue most of ’em were already pretty well co-opted. Steele explains,

Now the plan is to get the Democrats locked into agreeing with the main thrust of Bush’s Iraq policy over the next two years, with the aim of preventing it from provoking a major divide during the 2008 campaign for the White House.

The problem with this is that if, in 2008, U.S. troops are still dying in Iraq, then it’s going to provoke a “major divide” somehow or another. The only way to get it not to provoke something is if it goes away, which is not likely if we stick to Bush’s Iraq policy. But here’s the most interesting part:

The third purpose in appointing Baker’s panel is the most extraordinary.

The country’s political elite wants to ignore the American people’s doubts, and build a new consensus behind a strategy of staying in Iraq on an open-ended basis with no exit in sight. “Success depends on unity of the American people at a time of political polarisation … Foreign policy is doomed to failure – as is any action in Iraq – if not supported by broad, sustained consensus,” say Baker and his Democratic co-chair, Lee Hamilton, in their introduction. In other words, if things go wrong, it will be the American people’s fault for not trusting in the wisdom of their leaders.

The Baker panel recognises, as does Bush, that the central plank in US policy in Iraq over the next two years has to be a dramatic reduction in US casualties. At the present rate, it will only be a few days until more Americans will have died in Iraq than in the attacks of 9/11. Adding the US death toll in Afghanistan that point has already been reached.

Bush’s war on terror has killed more Americans than Osama Bin Laden’s terror.

What Baker proposes is essentially a continuation of what Bush is already doing – trying to reduce US deaths by moving troops out of the front line while avoiding any commitment to a full US withdrawal.

This bears watching.

Spencer Ackerman comes closest to the truth, IMO —

Given the specific lineup of the 10 wise men and women serving on the Iraq Study Group, the most conspicuous absence is that of supermodel Heidi Klum. Sure, she has no relevant experience in foreign policy, nor any real knowledge of Iraq — but neither do commissioners Sandra Day O’Connor, Vernon Jordan, Alan Simpson, or Edwin Meese. What Klum does have to offer is a lesson completely lost on the commission, one taught each week on her hit reality show Project Runway: you’re either in, or you’re out. When it comes to Iraq, it’s good advice.

From the commission’s perspective, however, such advice would represent a dangerous breakdown of Washington’s most enlightened foreign-policy tradition — that is to say, bipartisanship.

Yes, we must be tasteful and soothing. And odor-free.

The Iraq Study Group, led by George H.W. Bush’s secretary of state, James Baker, and 9-11 Commission co-chairman Lee Hamilton, made a point from the outset of its work to rule out the outer boundaries of the Iraq debate. Its report refuses to bless the idea of sending new combat forces to Baghdad, the favored solution of hawks like Senators John McCain and Joe Lieberman; and it also blanches at what Baker called “precipitous withdrawal,” the position held by many in the Democratic Party, the country as a whole, Iraq, and the world. A safe consensus is what the commission is out for, as reflected by the name for their strategy: “responsible transition.” That’s something that anyone could embrace. (Except, well, George W. Bush.)

I can just see them wind up the day’s august discussions, then retiring to the den for brandy.

The Iraq Study Group congratulates itself for being fair and responsible, all the while smelling of vanilla, with just a hint of lilacs and citrus. And, I predict, all of their work will be for naught. Because nothing will change until someone with some power raises a stink.

The Twilight Zone

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Be sure to read Paul Krugman’s column today, brought to you by the brave folks at Welcome to Pottersville. He begins by noting the famous “How’s your boy?” exchange between James Webb and George Bush, then continues,

We need people in Washington who are willing to stand up to the bully in chief. Unfortunately, and somewhat mysteriously, they’re still in short supply.

You can understand, if not condone, the way the political and media establishment let itself be browbeaten by Mr. Bush in his post-9/11 political prime. What’s amazing is the extent to which insiders still cringe before a lame duck with a 60 percent disapproval rating.

Look at what seems to have happened to the Iraq Study Group, whose mission statement says that it would provide an “independent assessment.” If press reports are correct, the group did nothing of the sort. Instead, it watered down its conclusions and recommendations, trying to come up with something Mr. Bush wouldn’t reject out of hand.

In particular, says Newsweek, the report “will set no timetables or call for any troop reductions.” All it will do is “suggest that the president could, not should, begin to withdraw forces in the vaguely defined future.”

And all this self-abasement is for naught. Senior Bush aides, Newsweek tells us, are “dismissive, even condescending” toward James Baker, the Bush family consigliere who is the dominant force in the study group, and the report. Of course they are. That’s how bullies always treat their hangers-on.

That’s pretty much what I was saying here. Everyone in Washington is still tip-toeing around His Majesty in fear of … something. The Iraq Study groups was supposed to provide an independent evaluation of how to handle Iraq. Instead, it was working on how to handle George W. Bush.

The Reptile writes in today’s Washington Post:

The notion bruited about Washington that James A. Baker is a deus ex machina imposed by President Bush to resolve the entangled Iraqi plot is nonsense. The Iraq Study Group, co-chaired by former secretary of state Baker and former representative Lee Hamilton, is out of the White House sphere of influence. The White House certainly did not ask Congress for help by creating this commission. Baker has made sure that the report, though leaked in part to the press, has not gone to the White House.

As a creature of Congress (an institution that Bush dislikes), Baker’s group spells trouble for Bush when it releases its report Wednesday. It will propose, however muted its tone, gradual withdrawal of U.S. combat forces from Iraq before the president is ready for it. The hope is that Baker will nuance the report’s words sufficiently and hedge calls for withdrawal in such a way that Bush can say that is what he has been doing anyway.

Remember the Twilight Zone episode about the six-year-old boy who held a town in terror because he could change or destroy anything at will? Washington is starting to remind me of that. Even the Reptile frames his column around what kind of problems the ISG might cause Bush, not whether it will provide a good plan for Iraq. He continues,

Bush has not stepped back from the decisions he has made on Iraq. At the core of Bush’s Iraq dilemma is the fact, still denied at the White House, that the president has lost his political base on the overriding issue of the war. In contact mainly with fawning campaign contributors, Bush may not appreciate the steady decline in support of his war policy that I have seen deepening among Republicans in the past year.

And those Republicans haven’t marched into the Oval Office to explain this to the President … why, exactly?

This New York Times editorial offers more testimony that the whole bleeping planet is being held hostage to George Bush’s ego.

Commission members say they concluded that Mr. Bush’s strategy so far has created an expectation that the United States will always be there to hold Iraq together. Breaking that culture of dependency, they concluded, is the key to making the long-discussed “Iraqification” of the country’s security a reality. But they are uncertain whether they can persuade a famously stubborn president to adopt that view.

“Is George Bush ready to hear that?” one commission member asked over the weekend. “I don’t think any of us really know. I don’t know if the president himself knows.”

There is much flapping around about how George W. Bush is the “commander in chief,” meaning he’s the only one who can make decisions about war. But earlier in our nation’s history it was understood by most that the power to declare and conduct war belonged to Congress (see Findlaw’s annotations to Article I, Section 8, of the Constitution). My reading of the authorities granted to Congress and the President say that Congress is responsible for the political decision to make war, not the President. The “commander in chief” powers granted the president in Article II (again, see Findlaw for further discussion) originally were understood to be “supreme command and direction of the Military and naval forces, as first general and admiral,” according to Alexander Hamilton. In other words, he was supposed to be responsible only for the conduct of military campaigns.

Through the years there has been considerable tension between Congress and the President on these matters, and on the question of when a President may act without the express permission of Congress. Little by little, the “war power” trickled from Congress to the President. And now all of Washington is tip-toeing around some petty martinet who thinks he’s Napoleon, and everyone is afraid to tell him, um, you know that war you started? Well, we’ve decided it’s turning out badly, and we’d like you to wind it up now.

I don’t think this is how the Founders intended the government to function.

Don’t think even Republicans aren’t stewing about this. George Will wrote today,

Sen. John Warner put down a marker.

Four months ago the Virginia Republican said that Congress must “examine very carefully” what it authorized the president to do in 2002 when it authorized military action against Iraq. Warner wondered whether, if there is an “all-out civil war,” the president must “come back to the Congress to get further indication of support.”

Yet there is faint hope. Walter Pincus writes that a pack of House Democrats who opposed the war all along are about to move into key positions.

Although given little public credit at the time, or since, many of the 126 House Democrats who spoke out and voted against the October 2002 resolution that gave President Bush authority to wage war against Iraq have turned out to be correct in their warnings about the problems a war would create.

With the Democrats taking over control of the House next January, the views that some voiced during two days of debate four years ago are worth recalling, since many of those lawmakers will move into positions of power. They include not only members of the new House leadership but also the incoming chairmen of the Appropriations, Armed Services, Budget and Judiciary committees and the Select Committee on Intelligence.

Notice, these are Dems who had the spines to say no to war before saying no to war was cool. You’ll want to read this article; it will cheer you up.

Anyway, I believe Congress would be within its constitutional authority to order Bush to end the war, whether he wants to or not. They probably don’t want to do this, because Bush would certainly refuse, and who’s going to make the commander-in-chief of the U.S. military, Justice Department, and various espionage agencies obey? Congress’s only recourse would be impeachment.

Heh.

By the way, here’s how Krugman’s column ends:

Well, here’s a question for those who might be tempted, yet again, to shy away from a confrontation with Mr. Bush over Iraq: How do you ask a man to be the last to die for a bully’s ego?


See also: Today’s Dan Froomkin column; in Salon, “Dems Gear Up for Oversight“; in Newsweek, Eleanor Clift writes about Jim Webb.

Update: Evan Thomas, “So Now What, Mr. President?”

Appeasers

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Today there is an abundant supply of news stories analyzing the significance of the President’s meeting with Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki of Iraq and explaining the recommendations of the Iraq Study Group, even though the recommendations aren’t supposed to be public yet.

All of the abundance can be boiled down to three words: Bush ain’t budgin’.

Let’s start with the Iraq Study Group. A number of news stories strongly imply that the ISG from its inception limited itself to recommendations they thought they might be able to sell to Bush. David Sanger writes for the New York Times:

… The bipartisan Iraq Study Group has shied away from recommending explicit timelines in favor of a vaguely timed pullback. The report that the panel will deliver to President Bush next week would, at a minimum, leave a force of 70,000 or more troops in the country for a long time to come, to train the Iraqis and to insure against collapse of a desperately weak central government. …

… In private, some members of the Iraq Study Group have expressed concern that they could find themselves in not-quite-open confrontation with Mr. Bush. “He’s a true believer,” one participant in the group’s debates said. “Finessing the differences is not going to be easy.”

The group never seriously considered the position that Representative John P. Murtha, the Pennsylvania Democrat who is a leading voice on national security issues, took more than a year ago, that withdrawal should begin immediately. The group did debate timetables, especially after a proposal, backed by influential Democratic members of the commission, that a robust diplomatic strategy and better training of Iraqis be matched up with a clear schedule for withdrawal. But explicit mention of such a schedule was dropped.

Helen Thomas writes,

Don’t expect any dramatic recommendations from the Iraq Study Group led by Baker and former Rep. Lee Hamilton, D-Ind. The nine men and one woman on the panel are cautious Washington insiders who got picked for the job because of their don’t-rock-the-boat reputations. After all, they might want to get asked again, sometime in the future, to serve on another White House commission.

This is unfortunate because the dire mess in Iraq demands bold action by the U.S. The real solution is a cakewalk out of Iraq tomorrow. The world would stand in shock and awe.

The Washington Post’s article by Peter Baker and Thomas Ricks is headlined “Iraq Panel to Urge Pullout Of Combat Troops by ’08.” Then the weaseling begins: “The call to pull out combat brigades by early 2008 would be more a conditional goal than a firm timetable,” Baker and Ricks write. The famous “conditions on the ground” and all that.

And note that qualifier “combat.” Troops would be left in Iraq in an “advise and support” capacity. So how many troops will be “pulled out” by 2008?

Although it was not clear how many U.S. troops would be left in Iraq by 2008, some people knowledgeable about the commission’s deliberations have said that it might be possible to reduce the force of 140,000 to half by then. “There’ll still be a presence there that will be significant just because of the nature of embedded forces,”said one of the sources familiar with the commission’s report. “It won’t be what we have now, I’ll tell you that.”

In other words, the ISG will recommend reducing the number of troops in Iraq only by half over the next couple of years, but that wouldn’t be a firm commitment.

Bleep that.

Fred Kaplan explains:

Judging from the advance leaks and previews, the Baker-Hamilton commission’s upcoming report on Iraq will do exactly what these blue-ribbon salvage jobs are meant to do: a) Stake out a position halfway between the president and his critics without fully satisfying either; b) provide “bipartisan” cover for both sides to shuffle toward middle ground; and yet c) sidestep the central question, which is too unsettling for anyone to face and which can still be kicked down the road for a bit, to everyone’s relief.

The panel’s recommendations seem to be as follows: Shift the U.S. military mission away from combat and more toward support of the Iraqi military (supplying logistics, intelligence, training, and advising); in tandem, cut the U.S. troop presence by roughly half, from 140,000 to 70,000 over the next year or two; redeploy most of them to the gigantic bases that we’ve been constructing inside Iraq over the past three years; and reach out diplomatically to Iraq’s neighbors—including Iran and Syria—to help stabilize the country and keep its conflicts from spreading across the region.

Walter Shapiro writes that “It is easy to guess why the commission has apparently confused blandness with boldness: an irresistible temptation to tiptoe through the tulips in trying to sway the dead-enders in the White House.” The problem with this “middle ground” approach is that, so far, all indications are that President Bush won’t budge from his “on to victory” position (formerly known as the “stay the course” position). Richard Wolffe writes in Newsweek:

The [Bush – al-Maliki] summit was in many ways a pre-emptive strike against next week’s much-anticipated report by the study group headed by former Secretary of State James Baker. Some pundits have suggested that Baker is running a kind of shadow national security council, as if he (and the president’s father) could run the place better than the current team.

Bush’s response has been clear all week: he’s running the real White House, and he doesn’t think much of the shadow team’s ideas. Talks with Syria? Not a chance—they’ll think we’re letting them “off the hook” for their bad behavior in Lebanon. Talks with Iran? Even less likely—they’ll think we don’t care about their nuclear ambitions. Troop withdrawals? Not realistic any time soon. “I know there’s a lot of speculation that these reports in Washington mean there’s going to be some kind of graceful exit out of Iraq,” Bush said. “We’re going to stay in Iraq to get the job done, so long as the government wants us there.”

Joe Conason writes at Salon that Bush isn’t fond of the ISG’s other recommendations.

According to every leak and rumor, the Iraq Study Group is expected to urge President Bush to directly “engage” with Syria and Iran as part of a broader strategy to curtail the chaotic communal violence that is slaughtering so many Iraqis every day. Although the president has not denounced that idea publicly, he and Vice President Cheney are widely expected to ignore any such advice. Sitting down with hostile regimes to settle differences is not consistent with their philosophy of power, in which America speaks and others listen.

Michael Hirsch says, in effect, that the ISG is a waste of time:

Here’s why the Baker-Hamilton report is destined to land with a thud, after weeks of messianic hype. According to sources who have seen the draft report introduced this week, the group will recommend deeper engagement with Iran and Syria in hopes these countries can help us quell the violence in Iraq. But George W. Bush, who remains a true neocon believer—”It’s the regime, stupid”—is very unlikely to cut deals with such evil states, except in the most foot-dragging way. In any case, with each passing week Iraq’s sectarian fratricide makes these neighboring countries less and less relevant. One doesn’t have to be trained by Hizbullah or the Iranian secret service to grab a few Sunnis off the street every night and shoot them in the head. But until those killings stop, the yes-it-is-a-civil war-no-it’s-not-a-civil-war in Iraq will continue to rage out of control.

The James Baker-Lee Hamilton group will also recommend tackling the problem of Israeli-Palestinian peace. But this central issue of Islamist discontent no longer has much to do with the violence in Iraq, just as the violence has less and less to do with Al Qaeda. The neocon fantasists, in their headiest days, used to say that “the road to Jerusalem goes through Baghdad.” This meant that somehow, in ways they could never spell out, the Israeli-Palestinian issue would be resolved after democracy was achieved in Iraq. Now Baker’s thought seems to be that the road to Baghdad goes through Jerusalem. This is just as silly as the earlier idea. Take this down: the road to Baghdad goes through Iraq.

Above all, sources indicate the Baker-Hamilton group will fudge the issue of what the size of the U.S. troop presence in Iraq should be, and what a specific timetable for withdrawal should look like. This means that, almost as soon as the report comes out in early December, Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki will be able to ignore it, and he likely will. Prominent Democrats like Sens. Carl Levin, Jack Reed and Joseph Biden will begin to dismiss it and reintroduce their own plans. Biden, for example, plans to hold six weeks of hearings in January, after he takes over the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, that will quickly turn Baker-Hamilton into a relic of that long-ago autumn of 2006.

Bottom line, the ISG was less a study group than a collection of appeasers. Instead of trying to craft the policy that is best for the U.S., our troops, and Iraq, they tried to put together something that might appease voters by making Iraq less of a hot button in 2008 while also appeasing Bush, who is determined not to change his position. It’s already clear that they failed to appease Bush. I doubt voters are going to be enthusiastic about the ISG recommendations, either.

That said, I am not confident that Joe Biden will come up with a bolder plan than the ISG; we’ll see. But televised hearings have a capacity to surprise and lead to results — good and bad — that weren’t necessarily on the agenda. Stay tuned.

Etiquette and Jim Webb

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Y’all will love this. Michael D. Shear writes in today’s Washington Post:

At a recent White House reception for freshman members of Congress, Virginia’s newest senator tried to avoid President Bush. Democrat James Webb declined to stand in a presidential receiving line or to have his picture taken with the man he had often criticized on the stump this fall. But it wasn’t long before Bush found him.

“How’s your boy?” Bush asked, referring to Webb’s son, a Marine serving in Iraq.

“I’d like to get them out of Iraq, Mr. President,” Webb responded, echoing a campaign theme.

“That’s not what I asked you,” Bush said. “How’s your boy?”

“That’s between me and my boy, Mr. President,” Webb said coldly, ending the conversation on the State Floor of the East Wing of the White House.

Be still, my heart.

At The Moderate Voice, Michael van der Galien sniffs that Webb should have been more civil. To which I say, bleep that. I can only imagine the grinding, prolonged anguish a parent feels when a child is off fighting in a war. When in fact that child is in danger only because of the corruption and incompetence of politicians, is that parent supposed to bow and scrape to the politician-in-chief like some bleeping courtier?

Bleep that, I say.

Webb didn’t seek the President out to start a fight, note. He spoke up only after Bush was rude to him. Emily Heil writes for The Hill:

At a private reception held at the White House with newly elected lawmakers shortly after the election, Bush asked Webb how his son, a Marine lance corporal serving in Iraq, was doing.

Webb responded that he really wanted to see his son brought back home, said a person who heard about the exchange from Webb.

“I didn’t ask you that, I asked how he’s doing,” Bush retorted, according to the source.

Webb confessed that he was so angered by this that he was tempted to slug the commander-in-chief, reported the source, but of course didn’t. It’s safe to say, however, that Bush and Webb won’t be taking any overseas trips together anytime soon.

Not getting slugged is more respect than The Creature deserves. As Glenn Greenwald says,

It is difficult to fathom the hubris and self-indulgence required for someone to ask a parent of a soldier in Iraq how their son is doing only to then snidely tell the parent that the answer isn’t what he wanted to hear.

Of course, the righties can’t see that Bush was out of line, and are already foaming at the mouth about the “Bush hater.” Like they’re so into civil discourse.

Update: Tristero:

I want to focus entirely on the unspeakable callousness Bush displayed here.

Folks, political enemy or friend, that is no way – ever– for anyone to talk to the father of a kid who’s in a combat zone.

This is the same man who reminisced about his hell-raisin’ during a speech at the worst natural disaster in American history. This is the same man who, when, asked to name his greatest achievement while president, “joked” that it was when he caught a large fish in his fake pond on his Crawford estate – sorry, ranch. This is the same man who, when informed that a second plane had hit the World Trade Center in less than 10 minutes, sat reading “My Pet Goat” in a children’s classroom. This is the same man who, in front of a supporter who he assumed wouldn’t report it, mockingly imitated a woman about to be executed in his state.

Sickening.

Tristero mentions “stunted social skills.” I still think we’re looking at some degree of sociopathy here.

Update update: I knew Taylor Marsh would enjoy this.