Our three options for Iraq, in Pentagon-speak: “Go Big,” “Go Long,” and “Go Home.”

Late Update: Regular TPM Reader MB registers a complaint of mock-outrage: “How you could post a link to that WaPo article without letting loyal readers know that our defense officials are likening potential war strategies to the dance moves of a boy touching, blanket dangling, plastic surgery disaster is truly beyond me.”

Fair enough. Here’s the sentence from the WaPo story: “That combination plan, which one defense official called “Go Big but Short While Transitioning to Go Long,” could backfire if Iraqis suspect it is really a way for the United States to moonwalk out of Iraq — that is, to imitate singer Michael Jackson’s trademark move of appearing to move forward while actually sliding backward.”

Former Rep. Mark Foley is out of rehab! The probe into his scandal, however, is still under wraps. That and other news of the day in today’s Daily Muck.

Ohio Coingate felon and one-time GOP player Tom Noe sentenced to 18 years in prison.

The state judge had this to say about Noe’s theft of at least $2 million from taxpayers: “a short prison term would demean your conduct.”

Apparently he was unmoved by Noe’s lawyer’s plea that “this was a one-time crime and set of circumstances that I think will never echo at any point in the history of this state again.”

What did the President know specifically about U.S. torture practices and when did he know it?

Democrats in Congress want to know; and, in an interview with Spiegel Online that was largely eclipsed by the frenetic last days of the midterm election campaigns, reporter and author Ron Suskind said the President knew more and knew it earlier than you might think:

The president understands more about the mistakes than he lets on. He knows what the most-skilled interrogators know too. He gets briefed, and he was deeply involved in this process from the beginning. The president loves to talk to operators.

This is a President who I suspect has a hard time with the concept of plausible deniability.

Democrat Christine Jennings has filed an official contest of the election results in Florida’s 13th Congressional District.

Sore winner watch? GOP Rep. Jim Walsh won re-election, but is “disappointed” in the voters of his hometown.

House Intel Committee Chairman Pete Hoekstra (R-MI) demoted a Democratic committee staffer just before the elections as political payback. A senior House Republican admitted as much. But if you needed further proof–the staffer has been reinstated.

I’ve been off dealing with new parental responsibilities. And I’m just now easing back into my TPM life. But a few comments on the president’s new obsession with the Vietnam War (sort of a sign of how bleak things have gotten in Iraq, on so many levels. Think about it: at this point, it’s the president who’s arguing that Iraq is another Vietnam).

The argument about the need to maintain ‘credibility’ when deciding whether to withdraw from an ill-fated engagement is not one that, I think, can be dismissed out of hand. But those who wield this argument ignore another argument that is at least as important. If everyone really is watching, what do our actions tell other countries about how rational our national decision-making is about the use of our own power?

To be more concrete, showing other countries that we’re willing to bleed ourselves dry because we don’t have the common sense to cut our losses doesn’t necessarily serve us well at all. Quite the contrary.

Also, and this is another point that I don’t think gets raised often enough, a great power has the luxury to make various course corrections without its international standing or ‘credibility’ collapsing in upon itself. In fact, those who don’t get this seem to be concealing a profound pessimism about the United States’ collective national strength. The Bush crowd (and of course Kissinger in his long-standing and twisted way) sees America’s position in the world as exquisitely brittle, liable to being destroyed entirely by what happens in Baghdad or what sort of ‘mettle’ we display in Iraq. (A similar mindset about the ‘demonstration effect’ of whacking Saddam is, in a sense, what got us into this mess in the first place. But let’s leave that to another post. )

To use a crass but I think not totally inapt analogy, say Rupert Murdoch invests a lot of money in a big business deal in South America. And it just doesn’t pan out. Which inspires more or less future confidence in Murdoch’s reputation as an international media mogul: a willingness to keep pouring money into the failed venture basically forever, or pulling up stakes once it’s clear the deal isn’t working and moving on to more profitable ventures? Again, a crass analogy given the cost in lives and treasure we’re talking about in Iraq. But I think the analogy and its implications are solid. Denial and moral and intellectual cowardice do nothing for ones ‘credibility’.

So, now back to Vietnam — both the metaphor and the country.

Isn’t this trip a really odd venue for the president to be arguing that staying the course basically forever is the only acceptable solution? Though it took a tragically long time, the US, for all the moonwalking, eventually decided to pull up stakes in Vietnam. And what was the result? One might make arguments that the Soviets and Soviet proxies were temporarily emboldened in Africa or Latin America, though I think that’s debatable. But what of the real effects? The Soviet Union was dismantling itself within little more than a decade of our pull-out. And now we have a Vietnam that is politically repressive at home but proto-capitalist in its economy and, by any measure, incredibly eager for good relations with the United States.

If geo-political standing and international repercussions are really the issue we’re discussing, it seems very hard to argue that our decision to pull out of Vietnam had any lasting or meaningful ill-effects. And there’s at least a decent argument to the contrary.

And yet here we have President Bush, stepping on to Vietnamese soil to further our rapprochement with Vietnam, and arguing, in so many words, that the lesson of Vietnam is that we should still be there blowing the place up thirty years later.

We’re really deep into the primitive brainstem phase of our long national nightmare of presidential denial and mendacity on Iraq. Poetically, politically and intellectually it’s appropriate that Henry Kissinger is now along for the ride.

Commentary in recent days from two retired Army generals, Barry McCaffrey and William Odom, gives an even greater sense of urgency to the need to change course in Iraq.

McCaffrey says the U.S. needs to bring home five brigades from Iraq before Christmas to keep the Army from breaking, a redeployment he concedes is not feasible, according to the Army Times:

“The country is not at war. The United States armed forces and the CIA are at war. So we are asking our military to sustain a level of effort that we have not resourced,” he told Army Times.

“That’s how to break the Army is to keep it deployed above the rate at which it can be sustained,” he said. “There’s no free lunch here. The Army and the Marine Corps and Special Operations Command are too small and badly resourced to carry out this national security strategy.”

Odom is equally gloomy:

Our leaders do not act because their reputations are at stake. The public does not force them to act because it is blinded by the president’s conjured set of illusions: that we are reducing terrorism by fighting in Iraq, creating democracy there, preventing the spread of nuclear weapons, making Israel more secure, not allowing our fallen soldiers to have died in vain, and others.

But reality no longer can be avoided. It is beyond U.S. power to prevent sectarian violence in Iraq, the growing influence of Iran throughout the region, the probable spread of Sunni-Shiite strife to neighboring Arab states, the eventual rise to power of the anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr or some other anti-American leader in Baghdad, and the spread of instability beyond Iraq.

These realities get worse every day that our forces remain in Iraq. They can’t be wished away by clever diplomacy or by leaving our forces in Iraq for several more years.

Meanwhile the President is focused on mislearning the lessons of Vietnam.

Look for congressional hearings in January on the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy and whether gays should be allowed to serve openly in the armed forces.