My blogging will be light to nonexistent until next week; Biggest Guy reports Monday, and to be blunt – I have more important things to do while he’s here.

Don’t kill each other or blow anything up while I’m away, please, and enjoy the work of the coauthors here…

Here’s what I see from my client’s window:

Here’s what I think about every time I look:

And here’s what I’m thinking about today…

May this anniversary be one of hope – hope for a year with less hate, a year where we look back on shared tragedy and realize that we also share a future, and that we all must share a planet.

Watching the Petraus/Crocker hearings and responses had me thinking about what they reminded me of…

…and I realized that it was really Noh drama:

By tradition, Noh actors and musicians never rehearse for performances together. Instead, each actor, musician, and choral chanter practices his or her fundamental movements, songs, and dances independently or under the tutelage of a senior member of the school. Thus, the tempo of a given performance is not set by any single performer but established by the interactions of all the performers together.

What we’re really watching isn’t any kind of real debate – it’s really a drama, preplanned out on both sides, and really much more about style and a kind of formal abstraction than about anything resembling reality.

Here’s the Center For American Progress on Petraeus’ testimony. Prepared in advance, they argue against points Petraeus doesn’t make.

Here’s Petraeus’ testimony; read it for yourself.

It’s really about positioning public arguments – seeding the public discourse.

The reality is – what, exactly? We’re lost in a forest of statistics of dubious provenance and facts rooted in rhetorical claims – on both sides, no doubt. We make a decision based largely on faith, and we choose who and what to have faith in.

And watching the hearings on my laptop, and reading about Moveon’s arrogant and stupid ad (…bought at a discount? Bob Owens wonders…) and then watching the disrespectful and foolish Code Pink demonstrators who fancy themselves the voice of the antiwar movement – no, the voice of the American people – I am wondering just who the dramaturg on the other side really is, and exactly what play they think this is and why they think I should have faith in them.

You can support the Victory Caucus by signing the online petition.

And you can support VictoryPAC by making a donation here:

VictoryPAC is a nonaligned PAC – which I control – that will support Congressional candidates who don’t support immediate withdrawal in Iraq; it will support both candidates who support the Administration position as well as those who propose interesting alternatives that don’t involve simply giving up and going home.

Do both – it’s one of those moments when you can feel the balance shifting.

Not much time to blog today – my latest project is demo-ing today at the Inc 500 Conference in Chicago – but I didn’t want this post by Steve Smith to go unremarked. I know my opinion of the Netroots doesn’t matter because I’m a turncoat warmonger and all that. But here’s what unabashed leftie Smith has to say:

Huh? Well, feel free to rant away, Mr. Stoller, but it wouldn’t hurt to get a f**king clue. Lefty bloggers are great at raising money for causes, for garnering attention to worthy causes, and for publicizing dark horse challengers, but on a tactical level, they have all the sense of a cage of spastic ferrets being harassed by a deranged hive of wasps. Bloggers can get a Ned Lamont nominated, but actually electing him, or avoiding doing really airheadish things that rile up the opposition, is another thing entirely.

Stoller’s notion that blogs doesn’t have “top-down” organizational control is technically correct (for one thing, traffic-wise, political writing is a relatively insignificant part of the blogosphere), but it still obscures the very negative role the Queen Beez play in determining what the agenda is for the rest of the non-MSM. If anything, it’s “pretty stupid” for Stoller to pretend that within the lefty blogosphere, there aren’t about a dozen bloggers who link almost exclusively to each other, who generate 99% of the press coverage, and thereby set the agenda for the rest of us.

Like it or not, that exclusivity can be a strength, since it keeps us on message and magnifies our influence, but it also backfires on occasion, as Mr. Drum points out in the post referenced above. Depending on the season, we are told by the Queen Beez that we have to elect more Democrats to Congress, no matter what position they take, or we are told that we have to purge the “Bush Dog” Demos at the first chance, or we just sit back and make snarky quips about “Friedman Units” and post photoshopped pics of Joe Lieberman. With that sort of de facto leadership, it’s no wonder we feel like we get snookered at every turn.

I pretty much agree; I think the influence of the netroots is vastly overstated (see: Snakes on A Plane) by the central position they have in the Big Media lens.

It doesn’t mean they (we) have no influence, and it doesn’t mean these tools aren’t useful or moving to change politics. But as long as bloggers are for sale, the reality of a ‘movement’ is tantalizing but just out of reach.

Commenter Beard sent an email asking my view of the recent flurry of reports that Bush is serious – darn serious – about attacking Iran before he leaves office.

My sense of humor is pretty dark these days, but the picture that came to mind was Bush sitting on the stand on January 20 2009, holding up his hand, and picking up a cell phone and telling the staffer on the other side “Go for it! Bomb the c**p out of them!” and then smiling at his successor. “How do like that,” in the words of not-yet-ex-Senator Craig.

But it’s actually a serious issue, and let me take a moment to lay out my thoughts.

Yeah, there’s a whole lot of public-intellectual chatter about Iran right now. Go see Daniel Drezner’s roundup for a good summary of it all.And we are getting to some critical points in the path toward understanding how serious Iran is about making nukes.

Mohamed ElBaradei just gave an interview to Der Spiegel in which he said:

ElBaradei said there are positive signs that Iran is willing to avoid confrontation over its nuclear development program.

“We should know by November, or December at the latest, whether the Iranians will keep their promises,” he said. “If they don’t, Tehran will have missed a great opportunity — possibly the last one.”

When a UN diplomat talks like that, my ears do prick up a bit. (As a side note, ElBaradei is worried about global warming, human misery, and nuclear proliferation – in that order –

“We pay completely inadequate attention to the important threats, the inhuman living conditions of billions of people, climate change and the potential for nuclear holocaust,” ElBaradei said.

Dude, I’d say you have quite enough to do managing the nuclear holocaust part of the problem…)

My own position on Iran hasn’t changed much in the year or so since I wrote this:

Could we smash the Iranian oil infrastructure, depriving them of cash and Europe and China of fuel? Of course. Child’s play. Could we drop the Iranian electricity grid, possibly slowing the centrifuges to a halt? Sure. Could we destroy the Iranian army, and do a smash-and-grab raid on the suspected weapons development sites? Probably.

Then what?

The point, in my view, of invading Iraq was largely to give pause to the leaders of Iran and Saudi Arabia. See ‘strategic failure’ to discuss how that’s worked out.

Is Iran a problem? A really, really big one? You betcha.

Is it one we need to panic about? Not yet.

On the other hand, if I wanted to negotiate with someone – whether they were based in Tehran, Paris, or Bonn – I’d say that making the consequences of a failed negotiation even more prominent than they might be in reality isn’t necessarily a bad thing. So as a posturing position leading to talking, I can say that I’d probably do much the same things as I’m seeing being done here. Float some trial balloons, create some ambiguity about what I might do.

There are two problems with that posture, however. Serious ones.

The first is that in building visible momentum toward conflict as a negotiating move, you risk being pulled along by events and your own momentum (see “World War One”). I’d rate this risk as high enough to worry about a bit.

The second is that you have to be taken seriously. Waving a wooden gun doesn’t accomplish much. And the reality is that if Bush gave the order to bomb – as I said back in 2006 – he’d immediately be impeached. Absent some facts not in evidence that could be shown to Congress and that would be strong enough to embarrass the wobblers, he doesn’t have and isn’t likely to get the support. If I – the last of the red-hot Iraq apologists – feel that way, imagine how the rest of the U.S. feels.

Bush has shown himself to be surprisingly competent at diplomacy – yeah, sorry about the keyboard – but the gradual progress and lack of hysteria about North Korea, the growing move in Europe to align the major powers more closely with the US, and the gradual chipping away at UN resistance to significant sanctions on Iran seem to show that the White House is – somehow – keeping the pieces in play diplomatically.

But until I see a meaningful opening to talks to Tehran that fails spectacularly, or until Iran oversteps militarily somehow (and they have been pretty canny as well), I just can’t imagine a surprise attack by the US. And I’ve got quite an imagination, to quote Benny Noakes.

The Israelis are another story…for another time. Time to board my flight home, and I’ll leave you all to think a bit more about that.

“Trust in my judgment of the book. Besides, you’re gonna hang no matter what it says in there, ’cause I am the law, and the law is the handmaiden of justice. Get a rope.

-Judge Roy Bean

Update: Check out former SF Operator Uncle Jimbo’s overview of Haditha…

Today the NYT has an article about Haditha. Here’s the lede:

Last December, when the Marine Corps charged four infantrymen with killing Iraqi civilians in Haditha, Iraq, in 2005, the allegation was as dark as it was devastating: after a roadside bomb had killed their buddy, a group of marines rampaged through nearby homes, massacring 24 innocent people.

In Iraq and in the United States, the killings were viewed as cold-blooded vengeance. After a perfunctory military investigation, Haditha was brushed aside, but once the details were disclosed, the killings became an ugly symbol of a difficult, demoralizing war. After a fuller investigation, the Marines promised to punish the guilty.

I’d laugh if I wasn’t so disgusted.Here’s the deal. If – as the New York Times appears to do – you believe in the process of law, you don’t get to make determinations like those in these paragraphs until the process has worked its way along and reached a conclusion.

You can argue – as many did during Jim Crow – that the process is deeply flawed, and point out the flaws, as many did. Here’s the best the Times can do:

Experts on military law said the difficulty in prosecuting the marines for murder is understandable, given that action taken in combat is often given immunity under the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

Something bad clearly happened at Haditha. Was it a crime? I doubt that we’ll ever know, and the sad truth is that this – like the millions of other cases of civilian death in wartime – will rest primarily on the consciences of the young men who pulled the triggers.

But ask yourself this – do they deserve this?

“We can’t say those guys didn’t commit a crime,” said Michael F. Noone Jr., a retired Air Force lawyer and law professor at Catholic University of America. “We can only say that after an investigation, there was not sufficient evidence to prosecute.”

The Times actually has some sensible quotes, which it buries mid-article:

“It certainly erodes that sense that what they did was wrong,” Elizabeth L. Hillman, a legal historian who teaches military law at Rutgers University School of Law at Camden, said of the outcomes so far. “When the story broke, it seemed like we understood what happened; there didn’t seem to be much doubt. But we didn’t know.”

It appears that the Times, facing the fact that they don’t know what really happened at Haditha has made a simple decision. The Marines must hang, no matter what it says in the book.

The article was by Paul Von Zielbauer; there’s a list of his stories here. Note the one that’s titled “Investigator Urges Dismissal Of Charges Against Marine” (behind the paywall).

The Times’ Public editor can be emailed here, I’d encourage it.

…if that doesn’t get some Google traffic, I’ll sell my shares…

More seriously. I don’t know enough to have an opinion on what Sen. Craig did or what the legal fallout of it was or ought to be; I’ll leave that to people with more experience than me in hot men’s bathrooms and courtrooms (and, especially hot, men’s bathrooms in courtrooms!).

But I’ll come out here and say that Craig should resign now. Not in response to his legal issue, but for his first response to it.

According to the police report, the senator presented a business card and asked, “What do you think about that?”

I’ll call that the Lindsay Lohan Defense, after Ms. Lohan:

Here’s the money quote from Lindsay Lohan during her night of drunken partying and driving:

“I can’t get in trouble. I’m a celebrity. I can do whatever the f**k I want.”

What do I think about that, Senator? I think one piece of 8-1/2″ x 11″ paper with your signature on it could go a long way toward making you right with God and the American People. Of course, you’d have to give up the business cards…

The elephant in the room in political discourse these days is, of course, Iraq.

It’s a combination of who to blame for the current situation, and what to do going forward. It’s made far more complex by the fact that Iraq is as much an internal political issue as it is an external issue; a consequence, I think of our somewhat foolish belief that internal arrangements of power matter far more than our circumstances in the world.

But that’s the reality we face, and to deny it is as stupid as to deny that the tides will come in whether or not we whip them.

I’ve been wrestling for months with my own position, trying to find a position where I didn’t feel like a fool and waiting to see whether events would clarify things for me.

I haven’t and they haven’t.To be blunt, all of the significant positions seem somewhat foolish to me.

The “stay the course regardless” position is foolish, first and foremost because those playing that hand don’t have the chips to stay in the game. There is not today enough political commitment in the US to see another three years of the war as it is through, and I can’t imagine the war as it is lasting less than three years. It is also foolish because the rationale behind the war has lost its strategic heart – the reason to do it – and no one has yet come up with a meaningful replacement. So we’re playing Irish sit-down except with guns and bombs.

The “get the hell out now” position is more foolish, because it – first and foremost – implies that the world is really a hall of mirrors where all the motion and action is simply a reflection of our own. If we come home and sit quietly, this position says at root, then things will be OK. There is a variant, which I call the ‘magic underpants’ model, in which we will pull out quickly and then – SOMETHING WILL HAPPEN – and then all will be better. What, exactly, is something? And while I’ve acknowledged that the current war is a strategic failure, it may not be the worst failure we can have strategically – and while it is not a tactical success, there are tactical outcomes I can readily imagine that are a lot worse for the Iraqi people and for us.

Then there is the “walk a tightrope” position, which somehow believes there is a variant – a twist to the left with the fingers crossed behind the back and an over-the horizon force ready to bomb the crap out of people and fastrope out of helicopters and Do Some Damage – kind of withdrawal which is not really a withdrawal. I was in high school, trying to convince reluctant girls to have sex with me the last time I used arguments like that. “Yeah, it’s sort of like sex, but not really, because…we have most of our clothes on!!”

Look, the people taking those positions are serious people; I’m not choosing Djerejian or Lind as punching bags, because they are no one’s punching bags.

This last position is close to, but sadly too far from the honorable position, which is to look at what we’re doing in Iraq, see that it’s a part of a larger conflict, and set out a clear discussion of what exactly it is that we mean to accomplish, how we’ll do it, and how we’ll know it’s working. It’s a different path that doesn’t involve threats we can’t back up, total abdication of responsibility, or lying to the world and to ourselves about what we’re really doing. It’s the place I’d really like to be, and a political movement I’d like to be a part of.

And the real problem is, if you’re just a random citizen like me, that you need to go stand with someone else to have any say in what happens in a situation like this. Where I want to stand is with some sensible people; people who don’t give a damn about domestic politics and who care deeply about how this plays out in the world more than they care about how it plays out in their own careers in the commentariat, academe or politics.

If anyone has found those people, please point them out to me in the comments.

So I’ve got to pick a position, and pick a group to stand with.

Bluntly, after a whole lot of thought, I’ll stand with the “stay the course” folks. Yeah, not a deep shock, but not a gimme decision either. Why do I take that position? There are a few reasons.

First, and foremost, the other side is evil – I have no other word for people who slice people’s necks and videotape it as a boast and a threat. What’s our military might for if not to occasionally kill evil people, and make other people wonder about the evolutionary advantage of choosing evil over good? If you listen to the troops in Iraq, the sheer badness of the people we’re fighting over there – the ones who set off truck bombs in marketplaces crowded with women and children – is one of their main motivations to keep going. I see no reason to disagree with that. I do recognize that we’re fighting a bunch of factions there, and when we’re just fighting the one that fights us, as opposed to the one that sets off bombs in laden gasoline tanker trucks in the middle of neighborhoods, I’ll be happy to reconsider.

Secondly, because while the other positions I know of – ‘quit’ and ‘kind of quit’ – are really hard to back away from (it’s really hard to convince a retreating army to attack), it’ll be a lot easier to back away from “we’ve decided to win” when and if someone comes up with a better plan that gets us to where we want to go and costs a lot less in lives and treasure.

Third, because who knows – we just might win while we’re figuring out what else we’d like to do.

Fourth, because as a negotiating position “we’re going to win, thank you very much” is pretty much impossible to beat. Try negotiating with someone while telling them “My wife says I can only stay and negotiate with you for fifteen minutes, and if we can’t make a deal, I have to give you what you want.” Almost all wars are won at the negotiating table. the desired outcome of this war is a negotiated settlement. How the hell do people think they can make a successful negotiation out of “you have until September and then we quit”??

Fifth and last, because I look at the people on different sides of the argument, and I just can’t stand with most of them. The ones I can stand tend – almost entirely – to be the Victor Hansens, the Blackfives, the Norm Gerases. There are good people struggling with the issue on the other side – Phil Carter comes to mind immediately – but you know, most of the people beating the drums for withdrawal are just doing it for reasons that I can’t make sense of. Yes, they want to save lives, but I don’t see a historic awareness that goes past Howard Zinn. When I talk to them about the likely consequences of withdrawal, their response tends to be Bush broke it, it’s his problem. Well, I helped him, I guess, and fixing it is partly my problem as well.

And I honestly can’t see either of the Standard Positions as leading Iraq – or the Middle East, or the Islamist/western conflict – any closer to resolution.

So we stand here with our finger in the leak – in the bloody wound – and we try and keep the bleeding to a level where the patient doesn’t die while we look for a better plan.

And I have no illusions about the condition of the patient – as Iraqis continue to vote with their feet (one thing I will give the antiwar commentariat props for is their push to open the doors to Iraqi refugees. As much as I wish they would and could stay and fight, I am the last person – from the safety of my pricey New York hotel room – to block the door).

But as long as every other position looks worse, the position to take is the best one available to you. And so I’ll take a stand, and start doing something about it.

Because one other reason for my taking this position is that it is fundamentally the only one where some of the facts on the ground can be changed. American public opinion – which is the strongest card the opponents of the war have to play – is volatile right now. And maybe a large enough chorus of small voices could help shift the needle enough to matter.

So it’s time to start singing, I guess.

There are some other things we need to do, as well. We need to look at how we can make this war far less expensive – less expensive in lives – ours and Iraqi noncombatants – and treasure. While we are doing far better on the ground in much of Iraq, we’re doing a horrible job here. One thing I’d love to see would be some Truman Committee hearings here; here’s someplace where John McCain could spend some his remaining political capital, and maybe build the place he deserves in history. Something else for the vets to request while they are in Washington.

Meanwhile, I’ll go stand behind them, as I stand behind them in almost all things.