I have noidea what these two wings represent and i read Krugman daily and follow Biden closely, Pollack less so. Wouldn't itbe helpfulfor this discussion if you spelled out how you perceive these two wings. I can say one thing. I reject the Biden view of foreign policy; I think Kerry more or less ran on it; I think  it was a mistake politically and it is wrong. We do NOT need more troops in Iraq (Afghanistan yes...but it may be too late there) then (when Kerry was running and now. And if the Democrats offer up a smogasbord of Biden/Clinton foreign policy, I will not vote or support it. I have lost time, money effort suppoorting losing Democrats |(who I really didn't agree with) the last eight years . The next election if it is not someone I strongly agree with, the Democrats can lose without my vote. One thing I would like to see discussed in one of these posts. How would Kerry have fared if he had been elected.  Clearly he is better than Bush in many ways; but I think he would have been a disaster on Iraq. It might be better for progressives that he lost. Let me know your thoughts.

I'm not taking sides, even though my dislike of Howard Dean is well documented here. Putting that aside, I submit that we have got to get over trashing our elected Democrats. Of the four choices mentioned in this thread, Biden is the only one who has found a way to be currently speaking for an electorate that elected him. Pollack and Krugman have yet to put their ideas into the marketplace of competitive politics by standing for election, as far as I know, and Dean did so but was rejected by the overwhleming majority of the Democratic electorate during the primaries. So, let's keep some respect for the ballot box. After all, it is the way that ordinary Democrats at the grassroots level make their opinions known.

If you mean the two sides being one Krugman "get out" or "stay till we finish" Biden, I must agree with Krugman.  The state of chaos serves no one.  The claim that the minute w get out Iraq will fall into civil war assumes that somehow Iraq is now in a state of civil unity.  The under the radar issues right now:  buidling the massive military bases, selling off the Iraqui oil and who benefits from chaos in the middle east?  
In all counts the US has to get out. I agree with Krugman.  The idea that Bush made this mess and we can somehow clean it up in the status quo is absolutely ridiculous.  The Iraqis, like generations before them, will figure out how to negotiate a peace and put their nation together again without the help of the "great white men" with guns and western ideas.  Arabs have had and will have ways of making peace and war with each other.  But will America let go of the oil or of the military presence ?  No, it's not about the Iraqi people, it's not about democracy--it's about Neocon imperialism.  

OK I read them both....

The way for ward for the Krugman side is actually to be less partisan. Every time you point out the incompetence of Bush, you give Pollack or the rest of the Dem establishment hope that they can try out their schemes on Iraq.

Whenever I read a Dem talk about improving procurement in Iraq, I know this means the Dem wants his hand in the cookie jar too.

Pollacks article was of course silly. He makes all these points that are so obviously green. Like "we need to have more US troops patrolling the streets of Baghdad"... then there will be even more dead troops, and the process of pullout will accelerate.

Theft of the oil revenues.... you know, it's the people we put into the government who are stealing them for private enrichment! If we pull the brake on that gravy train, then the Shiites and Kurds will turn against us.

LOL--"Democrats should be less partisan and negative toward Bush, and then they'd have influence."

Did you watch the Democratic and Republican Conventions last summer?  Which of the two was more partisan and negative?  And who won?

Republicans got Clinton impeached over a marital indiscretion and it cost Gore the election.  And yet a month ago, Democrats who talked about impeachment based on the Downing Street revelations were looked upon as extremists.  With 40% of the population now in agreement, they can hardly be seen as extremists.

We're getting nowhere being nice and reasonable.  We should demand what we think is the best course for America, not what we think will sound sane in comparison to the lunatics in the White House.

America is beginning to realize that George Bush sent us on a snipe hunt for WMDs in Iraq, with no real clue what he was doing.  And Americans are getting upset.  When they begin waking up to the fact that we gave up hunting the real terrorists of 9/11 in order to go off on this snipe hunt, there's going to be hell to pay and rightly so.  We don't want to be supporting the snipe hunt--we want to be able to say, "it is BAD we stopped hunting Osama in order to catch Saddam.  I can't believe how he suckered us all into this.  Now, to fix it, I think we're gonna have to..."

Josh wrote a lot about Pollack on TPM in the lead-up to the war, including a lengthy two part interview which Josh might consider putting up ion the Cafe.  Yeah, Pollack was wrong about the war but he wasn't belligerent about it, he wasn't dismissive about people's concerns or insulting towards people who disagreed.

All I'm saying is that Pollack was thoughtful in his disagreement.

The thing that the Pollack/Biden people need to overcome is that they often seem to be as infected with the same cynicism and bad faith that have been the hallmark of the Bush administration during all phases of this thing.  As the public moves further and further away from support of this business, it is hard to see the Pollcak/Biden position as anything other than tweaking an already bad situation.  Over coming this would be real leadership -- because that means that they will have crafted a vision for some real, benchmarkable success in Iraq.  Their current, "Yes, but the Bush people are doing it wrong" just looks like CYA on the part of people who still need to justify their (very crucial) support of this botched business.
 

That said, I am not so certain about the pull out now position.  Krugman raises a question that I have been asking everywhere about a timeline -- that is, wouldn't an exit timeline tell the Iraqis how much time they have to get their act together and shoulder the burden of quelling the insurgents?  There is something to be said for incentives.

 But the Pollak/Biden PNAC-lite position has only one hope for  a real test of its success, and that is to try it without the Bush Administration.  An administration that is more invested in a good outcome for the Iraqis and the region, rather that its own steadfastness (!) may be able to implement some of the ideas that might get the job (mostly) done.

But that would be too late, right? 

Above all else Kerry is an honest and courageous man. If he had won we could once again trust that what the White House is saying is at least very near the truth. Kerry would have had the respect of other world leaders. Kerry would negotiate with NATO and the EU towards a multi-nation course of action for Iraq.

But, there is more to being President than running the Iraq mis-adventure. Kerry would appoint reasonably well qualified people to administration posts, would appoint moderates to the Supreme Court and the lesser courts, and would work to slow global warming, stop the rape of the environment, etc. A Kerry administration would once again have our country listed among the world leaders, and not listed as a war crimes participant.

>Moreover, we need to relearn the lessons that the marines and Green Berets learned in Vietnam and the British learned in Northern Ireland. American troops need to be on the streets, patrolling on foot with Iraqis, to reassure civilians. This is the only way to create a safe "space" for Iraq's economy and society to revive.<

>shift the bulk of our troops from trying to pacify insurgent hotspots that may never support reconstruction and toward keeping the peace in areas dominated by Shiites and urban Sunnis<

> America doesn't have to let itself be taken hostage. The country missed the chance to say no before this war started, but it can still say no to Mr. Bush's open-ended commitment, and demand a timetable for getting out.<

>this argument will be hard to sell. Despite everything that has happened, many Americans still want to believe that this war can and should be seen through to victory.  But it's time to face up to . . .  realities.<

Way too late!  Set a timeline and then get out of there.  I am with the Krug.

Someone needs to tell Joe Biden:

a.) Scoop Jackson is dead

b.) Scoop Jackson never made it to the nomination, never mind the White House

Biden's not only running our of an <I>old</i> playbook, he's running out of a <I>failed</i> playbook. 

Paul Krugman.

That's who you think should be leading the Dems to the promised land.

Krugman.

Get ready to lose a few more elections.

Winning five or six consecutive elections in one small blueish state no more validates Biden's national Democratic support than it does Dean's, and it certainly says nothing about the correctness of his views.

And Dean's views on the war were (correctly) shared by the great majority of the Democratic electorate, who nonetheless voted for Kerry in the belief (mistaken, in my view) that he was more electable.

And I will agree that, except in extraordinary circumstances, we should not trash elected Democrats.  Or unelected ones, for that matter.  But we have to be able to have vigorous give-and-take on the wisdom of various foreign policies (as I rambled about here in America Abroad) without assuming evil, cowardice, ignorance or naivete on the part of any who disagree with us.

The Pollack/Biden plan requires more troops. We don't have more troops.

Not much of a plan, then, is it?

This is so frustrating I want to scream, but I will try to keep my composure and write.

Before the most asinine foreign policy adventure in the entire history of the United States, there were millions of Americans who foretold this outcome down to the last detail.

1. Whatever weapons Iraq may have had, the situation was not so dangerous that Saddam could not be contained.

2. Iraq was not a supporter of terrorism, had no link to 9-11 and was no threat to our country, direct or indirect.

3. A fairly easy victory would be followed by a "peace from hell" (Molly Ivins).

4. Americans in Iraq would energize the Muslim fanatics and aid Al Qaeda recruitment, turning Iraq into the threat it had never been.

5. For thousands of years one conqueror after another had become bogged down and finally defeated in Iraq. They are the most tenacious people in the world and they have memories that last for millennia. It could happen to us!

Such a track record would earn anyone in any area of life the right to be heard. In business, science, ANYWHERE, people who had been so wrong and wasted so many resources would be shown the door, but not in American politics. A recent article in Newsweek ended with, "this war is proving to be longer and nastier than almost anyone expected." Anyone? ANYONE? What the hell are they talking about? Millions of us never even existed?  The article should have said "...anyone from my social strata or circle of friends expected."

We have earned our right to be heard! The Biden wing, those pumped-up pinstriped plutocrats whose egos are too huge to admit a mistake, must now sit down and let people like Krugman and Dean, whose understanding of history, society, LIFE is so much greater, take charge!

Joe Biden represents the state of Delaware, a state that has only 800,000 people.  By comparison, Barbara Boxer's margin of victory in her most recent Senate race was 3 million votes.   It takes about 40 minutes to drive across the state at its widest (E-W) point.

Furthermore, the state of Delaware finances itself by making itself the preferred headquarters for corporations and banks, and Joe Biden leans over so far to back whatever these institutions want that he is commonly referred to as (D-MBNA) by Democratic activists, though with the recent merger that's (D-BOA). He has no hope of running for higher office, and he only gets as much TV exposure as he does because he, along with Joe Lieberman, is the go-to guy when someone wants to put a Democrat on the air who will bash other Democrats. If he runs for president, he won't win one state outside Delaware.

Should the Democrats regain the Senate in 2007, it would be a disaster for Biden to be de-facto (because of committee assignment)  

Dan,

It isn't about vengeance, it's about saving the country.

We need to reverse the Bush/Pollak policy in a hurry, or we we see the destruction of the US army, the permanent alienation of all our allies, and the permanent crippling of our economy.

Look, when are you guys (DLC? sorry, I don't really know) going to realize that the war was <em>not</em>, for the Bushies, a serious or important project? It was -- entirely, completely, unmistakably -- a political project to pad up POTUS's (then) high approval ratings into the re-election campaign.

There is no substance to their planning. Even their wishful thinking doesn't deserve wishing! They didn't draft an exit strategy because they didn't know what  would constitute victory. No one does even now. When I hear people say "for Iraq to become a stable democracy," I have to hang my head in desperation. What does that even mean??  To be like Switzerland? Like Greece? Like India? How is this miraculous transformation going to be produced? This is confused thinking of the most childish kind.  It is so confused that it is impossible even to believe that the movers and shakers in the WH could be motivated <em>by it</em>.  No adult person in a relatively high professional position can even think of making decisions based on such fatuous vapor. They must have had more solid benefits to strive for, and those were all in full display on Nov 4 of last year.

And yet there is Pollack again, taking this stuff seriously. "We might achieve that if we had more troops": this is like a mantra. Where is the argument? "Buy the sheiks": oh yeah, start with graft on a grand scale, that will produce a really stable democracy.

This is really a fantastic moment in history: a WH that got us into war for the most cynical, yet fully visible, of motives; and an opposition that somehow still takes the WH's propaganda at face value.  

It seems to me the value of uniting and strengthening the Democratic party behind either a Pollack/Biden or Krugman/?? message addressing the Iraq situation depends on which of these perspectives most accurately describes the current problems and  most closely relflects the facts on the ground.

Despite the oft repeated assertion that; "It would be disastrous for us to withdraw from Iraq before we've accomplished our mission", as far as I'm concerned the jury's still "out" on this idea. First of all, aside from all the grandiose rhetoric about freedom, democracy and liberation, there's little if any evidence on the ground in Iraq that the overall situation is getting better. In fact, what evidence there is suggests the situation is deteriorating. (Now, polling in Iraq might suggest people are somewhat more optimistic about their future there, but let's not forget that most Romans were pretty optimistic about their own future all the way up until the barbarians crashed the gates and sacked the city).

So, whether our military presence is primarily part of the problem or part of the solution is a central question that needs to be addressed directly. and the perspective of whoever is able to address this question best will get my attention, be it Biden/Pollack or Krugman and several 10's of millions of fellow citizens who believe our militarty presence in Iraq was not only a mistake from the gitgo, but also is provoking the spread of violence now rather than defeating it.