Jonah kept Central European time and so we awoke at a decent hour, 2:30am PDT, but really much later in the day in Geneva. We snuggled for a bit and turned on the light to "read book" -- my French is a lot better after ten days of use -- and shortly before the sky lightened, went out to look at the stars and spend time skipping around in the camp bathroom.
At some point I looked at the blog-o-gon (hexagon for Yankee writers rather than French witches) and saw (via Avedon, who I'm now gratefully many hours behind, rather than one hour ahead), that Senator Clinton spoke yesterday on the need for "a responsible plan" [the full thing is a 36pp .pdf located here]. There was another reference to the plan in email from Chellie Pingree's campaign. Jonah was kind enough to fall back asleep after dawn, giving me time to read the whole thing over coffee before doing some accumulated dishes and cleaning up after four wicked sick people (Jonah being, as usual, unclaimed by any passing plague).
So what is wrong with "a responsible plan"? Fundamentally, that it is "responsible", that is, it continues to attempt to contain or control events in Iraq, and contains more references to what has gone wrong in the Republic that had no need to stop and reflect on September 12th, 2001, but went off to war untroubled by doubt about either the nature of the conflict it co-created, or the nature of the administration created by an executive who could barely speak coherently with assistance, and appointed by the faction of the Court formed by William Rehnquist, Anthony Scalia, Clarance Thomas, Sandra Day O'Conner and Anthony Kennedy, than it has to the actual conflict between the United States and Iraq.
The "responsibility" of the "responsible plan" is a domestic political responsibility, one that has no need to state facts as I understand them. From General William Odom, one of the earliest advocates of an immediate withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq, his Six brutal truths about Iraq with my interlinear comments:
Truth No. 2: There was no way to have "done it right" in Iraq so that U.S. war aims could have been achieved.
Virtually every new book published on the war, especially Cobra II, Fiasco, and State of Denial, reinforce the myth -- the illusion -- that we could have won the war; we just did not plan properly and fight the war the right way. The Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and most other major newspapers have consistently filled their opinion pages with arguments and testimonials to support that myth. (Professor Eliot Cohen of Johns Hopkins University offers the most recent conspicuous reinforcement of this myth in the Wall Street Journal, December 7, 2006.)
The fragmentation of the country, civil war, and the rise of outside influence from Iran, Syria, and other countries -- all of these things might have been postponed for a time by different war plans and occupation polices. But failure would have eventually raised its ugly head. Possibly, some of the variables would be a bit different. For example, if the Iraqi military had not been dissolved and if most of the Baathist Party cadres not been disenfranchised, the Sunni factions, instead of the Shiites, probably would have owned the ministry of interior, the police, and several unofficial militias. The Shiites, in that event, would have been the insurgents, abundantly supplied by Iran, indiscriminately killing Sunni civilians, fighting the U.S. military forces, blowing up the power grid, and so on.
A different U.S. occupation plan might have changed the course Iraq has taken to civil war and fragmentation, but it could have not prevented that outcome.
EBW: Odam should have addressed the rationality of U.S. war aims, not the outcome of a particularly poor set of choices. The US was defeated in its initial political goals (an Iraqi government as independent as that of Alaska) by the Iraqi investment in education from Abdul Karim Qassim to Saddam Hussein, which obsoleted operational dependence. The strategic capability that pre-determined the outcome of the conflict was stated quite plainly in another guest contribution to Juan Cole's blog. William Polk's What is to Be Done in Iraq?When I first lived in Baghdad in 1951, the whole country had only 5 mechanical engineers.
Today, the situation is entirely different. Iraq has one of the highest rates of literacy in the Middle East and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis are highly trained professionals. In my example, it now has thousands of mechanical engineers. In sum, the Iraqis are not an "underdeveloped" people. It should be evident that they cannot be fooled with a façade in place of a government.
The US was defeated in its initial military goals (universal monopoly on violence) when it abandoned 400,000 organized, and defeat-accepting Iraqi regular Army career officers and soldiers to unemployment in a non-state with non-law, and carried out the ground offensive of Days 11 through Day 18 of the 18 Day War. Failure to accept terms has caused the Iraqi regular Army career officers and soldiers, and armed civilians to acquire sufficient operational advantage to drive US forces into cantonments and divert US forces from independent force projection to force protection and dependent force projection. See Odam's Sixth Truth At present, U. S. military forces in Iraq merely facilitate arrests and executions by Shiite officials in the police and some army units
Having created the conditions of persistent universal political non-dependence and persistent universal operational capability pervasive in the former Iraq, universal command and control objectives are not possible, and the unsettled issues from the 1980-1988 war, in which the United States assisted Iraq, are not possible to not contest.
Truth No. 3: The theory that "we broke it and therefore we own it," with all the moral baggage it implies, is simply untrue because it is not within U.S. power to "fix it."
The president's cheerleaders in the run-up to the war now use this theory to rationalize our continued presence in Iraq, and in that way avoid admitting that they share the guilt for the crime of breaking Iraq in the first place.
No matter how "responsible", how nuanced, how careful any political director may attempt to steer his or her candidate, control over the freedom of action of the message, the candidate and the campaign has been given away. The media, targeted as corrupt in the "responsible plan", will defend itself, its past as a party to the War, and savage the message as "cut and run".
I suggest the better course is to start with "cut and run", and make the case that at least one primary campaign isn't going to attempt to slide into an office on the Hill or into 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue on a diet of frosted flakes. That the US has been defeated politically and militarily, that SSBNs and main battle tanks simply are as useless as dreadnoughts in this particular theater of operations, meaning that force posture review is much more prudent than continuing to jump into "easily won wars" armed only with ineffective weapons, and the political goal of influence or control is possible if the tool chosen is education and development, rather than the destruction of education and development.
That's the hard part. We lost. We got beat. We're done. Everything from this point on is on par with the waste of lives and countryside by the CSA after Gettysburg. Jeff Davis ordered Robert E. Lee to kill more men to stave off the day when Davis had to admit that supporting the hotheads in Charleston who fired on Fort Sumter was a strategic error that doomed the possibility of a favorable outcome of the compromises from 1820 onward, that he was outthunk by John Brown. Robert E. Lee accepted the order to match waste for waste, from the Wilderness to Richmond, for a total of 18% of all white males aged 13 to 43, nearly half after the 20th Maine shot down windrows of massed men at close range attempting the slopes of Little Round Top.
Every member of the 111th Congress will vote on a Defense Appropriations Bill. Its one of thirteen regular appropriations bills the Congress considers each year. The number will be on the order of a half a trillion dollars, or a total of a trillion dollars each Constitutionally mandated two year cycle. If we "cut and run", the last Defense Appropriations Bill fatally compromised by bipartisan cooperation with the pro-war party, with the "responsible" party, will be the two voted by the 110th Congress, the winners of the miracle of the 2006 election, who then did nothing with a majority, for fear of being something other than "responsible".
The difference between spending time in a European airport and spending time in an American airport is that in the latter CNN is blaring away, in every bar, from every waiting room, from everywhere an outside world could possibly be visible. There's no radio, and no free wireless, so other than the stale magazines and the papers, which mostly feature the same content, it's Wolf Blitzer and Friends. Yet still, the public support for the "responsible" narrative is less than GOP registration in Rhode Island, and the public is now hearing even the "responsible" narrative include "recession" and "depression" and "Great Depression".
I think the Maine primary election can be won, on the customary and familiar battleground of the Democratic primary demographic in Maine, by Maine Dems who are capable of running to govern the governable, beating Maine Dems who are running to win, but leaving the "responsible" beltway, and Iraq, both ungovernable.
I also think the Democratic primary contest can be won, on the familiar battleground Bobby Kennedy came to California to contest in 1968, the primary delegate and PLEO accumulation contest and the Convention floor, by national Dems running to govern, not just win and throw away yet another full measure of Jeff Davis' -- our George W. Bush's -- extravagant futility.
To conclude otherwise is to conclude that in Maine, the majority of the primary demographic in the 1st CD is content with Wolf Blitzer's product, and I know that's simply not true.
Update: MB, who's been FD for a campaign executing in the ME-01, and who's familiarity with the 116th district equals mine (number of doors done), concludes that the majority of the primary demographic in the 1st CD is content with Wolf Blitzer's product, or rather, the NYTimes' product, and that the national meme of "responsibility" is a smart one to pick up.
Two hacks, two opinions.
So, I too filled in the little ovals before traveling to Cairo, Egypt (an American Overseas Monarchy where bloggers are arrested). I too tried not to think about it while I was doing it. I too disliked the fact that Carter was an avowed born-again Christian, and I too wrinkled my nose over Bill Clinton, but I never, ever, in my wildest dreams, thought I'd be voting for someone who supported unrestricted wiretap and eliminating the capital gains tax. Like Avedon.
Ethan's wanted to go to the District for a long time. It is why he came to Maine. Someday he'd get through the muni-maze, and with Charlie Harlow's help in the famously broken election 1999 election he made it on to the Portland city council long enough to make a theatrical gesture of "stepping aside", when Jack Dawson appealed Charlie & co's gift of 35 ballots, which was enough to get him into Ann Rand's Senate seat when she term-limited, always "fighting for Portland", because some day the safe seat in the 1st CD would open up. Someday someone would move on, up, out or die, and start the feast of movable chairs, to the Senate or to the Blaine House, but most of all, from Portland to Capital Hill. Funny, when Bob Masse was designing this poster Ethan was just another guy from away who'd lost his break-in race. Now he's talking dirty to the woman who gave John Baldacci the Blaine House and fell on the Party sword to be the symbolic candidate against Susan Collins in the first election after 9/11 made every Republican a Hero, after spending almost as many years in Augusta as Michael Brennan. 
I used to run into Tom Allen occasionally at RSVP on Forest Avenue. Being polite, I saved my "You screwed up on the Syria Sanctions vote" of the day for whatever intern handled the phones at his Portland constituency office. We've all been waiting for the opportunity to replace Susan Collins with someone with a lot more spunk and moxie. We contributed to and worked for Chellie Pingree's run against Susan Collins in the '00 cycle, and Mark Lawrence's run against Olympia Snowe in the '02 cycle.