Not true. When Republicans controlled Congress, Democrats votes were moot because the GOP always had enough votes to pass funding in the annual appropriations bills and the “emergency” authorizations which followed it (because the administration consistently low-balled the cost of the war in the annual budget and got a compliant GOP to add to the war budget during the fiscal year). Now that Democrats control Congress, the war is still fully funded. Some Democrats have voted for funding and others against it; never have enough Democrats voted to de-fund the war for it to make a difference.

Re reconstruction funds: the amount of funds which have been misspent due to corruption, projects which were abandoned after they were half-built, waste, and loss of principal (funds which are simply unaccounted for) is mind-boggling. Is your suggestion that the spigot always be open regardless of what happens to the money?

2) “Rhetorically, the Democrats have been declaring the war a failure and seeking to undermine US goals in Iraq by taking everything they could and casting it in a negative light”

The war has been a failure since nearly day one. Is there something wrong with mentioning the obvious?

It is hard to discuss Iraq without “casting it in a negative light.” A stable country has been turned into anarchy, tens (hundreds?) of thousands are dead, the balance of power in the region has shifted to Iran, terrorists have their best recruiting tool ever, and our ability to influence events in the Middle East and elsewhere has been drastically diminished. Is it your suggestion that politicians evaluating Iraq should be docile Pollyannas happy to rubber-stamp whatever they hear from the administration?

3) “primarily to hurt the president and later the GOP congress”

Let me get this right. You’re a member of Congress and you recognize that the war has been a catastrophic disaster. You discuss this on the floors of Congress, to the media, or in your district. Your motivation therefore is not to do your job and try to correct the nation’s course, but rather to hurt the opposing party? The logical implication of your statement is that the opposition party ought to always support whatever the President does, because to do otherwise would be due to partisan considerations. Is this really what you believe?

Let’s go back to the 1990’s when the Clinton administration tried to strengthen the ability to track Al Qaeda’s finances, which was blocked by Republican Senators such as Phil Gramm and Fred Thompson. Did they do that to “hurt the President?” When the GOP Congress wouldn’t go along with Clinton’s health care program, did they do that to “hurt the President?” Gramm and Thompson blocked the anti- terrorist program because they thought it would place undue burdens on the financial system; the GOP Congress rejected the health program because they disagreed with the policy. Reasonable people can argue as to whether these actions were misguided or not, but if your first assumption is that the opposition party does everything out of political self-interest to damage the party in power, then you’ve denied the justification of representative democracy.

4) “the war against Islamists in Iraq is certainly justified and should be fought.”

A very revealing statement. Who exactly are the Islamists in Iraq we should be fighting? Are they the Sunnis who are killing Shia to extract revenge for the decades of Shiite rule? Are they the Shia death squads who kill Sunnis living in Shiite areas? Are they the death squads who killed 500 Iraqis last week because their obscure religious sect doesn’t recognize Islam? And what have the “Islamists in Iraq” done to threaten us? By what right do we occupy their country?

5) “because the Surge has been fully underway for a couple of months and the Iraqi politicians haven’t all started holding hands and singing kumbayah”

The escalation started in February. The war has been going on for years. There are no signs of political progress since the war started: in fact, things are getting worse as minority groups pull out of the government. This has occurred at the cost of hundreds of American lives. How many more lives are you willing to throw on the fire so Iraqi politicians can dither?

Moreover, we have created a situation where the different groups in Iraq stand to benefit from continuing chaos, and hence are either unwilling to support the central government or actively oppose it. I suggest you read the following article from today’s New York Times – it also rebuts Post 21:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/25/world/middleeast/25assess.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

The logic offered by those supporting a troop reduction is reasonable: It will let the Iraqis know that we will not be there forever, so they’d better get their acts together.

Unfortunately, what the Iraqi politicians take from this is that they need allies with guns who will not be leaving if they are going to maintain power — hence Maliki’s forced removal of roadblocks that allowed al-Sadr to escape among other things.

Maliki has suggested that Iraq could take care of the insurgency within a few months if the US left — the way they would “take care of” the insurgency, of course, would be mass slaughter of the Sunni population, probably resulting in either veiled or direct intervention from the Sunni Arab states to the west, which would likely be met by intervention from Iran to aid the Shia. So we get a region-wide war and chaos across the Middle East for a decade or more (not to mention $8-gas over here, further empowering “President” Chavez, but that’s another story). If this weren’t such a dreadful scenario, I’d find it amusing that the same people who opposed the war in 2002 and 2003 because it would bring chaos are now urging a pull-out in spite of the same likely result.

Materially they have voted against funding for the war, ever since the first funding vote was taken, I believe. There is a contention over whether this was funding for military equipment for the US forces in Iraq or for the reconstruction of the country — but then, as you said, the war cannot be won exclusively by the military, so either way, those (like the 2004 Democratic presidential nominee) who voted against such funds were voting to undermine the war effort. It seems quite clear that the 2004 Democratic presidential nominee cast this vote for political reasons. I hope you don’t expect me to re-tell you this story.

Rhetorically, the Democrats have been declaring the war a failure and seeking to undermine US goals in Iraq by taking everything they could and casting it in a negative light — primarily to hurt the president and later the GOP congress. A responsible statesman would have acknowledged that whatever the reasons for going to war against Saddam where (if he agreed with them or not) the war against Islamists in Iraq is certainly justified and should be fought. For an example of such a rare statesman, see Congressman Brian Baird (D).

Also, just because the Surge has been fully underway for a couple of months and the Iraqi politicians haven’t all started holding hands and singing kumbayah — or however it’s spelled — we ought to cut and run? I mean, what has the US congress accomplished in the last three months?

I do think the question of the strategic value of victory in Iraq – to us – needs to be addressed too. The President asserts that leaving would be both a strategic and humanitarian disaster. An Intelligence assessment and political consensus on that is needed.

Oh, come now. The criticism revolved around the lack of Sunni buy-in, thus undermining the government’s legitimacy and exacerbating suspicions and tensions. Which is exactly what happened.

I’m disinclined to think we can win in Iraq, regardless of how low a bar you set for victory. My suggestion for getting out is a referendum on whether we should stay or go. Whether we think we can do some good is perhaps not as important as whether the Iraqis think we can do some good.

You call it moving the goalposts, I prefer to say that we haven’t had a definitive, and consistent, strategic objective for our presence in Iraq. Talking about tactics when the objective is absent or poorly defined is not only a waste of time but in war can be lethal. Certainly the President has failed to offer a consistent, well-defined objective for our presence in Iraq, but the war opponents – those that voted for it and then changed their minds, rather than those who were against it from the beginning – have also been quick to define a new objective every time some amount of success has been achieved.

Rather than laud the historic election in Iraq – and the physical risks the voters took to vote – they restate the objective (success) as nearly 100% voter turnout. Lately there is an acknowledgment that the surge is working accompanied by a “but we won’t have success” until Maliki is chastised, at best, or replaced, at worst, for his so far failure to install a stable, happy, functional political structure.

If you are inclined to believe we can win in Iraq, and that there is value to us in doing so, how would you define victory (aka: strategic objective)?

That was by no means an unreasonable position to take. Every one of Davies’ principles still applies to the current situation, particularly this one:

The Vital Importance of Audit. Companies which do not audit projects in order to see how accurate the original projections were, tend to get exactly the forecasts and projects that they deserve. Companies which have a culture where there are no consequences for making dishonest forecasts, get the projects they deserve. Companies which allocate blank cheques to management teams with a proven record of failure and mendacity, get what they deserve…

There is much made by people who long for the days of their fourth form debating society about the fallacy of “argumentum ad hominem”. There is, as I have mentioned in the past, no fancy Latin term for the fallacy of “giving known liars the benefit of the doubt”, but it is in my view a much greater source of avoidable error in the world. Audit is meant to protect us from this, which is why audit is so important.

We have no independent audit of this war’s progress (in part because it’s too friggin’ dangerous for anyone to conduct one, which tells you much in itself). Therefore there’s no reason to believe this administration’s claims are accurate (a conclusion that has borne out time and time again through the years) and therefore no valid reason to invest more blood and treasure in this project.

It seems to me that each of the definitions of victory except the possibly the last one or two are now out of reach. The question then becomes how effective the military can be in changing things for the better, or whether a cataclysm is inevitable regardless of what we do. We will have to draw down troops regardless of what happens in Iraq: we just don’t have enough troops to do otherwise. If the case can be made that a continuing presence at a scale close to what we have now will change things – instead of delaying the inevitable – then I’m eager to hear it. Otherwise, the question is simply the logistical one of what pace we wind down American military involvement to do the least harm.