Category Archives: Iraq War

The Amazing Disappearing War

Posted on by

Today Glenn Greenwald blogged about “the very sudden, and virtually complete, disappearance of the war in Iraq from the media radar.”

That country is literally falling apart, engulfed by what even war proponents are acknowledging increasingly appears to be an inevitable civil war and growing anarchy. And yet for the last week, Iraq was barely discussed, save for a completely inconsequential gossipy sideshow about whether the Democrats did something which the Republicans would never, ever do — namely, exploit a national security matter (Prime Minister Maliki’s condemnation of Israel) for political gain.

In Sunday’s New York Times, Frank Rich also writes about the “disappearance” of Iraq. But Rich documents that Iraq has been fading for a while.

On the Big Three networks’ evening newscasts, the time devoted to Iraq has fallen 60 percent between 2003 and this spring, as clocked by the television monitor, the Tyndall Report. …

… The steady falloff in Iraq coverage isn’t happenstance. It’s a barometer of the scope of the tragedy. For reporters, the already apocalyptic security situation in Baghdad keeps getting worse, simply making the war more difficult to cover than ever. The audience has its own phobia: Iraq is a bummer. “It is depressing to pay attention to this war on terror,” said Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly on July 18. “I mean, it’s summertime.” Americans don’t like to lose, whatever the season. They know defeat when they see it, no matter how many new plans for victory are trotted out to obscure that reality.

The specter of defeat is not the only reason Americans have switched off Iraq. The larger issue is that we don’t know what we — or, more specifically, 135,000 brave and vulnerable American troops — are fighting for. In contrast to the Israel-Hezbollah war, where the stakes for the combatants and American interests are clear, the war in Iraq has no rationale to keep it afloat on television or anywhere else. It’s a big, nightmarish story, all right, but one that lacks the thread of a coherent plot.

If you are locked outside the NY Times subscription wall, Frank Rich’s column will probably turn up on True Blue Liberal in the next few hours. [Update: Yep. Here it is, in its entirety.]

Earlier this week I linked to this Michael Hirsh column in which Hirsh discusses the new book Fiasco by Thomas Rick —

Reading “Fiasco,” Thomas Ricks’s devastating new book about the Iraq war, brought back memories for me. Memories of going on night raids in Samarra in January 2004, in the heart of the Sunni Triangle, with the Fourth Infantry Division units that Ricks describes. During these raids, confused young Americans would burst into Iraqi homes, overturn beds, dump out drawers, and summarily arrest all military-age men—actions that made them unwitting recruits for the insurgency. For American soldiers battling the resistance throughout Iraq, the unspoken rule was that all Iraqis were guilty until proven innocent. Arrests, beatings and sometimes killings were arbitrary, often based on the flimsiest intelligence, and Iraqis had no recourse whatever to justice. Imagine the sense of helpless rage that emerges from this sort of treatment. Apply three years of it and you have one furious, traumatized population. And a country out of control.

As most U.S. military experts now acknowledge, these tactics violated the most basic principles of counterinsurgency, which require winning over the local population, thus depriving the bad guys of a base of support within which to hide. Such rules were apparently unknown to the 4th ID commander, Maj. Gen. Ray Odierno. The general is a particular and deserving target of Ricks’s book, which is perhaps the most exhaustive account to date of all that went wrong with Iraq. Nonetheless—according to that iron law of the Bush administration under which incompetence is rewarded with promotion, as long as it is accompanied by loyalty—Odierno will soon be returning to Iraq as America’s No. 2 commander there, the man who will oversee day-to-day military operations. (Odierno, asked by Ricks to respond to criticism, replied that he had studied the insurgency and “adapted quickly.”)

Frank Rich brings up Fiasco also —

The contempt our government showed for Iraqis was not just to be found in our cavalier stance toward their casualties, or in the abuses at Abu Ghraib. There was a cultural condescension toward the Iraqi people from the get-go as well, as if they were schoolchildren in a compassionate-conservatism campaign ad. This attitude was epitomized by Mr. Rumsfeld’s “stuff happens” response to the looting of Baghdad at the dawn of the American occupation. In “Fiasco,” his stunning new book about the American failure in Iraq, Thomas E. Ricks, The Washington Post’s senior Pentagon correspondent, captures the meaning of that pivotal moment perfectly: “The message sent to Iraqis was far more troubling than Americans understood. It was that the U.S. government didn’t care — or, even more troubling for the future security of Iraq, that it did care but was incapable of acting effectively.”

As it turned out, it was the worst of both worlds: we didn’t care, and we were incapable of acting effectively. Nowhere is this seen more explicitly than in the subsequent American failure to follow through on our promise to reconstruct the Iraqi infrastructure we helped to smash. “There’s some little part of my brain that simply doesn’t understand how the most powerful country on earth just can’t get electricity back in Baghdad,” said Kanan Makiya, an Iraqi exile and prominent proponent of the war, in a recent Washington Post interview.

Hey, we’re having trouble keeping electricity turned on in the U.S.

Rich goes on to say that the simple answer to the question of why “the mission” in Iraq was such a failure is that the Bush Administration didn’t care enough about Iraq or Iraqis to get the job right. And although I’m sure that’s true, it begs the question — why didn’t they care? We’ve heard time and time again that Bush “rolled the dice” and “gambled his presidency” on Iraq. You’d think he would have been at least mildly interested.

I think the more essential reason for the Bush Administration’s failure is that the Bushies were never clear in their own minds what the mission — and the motivation for invading Iraq — really was. We know that eliminating Saddam Hussein’s fictitious WMDs was not the real reason for the invasion. Converting Iraq to a pro-western democracy was the neocons’ reason, but if the Bushies had been serious about nation building in Iraq you’d think they would have planned some nation-building activities for the “postwar” period. Instead, they seem to have believed that deposing Saddam Hussein would all by itself cause democracy to root and bloom like dandelions in June.

In 2003 and a large part of 2004 the Bushies dragged their feet on even planning for a sovereign and democratic Iraq, as if they had all the time in the world. They dragged their feet even as what little opportunity they might have had to accomplish something was slipping away. You’d think that if establishing a new Iraq was a priority for the Bush Administration, then the White House would have been energized and focused on the project. But, clearly, it never was. What’s left? Oil, of course, and contracts for Halliburton. But I suspect there are other, more primal, motivations in the murky depths of the Bushie collective psyche. Bottom line, the Bushies invaded Iraq because they wanted to invade Iraq. But I don’t think they are self-reflective enough to understand themselves where that desire was coming from. It just seemed like a good idea at the time.

So now we’re over there with no objectives, no plans, no hope, and it’s not on television because it’s such a bummer.

Glenn Greenwald points out that even Joe Lieberman wants to “move on.”

Via Atrios, it seems that Lieberman himself yesterday “suggested that he wanted to move the debate away from the war. ‘We’re going to try hard to focus this back on the issues that I think really are ultimately more important to the future of families in Connecticut: jobs, health care, education,'” he said.

Somehow, the war went from having “enormous consequences for the people of Iraq, America and the world” to being something that isn’t really all that important to talk about.

Frank Rich concludes, “That the latest American plan for victory is to reposition our forces by putting more of them in the crossfire of Baghdad’s civil war is tantamount to treating our troops as if they were deck chairs on the Titanic.” It’s a horrible mess that makes no sense and has no possibility for a good ending. Who wants to watch that?

Once upon a time news stories from Vietnam were broadcast on television every night, whether we wanted to watch them or not. But in those days, news was news. Now, news is entertainment. The Iraq War just isn’t entertaining. Maybe it could be re-packaged as a reality show.

Chickens and Straw Men and Hawks, Oh My

Posted on by

Jeff Jacoby doesn’t want to be called a “chickenhawk.”

You hear a fair amount of that from the antiwar crowd if, like me, you support a war but have never seen combat yourself. That makes you a “chicken hawk” — one of those, as Senator Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey, defending John Kerry from his critics, put it during the 2004 presidential campaign, who “shriek like a hawk, but have the backbone of a chicken.” Kerry himself often played that card. “I’d like to know what it is Republicans who didn’t serve in Vietnam have against those of us who did,” he would sniff, casting himself as the victim of unmanly hypocrites who never wore the uniform, yet had the gall to criticize him, a decorated veteran, for his stance on the war.

“Chicken hawk” isn’t an argument. It is a slur — a dishonest and incoherent slur. It is dishonest because those who invoke it don’t really mean what they imply — that only those with combat experience have the moral authority or the necessary understanding to advocate military force.

Jacoby defends himself by scratching up a straw man argument. I, for one, would never argue that “only those with combat experience have the moral authority or the necessary understanding to advocate military force.” I don’t have combat experience, and I spout off about moral authority and military force all the time. Further, our two greatest war presidents, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt, had no combat experience. FDR was never in the military, and Old Abe claimed the most action he saw in the Illinois militia was swatting mosquitoes.

Yet Jacoby might still be a chickenhawk.

I like this definition of chickenhawk (emphasis added) —

Chickenhawk n. A person enthusiastic about war, provided someone else fights it; particularly when that enthusiasm is undimmed by personal experience with war; most emphatically when that lack of experience came in spite of ample opportunity in that person’s youth.

James Wolcott elaborates:

Those who wrestled with the decision to go to war I’m not inclined to call chickenhawks. A pro-war civilian does not automatically a chickenhawk make.

For me, the working definition of a chickenhawk is–a chickenhawk is a cheerleader. A cheerleader for war. And not necessarily just the war in Iraq, or regional war in the Mideast, but war in general. A chickenhawk glorifies war as an enterprise, enjoying the heroics inside his or her head, mocking those less enthusiastic military aggression as pacifists, appeasers (Michael Ledeen’s pet word), even traitors. Who patronize anyone with qualms, from the Quakers to the Chuck Hagel, with edgy impatience and disdain. Who treat the destruction of human life as a stupendous flourish as long as it’s the US doing the destroying–who, that is, propose “creative destruction” on a geopolitical scale as an instrument of transformation. Not to mention an opportunity to teach those desert folks in sandals a lesson upside the head.

The enthusiasm part is essential to the classification of the species pullus bellum diligo. Sometimes wars have to be fought. Sometimes people who recognize a war has to be fought have no combat experience and are not capable of combat — too old, too infirm, whatever. By themselves, these attributes do not make someone a “chickenhawk.”

As Jacoby’s argument is made of straw, just ignore it. Please also ignore Wikipedia on this matter, as the online encyclopedia gets neither the etymology or the definition of chickenhawk right. I assume a chickenhawk wrote it.

There is a big difference between acknowledging a war must be fought and being enthusiastic about it. There’s a difference between making a moral judgment for war and cheerleading. A person with no combat experience who makes a sober and reluctant decision to support war, and is unable to fight that war, is no chickenhawk. He or she may have made a wrong decision, but it wasn’t a chickenhawk’s decision.

But when you find an able-bodied enthusiastic cheerleader for war who has “other priorities” than to fight it — you’ve got yourself a chickenhawk. And I think the lowest form of chickenhawk is not only a war cheerleader who thinks himself too precious to fight; he also attacks and calls “cowardly” people who don’t support the war. Like it’s an act of courage to park one’s fat backside on the sofa and cheer the carnage on CNN.

Greg James writes in today’s San Francisco Chronicle,

You don’t have to be a psychologist to see a predictable pattern with this administration and its most vocal conservative supporters: They project one thing and do another. Or more to the point, they try to project a manly Teddy Roosevelt “rough rider” image; in reality they are a bunch of overweight middle-aged men who mostly avoid wars and real action in favor of sending others to do the dirty work.

In many ways, I suspect this is at the heart of why Iraq is going so wrong, and why our country is in such turmoil. Maybe the U.S. is finally waking up to the scare tactics, orange alerts and right-wing “talkers” and coming to terms with who they really are.

Recently, Rep. John Murtha took presidential adviser Karl Rove to task for his “cut and run” comments and called a spade a spade. He didn’t mince words as he described Rove as a fat Washington-based spin doctor who sits in an air-conditioned office and has no problem pushing a war in which he’d never die. Thank God someone finally found the guts to go after the cheerleaders and actually point out what they really are — sissies who talk tough but do little.

From President Bush all the way down, a quick look finds the “big talkers” in charge and promoting a kind of “do as I say, not as I do” agenda. As a veteran myself, it’s hard not to be outraged by this crowd. Bush, who has so vocally pushed the war in Iraq, was himself a cheerleader (yell king) in college and avoided Vietnam with a cushy job in the Air National Guard.

Vice President Dick Cheney took numerous deferments from the draft and, as the poster boy for the National Rifle Association and tough guy hunters, shot a friend in the face at close range while blasting pen-raised quail in Texas. Limbaugh, along with Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, Mike Medved and the majority of right-wing radio’s most vocal “tough talkers” also fall squarely into the “did not serve” crowd.

The most offensive thing about this bunch is they have no problem attacking people such as Murtha, Sen. John Kerry, former Rep. Max Cleland and retired Gen. Eric Shinseki (the guys who actually did fight in Vietnam) while they sit around sipping lattes in their protected, mostly white, upper-class enclaves.

As with Limbaugh and his constant attacks on Clinton, you have to wonder if this isn’t actually some type of perverse psychology playing out on a national scale where the sissies actually tear into the tough guys because they’ve developed sharp tongues as a response to their own perceived shortcomings. (In this case, a lack of real courage.)

And the punch line:

I suspect the Iraq war would have had a whole lot more thought put into it if the “cheerleaders” actually had to fight rather than sitting on the sidelines talking and urging others on.

I suspect so, too.

See also: “Chickenhawk” flash video; “The new world immaturity.”

Pride and Powerlessness

Posted on by

In “City Of Vengeance,” Philip Robertson writes that Iraq is “accelerating toward civil war.”

Over the weekend and on Monday, July 10, Baghdad witnessed the most savage outbreak of revenge killings to date. Shiite militiamen, who witnesses claimed were members of Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army, set up checkpoints in the city’s al-Jihad neighborhood, inspected ID cards and killed 42 people they identified as being Sunnis. They also broke into homes and killed their inhabitants. Corpses were found in the street with drill holes and pierced by nails and bolts. These attacks, which took place after sunrise, were clearly acts of revenge for two earlier car bombings near Shiite mosques. In turn, the checkpoint killings spurred two more huge Sunni car bomb attacks in the Sadr-dominated neighborhood of Talbiyeh, killing 25 and wounding 41.

On Tuesday, violence flared again, as suicide bombers detonated bombs across the street from the heavily-guarded Green Zone in Baghdad, killing as many as 16 people. Across Iraq, about 60 were killed, including 10 Shiites who were gunned down on a bus as it left for a funeral.

The warbloggers want you to know that, somewhere in Iraq, a school is being painted.

The killings are ominously similar to the “Black Saturday” massacre in December 1975 that helped precipitate the Lebanese civil war, when Christian Phalangist militiamen stopped 40 unsuspecting Muslims at a checkpoint in Beirut and cut their throats. In retaliation, Muslim militiamen set up their own checkpoint and slaughtered Christians.

Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki appealed for calm, but the situation is beyond his ability to control. Sunni politicians accused Iraqi police of collaborating with the attacks, and said Iraq’s two key security ministries were also infiltrated. Iraq’s deputy prime minister for security affairs, Salam al-Zobaie, told Al-Jazeera, “Interior and Defense ministries are infiltrated, and there are officials who lead brigades who are involved in this.”

When Bush says “When they stand up, we’ll stand down,” I’m not sure this is what he means.

The Mahdi Army and other Shiite militias have filled a power vacuum in Iraq. With U.S. forces and the Iraqi government unable to prevent Sunni bombings that cause mass casualties, the militia group offers a measure of protection from such attacks and a means of retribution. The rise of sectarian militias represents a sea change in Iraqi society, one marked by a steady increase in the flow of corpses to the Baghdad morgue. Statistics from the Ministry of Health show that 40 people a day, not including bomb victims, were killed during the first four months of the year. But the true numbers are likely to be higher. Not all bodies make their pilgrimage to the morgue. [emphasis added]

If there’s one thing I wish righties would realize (if such things were possible), it would be that the “coalition” is not in control in Iraq. I wrote yesterday about the calls for vengeance coming from righties for the grisly deaths and mutilation of two American soldiers. Among the several hundred reasons why that would be a bad idea is the fact that we don’t have the kind of muscle in Iraq to get away with vengeance.

The word for today, boys and girls, is impotence.

Kirk Semple writes in today’s New York Times that the three-day death toll in Baghdad alone is “well over 100.”

Riverbend writes,

The day before yesterday was catastrophic. The day began with news of the killings in Jihad Quarter. According to people who live there, black-clad militiamen drove in mid-morning and opened fire on people in the streets and even in houses. They began pulling people off the street and checking their ID cards to see if they had Sunni names or Shia names and then the Sunnis were driven away and killed. Some were executed right there in the area. The media is playing it down and claiming 37 dead but the people in the area say the number is nearer 60.

The horrific thing about the killings is that the area had been cut off for nearly two weeks by Ministry of Interior security forces and Americans. Last week, a car bomb was set off in front of a ‘Sunni’ mosque people in the area visit. The night before the massacre, a car bomb exploded in front of a Shia husseiniya in the same area. The next day was full of screaming and shooting and death for the people in the area. No one is quite sure why the Americans and the Ministry of Interior didn’t respond immediately. They just sat by, on the outskirts of the area, and let the massacre happen.

Look, righties, it’s over. It’s way over. I’m sorry this wasn’t the glorious little war you wanted, but it ain’t, and it’s never gonna be. We’ve got the rest of our lives to argue about whose fault that is. But there is absolutely no point pretending that anything remotely resembling “victory” is going to happen in Iraq, whether we stay or go.

And yes, there will be terrible consequences if we leave a power vacuum in Iraq, which will no doubt be filled by very nasty people. But it’s happening anyway. Even as our troops stand by. Even as they suffer injury and death themselves.

Rummy is in Baghdad now discussing “security.” I’ve been skimming news articles looking for fresh Rummy quotes, but this is all I’ve found so far — Kristin Roberts and Ross Colvin report for Reuters:

“A year ago, terrorism and the insurgency against the coalition and the Iraqi security forces were the principal sources of instability,” Khalilzad said on Tuesday. “Violent sectarianism is now the main challenge.”

As a result, the U.S. military is adapting its tactics to focus more on containing the sectarian violence, but Rumsfeld cautioned that the “solution is not military”.

“We’re at a point now when the security situation depends as much on the reconciliation process and on the strengthening of (government) ministries,” Rumsfeld told reporters.

And we’ve seen how well that’s going.

Maliki has offered talks with some Sunni rebels and a limited amnesty under his 24-point plan in a bid to draw Sunnis, the seat of the insurgency, closer into the political process.

Rumsfeld’s trip also comes amid growing anti-war sentiment among the U.S. public in a congressional election year. A 129,000-strong American force is serving in Iraq more than three years into the war in which about 2,500 U.S. troops have died.

The defence secretary said it was too early to talk about adjusting U.S. troop levels. “We haven’t gotten to that point.”

One wonders what “point” Rummy is waiting for. Something like this, perhaps?

I’ve also been looking for President Bush’s most recent pronouncement on Iraq. I believe it is this, spoken yesterday at a gubernatorial campaign rally in Wisconsin:

“We are not going to lose in Iraq. As a matter of fact we are going to win in Iraq so long as we stay the course”, President Bush said.

We have a course?

This same news story says that Bush’s visit was protested by about 60 nuns from the Sisters of Saint Joseph. I wish I had a picture of that.

But you know the Bushies can’t make any substantive changes to “the course” until after the November midterm elections, because the White House strategy for the GOP is to turn Iraq into a political pissing contest. As Eleanor Clift wrote last month,

Karl Rove is back in business framing the November election as a referendum on cut-and-run Democrats. …

… Moments after learning he had escaped indictment in the CIA leak investigation case, Rove told New Hampshire Republicans that Democratic critics of the war like John Kerry and John Murtha “give the green light to go to war, but when it gets tough, they fall back on that party’s old platform of cutting and running. They may be with you for the first few bullets, but they won’t be there for the last tough battles.”

It’s appalling that an administration led by chicken hawks dares to build an election strategy based on lecturing combat veterans, but it is devilishly clever, and it might work. The Swift Boat veterans destroyed Kerry in 2004; and in 2002, losing three limbs in Vietnam didn’t save Georgia Sen. Max Cleland from attacks on his patriotism. Rove told the GOP faithful that if the Democrats were in charge, Iraq would fall to the terrorists and Zarqawi would not be dead. As offensive as those words are, Rove is doing his job, which is sliming the Democrats so Republicans can cling to power on Capitol Hill. He is politicizing the war for partisan political gain, a strategy that could backfire if events on the ground in Iraq deteriorate.

Worse, it ought to be obvious to the dwindling ranks of war supporters that Karl’s pissing contest gets in the way of the tough, bipartisan decision making that we need right now — hell, three years ago — if anything positive will be salvaged from the Iraq disaster. I wonder if it has even yet occurred to BushCo that eventually they’re going to be judged not by the quality of their photo ops and talking points, but by what they have actually accomplished.

And if making Iraq the centerpiece of Republican political strategy isn’t a testament to abject and absolute failure to govern, I don’t know what is.

Barbarians Online

Posted on by

Like sharks to chum, so righties to beheading videos. They’ve got a new one, and they’ve dropped poor Debbie Frisch in mid-flame because, you know, why waste time baiting the psychologically miswired when you’ve got severed heads?

I’m not going to link to the rightie sites “discussing” the video — they aren’t that hard to find, if you really want to go there — but here’s a New York Times story about it. The video shows the the mutilated bodies of Pfc. Kristian Menchaca, 23, of Houston, and Pfc. Thomas L. Tucker, 25, of Madras, Ore. Just the description of the video is sickening enough.

Of course I didn’t watch the video, but I inadvertently saw some “stills” posted on a rightie site, which is why I’m not linking to any of them. The last thing these sickos need is encouragement. However, I’m going to quote this from the Jawa Report anyway —

This video shows the true face of the enemies we fight. However you feel about the war in Iraq, this should enrage you. They are ruthless barbarians who boast about killing those they have taken hostage.

We show you these images so that you will understand what it is we are up against. The video and images should enrage you. If you do not have righteouss anger after seeing this, you are beyond hope. Update: Or, as reminded by Jason in the comments, they ought to at least give you clarity and resolve to defeat them.

Update: John at Powerline laments that POTUS has not followed Putin’s example, and ordered the killing of the AQ scum who did this. However, I have received several e-mails from officers serving in Iraq who wanted the video.

One Air Force officer told me he was about to do a brief and wanted to show it to his men. So, if POTUS hasn’t directly ordered revenge, I have a feeling the military is about to take it upon themselves to find and kill the AQ bastards who did this.

Vengeance may not always be swift, but it is always sweet.

I say vengeance is self-indulgent. To act out of vengeance is to abandon your own purposes. Instead, you’re letting your emotions jerk you around, like a puppet on strings, and the script for your theatrics is being written by your enemies. Disciplined people, wise people, don’t indulge in vengeance. They don’t take the bait.

Further, “resolve” born of rage rarely goes hand in hand with “clarity.” Enraged people are not thinking people. Enraged people aren’t weighing the consequences of their actions. They aren’t in control of themselves.

Fred Kaplan wrote in Slate about the U.S. Army’s new field manual on counterinsurgency (here in .pdf format). According to the field manual, getting vengeance for anything is about the last thing we need to be doing in Iraq now.

From first page to last, the authors stress that these kinds of wars are “protracted by nature.” They require “firm political will and extreme patience,” “considerable expenditure of time and resources,” and a very large deployment of troops ready to greet “hand shakes or hand grenades” without mistaking one for the other.

“Successful … operations require Soldiers and Marines at every echelon to possess the following,” the authors write. (Emphasis added.) They then list a daunting set of traits: “A clear, nuanced, and empathetic appreciation of the essential nature of the conflict. … An understanding of the motivation, strengths, and weaknesses of the insurgent,” as well as rudimentary knowledge of the local culture, behavioral norms, and leadership structures. In addition, there must be “adaptive, self-aware, and intelligent leaders.”

Meanwhile, a single high-profile infraction can undo 100 successes. “Lose moral legitimacy, lose the war,” the authors warn, pointedly noting that the French lost Algeria in part because their commanders condoned torture.

The authors note mistakes the U.S. has made already:

  • “The More Force Used, the Less Effective It Is.”
  • “An operation that kills five insurgents is counterproductive if the collateral damage or the creation of blood feuds leads to the recruitment of fifty more.”
  • “Only attack insurgents when they get in the way. Try not to be distracted or forced into a series of reactive moves by a desire to kill or capture them. Provoking combat usually plays into the enemy’s hands.”
  • “A defection is better than a surrender, a surrender better than a capture, and a capture better than a kill.”

    • Kaplan observes, “as a nation we may simply be ill-suited to fight these kinds of wars.” He’s probably right. But even if most of us could countenance such an effort, most of us are not in charge. The righties are. And righties are way ill-suited to fight these kinds of wars. You can see that today in the calls for vengeance on the rightie blogosphere. The hell with the mission; to hell with the consequences; they want blood.

    Back to the new video — according to Edward Wong of the New York Times, “A message with the video says the soldiers were killed out of revenge for the rape and murder of an Iraqi girl in March, a crime in which at least six American soldiers are suspects.”

    “We present this as revenge for our sister who was dishonored by a soldier of the same brigade,” says a message in Arabic on a title card at the start of the nearly five-minute video. Militants had learned of the crime early on and “decided to take revenge for their sister’s honor,” the message says, according to a translation by the SITE Institute, which tracks jihadist Internet postings.

    However, this explanation may be bogus:

    It is questionable whether the soldiers were actually killed out of revenge. Iraqis around Mahmudiya, where the rape and murders took place, believed at the time that the girl and the other three victims were killed by other Iraqis in sectarian violence, according to the mayor of Mahmudiya and American military officials. The mayor said the possible involvement of American soldiers only became apparent on June 30, when the American military announced it had opened an investigation into the crime.

    So, the “revenge” motive may have been post hoc. Still, we’ve had no end to revenge killings already. We’re already well into the “retaliations for retaliations” cycle, which I’m sure is a major cause of the escalation of violence.

    The 2004 attack of Fallujah was, by many accounts, ordered by the White House in retaliation for the murder and mutilation of four civilian contractors. This order was given against the counsel of the commanders on the ground. The results are not, um, encouraging.

    On a practical level it’s ill advised to be Sonny Corleone (“They hit us so — we hit ’em back.”) if you don’t have the muscle to settle all the family business at once. (Remember what happened to Sonny?) And we don’t have that kind of muscle in Iraq.

    Another rightie argues that “I strongly believe we must know and understand who we are fighting against.” OK, but we’d better understand ourselves as well. Whether you thought the invasion was a good idea or not, from the beginning the effort in Iraq has been pulled in at least two directions. War supporters talk about nation building, unified governments, democracy, and security, and that’s fine. But, time and time again, our actions — Abu Ghraib comes to mind — say that we want something else entirely.

    I’ve believed all along that, on a subconscious level, Iraq is a proxy war. It stands in for the war many of us, including me, desired after the 9/11 attacks. If only we’d been attacked by a nation-state instead of an international movement, we could have bombed the bleepers to hell and been done with it. But we couldn’t have that war, because we weren’t attacked by a nation-state. Most of us understood that, and we realized that counterterrorism and national security policies should be crafted to deal with the enemies we have instead of the enemy we wished we had.

    But then there are righties. They blame us lefties because Iraq is less than the resounding triumph they wished for, but the fact is they and their Dear Leader have been working at cross purposes all along; their desires get in the way of their goals; their ids override their superegos. They haven’t yet come to grips with the fact that the enemies we face are not the same ones John Wayne took on in Sands of Iwo Jima.

    (One of the rightie bloggers worked up over the new video has this blurb in his blog masthead: “Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit upon his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.” — H.L. Mencken. Observes Steve M., “I have to say I really enjoy being lectured on the savagery of people who slit throats by a blogger whose motto invokes the desirability of slitting throats.”)

    I’m sure the righties want me to look at the video so that I will be “understand” and feel as they feel. But like I tell the “controlled detonation” theorists who drop by here from time to time — I saw the WTC towers fall with my own eyes. I don’t need to look at the video, thanks.

    Righties Being Wrong

    Posted on by

    I don’t know why this popped into my head this morning — possibly because it’s turning out to be a lovely summer day — but as I sipped coffee and admired the aforementioned day through the window I remembered something. Last April a rightie blogger predicted “this is going to be a vindicating summer for supporters of the Bush Administration.”

    The MSM is predictably trying to throw cold water on this new story as AJ Strata comments on the NY Times take. But the pure and simple fact is as I told you this is going to be a vindicating summer for supporters of the Bush Administration.

    Well, it’s July 7. “Vindication summer” has been a bust so far.

    The cause of last April’s optimism on the Right was the firing of Mary McCarthy from the CIA on allegations that she leaked classified information to reporter Dana Priest. Naturally the Right Blogosphere immediately declared McCarthy to be a traitor. But they were also very certain McCarthy’s would be just the first head to roll. They were supremely confident that the noggins of Larry Johnson, Ray McGovern, and the like would soon follow.

    I guess they were wrong.

    What Really Happened is that two weeks after CIA Director Porter Goss fired McCarthy, Goss himself was fired. McCarthy, who maintains her innocence, dropped out of the news. Conventional wisdom says that Goss was fired because he unwisely butted heads with John Negroponte, or else because of his association with one “Dusty” Foggo, who had fallen into bad company. Since then, there have been no new developments on the McCarthy story that I’m aware of, although she’s mentioned in this WaPo Op Ed from June.

    One suspects the White House wants the firing of Mary McCarthy to drop into a very deep memory hole.

    Much more recently righties celebrated the death of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi as a major turning ponit in the war in Iraq. I wrote at the time, “since it’s unlikely this will make any bleeping difference to the insurgency or the activities of the Iranian-sponsored Shiite militias — whoop-dee-doo.” This rightie blogger found my attitude shocking.

    Well, guess what? The pace of killings in Iraq has increased since Zarqawi’s death, and even the American ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay M. Khalilzad, admits that killing Zarqawi has not made Iraq safer.

    The non-effect of Zarqawi’s death wasn’t a hard prediction to make if you have even a rudimentary idea of who’s doing what to whom in Iraq. The reality is that diverse factions are killing each other for diverse reasons. Al Qaeda is only one of the factions, and a small one at that. But since the righties persist in maintaining their simplified cognitive model (bad guy terrorists v. good guy coalition), they don’t get it.

    Meanwhile, Michelle Malkin, who has made a career of stirring up hatred of ethnic (and other) minorities, is bashing “Democrats” because of a bigoted remark made by Sen. Joe Biden. Naturally, if one Democrat makes a bigoted comment, all Democrats must be bigots. That’s logical, right? Oh, wait …

    One wonders why a bigoted remark would bother Malkin, since bigotry is her stock-in-trade. (See David Neiwert for the connections between Malkin and white supremacists.) Jill at Feministe expresses my views on the matter. See also Jill’s Crazy Conservative Round-up.

    Be sure to add your own favorite examples of righties being wrong to the comments.

    Update: Speaking of Malkin — David Weigel of Hit and Run has a follow up to the story about UC Santa Cruz Chancellor Denice Denton, the target of a Malkin hate campaign who recently committed suicide. True to form, Malkin expresses no contrition for her possible contribution to Denton’s state of mind. Instead, she complained that Weigel’s asking for a comment is some kind of harrassment.

    “Making Malkin angry is like shooting orca in a barrel,” says Weigel. Heh.

    Gassing Our Own People

    Posted on by

    I hope you won’t mind my going back in time a bit, but lots of threads to the past are converging these days. Recently this post generated some comments about support given to Saddam Hussein in the 1980s by St. Ronald of Blessed Memory, even as Saddam was going through his “gassing the Kurds” phase. I was reminded of this episode again today. Murray Waas posts a lovely bit of writing at Huffington Post in which he explains why he dedicated himself to exposing the Reagan-Bush I support for Saddam and his war machine. He also speaks to why he is dedicating himself to exposing the lies and manipulations that got us into Iraq. Be sure to read it; it’s very moving.

    Back to the gas: You’ll remember that in the weeks before the Iraq invasion, a hoard of operatives infested talk radio and cable news, babbling about how Saddam “gassed his own people,” meaning the Kurds, which was why we had to invade Iraq right now. A month before the invasion I wrote this piece for Democratic Underground about why the “gassing his own people” talking point fell way short of a casus belli. And in that I linked to this 1993 Los Angeles Times article by Douglas Frantz and Murray Waas about how Bush I secretly continued to build Iraq’s war machine after the gassing of the Kurds. Just nine months before Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, President Bush I approved $1 billion in aid to Iraq. The Bush I Administration also provided Iraq with access to sophisticated “dual use” (military and civilian) technology, “despite emerging evidence that they were working on nuclear arms and other weapons of mass destruction.” Frantz and Waas uncovered

    …a long-secret pattern of personal efforts by Bush — both as President and as vice president — to support and placate the Iraqi dictator. Repeatedly, when serious objections to helping Hussein arose within the government, Bush and aides following his directives intervened to suppress the resistance.

    The reason for this, ostensibly, was that while Saddam Hussein might have been an odious little toad, he was an enemy of Iran, which after the fall of the Soviet Union had moved into the #1 spot on the Real Bad Places list.

    But classified records show that Bush’s efforts on Hussein’s behalf continued well beyond the end of the Iran-Iraq War and persisted in the face of increasingly widespread warnings from inside the American government that the overall policy had become misdirected.

    Moreover, it appears that instead of merely keeping Hussein afloat as a counterweight to Iran, the U.S. aid program helped him become a dangerous military power in his own right, able to threaten the very U.S. interests that the program originally was designed to protect.

    Clearly, U.S. aid did not lead Hussein to become a force for peace in the volatile region. In the spring of 1990, as senior Administration officials worked to give him more financial aid, the Iraqi leader bragged that Iraq possessed chemical weapons and threatened to “burn half of Israel.” Nor did he change his savagely repressive methods. In the summer of 1988, for example, he shocked the world by killing several thousand Kurds with poison gas.

    Even today, the Iraqi nuclear and chemical weapons programs carried forward with the help of sophisticated American technology continue to haunt U.S. and United Nations officials as they struggle to root out elements of those programs that have survived the allied victory in the Persian Gulf War.

    I remember when Halabja was gassed, in March 1988. I remember especially the photographs of dead mothers, their arms wrapped protectively around their dead babies. At the time I did not understand what was going on. But I remember there was some movement in the Senate toward doing something about it. Senators Claiborne Pell, Al Gore, and Jesse Helms introduced legislation to impose sanctions on Iraq, and the Senate passed a Prevention of Genocide Act, unanimously, just one day after it was introduced.

    But the Reagan White House vetoed the Act [lobbied against the Act so that it died in the House], and squelched any reprisals or sanctions against Saddam, and continued to shovel truckloads of money and technology to Baghdad. And President Bush I continued Reagan’s policies.

    This part of the Franz-Waas article caught my attention:

    What drove Bush to champion the Iraqi cause so ardently and so long is not clear. But some evidence suggests that it may have been a case of single-minded pursuit of a policy after its original purpose had been overtaken by events — and a failure to understand the true nature of Hussein himself.

    Maybe Junior isn’t as different from Poppy as we had thought. Anyway, Saddam’s behavior was erratic and threatening, yet Bush I continued to treat him as if he were America’s Best Bud. I dimly remember hearing that when he invaded Kuwait, Saddam sincerely believed George Bush I wouldn’t mind.

    And some of you will remember the glorious episode that occurred after the Persian Gulf War, in which President Bush I encouraged the Kurds to rebel against Saddam Hussein and then stood by while Saddam crushed the rebellion, ruthlessly. I believe some of the mass graves found in Iraq after the 2003 invasion — the ones that didn’t date to the Iran-Iraq War or the Persian Gulf War — held the bodies of Kurdish rebels.

    In 2003, before the invasion, I remembered Halabja, and I remembered the crushed Kurdish rebellion. The righties who were fired up to to go war had never heard of these things before; they seemed to think the Kurds were still being gassed, and we had to invade quickly to rescue them. And after the invasion, whenever troops found a mass grave of Kurdish rebels, the righties would dance about and yell See? We told you Saddam was evil. But the mass graves were no surprise. The righties were always oblivious to the rest of the story, and wouldn’t listen, and wouldn’t believe us if they did listen.

    But it strikes me now that all of the trouble surrounding Iraq going back 20 years resulted from Republican presidents being soft with a ruthless dictator. Appeasing, even. It’s a damn shame the Dems didn’t push that point through the Noise Machine years ago, because not doing so allowed the next generation of soft little Republican fatasses to portray themselves as hardened he-men warriors, even as they call Democrats “weak” and swift-boat any real warriors who dare oppose them.

    Bushies Prepare to Cut and Run

    Posted on by

    From the Times of London:

    THE Iraqi Government will announce a sweeping peace plan as early as Sunday in a last-ditch effort to end the Sunni insurgency that has taken the country to the brink of civil war.

    The 28-point package for national reconciliation will offer Iraqi resistance groups inclusion in the political process and an amnesty for their prisoners if they renounce violence and lay down their arms, The Times can reveal.

    The Government will promise a finite, UN-approved timeline for the withdrawal of all foreign troops from Iraq; a halt to US operations against insurgent strongholds; an end to human rights violations, including those by coalition troops; and compensation for victims of attacks by terrorists or Iraqi and coalition forces.

    It will pledge to take action against Shia militias and death squads. It will also offer to review the process of “de-Baathification” and financial compensation for the thousands of Sunnis who were purged from senior jobs in the Armed Forces and Civil Service after the fall of Saddam Hussein.

    The deal, which has been seen by The Times, aims to divide Iraqi insurgents from foreign fighters linked to al-Qaeda. It builds on months of secret talks involving Jalal al-Talabani, the Iraqi President, Zalmay Khalilzad, the US Ambassador, and seven Sunni insurgent groups.

    As Chris Bowers points out, this says that for the past several months, while Bush and his minions have hurled scorn and vituperation on anyone who even thinks about a timeline for withdrawal — the Bush Administration has in fact been involved in negotiations that will propose a timeline for withdrawal.

    The Times doesn’t say that the White House will accept all of the conditions, however. Seems to me this puts the White House in an uncomfortable position — if it rejects the terms, and especially if the U.S. is the sole holdout, this would create a campaign issue so big, fat, and juicy that even the Democrats might see it. We had a way out and we didn’t take it! Iraq asked us to leave, and we didn’t go!

    On the other hand, if the Bushies accept the terms and begin a withdrawal, there goes Karl Rove’s midterm campaign strategy. And the hawks and congresspersons who’ve had Bush’s back on “staying the course” are likely to feel betrayed, not to mention the righties who loyally supported the war.

    In that event, we lefties can grab the popcorn and sit back to watch the Right dance the cognitive dissonance waltz.

    If past behavior is any guide, their tactic will be to paint Bush’s cutting and running as a manly and dignified cutting and running, whereas Democrat calls for cutting and running were a symptom of PMS.

    We see the beginnings of this effort at Q and O:

    Democrats should welcome this, but let’s not confuse the difference between the two timelines. One was arbitrary and the other is based on the conditions as seen on the ground by the country in question. One reflects politics and the other reflects an assessment of the real situation. Of course it is all predicated on the acceptance of the plan by the soon to be named Sunni insurgent groups.

    Having listened to John Kerry’s speech at Take Back America last week, I know that Kerry planned to tie a timeline for withdrawal to conditions on the ground, also. He talked specifically about pressuring Iraq to take responsibility for its own security, allowing U.S. troops to withdraw. As he argued here, the Iraqi government seems to act decisively only when presented with a deadline. “Now we must set another deadline to extricate our troops and get Iraq up on its own two feet.”

    John Murtha’s proposal also allows for realities on the ground. Among other provisions for security, he proposed creating a quick reaction force in the region and an “over-the-horizon presence of Marines.”

    These details never seem to filter through to righties. I blame Faux Nooz.

    Blogged Out

    Posted on by

    Sorry I’m a little too tired to comment, but here are some links not to be missed —

    Sunday Times — “Horror show reveals Iraq’s descent”

    Greg Mitchell, Editor & Publisher — “‘Wash Post’ Obtains Shocking Memo from U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, Details Increasing Danger and Hardship”

    David Usborne, The Independent — “Baghdad blasts mock US claims of Iraqi progress”

    Carol Williams, Los Angeles Times, “Kicked out of Gitmo”

    David Rose, The Observer, “How US hid the suicide secrets of Guantanamo”

    Hannah Allam, Knight Ridder, “Somali leaders warned U.S. of strengthening Islamic militia”

    Their Strategy for Victory

    Posted on by

    Here are a couple of editorials that ought to be read together. The first is in today’s Baltimore Sun —

    Having refused for three years to try to come up with any actual constructive ideas about the war in Iraq, congressional leaders last week chose to put the enduring conflict smack in the center of the coming election campaign. Jeering at “cut-and-run” Democrats, the Republicans placed their confidence in a formula that would keep American soldiers in the deepening quagmire — indefinitely.

    There it is: their strategy for victory.

    How many times have we heard that the Democrats have no proposals for dealing with Iraq? Yet the Sun is right — the GOP has no idea what to do about Iraq, other than use it as a wedge issue.

    Of course, as far as the Right is concerned, just having U.S. troops fighting in Iraq is all the plan they need. We’re bound to achieve “victory” eventually if we have enough faith.

    The maneuvering in the Capitol on Thursday and Friday was shameless and pandering, but at least it puts Iraq on the table for the voters to think about. The last elections, in 2004, came when it seemed to some that things could still be turned around, given a little patience. Two years later, with no significant progress, Americans’ patience has about run out.

    Yet the Republicans are still using Iraq as a wedge to split Democrats —

    … the country, after all this time, deserves a real debate, not the lugubrious emoting that went on in Congress last week. The Republicans there were feeling their oats, because Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the bogeyman of Baghdad, had been whacked with a half-ton of explosives, because President Bush had spent five hours in Baghdad and come away confident that the Iraqi government was going to come up with a plan, and because that government itself has finally been formed just six short months after elections.

    The House and Senate, as expected, rejected any sort of timetable for withdrawal. A plausible argument could be made that such an approach is not the best way to extract U.S. troops from Iraq, but plausible arguments were not what congressional Republicans were about. If there’s a better way to get out of Iraq and leave the country in some sort of stable shape, they should be talking to Americans about it. … If the Republicans think that doing nothing different is a good strategy, let’s talk about that, too.

    The Sun is right; the Dems should be challenging the Republicans on Iraq and demanding they trot out ideas for dealing with it.

    The second editorial is in today’s Los Angeles Times.

    On Friday, the House, by a 256-153 vote, approved a nonbinding resolution opposing an “arbitrary date for the withdrawal or redeployment.” During debate, Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R.-Ill) dusted off the specious connection between Iraq and 9/11, piously pleading with his colleagues to “show the same steely resolve as those men and women on United Flight 93, the same sense of duty as the first responders who headed up the stairs of the twin towers.” For its part, the Pentagon unwisely provided members with “rapid-response talking points” that sounded more like a stump speech than a military reference work.

    The President himself is taking (for him) a softer tone —

    The commander in chief, meanwhile, appears to recognize that being too triumphalist and partisan could undermine support for his stated intention of reducing U.S. forces gradually as the Iraqi government takes over more responsibility for security.

    This is standard operating procedure for the Bushies. Although last week’s maneuvers to paint the Dems as wusses on the war was no doubt orchestrated by the White House — Karl’s gettin’ feisty now that he no longer has a threat of indictment hanging over his head — it’s essential that the President appears to be above it all.

    In his homecoming news conference last week, Bush sent mixed signals about whether he understands that public impatience with the U.S. presence in Iraq threatens his stated goal there: to help Iraq “govern itself, sustain itself and defend itself” and become “an ally in the war on terror.” On the one hand, he said, “success in Iraq depends upon the Iraqis.” Yet he also suggested that Iraq was so crucial to the war on terror that it could not be left to the Iraqis, at least not yet. “If we fail in Iraq, it’s going to embolden Al Qaeda types,” he said. There is, to put it mildly, a tension between those two statements.

    Yes, and let’s see the Dems capitalize on that. Let’s see the Dems take the GOP smear campaign and shove it back in their faces.

    Behind the New York Times firewall, Frank Rich writes [UPDATE: Here’s a public link to the article at True Blue Liberal],

    Polls last week showed scant movement in either the president’s approval rating (37 percent in the NBC News-Wall Street Journal survey released on Wednesday night) or that of the war (53 percent deem it a mistake). On NBC Tim Russert listed Mr. Bush’s woes: “Iraq, Iraq, Iraq.” Americans pick Iraq as the most pressing national issue, 21 points ahead of immigration, the runner-up. They find the war so dispiriting that the networks spend less and less time covering it. Had the much-hyped Alberto roused itself from tropical storm to hurricane, Mr. Bush’s Baghdad jaunt would have been bumped for the surefire Nielsen boost of tempest-tossed male anchors emoting in the great outdoors.

    All of which makes it stupendously counterintuitive that the Republican campaign strategy for 2006 is to run on the war. But there was Karl Rove, freshly released from legal jeopardy, proposing exactly that in a speech just before the president’s trip. In a drive-by Swift Boating, he portrayed John Kerry and John Murtha, two decorated Vietnam veterans calling for an expedited exit from Iraq, as cowards who exemplify their party’s “old pattern of cutting and running.”

    Rich points out that Karl is working from exactly the same playbook he was using back in 2002. But in 2002, Bush’s approval ratings were sky-high, and in the four years since the American public learned the hard way that Bush can’t be trusted. Why isn’t Karl adjusting the playbook?

    One explanation might be that he thinks his team can still keep the ball by running the old plays, because the Dems still haven’t developed much in the way of a defense. Although individual Dems have taken firm positions on Iraq, the party as a whole is all over the map and can’t agree on anything approximating a united counter-strategy. Rich continues,

    While the Democrats dither about Iraq, you can bet that the White House will ambush them with its own election-year facsimile of an exit strategy, dangling nominal troop withdrawals as bait for voters. To sweeten the pot, it could push Donald Rumsfeld to join Mr. DeLay in retirement. Since Republicans also vilify the defense secretary’s incompetence, his only remaining value to the White House is as a political pawn that Mr. Rove can pluck from the board at the most advantageous moment. October, perhaps?

    In a post I published recently at Unclaimed Territory I linked to an article from In These Times magazine that calls for liberals and progressives to develop a “unified progressive narrative.”

    “An opening now exists, as it hasn’t in a very long time, for the Democrats to be the visionaries,” writes Michael Tomasky, the editor of The American Prospect, in the magazine’s May 3 issue. “To seize this moment, the Democrats need to think differently—to stop focusing on their grab bag of small-bore proposals that so often seek not to offend and that accept conservative terms of debate. And to do that, they need to begin by looking to their history, for in that history there is an idea about liberal governance that amounts to more than the million-little-pieces, interest-group approach to politics that has recently come under deserved scrutiny and that can clearly offer the most compelling progressive response to the radical individualism of the Bush era.”

    A narrative is more than a bulleted list of policy proposals. A narrative is a story. A narrative puts policy in the context of history. And stories are often saturated with mythos — traditional beliefs and notions accumulated about a particular subject. The Republican mythos about Democrats and liberals is that they don’t know how to fight bad things, like Communism, crime, and terrorism. They don’t seem to understand how dangerous these bad things are. They raise taxes to ruinous degrees and throw money at expensive social programs that only make [mostly black and brown] people lazy. They are impractical and snooty and don’t love America/children/God as much as normal folks do.

    Ann Coulter’s whole shtick is the Republican mythos. She has become the perfect reflection and embodiment of the mythos, like a priestess who gives voice to the pure and undiluted narratives of her tribe.

    This mythos has been so thoroughly internalized by much of the American public that it doesn’t have to be spelled out in Republican narratives. Dennis Hastert merely has to evoke the memory of Flight 96 to conjure the lore of weak and wussy liberals who don’t know how to fight. This mythos is so hardwired into American brains that a baby-faced pudge like Karl Rove can tell Republicans audiences that Democrats are wussy and soft, and the audience can’t see what a joke that is coming from Karl.

    Frank Rich continues,

    What’s most impressive about Mr. Rove, however, is not his ruthlessness, it’s his unshakable faith in the power of a story. The story he’s stuck with, Iraq, is a loser, but he knows it won’t lose at the polls if there’s no story to counter it. And so he tells it over and over, confident that the Democrats won’t tell their own. And they don’t — whether about Iraq or much else. The question for the Democrats is less whether they tilt left, right or center, than whether they can find a stirring narrative that defines their views, not just the Republicans’.

    Rich also links to Michael Tomasky:

    What’s needed, wrote Michael Tomasky in an influential American Prospect essay last fall, is a “big-picture case based on core principles.” As he argued, Washington’s continued and inhumane failure to ameliorate the devastation of Katrina could not be a more pregnant opportunity for the Democrats to set forth a comprehensive alternative to the party in power. Another opportunity, of course, is the oil dependence that holds America hostage to the worst governments in the Middle East.

    Instead the Democrats float Band-Aid nostrums and bumper-sticker marketing strategies like “Together, America Can Do Better.” As the linguist Geoffrey Nunberg pointed out, “The very ungrammaticality of the Democrats’ slogan reminds you that this is a party with a chronic problem of telling a coherent story about itself, right down to an inability to get its adverbs and subjects to agree.” On Wednesday Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid were to announce their party’s “New Direction” agenda — actually, an inoffensive checklist of old directions (raise the minimum wage, cut student loan costs, etc.) — that didn’t even mention Iraq. Symbolically enough, they had to abruptly reschedule the public unveiling to attend Mr. Bush’s briefing on his triumphant trip to Baghdad.

    Talking points alone are not enough. Agendas are not enough. George Lakoff’s “framing” technique, with which I essentially agree, is not enough, either. And it may be that standing up to Bush and the wingnuts is not enough, either, as long as their stories are better than ours. But it’s a start.

    Disarray

    Posted on by

    Conventional wisdom before and after the Take Back America conference — featuring The Booing of Hillary — is that liberals are “dividing” the Democratic Party. Unlike the groomed and housebroken “centrist” Dems like Joe Lieberman, we liberals are flea-bitten, uncombed mutts scratching at the door with muddy paws. Our disagreement with the indoor pooches is not a difference in opposing views but an untidy “disarray” that threatens to soil the carpets.

    Last Tuesday morning Senators Clinton and Kerry separately addressed the Take Back America attendees, who were assumed to be “liberal activists” in some news stories, although that point is debatable. Senator Clinton’s speech was well received on the whole, but her non-position on the Iraq War — she wants neither an open-ended commitment nor “a date certain” for withdrawal — drew polite applause, plus some heckling and boos. By contrast, Senator Kerry won the day, and the audience, by admitting he had been wrong on the war in 2002 and calling for a firm withdrawal date. When Kerry said this the audience caught fire and leapt to its feet, cheering and applauding lustily.

    John Gibson of Fox News, believing he saw disarray among the Dems and overlooking parallel disagreements about the war among Republicans, attempted to shove a wedge into the party by pressing former DNC chairman Terry McAuliffe to choose between “Hillary’s side” or “the John Kerry side.”

    Wow, which is it? The divide is widening within the Democratic party over the war in Iraq. Two top Dems don’t agree on an exit strategy, as you’ve just heard. And all this comes as the party fights to take back control of Congress. Now some Democratic leaders are trying to take things in a new direction. Former DNC chairman Terry McAuliffe joins us now. Before we get into a new direction, Terry, what am I supposed to make of no deadline from Hillary, must have a deadline now from John Kerry? What is a Democrat to think?

    I think the audience at Take Back America answered that question clearly; a whopping majority of Dems at the conference preferred a firm withdrawal date to “whenever .” I realize the TBA crowd is not necessarily a representative sample of Democratic voters. But considering that only 9 percent of Democrats approve of the George Bush non-strategy in Iraq (CBS News Poll, June 10-11), the TBA attendees may reflect rank-and-file Dem opinion pretty durn accurately.

    And it seems to me the same poll reveals the Republicans are more “disarrayed” than the Dems. The GOP split on the question “Do you approve or disapprove of the way George W. Bush is handling the situation with Iraq?” was 71 to 24; the Dems split 9 to 85 (remainders were unsure).

    Speaking for myself, I’m willing to consider options other than a firm withdrawal date. For example, I could live with a plan for withdrawal or redeployment within a time range — say, six to nine months, or by the end of 2007, or some such. What’s important is that the government draw up a concrete plan and then implement it in a timely manner. “Whenever” is not satisfactory. That appears to be the opinion of a solid majority of Dems.

    Now, finally, print pundit Robert Kuttner suggests in today’s Boston Globe that just maybe the Dem party’s “disarray” is no disarray at all, but instead is a vacuum of leadership.

    Most voters want to end American involvement in Iraq. As in the Vietnam War, the voters are ahead of most politicians. And political debate about defense is finally recovering from the administration’s manipulation of 9/11 trauma.

    Yesterday’s passage of a House resolution affirming the President’s “plan” shows us political debate hasn’t recovered enough, however. Forty-two House Dems caved.

    Democrats serious about national security are redefining what it means to protect America, and what it means to be a “Defense Democrat.” The dwindling Lieberman wing of the party and its enablers of George W. Bush have had a lock on that label for far too long.

    Wow, a print pundit almost caught up to where leftie bloggers were even before the bleeping invasion. Be still my heart.

    Digby links to a Republican analysis that says Dems aren’t ready to lead. The analysis points to the Lamont challenge of Joe Lieberman’s Senate seat as an example of immature Dem voters viewing the world through “war colored glasses.” Digby comments:

    “The Democrats are not ready to lead.” I think we all know why, don’t we? The “war colored glasses” crowd is a terrible influence, don’t you know. We’re so out of control we are supporting a challenger in a Senate primary! Call out the guard!

    And to charges the Dems haven’t fired up the base enough to ensure a House takeover by the Dems, Digby says,

    I have to agree that Democrats have yet to fire up the base enough. And the reason is that although many voters are unhappy with Bush they can’t see how things will be any different with Democrats in charge of the congress….

    …Democrats can ignore this and fret about the immature and distasteful grassroots — or they can start giving their base a reason to vote for them. Mid-terms are about turn-out. Until rank and file Dems see that their party won’t just excuse, enable and endorse GOP policies they have no reason to get off the couch.

    Let’s be clear about this: if we lose this fall, it will not be because the “war colored glasses” crowd was immature and failed to behave properly at the debutante ball. It will be because the Democratic establishment blew off its own voters in order to please David Broder and the stale DC punditocrisy — the same thing they have been doing for more than a decade and losing.

    Don’t look at us. We’re trying to get Democratic voters charged up about being Democrats again. Pissing and moaning because Joe Lieberman is facing a primary challenge is having the opposite effect. If we lose, it will be because the party establishment once more showed contempt for Democratic voters — a fatal error the Republicans never ever make.

    I cannot understand why the Dems are so clueless. According to a CNN poll of June 14-15, Bush’s disapproval numbers are still sixteen points higher than his approval numbers. This was after the glorious victory over Zarqawi and the publicity stunt visit to Iraq, notice. The war remains solidly unpopular with big majorities of Dems and Independents (the “I’s” poll at 67 percent against, 27 percent for, same poll linked above). Yet the Bushies can still scare the Dems into covering Bush’s butt with the ol’ soft on Communism terrorism threat.

    You want to look tough and strong, Democrats? Then stand up to Bush. Every time you cave you prove to America you’re a pack of weenies.