We threw an election in Iraq. Declare victory and pull out. Countries like Vietnam and Iraq mean little except as a mirror for our domestic politics. If we pulled out now, the civil war would quickly wind down with the Kurds assuming more and more autonomy until Kurdistan is formed in 30 years, and the Shia and Sunnis reaching an accomodation.

Meanwhile, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, where the real war on Muslim fundamentalism will be played out, will await a more honest and confident administration.

We can only win on this issue if we demagogue it hard. The blame game has to be won by won side or the other -- it cannot be evaded. This kind of thing, in these times, is not capable of a civilized resolution.

The other side is already raving. They are capable of inflating small errors (or non-errors) into major crimes. Think what they could do with an Iraq withdrawal.

Either we destroy the hard right of the Republican Party, or they destroy us. There's no middle ground. (By and large, the moderate Republicans are slaves of the right. Almost all of them supported Bush in 2004).

Note the "if". Bush is a murderer and a criminal, but most of the Democratic party is neither willing nor able to play the Bartcop game. And the media are hopeless, and will immediately go to bat for the Bush Crime Family.

Modus tollens, we cannot win on this issue.

http://www.bartcop.com

http://billmon.org/archives/001918.html

My browser ate my cookies

Leslie Gelb a reliable source? Ten divisions pointed at Iran? Iraqi security forces not controlled by the Shia government? Rice doing her talking to Ghalabi and Allawi? As said above, the Shia in Iraq look to Tehran for help against us. As Harold Ford said, the "official government" complaining about Iranian infiltration.

Look, I don't know how Bush/Cheney/neocons think they going to keep control of Iraq,the US Armed Forces, and the American People, but I bet they have a plan. We are not leaving Iraq. If you think softer Republicans or Democrats will leave Iraq, then they won't get elected. I suggest you work on electoral reform and verifiable voting, because I suspect that is part of the plan, but I understand even the suggestion of suspicious ballots is off limits to Washington insiders.

Or maybe if we are ruled by madmen and monsters and mobsters we ought to start acting like it.

bob mcmanus

Increasingly, it looks like our future actions on Iraq will be dictated to us by circumstance.  It's civil war, separate states, or brutal strongman.  Those are the choices, and we'll choose only as soon as that becomes clear that those really are the only choices available.

I agree that there isn't much point of being the "I told you so" party, however briefly satisfying that might be.  What might be useful is to make an open effort to determine how this happened, so we can promise Americans that we won't make the same silly mistakes on our watch.  (It would also give heart to those of us who worry that, for lack of a will to examine our own missteps, we will make the same mistakes on our watch.) 

But I don't see much benefit in Democrats openly making the case for withdrawl.  Any arguments we make will be regarded with suspicion by the Republicans and the DLC crowd.  The most we can do is create an intellectual framework for them to adopt once they've come to the conclusion on their own that we should get out.  If we push that framework towards them, they'll reject it out of hand, and we'll be stuck in Iraq all that much longer. 

I think anyone who thinks that either Democrats or Republicans are going to emerge from this mess covered in political glory is deceiving themselves.  Here is the sad truth about Iraq:

It's going to fall apart if we stay.

It's going to fall apart if we leave.

No matter what happens, the denoument of the American adventure in Iraq be very ugly, and everyone here in the United States will begin blaming everyone else.  In the firestorm of blaming, hardly anyone will emerge looking good, and people will believe those they prefer to believe.

Weasly fence-siting centrist Democrats will be denounced for opportunism and moral cowardice.  The left will be ridiculed as the "loony left" and pilloried for their anti-imperialist, anti-nationalist and anti-militarist views. 

Pro-war Democrats and Republicans will be denounced for getting us into the mess.  Antiwar Democrats and Republicans will be denounced for weakening public and troop morale and losing the war. 

And in 30 years or so, we'll do it all again, in an atempt to shake off our "Iraq syndrome".

I think we can say one thing for sure about the current leadership in Washington.  Many of them are going down.  This traumatic catastrophe will usher in a generational change in Washington.  Candidates running for office would do well to distance themselves from their national party organizations to the greatest extent possible, and run as anti-Washington and effectively unaffiliated.

I suspect historians will come to view the aftermath of 9/11 as one of the lowest points in US history.  The country responded to that blow with an uninspiring mix of fear, vengefulness, sadism, moral fanaticism, chauvinism, vanity, stupidity and xenophobia.  Respect for the truth, never a preeminent value and politics, has declined to a terrifyingly debased level.  Americans of all political stripes take it complacently for granted that everyone lies to everyone, and continually struggle to out-think both their opponents and themselves is the disgusting game of political advantage, staying three rhetorical moves ahead at all times.  The Washington pols and punditocracy lie so much they don't even know what the truth is anymore.  Yet they strategize endlessly about what new round of phony poll-crafted messages to hawk, and what new piles of bullshit to shovel.

As we're becoming more and more aware, framing is a crucial component to today's political discourse. The anti-war movement needs to find a frame that works against "stay the course" and shows that old chestnut in the worst possible light.

One solution--and I'm just beginning to put this into some kind of focus even in my own head--is to reframe "we won't set a date for withdrawal" into something more sinister or irresponsible. "President Bush's Open-Ended War" or "Bush's Permanent War" spring to mind: something that clearly connects the President's name with the idea of an endless commitment of time, money and lives. Whatever frame is settled on, it would be used again and again and again, probably without explanation, since the Right has shown us that a good frame has a life of its own and needs no explanation.

While we're at it, someone needs to do something about the "the worst mistake we could make is to set a date for withdrawal" meme. What do people who say this think--that we're going to be able to sneak out of Iraq one night without a trace? Whenever we leave, people are going to see us packing our bags before we actually hop that freight out of town. That's unavoidable.

It's important to recall from the 1970s that the public can turn against a war while turning even more sharply against an anti-war movement they perceive as insufficiently patriotic.

Not just the 1970s.  Every voluntary war the US has entered has spelled disaster for the political faction that opposed it.  This is what the Democrats have to keep in mind as we fashion a way to salvage some kind of victory.

War of 1812 - anti-war Federalist Party disintegrated

Mexican War - opposition Whigs had to nominate paradoxically a general from the war to survive the next election cycle, eventually fell apart from war's consequence

Civil War - Democrats out of White House 1861-1885, thanks to Copperheads

Spanish-American, WWI, WWII, Korea - N/A, bipartisan support for wars.

For the case that there are still a bunch of things that merit trying before we fold the tent and withdraw see www.democracyarsenal.org

Seems like there's little point in saying anything about the further course of the war. Has the administration listened in the past? If it's the Democrats offering good advice, does that make the Administration more or less likely to take it?

Why not take every opportunity to talk about what comes after the war, forthrightly assuming that the voters will turn this crew out? Say "no matter what happens, the Army and Marines are hurting, and here's our plan to fix that..." Talk about how we'll repay our debt to the soldiers tossed into this mismanaged war. That could even tie into health care: trumpet the VA medical system's good results, describe how it will be improved to help cope with the large number of wounded who would have died in previous wars, and then talk about how to capitalize on the VA system to improve overall healthcare. (What has the VA done that could be packaged and released into the public domain, for use by all? When providers complain, tell them that the government is committed to providing a higher base upon which the private sector can build, and draw parallels to the interstate highway system.)

The Democratic party seems to have lost its base in the working class, and the armed forces are a big chunk of the working class. Convince them we're on their side, 'cause the geostrategic discussions are moot until the Republicans are out. Going public with them has no upside.

Every two years we are asked to vote for Congressmen and Senators. In order to know how to vote we need to have information on how well the incumbents have done their jobs. For that, we need to be given the facts by the news media and we need to evaluate those facts. Today that is virtually impossible for the average voter. The Republicans have persuaded us that discussing the facts, what has happened over the past few years, is just not patriotic.

I think it is up to us to counter this "patriotic" nonsense. We need to continue to talk about what has happened under Bush and the GOP's watch. We need to make sure everyone knows how we ended up mired in an impossible war in Iraq, and in a perpetual "war" on terror, which distracts us from the real problems we face. Our primary goal has to be planting the responsibility for this entirely on the Republicans and Bush in particular. Anything less will leave the voters believing that Democrats are the problem.

Don't worry, Matt; no one will mistake the Democratic Party for any kind of antiwar movement, thanks to all the "pragmatist" Dems who allowed this war to happen by caving in the fall of 2002.  And thanks to running a candidate who was a leading member of that group.

This is not 1970. Pre-invasion opponents of the war on Iraq were not a hippie rabble.  Half the country opposed invasion.  The active opposition to the war was phrased in patriotic, pragmatic terms:  Invading Iraq would not make us safer, it would weaken the campaign to stop terror attacks (through inflaming the Arab world, tying down the military, cost, diplomatic isolation), and it was unnecessary (no links to Al Qaeda much less Sept. 11 attacks, no threat to U.S., inspections and containment were working).


There is a demand that makes sense for those who want to create political space for withdrawal:  Renounce permanent bases; make it official U.S. policy that we will leave Iraq.  Only such an assurance will let Iraqi factions negotiate in good faith, as well as creating pressure to do so.

The Bush administration will not accede to such a demand, since bases are a fundamental objective of the war.  Given that and Condi Rice's amazing assertion that we were told the war in Iraq would be a generational commitment, the door is open for partisans to frame this as 'Bush's endless war'.

Meanwhile citizens can press members of Congress and candidates of both parties for the commitment to leave (renunciation of bases). Those interested in creating that pressure should go here.

<i>I suspect historians will come to view the aftermath of 9/11 as one of the lowest points in US history.  The country responded to that blow with an uninspiring mix of fear, vengefulness, sadism, moral fanaticism, chauvinism, vanity, stupidity and xenophobia.  Respect for the truth, never a preeminent value and politics, has declined to a terrifyingly debased level.  Americans of all political stripes take it complacently for granted that everyone lies to everyone, and continually struggle to out-think both their opponents and themselves is the disgusting game of political advantage, staying three rhetorical moves ahead at all times.  The Washington pols and punditocracy lie so much they don't even know what the truth is anymore.  Yet they strategize endlessly about what new round of phony poll-crafted messages to hawk, and what new piles of bullshit to shovel.</i>

how true, dan. i always heartily agree with your comments, by the way, one of the main reason i visit matt's site.

i do wonder how much weight historians will put on 9/11 itself. i more or less share the thesis that this has been accumulating ever since world war ii and its aftermath spawned a society that glorified war and capitalism, even capitalist politics. in such a society somehow americans were convinced that strong national defense involved trillions spent on undeclared military adventures in foreign countries. thus the cold war spawned the beast that must be fed at all times, the american "security" industry, directly responsible, per the causus belli of bin laden himself, for the attack on the towers, and directly responsible for vietnam and iraq as well as the lesser known mess we've made of colombia (which thankfully for us doesn't involve the deaths of any americans, thus unnewsworthy). so i think historians will look at the period 1955-2025 or so as the rise and fall of the american empire, the fall to be brought by a combination of factors--washington d.c.'s failure to address an impending energy crisis, the decline of america's preeminence in high-tech industry, and the dereliction of vigiliance in the face of electoral fraud by the congress being chief among many others.

your characterization of the blame game, however, was quite an excellent retort to yglesias' fingering the antiwar movement from his typical centrist hawk (pro-"security") pedestool. all sides will receive scorn, and all deserve it, for allowing this atrocity in iraq. even the antiwar movement, of which i am a part, did not act as responsibly and effectively as was necessary, essentially too comfortable to risk real confrontation of the type that is common in bolivia now and en vogue in argentina a few years ago.

i think the dems are already losing significant ground in urban areas, among the younger, educated class, to both anti-war progressives and sensible libertarian antiwar conservatives. as far ahead as yglesias and others try to anticipate republican attacks--why else would matt use the inaccurate term "insurgency" and try to paint the resistance as uniformly evil when in fact there are undoubtedly many decent men and women fighting the american occupation--their efforts to appear simultaneously solidly behind the military and critical of certain aspects of the war will no doubt convince less and less people. the 'waffler' meme has stuck.