The surge is working, of course. More than that, it has been a tremendous success. Who can deny it? Who?
It has not achieved all of George W. Bush's goals in Iraq, whatever they are. It will not create a strong new city-on-a-hill democracy in the Middle East, which the US can benevolently oversee and protect (in a spectacularly lucrative arrangement) from large permanent bases to the end of time. It will not restore any real, lasting order in the chaos of Iraq (though it can provide some ideal photo-op pockets of peace and quiet-inside big Camp Cupcake, for example, where our stealth warrior-hero wannabe just had his picture taken). It will not stop the tribal bloodbath we have so innocently, ignorantly, criminally provoked (though it can turn it into a trickle, here and there, for a little while). It will not even help us identify which Iraqis we ought to be trying to kill and which are on our side. (In fact, with our selective and isolated applications of American power-not to mention our timely bribes-it makes that basic question much harder to answer.)
Most of all, it will not alter the fact that all we have accomplished in this long war is to destroy an admittedly lunatic and disgusting secular leader who was, at the same time, the only real impediment to the domination of the region by our greatest enemy. If Bush and his ideological dimwits had gone to war exclusively to magnify the power and influence of Iran, they could hardly have done it better.
The successful surge has achieved none of the shifting list of goals that have been advanced to justify this war. It has only "worked" to accelerate the astonishing neocon assault on our fundamental security, our reputation, our national honor, our economy, and our soldiers. But it is working, nevertheless. How?
It has accomplished the single most important remaining goal of George W. Bush's virulent presidency, while at the same time giving a little oxygen to the expiring, eternally discredited rubber-stamp Republican Party. It has achieved the one goal they all hoped against hope would be accomplished when the surge was first proposed by some advertising man in the bowels of the White House, and there is no denying this enormous success.
The surge has sewn debilitating doubt, confusion, despair, and division in the enemy.
Not bin Laden, of course; not al-Zawahir; not al-Sadr; not foreign al-Qaeda terrorists in Iraq; not the resurgent Taliban in Afghanistan; not the jihadi terror cells all over the world; not the Sunni insurgents; not the Shia militias. That motley group smiles at the successful "surge": those people can read; watch television; see what is before their eyes. Most of all, they can lie low and wait. They know that surges are by definition temporary, and that we don't have the money or the manpower (short of a draft) or the will power (there will be no draft) or the old blind jingo faith in our smirking fantastical little cowboy president and his vision of America to sustain this terrific surge and build on its results and continue trying to reach those unreachable goals.
What enemy, then, is left on any battlefield that can honestly be described as reeling from debilitating doubt, confusion, despair, and division? The only important enemy, of course: the Democratic leadership.
When Hillary said a few weeks ago that the new tactics were working, she fell into just the trap for which the surge was invented, and most of her blustery, feeble, centrist colleagues have joined her there, bewildered, wishing they were brave enough to gnaw off their own paws as they struggle, caught.
One can almost feel sorry for them. Why did Bush have to do this, just when everything was going so well? These newly-empowered (sort of: did you campaign for Lieberman? Barbara Boxer did)--these newly-sort-of-empowered Democrats had such a good plan for 2008. Impeachment was off the table (never mind if that was the only way to keep a criminal president from ordering an unimaginably catastrophic attack on Iran). They knew that If they could just dither and dawdle long enough, pretending to be angry and vigilant as they were stalling, issuing a subpoena every now and then, holding a few little photo-op hearings, being tough and smart at a few press conferences, passing things like an increase in the minimum wage, going after soft targets like the criminal moron Gonzales but not impeaching him (not pressing to find the emails and memos in which Rove and Bush demanded that federal attorneys be fired for political reasons: who doubts they are there to be found?; not demanding the evidence that Kerry and his campaign were wiretapped; who doubts that?), not demanding any real accountability, talking about Republican greed and tax fairness while protecting their own corporate donors (see Chuck!; see Chuck hedge!), not making waves, not rocking the boat, if they could just keep a low profile while more Americans were dying in the stupid illegal war, if they could just keep from making anybody on the right or in the middle mad at them, if they could just wait--then Bush's poll numbers would continue to go down, Republicans would be even further discredited, and they would win a landslide in 2008 and live happily ever after. They'd take the White House, the House and Senate, with enough votes to do whatever they wanted, whenever they decided what that might be. The second permanent majority in a decade!
Now, all that is in jeopardy: the surge is working! Really? The surge is working? That depends on what the meaning of "is" is. Oh, we'll lose the war, we'll lose in Iraq, of course-we have already lost in every meaningful definition of the term and everybody except McCain and Lieberman knows it. The surge won't "win," but it's working. And when we don't win, that is, when we lose and everybody admits it, well, since the surge was working back in September of 2007-pay attention Democratic leaders: this is not rocket science--the reason will be that the craven Democrats, who cannot and will not defend American and keep it secure, have stabbed Bush and Co. and the whole country in the back. As usual. The wonderful things that might have been-a democracy in the Middle East! free oil!-won't happen because the Democrats, the party of surrender and appeasement, the cut-and-runners, have betrayed America again. Because they can't help it, it's who they are, it's what they do. (Didn't you see The Path to 9/11? It doesn't have to be true, it just has to be repeated a lot and said on television.)
Test this in your own lives. If you have any Republican friends, ask them why we aren't winning in Iraq. Some . . . well, McCain and Lieberman . . . will say we are winning. But many of the others will angrily blame the Democrats already. (This has been a Talking Point for a long, long time.) If they are inclined at all to blame Democrats for losing Iraq, ask them to answer one question. Ask tenderly, yearningly, as if we might learn from their answer. What has Bush ever wanted to do in Iraq that the helpless, spineless, pathetic opposition party has ever kept him from doing? If they haven't opposed him, ever, in any meaningful way, they can't actually be blamed for losing Iraq. (That's the main reason they haven't done anything.) Not that the facts will matter, especially when spinners and spinner-enablers, the culpable news people, say the revealing lie-alert phrase: "the fact of the matter is." "The surge was working, everybody admitted that and the fact of the matter is the Democrats lost Iraq."
Who could believe such malignant nonsense? Well . . . who believes that George W. Bush served honorably in the National Guard and that John Kerry was being a coward in Vietnam? Who still believes that Osama and Saddam were in cahoots, that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, that Iraq had something to do with 9/11? The flagrantly lying vice-president, the education president, and all their greed-and-meanness tribe have been pretty safe, so far, in relying on the easily-manipulated fear and the profound stupidity of the American people.
What can we do about this, we Democrats who are falling victim to the surge? Not much. Our hopes for change and a renewal in 2008 are beginning to fade: for some of us those frail hopes have already vanished. The vote for the FISA extension finished some of us off.
Our only hope, at the eleventh hour, would be for a leader of great moral force, stature, and courage to emerge, to come out swinging. Someone who could stand up to the liars and spinners. Someone who could speak the truth to them and maintain it against their increasingly vicious counterattacks, including their angry deceptions and obfuscations and selective, distorted facts of the matter. Someone who could excoriate them, wither them, and galvanize us.
Is there anyone out there who could do that?
Yes. Al Gore.
If Al Gore stood up to debate the smirky ignoramus Commander-in-Chief, Bush would suddenly recede, seen immediately and irrevocably by most American for the hollow arrogant irritating little catastrophe he is. Gore vs. Giuliani: a man of great intellect, courage, and principle vs. a grandstanding blowhard. Gore vs. Romney or Thompson: an adult vs. children, one smarmy and duplicitous, the other vacant and lazy. If Gore towers over the Democratic candidates, he reduces the embarrassing Republicans to laughable insignificance.
I have believed all along that Gore would run, because he had to; he would sooner or later see that and do it, despite his reluctance. But now I think he won't. He doesn't like us enough. He got his feelings hurt in 2000. He doesn't like the whole absurd, disgusting, demeaning business of running for office, and he doesn't intend to stoop to it again, even to conquer. Please, Al: reconsider. Speak out. Run. Lead us. There is more to life, hope, and the future happiness of all mankind than sustaining a habitable planet, though that is important too. There are inconvenient truths, and there are inconvenient necessities. We need you. The country may never have needed a particular man more.
If not Gore, who? These next few days and weeks will show us if there is a powerful opposition voice in the party that has done so much to keep anybody from noticing it is an opposition party, a party that has long been guided by the pitiful hope that no one will get mad at it for not being nice. I thought I was probably going to be forced to write in Gore on my 2008 ballot. I won't do that now. If he doesn't run, I'll honor his perverse and potentially devastating reticence. So-my vote can be won, if someone will step forward as the real Democratic leader, someone with the moral stature that can withstand the perfidious diminishing mockery of the whores of the media (Edwards paid for a $400 haircut and owns 2 SUVs!; Kucinich is short!), someone who will take the real war to our real enemies and scatter them like chaff, someone who can make the truth be heard, someone who can save us. Please, please let a candidate emerge who is not a "working" stiff, someone full of passion and authority, who will stand up to this fraudulent little spinner's trickle masquerading as a surge, someone who will be the leader who both earns and compels our votes.
We have a big problem here in Michigan. The head of our state party turned in a list yesterday of potential candidates for the ballot on our January primary, if that primary actually happens. He refused to include Gore's name, despite the fact that names on the list only need to be POTENTIAL candidates and that there is no requirement that they be DECLARED candidates. Now we have to gather over 12,000 signatures in six weeks to get him on the ballot should he declare. Barring that feat, we may need to mount a write-in campaign. If he declares, I think we could get a lot of people, me included, to actually write him in. If he doesn't declare, I won't waste my vote on a write-in, but I have no clear second choice.
At this point, I think my choice will have to be whoever Gore endorses if he doesn't run -- I trust him enough to let him help me make up my mind.
Run, Al, run! We really, really need you.
He is no more a cowboy than he was a fighter pilot.
He is the 1st son of a rich powerful family, who is the produce of the wealthy, powerful NE elite boys finishing schooling, and elite universities.
He is not a product of a working ranch or farm family trying to maintain a family agra tradition. He is an urbanite, and an MBA busness failure.
If he were a true cowboy, he would be castrating livestock not castrating our freedoms.
"What has Bush ever wanted to do in Iraq that the helpless, spineless, pathetic opposition party has ever kept him from doing? If they haven't opposed him, ever, in any meaningful way, they can't actually be blamed for losing Iraq. (That's the main reason they haven't done anything.)"
It's like the dog that always craps on your lawn. After a while, you stop getting mad at the dog because, well, that's what dogs do - they crap. It's the owner/handler who is to blame for LETTING the dog crap on your lawn.
Congress is letting bush's occupation of Iraq continue because of politics.
A SHAMEFUL response to a national tragedy that gets worse every stinking day we stay there.
tweak will be required. Sometime soon, we're
going to give it an exciting new name. Hence
forth it will be known as 'The First Surge',
to distinguish it from the equally successful
'Second Surge', 'Third Surge', etc.
This is his way of bringing the logic of the marketplace to education and government.
Why don't we use the same standards, the same logic, and the same remedy, to the occupation of Iraq and the (unrelated) so-called War on Terror?
Neither has worked. Neither has achieved it stated goals, even as those goals have mutated on a monthly basis. Neither has shown an signs of progress or success.
So, by Bush's reasoning, there is only one thing to do: Shut 'em down. End the funding for the occupation and the permanent bases in Iraq. End the funding for the illegal wiretaps and incarcerations. Pay to bring the troops home where they can do something useful (when the next president gets there and can think of something).
No Terrorist Left Behind.
End the Occupation.
Support the Troops.
Suppose, for example, Kucinich wanted to go Independent, or one decided to give the Green Party a look. And suppose that, by some miracle, a small power base even ended up getting formed. And then what you would have would be nothing. To govern, a coalition would have to be formed and that means handing the new power over to the current abusers of the old power. Except that even that would not really be available because the effort of building the new power base would surely drain the Democratic power base to the benefit of the Republican power base, and the new coalition would be left to form the opposition.
We will flounder, to one extreme or another unless and until we each find our own resolve to work for the creation of The Second American Constitutional Convention. Only through that means can we overturn enough of the separate little fiefdoms that have imprisoned our society and its government to be able to rebuild an effective new power structure. It won't be one that will be controlled by any one power base in each and every matter, but it can be one that actually does turn out to be answerable to the will of "We, The People".
The process of the creation of the answer serves as an integral part of the answer. We have the collective intellect to handle any challenge. People tune in here and there and then move one. We can change that by staging a political event so grand that it captures the collective imagination unconditionally. With that structure our new political foundation can be designed, and within no other can exactly that goal be achieved.