slowly but surely, today's young folks are learning why the dreaded dirty hippies were driven so insane by vietnam....

Cheer up, Tom and Howard. Once Democrats buy enough ownership of the war, and convince Bush/Republicans that it won't be used for partisan political purposes against them, it'll be safe to end the war.

Or keep troops in Iraq forever.

Whatever Republicans want.

Because George W. Bush can run the military into the ground, veto pay raises and equipment upgrades and benefits, and accuse Democrats of failing to support the troops - and Democrats' reaction is, "Crap, they accused us of failing to support the troops! We can't argue with them; we better do whatever they tell us to do, before they threaten to say mean things about us! (and hey, on a related note, why don't people think we're tough on security policy?)"

Chris,

Yeah, the "serious" Democrats are right, it's much better to collude in yet more death and Frieman Units than to, you know, stand up and resist. Why, if they did the latter, people would call them names, and having principles is much less important than never being called names, ever.

Howard, today's youngsters will now why Vietnam drove people insane if a draft is instituted. That won't happen while we're in Iraq but I don't see how we can invade Iran without a draft. Yeah, I know... I don't see how we can invade Iran, period. But a draft is what gets everybody involved.

Oh, but we're blogging all about it. Surely one day all our blog posts will persuade the people with ability to change things.

There's a reason why the cretins who rule our discourse still disparage the 60s--it scared the shit out of them. (Read Liddy's bio for descriptions of Guard units with machine guns outside the EOB to get a flavor of then vs. now.) Right now, no one in power is particularly scared at all. And that's why nothing is changing.

We need mass desertions from the military. We need mass demonstrations that shut down DC. We need disruptions of Halliburton stockholder meetings. Until these kinds of thins happen, the war machine won't pay any attention.

If you want to fully grasp the historical parallels here with Vietnam, see the American Experience documentary: 'Two Days in October', and the HBO movie 'The Path to War'. It is like deja-vu all over again.

scott, since we agree on the wisdom of the tactic (which is to say, we recognize each other's sarcasm about the "wisdom" of "serious" Democrats), I think the next step is to name it.

The Powell Doctrine is that you only go to war when you can kick your opponent's ass; the Sessions Doctrine is that you have to be ready to fight anyone who says you didn't win any given war (apparently, though, Jeff Sessions has a grandfather clause for the Viet Nam war) (no, seriously, he said that was part of why we had to invade Iraq, was Saddam saying that we hadn't won)... but I'm not sure who's most closely associated with this (Blue Dogs, yes, but who's the poster boy?). I'm tempted to peg the punchline as "War in our time!"

The Dems caved, as I predicted because their job is to appease the people with tough talk,but ultimately to give the Preznit whatever he wants.

Soon, however, after the next 9/11 attack (presently in the planing stages in the Bush administration) the Preznit will invoke NSPD 51 and HSPD-20 (google it) and end the Republic once and for all.

There will be NO election in 2008. You read it here.

Hey Anonymous, maybe *that's* why Democrats keep caving to Bush - because he's not just holding American troops in Iraq hostage, he's not just playing Chicken with the Constitution, but he's threatening to go nuclear, whether it means Iran or in America. That's the kind of backroom bluster that'd explain a lot of Democratic wussitude in the face of clear and present threats on pretty much every legal/political front.

Though, as Occam might suggest, it could be their natural state.

good point Chris.

I would put absolutely nothing past these criminals.

But you don't understand. The fact that more Americans and Iraqis are being killed is proof that the surge is working. The enemy is worried. They are under more pressure, so they increase attacks. More death is better.

Get it??!??!

Mark, not only is more death better, but more death is more valuable, because it shows how much we care about life, and promoting a culture of life, as Bush says - and Democrats need to support Bush in that regard even more, because we've been called the party of death, so we start out at a disadvantage.

So, we need to *support* more death until people stop accusing us of being the party of death, if I understand the logic here...

Only one man can fix this: Guy in a Reagan Mask '08.

It's hard dealing with people who don't have either a sense of decency/integrity or reality, as the current Republican leadership.

I've suggested in other places that either a law (or better yet) a constitutional amendment that requires a draft be instituted when troops are to be deployed anywhere, other than peace keeping missions, after a specified period of time.

It would ensure that if you're going to send troops you're going to have the support of the country.

Bush' Iraqi mis-adventure would never have gotten off the ground if the Republican congress knew that a draft would kick in six-months (or so) later.

bullgooselooney, just to clarify a fine point: a draft would increase the vocal opposition of young people.

but what i was referencing was the way in which the intractability of american policy in the face of its obvious wrong-headedness drove some vietnam war opponents completely around the bend.

There is an alternative to caving, and it's still possible. That is to include one final benchmark in this bill: an Iraqi referendum on the continued occupation of their country. With 71 percent of Iraqis wanting U.S. troops out in a year or less, this would be sure to pass. Adding this benchmark would be the functional equivalent of a withdrawal timeline. It would likely lead to the withdrawal of all U.S. troops by the end of 2008, if not earlier. I have written an extensive four-part diary exploring all facets of this idea which I've posted on MyDD, under the name "A New Way Out of Iraq."
In brief, my proposal is for the Congress to add the following section to pending legislation: The Iraqi government is strongly urged to hold a referendum within four months after this legislation is signed on whether and for how long the occupation of Iraq should continue. The U.S. government would be required to support and facilitate the holding of such an election, and if the Iraqi government asks us to leave, to do so, according to their timetable and their requirements.
The basic concept behind the referendum was supported by 67 percent of Republicans in a little-noticed November 2006 poll by the Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA).
The poll asked "if the majority of the Iraqi people say they want the United States to commit to withdraw U.S. forces according to a timeline of no more than a year, do you think the U.S. should or should not do so?" 67 percent of Republicans said the United States should do so (close to the overall support of 73 percent). That's a shift from two-thirds support for the president's position to two-thirds support for a one-year withdrawal from Iraq!
And because it does not tie the president's or the military's hands in conducting the war, it would be hard for the president to veto, to reject legislation that encourages Iraqis to exercise their democratic rights when the Bush administration has supported democratizing the Middle East and justified the U.S. presence in Iraq on that basis. Even if such legislation is vetoed and the veto upheld, however, its passage by Congress might well encourage the Iraqis to hold such a vote on their own initiative. After all, last week, the majority of the Iraqi parliament, 144 out of 275 members, signed a petition calling for a withdrawal timeline.

One thing (well, one more thing) I've noticed about all this that really depresses me is that the blog opinion leaders seem much less enraged about it than I would have expected. Kos, FDL, MyDD, TAPPED, yeah, they're upset, but there's a lot of this "well, the leaders have a tough hill to climb, so buck up kiddies" kind of rhetoric. Which I kinda understand, but I also find it condescending and inconsistent with the deadly seriousness of what just happened - we blinked and put our stamp on more blood, death, and dishonor. I've been trolling the sites for full-throated outrage, and it's in shorter supply than I would have thought. Disappointing.

Chris,

How about the Broder Doctrine, in honor of the "Dean" of the Beltway press corps? It applied to Vietnam, and it applies here too - Democrats can disagree with the President's disastrous prosecution of an immoral war, they just shouldn't do anything as uncivil as protest it or try to stop it. Silently thinking these thoughts is probably all right as long as we don't exhibit any snarky facial expressions while we do it.

scott, the reason i'm upset but not outraged is very simple: the dems don't have a veto-proof number in congress.

ergo, there was never a chance to defund the war unless republicans signed on.

republicans are refusing to sign on.

i myself would have simply sent the same bill back and lived with the ongoing spin battle, but i can't be outraged that the leadership has concluded that the votes aren't there.

the votes really aren't there.

this doesn't make the dems equally complicit in this war, and outrage should be reserved for the lying scum who brought us this unnecessary piece of adventurism, not for the folks who quite literally don't have the ability to stop it.

We are not only in the midst of the deadliest six (6) month period, but also just completed the deadliest eight (8) month period for American and overall Coalition deaths (9/1/06 through 4/30/07). What makes the current, unrelenting level of violence more clear is the fact that spikes in casualties in a particular month during this recent period are less significant than in the past. Thus, the next most deadly eight month period (4/1/04 through 11/30/04) is one which was bracketed by the so-called First Battle of Fallujah in April, 2004 and the Second Battle of Fallujah in November, 2004, when overall Coalition deaths spiked to 140 and 141 deaths respectively.

Ohmygod, I was generalizing about the "buck up" rhetoric, but the mighty orange Kos himself actually used it in his post a couple of hours ago. What a patronizing motherfucker! Oops....I'm sure Dean Broder and our liberal "leaders" would be offended by my coarseness....

Not just the deadliest six months yet, but the deadliest year of the war.

Yesterday, U.S. service deaths from June 2006 to May 22, 2007 hit 984.

The previous deadliest year was March 2004 to February 2005.

Uh...YahooNews is reporting another NINE DEAD SOLIDERS today.

Excuse me while I puke.

Howard - we didn't need a veto proof majority to defund Pretzelnit's war. All the Dems needed to do was say- "You want funding you accept timetables". Else no funding.

slowly but surely, today's young folks are learning why the dreaded dirty hippies were driven so insane by vietnam....
Posted by: howard | May 23, 2007 11:55 AM

The young can't be engaged completely because there is no draft although in general that generation cohort is bluer than any since the Great Depression. I will predict that the military will go deep blue democrat for the next 20 years. Oh they may call themselves independents but they will not be pulling any (R) levers.

Congressional Dems don't lack the votes to prevail on the war, they just lack the balls. As numerous bloggers and ordinary citizens have realized, Congress doesn't need to override a veto, it need only continue to send funding bills to the President with timelines. If the situation had been reversed, you know the R's would pull this maneuver in a heartbeat on a Democratic president, as they did in the funding showdown between Gingrich and Clinton. Of course, in that go-round the R's ultimately caved because popular opinion was against them.

For some reason, the obvious tactical advantage Dems hold has been lost on members of Congress and the mainstream media.

wilderness voice, sorry, not the case. i wish it were.

as i've already said, i've had sent back the same bill.

bush vetoes it again.

again, an override fails.

now, we're at the time where the money really is running out.

at that stage, there's a twofold dynamic: the first is that the bush presidency cheats and uses other funding to keep the war going. until that was litigated, many more months pass.

the second is that we get a full-court press that the dems are abandoning the troops in the field, which causes the wimps in the caucus to crack further.

it would be nice if it were as easy as continuing to say "no timelines, no funding," but it ain't that easy.

Howard - how about - the surge continues to go bad? Your scenario, of course, is that the war is frozen, and the dems (chastely) keep silent about, uh, the fact that Bush is not agreeing with the mandate to fund the end of the war.

Apparently, the only scenario that works is that one where nobody opposes you. Gee, politics is hard.

Now, since your scenario was just as true when the Dems passed the first time table conditioned budget, here's a good question: was that a joke? Or were they showing some symbolic courage there? Gonna give the prez what he wants, but our strategy is to show that we don't want to, and would have held our breath, too, but it wouldn't be advisable...
In fact, to end the war, there is no clean scenario. Not one. You are proposing keeping a senseless war going cause it might cause people to question the dems. Well, what do you know? That's the price of action. Since the numbers are and have been shifting towards timetables, your scenario is not even politically astute. It assumes that the scene in 2003, when Bush was popular, is the same scene as now. And you know what? If the Dems keep assuming that, they will make it true. Because Bush seems, at the moment, much stronger than the Dems, and that image has to help him.

The Democratic party - clueless since forever.

roger, perhaps instead of adopting the typical "holier than thou" approach of a certain brand of lefty (a problem so old that Lenin wrote about it) you should read what i actually said.

as in, i said that what i would have done is send the same bill back. i'd have been perfectly prepared to fight it out along those lines indefinitely.

but i'm not outraged that people weren't: there are a lot of nervous folks in the democratic party and i can't make them not nervous by pounding on my chest.

what i did point out was that the notion that the war could be ended by defunding without a veto-proof majority is an illusion, not a strategy. did you actually have a counter for that?

I am not, in saying this, "proposing" keeping the war going; i am being a realist about what it will take to stop the war.

and you - by your inability to read me accurately, by your condescension, by your misguided anger, and by your holier than thou posture - are demonstrating precisely what i said in my initial comment at 11:55 a.m. the war is maddening; it ought to be easier to stop it.

but it isn't, and the fact that it isn't did (in the late '60s and early '70s) and will (now) drive some folks around the bend.

Howard, I'm glad you think that the Dems should have sent it back - because of course, they shouldn't have sent it at all if they didn't know what they were going to do once it was vetoed.

However, the scenario you outlined is still screwy:

"at that stage, there's a twofold dynamic: the first is that the bush presidency cheats and uses other funding to keep the war going. until that was litigated, many more months pass.

the second is that we get a full-court press that the dems are abandoning the troops in the field, which causes the wimps in the caucus to crack further."

In that scenario, the Iraq war is, as I said, frozen. It is as if nothing happens there, while the tussle goes on between Congress and the President. But quite a lot is going on there, as the surge, a self-contradiction in action, shifts violence from one place to another without ever stifling it and continues to create ever more sectarianism by the pacifying strategy it has chosen. And, not incidentally, more and more American soldiers are killed for this.

So: who cares about the full court press? Who is it coming from and who is it going to appeal to? Independents? I doubt it. Dems? No. It will be narrowcast, as usual, to the Bush base. Why you think this will crack the dems rather than the republicans is not argued for - it is simply assumed. If the Democratic party is dumb enough not to use the tools it has at hand to create its own full court press, and use it on wavering East coast republicans, on republicans in the west and southwest, than they are too dumb to live. And certainly if they think they can't turn the defunding issue into the issue of the President refusing to fund a rational end of the war policy, then they will never end the war. Who, really, are they afraid of in that full court press? The press elite? Donors? They sure as hell aren't afraid of voters, since they seem so intent on stiffing them.

It is amazing to me that whenever I see one of these arguments about 'strategy' to end the war, someone will come up with the brilliant thought that, wow, pro-war people will call anti-war people names! That's fiercesome. But ... not important. It has a magnified importance only because the demographic sector least likely to vote Democratic, white management level males, is also the sector most likely to produce political commentators. They look to their own kind, of course, and don't want to be called mean names. But maybe they will just have to toughen up. After all, reality - the reality that this war is lost and that the surge is going to involve wasting ever more lives for ever more unclear purposes - is behind them.

roger, does that mean we can call Republicans nastier names now? Though in the interest of being bipartisan, I suppose we could also call some Democrats names, too, now that they've earned it - *and* shown that it's what motivates them.

Chris, I'm all for a "sticks and stones" policy. If the Democrats actually go through with this surrender, I don't think this is just going to be a blip. Scott is right about the weird silence that reigns about this in the blogosphere. Usually a topic that fills up forty five pages of comments on the Washington Post does get top billing, but no - it is discussed in the little posts, and we go on to the all important Monica hearings. That isn't going to work. The reverse side of the cave strategy is that the Dems have signed on for one hundred billion dollars worth of war - in three months! - and show that, if Bush does decide, in the interest of supporting the troops, to do a little Iran bombing, they'll bustle about and do nothing. There's nothing more dangerous than an aggressive, unpopular presidente and a futile, impotent opposition. It means more and more bloodshed.

roger, i have on idea why you think the war is "frozen" while the war continues. the logic escapes me completely: as long as bush wants to continue this war, he can and will continue this war.

it is, in fact, not clear to me that he would even take seriously a defunding, but since we aren't at that point, i can't say that for sure.

as for the rest, look, pay attention here, why doncha? the dems already cracked, under modest pressure. imagine, instead, we actually get to the point where the "authorized" iraq money really is running out. do you think with bush and cheney demagoguing along that suddenly joe lieberman and ben nelson and bunch of blue dog house dems suddenly get tougher against the war?

quite clearly, you are bound and determined to be disgusted. fine, that's your choice, but personally, i think that's narcissistic thumb-sucking, a willful refusal to count.

it ain't gonna make the war shorter.

here's something to remember: for all the anti-war marches and fury and effort, there were two truths about ending the war in vietnam: the first is that while the country turned against the war for good in 1968 (the pro-war candidate was george wallace; nixon ran on a "secret plan" to end the war, and humphrey ran, finally, on negotiations), it still took 7 more years for funding to end; and as much as the country turned against the war, there was an element that hated the anti-war folks even further, which helped prolong the war.

which was why i made the point i made at 11:55: i'm old enough to have been there and done that, roger, and i'd just as soon see the war end as indulge my ability to express disgust.

roger, the thing that freaks me out is that the Democrats couldn't even muster a majority to say that Bush should be required - as if he weren't already - to seek a declaration of war before doing anything against Iran (or *something* along those lines; whatever it was made me think they *really* don't get it).

Yeah, that doesn't look like handwriting on the wall, at *all*...

Hey, Howard, I tried to give your argument some respect in my second post. You, on the other hand, continue to argue via a tone of voice. You were THERE during the Vietnam years. Wow. You and your buddies, battling it out for peace, eh? I'm just so in awe.

As for counting, who gives a damn? I can count, and so far, there is no way Bush gets any funding bill without the cooperation of the Dems. That is, the Dems could do nothing and Bill Nelson, Joe Lieberman et al can do nothing about that.

You seemingly don't understand my argument - I'll be charitable here - so let us spell it out once again. The Democrats can't play a strategy of refusing to fund the war strictly in Washington D.C. They have the popular side on this, but of course they have to push their own full court press - which I haven't noticed them doing, have you, during these weeks of 'negotiation' - to capitalize on taking the popular side. In other words, there is no rush to legislate. There is no rush to fund. Bush has vetoed funding. Period. It is easy: Bush has vetoed the funding of the troops. Bush is not living up to his responsibility to fund the troops. It is pretty easy to put this into one sentence. The idea that the American people are secretly still behind the war, so that we have to finesse the end of it o so gently in D.C., is crap. The numbers that count, here, are the numbers that tell us that the GOP faces a meltdown if they tie themselves to closely to the President. And that argument is reinforced by news from Iraq, pouring in every day. Your scenario ignores this. And you have compounded that omission by, treating this as something that is merely happening in D.C. It isn't. Thinking in the D.C. bubble is going to destroy the Dems, if they indulge in it. This is an issue effecting the whole country, and one that, moreover, is very sensitive to what is happening in Iraq at the present time. Those two factors subvert your whole argument. More than that, the Dems are going to be punished, by the number, if they so radically fail to fulfill their promises. The woulda coulda shoulda argument is not going to elect a single new Dem.

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