I support structured troop redeployment in Iraq.  But I take the 'sign of weakness' problem seriously.  Withdrawal of our troops is necessary, but the President's extreme incompetence has provided a propaganda windfall to al Queada.  When we inevitably withdraw, they will claim that they drove the 'Great Satan' out of Iraq.  That is a fait accompli:  we have to redeploy, and we can't stop them from claiming victory.  But we can mitigate that windfall if we impeach President Bush first, and then begin troop withdrawal.  If the Iraq War carries over into a new presidency, withdrawal will be seen throughout the world as a defeat for America.  But if we withdraw pursuant to impeachment, then the defeat belongs to Bush alone.  It is vital to the national security that the President be removed from office and that redeployment begin before the end of his term.

Of all the disastrous consequences of the President's failure in Iraq, outlined by Bush himself in his escalation speech--chaos, civil war, regional war--the bonanza of propaganda for al Queada is the most disastrous.  Even the availability of a failed state as a new logistical safe harbor for terrorism pales in its deadliness to the global false perception that al Queada has defeated America in head-to-head combat (they have not).  The political gains reaped by the Hizbal after the Lebanon invasion is just a tidbit by comparison.  From what I can tell, Jihadism is an altered mental state, a malevolent rapture; by subjecting this nation to strategic defeat (not military defeat!), the President will fuel that killing rapture with glory and exhilaration beyond bin Laden's most perverted dreams.  That is the Bush legacy of failure.

But the dynamics of withdrawal change if done in tandem with impeachment--don't they?  Withdrawal after impeachment doesn't feel like defeat to me.  It feels like a cleansing.  It feels like a cure, a purging, a renewal.  It feels truly like a 'New Way Forward'.  And our enemies will be warned:  America is no longer crippled by a tactically incompetent President.   This is Bush's strategic failure, not ours, and for national security reasons, we must make that official.  al Queada has to get the message in high profile fashion:  Beating Bush is not the same as beating America.

For opponents of escalation in Congress, the opportunity is right now.  Immediately, they should seize on Bush's 'Caligula Moment'--his delusional escalation plan, the very plan for freestyle urban warfare rejected by his superior father, rooted in his deeply neurotic 'daddy conflict'.  Words like 'insane' and 'detached from reality' are swirling about the Capital.  Unflattering observations on the President's mental state are common.

Nixon's Callgula Moment

Looking back at Watergate, it was Nixon's 'Caligula Moment' that brought down his otherwise brilliant Presidency.  Nixon wanted to fire the Watergate Special Prosecutor.  But the SP was technically employed by the Attorney General; only the AG could fire him.  Nixon ordered his AG to fire the SP.  The AG refused, so Nixon fired the AG.  The Deputy AG then became acting AG; Nixon ordered the acting AG to fire the SP.  The acting AG refused, so Nixon fired him.  Finally, the Solicitor General (Robert Bork) became acting AG and fired the Special Prosecutor.  All this happened in one evening, the 'Saturday Night Massacre.'  From that night on, the nation believed that President Nixon had lost his mind.  Nothing the Special Prosecutor found would have brought down Nixon by itself.  All the lying, dirty tricks and rat-f**king, so what?   The nation knew who 'Tricky Dick' was when they elected him.  It was the 'Caligula Moment'.

Senator Joe Lieberman fearmongers in Bush's defense: "We undermine the credibility of a Commander-in-Chief during wartime at our peril."  But we removed Nixon at the height of the Cold War, when the Soviets posed a greater threat than radical Islam does today.  Unlike Bush, Nixon was up to the job of C-in-C in dealing with our deadliest enemies.  For all his mistakes in Watergate, 'Tricky Dick' was uniquely gifted at negotiating on the brink of war 'from a position of strength'.  Like his successor Gerald Ford, he was the right President at a dangerous time.  I credit him with averting war with the Soviets during the years when that war was most likely.  Taking down the highly competent Nixon was far more problematic, in national security terms, than impeaching the dangerously incompetent Bush.  Yet we did it, and we survived.  We lost FDR during wartime, we lost Kennedy and savaged LBJ during the Cold War.  We're a democracy.  Our government is designed to tolerate succession.

Lieberman is playing the bogus 'Churchill' card, the 'resolute leader in wartime' spin.  This isn't WWII.  It's a 'new kind of war'.  We don't need some fake Messianic Churchill wannabe.  We are at war with diabolical masterminds, and we need a mastermind of our own as President, someone who won't get suckered again and again by Ahmanidejad, Chalabi, Zarqawi, Maliki.  If there was ever a president we could afford to get rid of in wartime, it's George Bush.

The nation can't afford to let the opportunity pass.  We have to take this one chance to mitigate the Jihadist wet dream and self-define our troop redeployment.  Bush has never played the odds in his Iraq policy, but we have to play the odds now.  Long odds say his 'Hail Mary' escalation strategy will fail.  (It's more like entering a lottery to win a raffle ticket where first price is a chance to throw up a Hail Mary Pass.)  The most likely future outcome is American withdrawal.  That withdrawal can either represent national defeat after 2008, or, before 2008, a dramatic disavowal of the Bush Presidency.

If you cut through the baloney, last night the President announced that American troops will join forces with the Shiite Death Squads to subjugate the Sunnis.  He didn't come out and say, 'plain and simple', that America is taking sides in the Iraqi civil war, but that is his plan.

The President did not say, 'plain and simple', that he wants to kill or arrest Shiite militia leader al-Sadr.  He did not mention al-Sadr by name.  Why not?  When it was our mission to kill Zarqawi, the President said, 'plain and simple', that we were going to kill Zarqawi, and we did.  After 9/11, the President said, 'plain and simple', that he wanted Bin Laden dead or alive.  We never got Bin Laden, but the President did not mince words about our objective.  So why mince words about al-Sadr?  Why not just say, 'plain and simple', we want al-Sadr's head on a stick.  He didn't say it because that is not his plan.  His plan is to side with the Shia against the Sunnis.

The President didn't call for al-Sadr's head because if he did, he may as well put the bullet in Maliki  himself.  The Prime Minister wouldn't be able to trust his own bodyguard.  I fear that the President is setting up the Prime Minister for assassination as it is.

The President did quote this statement from Maliki  'just last week':  "The Baghdad security plan will not provide a safe haven for any outlaws, regardless of [their] sectarian or political affiliation."  Why be so vague about it?  Is it the clearly-defined mission of American troops to take down al-Sadr's milita?  If it is, then say so.  If you can't even say it--because that would bring down Maliki's government overnight--then how are you going to execute it?  They are not going to execute it.  It is not the plan.  The plan is to choose sides in the Iraq civil war.

From the President's speech, one of the 'main elements' of his plan:  "The Iraqi government will deploy Iraqi Army and National Police brigades across Baghdad's nine districts. When these forces are fully deployed, there will be 18 Iraqi Army and National Police brigades committed to this effort, along with local police. These Iraqi forces will operate from local police stations-- conducting patrols and setting up checkpoints, and going door-to-door to gain the trust of Baghdad residents."

This is nonsense:  It is the Iraqi police that have been carrying out Shiite revenge killings against the Sunnis.  The Iraqi police are the Death Squads.  The President proposes that Shiite Death Squads, backed up by our  troops, will go 'door-to-door gaining the trust' of the Sunnis in Baghdad.  This is his strategy to achieve national unity in Iraq.

Hello, Death Squad Calling

If the Sunnis had attacked the United States, I'd say send our troops in and wipe them out--men, women, and children if tragically necessary.  But they didn't.  The Sunnis do not threaten America.  Our troops didn't go to Iraq to wipe out the Sunnis.  They are there on this pollyana spacehead mission of spreading harmony throughout the Middle East.  How does subjugating the Sunnis hand-in-hand with Shiite Death Squads spread harmony through the Middle East?

The President's plan is not 'worth a try'.  It has no rational chance of success--absolutely none--and will only succeed in fomenting an eternal blood rage against America amongst the Sunnis throughout the Middle East (as if there wasn't enough anti-American pathology already).

Impeach First, Then Redeploy

The Bush Presidency rests tenuously on two great fears.  The first great fear is that withdrawal from Iraq would be a disaster for the United States--a political 'mushroom cloud.'  This is an extremely complex question.  The second great fear is that we cannot afford to undermine or remove the Commander-in-Chief during war time.  This is a lie.

We fear:  civil war between the Shia and the Sunnis will erupt if we withdraw.  What do we expect--two massive armies aligned across a battlefield?  These people fight wars with pipebombs.  The civil war isn't going to get any bigger.  It's just going to get resolved faster once we get the hell out.  We are prolonging the civil war indefinitely by creating an artificial stalemate.  Our presence only dooms that nation to permanent civil war.  Will they ever get tired of violence?  Ask the Israelis.

We fear:  Shiite genocide against the Sunnis, triggering military intervention by the Saudi Arabia.  Saudi Arabia has an army?  The Sunnis don't think they will be massacred by the Shia if we leave.  They are trying to drive us out.  They believe they will win a civil war, not be massacred.  Ask yourself--why were the Sunnis running that country in the first place if they are a minority.  The Sunnis are not sheep and they are not going to be slaughtered.

We fear:  widespread regional war.  There have been regional wars.  Iraq and Iran fought constantly in the last half of the last century.  I doubt most Americans even knew those wars were happening.

We fear:  humanitarian crisis.  Yes, it will be terrible.  There was humanitarian crisis under Saddam.  'Shock and awe' was a humanitarian crisis.  The Iraq-Iran wars were humanitarian crises.  We should redeploy our troops to help as best we can with humanitarian aid, not join forces with the Death Squads to foment eternal jihad.

We fear:  an al-Queada base in Iraq.  This should be the sole focus of our troop redeployment.  Stay out of the Shiite-Sunni mess, and focus entirely on blocking al-Queada, as well as offer humanitarian aid--we don't want al-Queada to play the role Hezbollah now plays in Lebanon.  This one element of the Bush doctrine should remain in force forever:  harbor al-Queada and you are dead.

I would ask whether al-Queada can establish a base of operations on the pre-9/11 Afghan scale in the middle of a civil war.  Don't they need stability themselves in order to stage international operations?  Zarqarwi was effective within Iraq, but he never projected terror overseas.  It's revealing that we tracked Zarqarwi down in Iraq, just as Israel has tracked and killed Hizbal and Hamas leaders repeatedly, whereas we still can't put a finger on bin-Laden or al-Zawahiri.  It may be a fear-mongering oversimplification to claim that Iraq will become another Afghanistan.  I don't think the scenarios are parallel.

We fear:  the perception of defeat in Iraq.  That is why we must impeach the President.  It is his personal defeat, not ours as a nation, and we need to make that official.

The biggest lie of all is that America cannot afford to neutralize or remove a failed Commander-in-Chief during wartime.  That big 'Uncle Tom', warmonger Joe Lieberman, is carrying this message for the White House.

But we lost FDR during wartime, and survived and won.  We lost Kennedy, savaged LBJ, and removed Nixon during the height of the Cold War, and survived and won.  And let's not forget how dangerous the Cold War was; one wrong move by an inept President could have turned that thing plutonium-hot in a blink.  Every day that George Bush is in office puts the nation at greater peril.  Every decision he is allowed to make places us in greater danger.  As we consider the consequences of the President's failure in Iraq, let us also consider the consequences of another huge Presidential blunder.  For that is what Bush is offering:  escalation in Iraq, yet another grotesque, catastrophic and unconscionable failure of judgment.

We do not need a Churchill now.  We need a Mastermind--like Nixon.  The President confessed last night that Zarqawi ran strategic rings around him in Iraq.  We are at war with diabolic masterminds, and we need a mastermind in the White House, not George Bush.

Unlike some opponents of the war, I take this 'sign of weakness' problem very seriously.  al-Queada will claim victory when we inevitably redeploy our troops.  The President has handed our enemy a bonanza of propaganda.  That is why it is imperative that we impeach the President and redeploy before the end of his term.  The nation can save face on the world stage by dramatically placing blame for Iraq squarely on the head of George Bush.  Only through impeachment can the nation distance itself from the stigma of the President's failure.  For the sake of our reputation as world superpower, we must send a message to the world:  This was the President's failure, not a failure for America.  And don't kid yourself, al-Queada.  Beating Bush is not the same as beating America.

The President cannot be allowed to complete his term.  We can use any number of reasons, we did it with Nixon, we did it with Clinton.  Lying about WMD's.  Disposing of American soldiers' lives for a cynical, personal purpose, to create some silly illusion of his Presidential legacy.  Tying the hands of future Presidents by escalating in Iraq.  Haliburton.  Mental collapse.  We have reached the point where impeachment is vital to the national security.

Argument:  Iran and North Korea, by pursuing nuclear weapons, are hitching the fate of their nations to the madness of Osama Bin Laden.  China is risking a cataclysm in Asia by not blocking the NK nuclear program.

There are horrible, dangerous miscalculations being made today by Iran, North Korea and China; all three are miscalculating the danger of Al-Qaeda.  North Korea and Iran, by pursuing nuclear weapons, are tying the fate of their nations to the actions of the lunatic Osama Bin Laden.   For if Bin Laden ever realizes his threat to strike the United States with a nuclear weapon, Iran and North Korea will become prime suspects of providing that weapon and will be in grave danger of retaliation. It is in the vital interests--the survival interests--of both nations to stay off that 'suspect list.'

I say again, the American people, in a blind blood fury the likes of which the world has never seen, will demand retaliation, and I'm not talking about 'moral equivalency.'  I'm talking about a megaton-to-kiloton ratio of reprisal.  And we're not likely to care who we hit.  Somebody is going to pay!

And I don't care about Republican vs. Democrat.  It was a liberal Democrat who hit Hiroshima and was so enraged, he hit Nagasaki for good measure.  The Republican 'values voters' need to get their act together and start sending us competent killers like Nixon and Bush 41, and stop sending up strategic dodo-birds like Bush 43 to pursue a Christian agenda at the expense of national security.  And the  Dems need to do the same.  Nothing but hawks from now on!  I want smart bombs like Truman and Kennedy for President.

When the Chinese President turns on his television one terrible morning and sees a hydrogen cloud over Pyongyang, how much will he regret that he didn't block this provocation?  Are these people suffering from Global Alzheimer's Disease?  I suggest they visit a Hiroshima memorial and then ask themselves, do they really want to test the United States of America?

It's time for China, NK and Iran to 'connect the dots.'

Our leaders must advise in the gravest terms that the people of North Korea and the people of Iran do not want to get caught in the middle between the US and Al-Qaeda.

Argument:  By opting out of bilateral talks with North Korea, President Bush missed an opportunity to pressure China to exert maximum regional power to block the North Korean nuclear program.  A true American president could have maneuvered China away from ambivalence and closer to a 'missile crisis' mentality.

I'm not surprised by President Bush's failure to contain North Korea (it fits into a pattern of foreign policy incompetence unprecedented in American history).  But I'm mystified by the apparent ambivalence of the Chinese.  Though they've made some ineffective noise, you could hardly compare China's handling of North Korea with the moderated ruthlessness and skill of President Kennedy in the Cuban Missile Crisis.  Can we conclude that the Chinese are as pathetic as President Bush?  I think not, since China is on the ascent while America, under President Bush, is blundering towards 'former superpower' status.  It is more likely that the Chinese have not gone 'ballistic' over North Korea because they see an upside to North Korean nuclear weapons that offsets the obvious troubles their plutonium-empowered little neighbor can now cause.

This is not a consensus in Beijing, but there may be elements in the Chinese government who view a nuclear North Korea as a powerful ally in their evolving long-term strategy to assert power over the United States.  The Chinese can use their mushrooming economy to influence the North Koreans indefinitely; the North Koreans fear America more than China; the Chinese fear America as well.  At some point in this century, American and Chinese vital interests will come into intense conflict.  The Chinese may believe that a rogue nuclear ally economically dependent on the yuan could prove vital in persuading the United States to surrender its superpower position peacefully.

Nuclear chess is not a game for normal people.  It is only a game for madmen who are not afraid of atomic weapons, men and women willing to dance on the brink of ungodly catastrophe.  What kind of man could even dream of putting nuclear missiles in Cuba?  Our own great President Nixon threatened to use nuclear weapons in Viet Nam, and
encouraged Japan to acquire nuclear weapons as a way of pressuring China to the bargaining table.  This is how the game is played; this is how the Chinese play the North Korean card today.  They want to knock off the United States in this century.  No one could dream of such a thing unless they were willing to take bold, mind-boggling risks.  The Chinese are willing to risk the worst that Kim Jong-Il can do because they dream of imposing the will of China on the United States.

Compare the simplistic Bush foreign policy concept (you are 'either with us or against us') to the advanced strategic mastery of Nixon.  Nixon played the Russians against the Chinese, the Chinese against the Japanese, the Japanese against the Chinese, in a dazzling display of trilateral virtuosity that averted war with the Communist bloc while setting up the Soviets to lose the Cold War.  In today's North Korean affair, the Chinese are both with us and against us, just as the Chinese and the Russians are both with us and against us--with Iran and against Iran--in that other, even more dangerous front of nuclear diplomacy.  A President who is bewildered by such complexity is not qualified to lead America.

Just as the Chinese agenda is clearly more complex than simply blocking nuclear proliferation, the American agenda vis-a-vis North Korea should be multi-faceted.  The North Koreans ask for bilateral talks with the U.S.  They want to shut China out of one aspect of negotiations because they want America to compete with China for influence in Pyongyang.  They want to start a bidding war.  If Bush had opted to compete with China for influence in North Korea, this could have weakened the confidence of the Chinese that they can control NK in the future.  This lack of certainty would have dissipated the Chinese upside, and thereby magnified the downside for a nuclear NK in China's region of influence.  By refusing bilateral talks with North Korea, Bush missed an opportunity to clarify the danger to China of a nuclear NK.  A skilled President could have used bilateral talks with NK to intensify the pressure on the Chinese.

By contrast to Bush's strategic mistake, Nixon would have exploited bilateral talks with NK in order to screw China; it is straight out of the playbook by which 'Tricky Dick' shattered the Communist bloc.  Foreign leaders were known to suffer dizzy spells and often needed psychotherapy after dealing with Nixon's multi-pronged booby traps and double-bind diplomatic maneuvers (the Nixon 'Shokku' or 'screw job').  This is what true American Presidents have always done!

Effect of Iraq Invasion

How much risk is China ready to take to contain American military power?  During the Cold War, if the U.S. had invaded Iraq, the Soviets would have responded with full scale war, possibly even a nuclear launch.  We would have done the same, of course, if the Soviets had seized the Iraqi oil fields.  The Iraq invasion was no less provocative simply because there is no military power in the world today that can challenge America.  The Iraq War can provoke a passive-aggressive response from other nations--particularly the Russians and the Chinese--indirect but every bit as dire and extreme as our response would have been to a unilateral move into Iraq by the former Soviet Union.  If the Chinese are willing to accept nuclear weapons in the hands of Kim Jong Il as a strategic buffer against American military power, what other risks will they take?

James Baker,  Secretary of State to George H.W. Bush (infinitely better in foreign policy than his son George W. Bush), says that the United States is more feared around the world today because of the Iraq invasion.  I don't think that's a good thing.  We weren't exactly pacifist saints before Iraq.  Only the psychotic braintrust of Al Qaida were stupid enough to threaten the U.S.  The Chinese were already sufficiently afraid of America - we gain nothing by intensifying their fear.  In fact, by invading Iraq, we frightened China into a posture of passive-aggressive desperation, a posture that has confused their national interest in containing both North Korea and Iran.

We can add both the North Korean and the Iranian nuclear proliferation to the price tag of the American invasion of Iraq.  Iraq is the biggest strategic blunder in our history.

The need for new leadership and a new political environment in America is stark and stunningly clear.