A couple nights ago on the News Hour there was suppose to be some sort of debate on whether we can call what's happening in Iraq a Civil War but having watched the segment I was left dumbfounded at to what lengths the distinguished scholars refused to address the question.  On the one hand Donald Kagan, Yale Historian and Classicist whose contribution to the discussion was best summed up with his open volley:

 DONALD KAGAN, Professor of History, Yale University: Frankly, I regard this as a frivolous discussion on the one hand, and on the other hand it is a calculated effort on the part of those people who would like to see the United States flee from its responsibilities in Iraq, to use a term that is more frightening, more dangerous-sounding than simply the kind of uprising that they've been dealing with, and decide that it's a civil war, in order to make it a more frightening prospect to try to win this thing and to persuade Americans that it's hopeless and that they should go away.

The News Hour neglected to inform us that Prof. Kagan was hardly a disinterested party in the discussion having been a long-time Iraq War booster as a fellow at the Hudson Institute and a signatory to Project for a New American Century , an organization which help lay the ground work for our current mess.  You see Prof. Kagan views this discussion purely as a political matter that, given his loyalties, really can't be debated based upon the facts on the ground only in terms of our overall resolve.  Prof. Betts was a little more forthcoming but at pains not to overreach:

RICHARD BETTS, Institute of War and Peace Studies, Columbia University: Well, there's no definition of civil war that's chiseled in stone. I'd call it an emerging civil war. It's more complicated than the image most people have of civil wars as a two-way conflict between, say, one group of rebels and a government.

I don't think we should get hung up on the label, as long as we focus on the extent to which the shape of the war has been changing and the main lines of division in the conflict have been changing. And at least the term "civil war" does focus attention on that.

For the first few years after the invasion, the conflict was mainly between a group of insurgents on one hand and the Americans on the other. It's been changing in recent months more clearly into a conflict between two main groups of Iraqis, with the Americans and the Iraqi government more or less caught in the middle trying to put the lid on both of them.

That's right, its all too complicated and we really can't find a solid definition of "civil war" throughout history which suggest either the term needs to be retired or we've been using it indiscriminately for centuries.  Instead of bringing on an expert who can explain a general criteria for what constitutes a civil war and why, we're provided with a neo-con Classicist with an agenda whose counterpoint seems to be afraid the newspapers might quote him on the topic?  Does it need to be so complicated?

 

Sport's Illustrated gives us their picks for sports teams with the best uniforms and it appears the one common "shred" shared by all these uniforms is how, with few exceptions, they're the same damn uniforms and team logos these chosen few have been wearing, virtually without change, for decades.  They probably should have called it "Change is Bad: Why we like Classic Uniforms and the Teams that wear them".  Hey, where are the Bears?

There have been reports that both the White House and the Pentagon are considering taking sides in Iraq's (non) Civil War and backing the Shiites and Kurds in hopes that giving up on policies aimed at "national reconciliation" will help us both destroy the Sunni-led insurgency and possibly pull us ahead of the Iranians in the competition for influence in Iraq. 

Yep, nothing like the proverbial "white terror" or pogrom to make up for all the fuck-ups we've inflicted upon Iraq; a "simple" solution with some very bloody historical antecedents.  What?  You mean most of the Sunni Arab regimes surrounding Iraq probably wouldn't let that happen, and they've even pledged to intervene to protect Sunnis if we were ever to pack up and finally leave?  Turkey worries about an independent Kurdistan?  But it sounded so good??  Who are these people?

No, not time for the worst Senate majority leader ever to give up his future political ambitions but instead I recommend its time to retire the phrase "grown-ups" when it comes to our discourse on how to govern the country.  From what I've been told the so-called "grown-ups" came to power after that dark, dishonorable period known as the Clinton Presidency and have been running the country almost exclusively for the last six years.  Oddly enough these "grown-ups" have done so much damage to a phrase meant to denote maturity, experience, steadfastness and able leadership that its bewildering to find pundits like Chris Matthews still even using it as a put down for the new Democratic Congress.  Last I looked, these much heralded "grown-ups" are leaving town without passing a budget, got us stuck in a conflict the may cause the disintegration of a sovereign nation and the destabilization of much of the Middle East and the head "grown-up" not only isn't too swift, but also has the social graces of a two-year old?

I'm really not sure what made Bill Frist an attractive Presidential candidate to begin with, but let's be thankful that we won't have to hear the words "Frist" and "presidential aspirations" in the same sentence ever again.

I recommend Pat Lang's take on the difficulties of enacting what passes for a "serious" solution for our misadventure in Iraq.  I think he makes it clear that when we debate large one time increases of troops to shore up our near term position in Iraq that such proposals are frankly not "serious" solutions but political posturing devoid of any consideration of a suitable timeframes, force structure pressures, logistical concerns or any real sense that a sudden influx of U.S. troops would accomplish anything.

You may occasionally see Pat Lang being interviewed on various news channels, but Pat's blog Sic Semper Tyrannis is also highly recommended; Pat brings a welcome and authoritative voice on not only the Middle East but also the U.S. military and intelligence community.

Happy Thanksgiving from everybody at the Ironmouth! 

In honor of "Turkey Day", here is a clip from one of the funniest moments in TV history:  WKRP's "Turkeys Away!"

....not only do we not have any respect for the institutions of government, we don't take this governing thing seriously either.

Something I did not read in any of the obituaries for Milton Friedman which I meant to write the other day and never got around to: 

1. Monetarism, ie. targeted money supply expansion as monetary policy, as Dr. Friedman prescribed, never, and I mean NEVER WORKED... in fact, it produced pretty disasterous results everywhere (US, Britain, Chile, etc.) it was tried and was often quickly abandoned.  
2. While Friedman's legacy might be reminding us of the importance of keeping inflation in check and advocating price stability (both pretty basic to the discipline of Economics in general) his assertion that "inflation is always a monetary phenomenon" is widely disputed and you won't find anyone, especially a reputable economist, who calls him or herself a "Monetarist" nowadays. 

Okay, that felt good to get off my chest.

Wow.  The cost of five years of fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan (adjusted for inflation) is on the verge of surpassing the total amount spent on the Vietnam War?  That's amazing especially when you consider the Vietnam War not only lasted longer, but also had a much larger commitment of troops and military resources than either Iraq or Afghanistan.  I know the Pentagon is historically notorious for not being able to balance its books or account for all its stuff, but come on!  Is an "all volunteer" force really all that much more expensive than the mix of draftees and volunteers sent to Vietnam?  New technology?  Anyone remember the "McNamara Line" or where expensive laser-guided munitions got their first use; Vietnam was a treasure trove of new weapons and technology.  

My hope for the coming year is that the new Democratic Congress will not only restore proper budgetary processes and do away with "war by supplemental funding", but also take a hard look at where all the money's going; don't be surprised if this is just one more area in which the Bush administration has both let down the troops in field and the American taxpayer at large.

Evidently the only thing more senseless than getting stuck in a land war in Asia is asking the President to provide a real world historical analogy.

Grim assesment on Iraq in today's Post:

While American commanders have suggested that civil war is possible in Iraq, many leaders, experts and ordinary people in Baghdad and around the Middle East say it is already underway, and that the real worry ahead is that the conflict will destroy the flimsy Iraqi state and draw in surrounding countries.

Whether the U.S. military departs Iraq sooner or later, the United States will be hard-pressed to leave behind a country that does not threaten U.S. interests and regional peace, according to U.S. and Arab analysts and political observers.

"We're not talking about just a full-scale civil war. This would be a failed-state situation with fighting among various groups," growing into regional conflict, Joost Hiltermann, Middle East project director for the International Crisis Group, said by telephone from Amman, Jordan.

"All indications point to a current state of civil war and the disintegration of the Iraqi state," Nawaf Obaid, an adjunct fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and an adviser to the Saudi government, said last week at a conference in Washington on U.S.-Arab relations.

"To envision that you can divide Iraq into three parts is to envision ethnic cleansing on a massive scale, sectarian killing on a massive scale," Prince Turki al-Faisal, the Saudi ambassador to the United States, said Oct. 30 at a conference in Washington. "Since America came into Iraq uninvited, it should not leave Iraq uninvited."

"When the ethnic-religious break occurs in one country, it will not fail to occur elsewhere, too," Syrian President Bashar al-Assad told Germany's Der Spiegel newsweekly recently. "It would be as it was at the end of the Soviet Union, only much worse. Large wars, small wars -- no one will be able to get a grip on the consequences."

Apparently we could do some things to help.  The price?  So steep that Bush could never swallow:

"The thing is, because Iran and Syria both have spoiling power in Iraq, if you could neutralize them," it would ease some of the many pressures within Iraq, Hiltermann said. But he said the two countries may demand a mighty trade-off: for Syria, U.S. help with its biggest stated aim, winning back the Golan Heights from Israel; for Iran, U.S. compromise over its nuclear program.

Hiltermann acknowledged the difficulty. "I'm saying it's required," he said. "I'm not saying it's possible."

 

Fox News internal memo, last week:

 

"And let's be on the lookout for any statements from the iraqi insurgents, who must be thrilled at the prospect of a Dem-controlled congress."

We report, you decide.

David Kurtz (TPM Reader DK) over at Talking Points Memo:

After the 1968 elections, not many Americans would probably have guessed that we would be in Vietnam for another six and a half years. We're at a similarly decisive moment now.

That's why she's thrown her support behind Murtha.  A bold move worth of a leader, no matter what Andy Sullivan thinks.

Wouldn't a better title for this article be "How Can One Failed Presidency Help Save Another: Does Anyone Remember That George H. W. Bush Was a Lousy President, Too?"

Willard: They told me that you had gone totally insane, and that your methods were unsound.
Kurtz: Are my methods unsound?
Willard: I don't see any method at all, sir.

The latest indication that there has been a massive wave of change overtaking Washington:  John Amato at Crooks and Liars catches cable news cutting into its broadcast to bring you a member of the Democratic Party giving a press conference!  What's it been six or seven years, maybe more?  Well I guess it adds a little variety to all the hours, ney months of time, already spent cutting away to the President giving the same speech over and over and over and over...

...and domestic terror suspect.  Sad thing is that if someone who posted to Dailykos was sending packets of fake anthrax to noted conservative politicians and media celebrities, progressive bloggers would be forced on television to defend the entire community and for weeks you'd hear nothing but how dangerously unhinged left-wing bloggers are.  I'm not holding my breath that you'll see Jim Robinson, Kristinn Taylor or noted conservative bloggers like Hindraker or Malkin on the news defending Castagana any time soon.

I hate to rain on everyone's "bipartisan" parade, but when evaluating the veracity of any new direction the White House proclaims its best to remember that its not what the Bush people say, what you think they'll say, or what you think they'll do, but what they actually do.  Now, can anyone explain why the President not only renominated John Bolton but why is the White House pressing a divisive lame-duck session vote on the nomination even though they know they don't have the votes? 

Allen concedes.

 

Ed Bradley, dead at 65.

J.D. Hayworth won't get rid of that shit-eating grin.  And he won't concede Arizona's Fifth Congressional District to Harry Mitchell, who still leads Hayworth by five percentage points. 

Before the Valley of the Sun's beautiful people elected Hayworth to Congress, he was an obtuse sportscaster on the Phoenix CBS (nox Fox) affiliate.  I remember he came to my school once to talk about the Great Rubber Duck Race - an annual non-event in Phoenix in which thousands of rubber ducks are dropped into the canal system of the Salt River, presumably to celebrate the miracle of bringing water to the desert for all those golf courses.   I remember that Hayworth was very, very fat.  And he had the personality of a lamppost.  Of course these attributes made him a natural for Congress.

And now, having lost his bid for re-election, he's like the rest of us.  What will he do, with no bully pulpit to espouse his anti-Semitic and anti-Mexican diatribes?  How will he launder dirty Abramoff money into the pockets of his wife?  Will Hannity and the other wingnuts really want a loser on their shows now?

He doesn't even have the class to bow out.  Step aside, fat man.  Your time has come.

AP calls it for Webb.

Isn't this the time for Chris Matthews, Tim Russert or some other talking head to get up and say something to the effect that if George Allen was a real patriot and son of Virginia he would drop all hints of a recount challenge and graciously concede defeat?

The majors call it for the boy with the buzz cut.  We're in.  Lieberman isn't going to SecDef, so we are set in the Senate.

This presser is amazing.  Retreat on all political fronts.  Hopefully it also means we can advance in the military sphere. 

Bye Bye Rummy.  The resignation this fast says good odds that Lieberman will accept the position of SecDef, denying Democrats the Senate as Jodi Rell, CT's Republican governor would get to appoint a replacement.

 

Red State reader posts front page diary about the Webb-Allen race stating "Let's Not Re-Do Florida."  I agree boys, but I think that its not up to you.  Good luck on that.  I'd expect Karl thinks differently.  Remember, he's entitled to his own math. 

Don't worry folks--Webb's got this one.

Remember 2005?  The Virginia Attorney General's race went down to the wire, with the Republican R.F. McDonnell getting approximately 280 more votes than the Democrat R.C. Deeds.  A statewide recount of 1.9 million ballots gave McDonnell 30 more votes.  Right now, Webb leads by 7050 votes.  Allen ain't going to pull it out.  Plus we are going to get a nice month of hearing about all of the dirty tricks that Allen pulled at the last minute, thanks to the recount hoopla.

As I said on October 14th, our day came.

While browsing TPM this morning I noticed this post of a comment by Grover Norquist in the LA Times advocating that the White House do all it can not to seek compromise on the issues of the day with the Democrats as if governing is about some Leninist drive to exploit inherent contradictions or something.  When will these people grow up?  Not everything in politics is ideology.  Not everything in politics is a zero-sum game!    Running the country is not some playground where you just pick up your toys and go home if you're not happy with your playmates. 

I think this election has shown the GOP that pursuing a "50+1" political strategy and purposely cutting Democrats out of the national debate while politically successful in the short run has given us a disasterous set of policies that do everything but address the needs of the nation and are often contrary to the wishes of the public. 

My big hope after the last six years of "slash and burn" is that we get back to the consensus that a functioning democracy requires debate and compromise.  Does that mean that I might not always like what they come up with in DC?  Sure, but in general I believe that the best ideas and practices will emerge from the essential interaction of different viewpoints and in the end the democratic process should be about finding what works best for the entire country, not just Grover Norquist.

Charles Pierce on Bob Corker:

"....a guy so nondescript he has no shadow."

I've been saying something similar for a number of months now.  Looks like we've got another uninspiring East TN Republican set to collect a paycheck and warm a seat in the Senate chamber and little else.  So it goes....

At the last minute.  Damn.  My ticker can't take this shit.

Looks like a big night for the good guys.  Virginia is quite tight.

Don't believe them.  Good or bad, we just gotta wait.

omg!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!  Like Britney just filed for D-I-V-O-R-I-C-E!!  is anything else happening today?

Massive turnout reported in VA as well.  Sounds sort of wave-like to me. 

Local papers reporting massive turnout in CT.  That's very interesting.

Next week on Fox, Steve Harrigan and the three men in black bring you the second part of our series on terrorist interrogation: What does pulling out a terrorist suspect's fingernails look like and how effective an interrogation technique is it? 

Christ. 

And the kings of the earth, and the great men, and the rich men, and the chief captains, and the mighty men, and every bondman,
and every free man, hid themselves in the dens and in the rocks of the mountains; And said to the mountains and rocks,
Fall on us, and hide us from the face of him that sitteth on the throne, and from the wrath of the Lamb:
For the great day of his wrath is come; and who shall be able to stand?
Revelation 6:15-17

Richard Perle, Kenneth Adelman, David Frum, all bail utterly on the war:

Perle goes so far as to say that, if he had his time over, he would not have advocated an invasion of Iraq: "I think if I had been delphic, and had seen where we are today, and people had said, 'Should we go into Iraq?,' I think now I probably would have said, 'No, let's consider other strategies for dealing with the thing that concerns us most, which is Saddam supplying weapons of mass destruction to terrorists.' … I don't say that because I no longer believe that Saddam had the capability to produce weapons of mass destruction, or that he was not in contact with terrorists. I believe those two premises were both correct. Could we have managed that threat by means other than a direct military intervention? Well, maybe we could have."

To David Frum, the former White House speechwriter who co-wrote Bush's 2002 State of the Union address that accused Iraq of being part of an "axis of evil," it now looks as if defeat may be inescapable, because "the insurgency has proven it can kill anyone who cooperates, and the United States and its friends have failed to prove that it can protect them." This situation, he says, must ultimately be blamed on "failure at the center"—starting with President Bush.

Kenneth Adelman, a lifelong neocon activist and Pentagon insider who served on the Defense Policy Board until 2005, wrote a famous op-ed article in The Washington Post in February 2002, arguing: "I believe demolishing Hussein's military power and liberating Iraq would be a cakewalk." Now he says, "I just presumed that what I considered to be the most competent national-security team since Truman was indeed going to be competent. They turned out to be among the most incompetent teams in the post-war era. Not only did each of them, individually, have enormous flaws, but together they were deadly, dysfunctional."

Fearing that worse is still to come, Adelman believes that neoconservatism itself—what he defines as "the idea of a tough foreign policy on behalf of morality, the idea of using our power for moral good in the world"—is dead, at least for a generation. After Iraq, he says, "it's not going to sell."

Their day has come.

Sorry its been a busy day, but Christ allmighty! who are these morons who thought it best to post nuclear bomb plans to a government website because they didn't trust the intelligence community to provide them with more inflammatory evidence on WMD's in Iraq?  Jesus Christ, evidently undermining nuclear non-proliferation treaties and agreements were not enough so they decided to post bomb schematics on the web!

Normally I'd say Congress should look into it but wouldn't you know it was chairmen of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees with the backing of the President who pushed this plan into being; something about using the "magic" of the blogosphere to prove the proverbial moot point.  What kinda expert analysis of nuclear engineering schematics in Arabic are they expecting from the likes of Rich Lowry, Jonah Goldberg, Glenn Reynold or John Hindraker?  Seriously? 

As usual the professionals in the intelligence community were stepped on in a misguided effort to once again playdefense for an indefensible  political position which makes me ask the question: "Do you feel any safer?"  I know I don't.  Its clear these people don't have my or your safety in mind whatsoever, and the continued corruption of national security procedures for political gain is breathtaking in its stupidity.  This nation deserves so much better. 

(Updated 11/4/06 RM)

Haggard, 50, initially denied the allegations, telling 9News Wednesday night that "I've never had a gay relationship with anybody, and I'm steady with my wife. I'm faithful to my wife."

But KKTV in Colorado Springs reported that New Life Associate Senior Pastor Ross Parsley told a meeting of church elders Thursday night that Haggard had met with the church's overseers earlier in the day and "had admitted to some indiscretions."

Or how 'bout Drudge last night--he hypes a stunning new story on Iraq's A-bomb work pre-war.

Its the bomb all right--Republicans had demanded a slew of intelligence documents recovered from Saddam's archives to be put on a website to assist them in re-election.  Turns out they described the following:

Last March, the federal government set up a Web site to make public a vast archive of Iraqi documents captured during the war. The Bush administration did so under pressure from Congressional Republicans who had said they hoped to “leverage the Internet” to find new evidence of the prewar dangers posed by Saddam Hussein.

But in recent weeks, the site has posted some documents that weapons experts say are a danger themselves: detailed accounts of Iraq’s secret nuclear research before the 1991 Persian Gulf war. The documents, the experts say, constitute a basic guide to building an atom bomb.

Last night, the government shut down the Web site after The New York Times asked about complaints from weapons experts and arms-control officials. A spokesman for the director of national intelligence said access to the site had been suspended “pending a review to ensure its content is appropriate for public viewing.”

Officials of the International Atomic Energy Agency, fearing that the information could help states like Iran develop nuclear arms, had privately protested last week to the American ambassador to the agency, according to European diplomats who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the issue’s sensitivity. One diplomat said the agency’s technical experts “were shocked” at the public disclosures.

Suckered.  There's your November Surprise.  Calling Osama . . .

I don't want to comment on the quality of the commentary on CNN these days, although I will say its lacking.  Case in point, this article as to whether the "fictional" character that Michael J Fox played for so many years, Alex P. Keaton, would support his stem cell research advocacy this election cycle.  While I too have had similar thoughts as to whether the people in Mayberry will vote for, oh, Democrat Heath Shuler, I was a little puzzled as to whether or not Alex would also have Parkinson's, because after all Alex is only a fictional character played by... oh, never mind?

I like this piece about how Bob Corker has lent his campaign another $2 million dollars because the $10 million dollars the Ford campaign has spent evidently threatens to overwhelm the $14 million his own campaign has spent. 

I'm not going to debate the merits of the Kerry "controversy", although to a generation of politically savvy men, like the Vice President, who were able to avoid being drafted through college deferments I'm sure it hit home. Who knows, maybe we'll get to hear another tirade from the queen of faux outrage to boot.  What I'm still shaking my head about is that the "botched joke" wasn't something off the cuff, but an actual prepared remark written by a staff member and he still botched it:

 “Do you know where you end up if you don’t study, if you aren’t smart, if you’re intellectually lazy? You end up getting us stuck in a war in Iraq. Just ask President Bush.”  

 

General Casey's next press conference:

"I'm not saying that things are going great and we've still got a lot of work to do but so long as that arrow stays out of the red, we'll be okay.  What was that...oh, crap!"

I'm not saying the 90 or so companies on this list should advertise on Air America and they have every right not to, but is there another radio network out there that is the target of such an extensive "blackout list"?  And if REI says that they never agreed to be on any sort of "blackout list" then who put them on there?

Ed Kilgore's take on George Allen and his desperate campaign is priceless.  My favorite paragraph is this:

 But I personally think the most damning thing about the Allen Story is that he has been exposed as the ultimate Golden State Child of Privilege who has spent much of his life trying to impersonate a dirt-farm, dirt-track Yahoo, mainly by aggressively embracing the underside of Yahoo culture, without the mitigating circumstances of actually growing up that way, or any indication that he shares the positive features of that culture (e.g., a healthy disrespect for economic elites). To put it another way, most true southern white crackers may well have contempt for those well-heeled cultural elitists who look down on them, but they'd also kill to give their kids the kind of advantages that George Allen had, and, if confronted directly with the full Allen Story, would probably consider his efforts to remake himself as a 'bacca-chewing, thuggish redneck the ultimate insult.

I've never quite understood the appeal of George Allen.  When I lived in DC there were nightly news stories of how Virginia was struggling to overcome many of the fiscal and political decisions he made, especially the huge cuts in transportation infrastructure funding that made plain his contempt for the northern VA suburbs around the District.  The odd thing about this election is how after thirty years of cultivating that crude tobacco-chewing, cowboy boot wearing, confederate flag waving "Southern" good ol'boy one step away from the White House, Mr Allen's artifice has suddenly cracked and we're left with a mean-tempered Southern California transplant ashamed of his actual heritage who after years of political success has only a mediocre Senate record to run on and a campaign perpetually shooting itself in the fo