Even as Rudy Giuiliani continues to lead in many GOP presidential polls, there’s a raging debate as to whether he could actually be nominated.Just today, Glenn Greenwald did a long, adamant post arguing that social conservatives care more about waging religio-ideological wars than about Rudy’s deficiencies on abortion or gay rights. Meanwhile, TPMCafe’s Election Central reports that one of the Christian Right’s big poohbahs, Tony Perkins, went on Pat Robertson’s network and dismissed Giuliani as an acceptable presidential candidate because of his views on abortion and gay rights, which place him “far outside the mainstream of conservative thought.”Somebody’s obviously right and somebody’s obviously wrong here. I’ve been in the “Rudy Can Fail” camp all along, and though Greenwald’s a persuasive guy, I think he’s a bit too pre-persuaded that social conservatives don”t really believe what they say or say what they believe.

Yesterday’s Washington Post had an article comparing and contrasting Democratic presidential candidates’ positions, as reflected in their DNC Winter Meeting speeches, about exactly how rapidly (assuming they endorse any sort of withdrawal “timetable”) they want to get U.S. troops out of Iraq. And over at DKos, Trapper John provided a handy-dandy list with the number of months before withdrawal for each candidate’s plan, followed up by a poll of Kossacks on their preference.This is all nice and neat, but there’s one problem that I tried to draw attention to last week: it’s not at all clear which troops would be withdrawn under some of the various proposals. Barack Obama’s plan sets a “goal” for withdrawal of “combat brigades” by the end of March, 2008, but also says: “A residual U.S. presence may remain in Iraq for force protection, training of Iraqi security forces, and pursuit of international terrorists.” And even the Kerry-Feingold resolution of last summer, generally thought of as the gold standard of “fixed withdrawal deadline” proposals, exempted from its entire withdrawal timetable “the minimal number of forces that are critical to completing the mission of standing up Iraqi security forces, conducting targeted and specialized counterterrorism operations, and protecting United States facilities and personnel.”Words like “residual” and “minimal” suggest we’re not talking about a lot of troops, but who really knows? And who will make that determination if not the Bush administration? I raise this point not to annoy people with details, but because the growing obsession of many antiwar folks–and for that matter, of their critics– with calendar dates may miss the more fundamental question that needs to be raised about Iraq: which missions would we be turning over to the Iraqis, and which missions would be continued, and for how long? Isn’t that at least as important as how many months a given proposal would provide for withdrawal of an ill-defined number of troops?

There’s a bit of interesting confusion breaking out in the progressive blogosphere about how to react to persistent reports (freshly denied, of course, by the White House) that the administration is planning military operations against Iran on grounds of its meddling in Iraq.Armando at Talk Left did an impassioned post accusing Matt Yglesias and James Fallows of arguing for a shift of progressive attention from Iraq to Iran. His main arguments are (1) Iran war talk is “bait” from the Bushies aimed at dissipating congressional efforts to end the war in Iraq; and (2) because Bush and Cheney have no legal authority to start a war with Iran, taking military action based on Iran’s role in Iraq is how they are going to get there. I get dragooned into the argument as someone who doesn’t “get” this latter point, based on a post that expressed incredulity at an Iraqi rationale for an attack on Iran.McJoan at DailyKos picks up on Armando’s post, and clarifies his argument, especially on Point II, suggesting that the only way Bush gets to wage war on Iran is by citing the Iraq War Resolution.What’s confusing to me about both posts is a pretty simple point: is the Iran war talk really a “red herring?” Or is the administration really lusting for immediate war with Iran?In terms of the “red herring” claim, you have to remember that most of the reports of administration war planning against Iran have been relatively under-the-radar, and have been talked about far more by administration critics than by official or unofficial Bush supporters. I see no particular evidence that congressional Dems are folding their tents on Iraq. And with all due respect to the blogosphere, I don’t think the Bushies think they can avoid getting repudiated on Iraq just because some bloggers are arguing about the relative importance of Iran.If the White House really wanted to throw sand in the eyes of Iraq War critics, including a sizable majority of the American people, they’d be doing some very high-profile Iran scaremongering, not focused on Tehran’s role in Iraq, but on the nuclear program, which has indeed gotten significant public and MSM attention.That brings me to the second prong of the Armando-McJoan argument: the Bushies have to make Iraq the pretext for an attack on Iran because they’d otherwise have to get a fresh war resolution from Congress, which ain’t happening. So they are stuck with a transparently stupid and specious rationale for a new war, which would be explicitly described as an expansion of an existing, and overwhelmingly unpopular war. If, that is, they really want to attack Iran, and aren’t just creating a “red herring.”You can see how this argument gets to be a bit circular. The administration either wants war with Iran, or it doesn’t, and if it does, it needs a plausible rationale a hell of a lot more than it needs congressional authority (remember its continuing claims of all sorts of inherent presidential national security powers?). And there’s an obvious scenario where that could happen: the U.S. strongly encourages the Israelis to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities, and then intervenes to help our ally as a matter of emergency military action, subject only to after-the-fact congressional endorsement under the War Powers Act, if the need for any authority was admitted.As for the initial question of how progressive bloggers should think about these tangled questions, I don’t quite see how worrying about a new war keeps anyone from stopping the old one, unless you’re really into an extreme version of the Noise Machine theory and think any dissent or distraction from the Message of the Day somehow adds strength to Bush’s rapidly collapsing support on Iraq.So let a few bloggers try to walk and chew gum at the same time.

Although I’m not as convinced as a lot of progressive bloggers that Bush is about to launch a military campaign against Iran, there’s certainly enough smoke out there to legitimately worry about fire.There are actually two separate reasons to worry.On the one hand, you’ve got renewed saber-rattling in Israel about the intolerability of a nuclear Iran. Israeli fears about Iran were nicely summarized last week in a New Republic piece by Yossi Klein Halevi and Michael Oren. I’m not about to tell Israelis what they should think or do about defending their own country, but still, the apparent conviction of 66% of Israelis that Ahmadinejad would happily sacrifice half his population (a realistic assessment, given Israel’s own massive nuclear arsenal) in order to hit Israel with a nuclear strike is, well, a bit counter-intuitive. Missing from this scary calculus is the virtual certainty that Ahmadinejad would be strangled in his bed if he made a single move in the direction of wiping out his own people.I’m not one to dismiss Ahmadinejad’s anti-semitic ravings as just some sort of “populist” claptrap, but we might as well remember that the very model of anti-semitic madmen, Adolph Hitler (who unlike the Iranian really did enjoy total personal power over his state) refrained from using chemical weapons during World War II out of fear of Allied retaliation.Even if Israelis are in fact losing faith in the power of their nuclear deterrent, you do have to wonder if some of the war talk is in fact aimed at psychological deterrence. A quick Google search produced reliable-sounding articles from 2005 and 2006 (here and here) reporting that an Israeli attack on Iranian nuclear facilities was imminent. Perhaps Israelis are trying to convince Iranians that if they are unwilling to halt their nuclear program, they’d better find a leader who doesn’t threaten the destruction of Israel every other day.If indeed Israel is on the edge of attacking Iran, you could understand why the Bush administration might be looking at what it would do in that contingency. But that’s the really weird thing: reports are now coming out that Bush and Cheney are considering a military confrontation with Iran that has nothing to do with its nuclear program.Check out this report yesterday from U.S. News:

The US News Political Bulletin has learned Democrats on Capitol Hill are increasingly concerned that President Bush will order air strikes against targets in Iran in the next few months or even weeks. They cite as evidence the tough warnings from senior Administration officials, including the Commander in Chief, that Iranian help for insurgents in Iraq is leading to the deaths of US troops and Iraqi civilians. Democratic insiders tell the Political Bulletin that they suspect Bush will order the bombing of Iranian supply routes, camps, training facilities, and other sites that Administration officials say contribute to American losses in Iraq. Under this scenario, Bush would not invade Iran with ground forces or zero in on Iranian nuclear facilities.

If true, this is a much crazier idea than anything being contemplated in Israel. Whatever Iran is up to in Iraq, the reality is that its primary agents in Iraq are SCIRI and its Badr Corps militia, which the Bush administration has called the great hope for marginalizing the Mahdi Army and building a “unity” government. And for that matter, the Maliki government is unmistakably pro-Iran as well. It’s hard to overestimate the extent to which a shooting war with Iran could destroy what little influence the U.S. still has in Iraq, unless we’re going to make the Sunni insurgency our new base of support. To risk all that, and not even make Iran’s nuclear facilities the target, makes absolutely no sense.Moreover, and this is the factor that neither Israeli nor American anti-Iranian saber-rattlers seem to want to talk about, any military confrontation with Iran would almost certaintly unite the Iranian people behind their government. While hardly a perfect democracy, Iran does have elections; that’s how Ahmadinejad gained power in the first place. His party recently got waxed in local elections, a fact that seems to elude those who view Iran as a theocracy where elections are entirely rigged. The simplest and least dangerous path to a less dangerous Iran is to encourage its people to get rid of Ahmadinejad. An attack on Iran would likely take this option off the table, perhaps forever.There’s already growing paranoia among progressive bloggers that “cowardly” DC Democrats would go along with the above-described plan for military strikes against Iran over its role in Iraq. I guess I would qualify as a “liberal hawk”‘ by the standards of many such bloggers, and when it comes to this crazy plan, let me say: not me, buddy. It would be a strategic disaster, and Democrats along with sane Republicans ought to fight it tooth and nail.

Mark Schmitt, whom I hold in great esteem, has a long post up at TAPPED on the question of whether Hillary Clinton’s ace card in the 2008 presidential race is her hidden support among women, even those who don’t agree with her on major issues.Mark’s actually responding to a blogospheric exchange with one Linda Hershman, who published a Washington Post op-ed piece basically arguing that women are too apolitical, and too politically irrational, to get the job done for HRC. Mark effectively demolishes Hershman’s condescending and anectdotal take on female political engagment, but also, perhaps overcompensating, disputes the Mark Penn/James Carville hypothesis that women will go for HRC more than for any other candidate with similar policy views. Indeed, he suggests Penn and Carville are playing into the same gender stereotypes as Hershman.I just can’t agree with Mark here, and not because I think women are more inclined than anyone else to indulge, on the margins, in identity voting, but because I don’t think they, unlike everyone else, are entirely immune to it.My empirical evidence here is less about HRC’s polling numbers than about history.Anyone who’s looked at Catholic voting trends over the decades recognizes that Al Smith, and more spectacularly, John F. Kennedy, benefitted from massive and disproportiate support from Catholic voters who had no other apparent reason for voting for them. Jimmy Carter would not have been elected president in 1976 without huge southern identity support in states that went heavily Republican before and after his presidency. Bill Clinton won less overwhelming, but still crucial support in the South for the same reasons. And if you compare voting levels and margins in South Florida between 2000 and 2004, it’s pretty apparent that the Gore-Lieberman ticket got into overtime in no small part because of Lieberman’s ethnic appeal to Jews.I understand that HRC arouses intense opposition from some outspoken women who view her as a feminist archetype they reject, or inversely, in some cases, as too subordinate or forgiving towards her husband. But JFK was also controvesial among Catholics; many clergy deplored him as too secular. It didn’t much matter when it came to the ballot box.The bottom line is that you don’t have to get into invidious gender stereotypes to understand that yes, HRC, as the first really viable female candidate for president, is likely to get votes from women that aren’t just a function of policy agreements or political alignment. And since unlike JFK or Carter or Lieberman, she represents a category of Americans that is a majority, not a minority in the electorate, I wouldn’t personally be too quick to underestimate the impact of identity voting in her case.

You could almost hear the whirring of emails flying around on Capitol Hill and in the blogosphere after the news this morning that Carl Levin, Joe Biden, and most importantly Harry Reid had signed onto a revised version of John Warner’s non-binding resolution opposing the Bush escalation plan for Iraq. ” Sources” indicated that Reid would make the Warner resolution the centerpiece of the planned Senate debate on Iraq next week, in an effort to get a filibuster-proof 60-plus votes for a repudiation of Bush’s plan. And the same story provided a somewhat confused report that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi had instructed staff to come up with an identical version of the Warner resolution, and/or that she was aiming at something quite different.Adding to the confusion were reports that the Warner resolution would foreswear any effort to cut off funding for troops in Iraq; since the language hasn’t been publicly released, it’s not clear at all what that means. (No effort to cut or condition troop funding at all? No effort to cut funding for new troops? No effort to deny supplemental funding for an escalated troop level later on? Who knows?).While the early stories on the Warner resolution emphasize the difficulty of getting sufficient Republicans on board, it’s equally clear that some more aggressively antiwar Democrats might throw sand into the works. And indeed, Sen. Chris Dodd, a presidential candidate, has already announced his opposition.Meanwhile, as of this writing, there’s a bit of an eerie silence on the latest maneuver in the progressive blogosphere. Scanning some of the big sites, I saw one post at DailyKos that rather tentatively worries that congressional Dems are caving. Everywhere else, folks seem to be holding their powder or waiting for details.I hope this means there’s at least some agreement that a maximum congressional repudiation of the Bush escalation plan, so long as it does not completely foreclose additional steps if Bush continues to stubbornly plug ahead with an approach almost nobody thinks can work, has some real political value. As I guess we all know, the Pentagon already has sufficient existing funds to do what Bush wants it to do. And as Matt Yglesias pointed out earlier today, the real opportunity to restrict or condition funding will occur a few months down the road, when Bush has to come back to Congress and request new money.But there is another, and perhaps more fundamental, question raised by the Warner resolution, and by a host of other proposals. According to the Post:

The Warner and Biden resolutions reach almost identical conclusions, in that they oppose the president’s deployment of 21,500 additional troops and call for existing troops to be reassigned to guard Iraq’s borders, combat terrorism and train Iraqi security forces. Both measures call for regional diplomacy to draw Iraq’s neighbors into a peace process.

Note the “reassignment” language. This basically means rejecting the idea of any continued combat role for U.S. troops, especially in places like Baghdad. That’s also what the Iraq Study Group called for. And it’s hard to avoid the implication that this “reassignment,” or “redeployment” if you prefer, would make immediate and substantial troop withdrawals not only possible but necessary, right?I draw attention to this rather simple point because so many commentators have made troop levels and withdrawal deadlines the key dividing issue on Iraq, especially among Democrats. Yet at least some of the “deadline” proposals, most notably Barack Obama’s latest plan, only talk about a deadline for withdrawing combat brigades, and explicitly provides for an apparently indefinite deployment of an undefined number of other troops. Since Obama’s (and for that matter, the Kerry-Feingold resolution that was supposed to be the toughest get-out-soon approach) plan explicitly talks about maintaining “counter-terrorism” operations within Iraq, I assume “non-combat troops” includes special ops units.This matters, of course, because if supporters of the Warner resolution are calling for a change of mission that means “withdraw combat troops,” then maybe the allegedly vast gulf among Democrats and even some Republicans on Iraq isn’t as vast as it seems.There are plenty of Democrats, in Congress, and on the blogs, and plenty of Americans, who literally think we should get every single U.S. soldier and marine out of Iraq almost immediately, including special ops forces and training personnel. But the real issues aren’t often resolved by the obsession with “deadlines.” The real choices aren’t necessarily “escalate,” “stay the course,” or “out now.” And even if you are in the “out now” camp, it’s not quite honest to say that proposals that would mean withdrawal of combat forces and elimination of any U.S. intention to “resolve” the civil war or control the country are just “status quo” approaches. And moreover, since public opinion is clearly demanding a change of course, it’s undeniable that the polls are not offering Americans anything like the full range of options on the table in Washington (How, for example, would you fit Obama’s proposal into the “more troops, same troops, or withdraw all troops?” questions typically posed?).Speaking of public opinion, a number of bloggers, in pressing congressional Dems to move forward quickly with a funding cutoff for the war, keep citing poll numbers indicating that 64% of Americans don’t think Congress has been sufficiently assertive in challenging Bush on the war. This is from a recent Newsweek poll, and the exact wording begins, “Since the Iraq war began….” Based on a question that clearly asks respondents to think back for nearly four years, I don’t think this finding can be credibly used to suggest that Americans have already decided the new Democratic Congress is being too timid.UPCATEGORY: Ed Kilgore’s New Donkey