by hilzoy
I don’t normally watch Chris Matthews — too many giant, green, ugly, horny monsters for my taste — but luckily, ThinkProgress does it for me. Today they have a video that has to be seen to be believed. In it, Andrea Mitchell, who normally has decent sources among Republicans, says:
“What I’ve been told from inside the moderate center of the Republican caucus is that the vote in favor of the president this week — it was against the president but the Republicans holding for the president — was misleading. That they really are not in favor of the surge. They don’t believe it’s going to work. But they basically said the president has until August, until Labor Day. After that, if it doesn’t work, they’re running. (…)
MITCHELL: They’ll stick until September and then they’ll leave. I believe very firmly that they’re against what he is doing but they feel that General Petraeus has persuaded them that for all intents and purposes, they can’t vote a withdrawal before September. (…)
MITCHELL: The Republicans were against the surge but they felt it was fait accompli, and that they were willing to give Petraeus until August. He told them there will be real progress by August. They have told him at a caucus meeting as very, very recently, that if there isn’t progress by August — and real progress means not a day of violence and a day of sanity — that they will pull the plug.”
In my naive little way, I think that it is just wrong to send people off to die for any reason other than to achieve some goal that is important enough to the nation to be worth their lives, and that you think they might actually accomplish. If the surge won’t work, then it is wrong to vote for it. And if the war is already lost, then we should be working to try to get our troops home, not sending more of them off to die.
If I had to vote on whether or not to send troops off to fight, I think I’d stop and ask myself what I would say to the parents or spouses of those who were killed, and specifically whether I would be able to look them in the eye and tell them honestly why their loved ones had died. And if I had to tell them that their husbands and wives and sons and daughters had died because I could not bring myself to defy my President — because I lacked the courage, or put the interests of my party above the lives of their loved ones — then I would hope that my tongue would cleave to the roof of my mouth, and my right hand would forget its cunning, and my breath would turn to ashes, and the heaven above me would be brass, and the earth below me would be iron, and the LORD would smite me with madness and blindness and astonishment of heart, and I would grope at noonday, as the blind gropeth in darkness, and I would not prosper in my ways: and I would be only oppressed and spoiled evermore, and I would become an astonishment, a proverb, and a byword, among all nations whither the LORD should lead me.
So I hope that Andrea Mitchell got it wrong.
And if I had to tell them that their husbands and wives and sons and daughters had died because I could not bring myself to defy my President — because I lacked the courage, or put the interests of my party above the lives of their loved ones
Who was it who asked “How do you ask someone to be the last man to die for a mistake?”
What did the Bush/Cheney political machine do to him for having asked that question 30 years ago?
Isn’t this part of the corruption in the American political machine, which has set opposition to war as by definition traitorous?
It’s not just individual Republicans who are to blame for this.
seems to me that’s it’s been obvious for years that the congressional republicans (and most of their most vocal supporters in the media) are only in it because it gives them another way to set themselves apart from the Dems.
how else can you explain their years and years of breathless rhetoric about the Possible End Of Western Civilization vs. their complete lack of interest in doing anything but clapping for whatever harebrained scheme W’s pushing this month ?
Malkin, for example: if it’s the end of the world, shouldn’t she blogging about how many terrorists she killed today, instead of dreaming up new scenarios for the 101st to war-game?
obviously, not. Dear Personality Cult Leader W says “[open-ended, ill-defined] Surge” and suddenly everybody’s like “yeah! let’s Surge!” ask ’em what a surge means and they’re all like “why do you hate America?”
even though i’m supa-cynical, i can see that i’m just incapable of being cynical enough for these clowns.
maybe their goal is to make politics as hideous as possible, thereby driving away everyone but those who vote according to their priest.
Obama riles up DK on this issue.
A quick note on “if the war is already lost”: I realize that this may seem like nitpicking, but it concedes too much to the mindset of those who would keep our soldiers over there to use this phrase. The war ended years ago, at least so far as the word materially relates to US troops in Iraq, and we won – all that remains is the occupation, an activity which can’t be “won” or “lost”. So the proper predicate at this point is “if the occupation isn’t worth the continuing cost in blood and treasure.” I’m not just playing word games here; bad framing like this affects not only the perceptions of the people listening to the debate, but the thinking of the participants.
Beyond that, of course, people are much more likely to balk at “we have lost the war in Iraq, so …” than at “the occupation of Iraq is going nowhere at a huge cost, so …”
If Petraeus claimed he could win it, and they pull the rug out from under him, we’re going to have 30+ years of wingnuts talking about traitors who pulled defeat out of the jaws of victory.
We’ll have that regardless, but they’d be able to quote Petraeus.
So Petraeus has to be discredited before we can pull out. If he says he can win it, we have to give him his chance before reasonable Republicans will admit it’s lost.
To my way of thinking, that means we successfully pacify Baghdad, and then we move the US troops out of Baghdad and pacify someplace else while Baghdad stays pacified.
It seems implausible, but wouldn’t it be great if he could do it!
And it isn’t clear how long it will take Anbar to be starved into submission. They aren’t getting their rationed food, maybe they’ll surrender before September. So it’s vaguely possible that things will look real good by then.
You would obviously have failed to make the cut in the Republican search for acceptable congresscritters. So would most people. We are all macaca now.
In my naive little way, I think that it is just wrong to send people off to die for any reason other than to achieve some goal that is important enough to the nation to be worth their lives, and that you think they might actually accomplish.
No arguing with that. I won’t try and don’t even want to.
Hilzoy is on fire today!
Hey, where are these moderate Republicans going to run? Into the desert to be chased around by a 50-foot tall Michael Jackson moon-walking and grabbing his crotch?
So, even IF we start withdrawing troops at some point in the next year or two, whither the Blackwater mercenaries? They and other “security” forces number in the tens of thousands in Iraq. Do Bush and Cheney the public servants recall them or do Bush and Cheney the private citizens leave them there to carry on a private, mercenary war, until of course they are required stateside for some blacker ops?
Special bonus points to anyone who can figure out which part of the second to last sentence, after “then I would hope that”, I made up. (Google would make the original Biblical sources of the rest too easy to find. It was a pity I decided the sentence was far too long as it was, and so had to reluctantly cut the angel flying above my head crying ‘Woe! Woe! Woe! (Rev. 8))
The brass and the iron, I think.
David Hicks is going to be a free man early next year. The plea agreement was negotiated with the judge, not the prosector! It contains a gag order that continues to apply after his release!!
Anybody want to start slogging through admin. files about Gitmo contain the worst of the worst?
Anybody want to justify the utterly abhorrent conduct of the admin in this case?
Jackmormon: Bzzzt! Deuteronomy 28:23.
Darn. Oppressed and spoiled?
You know why they made the deal for Hicks?
We have an election coming up later this year and poor little Johnnie was worried about the fact that the Australian public were not happy with the current situation. With any luck this will have made it worse, for him.
Nope. Breath turns to ashes.
Deuteronomy 28 is a wonderful fountain of disasters visited upon the wicked. Great for party games.
Well, at least I didn’t cheat.
Andrew Sullivan has a post about the Howard-Cheney-Hicks affair.
Clearly not cynical enough. Richard Nixon knew when he came to office in 1969 that we could not win in Vietnam. In order to create the illusion of “peace with honor” and to create “a decent interval” between the withdrawal of American ground forces and the collapse of South Vietnam, he continued the war for 4 more years, at the cost of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Vietnamese lives, and a passel of American ones as well. And spread the war into Cambodia, leading to the rise of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. (And Laos.)
If we’re going to go all Biblical, try Ecclesiastes 1:9-14 (NIV): What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.
I’m not sure why you’re surprised by this, beyond the fact that some Republicans are admitting their motives – off the record of course. It was pretty obvious at the time that many people were voting against their better judgement, just as the Democrats did with the first Iraq vote. That, unfortunately, is the nature of American politics and it’s why America is going to keep getting stuck in situations like this until it grows out of its fantasy idea of war.
two comments (not only) about framing:
a.)
as Evan said, it’s not about losing or winning, the sh#t hit the fan already, the proper question that should be asked is:
is the US troop presence conducive or detrimental to the security and humanitarian situation in Iraq?
and b.)
it’s not about the US military leaving at all, AFAIK nobody except Kucinich is proposing a ‘withdrawal’ in the proper sense of the word, it’s about US troops hunkering down in their billion $ mega-bases watching Iraqis kicking each others heads in
Francis: The plea agreement was negotiated with the judge, not the prosector! It contains a gag order that continues to apply after his release!!
Only for a year, however.
I hope Hicks writes a book. I would.
The particularly meanspirited aspect of the gag order is that if Hicks does write or is interviewed about his experiences after the year is up, any fees paid go to the Australian government, not to Hicks himself.
I’m a veteran. I say “Amen.” Which parent, spouse, or child would want their military loved one to die now for what apparently even congress believes is a wasted effort?
Which parent, spouse, or child would want their military loved one to die now for what apparently even congress believes is a wasted effort?
Every single parent, spouse, or child who opposed Kerry as a candidate for President because of Kerry’s opposition to the Vietnam War in the 1970s. There were so many times I was told in 2004 that someone just couldn’t bring themselves to support Kerry because of that…
Jes, the Post article says Hicks had to agree to “a year-long gag order, a guarantee that he will not allege illegal treatment at the hands of his U.S. captors, and a waiver of any right to appeal or sue.” It seems that only the general gag order expires after a year, so Hicks wouldn’t be able to write about illegal treatment in any book.
More on Hicks at Balkinization.
KCinDC: It seems that only the general gag order expires after a year, so Hicks wouldn’t be able to write about illegal treatment in any book.
That provides for an interesting paradox, though, doesn’t it?
In order to enforce the gag order, the US government would have to acknowledge that its treatment of Hicks was illegal.
So Petraeus told them they’d see progress in a Friedman and they believed him? What a bunch of chumps.
So Petraeus told them they’d see progress in a Friedman and they believed him?
No, they didn’t dare admit they didn’t believe him.
The trouble is, we’re going to have to pull out. Not just sit in our bases and wait, we’re going to have to leave. If we manage to get a more-or-less-stable iraqi government in place it will inevitably be an iraqi government that’s hostile to us and tells us to go away.
And if we don’t do that, we’re in continual failure mode.
Either way, it’s a lot harder sitting in bases than it is sitting in Guantanamo. We got Gitmo in perpetual lease from a defunct government. Castro told us to go away and we told him he had to honor the lease. He cut off the water supply and we put in desalination plants. Because we had a port and we could supply the base by sea.
But our bases in iraq have to be supplied by air or overland. Overland means through syria, or turkey, or iran, or iraq. Unless we can get friendly relations with one of them it doesn’t work.
Even if we don’t get anything that looks like a military defeat (which may be increasingly possible) we’re going to have to pull out in disgrace. And the US public will have a lot of ugly feelings about it.
The ones who’ll be least willing to forgive will be the ones who think we can win and that it’s a stab in the back to prevent that victory. They won’t forget while any legislator who had anything to do with it is still in office. And some of them may get violent and try assassinations.
It’s personally dangerous for republican legislators to indicate no-confidence in Petraeus’s plan. They need to provide as much money as asked for, and approve each new plan, and wait for something that looks like an unambiguous defeat before they can pull the plug.