Harry Reid sips the Kool-aid:
Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid said on Sunday he would support a short-term increase in U.S. troop numbers in Iraq being weighed by President George W. Bush if it is part of a broader withdrawal plan.
. . .
“If it’s for a surge, that is, for two or three months and it’s part of a program to get us out of there as indicated by this time next year, then, sure, I’ll go along with it,” Reid, who will become the majority leader when Democrats take control of the Senate next month, told ABC’s “This Week” program.
And if pigs could fly, and money could grow on trees, etc.
Some readers have suggested that Harry Reid’s openness to sending more troops to Iraq is a clever political move. I don’t see it, and that circle gets harder to square when considered along with Colin Powell’s remarks today:
Former secretary of state Colin L. Powell said today that the United States is losing what he described as a “civil war” in Iraq and that he is not persuaded that an increase in U.S. troops there would reverse the situation. Instead, he called for a new strategy that would relinquish responsibility for Iraqi security to the government in Baghdad sooner rather than later, with a U.S. drawdown to begin by the middle of next year.
Powell’s comments broke his long public silence on the issue and placed him at odds with the administration. . . .
Speaking on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” Powell seemed to draw as much from his 35-year Army career, including four years as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, as from his more recent difficult tenure as Bush’s chief diplomat.
Last summer’s surge of U.S. troops to try to stabilize Baghdad had failed, he said, and any new attempt was unlikely to succeed. “If somebody proposes that additional troops be sent, if I was still chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, my first question . . . is what mission is it these troops are supposed to accomplish . . . is it something that is really accomplishable . . . do we have enough troops to accomplish it?”
In what struck me as really odd coming from Mark Shields, he called Don Rumsfeld a tragic figure on the Newshour Friday. Not so, in any sense really. But Powell is truly a tragic figure. The great tragedy of Iraq (in the traditional meaning of the term) is that an entire generation of military men–who were hardened in the crucible of Vietnam as young officers and spent most of their careers building the all-volunteer armed services and warning against repeating the strategic mistakes embodied by that terrible conflict–in the end, at the apex of their careers, made the same mistakes they had spent their professional lives studying and warning against. The fact that their civilian leaders had sat out Vietnam (or in Rumsfeld’s case was a half a generation older) only makes the tragedy more compelling.
Despite his grave mistakes as secretary of state, Powell is worth listening to on this.
I don’t want to pick on TPM Reader DP, but his email exemplifies the reader emails coming in suggesting that Sen. Harry Reid’s support for a temporary increase in the number of U.S. troops in Iraq is either a clever political move or a move that Reid has no choice but to make:
I just want to send my qualified agreement with your readers who say that, as a tactical move, Reid should be supporting this temporary increase in troops. Somehow over the last six years our national debate over matters of life and death have been reduced to stupid slogans and 2 dimensional ideas. That’s the “facts on the ground” we have to deal with. Dems have to give the Commander/Decider in Chief every resource he asks for during this “last effort.” Opposing it will not prevent it from happening but it will make it harder for Dems to then clearly demonstrate that victory is not going to happen.
In the fantasy world I like to live in, Dems could repeat all the intelligent and nuanced arguments that demonstrate without a doubt that the war is lost and it’s time to leave and Bush would back down in the face of the country rising against him. In the real world, if Reid does anything more at this moment than say “I disagree with his tactics but will give him the resources he needs” then it will be much more difficult in three months to force real change. The political reality, as awful as it is, is that Bush had an opportunity after the elections to take a mandate for change and do whatever he wanted with it. He chose a stupid route, but what can we do about it?
There are any number of problems with this reasoning, both politically and substantively, not the least of which is the assumption that Bush will send additional troops (check), it won’t work (check), and then he’ll be forced to begin a large-scale withdrawal of U.S. forces (right–just like he was going to be forced to do after the Democrats took Congress and after the ISG report).
On the political side, 71% of Americans disapprove of Bush’s handling of Iraq. Why are Democrats still looking for political cover?
I had just about been driven to distraction by the catch-word of the moment: “surge.” As in, the President’s “New Way Forward” in Iraq calls for a “surge” of additional troops. How can such a ridiculous euphemism makes its way into print past so many editors in one week’s time?
But Colin Powell made a good point today about what “surge” really means:
Before any decision to increase troops, “I’d want to have a clear understanding of what it is they’re going for, how long they’re going for. And let’s be clear about something else. . . . There really are no additional troops. All we would be doing is keeping some of the troops who were there, there longer and escalating or accelerating the arrival of other troops.”
“That’s how you surge. And that surge cannot be sustained.” The “active Army is about broken,” Powell said. Even beyond Iraq, the Army and Marines have to “grow in size, in my military judgment,” and Congress must provide significant additional funding to sustain them.
Suddenly “surge” seems worth co-opting, as a euphemism for ephemeral last gasp.
A New York Times piece on how Air America Radio has been and, seemingly, continues to be run. Ugh.
Ugh.
Late Update: A number of readers have written in to ask whether, in this post, I was criticizing the Times or Air America. Short version: Air America. I don’t want to get too deeply into this because I don’t know enough of the details to say with any intelligence who knew what they were doing and who didn’t. And I know a lot of people at the Air America so I’m probably compromised by that at some level — not wanting to criticize friends and all that. But reading the Times article and just hearing stories along the way it’s really, really hard not to get the impression that the management and business side of the operation never matched up to a lot of the stuff being done by the on-air talent. And there’s a follow-on point I’d like to make. A number of readers have written in to say that I’m being unfair to the enterprise because there’s no real way AA could succeed as a business without in some way violating its liberal editorial principles. I think that’s crazy. And this point is entirely separate from anything about Air America. But whether you define your market as liberals or Democrats, or some mix of the two or whatever, I don’t buy — based on principle and experience — that you can’t publish or broadcast stuff those folks like and make a profit at the same time. The thought that the two aims are in some necessary conflict has always struck me as one of the most effete, self-justifying and pathetic parts of the liberal psyche in this country. Hopefully, one on the decline.
Harry Reid: No more middle-of-the-night legislative tricks. Starting. . . . next year. That and other news of the day in today’s Daily Muck.
Hillary Clinton comes out against a troop increase in Iraq.
OK, so he narrowly lost. But Sen. Conrad Burns (R-MT) finished his campaign with plenty of money left over to pay his lawyers. At least he’s got his priorities straight.
Friday, Justin reported that the Defense Department had classified the number — yeah, the number — of attacks in Iraq.
Over at TPMmuckraker, we’re trying to find all the examples we can of the Bush Administration keeping once-public information sources from the public. We’ve gotten started, but boy, do we need your help.
It looks like Mark Penn isn’t going to give up the biggest Dem pollster BS-artist crown without a fight. Here he is arguing that Hillary is actually the least polarizing of the Democratic presidential candidates.