Now faced with a new global threat, that of terrorism from Islamist extremists, we could sure use some of that type of creative and bold thinking. What would George Marshall and Dean Acheson be doing now? At the top of their list, I suspect, would be forging a new version of NATO. They might call it MATO: the Mideast Antiterrorism Organization, a military, police, intelligence and security mutual-defense alliance between the West and our moderate allies in the Middle East. ~Walter Isaacson

We certainly could use some bold, creative thinking.  So why is it that every single proposal put forward by people who talk about the “different kind of war” we’re fighting and the need for new and creative ideas sounds like a canned propaganda spiel from the 1950s?  If these people are not falling over themselves to make WWII references and make hints about their opponents’ desire to appease Nazislam (this seems to be some Europeans’ answer to our idiotic neologism of Islamofascism), they invoke Cold War precedents…for a war that is supposed to be unlike all previous major conflicts.  This is an understandable impulse, but whatever it is it isn’t “bold and creative thinking.”  If Marshall and Acheson were around today, I would be sorely disappointed in them if the best they could do was to cook up another version of NATO.  First of all, it’s been done already and it was done to counter the particular threat of the USSR.  Therefore, it is probably unsuited to combating jihadis, who are not preparing a massed tank charge through the Lachin Corridor or some other blunt, conventional attack that would be readily checked by anything resembling NATO. 

Mr. Isaacson is talking about a security cooperation and mutual defense pact, which sounds interesting at first, but has at least one glaring problem: it assumes that the “moderate” allied states regard the Quartet of Malevolence (Secretary Rice has listed them: Iran, Syria, Hizbullah and Hamas), or whatever we’re calling it now, as their enemies.  That would mean that Jordan would declare itself hostile to Hamas (which would cause the monarchy endless problems at home), the “Iraqi government,” so called, would declare itself hostile to Iran and Hizbullah (probably bringing about the assassination of whichever prime minister was stupid enough to sign the treaty) and Turkey, let’s say, would declare itself hostile to Syria.  This last opposition might in turn reignite the conflict that nearly led the two to war in 1998.  If the alliance includes Israel, as Mr. Isaacson suggests, I think it is safe to say that few other states would join.  Even the Turks, who have established a military alliance with Israel, are much less enthusiastic for their current arrangement than they once were.  Tightening those connections would likely go over very poorly in modern Turkey.  

Another obvious flaw is the name.  No one will respect something called MATO.  It’s not even a proper acronym.  Mideast Antiterrorism Organisation gives you MAO, which will hardly play well with voters here at home.  “I’m proud to say that I voted to ratify the MAO Treaty,” a Senator will say.  His audience will gasp: “You voted for Mao?  Communist!  Traitor!”  You think I’m kidding, don’t you? 

Most annoying is this line by Ms. Isaacson:

Another challenge would be to ensure that the new alliance does not inflame the sectarian divide in the Islamic world, which could happen if it is seen as a Sunni cabal against the Shi’ites.

It wouldn’t just be seen as a Sunni cabal.  That’s exactly what it would be (plus the odd, unlikely membership of Israel and, of course, the U.S.).  The only reason why all these disparate states would feel the need to join together under a formal treaty arrangement is that they feel threatened to one degree or another by Iran and fear the growth of specifically Shi’ite power within their lands and abroad.  Since he likes Cold War models,  his worry about fomenting sectarianism would be like the founders of NATO worrying that it might “be seen” as a fundamentally anticommunist organisation.  You should certainly hope that it would “be seen” this way, since that is one of the reasons why it came into existence.   It is fine to worry about fomenting sectarianism, but then perhaps it would be better to not commit to a policy of hostility towards the major Shi’ite players in the region.

Tell them the lefties are outraged –a very good sign. ~Hugh Hewitt

Are they really?  There’s no mention of the pledge at The Plank.  Searches for related material at Huffington Post have come up with nothing.  One Kossack took brief note of it, but didn’t seem terribly concerned.  Gleen Greenwald seems to have written the most about it.  He rightly disparages it, but talks about it as an example of the servile habit of yielding to the decisions of the executive and military commanders as if they possessed sole authority.  It is that terrible habit that he is disparaging.  The pledge itself is just an embarrassing confirmation of this servility.  If “the lefties are outraged,” they are doing an unusually good job of keeping it under wraps. 

If I were a lefty blogger, I would have little to say about this spectacle of Republican blogging insanity.  I would just sit back and watch with a smile as my opponents imploded in a paroxysm of irrational, self-destructive rage.  Oh, wait, that’s exactly what one blogger at MyDD is doing:

But it’s hilarious in terms of the worldview of these clowns.  The progressive blogosphere has grown up around rewarding good behavior, by running our own candidates against those who the Beltway denotes the presumed victor.  The conservative blogosphere can only think in terms of punishing bad behavior.  They’re not going to find their own “rightroots” candidates (that concept failed so miserably because they simply found a bunch of people the NRCC and the NRSC picked for them anyway).  They’re going to hurt the party and try to make it bleed (though, as I said, it’ll probably be a pinprick).  

With the exception of these couple of notices on the big progressive blogs, that’s about it.  They’re not outraged.  They’re laughing at you, Hewitt, as am I.  Dave Weigel at Hit & Run is having a few laughs at your expense as well.  There is nothing that the Democrats would love to see more at this point than to watch Republicans start cannibalising each other to defend a war that should never have been started in the first place.  Hewitt has started putting in overtime to help them realise this dream. 

This blogger has given us this startling reminder: if you undermine Norm Coleman, you will get…Al Franken.  He also reminds us that it was Hewitt who called for party solidarity in support of the re-election of Arlen Specter.  Some things are worth fighting for, and others are expendable.  So, to recap: for Hewitt, stopping a non-binding resolution is worth sabotaging GOP chances of retaining their current Senate seats, but ousting a pro-abortion Senator in a primary contest isn’t worth the risk.  Glad to know he has his priorities in order. 

Outside of their own echo chamber, who, besides a few small-time bloggers including myself, has even noticed this little snit fit?  Andrew Sullivan has noticed.  He doesn’t agree with the pledge, but he doesn’t really care, either.  The professional political pundit blog, Hotline’s Blogometer, did take note of the pledge drive.  They mention it in the context of the blog right’s decreasing influence and weakness over the past couple years.  That’s an interesting point.  I have been pointing out the political stupidity of this drive on the assumption that Hewitt and friends actually wield real influence among GOP voters and could seriously damage the electoral prospects of vulnerable Senators up for re-election next year.  (It strikes me as fairly stupid, since it is Hewitt who is the near-mindless defender of the GOP and all its crimes, so he should be the last one to sabotage their electoral chances.)  These Senators are probably more focused on their weaknesses with voters beyond the Republican base, and may prove to be indifferent to the threats and blandishments of Hewitt’s thousands. 

They’ve racked up over 19,000 20,000 people in a couple of days, which is somewhat impressive.  Then again, when you consider the number of people all these hundreds of blogs are reaching on a daily basis, it should actually be surprising that such a relatively small number have pledged to not give money to any of these Senators (especially on such a profound issue as stopping a non-binding resolution!).  A pledge to not give away your own money to Republicans for any reason should be getting hundreds of thousands of signatures at this point.  As Clark Stooksbury has shown, almost anyone can sign the pledge in good conscience, knowing that there is no danger that he would be contributing to the NRSC or any of these candidates.  It’s a pledge a lot of us could very easily keep.

John Tabin at AmSpec‘s blog hits Brownback for his support of Warner’s resolution with its half-a-surge proposal.  Here’s the description from the Lawrence Journal-World:

Instead, Brownback, a Republican senator, said he favored a proposal by U.S. Sen. John Warner, R-Va., that has been described in reports as endorsing a much smaller troop increase in the western Anbar province of Iraq, while also supporting the president’s authority over U.S. forces.  

This is the option that Norm Coleman also seems to like.  Why do Coleman and Brownback like it?  Because it doesn’t send American reinforcements into the middle of a sectarian civil war.  That seems to the major problem that they have with the “surge,” as well they might, but they seem oblivious to the futility and wastefulness of sending more reinforcements to Anbar. 

Sending reinforcements to Anbar means that you support fighting the Sunnis in the west, but that you don’t want to get embroiled in the possibility of having to fight both sides or being forced to take sides in Baghdad.  Not wanting to get embroiled in the civil war in Baghdad is smart, so give them credit for that.  Wanting to increase troop levels in a country whose government is increasingly unreliable and bent on communal revenge, no matter where you put them, strikes me as foolish.  At some point, once you secure other parts of the country and the sectarian government wins its bloody triumph, there will eventually come the absurd situation where their push to punish and marginalise Sunnis will run up against our soldiers’ mandate to provide security in areas where Sunnis live. 

Besides, since the political fate of Iraq hinges on what happens in Baghdad, limiting reinforcements to fighting insurgents in Anbar simply goes back to what the military was doing in 2003 and 2004.  If the fear is one of escalation into even bloodier civil war and a spiraling nightmare of attack and reprisal between rival communities, attacking the roots of the problem in Baghdad would be best if you actually think there is a remote chance of success.  Clearly, supporters of the Warner resolution are not convinced of that.  Indeed, many of the opponents of the Democrats’ resolution are not convinced that this will work. 

The trouble is that the Iraqi government is connected to one of the roots of the problem and has become an essential part of the problem.  That ought to convince these Senators, who are so wary of entering into the middle of a civil war, to support an alternative plan that finds a way for Americans to leave Iraq in short order.  (Yes, that’s right, in short order.)  If they don’t want Americans in the middle of a foreign civil war, they shouldn’t want Americans in Iraq (or at the very least in non-Kurdish Iraq).  That ought to be their position.  Their timid half-measures, aimed at buying themselves some cover back home and creating some distance between themselves and the Democrats to avoid the impression of selling out to the “defeatists,” leave them in the unenviable position of being foreign policy Mugwumps. 

Brownback had achieved some distinction as the only ’08 candidate to oppose the “surge.”  Now he has muddled that message and put himself in the bizarre position of having to say, “I am for escalation in some parts of Iraq, but not in others,” or “We should fight insurgents, but not death squads.”  This will draw hearty chortles from his opponents in the race, and it will tend to damage his credibility with voters as a foreign policy hand.  In other words, Brownback and supporters of the Warner resolution accept that the bloodletting in Baghdad is unavoidable and should be considered the Iraqis’ problem, which is true, but remain convinced that the rest of Iraq remains our problem.

And if things continue on their current path in Iraq, Hagel will look a lot better to the GOP grassroots. ~Rod Dreher

Maybe.  I really want to believe that the GOP grassroots are not the people who listen to what Hugh Hewitt and the like tell them to do, because if they are I see no one with a remotely rational foreign policy platform focused very specifically on the national interest making any headway on that side.  When I think of the GOP grassroots, my parents come to mind: these are the sorts of sane, responsible, temperamentally and philosophically conservative people that I used to associate with the phrase “GOP grassroots.”  These days, I’m not quite sure what to associate with that phrase.  I would like to think that many conservative activists in the GOP, whatever they believed last year or the year before, have started to view the entire Iraq episode with horror, and that the loudest voices who claim to represent “the grassroots” are, as they often are about other things, simply full of it.  However, that was the kind of wishful thinking that caused me to be deeply shocked and stunned five years ago to find that most people calling themselves conservatives embraced every bad hegemonist idea offered to them. 

Whatever else anecdotal evidence may tell us, numerous polls have consistently placed GOP support for the “surge” at or around 60%.  That’s hardly overwhelming for a policy that is supposed to be so obviously well-conceived and necessary for victory, and even that support may evaporate quickly, but it places a formidable barrier in front of a potential candidtate, such as Hagel, who has distinguished himself so far this year by being the only Republican to formally oppose the new plan.

The 11th Commandment for liberals seems to be, “Thou shalt not intervene out of self-interest.” Intervening in civil wars for humanitarian reasons is O.K., but meddling for national-security reasons is not. This would explain why liberals supported interventions in civil wars in Yugoslavia and Somalia but think being in one in Iraq is the height of folly. If only Truman had called the Korean civil war a humanitarian crisis, Ike might not have called the whole thing off. ~Jonah Goldberg

Unless I am misreading this very badly, isn’t Goldberg calling Eisenhower a humanitarian interventionist liberal?  Is the reference to “the Korean civil war” serious?  It could only really be called a Korean civil if the Koreans fighting one another were all members of the same polity, which was exactly what they were not in 1950-53.    

It’s late and I have been sick all week, so perhaps I have simply missed the part where this quote is a) correct and b) clever.  I know this is something of a standard line offered by the “hard Wilsonians” and aimed at the “soft Wilsonians”: our interventionism makes sense because it is based in self-interest, and yours is irrational because it excludes self-interest.  That would be interesting, if only it were true.  The two types have much more in common than either one would like to admit. 

More to the point, the more obvious and depressing reason why liberal interventionists oppose some allegedly “self-interested” wars of intervention is that they only oppose these when a member of the other party is in the White House.  The Clinton administration, and many liberal interventionists at the time along with it, obviously never had any problems with the idea of regime change in the name of national and regional security.  They discovered their opposition to regime change in Iraq (oh, sorry, I mean “disarmament and enforcing U.N. resolutions”) when someone else was running the operation.  Much of the liberal opposition, when it was not completely opportunistic and partisan, focused on Mr. Bush’s mistakes in how he was launching an aggressive war, and did not really claim that he was doing anything inherently wrong or unjustified.  Many of the opponents on the left, or at least on the center-left, did not even object to the goal of regime change as presented by Mr. Bush, but wanted it to go through the proper channels with all of the appropriate institutional stamps of approval.  In this way, the jingoes could make many opponents of the war appear rather silly, and all of this helped to make supporting the Iraq war seem like the viscerally patriotic thing to do–after all, everyone knows that real Americans don’t listen to the U.N. or Europeans, and anybody who supports all of that time-wasting procedure must not be very patriotic.  The “debate” over Iraq was unfortunately carried on primarily between liberals of the “yes, Hussein should be disarmed and/or overthrown, but…” view and the supporters of Mr. Bush’s invasion.  (The non-liberal antiwar dissenters were constantly making their arguments, and were routinely making better ones than many on the left, but these dissenters were unfortunately never really in the main debate.)  I think of that debate as being like a scene where two people driving in a car are both committed to sending their car into oncoming traffic, but one of them wants to make sure that his insurance and registration are up to date before they do this while the other is in a hurry to crash the car.  Both are convinced that it is imperative that they crash the car, but the person who wants to take the slightly slower, more methodical approach to disaster is the liberal concerned with the proper procedure.     

It is true that liberal interventionists do not limit their calls for intervention to what Goldberg would regard as self-interested interventions.  This is why liberal interventionism is in some ways even more dangerous to this country, because there are no obvious limits to where American soldiers will be sent.  If Somalia, why not Congo?  If Congo, why not Zimbabwe?  To which the liberal interventionist will simply say, “One thing at a time.  We’ll get to Zimbabwe, don’t you worry.”  However, in virtually every case I can recall they hitch their do-gooding to some exaggerated definition of national interests and values…just as the current administration does, but arrange them in a slightly different order.  The main difference between “left” interventionists and “right” interventionists is the order in which they list their pretexts (sorry, I mean serious reasons) for invading, er, helping another country: the left will usually talk up the humanitarian side first and then proceed to their poor strategic arguments (e.g., “we cannot allow the Balkans to be destabilised, etc.”), while the right will focus on an overblown sense of the strategic importance of a crisis (“existential threat!”) and then mention that there is also a humanitarian and/or moral dimension (“he gassed his own people!”; “new Hitler!”).  The content of the justification ends up being more or less the same.  

Some of the foremost advocates for action in Darfur on the left are at The New Republic, which has distinguished itself for being for any and all military interventions everywhere for any reason for at least the last fifteen years.  (Their newfound regret for initially supporting the Iraq war is four years late and embarrassingly insufficient.)  They are so frequently in favour of intervention that they would probably have to seriously consider sending an expeditionary force if there was a cat stuck up in a tree somewhere in Tegucigulpas.  “Honduran cat-owners’ anxieties could spark political and social unrest!  Central America might be consumed in endless violence!  We must act now,” the editorial would blare.   

In their way, however, they are convinced that calling for intervention in Darfur is imperative for the national interest, just as these sorts of liberals argued, equally incredibly, that meddling further in Yugoslavia advanced the security of our allies in Europe by “stabilising” the Balkans.  Their legacy is the empowerment of jihad in Europe, the establishment of rampantly corrupt, criminal regimes and a brutal Albanian nationalist statelet in Kosovo whose proposed independence from Serbia could well trigger another round of bloodshed.  The Italians are especially grateful that we have helped shore up such egregious sources of criminality, drugs and human trafficking as Montenegro, Albania and Albanian-dominated Kosovo.  So they have a long record of being impressively wrong about the effects of intervention and our strategic interest in intervening, but they will continue to make appeals to national self-interest and they are, so it seems to me, in deadly earnest.  

This does require them to broaden the definition of self-interest a little.  This redefinition usually involves a lot of hand-waving about the integrity of the international legal system and the genocide convention and American leadership.  Neocons will be familiar, since they used much of this hand-waving when it came to Iraq, and some interventionists on the right (such as Romney) are beginning to use it with respect to Iran.  The difference between the different kinds of interventionists tends not to be on the level of principle (i.e., never intervene in self-interest vs. only intervene in self-interest), since virtually all interventionists are open to a mix of both self-interested and humanitarian meddling.  The difference is that of judgement about the relative urgency and priority of a given intervention.  We’ll get around to Iraq, seems to have been the thinking back in ’02-’03 with many in this crowd, but we have more pressing things to do right now.  No wonder they lost the debate!  TNR has the dubious distinction of buying into warnings of urgent crisis whenever they are made, so that every crisis under an administration of either party leads to their calls for action.  If someone says there’s a genocide in Kosovo, they believe it, no more questions asked, and demand a start to the bombing.  If someone says there are dangerous weapons programs in Iraq, they believe just like that, and support an invasion.  And so on.  The problem isn’t that liberal interventionists never support wars fought in what they might call the national security interest, but that they support any number of wars according to an extremely distorted and false definition of the national interest.  Then again, that’s pretty much what neoconservatives also do.  Their target lists just happen to be slightly different.

Paul Beston at AmSpec‘s blog quotes James Bowman on accusing opponents of being “delusional”:

Generally speaking, the rhetorical resort to the popularized language of psychotherapy should be treated as prima facie evidence of a lack of intellectual seriousness, and that applies in spades to any allegation of psychosis against one’s political enemies.

I think that’s basically right.  So it was funny to see the start of Hewitt’s latest post where he babbles on about his pledge effort and the non-binding resolution against the “surge”: 

The Senate is delusional if it thinks the American people want it to run the war.

Now I don’t suppose we really needed more evidence to question Hewitt’s “intellectual seriousness,” but the time stamps of the two posts made the connection irresistible.

Update: Oh, yes, I almost forgot: in the strange world of Hewitt, even John McCain, who might be called the godfather of the “surge” because of his adamant support for increased numbers of soldiers in Iraq, is no longer pure enough.  He has suggested a resolution that involves benchmarks to measure what success (if any) the “surge” is having.  This is called Congressional oversight.  It makes Hewitt very unhappy.  It supposedly “undercuts” the soldiers now going to Iraq because it, er, wants some standard by which to measure their success.  Clearly, that’s a heinous betrayal by that no-good appeaser (or is it neoappeaser?) McCain.  Here is Hewitt’s take on oversight by the Senate:

To demand more “oversight” two days after confirming the general committed to the new strategy is quite simply political cowardice of the highest order.  They had their “oversight,” and they said yes.  How can any of them send the man off to Iraq and then undercut him before the plane takes off. [sic]  He was clear and forceful.  And they voted yes.

How could we all be so stupid?  Obviously, oversight always stops the minute the vote is finished and…what’s that, you say?  The Senate has a responsibility to engage in oversight on an ongoing basis?  Why would they need to do something like that?  It’s not as if they’re equipped to engage in this so-called “oversight” with a whole apparatus of committees and…oh, wait.  No, don’t try to confuse me with any of these details–political cowards, every last one of them! 

Actually, that last part is true, but not because they are talking about these resolutions, as Hewitt holds.  Truly serious people on both sides would insist on having up-or-down votes on the meat of the policy that would either fully endorse the White House’s plan or scuttle it.  Maybe someone like a Chuck Hagel would have the courage of his stated convictions and actively work to stop the “surge” all together.  More likely, when the vote really counts, he might just sheepishly line up with his party again, as he did with the authorisation resolution over four years ago.  We are unfortunately left with a parade of clowns who would like nothing so much as to be able to avoid the entire subject.  Because they cannot, they settle for meaningless, non-binding resolutions out of fear of being attacked as “defeatist” and worse if they try to exercise their constitutional powers.  That being said, the clowns are within their rights and have managed to come off looking a good deal more credible than Hewitt and his associates.

The pledge rests on the premise that Republicans who are supporting the anti-surge resolution are doing so as a craven political play. ~Dean Barnett

Yes, they are engaged in the “craven political play” of representing their constituents, more than half of whom nationwide oppose the “surge.”  For shame!  Many of these Senators are in increasingly unfavourable political environments in the coming election cycle and must demonstrate some responsiveness to the large non-Republican, non-fanatical constituencies back home.  In fact, some might even suppose that this is the very definition of their duty as elected members of the Senate: to represent their entire state, and not the narrower interests of a single district or especially vocal constituency.  Thankfully, we have Hewitt and Barnett to remind us that this is treacherous and vile behaviour–what would we do without them?  

In the good old days, before the Progressives meddled with the system, Senators had only the most indirect accountability to the mass of citizens–they represented one of the aristocratic elements of our original government and were representatives of the sovereign states through their legislatures.  As an important part of the federal system, they ensured that all states possessed an equal voice in at least one chamber.  Now, in addition to sabotaging GOP electoral chances in ’08, Hewitt and friends are effectively trying to deny the citizens of the states these Senators represent their due representation through a kind of political blackmail.  Oregonians, Tennesseans, Ohioans, Kansans–fight back and let your Senators know what you think they should do in response to the proposed “surge”!    

Sen. Lugar said a curious thing before he voted against the resolution in committee.  He said:

This vote will force nothing on the President, but it will confirm to our friends and allies that we are divided and in disarray.

Remember that this comes from someone who doubts the efficacy of the “surge” proposal.  Said Lugar: “I am not confident that President Bush’s plan will succeed.”  Now when Sen. Lugar says this, he is apparently not sowing discord and division and announcing to the world that America is split over the war, but had he voted for a non-binding, symbolic resolution that, as he acknowledged, did nothing to stop the “surge” (in which he has no confidence) he would have been “confirming” our division and disarray.  When he announces to the national press, whose stories are transmitted around the world electronically, that he is not confident in the success of the plan, he is not “encouraging” the enemy.  Had he voted for a symbolic, non-binding resolution that changed nothing about the actual proposed plan, according to Hewitt he would be aiding the enemy in Iraq.  Is everyone clear on that?

Only a senator with levels of vanity off the charts would be indifferent to the message being sent, and the new media support for that message. ~Hugh Hewitt

Right.  10,000 Web denizens and a few hundred bloggers simply must influence the half-dozen or so anti-“surge” GOP Senators.  The only way that this doesn’t happen is if the Senators in question are excessively vain and self-important, unlike, say, the bloggers who started this whole charade.  

In addition to the Senators’ vanity, there is also their supposed willingness to give “encouragment” to the enemy, or, to put it as Hewitt would, their willingness to betray our soldiers and commit a kind of treason.  How do we know that this non-binding resolution would “encourage” the enemy?  Well, it’s obvious, isn’t it?  Gen. Petraeus said so, and therefore no more thought needs to go into it.  Curious, isn’t it, how these are the same kinds of people whomoanedandwhinedabout a veritablecoup d’etat and a conspiracy against the government last year when six retired generals made loud noises about Rumsfeld’s failures on the job and called for his resignation?  These war supporters had no interest in the expertise and experience of those retired generals–plus, the generals were meddling in the business of the civilian government, and this represented a threat to our entire way of life!  That was the sort of hysterical stupidity that suited prominent war supporters last year.  This year, the mantra is, “Follow the General.”  Anything to back up the administration line on Iraq will do. 

Where the retired generals were supposedly threatening civilian control of the government by calling for Rumsfeld’s resignation, Hewitt et al. are essentially insisting that the Senate should govern its own proceedings according to one answer from Gen. Petraeus–they are demanding that the civilians in Congress take their direction from an active-duty field commander.  To say that this injures republican government would be a gross understatement. 

It is reasonable to say that the Senate should take Gen. Petraeus’ statements into consideration when deliberating on this or any other war-related measure.  If the “surge” made sense to more people in the country and in Congress, and if the proposal seemed to have a reasonable chance of success and a clear, realisable goal, there would probably be no question about passing resolutions to oppose it.  It is because the proposal is such a widely reviled one and one considered unlikely to succeed because of key problems (i.e., the Iraqi government is Sadr’s puppet and pursues narrow sectarian goals in the prosecution of a civil war) that we have reached this impasse.  Now Hewitt & Co. insist that the Senate suspend its duties of oversight and policymaking (not that they were preparing to do anything terribly bold or meaningful anyway) based on one sentence from a general. 

It is absurd to say that the Senators must defer to his judgement in all things because he is the theater commander and because he believes, predictably, that any resolution against the “surge” would send the “wrong” message.  No offense to Gen. Petraeus, who has obviously been one of the smartest and most successful commanders in the entire war, but it is inevitable that he, as the new commander charged with executing this plan, would seek to discourage any opposition to that plan.  His statements should be taken into account, but they cannot be treated as if they were the final word on the matter. 

The main trouble in all this is that the “wrong” message the Senate is trying to send (i.e., Americans are sick of this war and want to bring it to a close as soon as possible) happens to be the truth.  For almost four years, Mr. Bush has used this “let the commanders on the ground decide” dodge as a way of avoiding responsibility for the obvious inadequacies of planning and preparation on the part of his administration.  Hewitt and friends would have the Senate adopt the same pathetic attitude of handing off all real decisionmaking to the executive and the military commanders. They would be fools to heed him and his little band of protesters.

Hugh Hewitt’s mad, Republican-destroying crusade to stop a non-binding resolution against the “surge” (shrieks of horror erupt) by issuing a threat of a revolt of the base continues.  He has become quite like Kos, but seems to lack all sense of the political implications of what he is proposing (Kos only lacks some sense).  He seems to have gotten to Norm “Hollow Man” Coleman of Minnesota, who, after all, has never exactly been known for his political inflexibility, and he is targeting Alexander, Warner, Collins, Smith, Voinovich and Brownback for punishment.  Of these, Voinovich is not up for re-election and, of course, Brownback is aiming for the White House in ’08, but all of the others are up for re-election and are trying to insulate themselves from the profound unpopularity of this war and Mr. Bush’s “surge” proposal.  As noted at The Plank, even the well-established incumbent Warner is nervous enough about his re-election chances next year (in Virginia) that he was willing to join with Coleman in trying to break a filibuster of the Democratic version of the minimum wage bill.  Doom for the GOP in 2008 beckons anyway, and Hewitt wants to make it worse than it was already going to be. 

Personally, I don’t care that much whether these Senators up for re-election win or not.  For their hitherto unbending support of the Iraq war, every one of them deserves to be voted out.  I also have plenty of problems with Brownback’s bid for the Presidency, so I wouldn’t exactly be heartbroken if his campaign fails because Hewitt and others stir up people against him.  However, one would think the ueber-loyalist Hewitt would take into consideration the political suicide he is demanding from these men and the marginalisation of Republicans in the Senate that his little revolt could help bring about. 

Considering how desperately and pathetically people like Hewitt pleaded and begged to help keep the GOP in the majority last year, it is strange that he would want to undertake a grassroots effort to destroy the party’s position in many of the nation’s closely contested or even Democratic-leaning states.  The GOP is not yet a regional party, but Hewitt wants to bring it closer to that sorry state.  Any hope of making progress towards regaining a majority in the Senate, or even of simply holding the seats they have, probably disappears if Hewitt successfully foments a revolt against anti-“surge” Senators.  Either he forces them to toe an unpopular line, in which case many will probably lose because of alienated independent and Democratic voters, or they will go against Hewitt’s followers in the GOP base, probably suffer from reduced turnout and lose anyway.    

This is not a protest in the name of victory.  It is a tantrum thrown by an inveterate Bush-worshiper and his allies to intimidate the people’s elected representatives from voting for a non-binding resolution that expresses opposition to a policy that many of the Senators opposed to the language of the current resolution also reject.  Sen. Lugar, as reliable an establishment Republican foreign policy man as there is and thus far a largely unquestioning supporter of the war, doesn’t support the “surge.”  By Hewitt’s lunatic definition he therefore doesn’t support American victory (an end-state Hewitt could not realistically define if his life depended on it).  Unlike Lugar’s slightly more forthcoming colleagues, however, he refuses to put that opposition into any concrete form.  In other words, Lugar wants to stop Mr. Bush from embarking on the course he has announced, and should therefore also be a subversive in Hewitt’s eyes, but because he refrains from voting for a meaningless, symbolic, non-binding resolution he is spared Hewitt’s ire. 

It must be hard to be one of the last nine patriotic Americans still Stateside–it’s clearly putting a strain on Hewitt’s delicate constitution.

Violent, stupid men who would be the dregs of society under normal conditions rise amid the trauma, chaos and stress and become revered leaders. ~David Brooks