Al-Maliki: What Obama Said.

“Barack Obama talks about 16 months. That, we think, would be the right timeframe for a withdrawal, with the possibility of slight changes…Of course, this is by no means an election endorsement. Who they choose as their president is the Americans’ business. But it’s the business of Iraqis to say what they want.” While much of the nation watched The Dark Knight, Iraqi prime minister Nouri Al-Maliki shook up our election considerably, perhaps even decisively, over the weekend by publicly backing Obama’s troop withdrawal plan in the German magazine Der Spiegel.

The Dubya White House immediately tried to lean on Al-Maliki to get him to walk back his remarks, but some hemming and hawing aside, they would seem to stand. In fact, they were reinforced today by Ali al-Dabbagh, Iraq’s government spokesman, upon Sen. Obama’s arrival to the region: “We are hoping that in 2010 that combat troops will withdraw from Iraq.“

In other words, even the Iraqis believe Obama is right and McCain is wrong on our future in Iraq. Which means the McCain campaign has just lost one of their critical tentpole issues, and has no place to go now except scream “surge, surge, surge.” “Via e-mail, a prominent Republican strategist who occasionally provides advice to the McCain campaign said, simply, ‘We’re f**ked.’“

Of course, McCain’s bleeding on the Iraq issue might be better staunched if he didn’t publicly refer to the non-existent Iraq-Pakistan border…

232.

A very happy 232nd birthday to our American republic. In the year 2008, frankly, our record is mixed. On one hand, we’ve continued to stand by while our witless joke of a president has assumed many of the dubious royal prerogatives that originally propelled our forefathers toward Independence. On the other, we stand poised to make history this November in a way that would make the founding generation gasp in awe at how far we’ve come.

So, let’s enjoy the 4th, and take a moment not only to remember how precarious the American experiment once was, but also to ponder what we hope to make of it in our own time. For, regardless of how terrible the past eight years — or forty years, for that matter — have been, “we have it in our power to begin the world over again.“

Update: The Muppets are celebrating too. (Via Bitten Tongue/Gideonse Bible.)

The Manchurian Handbook.

“The military trainers who came to Guantanamo Bay in December 2002 based an entire interrogation class on a chart showing the effects of ‘coercive management techniques’ for possible use on prisoners, including ‘sleep deprivation,’ ‘prolonged constraint,’ and ‘exposure.’ What the trainers did not say, and may not have known, was that their chart had been copied verbatim from a 1957 Air Force study of Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean War to obtain confessions, many of them false, from American prisoners…The only change made in the chart presented at Guantanamo was to drop its original title: ‘Communist Coercive Methods for Eliciting Individual Compliance.‘”

How low have we sunk under Dubya? Apparently, under this administration, we’ve actually been plagiarizing Maoist torture techniques for use in the Gitmo gulag. “‘What makes this document doubly stunning is that these were techniques to get false confessions,’ Levin said. ‘People say we need intelligence, and we do. But we don’t need false intelligence.’”

We screwed up Afghanistan…

“Just as it had on the day before 9/11, Al Qaeda now has a band of terror camps from which to plan and train for attacks against Western targets, including the United States…’The United States faces a threat from Al Qaeda today that is comparable to what it faced on Sept. 11, 2001,’ said Seth Jones, a Pentagon consultant and a terrorism expert at the RAND Corporation.“

In the NYT, Mark Mazzetti and David Rohde explore how, despite all their endless bluster and unconstitutional behavior, the Dubya administration is losing the war against Al Qaeda, and has apparently given up on catching Bin Laden. “By late 2005, many inside the CIA headquarters in Virginia had reached the conclusion that their hunt for Bin Laden had reached a dead end…’You had a very finite number’ of experienced officers, said one former senior intelligence official. ‘Those people all went to Iraq. We were all hurting because of Iraq.’”

…so why not Iran?

“The Democratic leadership’s agreement to commit hundreds of millions of dollars for more secret operations in Iran was remarkable, given the general concerns of officials like Gates, Fallon, and many others. ‘The oversight process has not kept pace — it’s been coöpted’ by the Administration, the person familiar with the contents of the Finding said. ‘The process is broken, and this is dangerous stuff we’re authorizing.‘”

In related news, The New Yorker‘s venerable Sy Hersh reports that the Dubya administration has been stepping up covert activities in Iran…and Congress is once again going along for the ride. “In other words, some members of the Democratic leadership…were willing, in secret, to go along with the Administration in expanding covert activities directed at Iran, while the Party’s presumptive candidate for President, Barack Obama, has said that he favors direct talks and diplomacy.“

The Prodigal Son.

“‘He won a huge amount of people to his side after making a huge amount of blunders and really lying to people,’ the director said…’We are trying to walk in the footsteps of W and try to feel like he does, to try to get inside his head. But it’s never meant to demean him,’ Stone said.” The LA TImes catches up with Oliver Stone on W.

North Korea: Now Not-so-Evil.

“This can be a moment of opportunity for North Korea. If North Korea continues to make the right choices, it can repair its relationship with the international community — much as Libya has done over the past few years. If North Korea makes the wrong choices, the United States and our partners in the six-party talks will respond accordingly.” In a Rose Garden statement yesterday, Dubya announces the lifting of trading sanctions against North Korea, on account of Pyongyang seemingly agreeing to nuclear disarmament as outlined in recent multilateral talks. But don’t get the wrong idea, folks: Talking to our enemies is still an act of horrible, dirty appeasement. Update: Slate‘s Fred Kaplan surveys the deal.

Friends in Low Places.

“I need to know if Stayman is a career or a political appointee…I think we can do something about it, but I’m trying to figure out what is the best way to go about it. I don’t want a firing scandal on our hands.” An e-mail trail published by the Washington Post illustrates how Casino Jack Abramoff used the Dubya White House to remove his enemies, in this case a State Department aide advocating labor reforms in the Northern Marianas. (“ Abramoff’s clients wanted to keep paying immigrants less than the federal minimum wage to work in textile factories.“)

The Court: Show us the Bodies.

“The laws and Constitution are designed to survive, and remain in force, in extraordinary times,” Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote for a five-member majority clearly impatient that some prisoners have been held for six years without a hearing.” In a setback for the Dubya administration and a victory for the American way of life, the Supreme Court grants habeas corpus rights to Guantanamo detainees. (The decision in Boumediene v. Bush is now the fourth time the Court has reaffirmed the rule of law over Dubya’s monarchial anti-terror policies.)

In vicious dissent, the conservative bloc: Roberts, Scalia, Thomas, and Alito, with Scalia in particular scowling and ranting like a Batman villain. “‘America is at war with radical Islamists,’ he wrote, adding that the decision ‘will almost certainly cause more Americans to be killed.’ He went on to say: ‘The Nation will live to regret what the court has done today.’” To which I say, “Get over it.” I highly doubt we’ll regret it as much as your being put on the Court in the first place, Justice Scalia.

Form of…Camelot! | New Target Acquired.

If that’s your man, then tag him in… The dirt off their shoulders, Sen. and Michelle Obama share a brief and touching moment onstage before the nomination-clinching speech on Tuesday. I must say, I greatly prefer this presidential show of affection to this one (or to the Gore make-out session, for that matter.)

Speaking of which, with Isengard subdued, meet the new opponent (via Little Bit Left, and the reverse-angle bump via The Late Adopter):