As the U.S. House moves inexorably towards a non-binding resolution rejecting the Bush escalation plan for Iraq, I hope the widespread progressive mockery of this step will subside. It’s the first step towards a strategic withdrawal from combat operations in Iraq, not the last.And speaking of next steps, some bloggers who are citing the latest Gallup numbers showing tepid 51% support for a non-binding resolution against the Bush “surge”‘ aren’t exactly playing up the same poll’s 58% opposition to cutting off funds for the escalation. The big anti-Bush majority (63%) is for setting a deadline for withdrawal of U.S. troops by the end of 2008, which, given the poll’s options, probably means “as soon as possible without disaster.”The simplest way to interpret this and other recent polls is to say that serious majorities of Americans want Congress rather than the Bush administration to take control of Iraq policy, but not, if possible, by cutting off funds. And that probably means that the Democratic Congressional leadership’s strategy of gradually marginalizing Bush on Iraq makes sense.On another but related front, Democrats are beginning to make serious noises about the administration’s saber-rattling towards Iran. Over at TPMCafe, I’ve responded and dissented from my good friend and fellow Clintonian Kenny Baer’s post suggesting that the netroots are putting too much pressure on Dems to go pacifist with respect to Iran. For those of you who think such issues are cut and dried and follow the predictable patterns of the usual intra-Democratic debate on Iraq: give it all a look.

Props to Ezra Klein at TAPPED for once again posting on the unsavory but important issue of prison rape, which doesn’t appear to have abated despite Congress’ unanimous 2003 legislation (signed by Bush) called the Prison Rape Elimination Act.As Robert Weisberg and David Mills pointed out in Slate shortly after the 2003 legislation was signed:

[D]espite its grand words and its sponsors’ passionate expressions of concern, the main thing the law aims to do is collect data, and that may be, paradoxically, both quixotic and redundant.It is quixotic because the obvious problems of unreliable observations and underreporting inherent in prison assault make highly refined objective data a fantasy. It is redundant because the relevant facts are already clear: A recent report by Human Rights Watch synthesized data and various perception surveys from around the United States and conservatively concluded that approximately 20 percent of all inmates are sexually assaulted in some way and at least 7 percent raped. A cautious inference is that nearly 200,000 current inmates have been raped and nearly 1 million have been sexually assaulted over the past 20 years.

A look at the web page of the primary product of the 2003 act, the National Prison Rape Elimination Commission, does not indicate what anyone would call a blizzard of activity. It’s held some hearings, and offers links to studies of prison rape, some of which were conducted prior to 2003. There is a link to an interesting 2006 Urban Institute report on state implementation of the NPREA. Despite lots of examples of new state programs, the report poses several “questions” that still need to be answered through “research.” Here are three of them that tell you everything you need to know:

Do the programs described in this report matter? Are incidents of PSV [Prison Sexual Violence] being eliminated in DOCs [state Departments of Corrections] implementing prevention efforts?…. Are perpetrators of PSV, both staff and inmates, being held accountable, through DOC sanctions and administrative penalties as well as criminally?

So we are definitely not as a society racing towards what the 2003 federal legislation described as a “zero-tolerance” position on prison rape. And thus we continue to accept the cruel irony of making prisons one of the most common arenas for the commission of one of the most violent felony crimes.Simple indifference aside, there are two obvious barriers to eliminating prison rape. The first is that most of the remedies are controversial (incarcerating far fewer non-violent offenders) or very expensive (building less crowded prisons, providing much higher pay and better training and supervision of prison staff, or radically improving monitoring of inmates).And the second barrier to change is the really dirty little non-secret underlying tolerance of prison rape: the idea that it’s an effective deterrent to criminal behavior.This “walk the line or get raped” attitude has undeniably been prevalent on the political Right, where for years politicians have railed against so-called “country-club prisons” and suggested that inmates deserve the most barbarous conditions imaginable. (There has to be a special place in hell for conservatives who want to criminalize loving, consensual gay and lesbian relationships, while smiling upon prison rape.) But it’s also found implicit currency elsewhere, among virtually every advocacy group that wants to deter some anti-social behavior, from drunk driving to white collar crime, by raising the specter of getting sent off to Oz and maybe being raped. As Ezra noted uncomfortably in a post last year:

When we were hoping to put Ken Lay behind bars, Bill Lockyer explained his grand desire “to personally escort Lay to an 8-by-10 cell that he could share with a tattooed dude who says, Hi, my name is Spike, honey.”‘

One of the most pervasive indicators of the keep-prisons-barbarous temptation has been the widespread deployment of “scared straight” programs which shuttle school kids through prisons to give them a taste of the consequences of straying into criminal behavior. No one has quite, yet, suggested staging a prison gang-rape for the edification of touring students. But that would in fact represent an act of clarifying honesty for those who continue to tolerate, for whatever reason, sexual violence in prisons.

It appears that Australian Prime Minister John Howard has finally figured out he should distance himself somewhat from Washington, DC. There’s only one problem. He didn’t take a shot at his buddy George W. Bush, who is profoundly unpopular Down Under as well as Up Here. No, Howard went after that real American political hot commodity, Barack Obama, and the Democratic Party.In a press interview, Howard said of proposals from Obama and other Democrats to begin withdrawing troops from Iraq:

“I think that would just encourage those who wanted completely to destabilise and destroy Iraq, and create chaos and victory for the terrorists to hang on and hope for (an) Obama victory,” Mr Howard told the Nine Network.”If I was running al-Qaeda in Iraq, I would put a circle around March 2008, and pray, as many times as possible, for a victory not only for Obama, but also for the Democrats.”

Wow. This isn’t Bushism; it’s Cheneyism gone publicly rampant. And in a country whose people (a) like the Iraq War even less than Americans do, if that’s possible, and (b) have a strong interest in maintaining good relations with both political parties in the U.S.The Obama campaign’s quick response was rather direct:

“If Prime Minister Howard truly believes what he says, perhaps his country should find its way to contribute more than just 1,400 troops so some American troops can come home,” [Obama spokesman Robert Gibbs] said. “It’s easy to talk tough when it’s not your country or your troops making the sacrifices.”

Indeed. Gibbs might have gone on to point out that even the very limited Australian troop commitment is deeply controversial in that country. Howard’s naming of Obama was perhaps not as weird as it would first appear to Americans. During my own recent visit to Australia, I was inundated with questions about the junior senator from Illinois; Aussies are extraordinarily well informed about U.S. politics. Moreover, Howard has been trying to make immigration a big wedge issue in the upcoming Australian elections, with the terrorist threat supposedly represented by Muslim immigrants being the public theme, and all sorts of racial fears lying just under the surface. Maybe an African-American politician with an Islamic-sounding name was just too tempting a target. Or maybe Howard’s just watching too much Fox News.

Why is the Democratic presidential nominating contest heating up earlier than ever? There are plenty of explanations, including an impressive field and the sense that this could be an especially momentous election. But the overriding reason is simply that despite widely-held complaints about the “front-loading” of the selection process in 2004, it’s going to be much, much more front-loaded in 2008.Jerome Armstrong of MyDD has a good summary of what he calls “the biggest mess ever,” and focuses on the maneuvering of some states to break into the DNC-dictated four-state (IA, NV, NH, SC) early calendar. And to be sure, all hell could break loose if NH and IA get into a crazy move-things-up-perpetually competition with other states to maintain their traditional first-caucus, first-primary status.But the bigger problem is the number and size of states that have moved up to dates just after SC. As Armstrong points out:

In 2004, seven states held primaries within a couple of weeks of New Hampshire, and already for 2008, sixteen states are in that window. Unlike the 2004, in 2008 there are mega-states like California, New Jersey, Michigan and Florida in that mix.

Some Democrats rationalized front-loading in 2004 on grounds that taking on an incumbent Republican president required an early start for the challenger. That’s obviously not a factor in 2008; yet the front-loading proceeds apace, basically because we don’t really have a national presidential nominating system.There are various theories about how front-loading will affect the 2008 contest. One is that it will actually magnify the importance of Iowa, where all indications are that there will be a close four-way race among Clinton, Edwards, Obama and Vilsack. Another is that the candidates with the most money and national support will “go long” and husband resources for delegate-rich post-SC states like CA and FL. But one thing’s for certain: when a grind-it-out attrition campaign means waiting to throw your real weight into states voting on February 5, roughly nine months before the General Election, it’s a very different nominating process than we’ve ever seen. And that makes me nervous.

There’s a fascinating and important exchange underway on the New Republic site between Yossi Klein Halevi of the Shalem Center and Larry Derfner of the Jerusalem Post about Israel’s options towards a potentially nuclear Iran.This debate was spurred by a widely quoted TNR article last week by Halevi along with Michael Oren that suggested Israelis have largely concluded that they cannot live with a nuclear Iran, and will probably soon launch some sort of attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities even if that spurs retaliation or a large-scale Middle Eastern meltdown.You should read the entire exchange (Halevi’s second rejoinder will appear tomorrow), but the central points in the dispute have to do with Halevi’s belief that the Iran regime’s peculiar theological nature will make it intolerably tempted to attack Israel with nuclear weapons regardless of the disastrous consequences to its own people, giving Israel little choice but to preempt that possibility or risk extinction.Derfner’s latest post nails the central problem with Halevi’s argument: it rejects the entire and completely successful history of nuclear deterrence:

You say it’s “facile” of me to use Stalin and Mao to argue that even crazy, bloodthirsty leaders aren’t likely to use nukes, because I’m disregarding the new element of apocalyptic Iranian religion. But, when I’m trying to anticipate what somebody’s going to do in the future, I put a lot more store in his deeds than in his texts. I think Stalin’s and Mao’s purges of tens of millions of innocents augur much more for nuclear insanity than the Shia doctrine of the Hidden Imam. For all its violent repression at home and aid to Islamic terrorism abroad, post-revolutionary Iran has never started a war with another country. It has never used its WMD on anybody, either. It has never trafficked in genocide.The reason, I believe, is the power of deterrence. It has worked on Iran, too. It has worked on everybody–no exceptions. And, while there is, of course, a theoretical possibility that it won’t work on a nuclear Iran, I think Israelis have to weigh the results of nuclear-age deterrence against the predictable and unpredictable results of a war against Iran–and to choose hopeful moderation over its fear-induced opposite.

There are, of course, considerable grounds for Israelis to believe that its nuclear deterrent won’t stop conventional military attacks on their country; after all, during the 1973 Yom Kippur war, Egypt and Syria concluded (inaccurately, according to most accounts) that Israel would not launch a nuclear attack to keep Arab armies out of Tel Aviv. But the conventional threat to Israel is only marginally increased by Tehran’s nuclear program, even if it’s far more advanced and successful than most observers think it is. So the question remains: what’s riskier for Israel? Relying on the 100% success rate of nuclear deterrence against nuclear attacks since Hiroshima? Or unleashing a regional war at a time when the furies that would unleash are undoubtedly horrifying, not least for Israel?

If you are a regular reader of political blogs, you are probably aware of the burgeoning kerfuffle over certain remarks about the Catholic Church expressed in the past by two bloggers recently hired by the John Edwards presidential campaign. The story has been percolating for a while, but blew up yesterday when National Review’s Kathyrn Jean Lopez served up some choice quotes from one of the staffers, Amanda Marcotte (formerly of the Pandagon blog), suggesting that women’s rights might be safer if the Virgin Mary had been able to get hold of Plan B contraceptives.As of this writing, it’s not clear whether reports that the Edwards campaign was about to fire the duo are accurate or not. It is clear the campaign is a bit between a rock and a hard place, the rock being fear of association with anti-Catholic opinions, and the hard place being the progressive blogosphere’s increasingly angry demands that Edwards stand up to right-wing intimidation or forfeit his previously strong Left Netroots support.Complicating the story is the fact that the notorious right-wing political operative Bill Donahue of the conservative factional Catholic League (best known for his demands that the Church excommunicate pro-choice politicians like John Kerry) has massively piled onto the dispute, running around the MSM today expressing outrage at the bloggers’ offensive opinions. Thus, any Edwards effort to discipline or dismiss the bloggers is inevitably being interpreted as a cave-in to the Right-Wing Noise Machine on the order of Kerry’s alleged refusal to counter the Swift Boat Veterans’ smear of 2004.The person being most obviously victimized in the furor is the second Edwards staffer in question, Melissa McEwan (a.k.a. Shakespeare’s Sister), who apparently did nothing more than use some profanity in rejecting anti-abortionist efforts to control women’s reproductive systems. Big deal; I feel the same way myself on occasion, and I’m so Anglo-Catholic that I tend to catch a cold when the Pope sneezes.The underlying question, nicely framed by Ezra Klein at TAPPED, is whether we are henceforth going to be treated to endless oppo-research examinations of the published utterances of campaign staffers on topics other than, well, campaign staffing. Ezra thinks this would set a terrible precedent, and I tend to agree, though it’s hardly a novelty; way back in 1972, George McGovern got flack for a pro-Palestinian manifesto that a campaign staffer, Rick Stearns, had signed years earlier as a college student (leading Hunter Thompson to facetiously refer to Stearns as “that devious Arab bastard” in his famous book on the campaign).Since Edwards’ bloggers were not exactly hired to be back-room operators, perhaps the press release on their hiring should have included a disclaimer that read: “All our previously expressed opinions have now been subsumed in the transcendent cause of electing John Edwards president, to which we henceforth slavishly submit.” That might have headed off a world of trouble.The deeper question, when it comes to Marcotte’s more provocative quotes, is whether Catholics specifically, or Christians generally, ought to take offense at this sort of blasphemous nonsense, and play the victim. The simple reality is that the central mystery of Christianity, the Incarnation, is inevitably, to unbelievers, a standing invitation to sophomoric jibes about the Virgin Birth and the whole idea of God Made Human. That’s hardly news, and hardly grounds for believers to get self-righteously huffy, particularly if some of their co-religionists insist on politicizing their faith as hacks like Donohue perpetually do.The whole dispute reminds me of the forgotten incident in 1971, when Patricia Buckley Bozell (yes, that Buckley’s sister, and that Bozell’s wife) assaulted feminist icon Ti-Grace Atkinson at a Catholic University podium after Atkinson made some smarmy remarks about the Virgin Mary “getting knocked up.”Soon after, this letter appeared in Time Magazine:

As a Roman Catholic, as a supporter of the free expression of ideas, and as a believer in the virginity of Mary, I offer Ti-Grace Atkinson my apologies for the outlandish behavior of Patricia Buckley Bozell [March 22]. Never before has the Virgin Mary required the use of arms—or hands—to defend her. Mrs. Bozell was rather presumptuous to think that Mary now needed her intercession.

That’s as true today as it was more than thirty-five years ago.

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.