Now about the time frame for withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq. Here's what Maj. Gen. Benjamin R. Mixon, a top commander on the ground in Iraq said Friday in a Pentagon press briefing:
I think we have to keep this in perspective. We spent about 10 years in Bosnia-Herzegovina setting the stage for those elements to be successful. We need to allow the Iraqis the same time to get their security forces on the ground, to get their government working, and then have a gradual withdrawal of American security forces, but continue to partner with them over the long term.
10 years?
--David Kurtz
How are things going in New Orleans? Not so good.
Citing the status of the rebuilding of the levee system, the largest commercial insurer in Louisiana, St. Paul Travelers, has announced it will cancel all commercial property insurance policies it has underwritten in the New Orleans area next year as existing policies come up for renewal.
What does this mean? For a region struggling to resurrect its economic base, it's a huge impediment to commerce.
"This is sending a shock wave through the business community," said Mark Drennen, president and chief executive officer of Greater New Orleans Inc., a public-private partnership that seeks to promote economic development in the area. "If one company has come to that conclusion, you would anticipate that others would come to that conclusion. Without insurance, we have a calamity. We cannot exist as a business community without insurance."
It'd be nice to hear the White House press corps asking how the Bush Administration's much touted rebuilding effort in New Orleans is going if the insurance companies don't trust the Army Corps' newly reconstructed levees, the centerpiece of the President's plan to help New Orleans recover.
--David Kurtz
Andrew Sullivan, addressing his former comrades-at-arms, on Iraq:
It's over, guys. Your beloved Bush administration botched this so badly it's irrecoverable. You enabled them. You never fully took them on when it would have counted - and you trashed those of us who did. You knew this before the 2004 election and still cynically played the anti-Kerry card for all it was worth, telling yourselves you could sway Rummy after the election. Well, you couldn't and you didn't. Your policy was sabotaged by a defense secretary who never believed in it and by a president too weak and out-of-it to rein him in. Get over yourselves and recognize that this dream has died. And we have to fight the nightmare we now face rather than pretend your dream is still even on life-support. That's the patriotic responsibility at this point. And no, I'm not impugning your patriotism. I'm asking you to place it before your shattered dreams.
--David Kurtz
This morning we noted that the civil suit arising from the GOP's 2002 phone-jamming scheme in New Hampshire had been settled yesterday, but there was no immediate word on the terms of the settlement. Since then, the terms have been disclosed. The New Hampshire Republican Party will pay $125,000 over five years. The RNC and NRSC will each kick in $5,000, for a settlement total of $135,000. The proceeds will go to two charitable organizations, not the Democratic Party.
Update: Actually the $125,000 will go to the New Hampshire Democratic Party, while the $10,000 ponied up by the RNC and the NRSC will go to two other organizations. More here.
--David Kurtz
Rummy's Revenge?
From the NYT ...
Two days before he resigned as defense secretary, Donald H. Rumsfeld submitted a classified memo to the White House that acknowledged that the Bush administration’s strategy in Iraq was not working and called for a major course correction....
“Recast the U.S. military mission and the U.S. goals (how we talk about them) — go minimalist,” he added. Mr. Rumsfeld’s memo suggests frustration with the pace of turning over responsibility to the Iraqi authorities; in fact, the memo calls for examination of ideas that roughly parallel troop withdrawal proposals presented by some of the White House’s sharpest Democratic critics.
So many secrets and lies, self-deception and obfuscation. It'll take a long time to unwind.
--Josh Marshall
For my money the most troubling thing about Rep. Silvestre Reyes (D-TX), Nancy Pelosi's choice to head up the House Intelligence Committee, is his frequent travels with GOP loose cannon extraordinaire Curt Weldon.
Today the Wall Street Journal offers conflicting accounts of whether Reyes was present at a now notorious Paris meeting between Weldon and Manucher Ghorbanifar, the Zelig of American foreign policy scandals:
As a member of Armed Services, [Reyes] has frequently traveled overseas as part of delegations led by one of the panel's most senior and controversial Republicans, Pennsylvania Rep. Curt Weldon.Mr. Weldon, who was defeated in last month's midterm elections, has made high-profile stops in North Korea, Libya and Russia in recent years, and has been outspoken about the threat posed by Iran. An August 2003 trip included a stopover in Paris that drew the ire of the Central Intelligence Agency, according to two recently retired members of the agency's Directorate of Operations.
Included was a meeting at a Paris hotel with group of Iranian exiles to discuss Iran's alleged role in terrorism and developing weapons of mass destruction. Among the leaders of the Iranian delegation was Manucher Ghorbanifar, a central figure in the Reagan administration's Iran-Contra scandal and a man the CIA had accused of providing bogus intelligence to the Americans.
In an interview Friday, William Murray, who was the CIA's station chief in Paris at the time, said he tried to prevent the lawmakers from going to the meeting after he learned that Mr. Ghorbanifar would be attending. But he said that his advice went unheeded. "Reyes was one of the guys who met with Ghorbanifar," Mr. Murray said.
Mr. Reyes's office said Friday that he has never met with Mr. Ghorbanifar, and didn't attend the hotel meeting during the Paris stopover.
The significance of the trip, in any case, is a matter of dispute. Some critics argue that going against the advice of a CIA station chief is naive. Others say Democrats on a Republican-led delegation have a responsibility to attend all meetings, and going against a local CIA officer's advice isn't without precedent for traveling lawmakers.
Laura Rozen has done a lot of good reporting on this subject. You might start here for a refresher.
--David Kurtz
The New Hampshire Democratic Party has settled its lawsuit against the GOP for the 2002 phone-jamming scandal. No details yet on the terms of the settlement. The case was scheduled to go to trial Monday. If you're late to this story, we've covered it extensively here and at Muckraker.
--David Kurtz
WaPo:
The new chief of the U.S. General Services Administration is trying to limit the ability of the agency's inspector general to audit contracts for fraud or waste and has said oversight efforts are intimidating the workforce, according to government documents and interviews.GSA Administrator Lurita Alexis Doan, a Bush political appointee and former government contractor, has proposed cutting $5 million in spending on audits and shifting some responsibility for contract reviews to small, private audit contractors.
Doan also has chided Inspector General Brian D. Miller for not going along with her attempts to streamline the agency's contracting efforts. . . .
Doan compared Miller and his staff to terrorists, according to a copy of the notes obtained by The Washington Post.
"There are two kinds of terrorism in the US: the external kind; and, internally, the IGs have terrorized the Regional Administrators," Doan said, according to the notes.
Although the Post story doesn't mention it, you might recall that David Safavian, the chief of staff at the GSA earlier in the Bush presidency, was convicted for, among other things, lying to the GSA inspector general about his connections to Jack Abramoff. So of course we need less oversight.
--David Kurtz
It's official. Stephen Cambone is out. The resignation of the undersecretary of defense for intelligence and close aide to the outgoing Don Rumsfeld is effective December 31. The move was not unexpected.
--David Kurtz
Here's the first of what will become something of a continuing series as we head into the new Congress:
Meet the investigators -- in this edition, Sens. Carl Levin (D-MI) and Pat Leahy (D-VT), the genteel bulldogs of the Senate.
--Paul Kiel
Last year Congress appropriated $20 million for the long-awaited Iraq war victory celebration. Now they've reappropriated the victory celebration money for whatever victory celebration may be in store for 2007.
--Josh Marshall
John Ikenberry at TPMCafe's America Abroad: "Now is the time for an honest post mortem of Bush foreign policy. Bush foreign policy has failed not just because of incompetence or bad luck in Iraq. The entire intellectual edifice of Bush foreign policy – such as it is – is deeply flawed. And let’s be clear. The Bush administration’s grand strategy is not simply a variation on earlier postwar liberal internationalist grand strategies – as some conservatives and liberals suggest. It was a radical departure from America’s postwar liberal hegemonic orientation – and the world has bitten back."
--Josh Marshall
Romney burnishes conservative credentials: appoints non-scientist lackey to key science post.
--Josh Marshall
Over at National Review's The Corner, Stanley Kurtz has responded to a post of mine in which I critiqued an earlier post of his. I must say that on the second try Kurtz has managed to make an argument even weaker than the first.
On the first go at it, Kurtz argued that the problem for President Bush was that the American people simply aren't willing to pay the cost of Bush's war in blood, money and years. I called that blaming the American people for Bush's disaster.
With the second try, Kurtz carts out a new culprit: the Democrats. While acknowledging the administration's tactical missteps along the way, Kurtz now argues that the real villains in this whole sorry mess are dovish Democrats. As he says ...
From Marshall’s posts, you’d think that all Democrats were Iraq hawks–comfortable with the idea of the Iraq war itself, so long as the war involved more troops, or only against the war because of prudent calculations about troop requirements. In fact, a huge chunk of the Democratic Party was against the Iraq war from the start, and would have opposed it even if–no, especially if–they thought that war could be won ... The dovish inclination of the Democratic base has acted as a major constraint on our policy in Iraq.
I commend the whole piece to you. But the essence of the argument is that Democratic doves have exaggerated Bush's screw-ups, constrained his ability to address problems and are in fact the root cause of Don Rumsfeld's cartoonish version of military transformation, which has played a key role in the unfolding of the disaster. In so many words, waging this war as long as the Democratic doves were around was just too much for the president, though he made some mistakes along the way too.
Some arguments -- and that is his argument -- are so silly as to require no mockery.
The first thing to do or say is to class this with the rising political chorus against accountability which is now the theme song of the Bush-adulating right in DC. But the argument is so vapid that a little bit more requires saying.
When Vietnam war stalwarts blamed Democrats for keeping President Nixon from winning the war in Vietnam there was at least a theoretical logic to the argument. I don't agree with it. And I think pretty much any reasonably-minded historical judgment would concur. But in the late 1960s and early 1970s the Democrats did control the Congress and thus the purse strings and oversight. So there was at least some logical means that congressional Democrats could have used to break President Nixon's stride.
But what excuse does President Bush have exactly? His party has controlled the Congress with lockstep majorities for his entire presidency. The one exception came in the Senate from 2001 to 2002. And that was before the war even started. If I'm not mistaken we've been treated to half a dozen years of commentary and news about how the Democrats were defeated, impotent, divided and generally just lame. Since he was so early and outspoken in his criticism, I assume this means Howard Dean prevented President Bush from winning the Iraq war.
But really, how can the president blame anything on a powerless minority in Congress and not indict himself as the weakest and most pitiful chief executive the republic has ever had?
President Bush has had the great benefit of what was up to quite recently a gelded opposition, a pliant press corps and a public inclined to give the commander-in-chief most benefits of the doubt because of the scarring wound of 9/11. Yet, taken together, these folks tied his hands and kept him from winning the war.
If this is really the argument I think we can forget about whatever happened in Iraq and say that President Bush is simply too lame a leader, too big a buffoon on history's stage, to be president at all. How can you hope to defeat Saddam Hussein or al Qaida or even Kim Jong-Il if you can't even go toe-to-toe with Charlie Rangel?
The whole thing is sad. Establishment conservative commentary has devolved into what looks like a latter-day Scholasticism focused on finding more and more improbable arguments -- insurgents on the head of a pin -- for why President Bush isn't responsible for the catastrophe that has become of the policy he and his administration authored, planned and executed, more or less singlehandedly, for going on four years.
(ed.note: Largely separate from the points raised in this post, let me take note of the fact that Kurtz says he was always more pessimistic than the Bush administration and many neo-cons about what we might call easy-democratization. And this recalled skepticism squares with my recollection of what Kurtz wrote at the time.)
--Josh Marshall
TPM is accepting applications for our winter/spring intern session. TPM interns work from our office in New York City. If you're looking for journalism and online media experience, it's a great gig. TPM interns get real exposure to the nuts and bolts of our operation -- pulling together news stories, reviewing government documents, writing news updates. And unlike a lot of journalism internships, they get bylines. Often lots of them. If you're interested, send us an email at our regular TPM comments email address (up there on the right) with the subject line "TPM Media Internship". Include a cover letter, a resume, and two references.
--Josh Marshall
GOP presidential hopeful Mitt Romney: Keep those damn illegal immigrants out!
But as long as they're here -- eh, my front lawn could really use some tending to. . .
--Justin Rood
Once it only endangered Americans' civil liberties. Now it endangers the White House who authorized it. Over 50 probes, lawsuits, reviews and audits have been launched at the NSA's warrantless wiretapping program, or are expected to begin soon.
Which one will expose the truth of the program? Will it bring down a president? At TPMmuckraker, Justin Rood gives a pocket-sized rundown of the many assaults on the NSA.
--Paul Kiel
Back in the 1980s, when I was a teenager, and then when I was home from college, I used to listen to a Sunday night radio show called Religion on the Line. The show had a priest, a protestant minister and a rabbi. And they'd discuss issues of the day and how different religions dealt with various questions. The host of the show was Dennis Prager. Prager was always the most self-satisfied voice on the panel. And always a bit pretentious. But for those of you who know Prager now as hate-ranting whack-job that he's become, I can only say that back then he was or seemed far more sane. In any case, if you have yet heard of his latest sick anti-muslim outrage, MJ Rosenberg will bring you up to speed.
--Josh Marshall
Rep. Silvestre Reyes (D-TX) tapped as chairman of House intelligence committee.
--Paul Kiel
It's official: Electronic voting machines mostly suck. That and other news of the day in today's Daily Muck.
--Justin Rood
Bertolt Brecht presaging/satirizing the Bush shills fifty years ahead of time ....
... the people
Had forfeited the confidence of the government
And could win it back only
By redoubled efforts. Would it not be easier
In that case for the government
To dissolve the people
And elect another?
Courtesy of TPM Reader FP.
--Josh Marshall
Jews for Junkets (from The Forward) ...
Two of America’s most influential Jewish organizations are gearing up for their first direct confrontation with the incoming, Democratic-led Congress. The topic: Democratic proposals for congressional ethics and lobbying reform.At issue are two key congressional perks, targeted for elimination, that Jewish organizations rely on to achieve community goals: overseas junkets, including dozens of trips to Israel each year, funded by Jewish organizations; and an estimated $25 million a year in earmarked funds for Jewish communal projects. Both the trips and the earmarked funding face possible elimination as part of the Democrats’ pledge to fight corruption on Capitol Hill.
--Josh Marshall
It really does seem as though the cardinals of DC punditry are constitutionally incapable of believing that George W. Bush has ever -- in the real sense -- gotten anything wrong or that they, the Washington establishment, has gotten anything wrong over the last six years.
I don't like to use such words but I can only think to call the denial and buck-passing sickening. I can't think of another word that captures the gut reaction.
Here's the lede to Mort Kondracke's new column in Roll Call (emphasis added) ...
All over the world, scoundrels are ascendant, rising on a tide of American weakness. It makes for a perilous future.President Bush bet his presidency — and America’s world leadership — on the war in Iraq. Tragically, it looks as though he bit off more than the American people were willing to chew.
The U.S. is failing in Iraq. Bush’s policy was repudiated by the American people in the last election. And now America’s enemies and rivals are pressing their advantage, including Iran, Syria, the Taliban, Sudan, Russia and Venezuela. We have yet to hear from al-Qaida.
Let's first take note that the 'blame the American people for Bush's screw-ups' meme has definitely hit the big time. It's not Bush who bit off more than he could chew or did something incredibly stupid or screwed things up in a way that defies all imagining. Bush's 'error' here is not realizing in advance that the American people would betray him as he was marching into history. The 'tragedy' is that Bush "bit off more than the American people were willing to chew." That just takes my breath away.
Now come down to the third graf. Bush gets repudiated in the mid-term election ... "And now ..." In standard English the import of this phrasing is pretty clear: it's the repudiation of Bush's tough policies that have led to the international axis of evil states rising against us. Is he serious? The world has gone to hell in a hand basket since the election? In the last three weeks? The whole column is an open war on cause and effect.
This is noxious, risible, fetid thinking. But there it is. That's the story they want to tell. The whole place is rotten down to the very core.
--Josh Marshall
Another update on Florida's 13th. The results are in -- Florida election officials attribute the discrepancies on the first run of tests of electronic voting machines to human error.
--Paul Kiel
From TPM Reader JS, one of our longtime readers ...
I have a slightly different take on this.I think Bush sought out Webb--who was rather obviously avoiding Bush--to symbolically spit in his face. "How's your boy?" was Bush's code for, "You may think you're hot spit because you have a chestful of medals and won running against me and my war, but I'm the Decider, see, and you don't have a damn thing to say about when your precious son, or any of the other troops, are going to leave Iraq. They'll stay there until I say they can go and not before. The only way your boy's getting out of there any earlier is on a stretcher or in a body bag. How do ya like *them* apples, tough guy?"
Bush intended for Webb to get it and be humiliated because he wouldn't dare answer back confrontationally in the context of a celebratory presidential reception.
Webb *did* get it, but he refused to knuckle under. It wasn't Bush's petulant response to Webb's statement about Iraq that got Webb's back up, it was the initial patently insincere inquiry about his son. The exchange
was hostile right from the start.
Thoughts?
--Josh Marshall
TPM Reader BY ...
Talk like Stanley Kurtz['s] misses the central point: there wasn't enough support to do the things he says and there never would've been. That's the central argument against doing it!!! It simply wasn't worth the cost to America and the world to undertake a mission with such a crushing ratio of required effort to possible success. Sure, sure, if the entire world agreed that taking out Saddam Hussein was a central point of emphasis for the world's political infrastructure, it would've had a greater chance of success. But the Bush Administration knew it could never make that case, so it deliberately concealed (possibly from itself, even, but certainly from the outside world) how costly it would be. Simply put, if they were honest about the potential costs, they never, ever would've gotten enough political support to invade. Only by grossly exaggerating the danger of Saddam and grossly downplaying the difficulty of the mission could they get the political support to do what they did.It was a stupid idea from the beginning for that very reason, and to treat it now like that's some little miscalculation in planning is disingenuous in the extreme. Or delusional.
This is a central, perhaps the central issue in the whole shambling, tragic, dingbat debate. But we don't return to it often enough. Saying the American people don't have what it takes to finish the job, or come up with a new job or, really, figure out a way to help George W. Bush keep his job in Iraq amounts to blaming the public for the lies this White House told to get the country into the war. It's really that simple.
The American people probably also don't have what it takes to terraform Mongolia, remake it into a summer vacation paradise and annex it to the United States to benefit from all new tax revenue. But do we really need to? Not a perfect analogy, I grant you. But not that far off either.
Consider a thought experiment. Let's go back to late 2002 and early 2003. Assume that the build up on the WMD front is more or less as it transpired. But assume, for our counterfactual, that the costs of what we were getting into had been made pretty candidly clear. Half a million troops to secure the place, maybe years of occupation and nation-building. Then you get to early 2003 when it was clear that even if there was some mustard gas hidden away somewhere, that beside those lamo rockets the inspectors found, there really weren't any big WMD programs or stockpiles. Remember, that was clear, before the war started. Once that was clear, and if people knew the costs of what we were getting ourselves into, is there any way the president would have had any support for still going to war, pretty much just for the hell of it?
This is the key. Yes, the American people probably won't support what it takes to make this happen. That's because they make a perfectly rational calculation that so much blood and money for no particular reason just isn't worth it. They're only in this situation because President Bush and his advisors gamed the public into this war on false pretenses knowing that once they were it would be almost impossible to get back out.
--Josh Marshall
Rep. Alan Mollohan (D-WV) is set to head up the panel that controls the purse strings for the FBI -- which is investigating him for his earmarking habits. Does anybody see that as a problem?
--Paul Kiel
One more point about Stanley Kurtz's argument that the American people don't have what it takes to win in Iraq. TPM Reader GG points out that in addition to needing a larger army and more, his argument would have required a lot more money. And not the kind the president is accustomed to using on the credit card from Chinese Central Bank, but, the dread word, taxes.
There's no free lunch and no free wars. Except in punditry.
--Josh Marshall
It's a great line, but will it fit on a bumper sticker?
Rep. William Jefferson (D-LA) in a new TV ad: "I have never taken a bribe from anyone."
--Paul Kiel
TPM Reader MR: "Earlier this week, Bush said, "There is one thing I'm not going to do. I am not going to pull our troops off the battlefield before the mission is complete." What exactly is the mission? Is the mission the same this week as it was last week, or the month or year before? And what was the mission at the beginning of the war? "
--Josh Marshall
Stanley Kurtz's excuse: "The underlying problem with this war is that, from the outset, it has been waged under severe domestic political constraints. From the start, the administration has made an assessment of how large a military the public would support, and how much time the public would allow us to build democracy and then get out of Iraq. We then shaped our military and "nation building" plans around those political constraints, crafting a "light footprint" military strategy linked to rapid elections and a quick handover of power. Unfortunately, the constraints of domestic American public opinion do not match up to what is actually needed to bring stability and democracy to a country like Iraq."
It may be a form of literary grade or concept inflation to call it irony. But the irony of this ludicrous statement is that from the outset it has been the American political opposition (the Democrats) and the internal bureaucratic opposition (sane people in the US government and military, not appointed by George W. Bush) who've pushed for a much larger military footprint in Iraq and much more real nation-building. These weren't 'domesic political constraints'. These were ideological constraints the adminstration placed on itself.
I would say Stanley should go back and familiarize himself with the debates in 2002, 2003 and 2004. But of course he was there.
We're now down to the Iraqi people or the American people as the primary culprits behind George W. Bush's disaster.
For what it's worth, I think substantially more troops would have made a big difference earlier on. Now, however, the Army and Marines are too worn down for any more troops to be available. And, more importantly, the sectarian chaos in the Iraq has taken on far too much momentum on its own for more troops to bring it under control. Would the 400,000 troops Gen. Shinseki wanted have led to a successful occupation? Probably not. But there are a thousands gradations of worse. And I think it wouldn't have been nearly as bad as it is now. The truth is that so many things were done so wrong in this disastrous endeavor that it's inherently difficult to pick apart the relative importance of each screw up to the eventual result.
I know there are a lot of people who either think that Iraq was a doable proposition that was botched or a project destined for failure no matter how it was handled. There are, needless to say, fewer and fewer in the former category. And I'd basically class myself in the latter one, if pushed. But both strike me as needlessly dogmatic viewpoints which make it harder to learn from the myriad mistakes that were made while telling us little about how we extricate ourselves from the mess.
Watching the president snap back to his usual state of denial, what I've been thinking about recently is how much of a difference it would have made if the White House had publicly recognized, say back in 2004, that Iraq was on a slow slide toward anarchy and started rethinking things enough to stem the descent to disaster. Let's say early 2005. Earlier the better. But let's give the benefit of the doubt and say it would have been hard to make the course correction in the midst of a presidential election. How much could have been accomplished? How much of this could have been avoided if the White House hadn't continued to pretend, for political reasons, that things were going well? And since the president now seems inclined to continue with his disastrous policy for the next two years, should we ask in advance what could have been avoided over the next two years if he'd only had the courage to confront reality today.
--Josh Marshall
It's enough to sink a political career: still more evidence of Mitt Romney's social tolerance emerges. What'll we tell the children?
--Paul Kiel
In Florida's 13th, the state tests continue while the evidence mounts that the voting machines' glitches threw the election.
--Paul Kiel
TPM Reader PJM responds to YF ...
President Bush’s war of choice in Iraq has now lasted 45 months with no end yet in sight. By contrast, the US war against Germany officially lasted 41 months and the war against Japan 44 months, and the US battled these countries and their allies simultaneously, around the globe. This means that America’s will in Iraq has already been tested longer than our will in all of WWII.President Bush has frequently asked, “If people disagree with my policies why do they keep re-electing me?” Earlier this month voters resoundingly rejected Republican war policy by electing Democratic congressional majorities. Yet President Bush now ignores the will of the same people he previously used to justify his policies.
The blame for the Iraq fiasco clearly belongs on this Administration’s failure to define a clear mission and achieve it, not on America’s lack of will. Any attempt by President Bush to blame Democrats for the situation in Iraq should be treated as the shallow, self-serving response it represents.
--Josh Marshall
George Will's take on Jim Webb's now famous exchange with Bush.
In his edited version, the President asked Webb "a civil and caring question," only to be met with "calculated rudeness."
--Paul Kiel
TPM Reader YF: "Wait for it. When Iraq breaks out into a full blown regional conflict and openly declared civil war as it appears ready to do at any moment you can bet your !#@ the Bush Administration will say: 'Look, as soon as you people start talking about pulling out all hell breaks loose', blaming it all on the 'appeasers'. Bush, whose foreign “policy” more and more resembles an argument you might hear in a bar, won’t be able to help himself. From the current position I only see the local politics of this getting uglier."
--Josh Marshall
Calling everybody's favorite federal agency "Kafkaesque," a judge forces FEMA to resume payments to thousands of Katrina victims whose aid had been cut off. That and other news of the day in today's Daily Muck.
--Paul Kiel
WashTimes: "Rival Shi'ite and Sunni groups are massing their militias in expectation of major confrontations, Iraqis say, even as President Bush prepares to meet today with the nation's embattled prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki. Mr. Bush's meeting in Jordan is part of a wider attempt to involve Iraq's neighbors in efforts to end Iraq's vicious sectarian violence before it spills over into a larger regional conflict. But Iraqis on both sides of their nation's sectarian divide report worrisome signs that the conflict will soon evolve into pitched battles between large armed groups."
--Josh Marshall
WaPo: "As late as Wednesday afternoon, it appeared that the White House was planning to go ahead with a three-way meeting that evening among Bush, Maliki and King Abdullah of Jordan. But when reporters showed up at the palace where the meeting was to take place, they were told by White House counselor Dan Bartlett that the session was off."
--Josh Marshall
Over at TPMCafe, Todd Gitlin has a post up which, in turn, picks up on a column by Harold Myerson. And it reminds me of a conversation we had here at TPM a few days ago along the lines that the comparisons between Iraq and Vietnam may actually be far too optimistic.
During the Vietnam war (and to an extent during all the Cold War proxy wars) the US always had a substantial anti-Communist constituency in the country. You can debate how large that constituency was and how great a constituency they were to support. But there's no questioning the fact that they existed, just as there was in pretty much all the Latin American insurgency/Cold War proxy wars in the 20th century. What's more, in the country's in question, those anti-Communist constituencies were often quite powerful -- certainly, in most cases, powerful out of proportion to their numbers.
In Iraq, however, it's not clear we have anything remotely like that. True, there's a smattering of western-educated sophisticates and liberals who probably would like Iraq to be more like the US. But that's not to say that they necessarily like what we're doing in the country -- a mistaken leap of logic that routinely gets made. And among the major, powerful groups in the country we have at best, contingent and often momentary support from whomever we're not against. So, we have a marriage of convenience with the Shi'as while we're mauling the Sunnis, and vice versa. The Kurds are a significant exception to this general observation, but because of their relatively small slice of the population, their inherent antagonism toward most of the neighboring states and the fact that they're geographically limited to the north, I'm not sure it's an exception that changes the general truth.
This bleak situation showed itself most clearly in the recent discussion of administration thinking on just whose side we would choose to support if and when we finally decide to start calling the situation in Iraq a 'civil war'. Going on four years running the place (officially or in effect) we're still not certain who our friends are. And that's really a round-about way of saying we don't have any.
--Josh Marshall
U.S. forced to apologize in writing to the man who the FBI mistakenly arrested in 2004 for aiding terrorist bombings of Spanish commuter trains. Oh, and he also gets $2 million.
--Paul Kiel
Bush-Maliki summit postponed. Because of the leaked Hadley memo? Or because a chunk of Maliki's government just resigned? At least the adults are in charge.
--Josh Marshall
If you're a white collar defense attorney who specializes in defending corporate clients against congressional investigations, you can't wait until January.
--Paul Kiel
Most pundits don't give much attention to pols' middle names. But once Republicans found out Barack Obama's middle name was 'Hussein', well ... see for yourself.
--Josh Marshall
So Bill Frist is not running for president in 2008.
So I guess if he'd known he was going to get the presidential run he might have held on to his senate seat and even his dignity.
--Josh Marshall
Your update on Florida's 13th, where the state's first run of tests on electronic voting machines brought "intriguing" results.
--Paul Kiel
Obama's book number one on the Times hardcover nonfiction best sellers list.
--Greg Sargent
A federal judge strikes down a presidential order on blocking terrorist funding as "impermissibly vague." That and other news of the day in today's Daily Muck.
--Paul Kiel
Getting off to a great start (from 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.
Can he vote on bills from Gitmo?
--Josh Marshall
Rep. Alcee Hastings (D-FL) releases statement after Speaker-to-be Pelosi gives him the bad news.
Take away line: "Sorry, haters, God is not finished with me yet."
--Josh Marshall
Bush: "There is one thing I’m not going to do. I am not going to pull our troops off the battlefield before the mission is complete."
--Josh Marshall
AP: "Democrats won control of the [Pennsylvania] state House of Representatives for the first time in 12 years Tuesday as Chester County officials settled a pair of hotly contested House races three weeks after the election. In the closest race, Democrat Barbara McIlvaine Smith was declared the winner in the 156th District by a 23-vote margin."
--Josh Marshall
Since I've only been listening to the liberal media I thought Iraq was on a slippery slope to hell. Turns out it's on the course to renewal.
--Josh Marshall
You may have read today's AP story about how the government's civil liberties oversight panel was "impressed" with the privacy protections built into the president's warrantless wiretapping program.
Over at TPMmuckraker, Justin Rood has the rundown on why you should take that with a grain of salt.
--Paul Kiel
More revelations forthcoming of RNC Chairman-to-be Mel Martinez's ties to Jack Abramoff?
--Paul Kiel
Okay, not that it's a surprise. But let's just stipulate for the record that the election results earlier this month didn't mean jack to the president when it comes to Iraq. Here's a story in the Times with the president not only blaming everyone but himself for the disaster he's created in Iraq but specifically laying the whole thing on al Qaida.
Said the president: "There’s a lot of sectarian violence taking place, fomented, in my opinion, because of the attacks by Al Qaeda, causing people to seek reprisal[s]."
To the extent that we can read 'al Qaida' as a gloss for 'people blowing things up' this is no doubt true to a certain extent. But that's sort of like the president saying not to blame the Katrina debacle on him when it was mainly the hurricane's fault.
The Times piece does a pretty good job explaining how everyone in the military and intelligence circles now agrees that 'al Qaida' (whatever that means in Iraq exactly) is not the real issue in what's happening. But to the president, it's still us versus al Qaida. Possibly with outside support from Dr. Evil and KAOS. I really never thought this country could be run for a significant period of time by a president who seems captive of dingbat conspiracy theories and the strategic complexity of a children's bedtime story.
The illusory couple-week post-election window of non-denial has closed.
--Josh Marshall
Gingrich: Terror war requires "different set of rules" for free speech.
Actually, just looking forward to next year, as sad as it will be for the country, there may be a high entertainment value watching at least a slice of the cast of GOP presidential hopefuls battle for most hawkish on Iraq.
Call it the war-on-terror-maximalism mini-primary.
--Josh Marshall
Alas, a sad moment. Victoria Wulsin (D) concedes to Rep. Jean Schmidt (R) in Ohio's 2nd district.
But in this case what's bad for the country is good for TPM. Lotsa good copy from this fool.
--Josh Marshall
Ledeen's quick and easy plan for victory and an end of the bloodshed in Iraq: overthrow the governments in Damascus and Tehran. Then everything will fall into place.
Presumably he's still got Cheney's ear.
--Josh Marshall
Who needs a free press? U.S. government wins the right to paw through the New York Times' phone records and see who their confidential sources are. That and other news of the day in today's Daily Muck.
--Justin Rood
The Cheney-ites play their card. From the NYT ...
A senior American intelligence official said Monday that the Iranian-backed group Hezbollah had been training members of the Mahdi Army, the Iraqi Shiite militia led by Moktada al-Sadr.The official said that 1,000 to 2,000 fighters from the Mahdi Army and other Shiite militias had been trained by Hezbollah in Lebanon. A small number of Hezbollah operatives have also visited Iraq to help with training, the official said.
Iran has facilitated the link between Hezbollah and the Shiite militias in Iraq, the official said. Syrian officials have also cooperated, though there is debate about whether it has the blessing of the senior leaders in Syria.
The intelligence official spoke on condition of anonymity under rules set by his agency, and discussed Iran’s role in response to questions from a reporter.
The interview occurred at a time of intense debate over whether the United States should enlist Iran’s help in stabilizing Iraq. The Iraq Study Group, directed by James A. Baker III, a former Republican secretary of state, and Lee H. Hamilton, a former Democratic lawmaker, is expected to call for direct talks with Tehran.
The claim about Hezbollah’s role in training Shiite militias could strengthen the hand of those in the Bush administration who oppose a major new diplomatic involvement with Iran.
Is it true? Is Hezbollah training the Mahdi Army? I have no idea. And regrettably, under current management, the fact that senior intelligence officials or senior administration officials say it, really doesn't mean much one way or another. It certainly wouldn't be particularly shocking if one radical Shia para-military (actually not that 'para') backed by Iran had ties to Iraqi Shia in the south who also have close ties to Iran.
Everybody's enemy's enemy is a friend. We do know the Israelis are knee-deep in Iraqi Kurdistan, right?
The truth or falsity of this new intel from the same sources of the reliably bogus intel of recent years, though, seems of secondary interest to the debate that's getting set up. It's a recipe and the argument for staying in Iraq permanently. We can't get out because getting out means coming to an accomodation with Iran and Syria who've already been meddling in Iraq.
If we're trying to overthrow the Iranian government -- which we've said we are -- is it greatly surprising that they're either having or allowing their proxies to help train the Iraqi militia which is helping pin us down in Iraq?
That doesn't mean it's good or bad, only that it's hardly unexpected. And it brings us back to the key question: what's our goal in Iraq. Not what it may or may not have been three years ago. But what is it right now? Is being in Iraq making us more or less secure? Do we want to stay there indefinitely or do we want to began the process of leaving in such a way as to leave as stable and safe a situation as possible? Those are the key questions. Letting a purported connection between Hezbollah and the Mahdi Army drive our thinking is just another way of saying we want to stay forever because if we don't Iran will have won.
The Times quotes former NSC official Flynt Leverett saying: “That sound to me a little bit strained. I have a hard time thinking it is a really significant piece of what we are seeing play out on the ground with the various Shiite militia forces.”
I think he has it just right.
--Josh Marshall
Judge orders Coingate crook, Tom Noe, to pay back $13.7 million.
Good luck on getting the money.
--Josh Marshall