Here’s a thought: the senate gave itself a raise recently. PAINT THE BARN!

There is more at stake than seeing some of the slimeballs slide off the poop deck of the Titanic. With the neocons being heaved overboard, who will manage the Great Game? Chimpster, Cheney, Libby, Wolfy, and the other neo-con architects of this debacle have been thoroughly outgamed by Ahmadinejad, Putin, Kim Jong Il, Hu Jintao, and Mokhtar al Sadr. We must do better. Two more years of this and we are going to find our options very limited.

Prediction:
While Chimpy McLame Duck sleeps and calculates how to keep the records of the administration locked up in Yucca Mountain for 20,000 years, Putin and Amedinejad build a wonderful nuclear twin-star system that is the new gravity in the Middle East.

US forced to sit idly by, being tied up in Stay-the-Quagmire. Kim perfects ICBMs that reach LA and China is too busy cutting oil deals with Teheran and Caracas to pay any real attention to our hollow threats.

This is the true legacy of this bunch of smart alecks without military experience, or passports. Into this scary scenario, sired by the dime-novel fake cowboy hero from Andover, comes indeed and ironically the Axis-of-Evil – the real one, the one the neo-cons gave birth to. Prophetic, pathetic, and the next thing to focus on after getting the country in the hands of some honest people.

Time to become adroit at bridge building (Europe), influence (China), and realpolitik (Russia, Iran). Not this crowd’s forte.

Show me the democrat who can operate at this level and you will have the right presidential candidate to back.

Netroots helped to make yesterday what it was – now to fix the presidency and our place in the world. Got anyone in mind?

scarecrow and hugh @104

Agreed, the lesson hasn’t been internalized. But it’s not only coming from the voters, there is another external force in play: Poppy. Rumsfeld’s resignation is an even bigger indicator of White House internals than losing Congress.

The appointment of Gates indicates Bush the Elder (who has long been Gates’s benefactor) is bailing Dubya out of his biggest mess yet, and that Jim Baker’s upcoming Iraq report will hit harder and have more immediate effect than almost everyone has thought it could.

In practical terms, Syria and Turkey will have to be bought off with oil revenues and security. The Kurds will be supplied with US weapons and training to balance Iran and the Shiites in Iraq. And Iran will have to be put up with, embraced and kept close, so it can be undermined gradually.

In terms of the Great Game, this means the US will likely follow a policy of stalemate and containment in the Mid-East versus Russia and China, and this is what should’ve been followed in the first place. The Cheney/Rumsfeld “Leapfrog and Oil Lock-Up” Plan was audacious, but had little chance of working because of reckless naivete. It was A Baghdad Too Far.

Marclord,

I agree about Baker the Bush family consigliere being sent in to clean up the mess. I heard Gates is a member of Baker’s Iraq Study Group and as SecDef he would represent at the least a challenge to the Cehney/Rumsfled axis.

I don’t agree about doing a deal with Syria because of our alliance with Israel. It was reported 2 days ago in Haaretz that the Israeli general staff is busily planning a war with Syria next year. If we were to do a deal with Syria, we would have to lean on the Israelis to back off. I don’t see this happening.

As for the Kurds, both the Turks and the Iranians see them as a threat because of their own restive Kurdish populations. The Kurds and Turks would need to do their own deal and while this is possible it would be difficult.

Finally, I agree that our policy will at some point return to one of containment, this time of the chaos in Iraq. Russia is a player but does not have the economy to be a major one. China is a longer term concern but is also further away. With regard to it, we need to decide what we want our policy toward China to be, something if have yet to do.

Didn’t say it would be easy to implement, just that it’s The Plan, and it’s a more soft-power oriented way to wall off Russia and China from the world’s oil. Chaos in Iraq is not congruent with oil extration, and the Baker Plan will seek to establish stability as quickly as possible. That means dealing with and buying off the Muslim stakeholders in the region whilst playing them off against each other. It worked in the past century, and it will work again. All this is in the Iraq Study Group paper. (”Wait and see” is about all I can offer.) Also, check out the Richard Haass article in Foreign Affairs, “The New Mideast.” The Haass article is the signal to the elite that the old game is curtailed, and outlines the rules to the new one.

OT–Limbaugh just admitted he’s through “carrying water” for the gutless, leaderless Republican party. He can no longer “assume the responsibility for their success,” “provide cover,” or make them “look good.” He feels “liberated.” Let the games begin….

Shorter Limbaugh: Limbaugh is toast.

–

Imagine how many GOP $millions were spent in Ct. and what that might have done elsewhere.

Speaking of which, any luck finding that petty cash of Joe’s? Wonder if it will get mysteriously paid back, as if it never happened?

I am glad Rummy is gone. However, what direction will the US military take now. I am not talking about Iraq but as most who read this blog know, the administration was moving toward more special forces and also changing the doctrine to lighter, more high tech force. This could be like the Titanic trying to change course with a rudder that is too small. I suspect there may be confusion if the new SecDef has different ideas.

A lot of this has to do with marrying the military you have to the missions you expect. You do not build a Rolls-Royce and then use it to deliver coal. We built a military that could intervene quickly and project great force for a limited period of time. This was a military that could move in and overthrow a Saddam Hussein but was never large enough or trained for occupation duties. It was a samurai sword used to cut wood. It didn’t work. It isn’t working. If we had wanted an occupation capable army, then this is what we should have been converting our military into over the last 3 1/2 years of the Iraqi conflict. I am not advocating or defending our Iraq policy here. What I am saying is that given the kind of army we had we should not have gone into Iraq as we did. If we had wanted to go in and depose Saddam Hussein and then leave (although I don’t know exactly what purpose this would have served), we could have done that. What Rumsfeld chose to do was go to war with the army he had and then not adapt it to the war he was fighting.