Gentlemen– to the Swift-boats!

Dean says:

Re: swiftboating.
Look for attacks on Murtha to begin Real Soon Now (oh, wait, I’m too late. They’ve already started shelling.) It seems to me that Murtha is probably less swiftboatable than Kerry was.
The thing that bugged me about the swiftboating of Kerry is that the only reason we could even talk about it was that KERRY WAS IN VIETNAM.
Kerry went, Bush didn’t.
Anyway, I suspect that they’ll have a tougher time beating on Murtha. Men who retire as colonels tend to know what the fuck they’re doing.

the talking dog says:

Well, that’s just it; Lawrence seems to be alone among Murtha’s critics in chosing to question what it is Murtha is saying, rather than going right for Murtha’s throat (see “McLellan, Scott” and “Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-Sweetheart Dealville, Calif.)” among others).
Frankly, I wouldn’t characterize a decision to set a time-table for withdrawal and turnover of security functions to the new constitutional Iraqi government “surrender,” as some do. I think that kind of language is little better than any other kind of shrillness. The issue of whether we have reached the point of diminishing returns in Iraq is a fair question: our continued presence may well not be stabilizing the place. It certainly sets up a moral hazard for the new Iraqi government, which knows it doesn’t have to work too hard on its own security, knowing we’re carrying the load for it. Some kind of drawdown timetable– less radical than “everyone out in six months”, may well be an appropriate policy… In fact, I have little doubt that there will be a significant drawdown in less than a year’s time anyway, in part for crass political reasons, in part for logistical necessity… I don’t believe our military can sustain this intense a deployment at its current levels (lowest American force total since the 1930’s) indefinitely, and still get anyone to enlist for future service.
But that said… a national debate, finally, without name-calling “traitors!” “surrendenderers!”, etc. is long, long overdue. Bring it on, as they say. I certainly acknowledge that even I find the particular suggestion– all out withdrawal within 6 months– to be… unreasonable. But to say, for example, that current troop levels might be brought down, say, 20 or 30% in a year, and more Iraqi units brought in to replace them, in whatever readiness state they are in… why can’t we debate that?
In Washington, these days, you get attention by taking an extreme position, and if this is the only way to get the ball rolling, then good for Rep. Murtha.
What’s interesting is that there’s an old news aspect to this: Murtha has been saying this sort of thing for some time, only now that there seems to be a shift in media attention, he’s getting coverage for it. But there you go. There seems to be a current “pile-on” the Administration now, which, itself, seems to be a shift from how things were done earlier. I wouldn’t worry too much: the President’s people are really good at working the media; I’m sure they’ll get their own message out.
And unfortunately, my guess is that message will be more shrill character assassination than actual substantive challenge. Which is too bad for everyone, because as I said, an open national debate is overdue.

Bruce Moomaw says:

See yesterday’s and tonight’s developments, Lawrence:
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/007057.php
http://tnr.com/blog/theplank?pid=3690
(Andrew Sullivan says today that the GOP’s charges against Murtha yesterday and today leave him “sick to my stomach”. He provides details.)
By the way, Sullivan also points out that tonight’s House vote on “immediate withdrawal” is deliberate sucker-bait by the GOP, since Murtha isn’t recommending withdrawal for 6 months (and then not anything like complete withdrawal from the area): http://andrewsullivan.com/index.php?dish_inc=archives/2005_11_13_dish_archive.html#113235685046106543 .
As for an argument that withdrawal from Iraq would “win the war”, the answer is obvious: the war we actually have to win is the bigger one against Megaterrorism — and the most important fight in that war, by far, is to prevent nuclear proliferation (which, you’ll recall, was officially what the Iraq War was supposed to be about). And the fact that our military is now stuck in Iraq — thanks to Bush’s crazy confidence that he could win the war quickly and easily, and his consequent willingness to rig up fake evidence of an Iraqi nuclear program — means that we are now utterly helpless to militarily prevent Iran from completing its own very real and very dangerous Bomb program, or to respond in any way to any crisis resulting from the fact that North Korea and Pakistan already have it.

Bruce Moomaw says:

*sigh* Read the evidence, Lawrence. The centrifuge components, the Duelfer report, and the Niger affair have all been looked into at great length, and have been discussed at great length by the sources I mentioned. For what the Duelfer Report really says — as opposed to Bush’s frantic and blatant public lies about what it said — see http://tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=20041025&s=editorial102504 . (By the way, if you’re going to accuse me of “not having an original thought on the subject”, might it not be wise for you yourself to do more than regurgitate official GOP talking points?) The centrifuge components — apart from being isolated — are so old that they’re known to be holdovers from his pre-Kuwait War nuclear program. Not only Wilson, but the State Department and the US Embassy in Niger regarded the Yellowcake story as nonsense, and the CIA was neutral on the subject.
And — to repeat — what the Bush White House mostly did was to cherry-pick the intelligence evidence, embrace the few crumbs which suggested a nuclear program by Saddam (the blatantly fake Yellowcake Memos being an example), and reject the huge amount of more credible evidence which suggested otherwise. (For still another recent note on this subject, see http://slate.com/id/2130605/ .) As for our involvement in Iraq making it impractical to launch needed military actions elsewhere — not only against Iran, but in response to any crises produced by the fact that North Korea and Pakistan already have the Bomb — I’m citing comments by military officials themselves, as quoted in the Post and a number of other newspapers. Certainly there’s nobody in the Bush Administration raising it as a possibility, even sotto voce.
It’s very likely that we would have had to deal with Saddam’s regime at some point in the not-too-distant future — our past actions had destroyed his nuclear program, and limited (and in fact, as we now know, destroyed) his CBW program, but obviously he would have very much liked to resume it IF we laid off the military pressure and the sanctions (which is what all those Democrats you’re quoting were referring to). But for the time being, he was no threat. He did NOT have the Bomb, and he was nowhere near acquiring it. (Nuclear weapons are infinitely more dangerous than CBWs, but attempts to produce them are also virtually impossible to hide from aerial inspections, let alone ground inspectors.) He was not #1 on our list of military priorities; he was #3 or #4, and we’re now paying the price for the Bush Administration’s stupid overconfidence that Iraq would be such easy pickings that making it our first military target would be worthwhile anyway.
As for “changing the diseased political landscape of the Middle East”: that is the direct consequence of the fact that Islam itself is still an unreformed and authoritarian religion. What are we going to do: kick our way into every mosque in the Moslem world and demand that they let us deliver the sermons? (For more on this subject, read that noted pinko George Will.) They’re not going to drop their destructive belief in the current malignant form of Islam because WE tell them to; they’re going to do so only when they find out the hard way, through their own experience, that Moslem theocracy doesn’t work one bit better than secular tyranny, and that self-declared Holy Men are usually not all that Holy. This process took bloody centuries for Christian Europe, and it’s likely to take at least decades for Islam. During that time, our military task is not to try to cram liberalized culture — which they’ve been trained to hate from childhood on religious grounds — down their throats. It’s to try to keep really nasty weapons out of the hands of Moslem tyrannies during the long period before they crumble from within (which they have yet to do even in Iran, despite the fact that the Iranian people have already had the kind of painful lesson I’m talking about, and in consequence are themselve more sympathetic to Western liberalism than the rest of the region).