The Ticking Clock In Iraq

post from TalkLeft on 22 April 2007 11:51:00 PM. © TalkLeft

Brad Plumer points us to a terrific article in the National Journal that discusses the politics and policy of withdrawal from Iraq. As Plumer and the article note, President Bush's myopic refusal to allow planning for withdrawal is another harmful act by the worst President in history. But a serious flaw in the article remains the assumption that, in terms of American interest, the situation in Iraq will worsen as a result of troop withdrawal. One of the usual "expert" suspects, Ken Pollack, who strongly supported the Iraq Debacle, now predictably warns about the dangers of withdrawal:

"I think the Baker-Hamilton proposal that we yank combat forces from Iraq but retain the missions of training Iraqi forces and hunting for terrorists was always unrealistic," said Kenneth Pollack, a Brookings Institution senior fellow and former Middle East analyst for the CIA. Given the likely size of the forward operating bases, rapid-reaction forces, and logistical footprint required to adequately conduct those missions, Pollack estimates that the United States would still need many tens of thousands of troops in Iraq. "Because I think things are going to get ugly very fast as the bad actors see a major reduction in U.S. forces, I also fear that the rapid-reaction forces we leave behind in Iraq will begin to look like a fire brigade at an arsonists' convention."

Coming from Debacle supporter Ken Pollock, who has been wrong on EVERYTHING about Iraq, this means next to nothing. But let's assume this is true, in what way would that be worse than if we keep US troops executing whatever the heck strategy Bush is supposed to be doing now or will be doing 12 months from now? Tell me Mr. Pollock, from the perspective of American interests, what could be worse than what we have now? If Ken Pollock had been in charge of Vietnam, we would still be there.

Of course there is a serious issue of a lack of planning for the inevitable withdraw from Iraq:

. . . The military could take a host of steps to help mitigate the risks of a U.S. troop drawdown, including staging a carefully phased and deliberate withdrawal; continuing U.S. support, and accelerated training and equipping, for the Iraqi forces that must fill the security vacuum; and keeping a residual, albeit smaller, U.S. military presence inside Iraq or around its periphery. But all of those options require the careful planning and hard decision-making that Sinnreich fears are being stymied by the deadlock in Washington. "The downside of this political theater in Washington, and the disingenuous refusal to admit that we've lost the political will to keep American troops heavily engaged in Iraq indefinitely," he said, "is that it keeps military planners from developing a timetable and a deliberate plan for withdrawal." . . . "God, I hope they're already doing the planning for a withdrawal, because only after working through the various scenarios and all of the possible branches and sequels can the military planners explain to their civilian masters what's needed to do this in an orderly way," said retired Maj. Gen. William Nash, who led NATO forces into Bosnia in the mid-1990s. "It's like I once told a superior who said not to worry about building refugee camps for the aftermath of Desert Storm: 'We can do this organized, or we can do it disorganized. Which way do you want it, sir?' The same goes for exiting Iraq. 'Which way do you want it, Mr. President?'"

The question is which Mr. or Madam President will that question be addressed to? For as it stands now, it won't be President Bush to whom the question is addressed. This article provides evidence of the myopia in Washington that George Bush is a man on whom you can "ratchet up the pressure"

Because the Democrats want out and Bush wants to stay, the congressional leaders' goal for ending the war is either to force the president to change his strategy through legislation, or to persuade him to change through political pressure. . . . But the math and the politics are simple: Democrats need Republicans, either to enact legislation or to exert pressure.

Just like every discussion of Iraq, this article and the persons quoted in it live in a fantasyland where legislation OR pressure will force Bush's hand on Iraq.

Bush is not running again. Bush does not care about "political pressure." My gawd, he won't even force Gonzales out. So "ratcheting up the pressure" on a madman is not a plan, it is a copout. And of course legislation will NEVER pass that ends the war. The way to end the war, as I have stated repreatedly, is to NOT fund the war. You know the drill, announce a date certain, say March 31, 2008, when funding for the Debacle ceases. Let me add a new wrinkle, demand plans for an orderly withdrawal from Iraq EVERY DAY for that 12 month period.

Some people like Levin and Schumer continue to cling to fantasy, or more likely, want to run on Iraq in 2008:

Sitting with Reid in his conference room recently, Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., the No. 3 party leader, explained the Democrats' strategy for picking up Republican support for a withdrawal timetable: Make them vote over and over on an unpopular war until their resolve crumbles. "We're going to keep at it, and at least it's my belief that they're going to have to break," Schumer said.

(Emphasis supplied.) No, they won't break. They CAN'T. Their base won't let kill them. More fantasy:

The Democrats plan to ratchet up the pressure steadily on Republicans through the fall -- a time when many lawmakers have indicated that they expect to see results from Bush's troop increase. The pressure, which started with the anti-surge resolutions in January and February and carried into the war supplemental debate in March and April, will continue as Congress takes up the fiscal 2008 Defense authorization and appropriations bills beginning in May and June.

Oh please. The Republicans won't say or do a thing in the Fall of 2007. They never have and they never will. Oner mopre Freidman Unit they'll say. And one more Friedman Unit gets you to March 2008. And then another, September 2008. And then it is election time and the Debacle will not end.

But here is a germ of an idea:

Some Democrats have even suggested that, after a Bush veto, they will pass a reduced supplemental with funds lasting only a few months, forcing a debate and vote on another supplemental later on.

That's a good idea IF coupled with an ANOUNCED DATE CERTAIN to end funding for the Debacle. Otherwise we end up at September 2008 again, and by then, the Democrats will co-own the war.

Yes, one more time, the answer is Reid-Feingold. And not passing it. Announcing that it is the Democratic position. The Democrats control Congress. If they say and MEAN no funding after March 31, 2008, a YEAR FROM NOW, then the Iraq Debacle will end. Otherwise, President Clinton or McCain or Rudy or Obama or whomever will be making speeches about how we can not precipitously withdraw from Iraq. You know why? Because they don't want to be the one who "lost Iraq." They won't want that hung around their neck in 2012.

The time is now to end the Debacle by adopting Reid-Feingold as the position of the Democratic Congress.

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http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/TalkleftThePoliticsOfCrime/~3/111174585/696

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FDA was aware of problems at food facilities

post from AMERICAblog: A great nation deserves the truth on 22 April 2007 11:35:00 PM. © AMERICAblog: A great nation deserves the truth

What does it take to bring change in this administration? People died and this team is still giving excuses.

The Food and Drug Administration has known for years about contamination problems at a Georgia peanut butter plant and on California spinach farms that led to disease outbreaks that killed three people, sickened hundreds, and forced one of the biggest product recalls in U.S. history, documents and interviews show.

Overwhelmed by huge growth in the number of food processors and imports, however, the agency took only limited steps to address the problems and relied on producers to police themselves, according to agency documents.

Congressional critics and consumer advocates said both episodes show that the agency is incapable of adequately protecting the safety of the food supply.

If the Republican-styled FDA wasn't so eager to choose business over people they would have made much better decisions but in the rush to keep cheap food moving they fell back on the only program that Republicans know, which is to allow business to self-regulated. Thanks Newt for launching these programs which are literally killing Americans.

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-at-food.html

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The mismeasure of China

post from Ezra Klein on 22 April 2007 10:44:00 PM. © Ezra Klein

(Posted by John.) Dean Baker, about the NYT:It is incredible that our country's preeminent newspaper doesn't have any idea how large the world's second biggest economy is... In fact, if China sustains a 10 percent growth rate, it will pass...[...]

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Book Review: Kim Todd's "Chrysalis"

post from Daily Kos on 22 April 2007 10:33:49 PM. © Daily Kos

Chrysalis
Maria Sibylla Merian and the Secrets of Metamorphosis
By Kim Todd
Harcourt, Inc.

On this Earth Day, I offer up a fascinating read that's part biography, part social and cultural history, and large part natural history, Kim Todd's Chrysalis, an exploration of the life of one of the most fascinating women you've likely never heard of, Maria Sibylla Merian.

Her life would have been remarkable for any woman--a teenaged bride, young mother, who finds a way to turn her hobby, and her father's good name, into a vocation and to make a name for herself. Who leaves her husband and, with her two children, forges a new life, and who, at age 52, follows her passion across the world to a largely unknown and unexplored country and in doing so advances science almost immeasurably. It's a fascinating story, but what makes it remarkable is that she lived three centuries ago.

What so engrossed Merian, and occupied some of the best scientific minds of the time, was the process of metamorphosis--the development of one life form into another. We know now of her life-long fascination with the process because she documented it from the time she was a child in her art, watercolor painting being one of few activities in which a woman could be trained and allowed to pursue as a career.

Merian was born in 1647 in Frankfurt, the daughter of a successful publisher. Her father died when she was just three, and her mother soon remarried an artist and art dealer. Publishing and art converged for Merian along with what a fascination with insects, starting with the silkworm, which she deemed "the most useful and noble of all worms and caterpillars" (p. 18). As a young girl, Merian raised silkworms and collected caterpillars in experiments destined to become staples of elementary schools everywhere--putting a caterpillar and the leaves it ate into a Mason jar and watching it transform to pupae and build it cocoon, all in anticpation of what winged creature might emerge. Merian sketched and painted the processes, and took careful notes on her observations.

Learning from her stepfather, Merian's artistic skills developed, and it's her vibrant botanical and insect prints that until recently defined her legacy. But her achievements in science have recently been reconsidered, and Todd's book adds significantly to the reexamination of her life and the impact of her work on ecology, a branch of science that wasn't going to develop for a couple more centuries.

In 1675, Merian published her first book, Blumenbuch, a book of flowers that gave her an audience for the more ambitious work that followed four years later Der Raupen wudnerbare Verwandelung (The Caterpillar, Marvelous Transformation and Strange Floral Food). This was the book that set Merian's work apart from much of the work done by her contemporaries:

In each picture, a caterpillar appears on teh plant it eats, along with its pupa, its cocoon, if it makes one, and the resultant moth or butterfly. Sometimes, the butterfly is laying eggs on a leaf or along a stem. Often the caterpillar's predator, a fly that will emerge from the cocoon after killing its host, appears also, with many of its life stages. All these elements made the illustrations startlingly unique. There had never been anything like them.

While Merian's contemporaries were approaching the study of insects as collectors--amassing as many rare species as they could, objects of curiosity to include in their specimen collections--Merian was approaching her study as a biologist would. She was studying the miniature ecosystem that supported the life of each caterpillar through its developmental stages.

But the crowned jewel of Merian's work, and the work that cements her place in science, is her Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium, the result of her two years of work and study in Surinam. Not content to just see the specimens other explorers sent back from the Dutch colony, Merian wanted to see observe the metamorphoses of them in their own surroundings--the foods that they ate, the parasites that afflicted them, the plants they lived in. She interviewed native peoples, and recorded local native names for the plants and described local uses. Observing that the butterflies that stayed in the tops of trees in the rain forest were significantly different from those that stayed closer to the ground, Merian was the first European to recognize the complexity in the forest ecosystem. In 1701, however, she caught malaria and was forced to return home.

With this basic outline of Merian's life, supported with little documentation beyond her books, 17 letters written by her, her wills and a handful of letters in which she was mentioned by contemporaries, Todd weaves a rich history of this complex woman. Cameo appearances by luminaries like Czar Peter the Great add to the historical narrative, placing Merian in time and importance. (Just days before her death, Peter visited Amsterdam and purchased a large number of Merian's Surinam plates, and his assistant bought the study book that she used throughout her life to document her studies and preliminary sketches. Through civil war, revolution, and two world wars, the Russians and then the Soviets kept the collection remarkably intact.)

Merian's work inspired Audubon. When Linnaeus was developing his Systema Naturae, the classification of species, he relied on her Surinam book to define species he didn't have specimens for. An effort by mid-19th century scientists to discredit Merian as an "amateur" succeeded in keeping her out of most history and science textbooks. But in the last several decades, her reputation has slowly been rehabilitated. Todd's biography should serve to secure Merian's place in the history of science, particularly ecology.

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http://feeds.dailykos.com/~r/dailykos/index/~3/111163983/414

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Sopranos Final Season: "Remember When"

post from TalkLeft on 22 April 2007 10:00:00 PM. © TalkLeft

Episode 80 is tonight: "Remember When."

This week, with the heat turned up in Jersey, Tony and Paulie head south to cool off. Meanwhile, Junior rekindles some of his old fire in a poker game.

I'm wondering if someone will be killed tonight. Three weeks without a whacking is a long time.

After the Sopranos is the final episode of Apprentice: LA. Donald Trump chooses his apprentice tonight. My money's on Frank. This was definitely not a great season for the show, I usually tuned in to the last 15 minutes to see the boardroom action and who got fired, but the finales are fun to watch because they are live and the contestants presumably don't know who will be chosen.

If you watch and have some thoughts, here's the place to leave them.

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Lee Iacocca makes me smile

post from Ezra Klein on 22 April 2007 09:57:00 PM. © Ezra Klein

Brief interview in the Boston Globe:And what's the most important new technology auto buyers don't know about yet? Plug-in hybrids. They're being touted as the wave of the future, and I think they are. I can imagine a scene in...[...]

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Something to Crow About

Singer Sheryl Crow and environmentalist Laurie David have more in common than awards on their mantels. Crow, who has won 9 Grammy Awards, and David, who recently won an Academy Award as a producer for An Inconvenient Truth, are both passionate about resolving the global climate crisis. They recently joined forces in a [...]

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http://kmareka.com/index.php/?p=1126

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Former World Bank execs call on Wolfowitz to go.

A “group of top former World Bank executives” — including Shengman Zhang, the former World Bank No. 2 official under Wolfowitz — has written a letter urging Paul Wolfowitz to resign:He has lost the trust and respect of bank staff at all levels, provoked a rift among senior managers, developed tense relations with the board, [...]

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http://thinkprogress.org/2007/04/22/former-world-bank-execs-call-on-wolfowitz-to-
go/

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Whither Gore Supporters Wither Gore

Over the past few months, among close watchers of 2008 polls, it has become conventional wisdom that Hillary Clinton performs better in national primary preference polls without Gore included the question than with Gore included in the question. One of[...]

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