It seems the Baker report’s dire portrait of the state of the war effort in Iraq — and lukewarm compromise proposals for how to wind down the U.S.’s disastrous commitment there — upset the diehards (dare we call them “dead-enders”?) on the right who led the charge to invade.

A New York Times Sunday piece collected their comments. Lame-duck Sen. Rick Santorum: “A prescription for surrender.” Richard Perle: “Absurd.” And, of course, mad Rush Limbaugh: “There’s nothing in this about winning, there’s nothing in this about victory. There isn’t anything in this about moving forward in a positive way. This is cut and run, surrender without the words.”

The few neocons still standing are supporting Sen. John McCain’s call for escalation. McCain wants to send 20,000 more American troops to Iraq — as though we had them to spare, and as though such a relatively small force boost could turn the tide. But here’s what William Kristol thinks: “In the real world, the Baker report is now the vehicle for those Republicans who want to extricate themselves from Iraq, while McCain is articulating the strategy for victory in Iraq.”

All this talk of “victory”! I keep hearing the voice of Robert Duvall’s surfing-mad U.S. Colonel Kilgore from “Apocalypse Now,” loving the smell of napalm in the morning, rhapsodizing that it “smells like…victory.”

Our conservative friends, desperate as their entire movement circles a drain of corruption and defeat, are as detached from reality as Duvall’s commander. There is no victory in Iraq. The war has been lost. Past tense. Invading was the greatest strategic mistake the U.S. has made in our lifetime. We will be paying the price, and cleaning up the mess, for a generation.

“Moving forward in a positive way” today means accepting this reality and figuring out what to do next. Pretending that “victory” is still possible is insane. There is no sense in throwing more money and lives down the hole that President Bush dug for the country. The only question is how many more U.S. soldiers must die so that Bush and his dwindling cadre of diehard supporters don’t have to admit defeat.
[tags]iraq war, neoconservatives[/tags]

Jeane Kirkpatrick, President Reagan’s U.N. ambassador, died today.

In this era when American foreign policy has once again been driven into a ditch by neoconservatives, her name is a reminder of another time when the U.S. made colossal errors based on fallacious theories.

Kirkpatrick’s Big Idea, known eventually as the Kirkpatrick Doctrine, was that it was OK for the U.S. to support repressive dictatorships because “authoritarian regimes” (like Chile’s Augusto Pinochet or, for that matter, Iraq’s strongman Saddam Hussein) were capable of evolving peacefully toward democracy, whereas “totalitarian states” — evil entities like the Soviet Union, Nicaragua or Cuba — were incapable of such change. We could talk to right-wing dictators; we could only fight the Commies to the death.

It’s hard to think of another case where a public intellectual has had his or her ideas so swiftly and definitively repudiated by the march of events. Within less than a decade of Kirkpatrick’s formulation of her doctrine, the Soviet Union and its satellite states had peacefully thrown off their Communist leadership. Subsequent events there have hardly been without problems and dangers. But no one could take Kirkpatrick’s idea seriously after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

In its own era, the Kirkpatrick Doctrine looked like a nakedly obvious fig-leaf for the ideological preferences of the Reagan team, who could relate easily enough to the Pinochets and Saddams of the world but who’d spent their lives winning elections by thundering against the Reds. Today, Kirkpatrick’s legacy is a sad reminder to take all grand theoretical frameworks of global policy with multiple handfuls of salt.
[tags]jeane kirkpatrick, kirkpatrick doctrine, foreign policy[/tags]

Remember that election we just had, where the country voted overwhelmingly against President Bush’s Iraq war and the party that made it happen?

Forget vox populi, because it looks like, rather than beginning to wind down American involvement in Iraq, we are headed for escalation. That’s why Robert Gates is out there saying we “aren’t winning” the war. That’s what John McCain has been urging for some time. That’s what President Bush will welcome, as a way of making sure that the war drags its miserableness out long enough for him to pass the buck to his successor. And now it seems the escalation crowd has some Democratic support, in the person of the new chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Silvestre Reyes.

Reyes is saying he supports sending an additional 20,000 to 30,000 troops to Iraq because he wants to “take out the militias.” I think he needs to go back and look at the intelligence again, because, as far as I’ve been able to tell, those “militias” pretty much are the current Iraqi government. Bush recently welcomed the de facto leader of one of the largest of the Shiite militia factions to the White House.

The presence of 140,000 U.S. troops in Iraq for close to four years now has done little to curtail the power and influence of these militias. Why would Reyes or anyone else think that adding 20-30,000 more would make any difference at this late stage of the game? You might be able to talk about “taking out the militias” if you were willing to, say, consider doubling the size of the American force in Iraq — a purely theoretical exercise, since we don’t have the troops. But modest increases in troop commitment are all about domestic U.S. politics; they’re not going to change the course of events.

Reyes seems to be engaging in the same sort of dangerous combination of wishful thinking and strategic confusion that got us into the Iraq mess in the first place. We thought we’d voted for change a month ago, but who’d have guessed Washington would interpret “change” to mean “send in more troops”?
[tags]iraq, militias, silvestre reyes[/tags]

So now we have news from the New York Times that, right before he was fired, secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld (not former yet!) wrote a terse memo to the president that basically said, “Oops, this war isn’t working out, let’s look at our escape hatch options.”

It’s hard to imagine that this leak came from anywhere else but Rumsfeld’s camp, who presumably felt it would demonstrate either (a) that Rummy isn’t such an idiot after all, and has some awareness of how badly the Iraq adventure has gone awry, or, (b) that Rummy got fired precisely for suggesting that “stay the course” was no longer an idea that anyone but a moron could embrace.

Of course, if Rummy really wanted to prove that he’s no dummy he’d have to dial up the Wayback Machine and find a copy of such a memo a year or two further in the past. No such memo exists; Rumsfeld remained a loyal stay-the-courser — indeed, he was the primary architect of the course-to-be-stayed — till the last possible moment, by which time the gesture was far too little, far too late. Yet even that gesture, it appears, was too much for the blinkered, bunkered man in the Oval Office, who read his defense secretary’s grim prognosis and promptly decided to hang the messenger.

These men belong to an administration that wove a golden-hued myth of loyalty around itself. But it seems that, in fact, each of them found a way to double cross the other — Rumsfeld by belatedly telling the president the truth about the war; Bush responding with a “Now you tell me? Off with your head!”; and now Rumsfeld returning fire with this knife-twisting leak. These guys truly deserve each other, though the nation deserves better.

Our household recently watched The Fog of War, Errol Morris’s amazing documentary about Robert McNamara, and it offers some instructive parallels. (The entire film, in fact, is eye-opening today, and worth watching again even if you saw it back in late 2003 when it came out; the echoes that were only ominous then are deafening in light of the downward spiral of events in Iraq.) McNamara, who in many though not all ways was Lyndon Johnson’s Rumsfeld, offered Johnson a similar memo in fall of 1967, telling his president that it was time to “cut and run” from the Vietnam debacle. Johnson promptly gave him the axe.

The nation was blessed by better timing in that conflict; primary elections were only months away, and the voters delivered such a resounding thumbs down to Johnson’s war that the president stunned the nation with an announcement that he wouldn’t run for reelection. Today we’ve got 15 months before the primaries. That’s a long time to weather the collapse of a government we’re propping up and a murderous civil war our irresponsibility helped start.

I wrote earlier this week about the prospect of a Bush/Cheney resignation, and I realize that remains the unlikeliest of scenarios. But consider how unlikely Johnson’s choice was: He’d won in 1964 in a colossal landslide (a victory on a scale that puts Bush’s two ostensibly “mandate”-delivering squeakers into perspective); he’d engineered passage of some of the most important civil rights and social-welfare legislation in American history; he presided over an era of expansive, if unsettled, prosperity. The idea that he could be essentially forced from office must have seemed absurd.

There’s probably no force that can dislodge Bush from the White House between now and 2008. But consider: we will soon experience a flood of revelations from Congressional investigations into administration corruption and law-breaking. We may well see a revolt in the Republican ranks by party leaders and voters who see how badly Bush’s blind policies can cripple their future. The Beltway media’s slavish willingness to look the other way at the administration’s lies and stupidities appears to be eroding (though at a surprisingly slow pace!).

Right now Bush looks like he’s resuming the policy, if not the rhetoric, of “stay the course”: The Gates choice for defense actually supports that view, as Thomas Powers argued, and the president’s statements are becoming more and more petulantly defiant, as with his declaration that talk of a “graceful exit” displayed “no realism at all”. But if, in the face of the opposition that is beginning to assemble, Bush keeps his heels dug in, the damage will be extraordinary: not only to the GOP but to the office of the president, the U.S.’s international position, and, finally, to the one legacy Bush apparently believes he’s building — his own place in history. If things get to that point, it’s not impossible to imagine someone picking up the phone and telling the president what he must do for the good of the country. I don’t know exactly who that would be — Henry Kissinger? James Baker? Billy Graham? dad? all of the above?

It’s a way long shot, to be sure. But, as Frank Rich writes today, Bush is “slipping into the same zone as Woodrow Wilson did when refusing to face the rejection of the League of Nations, as a sleepless L.B.J. did when micromanaging bombing missions in Vietnam, as Ronald Reagan did when checking out during Iran-Contra.” The president, in other words, is entering a “Final Days”-like phase of utter detachment not only from reality but also from the forces that have hitherto insulated him. That’s dangerous for us all, certainly; but it could be the beginning of the end of the nightmare, too.
[tags]bush administration, iraq, rumsfeld memo[/tags]