Can someone tell me what, if anything, this means?

I made the following post, then just remembered that Kerry mentioned General Casey in his Path Forward speech:


http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=104x5402230


In fact, because we failed to take advantage of the momentum of our military victory, because we failed to deliver services and let Iraqis choose their leaders early on, our military presence in vast and visible numbers has become part of the problem, not the solution. And our generals understand this. General George Casey, our top military commander in Iraq, recently told Congress that our large military presence "feeds the notion of occupation" and "extends the amount of time that it will take for Iraqi security forces to become self-reliant." And Richard Nixon's Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird, breaking a thirty year silence, writes, ''Our presence is what feeds the insurgency, and our gradual withdrawal would feed the confidence and the ability of average Iraqis to stand up to the insurgency." No wonder the Sovereignty Committee of the Iraqi Parliament is already asking for a timetable for withdrawal of our troops; without this, Iraqis believe Iraq will never be its own country.

http://www.johnkerry.com/pressroom/speeches/spc_2005_10_26.html


Maybe I'm just tired.

and others who make recommendations.

and he's offered this plan, if General Casey is looking to the Democrats, he would invalidate the argument that calling for a withdrawal or setting a timetable sends the wrong message to our troops.

Republicans are shameless and it wont stop them from spewing their crap.

the Dems have been quoting generals and others for years now but the Republicans don't respond. they just keep repeating the same stupid lines. "cun and run" "hurting the troops" .

submitted a plan (linked in OP) for withdrawal---if this is General Casey looking to Kerry or if it's a Republican ploy?

Kerry was using Casey to back up his own plan.

for it to be a Republican ploy would mean Casey was part of it which i'm sure is not the case.

it still doesn't say anything about what the Republicans will do.

then it could take the wind out of the Republicans'"wrong message" spin.

At first it sounded like something, but then at the end they said that it depended on the Iraqi troops getting their act together. That's the problem with the Repub plan--it says we will stay until the Iraqis show they can handle it. Kerry said you have to tell them you're leaving so that they will know it's serious.

Well all I know is that when you teach a kid to ride a bike,they never learn if you always run beside them holding on. You have to give them fair warning, then let go, even as they are yelling, "No, Mom!", and just let them learn to stay balanced. If they don't want to crash, they will.

advice to stabalize things immediately and that was a problem. Switching to current time he quotes Casey and Laird to say current situation casues problems.

I think he is signalling that he and Casey (at least on this part of the plan) are insync. Might be reading in too much - but it would be interesting if Kerry's plan became the one preferred by much of the upper reaches of the military. He did say he consultyed with military people, which makes sense as a major critism of Bush is that he ignored military advice.

Though I think his view of turning search and destroy and policing to the Iraqis could have come from his own observations at 25. I loved the part of the Matthews interview when he talked about the cultural sensitivity of US soldiers entering a Moslem home. It was so obvious he had his attention then. Kerry made observations about what amounted to harrasment because of language and culture barriors in Vietnam.

What do you think?

That is interesting. That would actually be good news. I doubt Casey's plan would be exactly Kerry's. It would likely have some features in common - at least those where Kerry quotes Casey in support of his views. Also, Kerry clearly holds Casey in high regard.

If this is what it appears, the public has forced the administration to change it's policy and they have gone to the generals. Kerry put his alternative out in the marketplace of ideas and I'm sure he would love for Bush to take it. It is a serious plan that was Kerry's best idea of how to get out. I doubt that Casey's plan will be exactly Kerry's, but Kerry quotes him often enough that you know Kerry likely had input from in before he crafted his plan and he would have run the his plan past him. This should give us confidence that the Bush administration is moving in the right direction.

The good news here is that the Bush administration may be moving in the right direction. This is beyond polics. If they do this, their numbers will improve. They won't call it Kerry's plan - because they won't have to - but Kerry's plan is forever in the Senate record. For Kerry, the important thing would be that we would begin moving in the right direction - saving lives and ending the war would be more important to him. It's funny, but if his logic and advocacy of his ideas were part of what moved Bush towards a plan that seems to almost immediately put the US in a safer place, tamp down the hostility and lead to exit - he will have suceeded more here than in 1971

It also may mean that things are bad enough, that the Bush administration will let Kerry and others do their job as the LOYAL opposition. Kerry didn't go to the middle east and Europe in January for his amusement, but to get a clear view of where things were.
That the Bush administration seemed unwilling to even get his views on what he saw and was told on his first trip was disturbing.

I think part of what happened was that Kerry, while a politician, is genuinely committed to being a positive part of the government. Bush, Rove and Cheney are leading a government placing politics and ideology above actually governing. It is very likely that they actually can't understand where he is coming from. This may be the problem with the press as well - which is why they dwell on who was first renouncing 2 yr old votes, rather than even read the paragraphs afterwards dealing with a substanitive exit plan - that's too boring.

Where it is possible to re-align the public view of what Democrats and what Republicans stand for in foreign policy. The Rethugs, starting 30 years ago, began a campaign to portray the Dems as weak and as pacifiers on the world stage. It worked, for a while. The Rethugs used their 'get tough' approach to circumvent Congress in Latin America in the '80's and to deal from both sides of the deck in the Middle East. We are now reaping what they sowed.

The Democrats have a chance now to show their side of the argument and to do wo without the overwhelmingly Rethug view of Dems as mushy getting in the way. The Democrats' problem before was that they were viewed as insufficiently boosterish for America. Well, we can see where overt militarism and common sense collide and the Dems have a chance to cement that in the public mind.

John Kerry is a premium thinker on Foreign Policy for the Dem side. This should only get more intense and interesting in the next 6 months. Stay tuned.

his campaign?
I always got the feeling from Kerry's comments that Kerry and Casey were more on the same page, vs Casey and Bsh.

A little off subject, but when I re-read this excerpt from Kerry's speech, again I have to ask why Kerry is not getting the attention that Murtha is?!

Maybe I know the answer. Murtha's speech was more motivational. Kerry's speech laid out an actual plan.

Some use to call Murtha the "Republican-Democrat".

There needs to be a significant drawdown of troops from Iraq in 2006 or republicans will get killed at the polls except in the reddest of districts. Well, some will survive through skill or corruption anyway, but they will have to work harder and spend more money.

So my theory is that the Republicans were going to find a way to declare victory and start bringing the troops home anyway. Kerry, Reid et al have preempted them by pushing hard for a specific plan based on benchmarks (Kerry), timetable (Feingold), or other measures. At this point it will be difficult for the republicans to present any plan that wasn't first presented by Democrats. Of course the republicans will try to take the credit anyway, but the media is less likely to give them a pass these days.

The only problem is that being cornered like this might make the republicans dig in their heels with "stay the course" rather than doing the right thing; and then the practical effect is to prolong the debacle (until early 2007 anyway). But I don't think that's predictable and I don't think Kerry or other Dems had any better option. Not calling for withdrawal would be untenable politically with their constituents. So it is good that they've done it in a way that is sensible and pre-empts the Republicans.

None of the political aspects should take away from the genuineness of Kerry's (or other Dems') intent to end the war in the best way possible. After all, what is politics but "finding a way to get things done with people who disagree with you"? What would be the point of posing a withdrawal plan in a way that didn't leverage political reality as much as possible to improve the chances of the plan actually being implemented?

If it were Dean or (insert current LF fave here), this is "brilliant strategy"; alas, it's Kerry, so "it just proves he does everything by calculation and not by his heart." Sigh.

A few more thoughts:

The Republicans are worried about the elections because public sentiment has shifted dramatically and Bush continues pushing stay the course.

Yesterday a number of Republicans went on record calling not just war critics, but decorated war veterans, cowards. There man Sam Johnson (toast) condoned that position by not speaking out against it.

Doesn't matter that the Democrats voted no on the Hunter plan because it wasn't Murtha's plan. Too

(please don't call it a "plan"; it wasn't) was that Dems were pretty much united in calling it a stunt and not falling for it.

The Hunter resolution was to "cut and run". That is not what either Murtha's or Kerry's plan is, and to take the rethug bait would have been a mistake.

And I agree with you about the republicans going on record. I think that will hurt them in 2006.

They don't want to admit that they are doing 'nation-building.' They are incapable of it. Which is why we are in so much trouble. The fundamental philosophy of the Bushies and of the PNAC crowd is that you use overwhelming technical and military force to get what you want. Other countries, having glimpsed the might of the US simply fall into place and do what you want them to do.

The PNAC crowd has NEVER abandoned this philosophy. They still argue that the US is the prime player in everything and can go it alone to achieve it's objectives. They still have not gone to the UN and asked for the kind of help they should and they still haven't tried to engage other players on the world stage in to help solve the problems in Iraq. They can't. It is antithetical to their political philosophy.

Sen. Kerry is an internationalist in foreign affairs. He is talking specifically about 'nation-building' but is not calling it that. He is also recognizing that without deeply looking into what is causing the insurgency and simply trying to force alien solutions on a culture that might not want them, we are dead in the water over in Iraq. Kerry is trying to get the US to overtly tell the Iraqis that we have no long term plans to occupy their country and build permanent US bases over there. He is trying to tell the Iraqis that the political solution to the insurgency is an Iraqi problem that the US can assist in, but is ultimately only solvable by the IRaqis.

Sen. Kerry laid out what the political problems are in his brilliant Georgetown speech: Our strategy must achieve a political solution that deprives the Sunni-dominated insurgency of support by giving the Sunnis a stake in the future of their country. The Constitution, opposed by more than two thirds of Sunnis, has postponed and even exacerbated the fundamental crisis of Iraq. The Sunnis want a strong secular national government that fairly distributes oil revenues. Shiites want to control their own region and resources in a loosely united Islamic state. And Kurds simply want to be left alone. Until sufficient compromise is hammered out, a Sunni base can not be created that isolates the hard core Baathists and jihaadists and defuses the insurgency.

This is the Senator's view on what to offer the Sunni's in the way of an enticement to get them to stop backing the insurgency. (And significants numbers of Sunnis do not back the insurgency. They want peace.)

Showing Sunnis the benefits that await them if they continue to participate in the process of building Iraq can go a long way toward achieving stability. We should press these countries to set up a reconstruction fund specifically for the majority Sunni areas. It’s time for them to deliver on their commitments to provide funds to Iraq. Even short-term improvements, like providing electricity and supplying diesel fuel - an offer that the Saudis have made but have yet to fulfill - can make a real difference.

We need to jump start our own lagging reconstruction efforts by providing the necessary civilian personnel to do the job, standing up civil-military reconstruction teams throughout the country, streamlining the disbursement of funds to the provinces so they can deliver services, expanding job creation programs, and strengthening the capacity of government ministries.

We must make it clear now that we do not want permanent military bases in Iraq, or a large combat force on Iraqi soil indefinitely. And as we withdraw our combat troops, we should be prepared to keep a substantially reduced level of American forces in Iraq, at the request of the Iraqi government, for the purpose of training their security forces. Some combat ready American troops will still be needed to safeguard the Americans engaged in that training, but they should be there to do that and to provide a back stop to Iraqi efforts, not to do the fighting for Iraqis.

This is nation-building. It's a smart and solid way to proceed.

The Bushies would have to admit that they have no long-term interests in controlling Iraq and in controlling the Middle East. They are not going to do this unless they are pushed by political expediency. Even now, they are attempting to co-opt the terms of debate by stealing the phrases of the Democrats who are offering solutions.

Gen. Casey's plan is not real. But it is a chance for more Rovian tactics of doing one thing and calling it another. This is not addressing the real political concerns of the country. It is face-saving and an attempt to use language in order to confuse, confuse, confuse. (Their specialty.) They will, ultimately, be pushed into doing what Sen. Kerry says. (More or less. This is what will happen. It's just a matter of time now.)

they have succeed in creating just that: confusion. After seeing the fallout from some of their tactics, I have no doubt that their manipulative strategies, arrogance and untenable motives will keep them always in face-saving mode. More and more people are beginning to see them for what they are: two-faced idiots. Rove is nothing more than a well-connected con artist.

I think the Bushies refuse to part with the idea of controlling Iraq and the Middle East, especially the mineral resources of the region and resulting $$$$. I think they would have no problem pretending to have no interest in controlling Iraq, if they thought they could get away with it and still actually maintain significant control.

One reason my respect for Kerry has continued to grow as I learn more about him, is that everything I learn seems to put another tile in the mosaic of a very smart, competent, ethical person who is genuinely interested in making the world a better place. The combination of ethical intent, intelligence, and general competence does not preclude human mistakes, but it sure makes positive results more likely than the opposite - which is what * is. It still baffles me that so many Americans were blind to this last year. (Both sides of the equation!)

So I think Kerry's plan on Iraq is another good product of well-intentioned study and a genuine interest in achieving the best result. He has to play the political game as best he can to have a chance of achieving that best result. But the plan in general is as good as anyone can offer that respects the Iraqis, yet puts their future back in their own hands and gets us out. I think he clearly wants to do it in a way that leaves the US with the most possible influence in the region (influence, not control) but he recognizes that as long as our motives are suspect, there will never be the opportunity for genuine partnership.

And I hope you are right that they will ultimately be pushed into doing it Kerry's way. Unfortunately I have a vivid imagination for all the ways they can eff it up in the meantime.

I don't, however, think the idea that te Democrats recommended it first is that much an issue. Bush taking action is what's important- most people won't care who made what plan when. The war has passed the point where Bush can score a huge victory with ending it. (It's like a class where you already have 2 F's and there's one test left- you can't do better than a D in history's final grade.) Bush is responding to the only thing that likely has an impact, he has to stop the hemmoraging of support.

The Democrats will have a weaker GOP than they had in 2004, even if the war ends. It also is a GOP where some of the fault lines have been exposed and are vulnerable. I would hope that the Democrats will welcome a change towards sanity even if insanity would help them in 2006.

As to Kerry, I think he will do exactly what he said he will - he will keep holding their feet to the fire as best he can, trying to push things in the right direction. I also think in his real world, he does get respect for his intelligence, competence and his character. I imagine that Kerry will either have another run as President (and win), become a very respected senior Senator and/or a respected party elder (like Goldwater with a shift on the political scale).

I agree with you that if this were Dean's or Clark's plan we would have seen joy and celebration that such a wonderous document was ever written. (Read the Clark - Hannity threads; I'm still trying to figure out what brilliant thing he did, but I'm not totally commited to finding out) It seems backward that they see Kerry as politically calculating when in reality all there 2004 complaints boil down to NOT being a political chameleon.

If Bush does get us out of Iraq - using a variant of the Kerry plan - what would be cool but extremely unlikely would be if the Nobel committee awarded Kerry the Nobel prize based on Vietnam/ contras/ BCCI/ Iraq. Some people who have won have done incredibe things on one issue with little visibility - Kerry has over the course of his life done a lot. The biggest selling point for them would be it would PO Bush even more than the Carter award.