The Costs Of Reductive Thinking

Barack Obama had an interesting moment last week during that Organizing for America strategy session on health care. Trying to put in perspective the price tag of reform, he said this:

"Now, one thing that's very important to remind people, because you notice there's been a talking point from opponents -- 'trillion-dollar health care bill' -- they love repeating that. 'Trillion-dollar health care bill.'

"First of all, it's important to remind people that when they say 'trillion dollars,' they're talking about over 10 years. So this -- we're talking about $100 billion a year -- which is still a significant amount of money. But just to give you a sense of perspective, I mean, the amount of money that we're spending in Iraq and Afghanistan is -- what's the latest figure, Debbie? You figure $8 billion to $9 billion a month, right?

"So for about the same cost per year as we've been spending over the last five to six years, we could have funded this health care reform proposal, just to give you a sense of perspective."

I don't know if I was the only one, but my immediate reaction was, "Um, well, why don't you do something about that?" I mean, sure, the costs of an unnecessary war in Iraq and a war headed toward quagmire in Afghanistan could have paid for the front end of health care reform. But they're both still raging, at a time when we have few national security interests in those regions, and certainly nothing that could not be handled with a diplomatic, law enforcement and intelligence approach rather than a military one. So if the cost of the wars from 2003-2009 could pay for health care, the future costs from 2009-2019 could go a pretty long way in their own right.

It's particularly pernicious to find the President making this argument, when as commander-in-chief he has the ability to draw down forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. If he wants to make that kind of comparison, he ought to back it up. Yet this transcript from Bruce Reidel, who managed a lot of the policy reviews on Afghanistan and Pakistan for the White House, might offer an explanation of why he won't go that far.

The triumph of jihadism or the jihadism of Al Qaeda and the Taliban in driving NATO out of Afghanistan would resonate throughout the Islamic World.This would be a victory on par with the destruction of the Soviet Union in the 1990s. And, those moderates in the Islamic World who would say, no, we have to be moderate, we have to engage, would find themselves facing a real example. No, we just need to kill them, and we will drive them out. So I think the stakes are enormous.

That's extremely dangerous thinking, as Matt Yglesias and Kevin Drum make clear. It's also not new thinking - it's basically what kept us in Vietnam for so long, as President after President didn't want to be tagged as the one who lost a war. So they talked themselves into inane theories like this, psychological projections about "losing face" and "denying the enemy a rhetorical victory," and 58,000 Americans died as a result. Hundreds and thousands more will die this time, because this kind of philosophy leaves us no out. We cannot leave so long as one member of the insurgency wants us to go, because otherwise we would be giving them a great victory.

It's not surprising to see establishment figures embrace such a reductive theory based on image and manliness. But the guy who just made the connection between the costs of war abroad and the betterment of the lives of citizens at home? As Barney Frank said at a recent town hall meeting, "If we hadn't gone to the war in Iraq, which I thought was a terrible mistake and voted against, we would have had more than enough money to pay for health care." You cannot say things like that and still send soldiers into the battle. Not if you mean them.

The Best And The Brightest

Robert McNamara died today. McNamara was a smart guy, a business type who rose up through the ranks to run the Ford Motor Company after working at the Pentagon during the firebombing of Tokyo. Kennedy pulled a reluctant McNamara out of Detroit and back to the Pentagon in 1960, and he sought to manage it with corporate precision. But this precise structure and its focus on measurements crashed against the shoals of the Vietnam War. Night after night, McNamara would stand before the press in his rimless glasses, looking very much like Don Rumsfeld would decades later, talking of body counts and targeted airstrikes and victory, disassociated almost completely from the realities of the ground and the futility of the enterprise. If you've seen "The Fog of War" you know that the pressure certainly got to McNamara, and he understood his mistakes after the fact (though he never took full responsibility for them). He directed subordinates to write the study that would eventually become The Pentagon Papers, hoping that future generations would avoid the pitfalls that he and his colleagues did in Vietnam.

Part of the framing of "The Fog of War" as well as one of McNamara's later books was the 11 causes and lessons that he listed coming out of Vietnam. It's worth listing them here again.

We misjudged then — and we have since — the geopolitical intentions of our adversaries … and we exaggerated the dangers to the United States of their actions.

We viewed the people and leaders of South Vietnam in terms of our own experience. We saw in them a thirst for – and a determination to fight for — freedom and democracy. We totally misjudged the political forces within the country.

We underestimated the power of nationalism to motivate a people to fight and die for their beliefs and values….

Our misjudgments of friend and foe alike reflected our profound ignorance of the history, culture, and politics of the people in the area, and the personalities and habits of their leaders….No Southeast Asian [experts] existed for senior officials to consult when making decisions on Vietnam.

We failed then — and have since — to recognize the limitations of modern, high-technology military equipment, forces and doctrine in confronting unconventional, highly motivated people’s movements. We failed as well to adapt our military tactics to …winning the hearts and minds of people from a totally different culture.

We failed to draw Congress and the American people into a full and frank discussion and debate of the pros and cons of a large-scale military involvement … before we initiated the action.

After the action got under way and unanticipated events forced us off our planned course … we did not fully explain what was happening and why we were doing what we did….We had not prepared the public to understand the complex events we faced…confront[ing] uncharted seas and an alien environment. A nation’s deepest strength lies not in its military prowess, bur rather in the unity of its people. We failed to maintain it.

We did not recognize that neither our people nor our leaders are omniscient. Our judgment of what is in another people’s or country’s best interest should be put to the test of open discussion in international forums. We do not have the God-given right to shape every nation in our image or as we choose.

We did not hold to the principle that U.S. military action — other than in response to direct threats to our own national security – should be carried out only in conjunction with multinational forces supported fully (and not merely cosmetically) by the international community.

We failed to recognize that in international affairs, as in other aspects of life, there may be problems for which there are no immediate solutions … At times, we may have to live with an imperfect, untidy world.

…We thus failed to analyze and debate our actions in Southeast Asia - our objectives, the risks and costs of alternative ways of dealing with them, and the necessity of changing course when failure was clear….

If this isn't an accusatory note toward the practitioners of American foreign policy during the entire post-war period up through today, I don't know what is. And although I'd like to think that some statesman could learn from these lessons and take America off such a self-destructive course, given the nature of the people who rise to power in this country I don't know if that's possible. Certainly McNamara's lessons represent the experience of a man who lived in the crucible and at least appears to have judged his actions against some moral set of precepts. But the peculiar dynamics of the political world, the need to act tough in foreign policy, the seeming inability for leaders to step outside themselves and view things through the lens of others, the narrow and incomplete renderings of history often at work, and of course the lure of money and power and the industry of war, resist politicians coming to any of these conclusions in the moment. We have so frequently bungled into conflicts, presuming our role in them when the other participants see it differently, making shortcuts while rationalizing ourselves as heroic, changing the rules if found to violate them, and controlling the message of moral rectitude rather than the actions. I find these cautions from McNamara to be crucially important, but even in my most optimistic moments I don't believe America is even wired to live up to them.

This is from The Fog of War, with McNamara talking about the firebombing of Tokyo in World War II:

Curtis LeMay said, “If we’d lost the war, we’d all have been prosecuted as war criminals.” And I think he’s right. He, and I’d say I, were behaving as war criminals.... But what makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?

...Just to respond to this point about The Fog of War, which Robert Farley thinks "Morris let McNamara get away with far too much at too low of a price." Right near the beginning of the film, Morris inserts a line from McNamara about how you should always answer the question you hoped to be asked, not the question you were asked. This line colors the entire reading of the film. McNamara, for all his confessions in later life, was never a reliable narrator, and he tried valiantly to color his reading of history, leaving him blameless. It didn't work, and Morris knew it, so he presented the folly instead of attacking it. McNamara's lessons of war are important and can stand alone, but that doesn't mean I sympathize with him in any way. He spun until the bitter end. He earned his legacy of failure, and all the rationalizing and compartmentalizing in the world won't make a difference.

I Love Me Some New Nixon Tapes

Another batch was released yesterday, and I wish I could fast-forward 40 years in time so I could drive down to Yorba Linda and spend the day listening to them all. Actually, I could telecommute, as the tapes, from 1973, can be heard right here.

One thing I love about the Nixon White House is the impression that they did almost nothing. Somebody would wander into the Oval Office, and Nixon and that figure, either Colson, Haldeman, Kissinger or Ehrlichman, would just shoot the bill with the President for about 45 minutes or so. It sounds less like the White House and more like The Office. I mean, this, from the Nixon Library, sums it up:

Other notable individuals on these tapes included Republican National Committee Chairman (and future President) George H. W. Bush, House Minority Leader (and future President) Gerald R. Ford, Vice President Spiro T. Agnew, journalist Barbara Walters, film director John Ford, professional golfer Arnold Palmer, conductor of the Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra Eugene Ormandy, “Truck driver of the year” Curtis C. Stapp, and Washington Redskins football coach George Allen and his family.

Obviously the big news hook has been Nixon's comments on abortion:

The tapes also caught his reaction to Roe vs. Wade, the Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion. In a Jan. 22 conversation with aide Chuck Colson, Nixon can be heard saying: "There are times when abortions are necessary -- I know that. . . . Suppose you have a black and a white, or a rape."

Nixon and Colson agreed that legalized abortion encouraged permissiveness.

"It breaks the family," Nixon says.

Please note that Loving v. Virginia was the law of the land for Nixon's entire Presidency.

But more interesting is this:

Nixon had promised "peace with honor" and pledged to withdraw American forces only when South Vietnam could defend itself. But if Nixon couldn't persuade Thieu to agree to his peace agreement, Hughes said, the American president would have had difficulty justifying his continuation of the war during his first four-year term, during which 20,000 American troops died.

"For domestic political reasons, Nixon needed to conceal the failure of his strategy of Vietnamization and negotiation," Hughes said. "If people realized that he had added 20,000 additional American casualties to the war, and the communists were going to win anyway, then it would have proved his critics right that he should have ended the war at the start of his (first) term."

And this, which is just classic Nixon:

On Feb. 23, 1973, he placed a call to future President George H.W. Bush, then the Republican National Committee chairman.

The call was "nothing of great importance," Nixon says, but he wanted to inform Bush of what he witnessed during his recent visit to the South Carolina state Legislature.

"I noticed a couple of very attractive women, both of them Republicans, in the Legislature," Nixon tells Bush. "I want you to be sure to emphasize to our people, God, let's look for some. . . . Understand, I don't do it because I'm for women, but I'm doing it because I think maybe a woman might win someplace where a man might not. . . . So have you got that in mind?"

"I'll certainly keep it in mind," Bush replies.

"Boy, they were good lookin' and bright," Nixon continues. And he had been informed, further, that "they're two of the best members of the House."

"Well, that's terrific," Bush says.

In addition to releasing tapes, the Nixon Library released a cache of documents, one of them showing that Mississippi Democrat John Stennis secretly approved of the bombing of Cambodia before Nixon carried it out in 1970.

In an April 24, 1970, telephone conversation with Sen. John C. Stennis (D-Miss.), who was then chairman of the Armed Services Committee, Nixon said the administration was going to provide arms to the Cambodian government to prevent its overthrow by a pro-communist element, and continue secret B-52 bombing raids, "which only you and Senator Russell know about." Richard Russell (D-Ga.) was the former committee chairman.

"We are not going to get involved in a war in Cambodia," Nixon reassured Stennis. "We are going to do what is necessary to help save our men in South Vietnam. They can't have those sanctuaries there" that North Vietnam maintained.

Stennis replied, "I will be with you. . . . I commend you for what you are doing."

ConservaDems, then as now...

Nixon is just a fascinating character sketch, and I wish I could marinate in all this material for a long while.

All In On Hearts And Minds

Um, OK...

The Pentagon is replacing the top American commander in Afghanistan, Gen. David McKiernan, less than a year after he took over, marking a major overhaul in military leadership of a war that has presented President Obama with a worsening national security challenge.

Defense officials said that General McKiernan was removed because of what they described as a conventional approach to what has become one of the most complicated military challenges in American history. He is to be replaced by Lt. Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, a former commander of the Joint Special Operations Command who recently ran all special operations in Iraq.

The decision reflects a belief that the war in Afghanistan has grown so complex that it needs a commander drawn from the military’s unconventional warfare branch.

In other words, more of the rise of the counterinsurgents.

This is a big deal. McKiernan was running the biggest national security challenge of the young Administration, and Obama might have felt he needed his own man in there. But it really looks like the war effort has been handed over to the counterinsurgents, with David Petraeus in the lead (Stanley McChrystal, the new general, was essentially the right-hand man for Petraeus in Iraq). At this point, it's important to understand the implications of that. A counter-insurgency strategy is designed to break the links between insurgents and the local population by bringing the locals around to the side of the dominant authority. This is nothing new, by the way - they called it "winning hearts and minds" back in Vietnam. And then as now, the dominant authority, behind the US military, was an illusion of a central government. The Diem and Thieu governments in Vietnam were basically kleptocracies, and the public gradually moved away from them. In Afghanistan, public officials facilitate the drug trade and the central government is hopelessly corrupt. Hamid Karzai has no legitimacy, and has recently taken to offering olive branches to warlords to try and restore it. At some point, you must offer people something beyond endless occupation. If they have no faith in the government to provide services, all the counter-insurgency in the world won't counteract a member of the Taliban offering goods. So COIN must have something attractive at its end, and right now I don't see that being the case in Afghanistan.

There's also this fun bit of McChrystal's record:

One spot on his generally sterling military record came in 2007, when a Pentagon investigation into the accidental shooting death in 2004 of Cpl. Pat Tillman by fellow Army Rangers in Afghanistan held General McChrystal accountable for inaccurate information provided by Corporal Tillman’s unit in recommending him for a Silver Star.

The information wrongly suggested that Corporal Tillman, a professional football player whose decision to enlist in the Army after the Sept. 11 attacks drew national attention, had been killed by enemy fire.

McChrystal also sought a "declaration of victory" over Al Qaeda in Iraq back in October 2007. Hopefully the same kind of rose-colored assessment won't take root in Afghanistan.

Very Serious Torture Apologist

Rachel Maddow had her Frost/Nixon moment last night when she got to question Colin Powell about his role in authorizing and directing torture. He was part of the principals meetings where interrogation techniques were discussed, and while practically every journalist who has ever interviewed Powell in the past year has neglected that fact, Rachel did not.

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Good for Rachel for pressing Powell on this - I'm sure the very serious people around NBC News tut-tutted the ignominy of their friend the noble soldier having to take this abuse. Except this is a familiar pattern for Powell. He's been covering for abuses at the highest levels since he was merely an Army major:

As Powell notes in his 1995 autobiography, My American Journal, in 1969 he was an Army major, the deputy operations officer of the Americal Division, stationed at division headquarters in Chu Lai. He says that in March of that year, an investigator from the inspector general's office of Military Assistance Command Vietnam (MACV) paid a call. In a "Joe Friday monotone," the investigator shot questions at Powell about Powell's position at the division and the division's operational journals, of which Powell was the custodian. The inspector then asked Powell to produce the journals for March 1968. Powell started to explain that he had not been with the division at that time. "Just get the journal," the IG man snapped, "and go through that month's entries. Let me know if you find an unusual number of enemy killed on any day."

Powell flipped through the records and came upon an entry from March 16, 1968. The journal noted that a unit of the division had reported a body count of 128 enemy dead on the Batangan Peninsula. "In this grinding, grim, but usually unspectacular warfare," Powell writes, "that was a high number." The investigator requested that Powell read the number into the tape recorder he had brought, and that was essentially the end of the interview. "He left," Powell recalls, "leaving me as mystified as to his purpose as when he arrived."

It would not be until two years later (according to the orginal version of Powell's book) or six months later (according to the paperbck version of the book) that Powell figured out that the IG official had been probing what was then a secret, the My Lai massacre. Not until the fall of 1969 did the world learned that on March 16, 1968, troops from the Americal Division, under the command of Lieut. William Calley, killed scores of men, women and children in that hamlet. "Subsequent investigation revealed that Calley and his men killed 347 people," Powell writes. "The 128 enemy 'kills' I had found in the journal formed part of the total."

Though he does not say so expressly, Powell leaves the impression that the IG investigation, using information provided by Powell, uncovered the massacre, for which Calley was later court-martialed. That is not accurate.

The transcript of the tape-recorded interview between the IG man--Lieut. Col. William Sheehan--and Powell tells a different story. During that session--which actually happened on May 23, 1969--the IG investigator did request that Powell take out the division's operations journals covering the first three weeks of March. (The IG inquiry had been triggered by letters written to the Pentagon, the White House and twenty-four members of Congress by Ron Ridenhour, a former serviceman who had learned about the mass murders.) Sheehan examined the records. Then he asked Powell to say for the record what activity had transpired in "grid square BS 7178" in this period. "The most significant of these occurred on 16, March, 1968," Powell replied, "beginning at 0740 when C Company, 1st of the 20th, then under Task Force Barker, and the 11th Infantry Brigade, conducted a combat assault into a hot LZ [landing zone]." He noted that C Company, after arriving in the landing zone, killed one Vietcong. About fifteen minutes later, the same company, backed up by helicopter gunships, killed three VC. In the following hour, the gunships killed three more VC, while C Company "located documents and equipment" and killed fourteen Vietcong. "There is no indication of the nature of the action which caused these fourteen VC KIA," Powell said. Later that morning, C Company, according to the journal, captured a shortwave radio and detained twenty-three VC suspects for questioning, while two other companies that were also part of Task Force Barker were active in the same area without registering any enemy kills [...]

There had been attempts at cover-up. Prior to Ridenhour's letter, the Army promoted the story that C Company had killed 128 VC and captured three weapons in the March 16 action. (Note the 128 figure--which Powell, in his memoirs, uses in describing the number of enemy kills he supposedly found in the journals. In his book, he is repeating the cover story, not recalling what was actually in the journal.) And information pertaining to My Lai disappeared from the Americal Division's files. A military review panel--convened after the Hersh stories to determine why the initial investigations did not uncover the truth of My Lai--found that senior officers of the Americal Division had destroyed evidence to protect their comrades. Powell keeps that out of his account.

Powell has never been implicated in any of the wrongdoing involving My Lai. No evidence ties him to the attempted cover-up. But he was part of an institution (and a division) that tried hard to keep the story of My Lai hidden--a point unacknowledged in his autobiography. Moreover, several months before he was interviewed by Sheehan, Powell was ordered to look into allegations made by another former GI that US troops had "without provocation or justification" killed civilians. (These charges did not mention My Lai specifically.) Powell mounted a most cursory examination. He did not ask the accuser for more specific information. He interviewed a few officers and reported to his superiors that there was nothing to the allegations [see "Questions for Powell," The Nation, January 8/15, 2001]. This exercise is not mentioned in his memoirs.

Concurrent with this, Powell brushed off a soldier's complaint about routine brutality of civilians by US forces in Vietnam. He was part of a military establishment that sought to cover up crimes like My Lai. So this dodging Maddow's questions on principals meetings and torture comes very naturally to him, I would imagine.

Of course, today Colin Powell is a very serious person, so he should never be questioned on such uncouth subjects. But recognize that this shame cannot just be wished away. Just today a federal judge ruled that subjects held at Bagram AFB in Afghanistan can challenge their detention in US courts. The torture regime will have ramifications for years, and the establishment, as represented here by Colin Powell, will continue to deny the problem, allowing it to fester.

Villagers Let Their Freak Flag Fly

This is a reversal:

President Barack Obama, who pledged during his campaign to shift U.S. troops and resources from Iraq to Afghanistan, has done little since taking office to suggest he will significantly widen the grinding war against a resurgent Taliban.

On the contrary, Obama appears likely to streamline the U.S. focus with an eye to the worsening economy and the cautionary example of the Iraq war that sapped political support for President George W. Bush.

"There's not simply a military solution to that problem," White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said last week, adding that Obama believes "that only through long-term and sustainable development can we ever hope to turn around what's going on there."

Less than two weeks into the new administration, Obama has not said much in public about what his top military adviser says is the largest challenge facing the armed forces. The president did say Afghanistan and Pakistan are the central front in the struggle against terrorism, a clue to the likely shift toward a targeted counterterrorism strategy.

After Obama's first visit to the Pentagon as president, a senior defense official said the commander in chief surveyed top uniformed officers about the strain of fighting two wars and warned that the economic crisis will limit U.S. responses. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because Obama's meeting with the Joint Chiefs of Staff was private.

I think the reporter is playing mind-reader a little bit. What's happening right now is a strategy review. Wisely, President Obama is actually looking at the situation and taking input from everyone, even detractors. Publicly, those who will be closest to making the decision are offering a very balanced view, full of warnings and caveats. Bob Gates' Senate testimony this week was quite honest.

Gates, a cautious advocate of bolstering U.S. troop levels in Afghanistan, told the Senate Armed Services Committee on Tuesday that he worries that “Afghans [will] come to see us as the problem, not the solution, and then we are lost.” He warned that increased levels of U.S. troop deaths in 2009 were “likely.”

In December, Gen. David McKiernan, commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, stated that he needs an increase of nearly 30,000 troops “for the next few years” — in other words, a sustained troop increase, not a brief surge in U.S. forces as occurred in Iraq in 2007. In the last few days Obama administration officials have begun telling reporters off the record not to presume that the president has made a decision on the size or duration of any prospective troop increase.

Gates said Tuesday that he backs McKiernan’s request — but signaled that the troop spigot would not remain open. “I would be very skeptical about additional force levels beyond what Gen. McKiernan asked for,” Gates told the Senate panel. A former senior CIA official during the Russian invasion and occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s, Gates recalled that “the Soviets couldn’t win that war with 120,000 troops and a ruthless approach” to Afghan civilians, since they adopted “the wrong strategy.” [...] “Above all,” he said, “there must be an Afghan face on this war.” More important to Gates than increasing U.S. troop levels, he said, was increasing the numbers of Afghan security forces, and he said the government of Hamid Karzai supports a U.S.-backed effort to increase the Afghan National Army to 130,000 troops from its current 80,000, though he said he was unsure “even that number will be large enough.” At several points in the hearing, Gates worried that the U.S. was losing support from the Afghan people, saying that the U.S. has “lost the strategic communications war” to the Afghan insurgency about U.S.-caused civilian casualties. Proposing a policy of “first apologiz[ing]” when U.S. troops kill civilians in error, Gates said, “We have to get the balance right with the Afghan people or we will lose this war.”

Gates was adamant that there's no military solution in Afghanistan, and that the goals should be minimal, narrowed to denying Al Qaeda a safe haven. “If we set as the goal [creating] a Central Asian Valhalla, we will lose,” he said. Similarly, this week Adm. Mike Mullen, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said to the Washington Post "I don't have enough troops in the United States military to make the difference that needs to be made" in Afghanistan.

Some of this may come from the large protests against the President's first forward action in the region, an airstrike in the Waziristan area that killed civilians. This may have shown that aerial strikes will only inflame the population and possibly turn Pakistan toward religious parties. While the theory behind additional troops is that less airstrikes would be necessary, it would increase the foreign occupier footprint at a time when the population is less supportive of them. The fact that NATO help appears unlikely is being factored into their thinking as well, as is the relative weakness and corruption of the Karzai government. While top officials press Karzai for more, there is a lot of thought to throwing Karzai over, or at least not offering him any support, in the next Presidential election, which has now been postponed until August due to the rising violence. So it looks like no big decisions have been made.

Throughout this there have been great, strident voices contextualizing the situation in Afghanistan and warning against a deeper commitment. Barnett Rubin, Juan Cole, Steve Clemons and Scott Ritter are just a few. What's been notable in the past couple days is, while the Administration undergoes this strategy review, the chattering class is going nuts. Newsweek decided that eleven days and a noncommital stance was enough to call this "Obama's Vietnam," as if he ordered the invasion in 2001 and neglected the war for seven years. They've somehow justified this by distancing from dirty hippies who analogize every war to Vietnam, and then... analogizing the war to Vietnam:

"Vietnam analogies can be tiresome," they write. "To critics, especially those on the left, all American interventions after Vietnam have been potential "quagmires." But sometimes clichés come true, and, especially lately, it seems that the war in Afghanistan is shaping up in all-too-familiar ways."

And you should have seen Bob Woodward on ABC this morning, yipping away with "What is the strategy?" and "Why aren't we leaving yet," sounding like a latter-day Country Joe McDonald. And there have been other big-picture pieces in the print media.

I agree that troops shouldn't be committed in the absence of goals or strategy, and it's good that the establishment is starting to question the slow roll in Afghanistan. Forgive me, however, for questioning their motives. Although Obama is engaging in a deliberative process, it is characterized as a rush to war. They are making up for their own past while they analogize to the distant past. Obama stumbling into his own Vietnam "fits" for them. It's the perfect narrative and they're going to sell it.

I think it's very unsettling. The public is very split on Afghanistan and could be persuaded on either side. While I'm personally against escalation, I'm willing to deal with the outcomes of my decision. I don't think the Village is. They're interested in putting their imprint on the story no matter what happens. So if Afghanistan falls into chaos with an escalation, then Obama is stuck in a quagmire. If it falls into chaos without an escalation, then Obama make a strategic mistake and the blood is on his hands. Even if it succeeds, the voices will be raised about when we can leave. And throughout it all, there will be talk about how the commitment overseas will constrain Obama at home and ruin all of his plans to restore and transform the economy. They are not arguing in good faith, and while I'm glad to have a real public debate about Afghanistan, I think it's worth thinking about why the Village has put on their tie-dye and gone wild in the streets.

Beware of Republicans Bearing Gifts

Good for Karen Tumulty to smack down the latest instance of a Republican mole trying to suck up to Barack Obama. Tumulty deconstructs the moment during the campaign where Obama correctly reiterated that Henry Kissinger had called for high-level talks between the new Administration and Iran. Faced with this from an ally, the McCain campaign put Kissinger up to claiming that Obama was mistaken when that was completely not the case. Now that the election is over, Kissinger has the gall to praise Obama for his foreign policy stances.

Of course, we all know that Kissinger, and in fact everyone in Nixon's orbit, was a worm. After all, there was nobody more responsible for blocking peace with Vietnam for at least 7 years in order to win an election, causing the needless deaths of tens of thousands of American troops and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese, than Kissinger.

In the last months of his administration, President Lyndon B. Johnson suggested that associates of Richard M. Nixon were trying to persuade the South Vietnamese government not to join the peace talks until after the 1968 election, recordings of telephone conversations released Thursday show.

Accusations of Nixon’s influence in the peace conference have been reported before, but the tapes provide a look at how Johnson handled the issue, said Bruce Buchanan, a government professor and an expert on the presidency at the University of Texas, Austin.

During a conversation with Senator Everett Dirksen of Illinois, Johnson, referring to people close to Nixon, and said, “This is treason.” Dirksen was the Republican leader in the Senate.

In a conversation in November 1968, Nixon assured Johnson that he supported the president’s efforts to arrange a peace conference in Paris. Johnson had cited news articles and private information he had been given that he said made him think Nixon’s associates were working against his efforts.

This is chronicled in Nixonland. Nixon's national security team had back-channel communications with the South Vietnamese that persuaded the then-President that they could get a better deal under the new leadership.

Privately, however, Nixon was acting more assertively on the Vietnam issue. Over the course of the campaign, Nixon grew increasingly concerned about President Johnson's negotiations with the North Vietnamese. Word was "out" that LBJ would be proposing a bombing halt of North Vietnam provided the South Vietnamese were permitted to participate in the ongoing peace talks in Paris. To blunt the possibility of a late campaign "Peace Offensive" by the Democrats, Nixon developed a "back channel" to persuade President Thieu of South Vietnam not to cooperate with President Johnson. The line of communication went from Nixon to John Mitchell (who would be named Attorney General) to Anna Chenault, a strong Nixon support who was close to a number of South Vietnamese officials, including President Thieu. Nixon's message was subtly delivered but unambiguous. Thieu should refuse to join the peace talks in 1968 because the South Vietnamese would be treated better by a Nixon rather than a Humphrey Administration. Thieu ultimately followed Nixon's suggestion and did not participate in the peace talks during the fall of 1968 (see, Steven Ambrose, Nixon: Triumph of a Politician, pp. 206-218).

This is a classic Kissingerian move and was repeated dozens of times in his tenure. He never believes in transparent negotiation, only secret meetings with political designs in mind, not conceptions of peace. He's an execrable man. I would stay FAR away from him if I were the President-elect.

Nixon's Id On Display

Coming out of reading Nixonland, I'm fascinated by his Presidency, and the fact that he used the Oval Office the way that a speaker would use Hyde Park, spouting off about whatever popped into his head. And he KNEW he was taping it! Yesterday the Nixon Library released 200 more hours of Nixon tapes, and I wish I was not working so that I could go down to Yorba Linda and listen to every one of them. Here's just one example:

-- On Dec. 9, 1972, Nixon talks to Colson about the appointment of building trades union leader Peter Brennan as secretary of labor:

NIXON: "The idea, they finally think the appointment of a working man makes them think we're for the working man.”

COLSON: “That's precisely it.”

NIXON: “They talk about all the tokenism. We appoint blacks, and they don't think we're for blacks. Mexicans. They don't think we're for Mexicans. But a working man, by golly, that is really something."

It takes a special kind of cognitive dissonance to complain about charges of tokenism while admitting that he's hiring a trade unionist for reasons of tokenism.

The AP has some more:

"Never forget," Nixon tells national security adviser Henry Kissinger in a taped Oval Office conversation revealed Tuesday. "The press is the enemy. The establishment is the enemy. The professors are the enemy.

"Professors are the enemy," he repeated. "Write that on a blackboard 100 times and never forget it."

The conversation was on Dec. 14, 1972, four days before the U.S. unleashed a massive bombing campaign on Hanoi and Haiphong aimed at getting North Vietnam to negotiate more seriously in peace talks.

"We're going to bomb them," Nixon told Kissinger and adviser Alexander Haig, green lighting one of the most controversial acts of the war. "We'll take the heat right over the Christmas period, then on January 3, it's Christmas withdrawal."

As early as 1966, Nixon was quoted as saying that Vietnam could not be won. He was bombing them into the Stone Age to get a better deal at the bargaining table, to get "peace with honor." This didn't work since he was inaugurated, but here in Christmas 1972, he's continuing with it.

The most obvious thing here is that all of the elements of the modern Republican Party are on display in Nixon's brain dump. The resentment, the anti-intellectualism, the demonization of academia and the press, the digging up of dirt (the big revelation is that Nixon's people knew about Tom Eagleton's shock treatments before it was made public), the siege mentality, the persecution complex, the bullying, the need to look tough, etc.

Of course, we had a chance to punish Nixon for his crimes, but we passed it up in the spirit of comity. Good move:

It's a good thing we decided for the good of the country not to play the blame game and to let bygones be bygones because it resulted in the Republicans completely changing their ways.

Dick Cheney, for instance, learned from Nixon's mistakes and completely repudiated Richard Nixon's imperial presidency and profane disrespect and operated with bipartisan good faith and total transparency as a result of the generosity with which Richard Nixon (and later Ronald Reagan) were dealt. It's a heartwarming story of the power of positive reinforcement, forgiveness and redemption.

Breaking Out The Big Guns

This was the week when John McCain did "the full Rove," attacking Barack Obama relentlessly for being horrible things like "popular" and "appealing" and then crying like children when the other side notices what they're doing. They got all indignant that Obama said "the only way they figure they're going to win this election is if they make you scared of me. So what they're saying is, 'Well, we know we're not very good but you can't risk electing Obama. You know, he's new, he's... doesn't look like the other presidents on the currency, you know, he's got a, he's got a funny name.'" In fact they did create an ad with Obama replacing Ben Franklin on the $100 bill.

But this final one is the most bitter yet, taking all kinds of quotes out of context, making an "argument" the way a snickering high-schooler would.



I think the craziest thing about this is the projection that Obama is representing himself as "The One." As far as I know, he doesn't open his town hall meetings with a video like this:

John McCain has the film. At many of his events, his campaign sets up a screen and plays for the crowd a three-minute film called "Service with Honor," telling the story of McCain's more than five years of captivity in a North Vietnamese prison after his Navy plan was shot down in 1967. As sonorous music plays in the background, McCain's mother Roberta recounts her reaction on hearing of his capture, images of McCain in captivity are flashed on screen, and two fellow POW's describe his comportment. "He was offered early release and he told 'em to shove it," says one, Paul Galanti. "He has been there, he's done that, he's been miserable he's been tortured, beaten to a pulp and yet he still comes up with that patented McCain smile."

McCain himself concludes the film with these words: "The only reason I am here today is because I believe a higher being has a mission for me and my life."

Talk about presumptuous.

Whether or not this is working, I can't say. I do know that this election has hit the completely stupid season, and there's no telling whether anyone will help us out of it. Certainly the media is lapping it up.

Remember, McCain Has Never Used His POW Status As Part Of His Candiacy

This is quite remarkable.



So McCain's surrogates and his BBQ buddies in the media spent all last week claiming that he's never used his POW status as a rationale for his candidacy, yet in the first 10 seconds of this ad, McCain contrasts himself from the dirty (black) hippies by exalting his being shot down over Vietnam and refusing an early release.

You can set aside the value of this service; I find it honorable but irrelevant to the task of the Presidency, which involves judgment on key issues like wanting wars to end and jobs to return to America. But this is in direct contrast to all that blather from last week. McCain is running on his bio in such a way that makes John Kerry look like he never mentioned Vietnam once.

Not that he has anything else to run on, but this is really jarring. Will the media notice? Signs point to absolutely not.

Great Stuff Around The Web About Dr. King

These are all must-reads.

Kai Wright on Dr. King's forgotten legacy as a radical who pushed an economic and political agenda that was stridently antiwar and opposed to the demons of "racism, materialism, and militarism". Actually I don't know how lost this radical vision was, at least today. Even on the usually vapid cable news, you heard about economic justice and saw quotes from bystanders at McCain's ill-received speech saying "He's a war guy, Dr. King was all about peace." CNN ran a pretty powerful piece about the Memphis sanitation workers, and they aired copious excerpts from black radio that was really revealing. I think a lot of these concepts have become internalized, and kind of exploded today.

Maybe that's because Dr. King's ideas, including his 1967 speech protesting the Vietnam War at a time when it was uncomfortable to do so, was so evergreen, and could be applied to this very day.

See also Rick Perlstein, pushing back on the painted-over history that conservatives try to use to forget their incendiary hatred of the civil rights leader.

Martin Luther King was shuttling in and out of Memphis in support of striking garbage workers. Or, as Governor Buford Ellington put it, "training 3,000 people to start riots." 500 Tennessee citizens signed a complaint asking a U.S. district judge to suspend Governor Ellington's frightening plans for National Guard training exercises that would simulate riots in black neighborhoods. Ellington huffed in return: "When we say we are going to train the guard to protect the lives of people and their property, there is a big hullabaloo about it" from "people who would like to see riots." A third of the New York Times's dispatch on the controversy focused on the fact that one of the 500 petitioners had been arrested for possession of marijuana.

The 1968 civil rights bill moved to the House. Minority leader Gerald Ford announced he would fight the open housing provision. Southern governors, ignoring outright a 1967 decision of the Fifth Circuit articulating an "affirmative duty...to bring about an integrated, unitary school system in which there are no Negro schools and no white schools--just schools," were served a deadline by the dreaded Harold Howe II: comply by September of 1969, or else. The California Democratic Council adopted a pro-Gene McCarthy resolution at their annual convention. The keynote speaker--Martin Luther King--refused to indicate a preference for McCarthy or RFK, but made it clear he opposed the incumbent: "Flame throwers in Vietnam fan the flames in our cities--I don't think the two matters can be separated."

The next morning, a Saturday, the President popped around to the Sheraton Park Hotel for a breakfast speech to the National Alliance of Businessmen that all but accused his critics [like King] of being against the troops:

"Earlier this week in the East Room of the White House, I awarded the Medal of Honor to two of our bravest fighting Marines....

"As your President, I want to say this to you today: We must meet our commitments in the world and in Vietnam. We shall and we are going to win.

"To meet the needs of these fighting men, we shall do whatever is required."

Maybe the finest historian on the conservative agenda. That's a REAL must-read.

Surely Knows More

This foreign policy ignorance from John W. McCain is becoming epidemic. He contradicted himself in CNN soundbites about the importance of Muqtada al-Sadr in the space of a couple weeks. He doesn't know what he's talking about and he'll say anything to make himself look like an authority. Joke Line has even another instance, quoting McCain as saying Basra was "not a problem" and that it was a good idea for the Iraqi Army to attack the Sadrists. Of course, he closes with this:

McCain surely knows more about the military than Barack Obama does--and Obama certainly needs to learn more--but McCain's carelessness and oversimplification, and wrong analysis, when it comes to the situation in Iraq puts him in a surprisingly vulnerable position.

"Surely"? He's been wrong about virtually every foreign policy issue for the past decade and beyond. Where is there any evidence that he knows jack-all about the military outside of abstract concepts like "honor" which box him into a reactionary, imperialist worldview? The guy thinks we should have never left Vietnam and that we only lost because we "lost the will to fight", and he's carried that anti-reality position forward to Iraq. What's lost in his "100 more years" comment is that he actually believes that the Iraq debacle is in any way analogous, and can ever be analogous, to Germany or Japan or South Korea. First of all, any "insurgency" in those under countries ended at the moment of surrender. Second, there is a historic "allergy," as Wes Clark put it tonight, to American troops stationed in the Middle East in anything more than a highly specialized capacity. Our basing in Saudi Arabia was a linchpin for fundamentalist rage and terrorist violence. McCain has refused to learn from history for 40 years.

The best thing that can be said about McCain's foreign policy is that once in a while he'll agree with you no matter who you are, since he's flip-flopped so many times that he's been alternately right and wrong. He even said that Iraq is nothing like Korea back before he had to make the analogy to cover for his 100 years comment, which is clearly working, and clearly applicable, so I hope you'll all write it on a signpost and put it in front of your house.

The cognitive dissonance we're up against in trying to get the traditional media to confront their own misperceptions about McCain is thicker than the strongest border fence that the Bush Administration has to waive environmental and land management laws to build. I watched Rachel Maddow tonight take apart McCain apologist Joe Scarborough, showing that Mr. Maverick voted against the Bush tax cuts and now wants to make them permanent, voted for comprehensive immigration reform and now says he wouldn't vote for the same bill, and all sorts of other panders to the right-wing base. And Morning Joe just wouldn't have any of it. He just wouldn't budge, lest his head exploded as his belief of McCain failed to match reality. Scarborough is a Republican and still an operative, but this is true across the traditional media. The media's free ride for McCain isn't likely to stop just because Rachel Maddow tells the truth. It's going to take a coordinated, citizen-led effort to force the truth into the debate.

Now We Know What Bush Was Spending All That Time in The National Guard Doing!

He was studying Vietnam!

President Bush plans to argue today that a hasty "retreat" from Iraq would lead to the kinds of bloodbaths that followed U.S. withdrawals from Vietnam and Cambodia in the 1970s.

In a speech he is to deliver here at the Veterans of Foreign Wars national convention, Bush will also say that the recent increase of U.S. troops is producing military progress in the war-racked country.

"Will their elected leaders in Washington pull the rug out from under them just as they are gaining momentum and changing the dynamic on the ground in Iraq?" Bush says in prepared remarks released by the White House late Tuesday.

Here's what the actual quote was: One unmistakable legacy of Vietnam is that the price of Americas withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent citizens whose agonies would add to our vocabulary new terms like “boat people,” “re-education camps,” and “killing fields."

Actually, that is eminently mistakable! First of all, no reasonable historian believes that the reaction to an unwinnable war in Vietnam was to stay longer.

"We were in Vietnam for 10 years. We dropped more bombs on Vietnam than we did in all of World War II in every theater. We lost 58,700 American lives, the second-greatest loss of lives in a foreign conflict. And we couldn't work our will," he said.

"What is Bush suggesting? That we didn't fight hard enough, stay long enough? That's nonsense. It's a distortion," he continued. "We've been in Iraq longer than we fought in World War II. It's a disaster, and this is a political attempt to lay the blame for the disaster on his opponents. But the disaster is the consequence of going in, not getting out."

Second of all, he uses "killing fields" cavalierly, when they didn't exist in Vietnam but in Cambodia. And here this is wingnut historical error like no other. In fact, Cambodian genocide was a direct result of our own aggression in that country.

Bush's invocation of the Cambodian genocide, however, is both predictable and disgusting. Rather than simply wallowing in counter-factual satisfactions (e.g., what if FDR hadn't simply "given away" a region of Europe his nation didn't actually control?) it actually inverts history by pretending that the killing fields were a consequence of American weakness rather than an effect of American aggression. The history on this is pretty unambiguous. Without four years of American and South Vietnamese bombardment of eastern Cambodia, and without the illegal invasion of the country in 1970, the preconditions for the ascent of the Khmer Rouge would not have existed. More importantly, as the Khmer became embroiled in a xenophobic campaign against ethnic Vietnamese and sought -- improbably -- to regain lands lost to Vietnam centuries before, the United States had little to say in the way of official complaint against Pol Pot's regime. Indeed, the "reasonable" position set forth by Kissinger (under Ford) and Brzezinski (under Carter) held that Pol Pot -- though detestable -- was at least useful so long as he threatened the Communists in Vietnam. And when the Khmer Rouge was deposed by a Vietnamese invasion and replaced by a Vietnamese puppet states, both Carter and Reagan continued to insist that the Khmer Rouge be acknowledged as the legitimate government of Cambodia.

Allow me to put it even more simply: to the extent that the United States abetted the Cambodian genocide, those contributions were made not by people who called for an end to the war in Vietnam but instead by those who insisted that the war be expanded into another nation; that the war could be brought under control with a massive, short-term escalation; and that domestic opposition to the war was irresponsible and meretricious.

In other words, the only historical parallel to Cambodia would be us attacking Iran and destabilizing that country, leading perhaps to another ethnic genocide. Not to mention the fact that 1.7 million Vietnamese died while we were there, suggesting that the cause of mass death was not us leaving, but us going in.

Bush also lied about the capture of "al Qaeda leaders" in Iraq, but that's familiar. Using Vietnam to BOLSTER support for staying stuck in an endless occupation is just lunacy. Most of the Democratic candidates have come out to trash this muddled logic. But this is one of those zombie wingnut lies that will never die. When we do leave the disaster of Iraq with our goals unfulfilled, these guys will claim that our troops were stabbed in the back.

The Asylum Inmate Who Would Be President

I think it took me a double days to get a full appreciation for the abject nuttiness of Rudy Giuliani in his big article for Foreign Affairs. From the need to capitalize "Terrorist's War on Us"; to its endorsement of a neoconservative foreign policy vision that has been completely wrong for the last 50 years; to its insanity about how we "almost won" in Vietnam; to advocating for 10 new military combat brigades and massive, crushing military spending to sustain all the wars he wants to fight simultaneously; to halting any pretense of preserving civil liberties and instead spying on the whole world three times over; to the rejection of the two-state solution in Palestine which every sane human being, including the Bush Administration and the Quartet, believe is the only sustainable course for stability; to the desire to effectively eliminate the UN and turn NATO into some kind of Justice League fighting whoever we decide not to like; to the only criticisms of Bush's policies being that he was too NICE, it's simply a tour de force of the wingnut id.

I'm not sure which is worse; whether Giuliani has to pander this far to the right to win the nomination of his party, or whether he ACTUALLY believes these things. Either way, it's unbelievably dangerous. Ezra believes we should be very afraid, Matt Yglesias worries about Rudy's ultimate vision of peace through complete military domination and subjugation...

The result of this policy is going to be an endless series of wars, a bankrupt country accounting for way more than fifty percent of world defense expenditures, fewer and fewer countries willing to cooperate with us on key priorities and, perhaps worst of all, more and more nuclear proliferation as countries decide its not safe to live in a world where the Rudy-led USA is the big kid on the block.

(which may be the point, is my fear. Defense multinationals could get rich in such an environment.)

... Jim Henley, in a devastating takedown, highlights a particular paragraph and thinks that Rudy doesn't get the irony...

Aspiring dictators sometimes win elections, and elected leaders sometimes govern badly and threaten their neighbors.

...Fred Kaplan takes Craziani behind the woodshed...

Had it been written for a freshman course on international relations, it would deserve at best a C-minus (with a concerned note to come see the professor as soon as possible). That it was written by a man who wants to be president—and who recently said that he understands the terrorist threat "better than anyone else running"—is either the stuff of high satire or cause to consider moving to, or out of, the country [...]

"Constellations of satellites that can watch arms factories everywhere around the globe, day and night, above- and belowground ... must be part of America's arsenal."

Yes, and while we're at it, let's build anti-gravity machines, mind-reading robots, X-ray-vision telescopes, speed-of-light transporter-beams, time-travel kits, and intercontinental heat-seeking bullets. It's bad enough that so many foreigners believe in the omniscience of U.S. intelligence agencies; it's appalling that a presidential candidate seems to believe such sci-fi fantasies, too.

... and conservative James Joyner completely concurs with everyone.

Essentially, he wants to massively increase a defense budget that already spends more than the rest of the countries on the planet combined so as to buy more submarines and anti-missile systems to protect us against a land-based guerrilla movement. We’re then going to use that military to go in, apparently, to topple every regime we don’t like and to wipe out every instance of non-democratic badness and spend decades occupying those countries. All, of course, while winning friends and influencing people.

We’re going to have a diplomatic policy that finally lives up to the caricature of Bush policy. We’re not going to talk to anyone unless they already agree with us. Our diplomats are simply going to be propaganda instruments from now on. And our media, too! And we’ll win the hearts and minds of Muslims everywhere by allying ourselves even more closely with the Israelis while punishing the Palestinian people.

There are more reviews, all of them abominable. This is a guy so consumed with terrorists that he has them on dartboards in his campaign bus, but in a 6,000-word foreign policy manifesto he never mentions Pakistan, where the terrorists ARE. This at the time when even the Bush Administration understands that this is the Earth's most dangerous trouble spot and that they must try to manage the chaotic situation.

There are some dull Republican candidates, there are some panderers who say only what the base wants to here, there are even some warhawks. NOBODY combines all of these qualities and complete authoritarianism in a package like Giuliani. He's certifiable.

UPDATE: Oh yeah, Rudy's got underpants problems, too.

The Very Silly Senator Morse

I always thought that this clique of Foreign Policy Scholars, who pay no attention to facts or dissenting opinions, was a new phenomenon... until I saw this (h/t Attaturk):



This is from a film called War Made Easy, from the makers of Hijacking Catastrophe, another excellent film. The featured speaker is Wayne Morse, Senator from the great state of Oregon, and much of it is from a Face the Nation episode circa 1964. Morse was one of only two Senators, both Democrats, to vote against the Gulf of Tonkin resolution. And in so doing, he went up against a political and foreign policy establishment that is eerily similar to where we are today. The Face the Nation exchange is absolutely fascinating, with Morse challenging the entire notion that a President has unique and untrammeled authority in matters of foreign policy. The journalist who questions him considers this a highly unserious answer, and makes no attempt to hide his disdain. For those who can't see the YouTube, here's a transcript:

Questioner: Senator, the Constitution gives to the President of the United States the sole responsibility for the conduct of foreign policy-

Morse: Couldn't be more wrong! You couldn't have made a more unsound legal statement than the one you have just made. This is the promulgation of an old fallacy, that foreign policy belongs to the President of the United States, that's nonsense-

Questioner: To whom does it belong, then, Senator?

Morse: It belongs to the American people, and our Constitutional fathers made it very, very, clear.

Questioner: Where does the President fit into this in the repsonsibility scale.

Morse: What I am saying is under our Constitution all our President is, is the administrator of the people's foreign policy. Those are his prerogatives, and I am pleading that the American people be given the facts about foreign policy-

Questioner: You know, Senator, that the American people cannot formulate and execute foreign policy.

Morse: Why do you say that? Why, you're a man of little faith in democracy if you make that kind of statement. I have complete faith in the ability of the American people to follow the facts if you'll give them.

Questioner: It isn't a lack of faith, Senator-

Morse: And my charge against my government is we're not giving the American people the facts.

This was well over 40 years ago, when we had a President using a trumped-up event to take the country to war, and Sen. Wayne Morse was a lonely soul challenging his government to tell the truth, to trust the American people, to live up to the ideals of democracy. For this he was dismissed as extremely silly. The next time he was up for election, he lost - to Bob Packwood. He would never return to the US Senate.

This idea that the people have a say in the workings of their government clearly irritated the journalist, presumably a Washington journalist, doing the questioning. His belief in the oligarchy of self-appointed elites represents an insidious trait in American political culture that we see to this day. It is not of much interest to the Beltway that this President is arrogating extreme amounts of executive power unto himself, because they see the self-aggrandizement of power as a noble goal. They believe that government is run best by themselves and them alone; that the foreign policy "consensus" is one made in the cocktail parties and right-leaning think tanks of the capital rahter than in the country at large. And this is nothing new, as we have seen.

This is the truly dangerous outcome of vesting power in the hands of people who do nothing but talk to each other and overlook each others biases. It's been a problem in this country almost since the beginning of the Republic. The Internet and blogs afford an opportunity for other voices to connect and mass against this deeply wrongheaded, groupthought, expansionist view of the world. But it won't be easy. Just look what happened to Sen. Morse.

The Blueprint

Take a look at this Nixon ad from his 1968 campaign.



Unlike Brink Lindsay, I think this is the blueprint for how the REPUBLICANS will end up talking about Iraq in 2008. There will be two antiwar candidates, at least rhetorically. What the Republican nominee will do is say that he has the best chance to get out of Iraq honorably and in a way that avoids chaos. It will be a lie, but it will attempt to blur the lines on Iraq and make the choice about who has the best plan to get out safely, rather than staying versus leaving. In this way, the Republicans on Iraq will be exactly like Hillary Clinton was on Iraq tonight in the debate.

Good Progress

Six more soldiers were killed by a roadside bomb yesterday west of Baghdad, adding to a bloody weekend. This in a week when we learn that al Qaeda is raking in the dough thanks to our continued presence in Iraq.

A major CIA effort launched last year to hunt down Osama bin Laden has produced no significant leads, but has helped track an alarming increase in the movement of al-Qaida operatives and money into Pakistan's tribal territories, according to senior U.S. intelligence officials.

In one of the most troubling trends, U.S. officials said al-Qaida's command base in Pakistan increasingly is being funded by cash from Iraq, where the terrorist network's operatives are raising substantial sums from donations to the insurgency as well as kidnappings of wealthy Iraqis and other criminal activity.

And when we learn that Iraq is likely to become a failed state:

There is not 'one' civil war, nor 'one' insurgency, but several civil wars and insurgencies between different communities in today's Iraq. Within this warring society, the Iraqi government is only one among many 'state-like' actors, and is largely irrelevant in terms of ordering social, economic, and political life. It is now possible to argue that Iraq is on the verge of being a failed state which faces the distinct possibility of collapse and fragmentation. These are some of the key findings of Accepting Realities in Iraq a new Briefing Paper written by Dr Gareth Stansfield and published today by Chatham House.

The paper also assesses Al-Qaeda activity within Iraq, especially in the major cities in the centre and north of the country. Dr Stansfield argues that, although Al-Qaeda is challenged by local groups, there is momentum behind its activity. Iraq's neighbors too have a greater capacity to affect the situation on the ground than either the UK or the US. Iran, Saudi Arabia and Turkey all have different reasons for seeing the instability in Iraq continue, and each uses different methods to influence developments.

This whole idea of Al Qaeda is significant. I truly believe that what the Administration is peddling about Al Anbar, where Sunni tribal leaders have turned on Al Qaeda (Marc Lynch independently confirms this in Harper's), proves that they would not in any way be able to take over the country if we leave. There's no political organ to Al Qaeda the way there was in Afghanistan with the Taliban. In fact, the only thing that appears to keep AQ in Iraq in the game is our presence. They can raise money off of our presence, they can gain local support by attacking us. If we left, their target would have to turn to the Iraqis, and there is simply no support for radical Wahhabism in a majority Shiite country, not even from Sunnis in Al Anbar. They would not have a safe haven at all, and it would be far smarter to go after Al Qaeda around the world than claiming dishonestly that we're fighting them in Iraq when they would be expelled much faster if we left. Here's Marc Lynch on that point:

The insurgents are very critical of Al Qaeda, its treatment of Sunnis and its extreme interpretation of Islam, but at the same time they are deeply committed to continued resistance to the American occupation. They want a less divided and more effective resistance, not an end to resistance. But there’s also a real divide in strategy that goes beyond the local grievances, which Americans really need to understand. Al Qaeda wants the United States to stay in Iraq as long as possible. It gets tremendous benefits from having American troops close at hand to kill – Iraq is the primary source of its propaganda and recruitment, and an integral part of its global strategy. They really want to turn Iraq into a base for exporting global jihad. But these major insurgency factions are focused on driving Americans out of Iraq and creating a political system that gives Sunnis a reasonable stake in politics [...]

If you listen to what these insurgency factions are saying, what Hareth al-Dhari of the Association of Muslim Scholars is saying, they couldn’t be making it more clear: make a credible commitment to withdrawing and the insurgency will dampen down and we’ll take care of the Al Qaeda groups out of our own self-interest.

Indeed, if we would deny Al Qaeda this constant barrage of self-described victories by killing American troops, the world would be rightly repulsed by them as they were in the immediate aftermath of September 11. That doesn't mean you do nothing to stop them, you vigorously go after them, instead of giving Pakistan a billion a year to stop patrolling the areas where the command operations are quartered. But it means you be smarter about how you go about this fight instead of wildly swinging like a drunk in a bar.

neither Al Qaeda as an organization nor bin Laden as an individual is commanding a great deal of respect or support. When you get these attacks in Algeria and Morocco, it repels people rather than attracting them. But the paradox is that even as Al Qaeda repels people with its actions, its core ideas are becoming more widely accepted, and that’s really troubling, and a real indictment of American public diplomacy. That’s also why the situation in Iraq is so devastating at the wider regional and global level. Killing people in Morocco and Algeria triggers a negative reaction, but fighting Americans in Iraq resonates with a much wider part of the Arab population. The Project on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland conducted a survey of Muslim public opinion a few months ago. 91 percent of Egyptians disapproved of attacks against civilians in the United States and only 7 percent disagreed with the statement that “groups that use violence against civilians, such as Al Qaeda, are violating the principles of Islam.” But 91 percent said that attacks on American troops in Iraq were legitimate, and 92 percent agreed with the goal of “getting the U.S. to withdraw forces from Islamic countries”. That gives you a sense of why jihad in Iraq is so vital to Al Qaeda – it’s a place where their violence is popular.

It's the only place where their violence is popular. And the sooner we allow Al Qaeda to collapse under its own weight by being a real beacon of freedom in the world, through global anti-poverty programs and restored moral leadership, the better. Incoming British Prime Minister Gordon Brown is announcing that he'll pull all troops out of Iraq within two years, before the next national elections. I think the number "two years" is significant, as it puts the withdrawal outside the end of Bush's second term, in an amount of time when a successor can implement an American withdrawal program. Brown is banking on sanity in the next American election. So am I, Prime Minister-in-waiting, so am I.

UPDATE: This tremendous post by Mona at Unqualified Offerings lists the 11 causes and lessons Robert McNamara learned in the aftermath of Vietnam, and how closely they relate to today.

We misjudged then — and we have since — the geopolitical intentions of our adversaries … and we exaggerated the dangers to the United States of their actions.

We viewed the people and leaders of South Vietnam in terms of our own experience. We saw in them a thirst for – and a determination to fight for — freedom and democracy. We totally misjudged the political forces within the country.

We underestimated the power of nationalism to motivate a people to fight and die for their beliefs and values….
Our misjudgments of friend and foe alike reflected our profound ignorance of the history, culture, and politics of the people in the area, and the personalities and habits of their leaders….No Southeast Asian [experts] existed for senior officials to consult when making decisions on Vietnam.

We failed then — and have since — to recognize the limitations of modern, high-technology military equipment, forces and doctrine in confronting unconventional, highly motivated people’s movements. We failed as well to adapt our military tactics to …winning the hearts and minds of people from a totally different culture.

We failed to draw Congress and the American people into a full and frank discussion and debate of the pros and cons of a large-scale military involvement … before we initiated the action.

After the action got under way and unanticipated events forced us off our planned course … we did not fully explain what was happening and why we were doing what we did….We had not prepared the public to understand the complex events we faced…confront[ing] uncharted seas and an alien environment. A nation’s deepest strength lies not in its military prowess, bur rather in the unity of its people. We failed to maintain it.

We did not recognize that neither our people nor our leaders are omniscient. Our judgment of what is in another people’s or country’s best interest should be put to the test of open discussion in international forums. We do not have the God-given right to shape every nation in our image or as we choose.

We did not hold to the principle that U.S. military action — other than in response to direct threats to our own national security – should be carried out only in conjunction with multinational forces supported fully (and not merely cosmetically) by the international community.

We failed to recognize that in international affairs, as in other aspects of life, there may be problems for which there are no immediate solutions … At times, we may have to live with an imperfect, untidy world.

…We thus failed to analyze and debate our actions in Southeast Asia - our objectives, the risks and costs of alternative ways of dealing with them, and the necessity of changing course when failure was clear….

These should be nailed above the cubicle of every foreign policy expert in Washington.

Oh, NOW It's Vietnam

Seeing war apologist John O'Sullivan on Real Time with Bill Maher, it occurs to me how fundamentally dishonest these people are, how they'll use any justification to serve their needs, even one they reject wholeheartedly in other contexts.

O'Sullivan, a think-tank habitué who's never so much as touched a battlefield, pressed the now-familiar argument that, if we leave Iraq, the violence will be catastrophic and horrible. As opposed to, you know, NOW. Maher's standing parry to this is asking why anyone should trust the predictions of the same people that have been wrong about absolutely everything relating to this war since the day it began, even before. So O'Sullivan attempted to prove his point through past experience, and he cited two examples: the end of the British Raj in 1947, which preceded a violent conflict between India and Pakistan that, in many ways, continues to this day; and the American pullout of Vietnam, which (according to O'Sullivan) occasioned the indiscriminate murder of millions of Cambodians under the Khmer Rouge and further violence as the North Vietnamese crushed the South.

First of all, I object to the notion that American withdrawal was in any responsible for the rise of the Khmer Rouge, which was happening since the mid-1950s, which was also virulently anti-Vietnamese (ethnic Vietnamese were among those targeted for death), and which was eventually stopped by the Vietnamese Army in 1979. (And we gave AID to Cambodia when they raided Vietnamese villages in late 1978). Maybe America bombing supply lines in Cambodia and turning the people in the countryside against imperialist forces and into the waiting hands of the Communists had something to do with it, but we didn't have a garrison of Marines in Phnom Penh. Second, in the case of India and Vietnam, the logical conclusion of O'Sullivan preferred policy is that we stay as a colonial occupier forever. Which, considering he's a Thatcher-era Brit, doesn't surprise me.

But that's all besides the point. It consistently amazes me that Bush defenders will go to their deaths denying that Iraq is similar to Vietnam until the MINUTE their critics make the decision that we should leave. THEN it's Vietnam all over again, and leaving will wrest great victory from our hands just when it was almost complete. The idea that Iraq isn't Vietnam until you want to leave is so deeply dishonest that it shows there's no possible argument with these people. The vows that you must take at the altar of conservatism are so twisted and deluded that it's difficult to make sense of them at all.

This is essentially an extension of the theory of Republican Dolschstoss, which suggests that stupid Republican foreign policy decisions have never lost a war, but the leftist-liberal-elite complex have always just taken total victory away by stabbing the war effort in the back. This was the conservative lesson in Vietnam, and it will be the conservative lesson in Iraq when we eventually leave that country. They are so convinced of their own righteousness that this can be the only possible explanation. They don't see mistakes and bad judgment and flawed assumptions, they only see cabals and conspiracies and betrayal.

O'Sullivan also used a dubious lesson of history to defend the announcement that we're building a wall between the Sunnis and the Shiites in Baghdad, a wall that the Iraqi government does not want and will move to end construction on. He cited the wall in Belfast as an example of this kind of decision working. Right, because for 25 years, there was no safer place on Earth than Northern Ireland.

Really, it's this latest tactic, taken along with the news that the US has abandoned the "stand up-stand down" strategy, which proves that the administration isn't even serious about counterinsurgency, which can only be accomplished through the marshaling of national power. Separating those powers, and sidelining them, only moves the country closer to isolation, alienation, and the inevitable paroxysm of violence. The Administration really doesn't care what they unleash in the region, they're just concerned with keeping the lid on until January 2009. So they'll put up prefab walls and stand sentry until they can send the helicopters off the roof of the White House. In truth, they're just prepping the ground for their own withdrawal, a withdrawal of responsibility.