We haven’t had one in awhile.
Archives for November 2006
The Last Big Push
I wonder what gave Bush his sudden sense of urgency? For three years Iraq spiraled into chaos and as recently as this summer the only response from our government was stay the course rhetoric and bizarrely counterfactual happy talk. Now suddenly Bush has settled on a plan that he calls the “Last Big Push.” You could call the new plan a day late and a dollar short, if you define a “day” as three years and a “dollar” as 300,000 troops and $100 billion.
President George Bush has told senior advisers that the US and its allies must make “a last big push” to win the war in Iraq and that instead of beginning a troop withdrawal next year, he may increase US forces by up to 20,000 soldiers, according to sources familiar with the administration’s internal deliberations.
Mr Bush’s refusal to give ground, coming in the teeth of growing calls in the US and Britain for a radical rethink or a swift exit, is having a decisive impact on the policy review being conducted by the Iraq Study Group chaired by Bush family loyalist James Baker, the sources said.
Although the panel’s work is not complete, its recommendations are expected to be built around a four-point “victory strategy” developed by Pentagon officials advising the group. The strategy, along with other related proposals, is being circulated in draft form and has been discussed in separate closed sessions with Mr Baker and the vice-president Dick Cheney, an Iraq war hawk.
Two problems come to mind with the president’s “strategy.”
First, compared with the numbers we really need 20,000 troops is a cruel joke. Given a solid postwar strategy and competent leadership we would have needed at least severalhundred thousand to handle the occupation from the outset, before anything resembling an insurgency began. We didn’t stop the looting in Iraq simply because we didn’t have the boots to do it. Even a bizarro-world Rumsfeld who cared about ordinary Iraqis would have been able to do squat with the forces we had in theater. By now the forces needed to bring the daily bloodshed under control could be many times the estimates given by realists like Shinseki and Colin Powell.
Think about it this way. Our last big initiative, the “inkblot” strategy, redeployed thousands of troops into Baghdad. It didn’t work. Maybe we missed the number of troops needed by a little or by a lot, or maybe nothing can stop the bleeding now. Either way the idea of moving troops into Baghdad so that the current troops can redeploy elsewhere won’t do the capitol any good and won’t distribute enough forces elsewhere to matter.
Second, we don’t have the troops. Whoever the president plans to sent to Iraq won’t be properly trained and equipped regulars from the Army or Marines.
At least we all now agree that “stay the course” amounts to losing, slowly. I bet that the Republican minority feels awfully grateful to Rove for last summer’s political stay the course orgy in Congress. However, while I’m glad that even the duller knives recognize the need to fish or cut bait I guess we will wait a little longer for some to realize that the fishing pole’s gone and the pond dried up.
Keep this in mind when some pundit claims to be a “serious” foreign policy thinker. Serious thinkers recognize that a choice between the impossible and the inevitable isn’t a choice at all. Picking the impossible, or punting via a endless series of Friedman Units, is the opposite of serious. It is what the vain and the stubborn do to escape admitting failure to the world and, more importantly, to themselves.
***Update***
Also proposed: “tilting” US policy in favor of the Shiite majority. That should ease sectarian tensions.
The Stupid Party
With the ascension of Trent Lott to the position of Minority Whip and the ongoing kerfuffle regarding Nancy Pelosi and her choice of Murtha, it is time for something really rare here at Balloon Juice- my wholehearted agreement with Dean Barnett on a sentiment:
Is it just me, or is it becoming increasingly apparent that the Republicans and Democrats are determined to engage in a two year dumb-off?
The one positive aspect of this development is that the current Bush administration is, for lack of a better word, fucked. They now face a hostile majority party in both the House and the Senate, and their own party in the House will be run by people running as hard and as far as they can from this White House (as soon as they quit stockpiling ammo for the circular firing squad) and is now led in the Senate by Mitch McConnell and Trent Lott.
McConnell is, by all accounts, a straight shooter and an extremely wily strategist, but he also has the distinction of being livid with this administration for their behavior with Campaign Finance Reform. Lott, as you well know, is, I am sure, salivating at the prospect of reaming this White House a good one. He still feels that they threw him overboard in favor of Frist, and he has been getting his pound of flesh every chance he can over the past few years. I expect him to make the next two years as painful excrutiating for Bush, Cheney, and Rove as he possibly can. Another upside to Lott is that he has some bad blood with Dobson and company.
So, while the election of McConnell and Lott will no doubt further cement the party as a southern regional party (I am inclined to believe the 2008 Senate races will be a disaster for the GOP, leaving the party truly marginalized), no doubt dooming Republicans electorally for generations to come, there is the upside that Bush is going to get it handed to him right and proper with some pretty good regularity (already there are rumblings about wiretapping). That, I am inclined to believe, is a good thing for both Republicans and the country.
Comity Watch
Bush seems determined to get some real mileage out of the waning weeks of his Congressional majority. First it was John Bolton and the domestic wiretapping acts, not it’s a panel of judges so far out there that even Republicans have their doubts:
After calling for bipartisanship, President Bush surprised Senate Democrats with plans to renominate a controversial list of judges – some of whom may be unacceptable even to a few Republican senators. “It’s an unfortunate signal,” said one senior Democratic Senate aide.
[…] Lawmakers and others had been waiting to see whether Bush would renominate four particularly controversial appeals court candidates whose nominations had expired without Senate action. He did. The four include two nominees to the Fourth Circuit in Richmond: Terrence Boyle, a district court judge in North Carolina and a former aide to Sen. Jesse Helms, and Defense Department General Counsel William Haynes, who became a symbol of the Bush administration’s policies on terrorism, interrogations and other wartime powers. In addition, William Myers, a lobbyist and critic of environmental rules, was renominated for the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco, and Michael Wallace of Mississippi, rated unqualified for the appeals court by an American Bar Association panel, was renominated for the Fifth Circuit in New Orleans.
Looks like last Wednesday’s open hand of bipartisanship really was a finger. Fortunately these gestures mostly amount to one angry has-been raging, raging against the dying of his light. With Trent Lott now #2 in the Senate GOP the president won’t find many friends in either caucus, in either house. Sad times for a guy whose image begins and ends with projecting strength.
Draining The Swamp
This dovetails nicely with the post below:
Republicans do not cede control of Congress for nearly two months, but money, power and influence are already beginning to change hands. The political economy, at least here in the capital, is humming for Democrats.
Democratic lobbyists are fielding calls from pharmaceutical companies, the oil and gas industry and military companies, all of which had grown accustomed to patronizing Republicans, as the environment in Washington abruptly shifts.
Take, for example, Vic Fazio, a California Democrat who rose through the ranks of Congress and reveled in the majority for all but 4 of his 20 years in office. In his second career as a lobbyist, Mr. Fazio did not experience the pleasures of Democratic rule — until now. Suddenly he is in demand.
For Mr. Fazio, who is close to Representative Nancy Pelosi, the California Democrat who is set to become House speaker, the power switch is, quite simply, good for business. Companies are scrambling to fortify lobbying teams with well-connected Democrats.
Draining the swamp isn’t going to be easy- especially with Murtha as your Number Two.
Meet the New Boss, Same as the Old Boss?
That is what John Fund would have you believe:
House Speaker-designate Nancy Pelosi’s endorsement of Rep. John Murtha for majority leader, the No. 2 position in the Democratic leaderhsip, has roiled her caucus. “She will ensure that they [Mr. Murtha and his allies] win. This is hardball politics,” Rep. Jim Moran, a top Murtha ally, told the Hill, a congressional newspaper. “We are entering an era where when the speaker instructs you what to do, you do it.”
But several members are privately aghast that Mr. Murtha, a pork-barreling opponent of most House ethics reforms, could become the second most visible symbol of the new Democratic rule. “We are supposed to change business as usual, not put the fox in charge of the henhouse,” one Democratic member told me. “It’s not just the Abscam scandal of the 1980s that he barely dodged, he’s a disaster waiting to happen because of his current behavior,” another told me.
As for Abscam, a recent book by George Crile, a producer for CBS’s “60 Minutes,” provides damning evidence that Mr. Murtha escaped severe punishment for his role in the scandal only because then-Speaker Tip O’Neill arranged for the House Ethics Committee to drop the charges, over the objections of the committee’s outside prosecutor. The prosecutor quickly resigned in protest.
I have no idea why Pelosi is so set on Murtha, but so be it. This also should be causing some concern among Democrats:
Convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff is scheduled to report to federal prison tomorrow, over the objections of federal prosecutors who say they still need his help to pursue leads on officials he allegedly bribed.
Sources close to the investigation say Abramoff has provided information on his dealings with and campaign contributions and gifts to “dozens of members of Congress and staff,” including what Abramoff has reportedly described as “six to eight seriously corrupt Democratic senators.”
Could get interesting.
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The Wreckers
Just saw the Wreckers on Imus.
Those ladies can sing, and they are mighty easy on the eyes.
Consider this an open thread.