Up Escalator

by digby

Bill Richardson uses the “e” word and calls out St. John:

“The leading advocate for escalating the war is Senator John McCain. I have served with John in Congress and I respect him. But John McCain is wrong, dead wrong to think that we can solve Iraq’s political crisis through military escalation.”

Yes, yes, yes. If Bush does what he’d like to do, which is send in more troops, then this will no longer be Bush’s war —- it’s McCain’s war too and he needs to have it strung around his neck like a neocon albatross. Bush and McCain want to “escalate” the war at a time when 70% of the public believe we should at least begin a process of withdrawal. Don’t let him worm his way out of it when he gets his way and it doesn’t work.

St. John and The Last Honest Man are both over there right now along with their dapper houseboy, Huckleberry Graham. They are all slavering over the opportunity to commit more troops to the meatgrinder:

McCain said conditions in some areas of Iraq have improved since his last visit in March, but “I believe there is still a compelling reason to have an increase in troops here in Baghdad and in Anbar province in order to bring the sectarian violence under control” and to “allow the political process to proceed.”

Two other senators in the delegation, Joseph Lieberman, D-Conn., and Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., agreed.

“We need more, not less, U.S. troops here,” Lieberman said.

So the great bipartisan lions of the Senate, the captains of the sensible Gang of 14 continue to insist that we just haven’t spilled enough blood to get the job done despite the fact that they are out of step with the vast majority of the nation and the world.

There was one killjoy among the manly warriors:

Another senator in the group, moderate Republican Susan Collins of Maine, was more cautious.

“Iraq is in crisis. The rising sectarian violence threatens the very existence of Iraq as a nation,” she said. The current U.S. strategy in Iraq has failed, but “I’m not yet convinced that additional troops will pave the way to a peaceful Iraq in a lasting sense,” Collins said.

She’s facing a tough re-election campaign in ’08. (And maybe she’s sane, who knows?)

Among the punditocrisy these four Senators are considered the perfect “moderates” of the ruling class — the leaders who best represent the mainstream thinking of “real Americans.” And yet they are alone with the radical, failed neocons like William Kristol and Frederick Kagan (who are lobbying with everything they have to try to rescue their tattered reputations) in their view that the war needs to be escalated.

Bravo to Richardson for calling it what it is and calling out John McCain on this right now. We’ll see if Dean Broder and his fellow court scribes begin to see him as a dirty hippie now that he’s separated himself so boldly from the “centrists” who represent the most radical 10% of the country.

The good news is that Lieberman is no longer a Democrat or he would have reached a new pinnacle of liberal perfidy with this latest gambit. After all, this is the man who ran his last campaign saying “no one wants to end the war more than I do.” It takes a lot of chutzpah to turn around two months later and say “we need more, not less, US troops here.”

And to think we called him a liar.

Update: McCain says we can send more troops to Afghanistan too. On ponies!

He hedged a little bit though:

“If it’s necessary, we will, and I’m sure we would be agreeable, but the focus here is more on training the Afghan National Army and the police, as opposed to the increased U.S. troop presence.”

I’m not sure where we’re going to get all these troops. Maybe that’s what they’re going to do with all those illegal immigrants they’ve been rounding up and shipping to parts unknown.

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