Dick Cheney Was Right About Iraq All Along

Really, he was! That is, if we point to 1991, when he said this:

What kind of government? Should it be a Sunni government or Shi’i government or a Kurdish government or Ba’athist regime? Or maybe we want to bring in some of the Islamic fundamentalists? How long would we have had to stay in Baghdad to keep that government in place? What would happen to the government once U.S. forces withdrew? How many casualties should the United States accept in that effort to try to create clarity and stability in a situation that is inherently unstable? I think it is vitally important for a President to know when to use military force. I think it is also very important for him to know when not to commit U.S. military force. And it’s my view that the President got it right both times, that it would have been a mistake for us to get bogged down in the quagmire inside Iraq.

But the new narrative emerging as Cheney pursues his “told you so” comeback tour is that he was right all along about how he had won the Iraq war and then Obama lost it. Weigel plumbs the depths of the derpitude:

Boy, the phrase “all along” is asked to do some heavy from-the-knees lifting there. All along? The timer starts four years after the start of the Iraq war, and two years after Cheney insisted, pre-surge, that Iraqi insurgent groups were in their “last throes”? Yes, that’s the new rule.

We are to analyze the situation of 2014 by crediting the Bush administration not for the Iraq war, but for post-surge Iraq. This has been the argument since 2011, when the Obama administration failed to extend the three-year status of forces agreement that (to the satisfaction of hawks) Bush had handed to him. The theme at the time, as Charles Krauthammer put it, was that Obama was“handed a war that was won,” and he blew it.

Dreher has no time for such nonsense:

Three out of four Americans in 2011 wanted the president to withdraw all US troops from Iraq. Read the Gallup poll; how soon, and how conveniently, we forget. You cannot keep US soldiers in a hopeless war with 75 percent of the country against that policy. Gallup’s poll numbers show that even though the percentage of Americans in 2014 who believe total withdrawal was the right thing is down to 61 percent, that’s still a strong majority. President Obama did what the Iraqis would allow him to do — it’s their country, after all — and what the American people wanted him to do.

This Bush prophecy business is b.s. through and through. It’s important to say that now, because Dick Cheney, one of the principal architects of one of the worst disasters in US foreign policy and military history, is now making an “I Told You So” tour, back in Washington (a standing ovation at AEI!) spreading his wisdom to appreciative conservative audiences. It’s like they let Bernie Madoff work on Wall Street again, or returned the FEMA portfolio to Brownie.

Beard Of The Week

Gibraltar Celebrates National Day

A Gibraltarian with the beard with the colors of the Gibraltar flag is seen during during Gibraltar National Day celebrations on September 10, 2014. The day commemorates Gibraltar’s first sovereignty referendum of 1967, in which Gibraltarian voters were asked whether they wished to either pass under Spanish sovereignty, or remain under British sovereignty, with institutions of self-government. By Sergio Camacho/Getty Images.

Is The “Islamic State” Islamic?

Last night, Obama made a point of stressing that ISIS is not Islamic. The usual suspects had a field day with that line, but Ramesh Ponnuru finds it sort of pointless:

I’m not sure what presidents think they are achieving when they make this assertion. (Bush did it too, all the time.) The alternative would be to say, “They claim to act in the name of Islam, something peace-loving Muslims say is a perversion of their faith,” or just to say nothing about the point. I can’t imagine that a non-Muslim-American president convinces anyone when he tells the world what true Islam is.

So why bother talking about it at all? Maybe it’s because, as Kelly Vlahos describes, America’s post-9/11 Islamophobia never went away and a new war with an “Islamic State” is only bound to make it worse:

According to [James] Zogby’s Arab American Institute, which has been polling Americans on their views of religious and ethnic groups since the 1990’s, Americans’ dislike of Arabs and Muslims skyrocketed after 9/11 and has hardly budged since. Unfavorable ratings for Muslims have declined from a peak of 55 percent in 2010 to 45 percent in July, but at the same time, favorable ratings have plunged, from 41 percent in 2012 to 27 percent in 2014.

Republican attitudes are clearly skewing the results. When narrowed, 63 percent of Republicans had unfavorable views of Muslims, while only 21 percent had favorable views in 2014. It’s not surprising, considering how Islamophobia has attached itself to Republican politics since 9/11. … Meanwhile, well-funded fringe groups like Geller’s American Freedom Defense Initiative, have attempted to purge Muslim-Americans who have dared to “infiltrate” the White House and other high profile positions throughout federal government. They might have gone too far in 2012, however, when they suggested long-time Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin had connections with the Muslim Brotherhood.

Another recent poll illustrates how the link between Islam and violence endures in Americans’ minds:

A Pew Research Center poll released just hours before Obama’s speech showed that 50 percent of Americans see Islam as a religion that “is more likely than others to encourage violence among its believers.” The figure’s up sharply from earlier this year and is the highest since Pew started asking that question in 2002. By contrast, 39 percent of Americans say Islam doesn’t encourage violence any more than other religions — down from 50 percent in February. … Not surprisingly, conservatives and Republicans are more apt to see Islam as a more violent religion. Two-thirds of Republicans believe this, while independents and Democrats are below 50 percent.

Igor Volsky and Jack Jenkins lay out some evidence in favor the president’s contention:

President Obama’s condemnation of ISIS is backed up by a global chorus of Muslim voices that are working to rebuke’s the group’s claim on Islam. Virtually every single American Muslim organization has publicly disavowed both the ideology and the practices of ISIS, and just hours before Obama’s address, dozens of Muslim American clerics and community leaders distanced their religion from the beliefs of the terrorist extremists. “ISIS and al Qaeda represent a warped religious ideology,” Faizal Khan, imam of the Islamic Society of America mosque in Silver Spring, said during a press conference with Muslim-American leaders from Indonesia, Pakistan, Ethiopia, Sudan and Trinidad. “Either we reject this violence in the clearest possible terms, or we allow them to become the face of Islam and the world’s perception of us for years to come.”

Why Not Webb?

Senate Holds Cloture Vote On Immigration Bill

Albert Hunt imagines that Jim Webb could pose a real challenge to Clinton. Some of the reasons why:

Clinton recently said she disagreed with Obama’s decision not to intervene in the Syrian civil war. Webb warns that the Syrian opposition includes not only elements friendly to the U.S., but also the radical Islamic State forces that have wreaked mayhem there and in Iraq, murdering thousands and beheading two American journalists. Syria, he has warned, is “Lebanon on steroids.”

Clinton has close ties to Wall Street, a source of campaign funds for her and the Clinton Foundation. Since leaving office, she has received large speaking fees from hedge funds, private-equity companies and big banks such as Goldman Sachs Group Inc.

Webb, 68, has long taken a populist, anti-Wall Street stance.

Millman suspects that Webb “would make a terrible primary challenger to Clinton” but hopes he runs anyway:

Webb is a pretty rare bird.

He’s an intellectual but not an ideologue. He’s a culturally right-wing personality who recognizes that on the most important issues facing the nation, we need to move to the left – and not just on economics and foreign policy; he’s been critical of Executive power, even with his own party’s man in office, and has taken a serious hard look at reforming our appalling prison-industrial complex. He’s a strong critic of the “Washington consensus” in foreign policy who cannot by any stretch of the imagination be called either naive or a neo-isolationist. (In a deep sense, he’ll always have the outlook of a Secretary of the Navy.) Most important, he’s a genuinely independent person, the exact opposite of the careerist climber. We desperately need more people like him in our politics.

And, I think it would be very helpful on foreign policy in particular for Democratic primary voters to recognize that Clinton is all the way on the bleeding right edge of her party.

Larison’s take:

Like Millman, I think Webb is an interesting and impressive figure, and I was very pleased when he knocked George Allen out of the Senate in 2006. During his one term in office, he did some important work on veterans’ issues, and he took a principled and correct stand against Obama’s illegal war in Libya. His response to Bush’s 2007 State of the Union address was the only one I can recall from the last decade that wasn’t immediately irrelevant. His decision to run for office as a Democrat in large part because of his disgust with the Iraq war and Bush administration incompetence was one of the more meaningful rebukes to the GOP back then, and if Republican leaders were smarter they would have learned something from it. It would be good for the country and the Democratic primary process if he ran against Clinton and put some obstacles in the way of her coronation, but I’m not sure that I see any incentives for Webb to do this.

(Photo by Jamie Rose/Getty Images)

A Reluctant Defense Of Circumcision

Rhys Southan offers one, writing that the practice “hurts some people, but we can’t pretend that it doesn’t bring joy to others”:

I agree with [philosopher Brian D.] Earp and [intactivist Matthew] Hess that this is honest and significant pain, not a laughable quirk to be mocked into hiding – and this is why I can’t fully side with the intactivists. If harm is in large part subjective – and to credibly amplify the voices of a tiny minority who regret circumcision, intactivists need to admit it is – cutting is bad only for the people who find it so. It’s dishonest to claim that the joy the Jewish practice of brit milah brings its practitioners counts for nothing when most people who are circumcised for religious reasons do not grow up to think of themselves as abused. The organisation Friends of Refugees of Eastern Europe (FREE), based in New York, says that it has circumcised more than 13,000 Jewish adults who were prohibited from infant circumcision in the Soviet Union. Many of them no doubt felt harmed by not having been circumcised in their infancy. Until far more Jews and Muslims step forward to protest their own circumcisions, to me it looks more hurtful to ban religious circumcision than to leave it alone.

The “joy” of others is a strange defense for the infliction of physical pain and permanent scarring on an infant’s body. But, look: I do not favor banning it for Muslims and Jews and others. I simply favor ending it as a routine procedure for most infant boys and raising some consciousness about the men whose own bodies were permanently altered without their consent.

The Quality Of Britishness

Several readers have made this point about Britishness:

I was born in the UK, in the south-east of England, and I’ve always lived here; but my perspective on Englishness or Britishness has a specific nuance that none of your correspondents so far have mentioned. It has to do with race; particularly how those, like me, who have mixed backgrounds, identify ourselves.

BRITAIN-ATTACKS-MILITARY-MURDERMy dad came to the UK from Malaysia on his own to go to boarding school in England in the early ’60s. About five years before that he and some of his family escaped from persecution in China. He later went to university in Scotland, became a doctor, met my English mother, married, took British citizenship and settled here permanently. He’s not English; he’s a Chinese man who is British, and who has lived in both Scotland and England. And I’m not English either; if you’re talking about my race, I’m half-English, but I identify as wholly and proudly British, part of a country that embraces people whose origin is African, Pakistani, Chinese … and Welsh, Scottish, Irish and English.

I’m married to a man who was born in Wales and lives in England, with one Welsh and one English parent. How is he to choose whether he’s Welsh or English? He’s lived here in England longer, but the town of birth on his passport is on the other side of the Severn, and we spend a lot of time with family who still live there. There’s a simple answer: he’s neither. He’s British.

Separation of Scotland has more than political implications. For many of us who do not have any vote in the matter, it carries profound implications about our identity, and what our nationality means.

This strikes me as a really valuable point. Britishness surpasses nationalism as a kind of supra-nationalism. It leaves space for the other; it is a rubric – largely defined as well by the Crown – that has more virtues than might immediately appear. Maybe it takes the potential end of Britain to value it all over again. Another reader notes:

Just an observation about the uniqueness of British nationalism in the European landscape.

I am unsure of another European example of a country that has for the most part successfully integrated large disparate immigrant classes, and I have always wondered how much the concept of British helps with this. Concepts like German, French, Dutch, and the like all have the same problem of tribal affiliation.  I could live in London for 25 years and never feel I am English (I know my heritage, and it isn’t English), but I would see no problem with becoming British.  By accident or design, the United Kingdom created a national class that would seem to put it in a much better position vis a vis the US/Australia/Canada in terms of the movement of immigrants and all of the benefits and drawbacks contained therein and if the Kingdom splinters, I wonder if they will lose this as well.

(Photo: A man wearing Help the Heroes tshirt looks at floral tributes left at the scene where Drummer Lee Rigby of the 2nd Battalion was killed outside Woolwich Barracks in London on May 24, 2013. By Justin Tallis/AFP/Getty.)

#WhyIStayed, Ctd

The conversation about domestic violence continues, with several reflections on Janay Rice. Robin Givens shares a personal experience:

People ask why I didn’t leave after the first time he hit me. But you feel such inner turmoil and confusion. You want it to be only one time. And for three days after that incident I did the right thing. I said: “Don’t call me. I never want to see you again.” But then you start taking his phone calls. Then he asks to see you in person, and you say yes to that. Then you have a big giant man crying like a baby on your lap and next thing you know, you’re consoling him. You’re the protector. One minute you’re running from him, the next you’re protecting him. And being a black woman you feel you want to protect your man. You think, the black man in America has it so difficult anyway, so now you’re turning them in. It feels like the ultimate betrayal.

Feminista Jones expands on the race angle:

These events have forced the country to face difficult truths about how prevalent domestic and intimate partner violence (DV/IPV) is in America.

According to the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence, an estimated 1.3 million American women experience DV/IPV each year. Women make up 85% of the victims of DV/IPV. Despite this, most cases are never reported to the police and most women are victimized by people they know.

And for Black women, it’s an even bigger problem: Black women are almost three times as likely to experience death as a result of DV/IPV than White women. And while Black women only make up 8% of the population, 22% of homicides that result from DV/IPV happen to Black Women and 29% of all victimized women, making it one of the leading causes of death for Black women ages 15 to 35. Statistically, we experience sexual assault and DV/IPV at disproportionate rates and have the highest rates of intra-racial violence against us than any other group. We are also less likely to report or seek help when we are victimized.

Emily Bazelon considers Janay Rice’s position:

As Jodi Kantor wrote in the New York Times, “it’s not at all clear that she views herself as a victim of abuse.” Palmer married Rice the day after he was indicted for hurting her. She has stood by his side at news conferences and rallied to his cause on social media. She tried to take the burden off Rice’s shoulders in the spring when she said, “I do deeply regret the role that I played in the incident that night.”

Rice and Palmer met in high school. They have a child together. She’s probably financially dependent on him. She has a lot of reasons to back him up. But that doesn’t mean prosecutors should take her statements at face value, Gandy said, or excuse Ray Rice because Janay Rice is still with him. Maybe she’s staying because she’s afraid to leave. When domestic violence ends in murder, it’s often after the victim tries to get out of the relationship.

Caitlin Dickson focuses on the impact of Rice’s firing on his family:

Almost everyone except Janay Rice applauded the move, though questions remained as to whether, contrary to what Goodell has said, the NFL saw the second video prior to its public release. But Monday’s news, and Janay Rice’s subsequent response, raised a different set of questions for domestic violence experts that highlight just how complicated the issue of domestic violence is.

While Rice inarguably deserved to lose his job, could the NFL have done more to ensure that he gets help? By suspending him indefinitely, did the NFL do more to disassociate itself from Rice’s heinous actions than to make the player, their employee, take responsibility for them? After all, the new domestic violence policy does not require offenders to go through any kind of counseling before they can petition for reinstatement after a year. What incentive does Rice have to change his behavior?

Dr. Benjamin S. Carson, the controversial GOP pundit flirting with a presidential run, describes another reason why some abuse victims stay:

There are situations in which domestic abuse is so violent and dangerous that nothing short of a total separation from the abuser is the only way of assuring the physical and emotional safety of the victim(s). But there are situations, especially where there is strong spiritual and community support, in which the best option may be counseling or mediation or other less drastic measures. This does not in any way excuse the act itself, but it may help prevent further harm: the harm caused by children growing up without a parent; the harm of losing economic opportunities that would help to strengthen the family; the harm to the community of destroying a family unit. While I firmly believe that individual freedom is essential to a healthy democracy, I also believe that a strong family is the foundational unit of a healthy society.

Often the knee-jerk reaction to the shock of violence and other betrayals of trust within relationships is for the aggrieved party to leave and never look back. In the heat of the moment separating two highly emotional people might be the best option until their emotions cool. But to imply that a woman or man is displaying weakness by staying in a relationship, or conversely, showing strength by leaving, is far too simplistic. Often it takes great strength to overcome difficult issues in a relationship. There should be a determination on the part of both parties– as well as sometimes courts, counselors, pastors and other community resources – as to whether the relationship is worth saving, and if so, what steps should be taken to try and heal the wounds and rebuild strong bonds of trust. When a family is involved the stakes are too high not to try.

The Case For War: Known Unknowns

Frum points to one big question the president didn’t address in last night’s speech:

The question before the nation is, “What is the benefit of this war to America and to Americans?” That was the question the speech left unanswered. And the ominous suspicion left behind is that the question was unanswered because it is unanswerable—at least, not answerable in any terms likely to be acceptable to the people watching the speech and paying the taxes to finance the fight ahead.

But Daniel DePetris can think of a few more:

President Obama announced that the United States will be getting far more involved in Syria’s civil war—accelerating the U.S. train-and-equip program for moderate Syrian rebels who are fighting on two fronts (against ISIL and Bashar al-Assad) and whose capabilities pale in comparison to the Islamic State.  If Congress agrees to the president’s request, $500 million will be available for the Defense Department as seed-money to supplement the smaller training program that the Central Intelligence Agency has reportedly been running for over a year.

Yet the question must be asked: is it too late for U.S. assistance to make a difference?

The Free Syrian Army is perhaps at its most fragile point since Syria’s civil war began, and the moderates have been begging for heavy U.S. military equipment for years now.  Will $500 million be enough money, and if not, is the president willing to double down on his strategy and expend more taxpayer funds to improve its chances of success?

Byron York lists ways things could go wrong:

[W]hat if the Iraqi government turns out to be not as inclusive as the president hopes, at the same time that the U.S. military is deeply involved in the fight against the Islamic State? “One of [the dangers] is that the Iraqi government fails to come together in any meaningful way,” Peter Wehner, a former Bush White House official, said in an email exchange. “It may be that the government comes together but the country does not. That is, the Shia-Sunni split is impossible to repair, at least at this moment. It may be that a new government is formed but the leader himself is weak, or too sectarian, or too incompetent to wage an effective war against ISIS. It may be that the president increases our commitment in Iraq, but (unlike George W. Bush with the surge) not enough. The danger is that having re-engaged in Iraq, we don’t succeed.” The bottom line is that — by the president’s own reasoning — if a genuinely inclusive government fails to materialize, the U.S. mission, no matter how far-reaching, will fail.

Fred Kaplan is relatively supportive of Obama’s approach but shares that concern:

Obama made very clear that this battle requires active participation by the Saudis, Turks, and Europeans. But the roles and missions haven’t yet been outlined; the commitments aren’t quite carved in concrete. The plan has a chance of succeeding in Iraq because the new government, formed by Haider al-Abadi, seems inclusive, embraced by Sunnis and Shiites, for the moment—but it could fall apart with the bombing of a single mosque or a marketplace, and then what? Will it look like the Americans are advising and bombing on behalf of a Shiite regime? Will the other Sunni nations back away, fearing the association?

Tomasky tries to strike an optimistic note:

There are a thousand ways it can go wrong. But what if it goes right? And how about—here’s a crazy thought—we all hope that it does? And not for Obama’s sake: This gambit will certainly—certainly—define his foreign-policy legacy, but it’s not for that reason that we should hope it all works. It’s for the sake of Iraqis and Syrians, and ultimately, for us. Obama didn’t communicate every aspect of this fight effectively in the speech, which was too short and too vague. But the goals are the right ones. It’s a strategy, and he didn’t wear a tan suit.

In Cassidy’s view, the address signified Obama relinquishing his foreign-policy realism:

President Obama, long a reluctant warrior, has committed the United States to a risky and open-ended military campaign, the ultimate consequences of which are difficult to predict. Confronted with popular outrage at the beheadings of James Foley and Steven Sotloff, and political opponents keen to exploit any hint of weakness or indecision, the realist has relented. … In pledging to “ultimately destroy” ISIS, he adopted the maximalist language of John McCain and Dick Cheney. Once a President issues pledges of this sort, he has an enormous incentive to try to follow through on them, even if that involves further military escalation. The President, who only last year, at West Point, talked about winding down the “war on terrorism,” has come a long way in a short time.

John Dickerson wonders what that means in terms of the broader debate over American power and foreign policy:

The president didn’t just start a new military phase of the war on terrorism; he started a new round in the foreign policy conversation. He was brought to office by a war-weary nation. Now the polls suggest the nation is tired of him. For the moment that means the country is looking for a more assertive foreign policy. Whether that is a permanent new condition depends on future violence and success. But at the moment the incentive is for most politicians to make declarations of strength to distinguish themselves from the unpopular incumbent. The presidential candidates in 2016 will be particularly emboldened, since they traditionally run as an antidote to the perceived deficiencies of the current occupant. That’s certainly the way Sen. Barack Obama won office. If his overcorrection was born in his simplistic response to the deficiencies of his predecessor, then judging by the way this current foreign policy debate is going so far, it likely contains the seeds of the next overcorrection.

Michael Scherer thought Obama’s tone of “I can handle this” was well-chosen:

Chances are good the U.S. will win the military fight, and the spooks seem optimistic at the moment about preventing another homeland attack in retribution. But there will also be a cost. Another goal of his second term was to wind down the eternal conflict his predecessor called the “war on terror.” Now that won’t happen anytime soon. The war against the Islamic State of Iraq and Greater Syria, which Obama described as neither Islamic nor a state, will be a long one. As with past painful conflicts, there is no end date, and no clear metric on which to declare victory. He said he will “degrade and ultimately destroy” the threat. But the destroy part could very well come years after he leaves office.

Walter Russell Mead accuses the president of revealing his strategy to the enemy:

As it happens, we agree with the President that American ground troops aren’t the answer to our ISIS problems, and if by some ghastly mischance we ended up in the Oval Office we would be no more eager to send ground forces into this war than he is. But we wouldn’t want our enemies to know that—and we would also be aware that war is, above all other things, unpredictable. You take that first step and you just don’t know what comes next. If things don’t go as planned, the President could find himself in a position where all those “no ground troops” pledges could haunt him; certainly many of his critics will begin to rake him over the coals about the number of advisers and others that he must now inevitably send into harm’s way.

It’s a sign of the President’s tone deafness (and also substance deafness) when it comes to the military that he just doesn’t seem to get this. Telling the enemy that you are going to be out of Afghanistan by date X, or that you won’t put more than Y thousand troops in the country, or that you won’t put any boots on the ground makes life much, much easier for the bad guys. Indeed, in most wars this is exactly the kind of information that the enemy is most eager to get—this is why there are spies.

And to Matt Duss, the speech reflected Obama’s overarching foreign policy principle that “American power is demonstrated not by acting impetuously and demanding that others fall in line, but by working to develop and strengthen international consensus on a range of issues, and then mobilizing that consensus behind cooperative action”:

This is clearly not going to satisfy those in Washington who believe that American leadership is best shown through the application of ordnance and deploying of troops. “By [the] end of [the] speech, POTUS powerfully embraces cause of ‘freedom’ but commits only another 475 troops to the cause,” tweeted the Washington Institute for Near East Policy’s Robert Satloff. Well, the Bush administration embraced the cause of freedom, and committed over 100,000 troops to the cause. And one of the reasons Obama was up there speaking last night is because we’re still cleaning up the mess. Speaking of Bush, I should mention that one thing that George W. Bush got right about the Middle East is that illegitimate, unaccountable, undemocratic regimes empower extremists.

A Pragmatism Too Far?

It’s extremely hard to reconcile the events of the past month or so with the rationale of the Obama presidency. And that’s what makes this capitulation to hysteria so profoundly depressing. I can see the simple pragmatism behind it: the president under-estimated the strength and tenacity of these maniacs, and feared they could make further gains, plunging the region into a new turmoil. The media and the elites all jumped into full metal panic mode and created a powerful momentum for action. In fact, the elite consensus in favor of attacking ISIS was, until last night, at least, eerily reminiscent of the elite consensus in favor of going to war in Iraq in 2003 – without the year or so of debate. If US-ATTACKS-9/11-ANNIVERSARY-OBAMAyou’re Obama, you do not believe you can really solve this problem, but you need to do something, both to stave off possible disaster, to guard against potential ISIS expansion, and to try and rescue the Iraqi “state” one more time. So you rely on air-power, you corral the Saudis to help train and fund Sunni opposition to ISIS, you funnel some arms to the “moderate” Syrian rebels … and hope for the best.

What this misses in its flexibility is that it comes at the cost of profound incoherence. Presidencies need a grand narrative if they are to succeed. Obama’s was a simple one: to slowly rescue the US from the economic and foreign policy nadir that Bush-Cheney bequeathed us. We would slowly climb back out of the hole of fiscal recklessness and financial corruption into a saner, calmer period of slow but steady growth. We would slowly de-leverage from counter-productive over-reach in the war on Islamist terrorism. We would end two wars. We would begin nation-building at home – in the form of universal health insurance and badly needed infrastructure improvement. Above all, we would not be jerked back and forth by Islamist fanatics abroad, seeking to chart a course of steady strategic retrenchment.

Now, of course, this was never going to be a linear path. I feared back in 2009 that withdrawing from Iraq might look a lot like withdrawal from Vietnam. That it took place without a bloodbath or national humiliation was a triumph of optics and luck and bribery. But I was never under any illusion that the “surge” had succeeded in its own terms. We had no guarantee that Iraq would not return almost instantly to the sectarian distrust, hatred and violence that have been integral to its existence for decades. Kurdistan could work – but the rest remains ungovernable, except by tyranny and terror. And so yet another spasm of Shi’a-Sunni violence seemed inevitable to me. But at least, we would no longer be sitting in the middle.

I don’t buy for a second the lame idea that if the US had kept a residual force there – despite Baghdad’s express wishes – we would have avoided the current turmoil. We couldn’t control or end it with a hundred thousand of the best-trained troops in the world. What chance would 10,000 advisers have to counter the weight of history and the cycle of revenge? So there would come a point at which Iraq would implode again and the US might be tempted to intervene. I naïvely thought no sane American, after the Iraq War, would ever support that. I foolishly believed we would not be able to instantly erase – like an Etch-A-Sketch – all that we so painfully learned in that catastrophe.

What I under-estimated was the media’s ability to generate mass panic and hysteria and the Beltway elite’s instant recourse to the language of war. I believed that Obama was stronger than this, that he could actually resist this kind of emotional spasm and speak to us like grown-ups about what we can and cannot do about a long, religious war in the Middle East, that doesn’t threaten us directly. But he spoke to us like children last night, assuming the mantle of the protective daddy we had sought in Bush and Cheney, evoking the rhetoric he was elected to dispel.

What the president doesn’t seem to understand is that this dramatic U-turn isn’t just foolish on its own national security terms; it is devastating to him politically. He is now playing on Cheney’s turf, not his own. His core supporters, like yours truly, regarded our evolution from that Cheney mindset one of Obama’s key achievements – and he tossed it away last night almost casually. He committed himself and us to a victory we cannot achieve in two countries we cannot control with the aid of allies we cannot trust. And, worse, he has done so by evading the key Constitutional requirement that a declaration of war be made by the Congress. He is actually relying on the post-9/11 authorization of military force against al Qaeda in Afghanistan to wage war in Syria (in violation of international law) and in Iraq.

This is not just a betrayal of a core principle of his presidency – a restoration of normality – it is a rebuke to his own statements. This is what the president said last year:

We cannot use force everywhere that a radical ideology takes root; and in the absence of a strategy that reduces the wellspring of extremism, a perpetual war — through drones or Special Forces or troop deployments — will prove self-defeating, and alter our country in troubling ways.

His speech last night was an argument for doing exactly what he said we should not do a year ago. He has made no attempt to explain why he has completely changed his mind – except to react emotionally to a vile off-shoot of another Sunni insurgency in Iraq. This does not only mean his administration no longer has a coherent narrative, it also means he is utterly hostage to forces abroad he cannot control. His refusal to go to Congress for a prolonged open-ended campaign in Syria is also utterly inconsistent with his decision a year ago to go to Congress before even considering punitive air-strikes in response to Assad’s use of chemical weapons.

If he believed he needed to go to Congress for that limited engagement, how on earth can he argue with a straight face that he does not need to now? It makes no sense – and no one in the administration has been able to make a persuasive case for this walking contradiction.

That seems to me to leave us with a small chance to nip this in the bud. I believe that the administration needs to get direct authorization from the Congress to re-enter the Iraqi theater and enter the Syrian one by October 7 – 60 days since the first air-strike. Again, this is completely consistent with Obama’s previous positions. We have to break the war machine’s ability to do what it will without any constitutional checks upon it. We need to demand a full debate and a serious declaration of war. We are, after all, planning at least a three-year campaign in Syria, without the Syrian government’s approval, and in violation of international law. How can we do that without direct Congressional authority – especially when the administration has declared that ISIS is not a threat to the homeland?

Maybe there are enough Democratic and Republican skeptics in the Senate to force a vote. Even if they lose, such a vote would at least force these cowards to own a war they are acquiescing in, to share the full responsibility and face the voters, and to be subsequently accountable for its failures or modest success. And if an open-ended war against an entity that has not attacked the US or plans to do so is not something that the Congress should approve, then we really are an empire, and not a republic.  We are an empire with an executive branch that controls war and peace, that launches covert and overt wars, that keeps the US on permanent offense across the globe, creating as much terror as it prevents, and entangling us in one more sectarian vortex of fickle friends and mortal foes.

I refuse to cave into depressed acquiescence to this machine, even as it has now captured the one president who promised to restrain it. The only way to do this is to build a strong campaign – not least among Obama supporters – that no war be continued past October 7 without full Congressional debate and formal authorization.

Are we able to prevent the US from entering another nightmarish engagement in a part of the world that rewards no one?

Repeat after me: Yes. We. Can.

(Photo: US President Barack Obama stands at the Pentagon in Washington, DC, September 11, 2014, for a moment of silence marking the 13th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on the United States. By Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images.)