This time David Ignatius nails it, although nothing he "discloses" is news to anyone who is a regular visitor to this site.

Many of the actions taken in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 may have made some sense at the time, but they were not well-thought through as long-term policy shifts. Since 9/11, however, the dominating fear of another attack has kept the White House focused on not losing the next skirmish rather than promoting the nation's long-term interests.

The result of continuing to operate in a state-of-emergency mode, what Jack Balkin calls "governing through terrorism," has been a pattern of policymaking that has often turned out to be short-sighted and self-defeating, whether in the wars we've chosen to wage and how we've waged them, the methods we have used to capture and handle detainees, or the ways we have confused spin and propaganda with public diplomacy. Not surprisingly, as we've been belatedly learning in the press over the past several weeks, the loosening of constraints on domestic intelligence collection has also appeared to produce mission creep by some agencies or parts of the military, unaccountable privacy intrusions, and unwarranted surveillance of political activities.

As we've pointed out frequently on this site, many of the Administration's post-9/11 policies, from the conduct of the Iraq war to the handling of detainees, have increasingly been opposed not only by the Administration's political opponents but by highly-respected professionals in the very departments and agencies devoted to security, intelligence and diplomacy. These "revolts of the professionals," as Ignatius calls them, can't be simply dismissed as classic turf-fighting. Instead, the pros have been trying to push the system back toward a more sensible, balanced and, in the long-run, more sustainable approach to strategy, operations and practices. The recent revolts by a number of Senators and Congressmen who are long known as strong advocates of the military and intelligence communities have been a clear signal that the pros have failed to get their message through to the White House, so they've decided that Congress must at least hear the full story.

In saying that we're moving into a post-post-9/11 world, I'm not suggesting that the risks facing America are necessarily greatly reduced compared to what they were on 9/12/2001. In some respects, threats to American interests abroad are considerably greater. But rather, the US is now in a much better position to evaluate, manage and respond to those risks.

Ignatius doesn't go as far as I would -- I think the proposal earlier this year to switch from the Global War on Terrorism to a Global Struggle Against Violent Extremism, how daffy the acronym, is another long-overdue shift to a post-post-9/11 world. However, he's certainly correct that it's no longer productive for the White House (or the OVP) to continue to insist on every executive prerogative and to dig in their heels on every issue of executive authority. As Ignatius argues, it's past time for the President to start providing leadership so we can start fashioning a workable consensus on how we will operate in a post-post-9/11 world.

Revolt of the Professionals

The national security structure that the Bush administration created after Sept. 11, 2001, began to crumble this month because of a bipartisan revolt on Capitol Hill. Newly emboldened legislators forced the administration to accept new rules for the interrogation of prisoners, delayed renewal of the Patriot Act and demanded an investigation of warrantless wiretapping by the National Security Agency.

President Bush has bristled at these challenges to his authority over what has amounted to an undeclared national state of emergency. But the intelligence professionals who have daily responsibility for waging the war against terrorism don't seem particularly surprised or unhappy to see the emergency structure in trouble.
[...]
I asked [a senior intelligence official] what he thought, watching the emergency structure come down around him. "We all knew it would," he said. The interim structure was inherently unsustainable. But he noted that the very fact that the nation is debating rules for interrogation and surveillance of suspected terrorists demonstrates the success the intelligence agencies have had since Sept. 11 in disrupting attacks.

One little-noted factor in this re-balancing is what I would call "the officers' revolt" -- and by that I mean both military generals in uniform and intelligence officers at the CIA, the NSA and other agencies. There has been growing uneasiness among these national security professionals at some of what they have been asked to do, and at the seeming unconcern among civilian leaders at the Pentagon and the CIA for the consequences of administration decisions.

The quiet revolt of the generals at the Pentagon is a big reason U.S. policy in Iraq has been changing, far more than Bush's stay-the-course speeches might suggest. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is deeply unpopular with senior military officers. They complain privately about a management style that has stretched the military to the breaking point in Iraq. For months they have been working out details of troop reductions next year in Iraq -- not just because such action will keep the Army and Marine Corps from cracking but because they think a smaller footprint will be more effective in stabilizing the country.

A similar revolt is evident at the CIA. Professional intelligence officers are furious at the politicized leadership brought to the agency by ex-congressman Porter Goss and his retinue of former congressional staffers.
[...]
The CIA, like the military, wants clear and sustainable rules of engagement. Agency employees don't want their careers ruined by future congressional or legal investigations of actions they thought were authorized. Unhappiness within the CIA about fuzzy rules on interrogation, and the risk of getting clobbered after the fact for doing your job, was a secret driver for Sen. John McCain's push for a new law banning cruel interrogation techniques.
[...]
President Bush needs to do what he so often talks about, which is to provide strong leadership. In place of the post-Sept. 11 emergency structure, the country needs clear rules that Congress can debate and finally endorse.

Amen!

cross-posted at American Footprints

I couldn't help stealing that great post title from Patricia Kushlis (PHK) of Whirled View. Her starting point is Elisabeth Bumiller's recent White House Letter ($ req'd), which noted that the Bush Administration is now "on message" regarding the existential threat of an AlQaeda-sponsored caliphate.

Needless to say, both the history and geography contained in the warnings from Cheney et al are more than mildly suspect, as PHK illustrates. But the Caliphate is certainly a colorful way to package the President's claims that the West is engaged in another generational struggle of near-apocalyptic proportions akin to the Cold War. Norman Podhoretz and the World War IV advocates must be highly gratified.

"D" is for Dominoes?

Few would argue that the US is not facing a long-term threat of terrorist attacks on US interests at home and abroad. The debate is rather about the appropriate strategy for addressing that threat, which depends in part on how one views the nature and sources of the enemy's strengths and weaknesses, and the best means to reduce its strength and counter its ability to cause lasting damage. And one of the central points of contention in that debate is the place, within the "global struggle against violent extremism" (yes, GSAVE is actually a useful concept despite its origins) of the current fighting with the AlQaeda-linked insurgents in Iraq.

By introducing the caliphate argument, the Administration seems to be shifting away from crude "flypaper" logic, although certainly not abandoning the rhetoric entirely, based on the President's Sunday speech from the Oval Office. The handy feature of the caliphate argument is that it doesn't simply equate Iraq as the "central front in the GWOT" because that's where the terrorists are fighting. Rather, Iraq is proclaimed to be the main line of defense against the encroachment of a geopolitical enemy. We can't leave Iraq because it could be taken over by AlQaeda -- step one in the march to the caliphate. Echoes of dominoes anyone?

Big Media Justin and his Cato colleague, Christopher Preble, have addressed the Administration's fear of an AlQaeda victory in Iraq in The Daily Star. After examining Iraqi and Arab public opinion, as well as the hostility against AlQaeda of other well-armed Iraqi insurgent groups and sectarian militias, they conclude that if America leaves, AlQaeda will not inherit Iraq.

As Logan and Preble parse recent speeches by Administration figures, what emerges is not only the argument that AlQaeda's defeat in Iraq (by the US or by Iraqi forces?) will be critical to preventing AlQaeda from achieving its goal of a caliphate. That argument is supplemented by the assertion that a withdrawal by the US would be greeted by AlQaeda as a moral victory, which would in turn attract legions of bandwagonning Muslim supporters across the arc of instability.

And "P" is for Peace with Honor?

Shades of Nixon and Kissinger's "peace with honor," the President's Sunday speech expanded on the theoretical costs of America's losing credibility by prematurely withdrawing from Iraq, providing a laundry list of international audiences:

We would abandon our Iraqi friends and signal to the world that America cannot be trusted to keep its word. We would undermine the morale of our troops by betraying the cause for which they have sacrificed. We would cause the tyrants in the Middle East to laugh at our failed resolve, and tighten their repressive grip. We would hand Iraq over to enemies who have pledged to attack us and the global terrorist movement would be emboldened and more dangerous than ever before. To retreat before victory would be an act of recklessness and dishonor, and I will not allow it.

Logan and Preble respond to the President's final warning:

The jihadis will certainly claim that the American withdrawal represents a victory for their side, but they will do so whenever U.S. forces leave - be that next year, or 10 years from now. In his Johns Hopkins speech, Rumsfeld declared that a "retreat in Iraq" would tell our enemies "that if America will not defend itself against terrorists in Iraq, it will not defend itself against terrorists anywhere."

That is absurd. An American military withdrawal from Iraq would not signal that the U.S. has chosen to ignore events there; it expects all countries around the world to cooperate with it in the fight against terrorism. The withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq must be coupled with a clear and unequivocal message to the people of Iraq, and to the world: Do not threaten us; do not support anti-American terrorists. Meanwhile, the U.S. must continue to pursue Zarqawi and his network, just as it pursues bin Laden and his network. The world can be assured: the U.S. will take all necessary measures to carry the fight the enemy, wherever he might reside, be that in Germany, Afghanistan or Iraq.

An American military withdrawal from Iraq will hardly be a stepping stone for Al-Qaeda's grandiose plan to establish an Islamic super-state from Morocco to Indonesia. The Bush administration ought to stop inflating the costs of leaving Iraq, and take a more serious look at the benefits.

That's not to suggest that the Iraqis, the US and Iraq's neighbors shouldn't be concerned about AlQaeda taking advantage of chaos and low-grade civil war in western Iraq to maintain fluid bases of operations from which attacks outside Iraq could be carried out. The recent bombings in Amman underscore that threat. But that argues more in favor of working on the political dimensions of the non-AlQaeda insurgencies. (More on that later.) Not on casting the conflict in Iraq with Zarqawi's supporters as the battlefield on which the future of a caliphate is to be determined.

As I've argued for a long time, the US needs a "peace with honor" exit for its own political equilibrium, not for its international standing, which will be helped, not hurt, by significantly scaling back its involvement in Iraq. And I'm willing to engage in a few harmless fictions from the Administration if it's helpful to that process. But ginning up new existential battles is a pernicious distortion of the threat from terrorism America is facing as well as of the nature of the conflicts in Iraq and the Middle East. As we should already have learned from the Iraq/WMD fiasco, fashioning and executing sensible strategy is considerably more difficult when the Administration engages in fanciful threat inflation.

cross-posted at American Footprints

Note: See below for Bill Keller's initial response to the timing question.

---

As I noted in the sidebar miniblog, and as Praktike posts, John Yoo's fingerprints are once again on an "aggressive" reading of executive power, this time the NSA getting into the domestic surveillance of Americans -- just reported in a major article in the New York Times.

No big surprise, the NYT report was used as ammunition in the Senate cloture vote on the Patriot Act that Feingold et al (three Dem and three GOP Senators) just won in a big way -- 46 votes (47 including Frist as a procedural move). [note: Feingold has been blogging the process at TPMCafe this week]

Glad to see the Senate standing up for its version against the House. When the Senate engages in long negotiations that produce something everyone can live with, the House can't be allowed to eviscerate the deal in conference. As much as the Patriot Act, this vote is a triumph of bipartisanship in the Senate against the House/White House majoritarianism, which will hopefully have a healthy effect on the conference process in the future (e.g. the Rep Duncan Hunter's threats to water down the torture prohibitions in the defense bill). Anyway, the NYT report was helpful to the cause.

But the Patriot Act's critics got a boost from a New York Times report saying Bush authorized the National Security Agency to monitor the international phone calls and international e-mails of hundreds — perhaps thousands — of people inside the United States. Previously, the NSA typically limited its domestic surveillance to foreign embassies and missions and obtained court orders for such investigations.

If the NYT had held off on this story until after the Patriot Act was extended, it would have been another Big Media travesty. I simply don't get why the NYT keeps putting themselves in the position of at least appearing to be the Bush Administration's poodles. I wonder who decided they should include in the article that they'd been sitting on the story for a year. I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall in the editorial conference on that paragraph!

On the substance, I don't understand why in the world the Administration can't comply with some simple, basic protections like a warrant. Although I'd certainly prefer that NSA didn't collect huge amounts of information of private conversations, my conscience isn't shocked that they may need to follow leads across borders back into the US. However, the FISA court procedures are super-fast and give enormous deference to the FBI and intelligence folks. If NSA needs some sort of rule that deals with their trolling large groups of phone numbers, I'm sure they could get a specific procedural waiver included in the Administration's precious Patriot Act -- something that gave the court a chance to look at the initial request, a process for dumping all the garbage info that a big sweep would collect, etc. And the Administration is so dreadfully short-sighted -- just as evidence acquired via torture may not stand up in court, evidence based on unauthorized privacy invasions may be fatal to a prosecution. Yes, hunting terrorists before they act isn't like trying to get the goods on someone who has already committed a crime, but with very small adjustments in process, they could retain the ability to "bring the bad guys to justice" even as they stop the bad guys from acting. And more fundamentally, there simply must be some basic safeguards that hold intel/law enforcement accountable to someone other than the internal John Yoos.

What's increasingly clear is that "trust us" is just as feeble an excuse as we all figured it would be. You don't have to be a libertarian, civil or otherwise, to know that it's the simple nature of bureaucracies. But it's time to break the Catch-22, that the Congress, in its oversight function, is dependent upon the Administration's discretion to decide whether to report on how they are actually using their powers.

The one encouraging thing about the NYT report was that the oversight by the FISA court and the Senate Intel Committee (Rockefeller) actually seemed to make a difference. Why? Because it gave the insiders who were opposing these measures some leverage to make their case heard. [noted: our need for the press to act as an effective watchdog, and use information from insiders who are concerned about Administration actions, is why I agree with Paleoprog that any prosecution in the Plame case NOT be based on the Espionage Act.]

But that's a bigger lesson we're learning about Congressional oversight with the Bush Administration. They steamroll over the cautions of experienced professionals inside the agencies and departments. The oversight process permits these other, somewhat wiser views -- e.g. key parts of JAG and State on torture, CIA & State on renditions -- a chance to make their case. But it's only the leaks to the press that give the Senate the leverage they need over the Administration, which otherwise is less than forthcoming about what they're doing.

And that brings me back to the NYT. Good to see they're starting to do their job.

UPDATE:Scott Lemieux of Lawyers, Guns & Money has a somewhat more colorful version of my assessment of the Bush Administration's pattern of behavior.

The Washington Post's report on the cloture vote cites Senator Specter's reaction to the news of the NSA's spying on Americans:

Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, called the domestic spying "clearly and categorically wrong" and vowed to hold oversight hearings on the matter when the Senate reconvenes early next year after its holiday recess.

And Atrios goes straight to the heart of the matter:

How hard it is to get a damn warrant? The reason do such a thing is to simply assert that you can.

FURTHER INFO: Phil Carter may be in Iraq these days, but he's not out of touch. He points to Orin Kerr at Volokh, who recommends Judge Sand's opinion in United States v. bin Laden, 126 F.Supp.2d 264 (S.D.N.Y. 2000) (pdf) as a good place to start to understand the legal/constitutional issues. Orin notes:

While the statutory privacy laws have an exception for this type of monitoring, see 18 U.S.C. 2511(f), and the constitutional limits on e-mail surveillance are uncertain even in traditional criminal cases, the constitutionality of warrantless interception of telephone calls in situations like this is really murky stuff.

Jack Balkin's a bit more blunt:

Once you begin with the twin assumptions that (1) emergency justifies suspension of constitutional rights and (2) that the President cannot be bound by the rule of law when he acts as Commander-in-Chief, there is very little left to restrain the President. And so he has not been restrained.

The NYT's first response to the heat to come:  In response to a question about the timing of the article, Tim Grieve (Salon's War Room) has received a long fax with a statement from Bill Keller:

We start with the premise that a newspaper's job is to publish information that is a matter of public interest. Clearly a secret policy reversal that gives an American intelligence agency discretion to monitor communications within the country is a matter of public interest. From the outset, the question was not why we would publish it, but why we would not.

A year ago, when this information first became known to Times reporters, the administration argued strongly that writing about this eavesdropping program would give terrorists clues about the vulnerability of their communications and would deprive the government of an effective tool for the protection of the country's security. Officials also assured senior editors of the Times that a variety of legal checks had been imposed that satisfied everyone involved that the program raised no legal questions. As we have done before in rare instances when faced with a convincing national security argument, we agreed not to publish at that time.

We also continued reporting, and in the ensuing months two things happened that changed our thinking.

First, we developed a fuller picture of the concerns and misgivings that had been expressed during the life of the program. It is not our place to pass judgment on the legal or civil liberties questions involved in such a program, but it became clear those questions loomed larger within the government than we had previously understood.

Second, in the course of subsequent reporting we satisfied ourselves that we could write about this program -- withholding a number of technical details -- in a way that would not expose any intelligence-gathering methods or capabilities that are not already on the public record. The fact that the government eavesdrops on those suspected of terrorist connections is well-known. The fact that the NSA can legally monitor communications within the United States with a warrant from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court is also public information. What is new is that the N.S.A. has for the past three years had the authority to eavesdrop on Americans and others inside the United States without a warrant. It is that expansion of authority -- not the need for a robust anti-terror intelligence operation -- that prompted debate within the government, and that is the subject of the article.

As with most such defensive responses, Keller's raises as many questions as answers. He gets the principles right. But he doesn't explain why the NYT, after months of investigation, didn't know what those of us amateurs who only vaguely follow these sorts of "legal constraints on intelligence collection" would have assumed: that disclosing that the Administration had unilaterally expanded its purported authority would not have exposed "any intelligence-gathering methods or capabilities that are not already on the public record."

On the face of Keller's remarks, it looks like the NYT editors swallowed the Administration's representations that they were being good boys and, only recently, began asking themselves whether those assurances, and the "national security" hype, were bogus. But the NYT can't come out and say in so many words that they were lied to, so we have to read between Keller's lines. It certainly appears as if the NYT finally figured out that its remaining credibility would have evaporated if the report had been published following the big Patriot Act cloture battle, given the relevance of NSA's activity to the Patriot Act debate.


[cross-posted at American Footprints]

Dave Schuler (The Glittering Eye) and I have been exchanging some lengthy comments on his blog about the domestic politics of the war in Iraq. Dave and I have similar perspectives on the war -- not only why it was a bad idea strategically in the first place but how, once the US went into Iraq, the US has had both a responsibility and a strategic national interest that compel it to try to make the best of its intervention. We also share similar views of the dynamics of the on-the-ground situation and the limited options remaining now to the US. And we both get extremely cranky when public debate disintegrates into the false dichotomy of "withdrawal" versus "stay the course." At least rhetorically, Dave's a bit more optimistic than I am. He still talks in terms of possible "victory" in the long-term, whereas I've been in "damage control" mode for some time. Still, I'd say that compared to the wide range of opinions about Iraq that you find in the blogosphere, Dave and I are more often than not on the same page (or at least in the same section of the hymnal).

Which is why I find it interesting that Dave and I have such markedly different opinions about the play of domestic politics re Iraq. At the end of an excellent discussion of assumptions underlying the "National Victory Strategy" presented by the President on Wednesday, Dave "couldn't resist" the following remark about "a good part of the Democratic Party" including at least one of what we might call war-Dems, Senator Clinton:

C’mon, folks. Lead, follow, or get the hell out of the way.

In response, I too "couldn't resist" -- commenting in part:

Sorry Dave, you should have resisted. The critiques by the “war-Dems” have been the same as the Republican Senators like McCain, Hagel, Lugar (and even increasingly Warner!) — and they’ve been on the money for the last several years in terms of where the big weaknesses have been in the Admin’s abysmal planning and execution. The changes in policy we’ve seen over the past 4-6 months under the Casey/Khalizad team are the sorts of things that “war-Dems” and the more serious of the Republican Senators have been calling for since 2003. Note Lugar-Biden attempts to deal with these issues in hearings that the media have generally ignored.

I don’t see what the war-Dems have been doing as anything other than responsible. They’re not in a position to “lead”, they surely shouldn’t be expected to have “followed” the criminally incompetent Admin without insisting on changing course, nor do I see them as “in the way.”

Dave clarified what he had meant by his off-the-cuff slap, I responded with a monstrously long essay in the comment thread, and Dave has now penned a further post that goes to what I believe is the heart of the matter. Rather than continue to bury this discussion in comment threads, and eat up vast quantities of his bandwidth, I figured I'd post my response here.

Dave's new post is appropriately titled “The President proposes, Congress disposes” -- "a play on a much older apothegm: 'Man proposes but God disposes'."

When you realize that in the Washingtonism “Man” has been replaced by “The President” and “God” by “Congress”, the meaning becomes quite clear: the President is the handmaiden of Congress and subject to its will, not the other way around.

Under our system the president has primary responsibility for the military, the conduct of foreign policy, and the administration of the departments of government:

The President shall be commander in chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the militia of the several states, when called into the actual service of the United States; he may require the opinion, in writing, of the principal officer in each of the executive departments, upon any subject relating to the duties of their respective offices, and he shall have power to grant reprieves and pardons for offenses against the United States, except in cases of impeachment.

and enforcing the law. The Congress has primary responsibility for the creation, passage, and promulgation of laws (and, of course, raising and apportioning revenue).

Here’s what the Constitution says about the president’s responsibilities in formulating domestic policy:

He shall from time to time give to the Congress information of the state of the union, and recommend to their consideration such measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient; he may, on extraordinary occasions, convene both Houses, or either of them, and in case of disagreement between them, with respect to the time of adjournment, he may adjourn them to such time as he shall think proper; he shall receive ambassadors and other public ministers; he shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed, and shall commission all the officers of the United States.

It should be clear that ours is a system in which the bulk of the responsibility particularly in the area of domestic policy devolves upon the Congress; we expect leadership and courage from our Congress; when you have cowardice and venality and a willingness to wait for the President to act and then snipe you get, well, what we have now. But that’s not our system it’s a perversion of our system.
[...]
Like it or not Senators are leaders. The slim Republican majority in the Senate doesn’t absolve the Democrats in the Senate from the responsibility to lead.

Let me be very clear: I’m not just critical of Senate Democrats. I think the Senators of both political parties did not fulfill their responsibilities when they authorized the president to go to war with insufficient debate. But I further think that those Senators who voted “Nay” had a responsibility to hold their peace once our soldiers had gone into harm’s way and those who voted “Aye” had an affirmative responsibility to defend their vote and advocate the position to the American people. This is manifestly not what happened and that’s why I’m convinced that many Senators, particularly Senate Democrats, did not vote their consciences but voted with one eye (as Nadezhda pointed out) on the midterm elections and the other on the upcoming presidential primaries. Of course there will be political calculation from Senators. But there should be more than political calculation. Where is the statesmanship? We aren’t just warring factions; we’re all Americans.

I also freely acknowledge that the greatest incompetency of the Bush Administration has been in communicating with the American people, with the Iraqi people, and with the world. But the Administration doesn’t have sole responsibility for communicating with the American people. Congress has substantial responsibilities in that area, too.

I share Dave's visceral commitment to what at times seems like an old-fashioned notion of separation of powers, with each branch responsible for playing its part and protecting its prerogatives in order for the system's checks and balances to work. Since I began blogging, one of my recurrent themes has been that our checks and balances haven't been working properly in recent years.

Dave and I are also certainly on the same page in believing that Congress has not been living up to its responsibilities. In my view, only the courts have provided an occasional check on executive power. I am personally hopeful, with the first small indications of a reassertion by the Senate of its institutional prerogatives, that a rebalancing is starting to emerge.

I don't, however, put Congress' failure down to sheer cravenness on the part of either individuals or their respective parties. Instead, I see several (hopefully transient) structural factors that have recently inhibited the sort of Democratic leadership Dave calls for -- or encouraged the media to ingnore attempts at constructive leadership by either Democrats or Republicans on the Hill -- while producing a quasi-parliamentary arrangement that fits poorly with the US system.

As Jack Balkan points out in a very nice short essay on the subject of checks and balances, James Madison's assumptions didn't include political parties. When US parties start acting as cohesive blocks, the system's potential weaknesses become glaring. Even before 9/11, some political trends had converged to produce a far more disciplined party-based organization (running the House, extending into the Senate once the party took over the White House, and maintaining its power base through especially effective political-financial connections) than has traditionally been the case in our national politics.

When one party hits the rare "constitutional trifecta" as Balkin calls it -- when all three branches of government "are working more or less together to achieve the party's goals" -- a parliamentary-style system is likely to emerge. And today, the power base that supports the GOP's trifecta is unusually insulated from voter sentiments by the current arithmetic of geographic representation. (See e.g. Hacker & Pierson's The Center No Longer Holds in the NYT Mag from a couple of weeks back.) The cohesion of this party-based organization has been more financial and electoral than ideological. It remains to be seen whether it can renew its cohesiveness now that its primary strengths -- electoral (Bush's popularity) and financial (DeLay-KStreet connection) -- are eroding and ideological fissures are widening.

It is my strong hope that we've not been going through a permanent change in America's political system. Rather, I prefer to believe that we've encountered a sort of perfect storm that has produced an excess of executive power which will be soon begin to be corrected. The combination of 9/11's trauma and the peculiar (to the US) polarizing style of this White House and GOP congressional leadership, when combined with the related growth of executive-branch patronage, has overridden the inherently conservative brakes of our system, not only in the legislative branch but within the executive branch itself. It's not simply the problem of the so-called "Mayberry Machievellis" who ignore substantive policy issues in favor of a purely political calculus. We have seen a widespread pattern of the Bush Administration trying to run a government via little groups of ideologically-committed but inexperienced appointees who bypass the bureaucracy (whether civil service, foreign service, military or intelligence). These practices have served neither the Bush Administration nor the country well.

Post-invasion Iraq and Katrina are two sides of the same coin. Organization Theory 101 teaches us that when you don't involve the folks with experience who are going to have to execute policy in your policymaking or planning, then when it comes time for action and you put your foot on the accelerator, you won't get to where you want to go. The engine may reve, but the connections to the gears and steering are missing or broken. This has not been a problem for the Bush Administration exclusively in the realms of military action or homeland security. The Administration has also been hollowing out the most professional and effective, and least partisan, parts of the bureaucracy, such as Justice and Treasury, and seeding the second tier of departments and agencies with political hacks and ideological naifs. The costs to the government and the nation are increasingly visible, and Congress is finally starting to push back on the appointment process.

In recent months, as more buried problems from Bush's first term start rearing their ugly heads in the press and Senators of both parties increase their pointed critiques of Administration policy, we're starting to hear indirectly from government, military and intel professionals who have been bypassed by the White House (or the Vice President's office) and its political apparatus in the departments and agencies. The whole "torture" and "detainees" issue is a perfect example -- the WH, OSD and DoJ ignored the accumulated wisdom of both the government departments and the military. The bipartisan opposition in the Senate, being led as much by Republicans as Democrats, is starting to give voice to those views. The same has been happening with a number of aspects of the Administration's military, political and diplomatic efforts in Iraq and the Middle East more boradly. Jack Murtha, John Warner, Chuck Hagel, John McCain and Joe Biden each have a different approach for the future course the US should take. But though their conclusions differ, they are all reflecting the facts and opinions they are regularly receiving from officials and officers who have been unable to be heard within the Administration's own decision-making processes.

I think Dave and I agree that a more robust system of Congressional (and especially Senatorial) oversight would and should have brought those voices and views to the fore years ago. As I see it, however, better late than never. I think we are starting to see a natural and healthy process of rebalancing, although it will be a noisy and acrimonious process. But then, it takes a good deal of noise and acrimony to effect a rebalancing when the system has gotten so far out of whack.

My principal disagreement with Dave is that I do not see the noise as the actions of a minority political party adopting the role of "parliamentary opposition" or failing to embrace the fact that "we're all Americans" when it comes to issues of war and peace. We should not be surprised by an occasional "parliamentary opposition" stance taken by the Democrats, primarily in the House given the way it's run. And perhaps on the Alito nomination in the Senate, especially if his files keep producing a stream of worrisome evidence of his opinions and habit of thought on some key issues.

But on the Iraq war, I don't see a "parliamentary opposition" emerging or likely to emerge. The Democrats have agreed to disagree among themselves for the past three years. As the debates heat up, they are already reverting to form (and to the incentives of the US system of constituency representation), with a considerable variety of individually-defined and rather nuanced positions. I assume that Reid and Pelosi won't even try for a unified party position on the war, since they know better than anyone it's like trying to herd cats. As the President's power has started to erode, the same phenomenon, by the way, has been emerging on the Republican side in the Senate, though the critiques of the President's performance by Republican Senators are more implicit than explicit.

Instead, we're likely to see more and more highly charged debates over policy positions that are, on close examination, difficult to distinguish. Battles to the death over distinctions without significant differences may simply be the way the American political system deals with disagreements over war, as Ed Kilgore has recently reminded us.

I had one of those old-guy moments today when I suddenly remembered a moment in the debate on Vietnam which reminds me of the odd disjunction between the relatively small policy differences dividing most Democrats and many Republicans on Iraq, and the big tonal and intepretative differences they sometimes convey.

In the famously fractious 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, the big platform debate over Vietnam (note to young people: this was back when big platform debates were still possible) involved a majority plank which endorsed free elections in South Vietnam to create a coalition government including the National Liberation Front (the political arm of the Viet Cong), and a minority plank endorsing a coalition government including the NLF that would be required to sponsor free elections. The policy distinctions between these two planks were about as meaningful as today's difference between supporters of a benchmarked withdrawal from Iraq based on estimated dates, and a timetable withdrawal contingent on benchmarks.

Yet at the time, these two proposals were almost universally described by the news media as "pro-war" and "anti-war" platform planks.

The lesson is this: So much as many of us might wish to focus on the policy details of proposals about what to do now in Iraq, you can't take the politics out of politics, and the "tonal" or "contextual" implications of various proposals, despite their substantive similarity, matter a great deal.

The challenge of reconciling policy with political imperatives isn't unique to Democrats. Praktike and I have written repeatedly on the huge gap between the President's political rhetoric on Iraq and the evolving (and improving) policies being adopted by both the military and the State Department in his second term. The primary virtue of what the President accomplished in his speech this week was to narrow the rhetoric/reality gap, as did his spokesman in somewhat disingenously claiming that Senator Biden's proposals represented Biden's embrace of the President's own strategy, as described by Eric Martin.

These sorts of "failures to communicate" that Dave bemoans are, in part, driven by political considerations of the White House and politicians of both parties positioning themselves with the electorate. Let's hope for all our sakes that the politics this time serves a broader purpose than acting as a circular firing squad of Democrats. At the close of Jack Balkin's admittedly partisan essay on the structural reasons for recent failures of Congressional oversight, he asks:

If Congress won't perform its assigned function of oversight, the only recourse is the American people. Will they become sufficiently engaged to put our constitutional system back in order, and once again let ambition counter ambition?

Many media commentators, especially the purveyors of "moderation" and the "pox on both your houses" punditocracy, argue that the Democrats shouldn't run so heavily against the performance of the Bush Administration since Bush won't be on the ballot in 2008. But that misses the point that one of the major political themes running across both domestic and foreign policy is a rebalancing of the system of powers. It's in the interest of the health of the body politic that we "once again let ambition counter ambition."

[cross-posted at American Footprints aka Liberals against Terrorism]