Sometimes I run out of different ways to say the same things. Looking back over the last five months, it seems I have returned, time and time again, to the same themes. To put them succinctly:

    We cannot prevail in Iraq and must enter into a period of damage control.
    No nation in history has ever allowed the leadership that led them into war and defeat to manage the consequences of that defeat.
    The possible consequences of defeat in Iraq are dire and will require nuanced and skilled diplomacy, national unity, and a fresh leadership team.
    The Bush Team has lost the good will of our allies, and their incompetence is so manifest that it would be an act of national recklessness to entrust them with responsibility for managing a new phase of damage control.
    The only logical conclusion for this is that the administration must be replaced.
    Therefore, we should make a successful impeachment our highest priority, and that is should be pursued in concert with efforts to end the war in Iraq.

Also flowing from this logic is that it would be reckless to force the end of the war in Iraq without simultaneously replacing our leadership. To do so only invites further disasters with potentially much worse consequences.

The Democratic leadership has been unwilling to embrace this logic, and their current failures are one consequence. Simply stated, too many Democrats are afraid of the consequences of a withdrawal from Iraq, and they are, correctly, extremely uneasy about the prospect of letting people like Bush, Cheney, and Rice manage the drawdown.

Anyone that thinks a withdrawal from Iraq will end the war in Iraq is deluded. And anyone that thinks that there will be no consequences of an ongoing civil war in Iraq for our relationships with Saudi Arabia, Turkey, the Kurds, Jordan, Israel, and the Emirates, is equally deluded. Even if we were to draw the conclusion that we should reduce our overall footprint in the region, we still must deal with a very complex serious of actions. We have leases signed for bases throughout the region, we have equipment throughout the region, we have responsibility for providing security throughout the region. We have to honor our commitment to facilitate Israel’s security. We need to maintain alliances with Egypt and Jordan as part of the overall strategy for a comprehensive peace plan in Israel/Palestine. We have to define our role in nuclear non-proliferation.

In other words, even if America emerges from the debacle in Iraq with a conviction that we must roll back our empire and engage in a more multilateral way, we will have a lot of work to do to make that transition.

And as I survey the current political landscape, I do not see any bipartisan support for rolling back our empire. What I see, rather, is concern about the health and sustainability of our empire. But even among this crowd, which dominates Washington DC and the editorial pages of the Washington Post and the rest of our bigfoot press, it is beginning to dawn on them that we must make a strategic retreat in order to regroup and shore up our lines. Our current leadership is incapable of implementing even this relatively minor correction.

Zbigniew Brzezinski discusses this in his new book:

Mr. Brzezinski’s verdict on the current president’s record — “catastrophic,” he calls it — is nothing short of devastating. And his overall assessment of America’s current plight is worrying as well: “Though in some dimensions, such as the military, American power may be greater in 2006 than in 1991, the country’s capacity to mobilize, inspire, point in a shared direction and thus shape global realities has significantly declined. Fifteen years after its coronation as global leader, America is becoming a fearful and lonely democracy in a politically antagonistic world.”…

…the United States is “widely viewed around the world with intense hostility,” its “credibility in tatters,” its military bogged down in the Middle East, “its formerly devoted allies distancing themselves.”

More:

This precarious situation, Mr. Brzezinski says, means that “it will take years of deliberate effort and genuine skill to restore America’s political credibility and legitimacy, “placing enormous importance on the diplomatic and strategic skills of the next president “to fashion a truly post-cold-war globalist foreign policy.”

“Nothing could be worse for America, and eventually the world,” he writes at the end of this unsparing volume, “than if American policy were universally viewed as arrogantly imperial in a postimperial age, mired in a colonial relapse in a postcolonial time, selfishly indifferent in the face of unprecedented global interdependence, and culturally self-righteous in a religiously diverse world. The crisis of American superpower would then become terminal.”

Does that sound like something that can be done by the people that have led this country to this disastrous place?

As I watch the Senate debate what we should do in Iraq, I see the Republicans making the case that we can’t afford to leave Iraq, but not acknowledging that we cannot afford (literally) to stay. And I see the Democrats saying that we can leave, but refusing to acknowledge that we cannot afford to leave if Bush and Cheney are still in charge of overseeing the withdrawal.

Any responsible person would support impeachment. There can be no other logical conclusion.