The theme set for today was analysis of why Hillary failed, or Obama succeeded.  And while both of these are interesting questions, with many valuable lessons to learn from even trying to answer, I thought this year's Democratic campaign's big surprise was that momentum failed to give us a nominee early.  And I believe that understanding why this failure occurred is clearly more important than understanding why Obama managed to nose past Clinton.

The front page has an item today about the complicated delegate allocation process in TX threatening to bring the courts into the nomnation process, Clinton allies threaten "imminent" lawsuit over Texas caucuses.  Let the courts, packed for years with partisan Republicans, get their oar in, and the whole process will melt down.

I assumed that this story (Petraeus Helping Pick New Generals) would get considerable play here, and elsewhere in the left blogosphere, but I guess not, so here goes my own inadequate, but better than nothing, take.

Hillary Clinton used an interview with the Boston Globe reported on October 11, (Clinton vows to check executive power), as mentioned by Glenn Greenwald, (Joe Klein's defense of warrantless eavesdropping and telecom amnesty, Update V), to talk about how President Clinton will rein in the Presidency after the excesses of the Bush years.  No doubt the main reason, at least the main reason that is not openly discreditable, that there is no huge groundswell of support in this Democratic majority Congress for confronting Bush on process issues, is precisely this idea of Clinton's that we have a politically safer, easier solution at hand -- the election of a Democratic President in 2008.

"The Democrats in Congress read the same polls we do. They know that the majority of the people want them to take control in Iraq, want this war to end.", from Thomas Ricks on Endless War

The majority of the people indeed clearly want this war to end.  It's the other part, Congress taking control of anything, least of all a war, that seems problematic in most people's minds.  And that is the problem.  The clear majority of us know the direction we want to go with this war, but unfortunately we also believe that the only possible way to get there is for some President to lead us there.

My last diary was substantially word-for-word a comment in a thread on Lawyers, Guns and Money.  I like this site, finding their items usually convincing, and always informative, but I sometimes butt heads with their "centrist" tendency to be "serious" on foreign and military policy.  Robert Farley was kind enough to give me a shout-out (well, at least you could say he recognized my butt-headedness) on a new post today, Caveats on the American Way of War, so I feel I should reciprocate.

Below the fold is my answer to his post.

An article in the Armed Forces Journal by a LTC Yingling, A failure in generalship, has been getting a lot of attention the past few days.  I would quarrel with the overall impression shared by many that it is unusual for a Lieutenant Colonel to question the senior leadership of the Army in an official publication.  In my twenty years in the Army, I found it to be a much more open, even democratic, institution than the typical private enterprise.  But I really quarrel with the idea that Yingling's critique is at all a view of the war that progressives should endorse.

LTC Yingling's explanation for our failure in Iraq, that our armed forces are insufficiently prepared for counter-insurgency warfare, is not at all new, and definitely not anti-war.  The problem isn't that we're insufficiently expert at "counter-insurgency".  The problem is that Counter-Insurgency is no more a real art or science at which anyone could be expert, than is Astrology or Creationism.

NPR reports this morning, in a story so new, or so obscure, that it's not yet up in print on their website (but you can listen at Prisoner to testify on ease of tax scam), or in any wire reports I can find, that the administration is attempting to block a Congressional effort to have a federal prisoner convicted of computer identity theft testify during hearings on that subject.  The immediate occasion for the NPR report was the judge's ruling against the administration in this dispute.

The reasons the administration cited in its legal arguments against allowing the prisoner to testify before Congress seem quite unconvincing.  They argue both that the prisoner would be endangered among the prison population by his testimony, and that testifying would unduly augment his power within that population.  The administration also cited concerns for the security of those at the hearing.  Given that Congress regularly hears testimony from terrorists and other violent criminals, it is hard to understand what insurmountable new security concerns are raised by having a convicted computer nerd in the hearing room.

What's going on here?

The soundness of any prediction rests on two factors.  It has to be based on a sound theory of how the decision process works that’s driving the events in question.  But the prognosticator also has to be right on which process, out of the many possible, the deciders choose to utilize in addressing the situation.

I have no way of knowing with any certainty, that Gonzalez, Rove and Bush won’t use a process other than political calculation to decide whether or not Gonzlaez will resign.  If he really valued time with his family, to cite the notorious example, he probably would resign.

But I am very confident that, should the calculation of their political interests be the process that guides their decisions, Gonzalez will not resign.  I will take, for purposes of this discussion, the very reasonable assumption that these folks think of themselves as being at war with their political critics, and they will decide the question of whether Gonzalez will resign based on whether resignation will help them win that war or not.

I am anatomically ill-equipped to venture much into the Right blogosphere (a weak bladder, and a spleen too easly depleted), but occasionally take a stroll over to more "centrist technocrat" sites like that of Matt Yglesias, just to peek over the fence at the sensible people next door.  They have an interesting discussion going on over there about how the war in Iraq is likely to effect the upcoming Presidential elections ( Is National Security a Loser?).  Of course, the discussion wasn't nearly shrill enough to do this topic justice...

The always interesting Cenk Uygur had a diary yesterday asking why we the people tolerate having a political operative like Karl Rove on our payroll ( Why is a Political Operative on the Government Payroll?).  I take his point a little further, and ask why we should have anybody in the White House on our payroll.

It was announced today that CREW is seeking Congressional oversight of the administration's adherence to the provisions of the Presidential Records Act (CREW press release) in the decision to fire the US Attorneys.

Discussion of the PRA may sound like distinctly inside baseball, but expect to hear more and more about this statute   (US Code: Title 44, Chapter 22).  The PRA will be important, not only in this scandal, but in every controversy in which this administration is embroiled. It will become more and more important the closer we draw to January 2009, when Bush leaves his office to his successor, because this statute governs the handover of WH records to the new administration.

I have not bought one of those little clocks that count down the days left in the Bush administration.  This is certainly not because I am any less eager than anyone else to see the worst Presidency in our history end.  But I fear that this administration's crimes are so extreme that they will not, cannot, let go of power on the appointed day, in the appointed way.  The good that January 2009 will bring may not come without much struggle and harm, and, at the end, we may not have a new President.

Under normal circumstances, it must be hard enough for a President to face the prospect of soon being ex-President, of losing all that power and all those perquisites overnight.  But this President will face in addition, in January 2009, the prospect of losing to his successor the control of the evidence that could send him to jail.

It was immediately obvious, when escalation in Iraq was first hinted at as as the President's vaunted change of course a few weeks after the midterms, that the idea made no sense in terms of the situation on the ground in Iraq.  What was not so universally agreed then, but has since become clear, is that the surge, and especially the completely unnecessary publicity and hype the surge was launched with, makes even less sense in terms of domestic politics than it does in terms of the war.  What has also become obvious in the last few weeks, though also not apparent in November, is that war with Iran seems to be an integral part of whatever the administration is planning

Had the invasion of Iraq merely been a mistake, Bush would have responded to the loss of Congress in the midterms, and the ISG report, by working with the new majority in Congress on a sensible, sane, moderate plan to go where the nation wants us to go on Iraq -- out of that country as soon as possible.  But Iraq was no mistake.  It was a tool, a way to terrorize the electorate into supporting the Republican political machine, a tool that has lost its ability to terrorize.  So they must move on to a fresh war with a country, Iran, that does have better means to retaliate against the electorate itself, and so keep it cowed in terror of switching Commanders in Chief in mid-stream.  

But eventually this new adventure will lose its ability to instill fear, perhaps more rapidly, now that people are growing wise to the game.  So they must have in reserve a supply of ever more dangerous adventures designed to keep us perpetually off balance, until they finally have so institutionalized fear that they no longer have to worry about any domestic opposition.  I will, from time to time, offer a brief outline of a particular gambit, similar to what they have done in the past, that they might soon deploy in this ongoing effort to, as Baghdad Bob (h/t)would say, Open the Gates of Hell.

Four weeks after the President rolled out his plan for escalating the Iraq War, it has proven, politically, to be an utterly predictable disaster (as predicted right here!.Why all the hype over a surge?.)  While those of us opposed to the war might wish Congress would pursue de-escalation more aggressivley than it has, even what little that Congress is doing now would have been impossible so early had the President not galvanized anti-war sentiment right across the political spectrum with his plan to escalate after the country told him in November to go in the opposite direction.  And, as also predicted right here, war with Iran suddenly looms large.  But the difference from what I expected four weeks ago, is that we seem to be easing gradually into this new war, rather than with a bombing campaign right off the bat.

A ceiling, or cap, on troop levels in Iraq would only be a means to an end, and the just the beginning of a process that would be useless, even harmful, if not carried forward to its end.  So yes, let us have a Congressional cap, but only if we have a majority willing to follow the process that cap starts through to its logical conclusion.

I explore the process below the fold...

Like that gunboat in Heart of Darkness, just firing away at random, deserted jungle, the AC-130 we used in Somalia is excellent at making big booms, and leaving large smoking holes. This is thought to have a salutary effect on upstart brown peoples.