Defining Obama's Iraq War policy through pundit imagination

Those zany conservatives come up with some creative arguments (kinda-sorta)

The San Francisco Chronicle's Debra Saunders is using a conservative meme that seems to be popular, by which they seem to think they're tweaking frustrated liberals (Obama's picks - so far, so good 12/03/08). Like a lot of conservative favorites, trying to follow these arguments came give you whiplash because of their double-reverse path. In this case, opposing Obama's Iraq policy comes out as supporting his Iraq policy while setting up to criticize him for implementing his Iraq policy:

Obama's decision to keep on Defense Secretary Robert Gates has angered the anti-war left, as it signals that Obama is prepared to drop his pledge to withdraw U.S. combat troops from Iraq within 16 months of taking office. I'm thrilled. Gates would not agree to stay if he expected a precipitous troop withdrawal.

Thus, the big question about Obama has been answered: While Democrats - even Clinton and Biden, who both voted to authorize the war - may play the blame game with Bush about Iraq, Obama understands that if Iraq collapses after U.S. troops are withdrawn, then it won't matter who started the war. America loses, and he loses.

Now the question is: When did Obama know he would not honor his hard timeline pledge - during the primary, as I suspect, or over time, as the Bush-Gates troop surge brought about increased security in Iraq? Either way, Obama is where he should be on the issue.

I guess Saunders just missed this short Reuters report from two days before:

President-elect Barack Obama said on Monday he believed U.S. combat troops should leave Iraq within 16 months of his taking office but he would listen to advice from military commanders.

"I believe that 16 months is the right timeframe but, as I've said consistently, I will listen to the recommendations of my commanders," Obama said after unveiling his nominees for top national security posts.

Obama said a new security pact between Iraq and the United States already put the United States on a "glide path" to pulling out of Iraq. He also noted that a "residual" U.S. force may need to remain in Iraq longer than combat troops. (Andrew Gray, U.S. troops may be out of Iraq in 16 months: Obama 12/03/08)

Just making stuff up makes things a lot easier. Why is Saunders so confident that Obama has changed the plan that he explicitly reaffirmed on Monday? Confident to the point of taking it as a given fact: "Now the question is: When did Obama know he would not honor his hard timeline pledge".

This is a good example of where a superficially cynical "left" position can wind up just echoing rightwingers. Active war opponents have been saying all along that whoever is elected President, the antiwar movement needed to bring pressure on him/her to get a full and timely withdrawal. That's still true.

It's also still true that Obama is reaffirming his 16-month timeline. Tom Hayden, who has quite a bit of experience opposing wars, writes about the promise and the risk of Obama's withdrawal plan in Iraq Pact Challenges Antiwar Movement The Nation 12/01/08. His is a critical perspective, focusing on the promising and problematic aspects of Obama's Iraq War policy as we know it now:

There will be continued attention to implementing the [withdrawal] pact [with Iraq] and pressuring for human rights standards in Baghdad, but the steady return of thousands of American soldiers will send a powerful message to most Americans that the Iraq War is ending, perhaps not soon enough, but ending nonetheless.

But it is possible to imagine broad and intense public support for a movement questioning Obama's multiple wars--Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, not to mention Iran and the Israel-Palestine conflict--as unwinnable quagmires that alienate countless Muslims and cost over $200 billion annually that taxpayers cannot afford amidst a collapsing economy.

But he's looking at withdrawals that he expects Obama to implement. During the campaign, Obama talked about removing all combat troops in 16 months. But leaving residual forces for training and emergency duty against "Al Qa'ida". Leaving even a residual force there is highly problematic.

And Hayden makes an interesting claim:

The agreement forces the Bush administration and Pentagon to back down from long-held positions, especially over deadlines. The barracking of American troops in remote areas by June 2009 will be a retreat from offensive operations. More important, the language of the agreement in Arabic stipulates that all American forces, not merely combat units, will be withdrawn by 2001.

If these terms are maintained, President-elect Obama will be acquiescing in a doubling of his sixteen-month deadline for withdrawal of combat troops, but also for the first time accepting a date for removal of the so-called residual American forces--since "all" means all counter-terrorism units, advisers, trainers and back-up forces that could total 50,000 or more.

Because shrugging off treaty obligations is a custom of state, only informed publics and alert parliamentarians in Washington and Baghdad can ensure that these agreements are implemented. [my emphasis]

How does this match up with Saunder's claim, "I'm thrilled. Gates would not agree to stay if he expected a precipitous troop withdrawal"?

Since "precipitous" can be used as a weasel-word, it's not really clear how much it differs. But if Hayden's information is correct, the Cheney-Bush administration Gates now serves has agreed to a full withdrawal of American forces by the end of 2011. And Obama says he intends to implement the 16-month timeline.

I worry myself that Gates may try to oppose Obama's withdrawal plans in some way. But that's a worry, not an assumption. I don't see that Saunders has any actual reason to conclude that keeping Gates means that Obama has abandoned his election promise. If anything, combined with the wording of the status-of-forces agreement, there's reason to think he is likely to try to stick to the timeline and get all the troops out, not just the "combat troops".

There continue to be some thoughtful criticisms of Obama's choice of Bob Gates to continue for now at Defense, such as Robert Perry's Obama's Fateful Choice of Gates ConsortiumNews.com 12/01/08. Perry is one who thinks Gates was a poor choice, as I do, too. But in that column he carefully explains his reasons based on Gates' record. And he notes, "During the presidential campaign, Gates continued to carry water for President Bush and his favored successor John McCain by arguing against Obama’s plan for a withdrawal timetable from Iraq."

That's a factual statement. But when Saunders says, "Gates would not agree to stay if he expected a precipitous troop withdrawal", it's not clear that represents anything but her own arbitrary assumption.

The real point of her position is this: "Obama understands that if Iraq collapses after U.S. troops are withdrawn, then it won't matter who started the war. America loses, and he loses."

She's positioning herself to make a stab-in-the-back argument that the Republicans will make no matter how smoothly things go in Iraq during withdrawal and after - and it's likely that there will be a lot of internal violence. In this column, she's trying to work around the fact that the Defense Secretary who implemented The Surge is staying on and accepting responsibility for implementing the withdrawal, and still keep the option open for the stab-in-the-back accusation later.

Robert Scheer, who was editor of Ramparts back in the day and was doing some pioneering investigative journalism back in the 1960s, still counts as a "left" critic of US foreign and domestic policies. But in Will Obama Stay the Course? Truthdig.com 12/02/08, he sounds cautiously optimistic about Obama's Cabinet. "If there is a grand arc to Obama’s appointments strategy, it seems aimed at providing the appearance of continuity on the part of a leader who still promises to be very different."

Scheer, who seems to be forever in search of one of those fabled "moderate" Republicans - creatures who seem to be rare as unicorns these days - is even willing to find positive things about Robert Gates as Defense Secretary. And, for Scheer, the following means he downright giddy over Hillary Clinton's appointment as Secretary of State:

Finally, the appointment of Hillary Rodham Clinton seems a good one. To paraphrase Obama’s remarks during the primary debates, Hillary is peaceable enough, and also has the smarts to make a fine secretary of state. Her more hawkish rhetorical side will be muted by the position’s obligation to emphasize diplomacy. My prediction is that she will leave her mark by exploiting her pro-Israel creds to complete President Bill Clinton’s once-promising Mideast peace initiatives to finally provide the Palestinians, and Israelis, with viable states.

So just who is it on the "left" that Saunders thinks is so despairing of the prospects under Obama? Maybe she picked up some Lyndon Larouche pamphlet and thought it represented the "left".

Tags: barack obama, debra saunders, iraq war

Press whackodoodlery

I like to watch the PBS Newshour because it's supposed to be the leader in "quality" TV News. Lately, every week is a downer reminder that "quality" doesn't mean that the program always discards press scripts and does solid journalism.

And every week increases my embarrassment that I once in my early days of blogging did a post praising Mark Shields. Well, he was against the Iraq War. So that alone did make him stand head-and-shoulders about the other Big Pundits. Not that such a comparison is much of a complement in itself. But I give him credit for having more sense than most pundits about the invasion of Iraq.

On Friday, the David Brooks/Mark Shields commentary was introduced by Jim Lehrer. The three "quality TV" journalists opened by a discussion of what our press corps considers probably the most burning need in American politics, which is the Holy Grail of High Broderism, "bipartisanship". If I had heard Shields say one more time how badly we needed legislators who would "reach across the aisle", my head would have exploded.

Meanwhile, Maureen Dowd is keeping her laser-like focus on the most pressing public issues of the day in Keeping It Riell New York Times 08/10/08. MoDo is so obsessed about politicians having sex but is so weirded out about sex and about gender roles that it's become emotionally disturbing to read her. Usually I don't worry that creepiness in a text will wear off on me somehow. But with MoDO, I do. And, yes, MoDo is still taken to be High Punditry!

And we wonder why a blithering old warmonger like McCain is polling as close as he is to Obama in a year when Republicans are about as popular as malaria.

I like to think I'm reasonably alert to the general dysfunctionality of the press. But I still manage to be surprised at some things. Like the press obsession with Edwards' admitted love affair, which is scarcely confined to MoDo, although I haven't seen anything else that approaches the level of weirdness in her Sunday column.

The Los Angeles Times ran a piece by a writer who was loosely acquainted with the Other Woman, Edwards' affair? My fault by Sarah Miller 08/10/08. She frames it as cynical-New-Yorker-meets-California-ditz story. When she encountered Rielle at a cocktail party, Miller became "extremely tense" because Rielle ... touched her on the wrist with two fingers. You know, lady, there are medicines you can take that will help with such anxieties.

Conservative columnist Debra Saunders weighs in along the same lines as MoDo in The not-so-pretty boy San Francisco Chronicle 08/12/08. Though Saunders lacks the bizarre creativity that comes with whatever afflicts MoDo when it comes to Democratic politicians and anything remotely to do with sex. Saunders does manage to mention the disparity in the press treatment of Edwards' liaison with Rielly and John McCain's conduct during his first marriage that didn't entirely conform to the official Southern Baptist standard. Saunders says it shows press bias ... against McCain!

The liberal Web bastion of the Huffington Post has been running over with columns from people rushing to condemn Edwards with various degrees of pseudo-sophistication. Even Elizabeth Edwards comes in for blame.

I mean, just for the sake of ritual, let me wonder aloud here if these great pundits bother with the most minimal fact-checking when they write their garbled ruminations like those of MoDo and Saunders. Saunders, for instance, tells us in her second paragraph that Edwards was "boffing an overpaid campaign aide".

But what facts do we actually know about this event of such overriding importance to our "press corps"? We know that the National Inquirer got a photo of Edwards going to visit Rielle at a hotel this year. We know that Edwards has admitted to an affair of some sort with Rielle in 2006. We know that Rielle is unmarried and has a child under a year old, which both she and Edwards say is not his.

I'm not sure that a contract film-maker counts as a "campaign aide". Nor do I have any clue if she was "overpaid". Did Saunders bother to check on either?

More to the point, so far as I'm aware, what's in the public record doesn't tell us squat about the interaction between the two that Edwards confessed to being an affair. Saunders has no problem assuming it involved "boffing". But does anyone other than the two of them actually know that? Maybe they held hands and talked about energy fields. Maybe they smooched a lot now and then. Maybe she touched him on the wrist with two fingers.

And with all the pop psychology going on about the effect of this on Elizabeth, what do we really know about that other than her very general and conventional standing-by-her-man statement on it?

Here's an alternative scenario. Edwards and Rielle had an affair that consisted mostly of conspiratorial visits and minimal physical contact. Elizabeth knew about the fling at the time and didn't care. Maybe even encouraged it.

Not the most likely scenario, perhaps. And certainly not as entertaining as the one everybody is fantasizing about in their writing. But is there anything in the public record that wouldn't also fit that scenario? And there are other variations that come to mind.

But when it comes to sex and Democratic politicians, worrying about what actually happened when you report on it is like, so 1980s. Remember Gennifer Flowers, who made all sorts of wild claims about an extended affair with Bill Clinton and even claims about him being involved in murdering people? Under sworn testimony in the Ken Starr witch-hunt, Clinton admitting to having had sexual contact with Flowers on one occasion under the broad definition of such contact used by Starr's inquisitors, though Clinton specified that the contact was not intercourse. (That weird definition of Starr's also excluded oral sex. And maybe Debra Saunders definition of "boffing" is more expansive that what I assume.)

But after that, Establishment journalists considered Flowers' claims about her affair with Clinton to be credible, even though Clinton's very limited admission of one encounter that did not involve "boffing", was the only remotely credible collaboration for any her claims about the affair. And, as the Daily Howler has repeatedly noted with disgust, the "liberal" Chris Matthews afterwards invited her onto his show where she made even wilder accusations about the alleged murders Bill Clinton had committed.

But the business trend that has made news organizations, including newspapers, parts of entertainment conglomerates that are expected to not just make a profit but make a level of profit that shareholders of entertainment companies expect, have made politicians into celebrities. And so they are encouraged to speculate freely about their sex lives with less regard to facts than tabloids!

(To see how a news organization being part of a diverse corporate "family" can work to the detriment of good reporting, check out Sam Zell's Deal from Hell by Emily Thornton, Michael Arndt and Ronald Grover Business Week 07/30/08.

While I'm on a rant about this, how did the conventional wisdom arise that John Edwards' political career is finished? How does this disqualify him for a Cabinet post, for instance? In less enlightened times, there was a saying: "Nothing is fatal in politics except being found in bed with a live man or a dead woman." I don't know if anyone has come up with a contemporary wording. It might be kind of difficult. We'd have to include a Rick Santorum clause these days, I suppose.

But this is a big reason why we have the absurdity over the last week of a public discussion where Serious Foreign Policy experts talk about the need to defend our long-standing, passionate American commitment to keep Abkhazia and South Ossetia as parts of Georgia without being laughed off the set. A week ago, most Americans (including me) couldn't have said where either of those places were, if we'd heard of them at all, without a quick consultation with Google. But our news organizations are far more focused on the latest sex gossip about famous politicians than they are about covering events that could well involve us in more wars and even more likely add to the justifications for insane levels of military spending.

No wonder Paris Hilton is a player in Presidential politics. And no wonder a blustering, mean old warmonger like John McCain has a serious chance to become President and invade Iran. The press obsession with their own sex fantasies about Democratic politicians has real-world consequences.

Tags: david brooks, debra saunders, establishment press, mainstream media, mainstream press, mark shields, maureen dowd