I feel it my bounden duty this Christmas Eve morning to put up a post–any post–just so that you don’t start your holiday morning with the post Josh ended with last night. It’s quite a shock, especially before your first cup of coffee. So either go and get your coffee before following Josh’s link, or perhaps instead you would like to read about the latest New Hampshire presidential polling. I just don’t want your day to start like mine did.

Last week we tried to nail down members of the Republican leadership in Congress on where they stand on the President’s soon-to-be-proposed “surge.” The response? Mostly silence.

But in an interview published today, one veteran Republican congressman says he is “highly skeptical” that a surge will have any real effect on the ground. Rep. Mark Souder (R-IN), who won re-election after a hard-fought campaign, was surprisingly candid in an interview with the Ft. Wayne Journal Gazette:

In my opinion, it’s been a civil war. But the question of a civil war is: Is there a functioning central government that can win a civil war? … What’s not clear to me is if this government can ever be stable and that the civil war has gone from skirmishing and marginal fighting at the terrorist level and some Shiite militias to the dominant pattern. There’s no number of troops we can put on the ground to basically battle inside of a large-scale civil war without a functioning central government.

If we see that it’s developed that way, do we stay to 2008 or do we get out in 2007? At what point do you say we’ve gone across the line where there’s not a hope of stability or at least that it appears to be small?

. . .

I think it’s intriguing that the president is looking at trying to put more troops on the ground like Sen. McCain has suggested all the way along. But my impression – and I haven’t been there since spring – is that we’ve passed that point. Even doubling the number of troops on the ground won’t do it. Instead of just having potentially a few thousand people that you’re trying to stabilize who are picking at random where to hit, or even 20,000, basically at this point the whole country’s engaged. Which means an increase in troop power isn’t going to stabilize it.

. . .

It’s the beginning of the end. The question now is how fast.

. . .

What is it going to look like if we all of a sudden immediately pulled out, pulled out in six months, 12 months or 18 months? Now we’re back to what’s in the interest of the United States and our world security picture, not trying to establish a government in Iraq. … I don’t have any confidence they have a plan. So maybe our troops have to stay there till ’08 till we get a plan of what’s a withdrawal look like. So I don’t know the answer to your question, but I know what variables I’m looking for.

If they can make a compelling case that more troops on the ground would give us a chance, I’m willing to listen. But I’m highly skeptical.

. . .

In my opinion the American people have already closed the book on “are we willing to wait until they have established a free and democratic government that’s safe and secure in Iraq?” The answer is no – unless they can do it awful fast.

Souder may be something of an outlier. He was one of the few GOP members whom I recall coming out publicly for pulling troops back even before the election. But overall he is a reliable conservative from a reliably conservative state. If the President loses the Mark Souders, he’s in big trouble on the Hill.

On one level, it’s hard to imagine the GOP minority not coming around to support the President’s surge. At the same time, these same folks just endured a withering political climate first-hand; saw some of their longtime colleagues defeated; won re-election in some cases by much narrower margins and after spending much more money than in the past; and by and large got an unpleasant earful from voters back home. They face election campaigns in two short years. The President doesn’t.

Even if the GOP presents a united front in support of the surge, as I expect it will, you can bet that just below the surface will be much skepticism and caution. With Souder’s remarks, the cracks in that facade are already showing.

One Goode Republican?

George Stephanopoulos asked Sen. Lindsey Graham (R) about Virgil Goode this morning. And the senator from South Carolina did not disappoint …

STEPHANOPOULOS: Let me turn to a domestic issue, Senator Graham. A Republican congressman from Virginia this week, Virgil Goode of Virginia, raised a lot of controversy with a letter he wrote in
response to the idea that the newly elected Democrat from Minnesota, Keith Ellison, the first Muslim in Congress, was going to take the oath, the ceremonial oath, on the Koran.

He wrote to his constituents saying — “If American citizens don’t wake up and adopt the Virgil Goode position on immigration, there will likely be many more Muslims elected to office and demanding the use of the Koran.”

Now, Democrats have risen up and said that Republicans ought to denounce Congressman Goode. Do you find anything wrong with what he said, and will you denounce him?

GRAHAM: I don’t think that’s the appropriate line for a congressman to take when it comes time for another congressman to take the oath. Why would you swear allegiance to a document outside your faith? In our legal system, people can take the oath in a variety of ways.

Religious diversity is a strength, not a weakness in this country.

We need immigration reform, but not for the reasons that Mr. Goode cited. What would happen in this country if a Christian were elected in Lebanon and he had to swear allegiance to the Koran when it came time for them to take office? There would be an outcry in this country.

So I embrace religious diversity. I welcome this new member of Congress. I’m glad he’s swearing allegiance to a document that is consistent with his faith.

And what I would like America to do in 2007 is understand that the war on terror is about intolerance, that Syria is a dictatorship that has no interest in seeing a representative democracy in Iraq, that Iran, the president of Iran hosted a conference denying the Holocaust in December 2006, has avowed to destroy the state of Israel. We don’t need to be talking to these people. We need to be standing up to their agendas and bringing them in line with the world, a world of tolerance. And Iran and Syria are not tolerant states, and the statements by Virgil Goode do not represent the best of who we are as a nation.

TPM reader EH:

In all of this talk of increasing troop levels to accomplish some kind of success or unstated goal, I’m reminded of a software engineering principle called Brooks’ Law: “Adding manpower to a late project makes it later.” This meshes nicely with analysis of the escalation being designed to carry the war into the ’08 election cycle, but I think the administration is cynical enough to push the surge just for this reason, especially since the reasons and goals of the surge have remained nebulous throughout the past weeks. Nobody knows what the goals are anymore, and nobody’s asking.

You may have seen the reports that British officials are on high alert for a possible terrorist attack on the Chunnel during the Christmas holiday. A tempting target, I’m sure, and more power to the Brits if they have obtained good intelligence and are taking action to thwart an attack. But this passage from The Guardian jumped out as an ominous sign that at least some among our friends across the pond have lost all perspective on the terrorism threat, in much the same way as we have here:

Last week Sir Ian Blair, the head of the Metropolitan Police, described ‘the threat of another terrorist attempt’ as ‘ever present’ adding that ‘Christmas is a period when that might happen’.

‘It is a far graver threat in terms of civilians than either the Cold War or the Second World War,’ he said. ‘It’s a much graver threat than that posed by Irish Republican terrorism.’

Is he serious? A greater threat to civilians lives than world war or nuclear annihilation? What happened to the stiff upper lip?

The LA Times has its latest installment on the goings-on involving developer-cum-congressman Gary Miller (R-CA).

An internal Japanese government document shows that Japan has recently looked into the possibility of developing a nuclear warhead, according to a Japanese media report, presumably in response to North Korea’s recent nuclear test.

Update: TPM Reader MC correctly points out that the date of the government report is September 20, prior to the North Korean’s nuclear test, but following this summer’s missile test.

Politically-connected corporations fleeced taxpayers for hundreds of millions of dollars on fraudulent Katrina cleanup contracts. That and other news of the day in today’s Daily Muck.

Nebraska to investigate robocalls.

November 2004 to November 2006 represented a remarkable turnabout for President Bush and the Republican party. Was there one key event responsible more than any other for the reversal of fortune: Katrina, Iraq, Social Security, Abramoff? What was the tipping point? We’re discussing this now at TPMCafe.