Guiliani Lays out Counterterrorism Plan: More "War"

Speaking at the C-PAC get-together in D.C. today (3/2), Rudy Guiliani laid out his vision for counterterrorism. In short, more "war" and keep on the "offense".

"War" means that he most likely is not going to view counterterrorism as a multi-dimensional effort to dispassionately bring justice to criminals and marginalize their political messages. In fact, "justice", longtime staple of anti-terrorism doctrine, was never on his lips even in lip-service, just "prosecution". Few, if any, of America's allies that I know of think of war-footing as appropriate to counterterrorism cooperation and execution, and, if they do, not as conceptually foundational in the way that the GOP is embracing it.

According to Rudy, the USA will continue to "use our military" and hope for the time when "down the road" Americans and others are friends again.

Being on the "offense" includes always responding to terrorism (he finds fault in inactions like an absence of response to the USS Cole bombing, he says). "Offense" also includes the PATRIOT act and "interrogation".

He skips over whether Operation Iraqi Freedom is/was relevant or not as a "response", a silence that will surely catch up to him, along with the fact that the response to Cole and the African Embassy bombings was to improve intelligence and an Executive finding for the CIA (as best I recall without looking it up), rather than just 'blow shit up', although that was tried too, when Clinton blew up what turned out to be a fertilizer factory.

At a time when Spain and Britain have brought criminal trials for post-9/11 acts and the US Administration's actions may have greatly complicated the same, his legal approach seems like an blind endorsement of all things Bush, including indefinite detention at the behest of the CIC and what seems to amount to a largely procedural justice doled out by the ninth-circuit, who handle the few appeals available related the combat-tribunals set-up in political haste before the mid-term elections by the last Congress.

Nothing - nada - on the long war or the long, twilight struggle. Nothing - nada - on how to confront extremism and the growing threats from rampant antiamericanism. Nothing - nada - on energy independence. Nothing - nada - on paying for "war". Nothing - nada - on readiness at home. Nothing on nation building. Nothing on the problems with the military and the inter-agency process that Newt, a former insider with some knowledge of Washington and not just a former mayor with a speech in hand, has been on about (see prior postings on Newt).

In other words, his speech amounted to George Bush, not even George Bush lite, in which we placate ourselves by "talking tough" about and to terrorists. I guess these feel-good speeches are what play to the crowds at C-PAC.

Still, it is political mastery to know your crowd well enough that you can simultaneously call the Congress cowards for ducking hard decisions with their no-confidence vote, while delivering a speech that avoids many of the hard questions about National Security!

Critiquing COIN 'orthodoxy' and Blostering OEF

Over at Oxblog, Patrick Porter and Taylor Owen have put up interesting thought pieces, Patrick's on veteran military guy Ralph Peter's critiques of COIN (Killing Insurgencies) and Taylor's on keeping NATO's Afghan ops on track.

Bush may find that pretzel was nothing to swallow compare to this

THE RACE FOR CONTROL

Iraq has always been a race for control on the ground. Evidence of the U.S. not thinking in those terms, let alone actively keeping one-step ahead on the curve in this race, goes back to 2003 (I'm thinking now of the grab of the religious Awqaf, the endowment funds, in the South that was widely reported ...).

"Forced withdrawal" has long seemed a remote possibility, it would seem, given the capabilities of the troops on the ground. However, it has been a looming consideration here, especially juxtaposed with those commentators who seem to think that a contained, limited-scale civil war are the worst outcomes for the U.S., in some ways.

A NEW ASSESSMENT - ESTIMATING THE INESTIMABLE

And here is the rub: some violence can unleash geometrically expanding forces, while economic stability steps are weakly self-reinforcing, and often slow, linear or episodic ...

Now comes this assessment, that maybe, after a long, long string of "stay the course", the situation may actually be on the brink of really coming down to ... leave or escalate. In other words, "go long", once thought to be a viable strategy, is losing it's ... event horizon.

Alarmist or not? Hard to say with any certainty - even in reverse key turning points are hard to identify in similarly typed conficts, but I could never take it off the table, the way some folks seem to have done ...

Simon Tisdall - The Guardian
Wednesday February 28, 2007

An elite team of officers advising US commander General David Petraeus in Baghdad has concluded the US has six months to win the war in Iraq - or face a Vietnam-style collapse in political and public support that could force the military into a hasty retreat.

Part of the trouble with "stability operations" is that you don't get a lot of re-tries. There is a cumulative aspect to the impact of them. What's more, terrorism has powerful tools, force multipliers. And here is the rub: some violence can unleash geometrically expanding forces, while economic stability steps are weakly self-reinforcing, and often slow, linear or episodic in implementation.

Rebuilding of the Officer Corps

For those recalling the tidbits in the Baker Report about the military officer corps and who may have been reading Colonel W. Patrick Lang (ret) warnings about the apparatus being shifted to possibly support Iranian action, here is something from British Intelligence:

US generals ‘will quit’ if Bush orders Iran attack

“There are four or five generals and admirals we know of who would resign if Bush ordered an attack on Iran,” a source with close ties to British intelligence said. “There is simply no stomach for it in the Pentagon, and a lot of people question whether such an attack would be effective or even possible.” -Times Online

Struggle Inside Islam

One of the reasons that I had picked up Halliday's book that I was recently discussing here was to see if there were not insights into how to confront radical Islam that were mapped out by experts. Frankly, there has to be more than Reagan-style confrontation with the Soviets, which is the mud-track that some on the Right are stuck in, without any overt reflection about why that model is applicable, let alone best.
Unfortunately, that still has to wait.

Doesn't most every 'revolution' ultimately include some segment of its intitial supporters disillusioned over its ideals having got lost in translation

Anyway, Time Magazine's Baghdad bureau guy, Bobby Gosh, weighs in this week with a bleak cover story on the topic of Sunni-Shi confrontation.

WHY IS AMERICA TO BLAME FOR EVERYTHING, ONCE AGAIN?

His observation, on Charlie Rose show last night, that both sides are united in blaming the U.S. for the problem is remarkable. How it could come to pass that the U.S. should be blamed for a set of issues so far outside its control, almost without question or refutation, is testiment to how angry people are at America and possibly with their own hijacked revolutionary hopes for Iraq (as Halliday notes, doesn't most every 'revolution' ultimately include some segment of its intitial supporters disillusioned over its ideals having got lost in translation).

The Struggle for the Future of Islam: One Tribe, One Bullet at a Time

I had just been writing about the Pandora's box that threatens to rewrite the long-term struggle inside Islam to one based predominantly on Sunni vs. Shi'a politics (also just writing about COP Falcon in Ramadi).

While we ogle potential changes in the conceptual landscape, we know also know that the daily epiphanies in almost any struggle come down to individuals who will write History with the success or failure of their moral conviction in action.

Accordingly, I point out this post from the guys at the Fourth Rail (where else?), who have this to observe:

The U.S. now estimated 12 of the 21 tribes in Ramadi actively support the government, 6 are neutral and three have sided with al-Qaeda.

Al-Qaeda has fired back with a vicious campaign of suicide attacks, murders and kidnappings of tribal leaders in an attempt to intimidate the Anbar tribes. Last year, a captured document showed al-Qaeda's 'hit list' of Sunni politicians, tribal leaders, clerics and Baathists in Anbar.

If you read the rest of the post, you get a long list of complaints of what al-qaeda hath wrought in al-Anbar.

Coupled with the Mecca Declaration, perhaps some of the animus of 'fighting occupation' might abate. The question is will it be enough or will enough people continue to struggle without their ideological 'cover story', as it were.

It is also a question of timing, perhaps. The Shi'a led unity government might come up with yet another display of unbelievable incompetence, which would provide another "rationale" and provocation to supplant the old one(s)...

Tracking the Surge: Uneasy Silence at COP Charlie, Ghazaliyah

Time reporter Charles Crain writes about an eering silence in Ghazaliyah (see posts on Baghdad Conurbation for general info on Baghdad neighborhoods).

Meanwhile the militia and the insurgents have been finding ways to operate under the radar and out of firing range. On the streets of Ghazaliyah, Sgt. Michaud said, the Mahdi Army continued to "slowly, but surely," force Sunnis from their homes through other forms of intimidation. The more immediate threat, though, may be a spectacular Sunni insurgent attack designed to show residents in Ghazaliyah that their power has not been blunted. "If I'm the enemy: I've lost the initiative," Peterson said. "I've got to do something big and visual."

This suggests that the coordinated attack on the Tarmiya COP and the massive car bomb explotion earlier in the month were related to changing tactics, rather than outright indicators of new strength in the insurgency.

Sadly, however, dividing lines remain:

In Ghazaliyah, northeast of Baghdad's airport, Iraq's savage and complex civil war has been playing out in miniature. Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army militia has been encroaching from Shula, the Shi'a-dominated neighborhood to the north. The Sunni minority has virtually vanished from northern Gazaliyah, driven away by murder and intimidation. In the heavily-Sunni southern part of the neighborhood homegrown insurgents and foreign jihadists have been attacking the Americans and Shi'a-dominated security forces.

The COP is a short drive from the road that serves as a dividing line between Ghazaliyah's Sunni and Shi'a communities. Moved from its home at Camp Liberty, one of the bases within the sprawling American compound at the airport, Charlie Company fortified a row of houses with concrete, razor wire and plenty of firepower. The COP is the first test of the counter-insurgency strategy the military plans to implement across Baghdad.

Refugees and Baghdad Street Fighting Afterall; Cheney may be US Baghdad Bob

VP Cheney's rose tint is undiminished - He's starting to look like Baghdad Bob, yes? Time Magazine's quote of the day:

"I look at it and see it is actually an affirmation that there are parts of Iraq where things are going pretty well." - VP Dick Cheney, responding to Tony Blair's decision to withdraw 1,600 British troops from Iraq
-----------------"Basra is dominated by 4 paramilitaries, who are fighting turf wars with one another and with the Iraqi government over oil smuggling rights." - Juan Cole

---

Mother Jones crunches the numbers and comes up with evidence that tensions and fitna imposed by the rejectionists in Iraq have created room for general rise in "jihadi" attacks (see chart below and story here - btw, read all of the rest of the feature, some of the statistics are astounding).

At this point in time, the world is not obviously safer (we've merely traded one kind of conflict for another), there are massive refugees (just not related to US bombing campaign to oust Saddam), and there will be street fighting in Baghdad by US Marines of significant intensity ...

They say things get worse before they get better, and while that is often the case, this project seems to be on long, long term horizon..

The Pandora's Box: Rewriting of the Struggle Within Islam

Damascus, the Ummayid Mosque and its minarate

Having just finished Islam and the Myth of Confrontation: Religion and Politics in the Middle East, I've added English scholar and author Fred Halliday (at the LSE) to the link list, next to Juan Cole.

For most of 2006 and now into 2007, the world has been watching to see if the much mooted struggle within Islamic polities among radical groups (with backward looking and discontinuous political "remedies") and moderate groups (seeking reform, integration, and individual freedom) has morphed into a different struggle at the hands of al-qa'ida and others, into a rapidly widening, full-scale struggle between Shia politics and Sunni politics. It is refined to put it that way, as Halliday remarks, "... this 7th-century division does not account for the major conflicts of the Islamic world then or later, in a way that wars between Catholic and Protestant were to do in early-modern Europe."

Halliday notes the paucity of analyzing the conflict by holy text, by creed, because it misses the important linkages with the evolving regional politics. He goes through an almost must-read of the historical evolution of the current state of political conflict, with a rich set of hyperlinks - the internet at its best, with layers of information at a click! - that turns out to be much shorter than having to read all of Shia Revival.

KNEE-JERK REJECTION OF IRAQI OCCUPATION => PROFOUND REWRITE OF THE FUTURE OF ISLAM?

Still, he doesn't deny that what have been for many, many years lesser or dormant differences cannot come to the fore, in the passion of the times:

Modernity, and the use of communal or religious differences for contemporary political ends, are however no barrier to the spread of hatred and violence. These fires, once lit, can destroy forms of coexistence that have existed for centuries. This is clearly the case in the "war of elimination" in Baghdad today (a city from which, it may be recalled, the Jewish community who had lived there for over two millennia experienced a mass exodus in the early 1950s).

Moreover, while at the beginning states may seek to control such sectarian loyalties, as both Iran and Saudi Arabia have done, such control may not last: today Iran has much less influence over the Shi'a of Iraq than it had three or ten years ago. How far these flames will spread is anyone's guess, ...

Some may take comfort from the dire warning that issued from a conference of Sunni and Shi'a clergy recently held in Qatar. As representatives of each side promised to stop preaching suspicion of the other, and Shi'a committed themselves to stop cursing the caliphs, a prominent Iraqi cleric warned that if this conflict were to continue, the direst of all consequences would follow: namely that young people in the Muslim world would be tempted ... to turn to secularism.

Neocons in History: Part II, A Clean Break ... Goes Bust

In a keen foreshadowing, Jim Lobe wrote a note in 2002 called, "Neoconservatives Consolidate Control over U.S. Mideast Policy", in opining about the rise in the Bush administration of Elliott Abrams:

Neoconservative hawks in the administration of President George W. Bush have won a major battle against the State Department in the fight for control of U.S. Mideast policy with the surprise appointment of Iran-Contra figure Elliott Abrams to the region's top policy spot in the National Security Council (NSC).

For the first time, someone who has publicly assailed the "land-for-peace" formula that has guided U.S. policy in the Arab-Israeli conflict since the 1967 war has been appointed to a top spot in Mideast policy.

Years later, we get the following numbers, which suggest that "Peace through Boldness", as Lobe shorthands it, has brought sentiment well past the point of constructive tension:

In a nutshell:
Egypt: favorable 13% unfavorable 73%
Jordan: favorable 5% unfavorable 90%
Lebanon: favorable 31% unfavorable 64%
Saudi Arabia: favorable 11% unfavorable 82%
UAE: favorable 35% unfavorable 61%

Among the most interesting figures, however, is that 45% said that being a Muslim was the most important part of their identity--more than the number who referred to their Arab or national identities. That's nearly double from the 2002 poll result.

That is about as bad a policy outcome as one could imagine, in a conflict in which military power is arguably secondary (or only an integral part of a wider whole) ...

UNABLE TO TALK, SHORT-TERM IS BLEAK, TOO

This bad news comes at a critical juncture for I/P policy, whether or how to continue to confront the Hammas, as recent talks have produced little forward motion, but plenty of pressure points (not all of neocon making, but also not looking like neo-con inpsired solutions will bring anything):

From Amman, limiting "provocations" and the primacy of negotiations, under even adverse circumstances:

Tuesday, February 20, 2007

His Majesty King Abdullah II called on the Israeli government to revive the peace process with the Palestinians and overcome obstacles that hinder the resumption of negotiations between the two sides in accordance with international legitimacy resolutions.

During a telephone conversation with the Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, His Majesty also urged Israel to stop "excavation work" near Al Aqsa Mosque, adding such acts threaten the Islamic holy sites in Jerusalem and contribute to increasing tension in the region. - Petra News Agency

From Israel, pre-conditions of negotiations (not even peace) and trust-building gestures:

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert demanded yesterday in talks with Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas and U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice that the Palestinian unity government recognize Israel, renounce terror and accept previous Israeli-Palestinian agreements.

Olmert said Israel would reject alternatives to the three conditions that are meant to make the unity government appear acceptable in the eyes of the world. The conditions were first set by the Quartet, comprised of the United States, the European Union, the United Nations and Russia.

Israel will not have any contact with Palestinian figures who are considered moderates, such as finance minister-designate Salam Fayad, if they serve in a government that does not accept the Quartet's conditions, Olmert said. In the Jerusalem meeting, he rejected the suggestion that Israel negotiate with the Palestine Liberation Organization, headed by Abbas, thereby freeing Hamas of the requirement to recognize Israel.

Olmert also demanded that the Palestinian government release captive soldier Gilad Shalit, who was abducted near Gaza in June. He also wants the government to stop the arms-smuggling between the Sinai and the Gaza Strip and deploy forces in northern Gaza to prevent Qassam fire.

Olmert promised that Israel would maintain contact with Abbas, but [Olmert] said the relationship would be limited to two subjects: fighting terror in accordance with the first phase of the roadmap and making the daily lives of Palestinian civilians easier.- Haaretz

The Political Misfortune of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby

Today will be closing arguments in the perjury case of VP Dick Cheney's former chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, whose political fortunes changed forever when Robert Novak wrote his column on July 14, 2003. The taxpayers fortunes have changed some $1.4 million, not including the trials, according to the AP, and Libby has raised a fortune of more than $3 million in his legal defense fund.

The folks over at Firedoglake have been making hay that the old-platform media hasn't been up to the task of covering the trial, but I wandered for 20 minutes through their website, before I gave up in a sea of un-organized details (excellent source material for writing a book, but not for time-pressed information consumers. Bloggert David Corn offers more concise summaries, in my estimation. Extensive pre-trial background, well presented, here.)

Perhaps AH can ask them to put together a timeline and to write up what they hoped to find out but which wasn't shown at trial, whatever came up that was totally unexpected, and the general import of the behind-the-scenes spillover for readers interested in more than simple guilt or innocence of the charges? (One effort here, Libby Trial Dodges the Truth).

Bloggert Swopa, while complaining about old-platform reports, offers up an interesting conjecture that, to him, seems in plain sight to those following the details:

What I think the [Washington] Post and [TPM bloggert John Marshall] are trying to imply is that those calls [to six Washington journalists] from Air Force One were specifically orchestrated by Libby, based on Cheney's instructions on Air Force Two. And special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald has sources on both planes to back that theory up.

PARDON ME?

Few people have speculated in advance of a verdict about whether Libby may eventually get a pardon for any of his adjudicated transgressions, perhaps with some pulbic support out of pity if folks come to understand that the true impetus for the Plame affair originated with his bosses. At least one neocon, Elliott Abrams, who pleaded guilty to lying to Congress as a diplomat in Reagan's State Department, had their political careers resuscitated. Abrams was pardoned by Bush-41 and, after a series of very critical posts with Bush-43, became a Deputy National Security Adviser, a post he still holds.

CLEMENCY FOR FRIENDS, PENALTIES FOR FOES

Against this backdrop, one starts to see the injustice, the duplicity, in the GOP's strategy for handling leaks and leakers.

On the one hand, it is fairly clear to an outside observer, that the Attorney General has been set to the task of providing a penalty to those who leak information. Leaking itself is neither good or bad, but the person who leaks must face consequences.

The imputed policy of imposing costs on a leaker can be gleaned from a number of instances:

1. the robust prosecution of the investigative journalists who used leaked grand jury testimony in the baseball steroid scandal



2. the partial, rather than full, de-classification of the deeply embarrassing NIE of April 2006 on Iraq, so that the leaker could still be held accountable, presumably;



3. the case of imposing a cost on Joe Wilson, albeit non-legal, for relying on a privileged position inside the government (his wife Valerie Plame's connection to the CIA) to provide information in an NYT op-Ed that others might have wanted to keep secret.

While we might think intuitively in terms of a "just leak", one that serves the public interest better than the elected officials are doing, there is, of course, no such legal category.

THE COUNTENANCE OF POOR GOVERNANCE

However, not only is the GOP's Administration in an odd position of having used 'leaks' to fight Wilson's 'leaks' (perceived as non-loyalty or policy-unfaithfulness, if not outright peddling of privileged information) but they also have promoted convicted liars right on up to the the highest ranks of government, namely the NSC.

It a hurdle to portray the first as anything more than vindictive and the second, hypocrisy.

(photo: AP)

Neocons in History - Black Eye for the New Century, So Far

I've been casting about to compose a post on the erstwhile Department of State's (DoS) "Future of Iraq" project, and I came across this reasonably well-known tidbit from the pages of neocon History. To be sure, it is to their credit that, unlike the White House's website on Saddam's "Apparatus of Lies" (painfully ironic in retrospect), they are brave enough to continue to show their history:

Such uncertainty will, by itself, have a seriously destabilizing effect on the entire Middle East. ...

In the near term, this means a willingness to undertake military action as diplomacy is clearly failing. ...

Although we are fully aware of the dangers and difficulties in implementing this policy, we believe the dangers of failing to do so are far greater.

Letter to President W. J. Clinton, January, 1998 - signed by:

Elliott Abrams	Richard L. Armitage	William J. Bennett
Jeffrey Bergner	John Bolton	Paula Dobriansky
Francis Fukuyama	Robert Kagan	Zalmay Khalilzad
William Kristol	Richard Perle	Peter W. Rodman
Donald Rumsfeld	William Schneider, Jr.	Vin Weber
Paul Wolfowitz	R. James Woolsey	Robert B. Zoellick

(shading = appointee of President G. W. Bush, some still "serving")

Taking the Temperature: Newt Revisited

It often pays to revisit Newt Gingrich, from time to time, if only now because the current candidates for the GOP nomination are not likely to put forward any bold ideas (Romney is flogging tort-reform, for instance).

SOMETHING NEW OR JUST DRESSING UP

Newt has long been saying that the State Department is "broken", but it was recently before the Senate in testimony that he called for a huge investment in the State Department (without suggesting how it might be funded), as follows:

14. The State Department is too small, too undercapitalized and too untrained for the demands of the 21st century. There should be a 50% increase in the State Department budget and a profound rethinking of the culture and systems of the State Department so it can be an operationally effective system.

Now, just when you thought that a new Conservative belief in the merits of diplomacy was what was on his mind, he also comes up with the notion that diplomats ought to be subordinated in the military chain of command:

1. Place General Petreaus in charge of the Iraq campaign and establish that the Ambassador is operating in support of the military commander.

Also, if one grabs his speech from Herzliya (key Israeli defense conference), you come across this jab at the DoS:

The US should have as an explicit goal, regime change in Iran, as its constitution makes them a revolutionary regime. In 2006 even the Department of State which seeks to deny the nature of reality, noted that Iran is a leading sponsor of terror. What I need is something that will be similar to Reagan’s Replacement strategy in Iran. The current unrest in Iran will facilitate this.

So, it is also a change in policy viewpoint that Newt wants "up-funded" (which is my new diplo-military term, to keep faith with the spirit of the proposal).

Altogether, nothing new, just more spending, it appears, whereby the DoS becomes an elements in the DoD Chain of command ...

By the way, that is to be sharply contrasted with Senator J. Warner (wartime rubber stamp from Virginia), who was unabashedly questioning General Casey on how he and Ambassador Kalizad interacted in the field with the new Iraqi government and making the overt point of suggesting that the military might want to put the Ambassador in the lead, if only because questions may be coming down the road.

This is the new wartime posturing, whereby everyone is not in the same boat, or so it seems, but thinking about "blame time", just as they do inside large corporations.


GENERALS PREPPING THE LAST WAR

Sadly, parts of Newt's testimony look like generals trying to prep to win the last war: more troops, a radically revamped US AID office, "new metrics", a National Security Budget that is closer to historic highs than historic lows, and very, very clearly a "fix" for the "inter-agency process".

Two observations, at least, on that. One, a revamped US AID office suggests that the US is going to be in a long term "war" that involves ... nation building, yes? If not, than what? Two, how can General Petreaus hope to fix the inter-agency process? If it is clearly so necessary/paramount and so clearly outside the scope of what Petreaus can do singlehandedly, then why should this General succeed, except in spite of the inter-agency process, not by fixing it?

That question is a nice segue to the next point.

WHAT HAS THE CIC BEEN DOING ON A REGULAR BASIS

I found the organizational and process recommendations that Newt made to be startling, an indication that the CIC basically delegated the war to his minister at defense, Rumsfeld and ignored the signs, those little thought poems from Rumsfeld conveying that some problems might have required (or still require?) a "big rethink" so to speak, profound process and institutional re-alignment.

Here is what Newt had in mind:

2. [Petreaus] should report daily to the White House on anything significant which is not working or is needed.


3. Create a deputy chief of staff to the President and appoint a retired four star general or admiral to manage Iraq implementation for the Commander in Chief on a daily basis.

4. Establish that the second briefing (after the daily intelligence brief)the President will get every day is from his deputy chief of staff for Iraq implementation.

5. Establish a War Cabinet which will meet once a week to review metrics of implementation and resolve failures and enforce decisions. The President should chair the War Cabinet personally and his deputy chief of staff for Iraq implementation should prepare the agenda for the weekly review and meeting.

Which all begs the question of what decision making really looks like inside the wartime Bush White House, if these things are not currently going on. I assume that Newt might reasonably be expected to know that they are not.

PUSHING DECISION MAKING DOWN THE CHAIN ACTUALLY PUTS PRESSURE ON THE TOP

There are those who maintained that a single U.S. President could handle two major military engagements, a far flung fight against terrorism, the challenge of reshaping domestic homeland security, a re-election campaign and much else besides.

Even given processes that are optimally efficient, that's a LOT of activity to coordinate!

Senate Confirms Role in Ongoing "Broken Branch" of US Government

The US Senate today confirmed its role in the Broken Branch of government by failing to pass a procedural step required to move on to floor debate of a no-confidence motion in President Bush's 5-year prosecution of Operation Iraqi Freedom.

GREGG'S AMENDMENT CALLS FOR CONGRESS TO WRONGLY CEDE POWER TO EXECUTIVE

Senator Judd Gregg, R-New Hampshire, is emerging as a chief spoiler for the GOP, offering amendments here and there that are designed to torpedo bills (cf. the line-item veto amendment that he recently offered). His amendment or alternative bill would have requested a vote that the Congress never pull funding from U.S. troops involved in the conflict.


The Congress ought not ever cede its authority to end a war in this way. Against the backdrop that the GOP dominated Congress has consistently ceded too much authority and trust to the Bush Administration over the course of the Iraqi deployment, following VP Cheney's "last throws" ad hoc assessments among others, a call for the Congress to once again vote away its authority to pull funding from any mission.

NO MORE LINCOLN-DOUGLASS DEBATES

Senator John McCain (R-Arizona) didn't even show up for the vote. This is emblematic of how debate really occurs in the US today.

Frankly, the Senate floor is too exposed politically. It's easier to regurgitate pre-hashed comments on Sunday morning shows, calling on "my fellow colleagues", rather than actually call on them in person on the Senate floor. It's easier to stick to your talking points, than to answer questions from across the isle. It's easier to read a statement than it is to make extemporaneous remarks that are worthy of consideration.

So broken is the tradition of debate, that Senator McCain was comfortable staying away from the floor on a question of such importance to the Nation, choosing instead to campaign from the relative safety of the podium, the carefully composed photo-op, and make pronouncements to talk-show hosts about what his position is.

GOP SENATORS FAIL TO SHOW CONFIDENCE

A down-vote on a no-confidence measure is a vote that confidence is justified or warranted. To defeat a no-confidence measure on a procedural motion, to shy away from a real vote, is hardly the way to show confidence in the President or in his Generals.

The fact that, even at this late date in the conflict, that elected officials are unwilling to let their precious careers be defined by the defining issue of the times is telling of just how much self-saving compliance and pushover rubber-stamping is still available from the days when the Senate was fully in GOP hands.