The Bush surge is not about "Mission Creep", it is "Mission Leap". Every justification for going to war in Iraq has been exhausted and repudiated. Finally, with the execution of Saddam Hussein, we have jumped the shark. Yes we have deposed Saddam and his regime, we have certified that there are no WMD's in Iraq, and have helped the Iraqi Shia create a fledgling Shia-led government. Go get that "Mission Accomplished" banner and let's start the celebration. It is time to send our combat forces home.

That does not mean we will leave Iraq in peace. Far from it. A sectarian civil war is underway and will probably worsen. But this is a war we cannot win. We might have a chance if we were fighting one insurgency--let's say Zarqawi's Al Qaeda. But we are not. We are in the middle of a hydra headed civil war. We have helped create a lethal version of an Animal House food fight. There are no clear discernible sides. There are multiple Sunni insurgent groups and there are multiple Shia insurgent groups. The most extreme Sunni groups believe their ultimate mission is to kill Shia. Some Shia groups are willing to collaborate with some Sunnis. There is only thing these groups agree on--all see the United States as an intruder and want it expelled.

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This week on TPMCafe's America Abroad, the bloggers are talking about…The President’s new plan for Iraq, and China. My full summary is after the break.

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I asked former CIA and Bush administration National Security Council senior official Flynt Leverett for a quick summary of his thoughts on President Bush's Address to the Nation.

Here is Flynt Leverett's response:

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Well, thank Howard Dean, and I bet Senator Clinton, for making sure we didn't mess up that convention venue issue. Our nominee will be celebrated in Mountain Time and we will have a strategy focussed on Ohio, Wisconsin, Colorado, New Mexico, Nevada, and even (watch out John) Arizona. My land, this will be grand: call us America's party!

An excerpt from “Reconstruction: An Agenda,” by Amitai Etzioni, in publication in the Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, March 2007.

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Others have spent more time following the ins and outs of our failed Iraq policy and can draw on years of expertise in foreign affairs to assess the “mess o’potamia.”

But in reviewing the Bush speech, there appears to be one central delusion – and, unfortunately, it is one that is shared by some vocal opponents of the war as well.

Specifically, Bush has an unrealistic, inflated, almost-imaginary belief in the capabilities and power of the current Iraqi government and military. Bush believes that the Maliki government has the will and the means to stand up to its own sectarian allies; unite Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds; train and fund a truly national Iraq security force; and have that force act in the interests of a unified Iraq – whatever those interests may be. As Michael Gordon of the New York Times put it, “the new plan depends on the good intentions and competence of a Shiite-dominated Iraqi government that has not demonstrated an abundant supply of either.” John Dickerson in Slate was more blunt: “the confidence he [Bush] expressed in the Iraqi government—without caveats, doubts, or warnings—seemed utterly fantastical.”

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With Senator Dodd aiming his sights on predatory lending, perhaps his first target should be prepayment penalties, which I have mentioned in passing before. The typical penalty for a subprime consumer who repays his loan early (usually by refinancing with another lender), is about six months worth of interest. While prepayment penalties are themselves objectionable terms, they also function to lock consumers into loans that are otherwise onerous. Its a form of monopoly power, preventing other lenders from competing to replace a bad loan with a better one.

The mortgage lending industry includes the penalties primarily in their sub-prime loans, on the argument that the lender incurrs lots of upfront costs that it should be allowed to recoup if the borrower chooses to breach its contract by repaying early, thereby depriving the lender of its expectancy, which is the total interest and the stable repayment stream over time. (Believe it or not, there was a time when common law courts refused to allow early repayment whatsoever.) Without such a penalty, lenders argue that they would have to charge higher interest rates.

Does the evidence bear this out? ....

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Chris Dodd, our incoming Senate banking chair, announced a zero tolerance policy for predatory lending just days before throwing his hat in the presidential ring.

Let's hope the timing is more than coincidence. Perhaps it suggests that '08 candidates will take our national debt problems seriously and at least strike out the biggest injustices. (Let's also hope that Dodd's friends in the financial sector -- new ones wooing the banking chair and old ones from insurance-capital Connecticut -- don't talk him out of his pledges.)

The great debate over how to fundamentally fix our broken health care system just got a lot more interesting.

Today, the Economic Policy Institute released the Health Care for America plan – a simple yet sophisticated approach crafted by Jacob Hacker, author of “The Great Risk Shift.” Health Care for America, which you can find at www.sharedprosperity.org, comprehensively tackles the major health care problems holding back our society and economy: the 46 million uninsured, the skyrocketing costs and the uneven quality.

My organization, Campaign for America’s Future, will be launching a nationwide effort to discuss and debate how to get good healthcare coverage for all Americans while controlling spiraling health care costs. The best way to start that debate is to put a simple, clear and progressive health care plan on the table. Health Care for America is that plan, and it will be a benchmark by which all other plans can be judged.

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Is it possible the President is seeking a confrontation with Congress? Might the White House be calculating the political value of being told by Congress how to manage the war, and then passing the responsibility to the Democrats now, instead of in 2009? That would be tragic, if true.

Let’s take the President’s speech on its own terms, but push back analytically:

“Tonight in Iraq, the armed forces of the United States are engaged in a struggle that will determine the direction of the global war on terror and our safety here at home.”

Is Iraq really the struggle that will determine the global war on terror? The argument of Iraq war opponents from the beginning was that it wasn’t. There are so many ways that this critique has been supported: the backsliding in Afghanistan; the global metastasizing of Islamist terrorism with Iraq being a main dynamic; many others as well. To the extent that the statement the President made is now true on its face about Iraq as a central front, it’s because of his policy not in spite of it.

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George Bush still does not get it. The war in Iraq is not and never has been about terrorism. The attacks, the vast majority of attacks carried out against U.S. troops and Iraqis, are not the work of foreign jihadists operating under the direction of Osama Bin Laden. The facts on the ground do not support it.

Although U.S. forces have killed the head of Al Qaeda in Iraq, Zarqawi, violence has soared unabated. The reason is simple and the solution complex. The U.S. presence in Iraq has unleashed a sectarian war that pits Sunni against Shia. The United States now finds itself confronted with equally unpalatable choices: 1) Back the Sunnis and piss of the Shias, or 2) Back the Shias and piss off the Sunnis.

Bush tonight signals that we are going to pitch our tent with the Shias except we also are going to fight the one Shia, Moktada al Sadr and his Mahdi Army militia, who are the most anti-Iranian of the Shia. Great! The one group of Shias not closely aligned with Iran are the ones we will attack. This is madness.

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David Finkel from the Washington Post wrote a really interesting piece following Robert Iles, a full-time worker in Achison Kansas, “lucky” enough to already be making $7.25 per hour.  Robert's $15,080 annual salary gets used up quickly since this 22-year-old's wages support himself, his father, and his mother. Robert’s Dad can’t work because he is legally blind, suffers from leukemia, and has a partially amputated foot from diabetes. Robert’s Mom used to make $6.25/hour as a nursing home aide, but had to quit to take full-time care of her husband.

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Peter Beinart and Mark Schmitt are all wrong. Greg is mostly right. Contemporary liberals who recognized the unwisdom of the Iraq occupation long before, say, The New Republic, are nothing like the original neo-cons.

The central premise of the old neo-cons was the doctrine that indulgence of murderous dictators and unlimited defense expenditures in the name of anti-Sovietism , not to mention harebrained democratization schemes, was no vice. (That neo-con John F. Kennedy thought nation-building in South Vietnam was a good idea.)

Remember, authoritarian totalitarians were susceptible to downfall, but communist dictators were forever? At the height of popularity of this nostrum, as Daniel Moynihan himself pointed out later, unbeknowst to the CIA the Soviet economy was in an advanced stage of collapse. And today the Democratic Republic of Vietnam manufactures shoes for Nike.

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Two key Senators started the Net Neutrality debate by introducing legislation. But the tactics of Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt remain.

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Earlier today, House Democrats pushed through an increase in the minimum wage – from $5.15 to $7.25, as part of their first 100 hours initiatives. Many conservatives and pro-business groups are concerned that the minimum wage will hurt economic growth by forcing small businesses to raise prices or hire fewer workers. And President Bush has signaled that he’d sign the bill only if it includes a tax break for small businesses. So it’s well worth inquiring - particularly in an age of huge deficits - whether a tax break for small business would actually be needed to offset the new wage – or if small businesses would do just fine without it.

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Like Greg, I read Peter Beinart’s column analogizing today’s liberals to the early neoconservatives associated with the journal The Public Interest, and while the line about how ”we spent more time tearing down icons than building them up” jumped out at me and had me prepared to hate it, in the end I thought it was a good and provocative piece, and I don’t see the “insult” or “libel” that Greg sees.

Yes, the historical analogy is facile (Is that surprising? The facile-historical-analogy racket has been a rewarding one for Beinart.) but there’s something to it,

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A few weeks ago, I mentioned that federal agriculture subsidies benefit wealthy mega-farmers at the expense of smaller, middle class family farmers - and create severe market distortions in the process.

Democrats in Congress are thinking about ways to fix the problem. Says Earl Blumenauer of Orgegon: "It currently is not serving most states, it's not serving most farmers, it's not fiscally conservative."

The take away point from Jonathan Rauch's excellent article:

No one, not anyone, would sit down today and design the current farm programs. Although much revised in their details, they remain a paradigm of New Deal heavy-handedness, distorting markets in a way that accomplishes little at high cost. Subsidies are absurdly lopsided: 93 percent of payments flow to five crops (corn, cotton, rice, soybeans, and wheat), which together account for only a fifth of U.S. farm receipts. Meanwhile, 60 percent of farmers and ranchers get nothing.

Howard Kurtz is a compassionate soul who believes that the nation has not heard enough from William Kristol, and needs more of his Iraq wisdom in the pages of Time. "Lots of media people, liberal as well as conservative, were wrong about the war," opines Kurtz. If he clamored for more of those wrong-headed liberals to get slots on the networks, or in the newsmagazines, I missed it.

Kurtz is satisfied that Time, in its finite wisdom, has also signed up Michael Kinsley to balance Bill Kristol. The estimable Kinsley has often expressed himself sagely on the Iraq debacle (for example, early on, here).

But Mistah Kurtz, he blows smoke. There is not one single regular voice on his contractual network, CNN, nor his contractual newspaper, the Washington Post, nor on a single one of the Sunday morning shows, who gets to sound off wholeheartedly about the unending disaster that George W. Bush has committed in Iraq.

Not one.

I believe I read these words in Kurtz's WP column: "Isn't more debate good?"

Peter Beinart’s new TNR piece attempts to make the case that today’s liberals have become “the true heirs” to the original Public Interest-era neoconservatives because 1) they share the view that the great danger to good government is “a prior commitment to ideology….For it is the nature of ideology to preconceive reality,” and 2) “they [both] spent more time tearing down icons than building them up.” I’m more than happy to plead guilty to the first charge. But it’s a huge and egregiously wrongheaded leap to the second, which Beinart mainly seems to base on “doubts about America’s capacity to remake societies we don’t understand” in foreign policy. The lion’s share of today’s progressives/liberals remain deeply committed to ambitious goals both domestically and internationally. Our continuing commitment to "building up" is exactly what differentiates us from conservatives of every stripe.

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This piece from American Prospect tells how a right-wing Jewish organization is trying to stifle pro-Israel activity by Jewish students who support Israel but not the occupation.

The story is this. The United Progressive Zionists brought former Israeli soldiers to various campuses to discuss the treatment of Palestinians in the occupied territories.

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Earnest and well-intentioned ain't going to cut it in Iraq. Someone needs to get that message to the new U.S. ground commander, Lt. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno. You see, Odierno wants to fight Iraq with the Iraqis he wished existed rather than the sectarian groups who acutally exist. If he persists believing in an Iraq that does not really exist he will fail. Just because you want to believe a circle is square does not mean you can square a circle.

While acknowledging in an interview yesterday at Camp Victory that the nature of the war and the tactics required to prevail had changed, his other comments to reporters reflect an alarming naiveté about the sectarian rifts in Iraq. According to the Los Angeles Times article by Solomon Moore:

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As we think about our response to President Bush’s upcoming announcement on Iraq, we come face to face with a thorny heuristic question: How do we decide among dreadful options? The Hippocratic tie-breaker—“Above all, do no harm”--works well enough among merely bad choices, but not here, where we’ve already done immense harm and are bound to a great deal more no matter how we choose.

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For at least a decade the United States has been beating on China to change its duplicitous stance on intellectual property rights. We’ve had only modest success. Now some Chinese content producers are suing other Chinese companies for copyright infringement. Now maybe we’ll see some action.

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Justin King over at New America has found a Wall Street analysis of the investment outlook on Sallie Mae.

Apparently the possibility of legislation cutting subsidies hasn't spooked investors: Sallie Mae remains in "five star shape," according to Morningstar Rating Services. Student loans remain an "extremely attractive asset" and "Sallie's wide moat should protect its profits over the long haul."

Morningstar also addressed the "controversy" over whether the government could save money making the loans itself. (Really, only the industry itself disputes the possible savings.) Morningstar notes that direct loans might be expanded since "it costs the government less" to originate the loans itself "than if lenders like Sallie originate loans."

Ryan Lizza has an article in today's New York Times Week in Review, "The Invasion of the Alpha Male Democrat," where he discusses the "new macho men" of the Democratic Party. Lizza seems to be questioning whether the presentation of the first woman speaker, bedecked in pearls and surrounded by her own and other members' children and grandchildren will clash with the new breed of men elected to Congress. According to the article, the Dems, led by Rahm Emanuel and Chuck Schumer, no shrinking violets themselves, intentionally recruited former CIA agents and war veterans to run this round--and many of them won. But, let's not forget that women also serve in the CIA and have been war veterans for quite a few years now-and a string of pearls, no matter how decorative, certainly don't mark the measure of a woman's ability to be as tough as any guy in Congress today. Nancy Pelosi is a perfect fit actually, herself bred on knee-knocking politics by her father when he was Mayor of Baltimore with Rahm Emanuel, who studied dance at Sarah Lawrence College (our time overlapped on campus, although I didn't know him there), and Chuck Schumer, the Brooklyn-bred Senator. Don't let the Armani fool you.

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