GOP: Can't 'pull plug...' Dems: 'Have to withdraw'

Why bet on the Bears or some sports team, when you can wager on a sure thing--the "Swamp's" left-wing bias?

As is inevitably the case, when the "Swamp" purports to present a "quite debate" between a Democrat and a Republican, the Democrat is given much more space. In this instance, Democrat Jim Webb is quoted 207 words, versus 139 for Republican John Cornyn.

Can anyone point out an instance where the Swamp covered a 2-party debate and gave the Republican 50% more space than the Democrat?

Evidently the Swamp reporters feel that their Democrat friends need to be favored with much more space. Guess they feel that a weak case needs the help.

"They looked at the television ads which Ari Fleischer, the former White House press secretary, is orchestrating, one picturing a military man pleading with the public that this is “not the time to quit’’ in Iraq and that withdrawing will only invite terrorists there to follow us home."

More garbage from the RNC.

What? Terrorists don't have MapQuest? They can't find the U.S. on a globe?

Hey, remember? The Democrats control Congress! If they want to pull out of Iraq, VOTE TO DO IT. Why won't they defund the war on terrorism? Their radical left supporters want them to. Murtha, Pelosi and their crowd want to do it. Quit pussyfooting around and vote to pull all the troops out...now. And leave the vast majority of peace-loving Iraqis to the head-chopping "mercy" of the murdering terrorist horde, just like they did in Vietnam and Cambodia and like Clinton did in Mogadishu (Blackhawk Down). DO IT, Democrats. You have the votes!

Smidgen,

The Democrats don't have enough votes to overide a Republican filibuster in the Senate. And with Lieberman voting Republican on this issue and with South Dakota Democrat U.S. Senator Tim Johnson still out ill Democrats can't even produce their own majority.

"GOP: Can't 'Pull Plug...' Dems: 'Have To Withdraw"

The Republican Party Chickenhawks need to start signing up for their stupid civil war in Iraq if their going to keep pushing for us to stay there indefinitely.

"Stay The Course", Wingnuts http://www.flickr.com/photos/45936529@N00/524589871/

As is inevitably the case, when the "Swamp" purports to present a "quite debate" between a Democrat and a Republican, the Democrat is given much more space. In this instance, Democrat Jim Webb is quoted 207 words, versus 139 for Republican John Cornyn.

Posted by: Bruce | August 26, 2007 11:15 AM

Things have become so bad for the Republican Party weenies (see above) that in their small little Fox Noise Channel minds the truth now has a "liberal media bias".

Don't be too sure the lefty libs want out of Iraq.

Every time somebody says genocide they back right off. The Bushies are aware of this. And the Bushies are playing to that by talking about the genocide that will supposedly occur if the Americans pull out of this nasty civil war in a nasty little country. I guess we care more about Iraqis than we do about the American troops who are doing Iraqis fighting for them.

In any case, there is no evidence that there will be
a genocide. But if there is...it's their problem.
The US needs to make reasonable preparations so those afraid of sectarian slaughter can get to a camp for safety, perhaps on the border, as we do in other third world conflicts, as in Africa. And then we need to get out of there and leave them to decide how to proceed.

It would be ironic if that didn't happen in the end because the lefty libs got in the way

That was a "quiet debate,'' Bruce. You're slipping, man.

Mark Silva,

Gasp! The horror of it all! BRUCE of all people made a typo.

Bruce, that's a dozen "Hillary will make a great president."

Mark, if you want to take yourself off your Trib pedestal and compare yourself to lowly me, go right ahead.

I note nobody's claiming any mistake about the Swampies giving Democrats 50% more space than the Republicans. By a non-coincidence, a recent Swamp article about the appearance of Obama and Fred Thompson at the VFW also gave the Democrat 50% more space. You'd think a journalist, as opposed to an advocate, would be ashamed of this repeated disparity.

Please keep up the personal attacks, Lib-nuts. The personal attacks just show you can't handle the facts.

Bruce,

For crying out loud. Are you that so humorless and/or full of yourself you can't take a little good natured ribbing?

Please keep up the personal attacks, Lib-nuts. The personal attacks just show you can't handle the facts.

Posted by: Bruce | August 26, 2007 3:56 PM

Thanks for telling all of us the "real" truth, "Bill-O".

What are all the people that say we should not get out of Iraq going to say next August? There is no chance that an Iraq government will be established by then. The Sunni have been strengthened by Gen. Petraeus and will not submit to Shia rule. Iran will probably pick one of the Shia militias to support and we will be spending soldiers lives stuck between two Shia factions and the Sunni with no end in sight.

Please keep up the personal attacks, Lib-nuts. The personal attacks just show you can't handle the facts.

Posted by: Bruce | August 26, 2007 3:56 PM

Personal attacks= "Libnuts". Bruce, if you don't like the heat here, go watch Fox or listen to Rush and Ann Coulter. At least you will be at home with like-minded imbeciles who won't give you a hard time.

Please keep up the personal attacks, Lib-nuts. The personal attacks just show you can't handle the facts.

Posted by: Bruce | August 26, 2007 3:56 PM

Personal attacks= "Libnuts". Bruce, if you don't like the heat here, go watch Fox or listen to Rush and Ann Coulter. At least you will be at home with like-minded imbeciles who won't give you a hard time.

Posted by: Rick/Sneads Ferry, NC | August 26, 2007 5:30 PM

"Can't handle the facts"? You mean like WMD's, Saddam linked to 9/11, "last throes", "mission accomplished", "fight them there so we won't have to fight them here", those facts, bruce?

Rick,
Have you heard Ann's latest slander on Hannity?

COULTER: Right, and if you attack the Clintons publicly, make sure all your friends know that you are not planning suicide, that you're not careless when you drive a car.

Another class act from the she-devil.

Bruce,
Aside from your "liberal bias" whine, have you any real analysis as to why we need to stay the surge? What, exactly, is being accomplished? What end result do you envision? Flowers and democracy? What is "winning?" Put your black/white Bushie goggles away and come to terms with reality -- Iraq was the worst foreign policy blunder in our history. Take off the RNC blinders and dispense with the fear tactics of "they'll get us over here if we leave." You give opinions a bad name...

This was assigned reading among others. The book is five hundred pages, starts off slow, but picks up. If more people took the time to look at Iraq from both angels maybe questions posed like Jeff Long's wouldn't need to be revisited over and over again; we would have common ground. This book is worth the read, and this is excerpted from the end; so it doesn't do it justice. But throughout there are many issues revisited, and you can pull points to support the right and lefts stance on Iraq. I read it when it came out and recently reread it and I have to say that it is amazing how it all still holds ground.

Excerpted from
The Assassins' Gate
by George Packer

The home front of the Iraq War was not like World War II, and it was not like Vietnam. It didn't unite American's across party lines against an existential threat (September 11 did that, but not Iraq). There were no war bonds, no collection drives, no universal call-up, no national mobilization, no dollar-a-year men. We were not all in it together. Nor did it tear the country apart. As soon as the war began, the American antiwar movement quietly folded up its tent and went home. The first and second anniversaries of the invasion saw large demonstration in Europe and parts of the Middle East and Asia, but in this country, organized opposition was muted by the imperative to support the troops in harm's way. Candlelight vigils like the one that displayed the pictures of fallen Iowans in Des Moines strove for a tone of respectful dissent.

This doesn't mean that the war wasn't controversial; no foreign venture has been more so since Vietnam. At a certain level - that of elite opinion, amplified in the media - Iraq generated words as bitter as any event in modern American history. But most American citizens didn't turn against other American citizens with a fury, any more then they joined together in a common cause. Iraq was a strangely distant war. It was always hard to picture the place; the war didn't enter the popular imagination in songs that everyone soon knew by the ear in the manner of previous wars, including the good one and the bad one. It was unlikely that a novelist would spend six months in Baghdad and come back to update From Here to Eternity or Dog Soldiers. The one slender American novel that the war has produced so far, Checkpoint by Nicholson Baker, a dialogue over lunch in a Washington hotel room between two friends, one of whom is preparing to assassinate George W. Bush, was a perfect emblem of a political culture in which hysteria took the place of thought. Baker's novel had nothing to do with Iraq and everything to do with the ugliness of politics in this country. Michael Moore, the left's answer to Rush Limbaugh, made a hugely successful movie in which Saddam's Iraq was portrayed as a happy place where children flew kites. Iraq provided a blank screen on which Americans were free to project anything they wanted, and because so few Americans had anything directly at stake there, many of them never saw more than the image of their own feelings. The exceptions, of course, were soldiers and their families, who carried almost the entire weight of the war.

This state of affairs on the home front was, in one way, the natural outgrowth of a political atmosphere that had become increasingly poisonous for a decade. The culture wars produced Clinton hatred, which led to impeachment, followed by the contested election of 2000, followed by Bush hatred, which was just as intense and crazy making as its predecessor. Iraq provided another level on the downward spiral. Whereas the street fights of the 1960s were the consequence of Vietnam, the word fights of the early 2000s were not the consequence of Iraq - if anything, the other way around.

It was the first bloggers’ war, and the characteristic features of the form - instant response, ad hominem attack, remoteness form life, the echo chamber of friends and enemies - defined the quality of the debate about Iraq far better than the reasoned analysis and proposals that quickly disappeared from view in responsible newspapers and policy journals. One of the leading bloggers, Andrew Sullivan, who would later have honorable second thoughts about the Bush administration and Iraq, responded to the news of Saddam's capture in December 2003 by writing, "It was a day of joy. Nothing remains to be said right now. Joy." He had just handed out eleven mock awards to leftists who expressed insufficient happiness or open unhappiness at the news. In response to an Iraqi blogger's declaration of heartfelt thanks to the coalition forces, Sullivan, at his computer in Washington, wrote, " You're welcome...The men and women in our armed forces did the hardest work. They deserve our immeasurable thanks. But we all played our part." Sullivan's joy was vindictive and narcissistic glee, and he rubbed his opponent's faces in it. From the prewar period through the invasion into the occupation and insurgency, an ascendant, triumphalist right and a weakened, querulous, left took more interest and pleasure in the other's defeats than in the condition of Iraq or the Iraqis. In this country, Iraq was almost always about wining the argument.

This was never clearer than when I traveled from one place to another. I would come back from Iraq with its swarm of contradictions as vivid in my mind as every individual face or voice: It was a liberation, it was an occupation; the Iraqis were hopeful, the Iraqis were furious; there was a chance for democracy, there was a reign of terror; the CPA was working hard, the CPA was getting nowhere; the American soldiers were kindhearted, the American soldiers were reckless. Then I would sit down to dinner with a group of progressive-minded people who all wanted to know what it was like over there, and before I could get halfway through one encounter with one Iraqi, the invective came at me with astonishing force, wind aided by a change of subject to the sins of the Bush administration. The same was true, on the other side of the looking glass, in the columns and talk shows of right-wing commentators: Every shred of good news - the arrest of a Baathis, the reopening of a museum - became definitive evidence that it was working. Everyone wanted to know whether or not it was working, and the question usually came loaded, and the answer had better be quick and simple. There were not many people in America who could stand the cognitive dissonance with which the Iraqis live everyday.

Actually, going to Iraq didn't have to intrude on this mental self-sufficiency. Christopher Hitchens, who had just published a book titled A Long Short War: The Postponed Liberation of Iraq, flew in with the entourage of Paul Wolfowitz in the summer of 2003, spent a few days in the deputy secretary's wake, and came back to tell Fox News that the revolution from above was succeeding splendidly, with the Americans busy rebuilding the place, gathering intelligence, rolling up Baathists, and making friends with people - none of which was appearing in press coverage. "I felt a sense of annoyance that I had to go there myself to find any of that out," Hitchens confessed to the Fox interviewer. The following March when the long short war was showing sign of turning into a short long war, Fred Barnes, an editor of the strenuously prowar Weekly Standard, parachuted into the Green Zone and discovered that the only thing wrong with Operation Iraqi Freedom was the Iraqis. "They need an attitude adjustment," Barnes wrote. "Americans I talked to in 10 days here agree Iraqis are difficult to deal with. They're sullen and suspicious and conspiracy minded." This wasn't the prewar judgement of hawks like Barnes, but something had to explain all the bumps in the road, which would lead to successful democracy in Iraq only after "an outbreak of gratitude for the greatest act of benevolence one country has ever done for another." Naomi Klein, a columnist for the bitterly antiwar Nation, visited Baghdad at exactly the same time as Barnes and found that the insurgency was mushrooming because so many Iraqis shared her own antiglobalization views. In Iraq it was always possible to prove that you'd been right all along.

Because the Iraq war began in ideas, it always suffered from abstraction. But long after those ideas took actual shape in Kevlar and c-4 and shrapnel, the war's most conspicuous proponents and detractors continued to see it and speak of it in the French historian Marc Bloch's "large abstract terms." The key in Iraq were "imperialism," "democracy," “unilateralism," "internationalization," "weapons of mass destruction," "preemption," "terrorism," "totalitarianism," "neoconservatism," "appeasement." One month after he survived the bombing in Baghdad, I met Ghassan Salame, the late Sergio Vieira de Mello's political adviser, in the lobby of UN headquarters in New York. Looking a little wan, Salame said, "Iraq needs to be liberated - liberated from big plans. Every time people mentioned it in the last few years, it was to connect it to big ideas: the war against WMD, solving the Arab-Israeli conflict, more recently the war against terrorism and a model of democracy. That's why all these mistakes are made. They're made because Iraq is always in someone's mind the first step to something else."

With their eyes turned to such lofty matters, few pro-war ideologues allowed the bad news from Iraq to break their stride. Either they refused to credit it, blaming the media and the defeatists for hiding the truth, or they continued to take the long view of history that a hundred Iraqis or a dozen Americans blown up in a suicide bombing hardly factored. But this was just as true on the antiwar side of the ledger. Experience taught me that the individual stories of Iraqis struggling against danger and the odds to create a better life for them and their country were impatiently flicked aside as soon as I tried to tell them. The retort was swift and sure,"This war is illegal, it's immoral. Nothing good can come of a lie." In spite of the enormous stakes and the terrible alternatives, most antiwar pundits and politicians showed no interest in success. When Iraqis risked their lives to vote, Arianna Huffington dismissed the election as a "Kodak moment." It was Bush's war, and if it failed, it would be Bush’s failure.

America in the early twenty-first century seemed politically too partisan, divided, and small to manage something as difficult as Iraq. Condolezza Rice and other leading officials were fond of comparing Iraq with postwar Germany. But there was a great gulf between the tremendous thought and effort of the best minds that had gone into defeating fascism and rebuilding Germany and Japan, and the peevish, self serving attention paid to Iraq. One produced the Army's four hundred page manual on occupation of Germany; the other produced talking points .

****

Erdmann had always rejected crude Vietnam analogies, and he still did: Iraq was strategically far more central, the nature of the insurgencies was different, and the chances for success in Iraq better. The constant remained the US government: ongoing effort to put its civilian and military branches to work in concert, the institutional constraints that made it so hard, the halting efforts to adapt imaginatively to new kinds of war, the sheer organizational difficulty of pulling off something on the scale of Iraq. All of this had been the theme of his dissertation, and when Komer’s book sent Erdmann back to it, he discovered that he had foreseen much of his own experience. “There are many things about Iraq that fit right into the pattern of the kind of stuff I was thinking about and working on before,” Erdman said. In 1917, for instance, with the American Expeditionary Force readying sail to Europe, General John “Blackjack” Pershing looked around for a plan and found none. “So it doesn’t come as a surprise to me, and only now that I have a little time can I piece things together in the mosaic and see more clearly some continuities.”

His dissertation had focused on the elusiveness of victory. The defeat of Japanese militarism did not come with the surrender in August 1945 on board the battleship USS Missouri, but six years later, with the end of the American occupation and the birth of democratic Japan. Because victory is a process, not an event, with fundamentally political rather than military goals, victory in Iraq, including the transformation of Iraqi politics, lay beyond the reach of American power alone. “Ultimately, it is always about the Iraqis,” Erdmann said.“The ultimate objectives can only be achieved by the Iraqis. Maybe these are particularly American objectives. We can help. But we are in a position where victory will only be achieved through the efforts of others. That’s a paradoxical situation. We may have the power, but precisely because of the nature of our objectives, we can’t use our power to force a specific outcome. Ultimately, our fate is tied to theirs.”

****

Since America’s fate is now tied to Iraq’s, it might be years or even decades before the wisdom of the war can finally be judged. When Mao’s number two, Chou En-lai, was asked in 1972 what he thought had been the impact of the French revolution, he replied, “It’s too early to tell.” Paul Wolfowitz and the war’s other grand theorists also took the long view history; if they hadn’t there never would have been an American invasion of Iraq, or, at least, not nearly so soon. Pragmatic officials who asked hard questions about allies, evidence, timing, and plans-especially those like Powell, who’d been tempered in combat–were not likely to doom flesh to metal on behalf of an idea, even one as compelling as the transformation of the Middle East from an incubator of mass killing to a collection of ordinary, semi-democratic states. There was no immediate threat from Iraq, no grave and gathering danger. The war could have waited.

Who was right whether it was worth it? Chris Frosheiser, who lost so much in Iraq, asks himself the question everyday, but he never comes closer to an answer than pride in his son’s service and grief at his death. He would not have chosen to give up Kurt for democracy in the Middle east: now he wants Kurt’s death to be part of some historical good. Yet Frosheiser has to pull back, he said, whenever the vision grows too grand, the language too abstract, or else what maters most will be lost: one life, one death.

Daily existence in Iraq remains a night mare. In the world’s newest democracy, most people aren’t free to speak their minds, belong to a certain group, wear what they want, or even walk down the street without risking their lives. During the worst of the violence, some Iraqis said that they had been better off under Saddam, that America should never have overthrown him if the result was going to be so much more bloodshed. Few Iraqis I knew ever said it, though. Experts in suffering, they are better qualified than people in Cairo, Rome, London, or Washington to balance their costs against their gains. When I told Aseel that, after the weapons turned out not to exist, some Americans felt betrayed by the Bush administration and Ahmad Chalabi, she exclaimed, “We are more important than missiles!” What the war gave people like her is hope.

The long view of history made the war possible, and the long view of history made the war costly. Out of government, Drew Erdmann dwelled on the institutional character of the administration’s mistakes, but in Baghdad in the summer of 2003 he had said that success of failure would largely depend on the judgement of individuals. I came to believe that those in positions of highest responsibility for Iraq showed a carelessness about human life that amounted to criminal negligence. Swaddled in abstract ideas, convinced of their own righteousness, incapable of self-criticism, indifferent to accountability, they turned a difficult undertaking into a needlessly deadly one. When things went wrong, they found other people to blame. The Iraq War was always winnable; it still is. For this very reason, the recklessness of its authors is all the harder to forgive.

****

The disintegration of the country had been underway for a long time; in a sense it had begun years before the Americans crossed the Kuwaiti border in March 2003. But by 2006 it was happening with alarming speed, and with all the signs of being irreversible. Iraqis who had once said that Iraq would need one or two years to emerge from violence now spoke in terms of a decade or more: a generation of chaos following generation of tyranny.

Iraq never ceased to offer paradoxes. American policies and military tactics had contributed a great deal to the strength of the insurgency and the spiral of sectarian violence that followed. And yet, in the same month when I saw how Baghdad had descended, I also saw evidence that the American military was finally learning to fight the insurgency in an effective way. In the northwester town of Tal Afar, which had repeatedly fallen into the hands of Sunni extremists after the Americans failed to hold it, an armored cavalry regiment under a brilliant colonel named H R McMaster spent the better part of living in the city, developing relationships with local people, training counterparts in the Iraqi army, and practicing the classic counter-insurgency strategy of separating the civilian populations from insurgents, providing security, and setting up institutions of government that could win popular support. All of this required a large, long-term American presence in the city and willingness to take risks and suffer casualties. McMaster and his young officers had trained for this approach in Colorado and undertaken it in Tal Afar on their own initiative, as rebels against the intellectual failures of their senior civilian military leaders. In Tal Afar, which had been the Falluja of the north, America and Iraqi forces managed to achieve a fragile peace. I saw what might have been possible had such things been done at the onset.

It was too little too late. After years of mistakes and incoherent strategy the Pentagon and the White House, America’s leverage in Iraq has greatly diminished. The tens of thousands of American soldiers who are still there, and who continued to die by ones and twos, are placeholders, buffers, trying to hold the structure of a national government together until it can exist as facts on the ground, while surpassing even worse violence-the nightmare specter of full-scale civil war and a regional war that could consume the Middle East and leave the carcass of Iraq to be picked over by militias, terrorists, and predatory neighbors. America might still be able to avert the worst in Iraq, but there is no prospect of a stable, decent country for years to come. That chance was already slipping away when I first went there in the hopeful, troubled summer of 2003; it is now long gone.

The failure of American policy in Iraq raises the biggest, hardest questions about the war. Was the insurgency inevitable? Could such a damaged and divided society ever have been expected to stay in one piece, let alone find its way to democracy? Could the administration of President George W Bush ever have succeeded at a project as difficult as this, undertaken with such arrogance and blindness, with so few friends and so much scorn? The stated cause for war-weapons of mass destruction and links to international terrorism-proved to be exaggerated or false. Could any other cause-the rescue of a country with which America has for years been historically entangled, the end of tyranny, the beginning of Arab reform-have justified it?

It’s still possible that the fondest hopes of the War’s architects will be realized in a generation or two, that regime change in Iraq will advance democracy and reduce extremism across the Middles East. But policy makers are accountable within the parameters of their own watch. For now, and into the foreseeable future, America and liberal, western interests have been badly damaged by the fighting of Iraq. The war has been a disaster for our military, which has suffered grievous death and injury, lost a measure of its honor at Abu Ghraib, and in the deaths of far too many Iraqi civilians, and been overextended to the point where withdrawal might become necessary simply for want of available troops. The vast majority of soldiers did all that was asked of them, but many of the best-including John Prior-have decided to leave an institution they love. Failure in Iraq has been marked by complete lack of accountability in Washington, which finally drove a handful of normal reticent retired generals to do something almost unprecedented in American military history: speak out publicly and point the finger of blame at their former boss, Donald Rumsfeld.

The direct costs to national treasure are easy to measure, now well over $300 billion; the fraying of alliances, the loss of American power and prestige, the draining of attention and resources from other crises, especially the struggle against the twin dangers of worldwide jihad and nuclear proliferation, are harder to quantify but no less real. The war’s out come has proved it to have been a mistake-a huge one, such as only happens once every few generations.

The Iraq War brought to an end the age of humanitarian intervention, which had helped make it thinkable. The war revealed what was already obvious to experienced soldiers and should have been to civilian idealists: moral purpose combined with force, without knowledge and wisdom, can be more dangerous than indifference. The consequences of any war are unknowable, other than inevitable death, and the ground in Iraq was always inhospitable to building anything durable and good. A war to end tyranny there-even one as monstrous as Saddam Hussein’s, for which the United States had a historical responsibility, first by arming him against Iran, then by leaving him in power in 1991, and finally by imposing sanctions that ruined the lives of millions of Iraqis–such a war should not have been undertaken as it was against such long odds, with little legitimacy in the eyes of the world. Nothing is inevitable; human beings, organized by activities called politics and war, make things happen as they do, and Iraq might have turned out otherwise if the human beings involved had been and done otherwise. But war is too blunt an instrument to be used when the chance for success is so slight.

The war has given rise to a deeply skeptical view in this country: that the Iraqis have proven that they are incapable of living together, of forming a nation, of creating a democracy; that they have the wrong culture. It’s true that, once the lid was lifted, Iraq turned out to be more religious, more tribal, more suspicious, and more violent than most outsiders have imagined. This had less to do with something hereditary and permanent called “Iraqi culture” than with the history of government by force, from Iraq’s origins in boundaries drawn by Europeans to the damage inflicted by thirty-five years of Baathist rule. If the best armed and least tolerant faction’s came to dominate post-Saddam Iraq, this hardly reflected the free will of the Iraqi people. The cardinal sin of the Americans was to create the condition for chaos. From the moment of the regime’s fall, no one in Iraq was safe from violent intimidation, and it was only a matter of time before insurgents and militias became powerful. Ordinary Iraqis, whatever society they might have wanted to live in–and many of them could not yet have known–were never allowed to practice the art of citizenship. The three elections of 2005 showed the Iraqis were capable of political courage and maturity, but the elections also ratified what already become reality in the streets: sectarian violence led to sectarian votes. The rule of the tyrant was followed by the rule of the gunmen. By failing to secure the country, the Americans failed to give Iraqis the true freedom to decide their future for themselves.

For better or worse, our fate is now tied to theirs. There can be no phased withdrawal from the future of Iraq. Some significant withdrawal of American troops in 2006 and 2007 seems inevitable. Whether it happens according to a timetable determined by American politicians, through a plan negotiated between American and Iraqi governments, or according to the advice of military commanders under great pressure to show success on the ground, the withdrawal will have far more to do with American politics than with the war in Iraq. The debate in Washington is so shrouded in partisanship and illusion as to almost meaningless. For Iraq to have any real chance of stability, large numbers of foreign will need to remain in Iraq, heavily involved insecurity and reconstruction, for years to come. Perhaps the US government will decide that large-scale American commitment has achieved all it can in Iraq, and that our national interests require moving troops to Kuwait or Qatar, where they will try to secure oil supplies, deter neighboring countries from encroaching, and act as a last-resort intervention force in case the insurgency make dramatic gains and the Iraqi government is about to fall. If that day comes, it will have nothing to do with success in Iraq. The administration will declare victory, the opposition will declare vindication, but Iraqis will know that they are being left to sort it out among themselves. And although the American departure will only enhance the position of regional powers–Iran, Saudi Arabia, Turkey–and tempt them to fill the vacuum left behind. There is also a good chance that western Iraq will be under the control of no government, Iraqi or foreign, and will become a base of operations for regional jihad. The effort to create representative government and hold the country together against forces of violence and fragmentation will have lasting consequences for Americans, far greater than Vietnam ever did. The notion that we withdraw our forces and be done with it, leaving the Iraqis to sort things out, is a fantasy.

Throughout the nightmare into which they awoke from the nightmare of Saddam, Iraqis have shown a patience and a resilience, born of many years of suffering, which is one of the very few sources of hope I can find in Iraq today. The ordinary people I know there who long for a decent life, without suicide bombs, electrical outages, or the secret police, make it difficult for me to write it all off as irredeemable disaster. It took me a long time even to be able to consider the biggest historical questions about the war; they required a distance from hope and suffering in Iraq that I couldn’t achieve. Once the regime fell and I began traveling there, all the old arguments about the merits of the war fell away with it. What mattered was the drama being played across the country, and I had no doubt where my sympathies lay: I wanted Iraqis to have the chance at the decent life they’d been denied for so long. I wanted what the American invasion had unleashed to succeed. I also wanted to understand why it was failing, but my feelings made the detachment that truly objective analysis needs impossible.

For all the horrors of daily life in Baghdad, I always wanted to return there, and while I was there I didn’t want to leave. There was something strangely compelling about the place even after the worst violence began. Human encounters were more intense, relationships formed quickly, conversations got straight tot the point; the Iraqis I knew felt no shame about expressing strong emotions, and this was true of Americans, including soldiers. People of very short acquaintances were sometimes prepared to risk their lives of each other. The news in Iraq was full of unspeakable brutality, but my experiences were marked by far more generosity and kindness, and I always found it hard to leave behind friends who have to go on living there, whose lives grow more precarious everyday.

I came to feel that the most appropriate response to the events of the past few years was neither justification nor reproach, but simple grief for the hopes and sacrifices of Iraqis and Americans alike. The Iraq War is not an argument to be won or lost; it’s a tragedy.

"If we leave Iraq, they will follow us here.’’

- Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.)

There they go again.

The Iraqis are not going to follow us home. The Shia, whom we liberated, are not going to follow us home. The Kurds are not going to follow us home. The Sunni will be pissed, but they will be busy trying to regain control of Iraq.

The only people who will try to attack us are the same people that attacked us the first time. But we weren't as vigilant then as we are now.

Of all the things I worry about, at the very bottom is another 9/11. And it's not because of Bush. It's because 9/11 was a sucker punch. We're not sleeping anymore.

Jeff,

The bruce is not here for discussion, his sole purpose is disruption. He's The Swamp's version of an IED. With his blind allegiance to political party, rnc bruce will defend the indefensible and seek to discredit any rational voice.

His M.O. is not to engage in the give and take of discussion, but rather to take his cheap shots and run. He goes from one thread to another planting his allegations of "liberal bias" or conspiracy theories. Then the professor runs off and hides from answering his critics.

Now lets look at bruce's latest baseless (and silly) allegation, that Swamp reporters favor Dems because Mark Silva's article quoted 207 words for Webb and only 139 words for Cornyn (quit laughing!), or 41% less space for Cornyn than Webb. Well, could it be, whinerdice, that the disparity is due to the fact that Cornyn had much less to say?

I couldn't find a transcript of the quite... I mean, quiet debate, but I pulled up the video and timed the responses. Yes folks, I put my bruce analdice hat on and measured the responses, to the second. The result: Webb spent 5:27 seconds answering his questions, Cornyn 2:15 answering his. There were no time limits imposed, as far as I know.

What the results show is that Cornyn's responses took 2.25 min./5.45 min. or roughly 41% less time than Webbs. Cornyn had 41% less to say than Webb, Silva had 41% less to write about Webb. Sounds reasonable to me, but then, conspiracy theorist see what they want to see.

Then, bruce says this:

Mark, if you want to take yourself off your Trib pedestal and compare yourself to lowly me, go right ahead.

Lowly me? Mr. college professor who's written an historical book that's been published, yet makes a living out of criticizing (and attempting to discredit) everyone on this blog for even the slightest grammatical error or misspell.

Jeff is right. Not only do you give opinions a bad name, but you discredit your profession by putting your own bias on display daily.

My Father was a professor at a major university for 35 years. My brother taught history at Stanford. Oftentimes, when we watched the news together, they would comment on the historical discrepancies of various commentators, Democrat and Republican. They didn't compromise their professional integrity in the classroom, or in public. You're nothing more than a political hack and a coward. Rovian politics created (and/or pays) for people of your ilk.

It's bad enough that I can't turn on the A.M. anymore because the airwaves are polluted with hate radio nonsense. Now your sole "contribution" to The Swamp is to bring that garbage over here under the guise of being the "hall monitor". You make me want to puke.

Oops. I guess Silva isn't biased enough. Assuming rnc bruce's count is correct, Mark's article quoted Cornyn 139 words to Webbs 207. 139 divided by 207=.67 or 67% of Webb's (words). The discrepancy in timed comments, Webb 5:27 to Cornyn's 2:15 or 2.25 divided by 5.50=.41 or 41% of Webb's (minutes). So Cornyn had 41% as much to say as Webb, but Silva quoted 67% as many words as Webb. Looks like Mark did better than could be expected, given the relative paucity of words in Sen. Cornyn's replies.

Of course, this whole discussion is inane and absurd on a number of levels. It fails to take into account the relative complexity of the questions posed the Senators. It doesn't reflect whether Cornyn's questions were easily addressed with a pithy response or whether the Senator was just more succinct, by nature, than Webb.

In other words, bruce likes to engage in specious arguments to try an discredit the Tribune reporters at every opportunity. I have seen a number of bruce's comments on other blogs, and his disdain for the Tribune, Tribune reporters, and MSM in general, borderlines on the pathological.

I have no vested interest in the Chicago Tribune. I stumbled on The Swamp blog while searching Bears content. I never wanted to do anything more that offer an informed opinion here. I only adopted the sometimes role of the "anti-bruce" and the "anti-John D." because I felt these individuals were here to spread propaganda and swiftboat others of differing opinion, not engage in meaningful debate.

Frankly, I'm sick of spending my time responding to members of "Rove's Army", but we can't let these people go unchallenged. IMO, they do not have the country's best interest at heart.

Smidgen is right. Veto or no veto, Democrats can still vote to defund the war...and they won't do it! Why? Why? Why? Actually, with a few Republican defectors, they could override a veto. The real reason?
The Democrats do not want the blame for retreat and loss of Iraq and the Middle East. They'd like to maneuver Bush into that "honor." These Democrats are not chickenhawks, they're not even chickenwings.

New left math: 139 is greater than 207. New left hope: a "debate" where the Cornyn side is given NO space at all, because in their view he has "nothing to say".

With this grasp on reality, one can see where they come up with their foreign policy.

bruce,
Spare me your labels and your twisted logic. I merely pointed out how absurd your assertions are that word count is a true measure of fairness in coverage. I listened to the entire debate and thought that the salient points of each presenter was fairly represented. Show me where Cornyn's position was slighted or ignored in any way.

And as for your perceived "grasp on reality", defending the worst foreign policy blunder in recent times doesn't give you much credibility. Nor does your contention, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, that Saddam was linked to 9-11.

Anonymous,
Yeah, I thought Assassins Gate was an excellent book. I believe Packer also revealed that, initially, he himself was a "true believer" of the decision to go to war.

dt,
Great posts, well spoken and very true.

I'm guessing that in the forward to Bruce Whinerdyce's civil war book he tried to slip in his opinion that the South would have won the war if not for the "evil liberal media" manipulating public opinion.

It's scary knowing that crackers like him actually "teach" our young people.

Look at Cornyn's picture;

That's the look of fascism as is walks up to your front door in broad daylight, slaps you on the back, and invites itself in.
(Sinclair?)

In America all it takes is a smile and a little self-flattery. (The most corrosive kind of.)