My Ridiculously Long Iraq Post

I have followed but not posted about the twisting and turning Iraq debate in the House and Senate, because I wanted to see exactly where it was headed first. After a lot of heated negotiation, the House Appropriations Committee yesterday pushed through the emergency supplemental bill which includes a timed withdrawa, beating back language stripping out any oversight on Iraq. Then in the Senate, we actually got debate on a similar bill, but cloture could not be invoked and in fact the bill lost outright on the cloture vote 50-48 (Mark Pryor and Ben Nelson crossed to join the Lieberman-Republican faction). The Senate will have the opportunity to attach something to the supplemental funding request when they get it from the House.

OK, so where are we? We have a bill in the House with a lot of flaws. Jack Murtha's original strategy was to demand readiness for our troops before they could be sent into the field, ensuring they were properly rested, trained and equipped. Now the President can sign a waiver and have the readiness ban lifted. There is an end date, but instead of that end date stopping the funding it essentially declares the war illegal, which will be challenged in court (and the commander-in-chief will have a credible argument to make there). The measure used to have language requiring the Congress to get Congressional approval for an attack on Iran. That language has been removed entirely to satisfy conservative "Blue Dog" Democrats. I understand full well that we have 62 Democratic members of Congress in districts that supported President Bush in 2004; I understand regional constraints. I also know that this war is deeply unpopular, and if Democrats don't do all they can to stop it they risk owning it. And removing the Iran language was just stupid and shortsighted, as John Nichols credibly argues:

Here's how the Speaker messed up:

The Democratic proposal for a timeline to withdraw troops from Iraq included a provision that would have required President Bush to seek congressional approval before using military force in Iran. It was an entirely appropriate piece of the Iraq proposal, as the past experiences of U.S. involvement in southeast Asia and Latin America has well illustrated that when wars bleed across borders it becomes significantly more difficult to end them. Thus, fears about the prospect that Bush might attack Iran are legitimately related to the debate about how and when to end the occupation of Iraq.

Unfortunately, Pelosi is so desperate to advance her flawed spending legislation that she is willing to bargain with any Democrat about any part of the proposal [...]

One of the chief advocates for eliminating the Iran provision, Nevada Democrat Shelley Berkley, said she wanted it out of the legislation because she wants to maintain the threat of U.S. military action as a tool in seeking to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons. "It would take away perhaps the most important negotiating tool that the U.S. has when it comes to Iran," explained Berkley.

The problem with Berkley's "reasoning" -- if it can be called that -- is this: Nothing in the provision that had been included in the spending bill would have prevented Bush from threatening Iran. Nothing in the provision would have prevented war with Iran. It merely reminded the president that, before launching such an attack, he would need to obey the Constitutional requirement that he seek a declaration of war.

By first including the provision and then removing it, Pelosi and her aides have given Bush more of an opening to claim that he does not require Congressional approval.

So in the interest of constraining the President, the House may have given him MORE of an opening to use unitlateral action without consulting the Congress. Furthermore, while practically all of the compromises were designed to stop progressive action on the bill, all of the deal-breakers seen as progressive policies, the House leadership will not even bother taking a whip count on it, calling Iraq legislation "a vote of conscience." While the bill is still likely to pass, it's absurd to take the most important piece of legislation they could pass all year and make no effort at party unity on it.

The real problem here, and maybe it heretical and unspeakable among partisan Democratic circles but it's no less true, is that the Democratic Party has not settled on a consistent foreign policy strategy. It's very easy to criticize this war in Iraq, as their government continues to miss benchmarks and the top general realizes we need more and more Americans to do their jobs for them. We still have a culture of dependency in Iraq, and the mission creep here rivals Vietnam, as more and more soldiers are thrown into the meat grinder (we've now seen 10,000 extra soldiers requested above the initial baseline of 21,500 for the surge). This illusory "progress" that the Administration conned the AP into believing is not grounded in reality; the fighting in Baghdad has moved to Diyala province, and security, along with any kind of political reconciliation, is still a pipe dream.

Yet despite all this evidence that our continued presence destabilizes the region, provides fodder for terrorist recruitment, and risks expanding a wider war, people like Hillary Clinton would still keep a reduced force in the country after 2009. I assume this is the dominant view of the Democratic foreign policy establishment. And their view does not have any particular way of looking at and thinking about the world, which means that everything gets done in a piecemeal and incoherent fashion. Here's that Tony Smith op-ed from WaPo I linked earlier:

Many Democrats, including senators who voted to authorize the war in Iraq, embraced the idea of muscular foreign policy based on American global supremacy and the presumed right to intervene to promote democracy or to defend key U.S. interests long before 9/11, and they have not changed course since. Even those who have shifted against the war have avoided doctrinal questions.

But without a coherent alternative to the Bush doctrine, with its confidence in America's military preeminence and the global appeal of "free market democracy," the Democrats' midterm victory may not be repeated in November 2008. Or, if the Democrats do win in 2008, they could remain staked to a vision of a Pax Americana strikingly reminiscent of Bush's.

Consider a volume published last spring and edited by Will Marshall, president of the PPI (Progressive Policy Institute, actually an arm of the DLC) since 1989. The book, "With All Our Might: A Progressive Strategy for Defeating Jihadism and Defending Liberty," contains essays by 19 liberal Democrats.

"Make no mistake," write Marshall and Jeremy Rosner in their introduction, "we are committed to preserving America's military preeminence. We recognize that a strong military undergirds U.S. global leadership." Recalling a Democratic "tradition of muscular liberalism," they insist that "Progressives and Democrats must not give up the promotion of democracy and human rights abroad just because President Bush has paid it lip service. Advancing democracy -- in practice, not just in rhetoric -- is fundamentally the Democrats' legacy, the Democrats' cause, and the Democrats' responsibility."

"For better or worse, whether you supported the war or not, it is all about Iraq now," writes (Kenneth) Pollack. The goal of this Democrat who helped bring us Iraq? "The end state that America's grand strategy toward the Middle East must envision is a new liberal order to replace a status quo marked by political repression, economic stagnation and cultural conflict." His problem with the Bush administration? "It has not made transformation its highest goal. . . . Iran and Syria's rogue regimes seem to be the only exceptions. The administration insists on democratic change there in a manner it eschews for Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and other allies. . . . The right grand strategy would make transformation of our friends and our foes alike our agenda's foremost issue."

This is not a fringe group. Many prominent Democrats are PPI stalwarts, including Sens. Joseph R. Biden Jr., Evan Bayh, Thomas R. Carper and Hillary Rodham Clinton. Rep. Rahm Emanuel, chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, published a book last year, "The Plan: Big Ideas for America," co-authored by Bruce Reed, editor of the PPI's magazine Blueprint and president of the DLC.

Emanuel and Reed salute Marshall's "outstanding anthology" for its "refreshingly hardnosed and intelligent new approach . . . which breathes new life into the Democratic vision of Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and John Kennedy." Not a word in their book appears hostile to the idea of invading Iraq. Instead, the authors fault Bush for allowing a "troop gap" to develop (they favor increasing the Army by 100,000 and expanding the Marines and Special Forces) and for failing to "enlist our allies in a common mission." The message once again is that Democrats could do it better.

In fact, these neoliberals are nearly indistinguishable from the better-known neoconservatives. The neocons' think tank, the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), often salutes individuals within the PPI, and PPI members such as Marshall signed PNAC petitions endorsing the Iraq invasion. Weeks after "With All Our Might" appeared, the Weekly Standard, virtually the PNAC house organ, gave it a thumbs-up review. And why not? The PPI and PNAC are tweedledum and tweedledee.

The DLC way of thinking on foreign policy is still ascendent. And while progressive groups like MoveOn are working to make this particular Iraq bill better, they are not fundamentally calling into question the assumptions of permanent war, belligerence in the Middle East and undying fealty to Israel. These are still sacred cows in Washington. Nobody is saying what can't be said about Iraq, and in the larger sense about the war on terror.

A fourth and final near-certainty, which is in some ways the hardest for politicians to admit, is that America is losing or has already lost the Iraq war. The United States is the strongest nation in the history of the world and does not think of itself as coming in second in two-way contests. When it does so, it is slow to accept that it has been beaten. American political and military leaders were reluctant to acknowledge or utter that they had miscalculated and wasted tens of thousands of lives in Vietnam, many of them after failure and withdrawal were assured. Even today, American politicians tend not to describe Vietnam as a straightforward defeat. Something similar is happening in Iraq, where the most that leaders typically say is that we "risk" losing and must not do so.

Democrats avoid the truth about the tragedy in Iraq for fear of being labeled unpatriotic or unsupportive of the troops. Republicans avoid it for fear of being blamed for the disaster or losing defense and patriotism as cards to play against Democrats. Politicians on both sides believe that acknowledging the unpleasant truth will weaken them and undermine those still attempting to persevere on our behalf. But nations and individuals do not grow weaker by confronting the truth. They grow weaker by avoiding it and coming to believe their own evasions.

I believe that there is a possibility to come up with a real Democratic foreign policy, one that recognizes threats as they exist, does not overreact or fearmonger to please interest groups who view war as the elixir of life, and and uses the time-worn skills of diplomacy and internationalism to reach solutions with other countries, actually treating them as the equals they are. But nobody's really stepping up to the plate and showing that kind of leadership. The legacy of the Bush Administration is that the world is an increasingly dangerous place. Mimicking his foreign policy style (and make no mistake that's what the Democrats frequently do, whether they are bullied into it or sincerely believe it) will only make things worse. The institutional structures that exist, as Michael Hirsh says in this piece, are useful if they are worked properly. But in order to do so, the mindset in Washington among Democrats must completely change. More of the same will end our pre-eminence in the world.