BOB GARFIELD:
From WNYC in New York, this is NPR's On the Media. I'm Bob Garfield.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
And I'm Brooke Gladstone. So now we have a better idea of which Democrats will be running the show when Congress changes hands in January, but we still don't have any clarity about what it's going to mean for U.S. involvement in Iraq. It certainly seems like "stay the course" has run its course, so what can we expect instead?

If there's one Democrat in a position to say, it's Carl Levin, chairman-in-waiting of the Senate Armed Services Committee.
CARL LEVIN:
We should pressure the White House to commence the phased redeployment of U.S. troops from Iraq in four to six months.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Levin's proposal for phased redeployment isn't a new one. Congressman Jack Murtha famously called for the same thing a year ago. But these days, the plan seems to have gotten a lot more supporters. Here's Senator Barack Obama on Good Morning America.
BARACK OBAMA:
What I would do is sit down with the joint chiefs of staff and the military that's actually on the ground, and figure out how do we fit together a military strategy that can start that phased redeployment?
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Soon-to-be Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is on board as well.
HARRY REID:
We need to have a redeployment in Iraq. What does that mean? Pull everybody out now? Of course not.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
So then what does it mean? Specifics are scanty, but in general, proponents talk about pulling U.S. troops out of Iraq, bringing some of them all the way home and leaving others on the periphery of the war zone.

Opponents, however, call redeployment nothing but a euphemism. "Do you make redeployment of money from an ATM machine?" wrote one visitor to the blog, Campus Progress. “Do you use the redeployment method of birth control?” Council on Foreign Relations President Emeritus Leslie Gelb is among those who favor redeployment - if it's combined with a political effort to make Iraq into a sort of republic with three semi-autonomous zones.

But even Gelb admits that there's a certain amount of rhetorical gamesmanship going on with the Democrats.
LESLIE GELB:
The word "withdrawal" has been made into a synonym for "cut-and-run," so they have to find another word to describe what they're trying to do. This is blue smoke survival language.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
[LAUGHS] By which you mean blue smoke and mirrors to obscure the real picture.
LESLIE GELB:
Sure. But the situation in this case is not entirely blue smoke. They're proposing a combination of withdrawals and redeployments. They're essentially saying take troops now in the fight in Iraq, and move them to a safer place there, say, up to Kurdistan, or move them to nearby Kuwait.

They really want to take out most of the U.S. troops out of the country, out of the area. But they can't say it now, because the Republicans say that means cutting and running.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
So what do you think would be the most honest way for these Democrats to communicate what it is they're proposing?
LESLIE GELB:
I'd use both words.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Cut and run?
LESLIE GELB:
[LAUGHS] I'd say that they want to withdraw the bulk of the troops from Iraq and from the area and redeploy some number of troops in order to continue training Iraqi forces, dealing with emergencies inside the country and deterring any intervention by neighbors.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
So it seems that one of the first people who started to call for something called “phased redeployment” from Iraq was Larry Korb. He's from the liberal think-tank, Center for American Progress. He's also a veteran of the Reagan-era Defense Department, which also used the term "redeployment" when discussing how to get American troops out of Lebanon back in the '80s. Any historical parallel there?
LESLIE GELB:
Sure. Blue smoke has a long history. What we were doing was taking our troops out of Lebanon because a whole bunch of them had been killed, and President Reagan wanted to cut his losses. So you make it look like not retreat but like redeployment.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Did the blue-smoke gambit work for Reagan?
LESLIE GELB:
It generally worked for Reagan because he was such a convincing communicator. But it generally catches up to whoever tries to use it if they use it too much.

Let me give you an example. You know, in the Vietnam days, when I was a young man working in the Pentagon, it was common to call the bombing of the North not the bombing of the North but the dropping of ordinance. [BROOKE LAUGHS] And finally, in '68, when we got to the table with the North Vietnamese, we didn't call it negotiations, because there was so much opposition in this country to negotiating with the devil, that we called it "talks," and talks went down more easily.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
And what about more recently?
LESLIE GELB:
Well, most recently we've had the most creative example of blue smoke imaginable. The people who want us to really hang in there in Iraq, stay the course, really are saying, we need to buy time – another year or two – to see whether this commitment can work.

But they know they can't say that. People would be outraged. So Tom Friedman and the White House invented the new line, which was the next three to six months will be crucial.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
And they've been talking about the critical six months in some form or another since, what, 2004?
LESLIE GELB:
Right. And General Abizaid modified it the other day in his testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee by saying the next three to four months will be crucial.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Well, Les, let's hope we speak again after a crucial, say, three to six months.
LESLIE GELB:
I'll be listening to your ordinance.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
[LAUGHS] Thanks very much.
LESLIE GELB:
Take care.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Les Gelb is President Emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations.
On the other side of the political fence is Frederick Kagan, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, who favors sending more troops to Iraq. He agrees that there's a lot of wordplay going on, but he says even if the terms "withdrawal" and "redeployment" were used properly, it really wouldn't matter.
FREDERICK KAGAN:
There's certainly a difference, I think, in the intentions of the people who are using the different terms differently, but I think when you actually consider what military reality on the ground will be, there isn't any realistic difference between the two.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
So it's not exactly that the Democrats are using redeployment as a euphemism for withdrawal. They're really talking about redeploying troops to the periphery of the country. But you're saying that the security implications of a phased redeployment would be pretty much the same as if we brought them all home.
FREDERICK KAGAN:
Yes, that's exactly what I'm saying. I do not believe in the end that if we have redeployed our forces to forward operating bases in Kuwait or, heaven help us, Guam, that we will actually end up using them in Iraq. Keep in mind that it's about 600 miles from Kuwait to Baghdad, and the problems that we're dealing with are going to be either in Baghdad or to the north of there.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
I'm just wondering, hasn't there been a discussion of maintaining some of the forward operating bases within Iraq minimally, so that they could serve as staging areas?
FREDERICK KAGAN:
If you're going to have forward operating bases in Iraq, then you have to have secure lines of communication that run from Kuwait to those bases, which means that you have to have troops patrolling the roads that lead from Kuwait all the way, 600 miles to Baghdad, and then to the north of that.

It also implies that you're going to have a large presence in Baghdad. You're going to require several brigades to secure the green zone in Baghdad, where we're still going to have a very large embassy staff, and you're going to require a lot of brigades to protect the forward operating bases.

In other words, you're still going to have tens and tens of thousands of American troops running around the country. The only real difference is that they will be entirely defensive, they will still be taking attacks, they will still be taking hits, but they will be doing nothing at all positive to contribute directly to security.

Therefore, it really doesn't matter whether they're stationed in Kuwait or Guam or Pakistan or South America, for that matter. The issue is are we going to continue to be involved in helping the Iraqis establish a peaceful, stable state or are we not? And from that perspective, I think there's not going to be a meaningful difference.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
So do you want to weigh in on the rhetorical issues here? Are we talking about choosing terms on the basis of sales, selling a policy? Does withdrawal simply have too many overtones of surrender?
FREDERICK KAGAN:
Yeah, I think that, you know, there are a lot of people who are trying to convince themselves – and others – that there is some middle ground, and that we can reduce the level of pain that we're suffering without accepting defeat.

And my problem is that that really is just rhetorical. In terms of stark military reality, there are two choices. We can either stay with a large presence, actively engaged in fighting the insurgency and attempting to achieve security, or the situation will collapse. And I think efforts to have rhetorical devices that obscure that are actually harmful to the debate.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Well, do you think the media have been doing as much as they ought to, to sort all of this out?
FREDERICK KAGAN:
I think it would be very helpful if the media would continually press advocates, both of withdrawal phased or not and of redeployment phased or not, to define in very sharp military terms what exactly they think that would look like.

I think we've had a failure of imagination all along as people have been making sentences about how we can pull out and we can withdraw and the Iraqis will fight and so forth. But I think that the media really needs to challenge proponents of various plans on both sides, and say, tell me what this is actually going to look like day to day on the ground in Iraq as this happens.

And until we've actually had a discussion with that level of concreteness, then I think we can't make a sound decision about what's the right thing to do.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
All right. Fred, thank you very much.
FREDERICK KAGAN:
Pleasure to talk to you.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Military historian Fred Kagan is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.