Carl, Use Your Inside Voice

I know I'm supposed to mind my manners like a nice little blogger, but I'm tempted to call Carl Levin some names after this stupidity:

The Senate will not stop paying for the Iraq war or relent from insisting that President Bush keep pressing the Baghdad government for a negotiated end to the violence, a top Democrat said Sunday.

Michigan Sen. Carl Levin, the Senate Armed Service Committee chairman, took issue with an effort by Majority Leader Harry Reid to limit war spending after March 2008 as a way to end U.S. involvement.

"We're not going to vote to cut funding, period," Levin said. "But what we should do, and we're going to do, is continue to press this president to put some pressure on the Iraqi leaders to reach a political settlement."

I'm sure Levin really believes that the Democratic Congress won't cut funding, and I'm sure he has his own reasoning for why he would be personally opposed to it. But why, WHY does he have to say it? This is the equivalent of playing a poker game, and before the flop saying "I have Ace-King suited, but everyone knows I'm going to lose, so go ahead and bluff me." How is that in any way good strategy, even if the end result is a stopgap measure of funding for a short time so the President has to come back for more money shortly thereafter?

I know that the war at home is different from the war on the ground. I know that Democrats are trying to be effective and trying to achieve what is politically possible. But another aspect of that is moving the impossible into the terrain of the possible. And you're never going to do that if you give up the battle before it's even joined.

The new talking point, from the Ricks article, is that defeating the insurgency is a 5-10 year project, and the folks in Washington are just being too impatient. Levin seems to have bought that, or at least is scared enough about "you hate the troops" invectives from Republicans that he can't imagine doing anything but funding the occupation.

But the war defenders have been saying "just you wait and see" for going on five years. And what we see is the patterns of the battle naturally shifting, from Baghdad to outside Baghdad, from fighting Shiites to fighting Sunnis to back to fighting Shiites, and nothing is essentially changing at all.

But there is little sign that the Baghdad push is accomplishing its main purpose: to create an island of stability in which Sunni Arabs, Shiite Arabs and Kurds can try to figure out how to run the country together. There has been no visible move toward compromise on the main dividing issues, like regional autonomy and more power sharing between Shiites and Sunnis [...]

In the northern and western provinces where they hold sway, and even in parts of Baghdad, Sunni Arab insurgents have sharpened their tactics, using more suicide car and vest bombs and carrying out successive chlorine gas attacks.

Even as officials have sought to dampen the insurgency by trying to deal with Sunni Arab factions, those groups have become increasingly fractured. There are now at least a dozen major Sunni insurgent groups — many fighting other Sunnis as well as the Americans and the Shiite-led government. A deal made with any one or two would be unlikely to be acceptable to the others.

While Shiite militias appear to have quieted in Baghdad so far, elements of them have been fighting pitched battles outside the city, sometimes against one another, sometimes against Sunni Arabs. They are pushing Sunnis out of their homes and attacking their mosques.

And in a new tactic, both Shiite and Sunni militants have been burning down homes and shops in the provinces in recent months.

One American private in the First Battalion, Fifth Cavalry, who was working the overnight shift at a new garrison in western Baghdad, described the Americans’ fight this way: “The insurgents, they see what we’re doing and we see what they’re doing. Then we get ahead, then they figure out what we’ve done and they get ahead.

“It’s like a game of cat and mouse. It’s just a really, really smart mouse.”

And as long as you don't have a buy-in from any of the major population groups, the mouse will always be smarter because he'll have more friends. Heck, even the jails have become recruitment centers for extremists:

Iraqi officials also struggle with a crowded system where prisoners can languish as long as two years before getting a trial. But they say the Americans have allowed militants to flourish in their facilities.

"It looks like a terrorist academy now," said Saad Sultan, the Iraqi Human Rights Ministry's liaison to U.S. and Iraqi prisons. "There's a huge number of these students. They study how they can kill in their camps. And we protect them, feed them, give them medical care.

"The Americans have no solution to this problem," he said. "This has been going on for a year or two, we have been telling them."

(can't wait until I see the first insaneosphere reaction to this that goes something like "See, that's why you gotta torture these people, we're being too nice!" as if that's the problem and not one of simple sequestration.)

This spun into a post about Iraq itself, but I want to put the focus back on Levin. He knows that there's only a political solution left for Iraq. And yet he'll continue to fund a strategy that takes us further and further away from that solution. And he won't even allow for any bargaining position for Democrats so they can at least get a piece of what they want.

I know we were out of power for a long time, but this is basic stuff: you don't tell your opponent that they've won before the battle even STARTS. (Of course, Levin tried to water down the nonbinding resolution, so maybe the truth is that he doesn't want to leave at all)