Measure of a Nation

The measure of a nation, as much as the measure of a man, is the ability to hold true under pressure to universal truths of decency and humility.

Executive authority strains most vigorously against its constitutional restraints in times of war and in matters of human liberty. Both Washington and Lincoln faced precisely these dilemmas, and resolved them without compromising America's dignity or reputation.

Read more of this, here. (The Nation, via How Appealing)

Weekend Reading for Patriots Only

There is this from Tim Grieve and the War Room at Salon

The House of Representatives has just put itself on record as opposing the president's escalation of the war in Iraq. The final vote on a nonbinding resolution was 246-182, with more than a dozen Republicans breaking ranks with their party to vote in favor it.

The text of the House resolution is simple and clear:

"Resolved by the House of Representatives ... that (1) Congress and the American people will continue to support and protect the members of the United States Armed Forces who are serving or who have served bravely and honorably in Iraq; and (2) Congress disapproves of the decision of President George W. Bush announced on January 10, 2007, to deploy more than 20,000 additional United States combat troops to Iraq."

The Senate will vote on whether to vote on the resolution Saturday.

Here is a good beginning to understanding Iraq, where it came from and where it is going: Source

William Pfaff--New York Review of Books

President George Bush has decided to disregard both the political message of the 2006 midterm election and congressional pressure for an early end to America's Iraq involvement, as well as the Baker-Hamilton proposals. These decisions are meeting much opposition, which is likely to fail. Bush's opponents have been unable to propose a course of withdrawal that is not a politically prohibited concession of American defeat and that does not risk still more destructive consequences in Iraq and probably the region—even though the result of delayed withdrawal could be worse in all respects. Most of Bush's critics in Congress, in the press and television, and in the foreign policy community are hostage to past support of his policy and to their failure to question the political and ideological assumptions upon which it was built.

This followed from a larger intellectual failure. For years there has been little or no critical reexamination of how and why the limited, specific, and ultimately successful postwar American policy of "patient but firm and vigilant containment of Soviet expansionist tendencies...and pressure against the free institutions of the Western world" (as George Kennan formulated it at the time) has over six decades turned into a vast project for "ending tyranny in the world."^[1]

The Bush administration defends its pursuit of this unlikely goal by means of internationally illegal, unilateralist, and preemptive attacks on other countries, accompanied by arbitrary imprisonments and the practice of torture, and by making the claim that the United States possesses an exceptional status among nations that confers upon it special international responsibilities, and exceptional privileges in meeting those responsibilities.

The rest of this article is available at the hot link.

Also check out this one: (source)

talking tough may look like a good way of demonstrating U.S. resolve, but when tough talk makes our opponent richer and stronger we may accomplish more by saying less. James Surowiekcki--New Yorker

"Our" War (begone)

Update on War Resolutions: Next stop, state capitals. (courtesy, NYT).

The Line in the United States House of Representatives

Not one more casualty in Iraq. Not one more body brought home in a box. Not one more. Not one. Nada. Bring them home tomorrow. That is the best view I've heard yet, and comes from Newsweek's Anna Q. She is right on the button.

Representative Woolsey also has the right idea on the floor of the House. The House resolution will pass, and is but a start. The finish is when the convoys bring the troops home, enemy in Iraq are shooting at the stars and not, not, not at under-armored Americans, and any threat that moves is picked off utilizing superior surveillance and intel by truly international cooperating forces seeking peace and order in the Middle East.

It all begins with one word, one action; the results will come.

Democrats Divided Beats Republicans Toe the Line

Begin today's review from the Crow's Nest with General Odom here (Washington Post OpEd. Odom is a West Point graduate with a PhD from Columbia, teaches at Yale and is a fellow of the Hudson Institute).
This is no dud, dude: "Victory is Not an Option" and it starts like this,

The new National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq starkly delineates the gulf that separates President Bush's illusions from the realities of the war. Victory, as the president sees it, requires a stable liberal democracy in Iraq that is pro-American. The NIE describes a war that has no chance of producing that result. In this critical respect, the NIE, the consensus judgment of all the U.S. intelligence agencies, is a declaration of defeat.

Its gloomy implications -- hedged, as intelligence agencies prefer, in rubbery language that cannot soften its impact -- put the intelligence community and the American public on the same page. The public awakened to the reality of failure in Iraq last year and turned the Republicans out of control of Congress to wake it up. But a majority of its members are still asleep, or only half-awake to their new writ to end the war soon.

Read the planks on the Iraq War and foreign policy here, (Jeffrey Goldberg) courtesy of New Yorker Magazine. Here's the nub:

Obama, like his rivals, would rather not see the Democrats take the blame for what recent events suggest will be an unhappy dénouement in Iraq. But many foreign-policy experts believe that, even without an increase in troop levels in the coming months, Bush may yet succeed in delaying the day of reckoning until the next President takes office.

A few other interesting excerpts:

2005 poll conducted by the Democratic-affiliated Security and Peace Institute found that the top two foreign-policy priorities of Republicans were the destruction of Al Qaeda and a halt to nuclear proliferation; Democrats named the withdrawal of troops from Iraq and the elimination of AIDS. Grassroots Democratic opposition to the Iraq war has been especially potent; it cost Senator Joseph Lieberman the support of Democrats in his primary fight last year. Polls also show that a sizable minority of Democrats now feel that the war in Afghanistan was a mistake—thirty-five per cent, according to an M.I.T. survey conducted in November of 2005. Even more noteworthy, only fifty-seven per cent of Democrats questioned in the same poll would support the deployment of U.S. troops against a known terrorist camp. A German Marshall Fund poll in June of last year found that seventy per cent of Republicans would approve of military action as a last resort to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, as opposed to only forty-one per cent of Democrats.******

New Republic editor-at-large Peter Beinart, who has argued for a more assertive Democratic foreign policy, notes in an essay that will appear in a forthcoming collection produced by the Brookings and Hoover Institutions, “America’s red-blue divide is no longer chiefly between churched and unchurched. It is between hawk and dove.” He is not alone in arguing that Bush has done something that would have seemed impossible in late 2001: he has turned the fight against terrorism into a partisan issue.

No Debate?

Here's what's going on about Iraq in the Senate:

At issue are four separate measures. The main resolution, worked out by Sen. John W. Warner (R-Va.) and Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.), would put the Senate on record as opposing the additional troop deployment while calling for a diplomatic initiative to settle the conflict. It would oppose a cutoff of funds for troops in the field of battle.

The Republican leadership's alternative, drafted by John McCain (R-Ariz.), Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) and Joseph I. Lieberman (I-Conn.), would establish tough new benchmarks for the Iraqi government to achieve but would not oppose the planned deployment.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/02/05/AR2007020500675.html