The Cheney-Bush administration torture and "special rendition" programs

From "Der erster Gewinner war Bush" von Günter Lehofer Kleine Zeitung (Graz/Austria) 03.09.06:

Den Kampf gegen den Terror müssen aber auch the Europäer weiterführen - bei aller Skepsis gegenüber Bush Form des Anti-Terror-Kampfes. Die Europäer brauchen eine "Bush-freie" Anti-Terror-Arbeti mit Polizei, Geheimdienst, wachsamen Bürgern und starken Nerven; Konzepte, die nicht von den Weltmacht-Motiven der USA Durchtränkt sind. ...

Der Terror kann nur siegen, wenn wir die Nerven wegwerfen und ihm ähnlich werden. Sonst ist er selbst in seiner grausamsten Form zu schwach, um uns and unsere Art in Freiheit und Demokratie zu leben auch nur zu gefährden.

But Bush's use of the fear after 9/11 to drive through illegal programs has been a severe loss for American democracy. The admission last fall by Dear Leader Bush about the secret CIA prisons is being spun by loyal Bush supporters as an attempt to reclaim the "moral high ground", as though that were possible with Dick Cheney and George Bush in control of the Executive branch. Republican flack David Brooks gave his version of this line on the PBS Newshour of 09/08/06:

JIM LEHRER: David, the president's secret prisons, 14 terrorists transfer, alleged terrorist transfers, announced, how big a deal was that?

DAVID BROOKS: I think it's a pretty big deal. I think it reflects a couple things.

The first thing, obviously, is, there are some decisions that have forced their - their hand to be a little more open, but, secondly - and almost more importantly - change in the internal power structure of the administration.

There have always been two these tensions in fighting terror, one, to kill the bad guys, two, to have some moral authority to win over people and to - to be a good citizen of the world. And the former camp was winning for about three or four years. And, for a number of reasons, the latter camp is now winning.

The "liberal" viewpoint was taken that evening by Iraq War enthusiast Tom Oliphant, with his pencil neck and bow tie on display as usual:

JIM LEHRER: Do you see it the same way?

TOM OLIPHANT: Sort of.

One reason that I don't think it has proved to be a big deal is that the political content of this move was drained almost immediately. Factually, there is no rush here. I mean, the procedures for trials could be agreed upon tomorrow, and it would still be a long time before there would be any trials.

And, secondly, to the extent there's been a difference of opinion here, as David noted, it's been inside the administration. And it's also been between the president and Republicans in the Senate, and between the politicians in the administration and the uniformed military legal system in the Pentagon.

So, I think, when all this was - happened on Wednesday, there was an expectation of politics that the reality underneath it kind of eliminated.

No wonder this political debate is so impoverished when even the supposedly professional and responsible PBS Newshour presents as the "liberal" viewpoint some mopey, muddled rambling like Oliphant's:

El País editorializes as follows in Más luz sobre Bush 10.09.06, and manages to say the obvious that apparently sailed right though the "liberal" Tom Oliphant's head:

Bush no sólo no muestra propósito de enmienda respecto a sus excesos tras el 11-S, sino que intenta presentarlos como un ejemplo de eficacia en la obtención de información y en la prevención del terrorismo, cuyo fantasma ha vuelto a agitar ante sus conciudadanos al hablar de un país permanentemente en guerra.

El paso siguiente tras reconocer la existencia de cárceles secretas es que se llegue a desvelar dónde se encuentran, lo que podría colocar en difícil situación a países aliados de EE UU, algunos con credenciales democráticas. A la luz de esta revelación, tanto el Parlamento Europeo como el Consejo de Europa deberían reabrir sus investigaciones sobre los vuelos secretos de la CIA y las cárceles donde supuestamente se ha torturado a algunos de estos detenidos, mientras prosigue en varios países, incluida España, la investigación judicial a este respecto. A diferencia de lo que parece pensar la Casa Blanca, se trata de combatir las prácticas aberrantes con la ley, no de modificar la ley para que las prácticas aberrantes se conviertan en normales.

This San Francisco Chronicle editorial also nails Dear Leader Bush for living in An alternative universe 09/08/06:

Talk about doublespeak. President Bush insisted this week that "the United States does not torture. It's against our laws and it's against our values." In the same speech on Wednesday, he announced he would be asking Congress to effectively grant immunity to U.S. interrogators whose tactics may have violated what Bush derided as the Geneva Conventions' "vague and undefined" prohibitions on prisoner abuse, such as "humiliating and degrading treatment."

The president insisted that the CIA's "alternative set of procedures" for interrogating terrorism suspects stopped short of torture, though he refused to describe the tactics in question. ...

Also, on Thursday, the Pentagon's top uniformed lawyers warned that curtailing the suspects' access to evidence against them could violate the Geneva Conventions.

"I'm not aware of any situation in the world where there is a system of jurisprudence that is recognized by civilized people where an individual can be tried and convicted without seeing the evidence against him," said Brig. Gen. James Walker, U.S. Marine Corps staff judge advocate.

Congress must not be cowed into rubber-stamping the administration's requests. There is no contradiction between being tough on terrorism and being respectful of civilized standards for the detention and prosecution of suspects. Remember, this is supposed to be a war not only to preserve our lives, but to defend our values.

The problem, of course, is that for Christian Right Republicans and hardline nationalists like Dick Cheney and Rummy, torture is a positive value.

Tags: torture, bush, bush gulag, rendition, special rendition

Iraq War: Is it a just war?

"I think we are winning. Okay? I think we're definitely winning. I think we've been winning for some time." - Gen. Richard Myers, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, on the Iraq War 04/26/05

"I just wonder if they will ever tell us the truth." - Harold Casey, Louisville, KY, October 2004.

Chris Dowd makes an argument from Christian Just War theory in Unjust & Indefensible - Iraq: A Case Study Commonweal 11/06/06. He summarizes the basic criteria of Just War theory:

When considering Christian thinking about the use of military force as an appropriate response to the attacks of 9/11, it is important to emphasize again how mindful just-war theory is of our own sinfulness and flawed judgment. In "Must We Do Nothing?" [Reinhold] Niebuhr insisted on humanity’s need for constant repentance and self-criticism, arguing that we "must engage in constant self-analysis in order to reduce [our] moral conceit." Taking this need seriously, just-war theory sets the bar very high for jus ad bellum, laying out six stringent criteria for the justification of war. In Love and Conflict, the clearest and most succinct treatment of the criteria that I have seen, Joseph Allen lists them as follows: justifiable cause; right intention; legitimate authority; proportionality; reasonable chance of success; and last resort. The first three were the original criteria systematized by [St. Thomas] Aquinas and are foundational for the others. (my emphasis)

Christian fundamentalists reject the natural-law tradition to which Dowd refers in the following, which is one reason they find it so easy to apply nationalistic judgments to wars:

Just-war theory has a long history, the product of a collaboration across the ages by some of Christianity’s greatest thinkers. Augustine, seeking to reconcile the earlier pacifist tendencies of the church with the realities of a sinful world, was the first to articulate the theory that some wars may be justified. The goal is peace, he argued, and sometimes that goal must be reached by wielding the sword. In the Middle Ages, Thomas Aquinas systematized Augustine's just-war thought into specific criteria. Behind Aquinas’s analysis lay an appeal to natural-law theory, the notion that rules are written into God’s creation, and that humanity’s task is to use reason to perceive and articulate them. Natural law and the "common good," Aquinas argued, create standards to which we are accountable; and that accountability, writ large at the level of conflict between states, manifests itself as just-war theory.

Dowd shows how the Cheney-Bush administration's decision-making calls into question the justification for the Iraq War - and thereby illustrates one reason why the question of when Cheney and Bush decided on the invasion is such an important one:

[Bob] Woodward’s Plan of Attack recounts the decision-making timeline for the Iraq war. As early as November 21, 2001, with the United States in the initial stages of its action in Afghanistan, Bush ordered Rumsfeld to begin planning for war against Iraq. By December 28, initial plans had already been developed, and Bush had given the go-ahead to begin laying the groundwork for the future invasion. A few weeks later, in his January 29, 2002, State of the Union speech, Bush made his now-famous reference to the Axis of Evil-Iraq, Iran, and North Korea. Interestingly, early drafts of that speech contained references to Iraq alone. Rice and then-Deputy Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs Stephen Hadley recommended adding other states to the list, to avoid tipping the administration’s hand with regard to the secret war planning for Iraq. By March 2002, Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet was convinced that the invasion of Iraq was simply a matter of time, and indicated as much to the leaders of two Kurdish groups in Northern Iraq; and in an April interview, a full year before the invasion, Bush told a British reporter, "I made up my mind that Saddam needs to go." (my emphasis)

"Wars are easy to get into, but hard as hell to get out of." - George McGovern and Jim McGovern 06/06/05

Tags: chris dowd, iraq war, just war, just war doctrine

Steve Simon on exiting Iraq

Stephen Simon, co-author with Daniel Benjamin of The Age of Sacred Terror and The Next Attack, has prepared a paper for the Council on Foreign Relations recommending the US exit Iraq, After the Surge: The Case for U.S. Military Disengagement from Iraq Feb 2007. We could probably call his proposal a "soft deadline" approach:

The intention to withdraw should be declared as the results of the surge become clear. A coordinated declaration of this kind would not entail setting a certain date on which the last American soldier would depart Iraq. Since there exists a remote possibility that the situation on the ground might change radically during the drawdown period, the United States could qualify its declared intention to leave on a specific timetable withappropriate caveats. If, for example, there were a dramatic increase in intercommunal violence leading to a flood of refugees, U.S. forces might be needed to set up camps, administer aid, and provide security for the refugees. Alternatively, if the current surge strategy works, political compromises are made, ethnic cleansing operations cease, militias are brought under the government’s control, a multiconfessional army including a meaningful number of Sunni officers is created, and the United States is asked to remain to battle a lingering insurgency, it might behoove Washington to suspend the drawdown. A twelve-to-eighteen-month time frame for disengagement, to commence once the results of the surge have become apparent, would leave the United States with the flexibility to respond to such changes. The surge results should be clear well within six months. [Duncan Black coined the term "Friedman unit" for these progress-in-six-months predictions, after columnist Tom Friedman who has made several of them.] Nevertheless, the departure timetable would not hinge on specific benchmarks, since the Iraqi government is probably incapable of curbing militias and accommodating Sunni concerns; nor is it likely to generate an effective, multiconfessional army in the foreseeable future. The U.S. drawdown should not be hostage to Iraqi performance. (my emphasis)

Tags: steve simon, iraq war

Bush's early-January call for "bipartisanship"

Dear Leader Bush expounds on his version of "bipartisanship" in an editorial the Wall Street Journal, What the Congress Can Do for America 01/03/07, from the start of this year.

Bush's examples of previous "bipartisanship" are telling. The No Child Left Behind Act, where the Democrats gave Bush the nationwide testing requirements he wanted in exchange for higher funding levels in future years; the tests went into effect, then Bush and the Congressional Republicans refused to provide the additional funding, so that a genuine compromise wound up to be a one-sided partisan Republican result. The PATRIOT Act, where a panicked Congress went along with pretty much every authoritarian-state measure Bush and John Ashcroft demanded. Tax "relief", in which taxes were slashed for the wealthiest Americans thus quickly squandering the surplus that had taken both the Bush 41 and Clinton administrations so many years to achieve. This is such empty rhetoric it would be overly generous to call it a bad joke.

Marc Sandalow and Zachary Coile reported at the same time, Pelosi to strike fast on agenda San Francisco Chronicle 01/03/07, "Speaker-to-be Nancy Pelosi is choosing accomplishment over accommodation".

Sounds good to me. And she's followed up on that successfully, so far. But most of Bush's article is taken up reporting on Republican whining that the Democrats are planning to run the House as though they won the election in November. The nerve of those uncivil Democrats!

If the Dems get effective ethics rules and processes functioning, and put limits on excessive lobbying practices, that will be a genuinely "bipartisan" benefit, whether or not the Reps support those changes or not. For the rest of the Republican whining, well, gosh, they have my sympathy. Maybe they should show their "bipartisan" goodwill by shutting up about it. That would be a "civil" gesture, huh?

Tags: bush, congress, nancy pelosi

Slim's pickin's en México

There were some interesting reports in the press earlier this month about México's wealthiest man, Carlos Slim Helú:

Slim se mantiene como tercer hombre más rico del mundo; acumula 49 mil mdd La Journada/AFP 09.03.07.

Carlos Slim comparte su fortuna de Romina Román y Roberto Aguilar El Universal 09.03.07.

$49 billion is Slim's pickings in Mexico by Marla Dickerson Los Angeles Times 03/09/07. Their headline writer called it the same as I did, but of course Yankees don't know how to spell "pickin's". Dickerson reports:

Telecom mogul Carlos Slim Helu has built a corporate empire so vast that it's nearly impossible for most Mexicans to go a day without slipping a few pesos into his pocket.

Those pesos add up. On Thursday, Forbes magazine estimated his net worth at $49 billion.

Tags: Carlos Slim Helú, Telmex

The "liberal press" and the Iraq War

Michael O'Hanlon and Nina Camp take on the issue of the fabled Liberal Press bias against the Cheney-Bush administration in reporting the Iraq War: Is the Media Being Fair in Iraq? Washington Quarterly Autumn 2006. (Has "media" been permanently established as a singular noun now? It's actually the plural of "medium".) The took a survey of major news outlets for the months of January, April and May for each of the four calendar years that US troops have been in Iraq.

Among their findings for newspapers:

Nonetheless, the data do vary more notably from month to month than from newspaper to newspaper. In other words, for some months, the news was far worse than it was for others. This variation suggests that events on the ground drove the tone of coverage much more than the emotional, professional, or political predilections of editors and journalists.

The following findings on television coverage did raise a question for me:

Another point to consider is that newspapers grab attention with headlines,
whereas television speaks most loudly with images. Violent imagery on television makes a greater impression on audiences than words or even photographs in a newspaper. It is therefore plausible that television coverage of the war in Iraq has conveyed an even more negative tone than the data suggest.

We found that Fox News, which is widely considered conservative leaning, had a far larger number of news stories about Iraq that were neutral in tone, whereas the other three outlets had comparable and much lower numbers of neutral headlines. The story headlines used by Fox News, regardless of time of day or program, do not lend themselves to the type of scoring that could be done as fairly straightforward as it was for headlines in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and NBC News. No doubt, a network that wishes to convey a different tone than the one adopted by the rest of mainstream media is capable of doing so. These initial assessments are entirely consistent with the possibility that Fox News made a decision to do just that.

Is it really the case that, "Violent imagery on television makes a greater impression on audiences than words or even photographs in a newspaper"? I'm not sure a generalization like that is meaningful. The context in which it is presented by the reporting and the framework in which it is understood by the viewer surely must play a large role. Especially when you're trying to rate the coverage as "positive" or "negative".

A survey like this will never convince anyone who's assuming that the conflict's true status is reflected in official administration statements or press releases from the armed services' PR departments. The more serious service journals of strategy and history, like the Army's Parameters or Military Review, certainly don't constrain themselves to assuming that.

And so what's actually happening has to be taken into account if you're really trying to judge the quality of the reporting. They write, for instance:

Leaving aside the war per se, Iraq has far and away the highest criminal murder rate in the greater Middle East. Although it is difficult to give precise figures, in Baghdad the criminal murder rate is estimated at nearly one murder victim for every 1,000 people per year.11 That rate is roughly 10 times the typical murder rate in inner cities in the United States. Kidnapping is another huge issue. Stories about kidnappings tend to be told only when a U.S. citizen, such as Jill Carroll or Nicholas Berg, is abducted, but kidnapping of foreigners is just the tip of the iceberg. The stunning reality in Iraq is that an estimated 30–40 Iraqis — professionals, political figures, doctors, lawyers, wealthy merchants — are kidnapped each day.12 Many if not most are released once ransom is paid; few are killed through grisly beheadings or other such spectacles. Yet, the rate of kidnapping, probably the highest per capita rate in the world, is tremendously disruptive to life in Iraq.

On balance, Iraq is easily the most violent country in the broader Middle Eastern region. Leaving aside a couple of extreme examples, such as Sudan, Iraq is one of the most violent countries in the world. (my emphasis)

Given an underlying reality like this, how can any honest reporting of those grim facts be "positive"?

If there were sensible conservatives still left in the Republican Party, they might find themselves agreeing with this:

The broad argument voiced by critics of the media in the United States is often badly overstated. Even though the overall image of Iraq conveyed by the mainstream media may be somewhat more negative than reality, it is not incredibly dissimilar from the situation on the ground. Iraq is a war zone in which progress has been largely elusive. Given this reality, accurate reporting naturally places more emphasis on the negative aspects than on the positive ones.

Journalists are missing quite a few stories in Iraq, but the ones they miss are just as often bad as they are good.

It makes little sense to expect people reporting from a war zone to have a particularly happy set of messages to convey. Sometimes the reporters do get it wrong, and it is legitimate to hold them accountable when that happens and also to suggest specific ways they can improve their reporting. Rather than habitually berating the media in sweeping terms, we should read their critical stories for insights into where U.S. policy may be failing and how it can be improved in a war that we truly must win yet could still lose, on the ground in Iraq. (my emphasis)

The Liberal Press conspiracy has become an article of faith for almost all Republicans, it seems. But the officer corps' attitudes toward media coverage of war are heavily influenced by the widespread belief that it was media coverage of the Vietnam War that deprived the military of a victory they had won on the battlefield. It is such a forced argument, one based largely on a "stab-in-the-back" viewpoint designed to let the military duck responsibility for their own failures in that war, that it's very disturbing that such a theory could have gained such wide support among officers.

In much military writing about the role of the media, we see a strong tendency to look at press relations as "information operations" to be managed in much the same way that false information designed to deceive an opposing army about operational plans on the battlefield would be.

Ironically, acting on that assumption for nearly four years in the Iraq War, the military has given the public and Congress very good reason to question their own credibility, from lying about Pat Tillman's death to constant declarations of endless strings of victories that only lead to more endless victories at a higher level of violence.

Tags: iraq war, mainstream media, mainstream press, michael o'hanlon, nina camp

On not making the other side's argument for them

Can the antiwar movement please stop making the other side's argument for them?

The idea that "defunding the war" is somehow inappropriate is a notion that Democratic officials and war critics need to stop legitimizing - and I think the House vote last week went a long way in that direction. Because now it puts the Republicans in the position of "voting against funding for the troops" and Bush in the position of having to threaten to veto the funding. So I hope they build on this and stop repeating the Republican talking points that frame any Congressional limits on military action into a funding bill as "cutting off funding for the troops".

Congress is responsible under the Constitution for declaring war and for regulating and funding the armed forces. It's perfectly legitimate for Congress to use those powers to place limits on Presidential war-making.

As a practical matter, the most likely way Congress could get any restrictions on the administration's ability to conduct the Iraq War is through the appropriations process, which is the approach the Democrats have taken with the Pelosi amendment. Because to get the President to sign any such restriction into law, like the Boland Amendment in the 1980s limiting support to the Nicaraguan contra guerrillas/terrorists, they would have to attach it to a bill that Bush basically couldn't veto. And that means a more general budget appropriation.

So the Dems need to stop validating the Republican talking points that make restrictions on appropriations sound like suddenly leaving American soldiers there in Iraq to fend for themselves with no ammunition and make their own way home.

(Using appropriations is not the only option; rescinding the 2002 Iraq War resolution would be another approach. I won't go into the complications of that in this post.)

Carl Levin, Democratic chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, appeared on Meet the Press of 02/25/07 along with Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell. Host Tim Russert played a statement by the Senate Republican leader:

SEN. MITCH McCONNELL: What seems to be coming next is the second step of their slow-bleed strategy, which I gather could best be described as trying to unring a bell. Now, that’s what the Democrats would be attempting to do in altering the original use of force authorization that, of course, a great many of them voted for. ... The truth of the matter is there’s really only, you know, one way to end the war, if that’s what our Democratic friends want to do. That is to cut off the funding for the war.

Looking at the Republican argument, it's hard not to notice the element of desperation in it. As a rhetorical device, it's pretty transparent: I don't want to debate the proposal you've made, so I'll debate about a proposal you haven't made. Mark Shields did an acceptable job of shooting down that aspect of it when the increasingly pitiful David Brooks made it once last month (Analysts Weigh War Resolutions, Presidential Race PBS Newshour 02/16/07)

DAVID BROOKS: Yes, I would say, first of all, [to Democratic war critics:] show some directness. If you want to get the troops out, call for a resolution that calls for getting the troops out. Don't monkey with the rotation schedules and the conditions. I just think it's indirect. It's not honorable. Do it straightforwardly.

The second thing I'd say, the surge is under way. We're going to have some troops already going there over the next several months. Are we going to leave them hanging out there without the full body, which the president and Petraeus thinks they need? I think that's a perfectly legitimate argument.

The Republicans would say, "You're leaving these guys just hanging out there, and the people they need to complete the mission aren't going to be coming."

And the third and the most powerful argument I think the Republicans are going to use is that, "You're sitting there in Congress. You don't manage wars and how many troops should be in a city, or what neighborhood they should be in. That's the president's job. That's in the Constitution. And there's plenty of backup for that. And we should not have 435 members of Congress micromanaging that."

RAY SUAREZ: Quick response.

MARK SHIELDS: You have a responsibility as a member of Congress. You voted to go to war. You have a responsibility to oversee that war.

This war has gone unsupervised. There's been no accountability for the past four years. The idea that you would not frame your position - and Murtha has been very candid about where his position is. He wants this war over. But you want to frame it in a way that is politically defensible, because you know what the other side is going to do.

It's already said it. "You're selling out. You're cutting and running." They're going to use every scare tactic in the world. The idea that you go in and unilaterally disarm politically in presenting your position I think doesn't make any sense. "This war has gone unsupervised" by Congress, Shields said. That's a decent response.

Shields got to the immediate rhetorical point of that argument. The Republicans are demanding that the Democrats "unilaterally disarm politically" by presenting a proposal the Reps would rather debate about at a particular moment rather than the proposals the Democrats decide to present. And he also said straightforwardly, this is the responsibility of Congress under the Constitution.

Unfortunately, Shields was kind snoozing on the job when that argument came up the following week. For instance, at one point he said (British Begin Troop Drawdown in Iraq; U.S. Army Mends Walter Reed PBS Newshour 02/23/07):

MARK SHIELDS: ... As far as the Democrats are concerned, I think they made a mistake. I think Jack Murtha made a mistake in revealing his plan on MoveOn.org, the activist, leftist group...

JIM LEHRER: Leftist group, yes. (my emphasis)

Well, I guess you can lead a Big Pundit to water, but you can't make him drink.

Just to be clear, there's nothing inherently wrong or right about being "left" on some issues as opposed to "liberal" or something else. Depends on the particular issue. The idea of Social Security was a "left" issue in, say, 1929. But MoveOn.org's antiwar position isn't distinctly "left" as opposed to "liberal". (American political vocabulary is actually kind of dorky on this. In most of the world, "liberal" means "free-market" opposition to regulations on business and to government-sponsored social programs.)

Brooks made this argument on the 02/23/07 program with no direct response from Shields:

DAVID BROOKS: ... The Democrats do not have a clearly understandable policy. They've got this subterfuge about changing the schedules, which as Murtha said is just an excuse to starve the surge. Then they've got this, "Go back to 2002."

If they want to get out, and if they think it's lost, do what Governor Vilsack said, "We think we should get out. Here's our timetable. We think we should get out.'

Instead, you've got Hillary Clinton at first saying, "We're going to cap," and then changing her position a week later, and saying a 90-day withdrawal. You've got slow withdrawal with Obama. You've got subterfuge. You've got nothing. You've just a series of dodges.

But this framing of Congressional war powers is also a pre-emptive strike against serious attempts to attach war retrictions to appropriations bills. And Levin on his Meet the Press appearance (linked above) walked right into the trap. Whether foolishly or willingly, I don't know:

MR. RUSSERT: Why don’t Democrats do what Senator McConnell says that they could do, cut off funding for the war?

SEN. LEVIN: There’s another way to achieve our goal. Number one, we can cap the number of troops. We can change the mission. These would both be binding resolutions without cutting funding for our troops. Most of us do not want to cut funding for our troops for two reasons. One is it’s wrong. Our troops deserve our support as long as they’re there, and we’re not going to repeat the mistake of Vietnam where we took out on the troops our differences over policies with the administration. Our differences are with the commander in chief and his policies, and we’re going to fund the troops as long as they’re there. Secondly, because that resolution would lose, the president would then use the defeat of a cut-the-funding resolution as a way of supporting his policy. So we would be playing right into the hands of the president and his policy makers by having a losing vote on funding. So it’s the wrong thing to do, and it also would strengthen the president’s hand when we don’t want to do that. We want to change the president’s course. He is on a course that is leading to defeat. The president’s course is getting us in deeper and deeper militarily. It is not working. We want to change that course. We don’t, don’t want to do anything which would strengthen that course.

MR. RUSSERT: What about the notion that Democrats are afraid politically to cut off funding?

SEN. LEVIN: Well, that’s not where I’m coming from, because I - my concerns are exactly the two that I mentioned. It’s not a fear of—politically of doing it. It’s the wrong thing to do morally in terms of the message it sends to the troop - troops, but it also would strengthen the president because he would use the defeat of that resolution as proof that the Senate or the Congress supports his policies, and the majority do not. And we ought to be allowed to vote by majority vote on this question: Do we favor a surge? Do we favor changing the mission? That’s what the Republicans will not let us vote on. They’re afraid of having the majority of the Senate vote as the majority of the House did in opposition to the surge of the president. (my emphasis)

Well, to use my favorite Rummy paraphrase, you fight for the Constitution with the Democratic Party you have, not with the Democratic Party you want, or might like to have. And that means we need to point out when our Big Dems like Levin make such flimsy responses. I don't much care whether Levin is "sincere" or not in his opposition to the war. For politicians, sincerity is a greatly over-rated virtue. I mainly care about whether he's effective in limiting the damage Cheney and Bush are doing to the United States and the world with their war policies. And this kind of unilateral political disarmament - by the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee - won't get us there.

Tags: carl levin, david brooks, iraq war, mark shields, mitch mcconnell