The Center for American Progress’ Iraq Timeline, charting various Friedman Unit-esque pronouncements over the years is a thing of beauty. It also reminds me specifically of Will Marshall’s January 2004 proclamation that “America has about six months to break the resistance and give the new Iraqi government a fighting chance to survive. It would help if our leaders stopped casting anxious glances toward the exits.” In January 2004, I thought much the same thing. And, indeed, to this day, I still think that was more-or-less the correct judgment.

But that’s exactly why, by the end of 2004, I thought it was time to schedule a withdrawal of US forces from Iraq. It really was true that if armed resistance had been subdued during 2004 and Iraqis of all stripes been persuaded to pursue their political grievances, including grievances with the existence of a US military presence in Iraq, through the scheduled elections that Iraq would have been a much happier place. It also really was true that if this window of opportunity slipped by, and the new Iraqi government was born compromised by violent sectarian conflict, that the situation was, in important respects, doomed.

Which is all by way of observing that unlike the other people on this list, Will Marshall both still opposes withdrawal from Iraq and has, in the past, responded to posts on this blog. So I’d be interested to know what Marshall thinks of the fact that 43 months ago he said we only had about six months to crush armed resistance before we tipped past the point at which our involvement would become useless. I agreed with him then, and I still agree with him now — why has he changed his mind?

Americans Against Escalation in Iraq has been organizing protests here and there in Randy Kuhl’s Upstate New York district, something I believe they’ve been doing to many Republican members around the country. Well, he got interviewed recently by the local paper, and here Jerri Kaiser reports that he seems a bit freaked out:

Kuhl said that he wasn’t at his offices when the protesters in Bath and Fairport were there. When I asked him if he had ever protested, he said “Yes, when I walked off the floor in Congress recently.” I asked if that means he thinks the protesters have a right to do so and he again said “yes, just not over the line.” He said that the types of protests have caused him to rethink security at his offices and that means securing doors. He said they are “more protective now” and that he “thought about packing.”

Kaiser herself is a typical left-wing radical — born in a small town in South Carolina, moved to Upstate New York about six years ago, mother of four, active in her local church, that sort of thing — so you can see why she asked him about this. At any rate, I think it’s pretty clear that Republican members across the country have plenty to fear from anti-war sentiment. The vast majority of GOP members are, of course, going to be re-elected one way or another. But the war’s become so unpopular that you can hardly call any of them “safe” as such — a talented Democratic challenger could win just about anywhere, much as the conditions of 1974 left the field wide open for geographically unlikely wins.

Via Brian Beutler, the AFP tries a revolutionary experiment in writing their story in such a way as to make readers better informed about the issue at hand rather than more familiar with the president’s propaganda. Here’s the lede:

US President George W. Bush charged Monday that Iran has openly declared that it seeks nuclear weapons — an inaccurate accusation at a time of sharp tensions between Washington and Tehran.

Oh, my! Imagine the world we might live in if this were the standard way to open a newspaper story about the president making a false or misleading claim.

Meanwhile, Ezra Klein notes that Michael Gordon doesn’t appear to have actually seen the evidence for Iranian complicity in this EFP business. Rather, “American intelligence says that its report of Iranian involvement is based on a technical analysis of exploded and captured devices, interrogations of Shiite militants, the interdiction of trucks near Iran€™s border with Iraq and parallels between the use of the weapons in Iran and in southern Lebanon by Hezbollah.”

This, of course, raises the perennial question of what kind of intelligence a country that’s decided to deploy systematic torture as an interrogation method is actually getting. Were the militants handed over to some sub-agency charged with assembling a dossier on Iranian meddling in Iraq and then tortured until they confessed to getting Iranian help? Presumably if you let me torture them until they admit that the weapons have nothing to do with Iran, my interrogation would produce that result.

To me, the only epistemic value of knowing that Michael Gordon says official sources say Iranian-supplied weapons “accounted for a third of the combat deaths suffered by the American-led forces” last month is that whatever the truth of the matter is to establish a theoretical maximum on Iranian culpability in the death of American soldiers. The administration is lying (for them not to be lying would be unprecedented) and Gordon is passing on what his sources tell him.

As a policy matter, looking at the Iranian support issue tends to highlights how pointless it is to get one’s hopes raised by such minor signs of progress as may or may not be thought to exist in Iraq. Iran is charged with supplying a bit more than 100 explosive-formed penetrator bombs to Iraqi militants per month. Iran is also a bit of a rinky-dink third world country. But even they clearly could be providing a lot more weaponry than that were they so inclined. Hezbollah’s armaments are, for example, much more sophisticated than that. If the Iranians ever were to reach the conclusion that the US were in danger of achieving its goals of creating a stable Iraq happy to play host to large US military installations and serve as an anti-Iranian bulwark in the region, Iran could easily step up its assistance and then you’re back to square one.

The issue here, then, really isn’t where, exactly, these EFPs come from and why. The issue is whether you think it serves US interests to try to reach an accommodation with Iran so they we can fight terrorism by trying to fight the al-Qaeda terrorists who want to come here and kill or, or whether you think it serves US interests to continue picking unprovoked fights with tangential adversaries. But before you pick what’s behind door number two, just keep in mind that a US-Iranian escalation cycle will certainly lead things to get much, much worse over the short and medium terms.

Julian Sanchez’s take on the FISA fiasco:

Like Bill Murray’s hapless weatherman in Groundhog Day, America is locked in a perpetual September 12, 2001. How else to explain this weekend’s frenzied passage of a sweeping amendment to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), effectively authorizing the program of extrajudicial wiretaps first approved in secret by President George W. Bush shortly after the terrorist attacks of 2001? How else to make sense of a Democratic Congress capitulating to the demands of a wildly unpopular executive for yet another expansion of government surveillance powers, mere months after the disclosure of the rampant abuses that followed the last such expansion?

The hasty passage of the massive USA PATRIOT Act, a scant 45 days after those attacks, was ill-considered but understandable. Six years later, however, the administration has grown comfortable with the prerogatives panic affords. And, perversely, it has learned that it can continue to wield those prerogatives even under a Democratic majority, provided it insists on regarding Congress always and only as a last resort. [...]

But then, that was almost certainly the point. Ingenious as the White House has proven at recreating the expedient panic of 2001, however, it is not September 12 anymore. Along with a chance to more cooly appraise the terrorist threat, the intervening years have provided ample evidence of how little this administration can be trusted with its existing powers, let alone new ones. When lawmakers return to Washington this coming September, they might try a bit harder to recall the year as well as the month.

It should be kept in mind, however, that most Democrats didn’t capitulate at all and of those who did some unknown and unknowable portion probably just agree with Bush that executive power should be essentially unlimited.