On Timetables (Jim Lindgren on Volokh.com)

"Jim Lindgren, at Volokh.com says:

When People Urge a Timetable, What are They Talking About?—

I frankly admit that I have no expertise in military strategy, yet I have been feeling particularly dense lately. When I read the calls for a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq, I can't for the life of me figure out what the heck they are talking about.

The time to talk about a timetable for withdrawal is when the mission is over. Then you start asking: Why are we still there? Should we set a timetable for withdrawal? But our troops are sorely needed right now. Things are still pretty dodgy, as Harry Reid and Ted Kennedy surely realize..."

I don't know much about military strategy either, but as a (retired) bureaucrat I was familiar with doing timetables.

"Timetable" is a metaphor--a railroad timetable has three features; the destination, the sequence of stops, and the scheduled times of arrival and departure at each. My timetables started with Congress passing a law for a farm program--we had to sign up farmers and pay them X billion by date Y. To create the timetable you had to work backward from that destination.

The problem with the timetable metaphor (the "roadmap" has similar problems) is that Americans don't agree on goals and the situation. What is "winning the war"? Is the goal a democracy like Switzerland (also divided by religion and ethnicity) because we are dealing with a straightforward conflict with remnants of Hussein's regime, that will end with the killing or capture of the insurgents? Is the goal simply a state that is not friendly to Islamic fundamentalists, because Iraq is currently a battleground in the worldwide war on terror? Could we live with a Shia dictator like Mubarak or Musharraf?

Or are we dealing with an incipient Sunni-Shia civil war, somewhere on the continuum between the Catholic-Protestant clashes in Northern Ireland since 1968, the Balkans during the 90's and the Tamil insurgency in Sri Lanka? Can the US successfully be a neutral third party or will we end up like the British Army in Ulster?

If statistics show the number of insurgents increasing, is that because foreigners are flowing in for jihad, because Sunnis are getting pissed off at the disorder and destruction and holding the US responsible or because we're getting better at counting?

I suggest that if Jim Lindgren and the Democrats agreed on the answers to these questions they'd agree on whether a timetable is wise. By the way, Democrats could point to President Nixon for a precedent in setting a timetable in the midst of combat. In his national speech on November 3, 1969

" We have adopted a plan which we have worked out in cooperation with the South Vietnamese for the complete withdrawal of all U.S. combat ground forces, and their replacement by South Vietnamese forces on an orderly scheduled timetable.[emphasis added] This withdrawal will be made from strength and not from weakness. As South Vietnamese forces become stronger, the rate of American withdrawal can become greater. "

Alternatively, a cynic might say Kennedy et.al. is simply what Congressional opponents of a President do to score points. Everyone likes timetables, it's a quick sound bite without taking a position where you might be wrong. After all, not only did the Republicans beat up on Clinton about a timetable for Bosnia, they put it in the law. (See Section 1205 of the National Defense Authorization Act of 1998 http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/D?c105:6:./temp/~c105yKpRva:: Also, see Senator Hutchison http://hutchison.senate.gov/ccbosn2.htm ) It flows from the Constitution--Congress can posture and pout while the President has to exercise energy in managing war and foreign policy, just as the founders intended.

Or, going back to bureaucracy, one could look to the latent function of my timetables. They were distributed to our field offices. Field employees liked them, I was never sure whether it was the information or because they gave the impression bigshots in Washington knew what they were doing (always a dubious assumption to field level bureaucrats). From that standpoint, Democrats have little faith in Bush, just as Republicans had little faith in Clinton, so timetables seem useful.

Or, it's simply a rhetorical device, like the pose of not understanding an issue in order better to attack one's opponents.