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While the economy has taken center stage in the final weeks of the 2008 campaign, Iraq remains a critical issue as well — the war costs billions of dollars each month, and costs American and Iraqi lives, limbs, and health as well.

The “Responsible Plan to End the War in Iraq” was developed by congressional candidates Darcy Burner, Donna Edwards, and others as a campaign platform and legislative agenda. For more on the plan — which seeks both to end the war in Iraq, and prevent failures like it in the future — follow the link and/or see my blog posts about it.  The plan calls for

• Ending U.S. military action in Iraq
• Using U.S. diplomatic power
• Addressing humanitarian concerns
• Restoring our Constitution
• Restoring our military
• Restoring independence to the media
• Creating a new, U.S.-centered energy policy

…with specific legislative proposals for each goal.  Here’s a quick rundown on how some of the candidates who developed the plan are doing.

• Donna Edwards (MD-04): an incumbent by now, and a prohibitive favorite — no Republican has received more than 25% of the vote in this district since 1994.
• Eric Massa (NY-29): Up 51-44, (10/7/08, SurveyUSA)
• Tom Perriello (VA-05): Down 42-55 (10/7/08, SurveyUSA); has gained 12 points in 2 months
• Chellie Pingree (ME-01): Up 44-33 (10/2/08, PolitickerME);  22% undecided!
• Jared Polis (CO-02): “heavy favorite” (9/10/08, PolitickerCO)
• George Fearing (WA-04): can’t find recent poll information; debate on 10/16 attended by about 200 people (TriCityHerald.com)
• Larry Byrnes (FL-14): out earlier this summer.
• Stephen Harrison (NY-13): out in September primary (9/9/08, BeyondThePolls.com).
• Sam Bennett (PA-15): “Republican favored” (CQ Politics); recent mistake about the solvency of two banks in a televised debate was blurred and muted at Bennett’s request by the broadcasting TV station — probably not a good development.
• Darcy Burner (WA-08): Up 49-44 (10/14/08, DCCC); had been down 44-54 (9/9/08, SUSA).

Obviously, all of them deserve our help and many are in close races. To help with a non-tax-deductible donation, go to the Responsible Plan ActBlue web site and give to any or all of them.

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UPDATE, EDITS, 10/16; Bennett, Harrison, Fearing information updated.

This is kind of brilliant:

The total cost of the Iraq War will be over $3 trillion, according to Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz and Harvard public finance professor Linda Bilmes.  That’s enough to buy a new Toyota Prius for every household in America.

Here are some other things we could’ve done for the price of the Iraq War.

…and each “War or Car?” blog post is an example. Some recent ones:

10/02/2008: Buy a California home every 20 seconds since Greenspan promoted alternative mortgages
09/29/2008: Give every American a community college economics degree
09/26/2008: Make everybody in Philly a Scottish baron
09/25/2008: Buy each panda an Arleigh Burke class destroyer
09/13/2008: Build Large Hadron Colliders all the way up the West Coast
09/11/2008: Put a tank staffed by Petraeus duplicates on every square mile of Afghanistan:

For the price of the Iraq War, we could’ve hunted down Osama Bin Laden by placing a fully equipped M1 Abrams battle tank on every square mile of Afghanistan and staffing them entirely with duplicates of General Petraeus.

The heavily armored 67-ton M1 Abrams battle tank, which carries four crew members, is the principal combat tank of the American armed forces. A fully equipped M1 Abrams costs $4.30 million. General David Petraeus, who oversaw all US forces in Iraq, earns $180,000 per year. The area of Afghanistan is 251,772 square miles Putting an M1 Abrams on each square mile of Afghanistan and staffing them entirely with Petraeus duplicates drawing a salary equal to his would cost $1.26 trillion, which is less than half of Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes’ estimate of $3 trillion for the cost of the Iraq War.

I didn’t get to see the knockout blow by Obama last night I confess I’d been crossing my fingers for; instead, the debate was a vivid demonstration of how narrow the field of debate is, and/or how unwilling Obama is to run outside the hash marks and set up some of that change he’s been promising. Examples (debate transcript via the New York Times):

I actually believe that we need missile defense, because of Iran and North Korea and the potential for them to obtain or to launch nuclear weapons  [...]

Senator McCain is absolutely right that the violence has been reduced as a consequence of the extraordinary sacrifice of our troops and our military families.  [...]

And to countries like Georgia and the Ukraine, I think we have to insist that they are free to join NATO if they meet the requirements, and they should have a membership action plan immediately to start bringing them in.  [...]

[Iran has] gone from zero centrifuges to 4,000 centrifuges to develop a nuclear weapon.

To the contrary: if we’re ever hit by a nuclear weapon in the U.S., it will almost certainly arrive here not by missile, but in a container on a ship, truck, or train. The surge didn’t reduce violence, the successful conclusion to ethnic cleansing and al-Sadr’s decision to pocket his gains did. Fast-tracking Georgia into NATO is of less than no value to American interests compared to locking down loose nukes, something Obama said in the next breath was something he also wanted; he may have to choose. And while I seem to be the last person on the East Coast who remembers it, it was not one year ago that a National Intelligence Estimate stated, and I quote, “We judge with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program.“

Even on Iraq, Obama couldn’t forebear to lead his criticisms with the observation that “We have weakened our capacity to project power around the world because we have viewed everything through this single lens,” as if our capacity to project power is itself the goal and point of American foreign policy.

I think Josh Marshall misses the point here: “I know that many Obama supporters are disappointed that he passed on various opportunities to deliver a smackdown that McCain couldn’t recover from. But having watched the guy for 18 months now, for better and worse, that’s not who he is.“  I realize that Obama is temperamentally not inclined to go for the jugular, and that may even be smart politics.  As hilzoy argued, his graciousness compared to McCain’s rudeness may be the dominant impression that many take away from the debate — something that burnishes his “bipartisan, get it done” credentials (not to mention his “not an angry old coot” credentials) much more than McCain’s.

The point wasn’t that Obama failed to smack McCain down, though I wish he had — say, on voting against the Webb G.I. bill, given McCain’s teary praise for vets.  (Bonus: would have got McCain mad, always good to watch for those just tuning in.)  No, it was actually and simply that he agreed on too much with McCain. As Jim Henley wrote after the debate:

As a symptom of the constriction of elite opinion, the debate was instructive less for the answers than even the questions. “Foreign policy” consists of wars and nothing but wars. It’s about whom you bomb or don’t, and whom you do or don’t convince to help you bomb someone.

The debate certainly also proved that there’s plenty of important stuff Obama is right about and McCain is wrong about.  But even if and when Obama wins this election, that will not be the end of all that’s wrong with our military and foreign policy.

Not all of that is Obama’s fault by any means.  Tonight, I saw a video by a group heretofore unknown to me: United Against Nuclear Iran.  It featured lots of ominous music, and repeated yet again the claim that Iran was building nuclear weapons. The video has one Richard Sokolsky talking about military measures as a way of stopping Iran’s alleged nuclear ambitions. And while known neocons Fouad Ajami and James Woolsey were two of the talking heads involved, so were ex-Clintonistas Dennis Ross and Richard Holbrooke.

Million Doors for Peace on Saturday. Obama on Sunday. Today must be Monday.

I only knocked on about 80 doors this weekend, but on Sunday it seemed like every d…elightful one of them was on the 3d floor of IdentApartmentComplexVille in Dumfries, VA.

In both cases, I was working from walking lists — lists of selected names in address order.  The common thread was that both lists — as usual — bore only an approximate relation to reality.  On Saturday, I was in my own neighborhood, and the names were of infrequent or new voters.  They turned out to be mainly — duh — kids who had left for college.  I had enough presence of mind to ask their parents whether they might sign on to the MD4P petition  to Congress (out of Iraq in one year), and a fair number did.  Most importantly, I got three or four (potential) volunteers for future work that way, vs. only one off the walking list.

Dumfries, VA Obama HQ.
Originally uploaded by Thomas Nephew;
see also slideshow.

For some reason, I was less mentally flexible the next day, though the problem was a little different.  In this case I was in a cookie cutter low-to-middle-price range apartment complex development in Dumfries, Virginia.  By whatever criterion the names were selected here (perhaps also newly registered and/or infrequent voters), turnover was high — and this time, instead of doing something with Mr. or Ms. Surprise NewlyMovedIn at the door, I just gave them the packet of literature and moved on.  The difference, I think, was (a) that I was maybe a little more tired and stupid on Sunday, (b) I had it in my head from the briefing that I was only after answers about the names on my walking list, and (c) that I didn’t have any designated piece of paper to put Mr. or Ms. Surprise NewlyMovedIn on.  (Though I might have crossed out the Mr. or Ms. NotThereAnymore and just written in the new name.  Stupid, stupid, stupid.)  I did get one volunteer and a couple of strong Obama supporters, but my unstupid partner did much better with fewer doors.

Well, I’ll do better next time.  Now to bed.

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UPDATE, 9/22: Prior “Million Doors for Peace” posts here. Also, eRobin at factesque provides a video of how things went in a Pennsyvlania “Million Doors for Peace” canvass.  Pretty well! — 3 hours, 257 contacts, 11 volunteers.
UPDATE, 9/22: SurveyUSA has Obama up 51-45 in Virginia, though results are among voting age; likely voters made up 80% of the tally. Still, how about this: “Among women, Obama led by 6 points before Sarah Palin was named to the GOP ticket, now leads by 16.” Survey taken 9/19-21.
YET ANOTHER UPDATE, 9/22: I’d heard of this, from Yale U.’s Brett M., but here’s the specific finding and reference, via Sean Quinn (”fivethirtyeight.com”): “For every twelve voters who you talk to at their doors, one voter goes and votes who would not otherwise have voted. If you’re asking: “how can I be most effective in helping my candidate win the election?” then an organizer’s answer is going to be: knock on doors.” (Source: Getting Out the Vote in Local Elections: Results from Six Door-to-Door Canvassing Experiments. Donald P. Green, Alan S. Gerber, David W. Nickerson; Yale University.)

Like eRobin, I’m already pretty impressed with the “Million Doors for Peace” effort, and it hasn’t even happened yet. Tonight I reserved a “walking list” of people in my neighborhood; I can print out neat lists of names, addresses and phone numbers; I can also print out a Google map of the households involved — all within a couple of blocks of me. Famous last words, but this may be so easy it’s almost embarrassing.

An extensive “Frequently Asked Questions” site provides a lot of the details:

Whose doors will I be knocking on?

Our goal with this project is get beyond the usual list of peace activists who sign online petitions and pass them around to each other, by going into the street (or on the phone) and reaching out specifically to people who haven’t been involved. That’s why we’ve compiled the list of new or infrequent voters which we’ll be sending you. We will put up an online petition after the canvassing is done, but the most important thing is to reach these specific people, not to simply collect names. [...]

…we came up with a list of people who either haven’t voted in the past few years or else have only recently registered to vote. Political professionals say these are the people most likely to respond to our message.

Will I be asked to support a particular presidential candidate? CAN I support my favorite candidate while canvassing?

A: No. This is a non-partisan activity. We aren’t working for or against any candidate.

Am I supposed to argue with war supporters?

…The point of canvassing is to find the people who already agree with us but whom we haven’t met yet. If you spend your time debating with war supporters, you’ll run out of time before you find the peace-minded people further down the list.

And so on.

Looking over my list, I see some neighbors I would think are fairly frequent voters. Of course, I may be mistaken in that, but the quality of the list will be important.

At any rate, this is an impressive,  well planned effort. You should get involved if you’ve got a couple of hours to spare — they’re OK with you going the next day, or even with phoning people on the walking list.

Writing for the Washington Post blog “The Fix,” Chris Cilizza pronounces himself gobsmacked by the ad above, writing:

Among the extremely tough lines delivered by the tearful couple:

* “I don’t blame the Army for our son’s death, I just blame the bad policies on President Bush, Norm Coleman who voted for this.” (Nancy Anderson)

* “I have no faith in Norm Coleman. He has no ability to make up his own mind.” (Claremont Anderson)

* “If Norm Coleman would have stood up to the president and said this is not a good idea maybe he would have listened.” (Nancy Anderson)

Wow. WOW. The ad all but blames Coleman for the death of the Andersons’ son, arguing that Coleman had the power to stop it by opposing the war in Iraq from the start.  [...]

While allowing that the ad helps “make clear what is at stake in this election,” Cilizza continues with the warning,

…the ad runs a real risk of being seen as an attempt by Democrats to score political points on the back of a personal tragedy. The image of a physically shaken Nancy Anderson on screen walks right up to the line of what is acceptable in the realm of politics.

No, this is a perfect strike in what is acceptable in the realm of politics. Wars have consequences.  It’s not some kind of frivolous political point to say that voting for this war — repeatedly — should have consequences as well.

Given that Cilizza doesn’t take the time to spot the “maybe” in Ms. Anderson’s statement, it’s not surprising he doesn’t take the time to provide some background about the alleged victim, United States Senator Norm Coleman.  Reports like this one (”Coleman and Franken on Iraq: Everything you need to know,” Eric Black, Minnesota Post) paint essentially the same picture the Stuarts do (emphases in original):

Norm Coleman was an early and unconditional supporter of the idea of war in Iraq to remove Saddam Hussein. After four years of toeing the pro-Bush, pro-war line, he wobbled slightly in early 2007 by doubting the wisdom of the surge. He has since recanted those doubts, thinks the war is going well and takes basically the same position on current matters as John McCain and President Bush. He believes the prospects are good for a drawdown of U.S. troops, but it must be done based on conditions on the ground as reported by commanders in the field, not according to an “arbitrary” timetable set for “political” reasons in Washington.Coleman recently told a press conference that, even if he had known then everything he knows now, he does not consider his original support for the war to have been wrong.

In a long interview with me about the whole six-year U.S.-in-Iraq saga, Coleman declined to affirm that last statement.  I asked whether he believes that after the whole tale is told the invasion and occupation of Iraq will turn out to have been worth it for the United States. He declined to answer the question directly and instead converted it, as he has often done, to a question he felt more comfortable answering: “Do I think the world is better off without Saddam Hussein running a country. The answer is yes.”

Summing up: Coleman started out for the Iraq War, finally thought briefly about being against it, but then stayed for it.  “Yes man” seems fair.  “Maybe Bush would have listened” if Coleman had changed course seems fair. “Can’t make up his own mind” seems fair. “All but being blamed” for the war that killed the Anderson’s son seems very fair — Coleman wasn’t some slob arguing about it at the barbershop, he cast a vote that sealed the deal.

No — these all seem like very fair critiques to make of someone who wants to be reappointed to one of the most powerful positions in the country.  This is essentially a man who has not learned anything of value in the last six years, is torn mainly between political self-preservation and abject servitude to the GOP party line, and then resorts to playing games in dodging his responsibility for the predicament he helped put Americans in.

Americans like the Andersons, not to put too fine a point on it.

Cilizza’s concerns about this ad are seem like another one of those episodes of faux astonishment and outrage which — consciously or not — seek to turn the debate from the ugly, painful war issue itself to the more comfortable one of how we’re permitted to see it and debate it.  We mustn’t see the caskets.  We mustn’t speak ill of any soldier or any general.  We tut-tut when Cindy Sheehan has the bad manners to repeatedly remind us that her son is still dead.

Cilizza’s right to identify this ad as a strong one, one that cuts through the grotesque fog of denial around this war.  The ad, the campaign, and the election offer Minnesotans a valid choice: to choose continued war, or not. To agree with the Andersons, or not. To elect a Senator Franken, or a Senator Coleman.

That’s what elections are for.

In Steve Coll’s New Yorker profile of General David Petraeus (”The General’s Dilemma”, 09/08/2008), a couple of things stood out for me.  First, there’s this:

…Petraeus and those around him believed “deep in their bones that we don’t get to choose what kind of wars we fight,” John Nagl, a 1988 West Point graduate and Rhodes Scholar who became part of Petraeus’s circle, said. They felt that it was therefore essential to vanquish Vietnam’s ghosts and learn to wage irregular war successfully.

While I take Petraeus et al’s point that officers don’t get to choose them, wars like Viet Nam and Iraq are precisely the kinds of wars the country – or more precisely, the U.S. government — or more precisely yet, these days, the White House — gets to choose to fight.

In his road to the top, Petraeus — a learned warrior — earned a Ph.D., read and wrote extensively on counterinsurgency, and finally rewrote the Marine Corps “counterinsurgency” manual (US Army Field Manual 3-24 / Marine Corps Warfighting Publication 33.3.5: Counterinsurgency) so well  — and  so well timed — that Samantha Power (the future ex-Obama advisor) wrote about it in the New York Times Book Review.

But what had seemed in the 1990s like an academic exercise in keeping military options open turned into something bigger and worse in the next decade.  It became the latest life preserver thrown to a president weighted down with a strategically stupid idea: the occupation of a foreign country and its conversion by force to a mutant version of “democracy.”  Take it from Westmoreland, McNamara, and LBJ: Petraeus isn’t vanquishing Vietnam’s ghosts, he’s been making new ones from Iraq.

And even in as damaged a democracy as our own, strategically stupid ideas like that require a great deal of artful communication, spin, and con jobs to sell them… maybe “lying” sums it up.  That’s where the second part that struck me comes in:

Petraeus is a professional briefer, and with a PowerPoint slide before him he will slip into a salesman’s rapid-fire patter. He illustrates his remarks with a laser pointer; he will swirl a bright dot of emerald light around a particular sentence fragment until a listener risks succumbing to hypnosis. Petraeus and his staff will discuss at length the shading of colors on a slide, or the direction of arrows depicting causality. When I asked, in a skeptical tone, about this passionate use of PowerPoint, the General responded in the staccato of the medium: “It’s how you communicate big ideas—to communicate them effectively.”

That struck me because it suggests it was no mistake that Petraeus chose a much more misleading set of maps for his slideshow presentation to Congress in the fall of 2007 than a different general (James Jones) had a week or so earlier.  As I wrote last September, Petraeus’s maps failed to show a competing explanation for declining violence — that the surge had been too late to put out the fire of ethnic cleansing, arriving in time to witness the burned-out result.  By successfully laying claim to a bizarre kind of “success,” Petraeus gained Bush — not Maliki — the “breathing room” to extend the escalation and leave the Iraq mess for the next President to clean up.  (And like idiots, Congressional Democrats went for it, despite having been elected to get us out of Iraq.)

Read the rest of this entry »

While it wasn’t her point, Nell’s excellent post earlier this week (”Prepare to Dare or Prepare to Despair“) reminds me that I’ve been less energetic than I should have been in supporting and discussing Dennis Kucinich’s H.Res. 1258 resolution calling for George Bush’s impeachment.  The lengthy resolution presents 35 articles of impeachment, leading with Bush’s propaganda campaign for the Iraq war:

In his conduct while President of the United States, George W. Bush, in violation of his constitutional oath to faithfully execute the office of President of the United States and, to the best of his ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States, and in violation of his constitutional duty under article II, section 3 of the Constitution ‘to take care that the laws be faithfully executed’, has both personally and acting through his agents and subordinates, together with the Vice President, illegally spent public dollars on a secret propaganda program to manufacture a false cause for war against Iraq.

The resolution is a resource in its own right, presenting factual bases for each of the charges.*   As David Swanson of AfterDowningStreet.org said,

Impeachment is only a lengthy process when you don’t already have the evidence.  President Andrew Johnson was impeached three days after the offense for which he was impeached. … Bush and Cheney could be impeached, tried, and convicted in a week.

Not even every impeachment supporter will agree that every single article in H. Res. 1258 merits Bush’s impeachment,  removal from office, and  banning from future federal office.  But even in this the resolution serves a useful function, reminding us that impeachment is by design a political tool, to be wielded by the House of Representatives — not a judicial one or one limited to narrowly proveable violations of U.S. law.

To be sure — for those who insist on them — there are (in my opinion) such statutory and treaty violations involving illegal detention (Article 17), torture (Article 18), and illegally spying on American citizens (Article 24).

But impeachment can and sometimes must also be applied to the kinds of breaches of trust and willful poor judgment that have characterized the Bush administration, even if no specific statute is broken, even if “only” our constitutional system itself is at stake.   The cannon of impeachment may seem less warranted for, say, the relative fly of “endangering the health of 9/11 first responders,” (Article 35), but quite a bit more so for the propaganda catapult of misleading claims about Iraq and 9/11 (Article 2), Iraqi WMD (Article 3), or “even” climate change (Article 32) — regardless of whether particular statutes were broken in the latter cases.  Yet others strike at the equally profound subversion of the American political system, such as those about tampering with free and fair elections, corruption of the administration of justice (Article 28), creating secret laws (Article 22), and announcing intent not to follow duly enacted law (Article 26).

As AfterDowningStreet.com is reporting, Dennis Kucinich will present petitions supporting immediate impeachment hearings to Speaker Nancy Pelosi today. (You can still add your support here.)

Kucinich will also reportedly urge the formation of a truth and reconciliation commission — something Mark Gisleson (”Norwegianity”) supports in an article written for Mick Arran’s impeachment blog “The Bush/Cheney Impeachment Papers.” The arguments of Mr. Gisleson and others (like local congressional candidate Gordon Clark) notwithstanding, I see the “T&R” idea as a half measure ratifying a drift away from the Constitution and towards unwritten and impotent customs and conventions.

But even the half-measure of “truth and reconciliation” is not eagerly embraced by the Obama campaign.  As Mark Benjamin reported for Salon.com (via Mick Arran) this summer:

…don’t hold your breath waiting for Dick Cheney to be frog-marched into federal court. Prosecution of any officials, if it were to occur, would probably not occur during Obama’s first term. Instead, we may well see a congressionally empowered commission that would seek testimony from witnesses in search of the truth about what occurred. Though some witnesses might be offered immunity in exchange for testimony, the question of whether anybody would be prosecuted would be deferred to a later date — meaning Obama’s second term, if such is forthcoming.

On the other hand (and for what it’s worth), while it doesn’t call for either a commission or impeachment, the draft Democratic platform identified many of the same issues highlighted in H. Res. 1258.  And it closed the relevant “Reclaiming our Constitution and Our Liberties” section with the ringing words:

Our Constitution is not a nuisance. It is the foundation of our democracy. It makes freedom and self-governance possible, and helps to protect our security. The Democratic Party will restore our Constitution to its proper place in our government and return our Nation to our best traditions–including our commitment to government by law, and not by men.

Impeachment is not a nuisance either — it’s an integral part of the Constitution.  Impeachment is no esoteric afterthought — it’s the biggest actual “check and balance” in the document, and it’s mentioned six times.  Impeachment is literally patriotic.  And it would be a far more powerful tool towards uncovering the truth than any congressional committee or even special prosecutor would be — refusal to honor impeachment-related subpoenas was itself an article of impeachment in the Nixon articles of impeachment.

As Nell Lancaster wrote:

Impeachment is the key to reversing the damage of the last eight years, not simply papering it over. The time to organize for demanding it is not after the election, but now.

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* I’m planning to find or publish a web page of the resolution with hyperlinks to supporting documents and reports.

The Washington Post has been running its customary serial excerpts of Bob Woodward’s latest book — this time, “The War Within,” an account of the Bush administration decision to send more troops into Iraq, despite the sweeping Bush/GOP defeat in the 2006 election.   Yesterday, Woodward used the title of a backgrounder to that series first to ask a good question, and then threaten (but fail) to provide a good answer: “Why Did Violence Plummet? It Wasn’t Just the Surge.”

Woodward identifies three other factors: “a series of top-secret operations that enabled them to locate, target and kill key individuals in groups such as al-Qaeda in Iraq, the Sunni insurgency and renegade Shia militias”; the better known “Anbar Awakening”, in which that province’s Sunni tribal leaders turned to all-out war against al Qaeda in Iraq; and Moqtada al-Sadr’s August 29(!), 2007 order to the Mahdi Army to suspend operations - “an unexpected stroke of good luck.”

And that’s it.

Lost in this accounting — no doubt personally dictated to him by Jack Keane or Dick Cheney — is the likeliest factor of all: that ethnic cleansing had run its course to such an extent by mid 2007 or so that the true object of most of the fighting — large, defensible, and homogeneous ethnic enclaves — had already been attained.

Why do I suspect this?  As I wrote last September (”Progress is just another word for nothing left to kill“), the conclusion comes from simply looking at a series of ethnic maps of Baghdad (provided during September 2007 congressional testimony by General James Jones) spanning the July 2006-July 2007 time period.*

Perhaps more interestingly, why would Woodward not suspect this?  He’d only need to have consulted his own newspaper last December, when Karen DeYoung’s article “Balkanized Homecoming” ran with an exceptional pair of ethnic maps of Baghdad (”Changing Baghdad“) showing just how hollow the surge’s “success” was.  DeYoung:

For many Iraqis, the homes they left no longer exist. Houses have been looted, destroyed or occupied. Most Baghdad neighborhoods, where Shiites and Sunnis once lived side by side, have been transformed into religiously homogeneous bastions where members of the other sect dare not tread.

And that remains the case.  Even DeYoung’s title is somewhat misleading; for millions of Iraqis, “homecoming” — even a “balkanized” one — remains a hopeless dream.  A UN report in late 2007 estimated that there were well over 4 million Iraqi refugees, about evenly divided between those “internally displaced” within Iraq and those who had decamped elsewhere, primarily Syria and Jordan.  (It is yet another pitiful abdication of responsibility by the U.S. that there were less than 20,000 refugees to this country at that time.)  So hold the medals ceremonies: the sheer size and apparent permanence of this exodus shows the Bush administration strategy in Iraq still hasn’t turned the corner to success.

Nor is it likely to — and reports today that “Iraq Troop Levels to Remain Steady Until After Bush Leaves Office” (Dan Eggen, Washington Post) aren’t the half of it.

In June, DeYoung reported a GAO report indicated “The administration lacks an updated and comprehensive Iraq strategy to move beyond the “surge” of combat troops President Bush launched” with his “New Way Forward” in January 2007. A similar July 2008 GAO report (”Securing, Stabilizing, and Rebuilding Iraq: Progress Report: Some Gains Made, Updated Strategy Needed”) echoes that finding, and adds another (emphasis added):

We found that the documents for the phase that follows The New Way Forward do not specify the administration’s strategic goals and objectives in Iraq or how it intends to achieve them, although they clearly state the importance the administration places on continued U.S. involvement in and support for Iraq.

It’s just like backchannel maestro General Jack Keane told Petraeus in March of this year, according to Woodward: “We’re going to be here for 50 years minimum, most of the time hopefully preventing wars, and on occasion having to fight one, dealing with radical Islam, our economic interests in the region and trying to achieve stability.”

Fifty years? What the heck, make it a hundred.

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* Lest one think only bloggers like me or (Middle East expert) Juan Cole think this is the likely explanation, the GAO’s Joe Christoff said the same in Congressional testimony in in October 2007.

Members of the United States Congress:

The five and a half years of war in Iraq has been an exercise of misplaced priorities:

Draining U.S. taxpayers of at least three trillion dollars which could have gone towards investments that strengthen our economy, such as: health care for our families, ensuring the best education for our children and youth, and addressing the energy crisis.

Resulting in hundreds of thousands of American and Iraqi’s dead and wounded.

And undermining the United States’ standing as a worldwide symbol for democracy and justice.

Because of these reasons, the majority of American and Iraqi people want the United States to begin a withdrawal of American troops from Iraq as soon as possible, with a date certain for completing that process.

Therefore, we, the undersigned, call on [Your Representative and Senators] to immediately support and pass legislation that will set a specific date to bring U.S. troops home from Iraq within a year.

On September 20, an alliance of organizations including USAction, MoveOn.org, United for Peace and Justice, Pax Christi USA and others will be circulating this petition in a new kind of demonstration — a demonstration of power. The goal is to have 25,000 volunteers visit or call a million households, asking for people’s agreement with the statement.  That will (1) help elevate the issue of Iraq and its economic, human and moral costs, and (2) expand a database of war opponents to pressure whoever gains the White House this November to accelerate their plans for withdrawing American troops from Iraq.

The idea is that you sign up here; Million Doors for Peace will contact you with a list of addresses to visit or call; on September 20th, that’s what you do; then you report back to the web site with the information you’ve gathered. According to the e-mail alert I got, the addresses will be of “new or infrequent voters.”

I’m going to do it.  I hope you will too.

After the FISA vote this summer, I vowed I was not going to just be a foot soldier for the Democratic Party this fall.  I wish the Obama campaign well, and will work with it in the weeks ahead.  But I won’t put all my work there this fall.  As Russ Feingold put it earlier this year, “January 21 is as important as January 20,” meaning that it wasn’t enough just to elect the right guy.  Even Obama will need to see pressure (and be able to point to it) if we want a timely withdrawal from Iraq rather than endless postponements of one — to say nothing of McCain.  This will be one small way for me to help prepare the ground for that.