Advice to Republicans: Stop Conceding What You Don't Have To

This morning I heard Madeline Albright and Sen. Lindsey Graham being interviewed by Tim Russert on "Meet the Press." Russert asked Graham about a statement he made regarding ties between Iraq and al Qaeda (I think it was regarding 9/11 ties). Graham stated categorically that he was wrong.

Why? This was an opportunity to talk about the fact that there were ties between Iraq and al Qaeda. Hell... the man was sitting there with Madeline Albright. The Clinton administration had made the connection between Iraq and al Qaeda. We have this from a Washington Times article: "The 1998 indictment said: 'Al Qaeda also forged alliances with the National Islamic Front in the Sudan and with the government of Iran and its associated terrorist group Hezbollah for the purpose of working together against their perceived common enemies in the West, particularly the United States. In addition, al Qaeda reached an understanding with the government of Iraq that al Qaeda would not work against that government and that on particular projects, specifically including weapons development, al Qaeda would work cooperatively with the government of Iraq.'" [emphasis is mine]

We also know Saddam harbored (and paid the way for) one of the first World Trade Center bombers.

Steven Hayes has done excellent work chronicling ties between Iraq and al Qaeda, including this piece in the Weekly Standard.

Moreover, we have reports of Iraqi Intelligence Service people in Prague perilously close to the places where Attah was finalizing plans for the 9/11 attacks.

Basically, reports on 9/11 report no conclusive proof that Iraq was involved in 9/11, but they don't provide conclusive proof that Iraq wasn't involved either. What IS clear is that there were ties between al Qaeda and Iraq. Ties that appeared to be Saddam courting Bin Laden. Why would he do that? Well, he hated the USA and wanted to find ways to effectively strike us, and what better way than helping people who were effectively striking us. Does it take genius to figure this out? Opponents of this theory generally rely on the argument that Bin Laden didn't like Saddam because he thought Saddam was a lousy Muslim. Certainly, a man of Bin Laden's high character wouldn't stoop to doing business with a lousy Muslim! Except that he did business with none other than the United States when he was fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan, and I don't think he regards the US Government as good Muslims.

So... Graham is sitting there with Albright, and instead of saying that the Clinton administration had pointed out ties between Iraq and al Qaeda, actually including an accusation that Iraq had agreed to assist al Qaeda in development of WMD in a legal document, and talking about all of the other ties Iraq had to al Qaeda and other terror organizations, and concluding that, while the administration itself had never claimed Iraqi ties to 9/11, it was also not conclusively proven that there weren't any, Graham simply concedes that he was wrong.

Of course, he was also conceding all kinds of other things... mistakes in the conduct of the war, not having enough troops, etc. All while supposedly making the case that we need to stay and win. This is bullshit. You can concede that, in perfect 20/20 hindsight, some things could definitely have been done differently. But you also add that, while in the midst of the action, when you don't really know what is coming next, you don't have that benefit. You act, see the way the opposition reacts, then you adapt and change and act again. (Why do people seem to understand this while watching a football game on a Sunday afternoon, but they don't get it when it comes to a war?)

Republicans like Graham need to stop conceding errors without contextualizing them. Anytime one is taking action, making something happen, mistakes happen along the way. You can acknowledge that, but you don't make it an emphasis (or make statements that allow others to emphasize it). You put it into a context where the moment we're in matters, not the mistakes made along the way. President Bush does it right. He inserts that "missteps" have been made, but he keeps his argument focused on the big picture and he emphasizes THAT. Republicans in Congress need to follow that lead, particularly when they're in a conversation with someone with as little ground to stand on as Madeline Albright.

DNC Seeks Psychic Candidate

Important News: Democrats are going to nominate a psychic for president in 2008. This psychic may or may not be Hillary Clinton. Democratic insiders say that her conversations with dead First Ladies while living in the White House bode well for her consideration, however, she’s shown no ability to actually know the future. Democrats, who demand that leaders be able to foresee all possible eventualities, even in war, are said to be intent on finding just such a candidate.

The search for a soothsayer candidate stems from their demand that a president, particularly in his role as Commander In Chief, be able to create plans that work perfectly each and every time, and that, as chief statesman, he or she be able to predict exactly when other governments—even those that have not yet been elected under a very recently minted constitution—are able to take full control of their country.

In a conversation at the DNC related by an insider, Howard Dean was heard to say, “That old axiom that ‘no plan survives contact with the enemy’ is complete bullshit. Bush should have planned for every possible contingency before he began conducting what he should have known was both an illegal and costly war. He should have been able to look beyond the so-called intelligence and known that Saddam had no WMD, and that Saddam was on the verge of declaring his pacifism and dedication to understanding among all people. If Bush had known all of that, we would not be in the position we find ourselves in now, simply trying to second-guess everything and Monday morning relief pitching [ed: he seems to have meant Monday morning quarterbacking] the war. This will NOT happen when we have a psychic as our president!”

It seems that the fact that the Democrats find themselves saying that they would not have voted for the war if they knew then what they know now has stirred a hornet’s nest at the DNC. They appear confused, in that they have no new ideas for what should be done differently in Iraq, other than to basically say that the Bush administration should do what it is already doing, while at the same time saying that what Bush is doing is not a plan. (Excepting, of course, the unpopular and potentially disasterous plan of pulling out, and it doesn't take a psychic to realize that, after that, they'd never win an election for any office above dog catcher.)

Our DNC insider put it this way: “Our fallback position is to demand timelines, as Senator Kerry has said. The problem is, we have no psychic who can tell us exactly when Iraqi Security Forces will be sufficiently trained and equipped to operate without US support, or when the government will be in a position that they feel is strong enough to ask us to leave. So we look like idiots trying to tell people that there should be a timeline that dictates when things occur, when anyone who has a lick of sense knows that what Bush is saying is right: you can’t know when things will happen without observing what’s actually taking place on the ground. And anyone who has ever tried to follow any plan, even something as simple as taking a vacation, knows that you have to adapt to contingencies as they come up. Our psychic candidate will eliminate those problems.”

To get back to Hillary Clinton’s prospects, it seems clear to Democrats that she was involved in an administration that seemed to have no ability to see the future at all. That works against her. The Clinton administration didn’t take Bin Laden when he was offered. They didn’t see how terrorists, particularly Bin Laden, would be emboldened by cutting and running in Somalia. They didn’t see how their fecklessness in dealing with Saddam would both embolden terrorists and Saddam himself. They didn’t even see that Jimmy Carter’s arrangement with the North Koreans might result in the North Koreans cheating on the agreement and becoming a major problem that must be dealt with in the future. This is to say nothing of the way they dealt with terrorist attacks during their time in office. In sum, Senator Clinton’s bona fides as a psychic engender more fear among the Democratic faithful than confidence, because the dream of Clinton II in the White House is so strong among some that she could defeat the true psychic they put on the ticket. Fortunately, any good psychic will be able to know whether or not they will actually win the White House, so the issue is sort of self-resolving.

The key, it seems, is that the psychic will be able to say that he/she would have known exactly what would have happened after the invasion of Iraq, and would have been able to formulate a plan that ‘survived contact with the enemy’. The psychic would have known who to round up, where to get them (even if they were foreign fighters who had yet to enter Iraq), and what their plans were. At the risk of being seen as pre-emptive, the Psychic CINC could have wrapped up the whole thing in a matter of a couple of days. Perhaps the psychic could have even known who would be elected and the whole “process” could have been truncated by political appointments. The psychic, of course, would know whether this would be seen as being more or less imperialistic than allowing a messy and more time consuming democratic process to take place.

Of course, all of this is conditional upon whether or not the psychic saw that Saddam was still a threat even without WMD, or, as Chairman Dean suggests, if he’d had a sudden transformation and become Ghandi-like in his desire for peace and devotion to understanding. Under the Bush regime, we will never know.

For now, it seems, until they find a real psychic of their own, the Democrats will have to be content bemoaning Bush’s lack of psychic skills, and running down his plan as nothing more than talking points. Perhaps if they DID have a psychic, and possibly the reason they’re having such trouble finding one, is that a psychic might tell them that Bush’s plan is actually working, and that a democratic Iraq in the heart of the Middle East, and the effect that will have (and that the invasion has already had), will make Bush go down in history as one of the great visionaries of history. It could be that the problem is that there are no psychics who can predict the events of the moment to come, but there are visionaries who create the future. It may be that the Republicans already have that guy.