Hanging Tough

After Labor Day - the season that Bush likes to hit his stride on the campaign trail (2004) and roll out wars (2002) - the White House launched a massive War on Terror/9/11 anniversary promotion. The arguments were old hat (Dems won't protect you), and the methods tired (loads of speeches - no new policies), but he managed to win back some of his base. Things were looking like they might swing back around just like in the fall of '04. They may still yet, but Democrats appear to be doing their damndest to keep things in play.

Unlike the congressional leadership of 2002, todays dems are both wiley and not afraid to engage on national security issues. Good. To have a fighting chance, the left can't run on minimum wage and social security alone. But for a party out of power, this can be a challenge.



Senate Dems signal they're up to the challenge by staging their own Iraq hearings:

"Maj. Gen. John Batiste, the former commander of the Army's 1st Infantry Division in Iraq . . . spoke before the Senate Democratic Policy Committee, a rump group with little legislative clout but access to a proper Senate hearing room. "Donald Rumsfeld is not a competent wartime leader," said Batiste, wearing a pinstripe suit, calling himself a "lifelong Republican" and bearing a slight resemblance to Oliver North. "He surrounds himself with like-minded and compliant subordinates who do not grasp the importance of the principles of war, the complexities of Iraq or the human dimension of warfare. . . . Bottom line: His plan allowed the insurgency to take root and metastasize to where it is today."

The Democrats received a nice alley-oop this week in the form of a classified report from the National Intelligence Council that determines "the war in Iraq is making the threat of terrorism worse.America is less safe today than it was after Sept. 11, 2001, because the conflict is creating more extremists. "The war in Iraq has exasperated the global war on terror," said Robert Hutchings, the council's former chairman." The full NIE may be released soon.

When Republicans attacked the Democrats for holding political hearings rather than killing terrorists, Minority Leader Harry Reid referred to the NIE findings:

“When the United States intelligence community confirmed that America is losing the war on terror because of Bush failures in Iraq, this White House lost all credibility on matters of national security.”

That's a good retort to keep in mind when all the rove attacks come down the pike as we head into November.



Politically speaking, former presiden Bill Clinton provided the Dems with a textbook example of how to engage on national security when he let loose on the always mediocre Chris Wallace. To be fair, Wallace never stood a chance, and Clinton overreacted a tad. But Clinton knew what he was doing. Planned or not, Clinton showed genuine passion and made the case not only on the details of his efforts to nab Bin Laden, but for Democrats to engage on this issue in general. My favorite part of the exchange:

"What did I do? I worked hard to try to kill him. I authorized a finding for the CIA to kill him. We contracted with people to kill him. I got closer to kill him than anybody's gotten since. And if I were still president, we'd have more than 20,000 troops there, trying to kill him. Now, I've never criticized President Bush, and I don't think this is useful. But, you know, we do have a government that thinks Afghanistan is only one-seventh as important as Iraq. And you ask me about terror and al Qaeda with that sort of dismissive thing, when all you have to do is read Richard Clarke's book to look at what we did in a comprehensive systematic way to try to protect the country against terror."

Clinton demonstrated that you can be moderate and tough on the right. There is a sweet spot here where all Democrats can rally. It's hard to keep it together when in power. But for now, and hopefully in '08, Dems ought to be able to rip the right without eating their own. Regardless of authorization votes and exit strategies, we can all fight the right together. That's where Lieberman fell short. His brand of the hand-wringing and lecturing of his own party, well that made some sense in 1998. But now he's way out of step. It's more admirable to speak truth to the party that's actually in power.

Here's a fascinating profile of Rahm Emmanuel, who's about as moderate and tough as they come.

Last month I said George Allen's presidential hopes were over, and now he's hanging on to dear life in his senate race. In the past week, he's lashed out at suggestions that his mother is/was Jewish - which she is/was and he knew it - and he's been accused of repeated using the "n" word in his college days. Oh yeah, and he was accused of trying to put a dead deer's head into a black family's mailbox.

What's getting lost in all of this, unfortunately, is the superb job challenger Jim Webb was doing in framing the national security issue for Democrats. In a debate on Meet the Press last week, Webb ran circles around Allen with his tough, clear stance on the issue:

"It’s one of the things I was warning about early on when I said that this was a, a double strategic mouse trap. First of all, a mouse trap with—that was going to burn out our conventional forces, and second of all, a mouse trap in the sense that we have gotten so engaged in fighting the Sunni insurgency that we have allowed the Shia to get more power inside Iraq . . . if you look at what we did after Afghanistan, in the invasion of Afghanistan, we actually brought the countries around Afghanistan to the table—including Iran, by the way. Iran was cooperating at that time, before President Bush made his “axis of evil” speech and they stopped cooperating. The eventual way out of this—and it can be done soon, with the right leadership—is for us to get something similar to what we had with the, the Madrid conference in 1991 after Gulf War I, get these countries to the table, and have them work out a formula. Sooner or later, we’re going to leave. And when we leave, the countries that are tangential to Iraq are going to be players. We should overtly push that now."

Not only did Webb clearly point out the failures in our Iraq policy, but he illustrated a plan to end the occupation - which is more than can be said of the Administration which began this war. More on Webb in this week's Time magazine.

Webb also has a great new campaign ad that should be blueprint for all Democrats running on the Iraq issue.

Sens McCain, Warner, and Graham gave some great speeches, got some good press, and generally made a great case against the Bush approach to torture and the Geneva Conventions. But ultimately, they caved. The president cannot openly defy the Geneva Conventions, but he can go back to circumventing as he sees fit. The Boston Globe notes:

"Because the legislation does not specifically outlaw any of the techniques that have been reported to have been part of the CIA arsenal -- including hypothermia, food and sleep deprivation, forced stress positions, and the simulated drowning technique known as ``water-boarding" -- members of Congress will not truly know what they are approving when they vote next week.

The CIA program could wind up continuing precisely as it has in the past, despite assurances from the White House and Republicans in Congress that the Geneva Conventions will be respected, said Major Thomas Fleener, a defense lawyer in the military. ``It doesn't appear to actually limit what the CIA can do," Fleener, an Army reserve officer, said of the compromise proposal. ``It's Congress just giving the president the right to reestablish the old system."

From the same article: `You're not having any checks and balances here," said Norman J. Ornstein, a resident scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. ``It sure doesn't look to me as if they stood up and did anything other than bare their teeth for some ceremonial barking, before giving the president a whole lot of leeway. I find it really troubling."

For all the trouble McCain may now be in with the Republican base, he probably should have gotten something out of it. For now, he remains a maverick in style only.

We'll close with some choice words from MSNBC's Keith Olbermann, who takes Clinton's fight with FOX as an opportunity to speak out on Bush's inaction before 9/11:

A TEXTBOOK DEFINITION OF COWARDICE

You did not act to prevent 9/11.

We do not know what you have done to prevent another 9/11.

You have failed us—then leveraged that failure, to justify a purposeless war in Iraq which will have, all too soon, claimed more American lives than did 9/11.

You have failed us anew in Afghanistan.

And you have now tried to hide your failures, by blaming your predecessor.

And now you exploit your failure, to rationalize brazen torture which doesn’t work anyway; which only condemns our soldiers to water-boarding; which only humiliates our country further in the world; and which no true American would ever condone, let alone advocate.

And there it is, Mr. Bush:

Are yours the actions of a true American?