“I said after I was elected in 1996 that 12 years in the Senate would probably be enough. It is…I will not seek a third term in the United States Senate, nor do I intend to be a candidate for any office in 2008.” Senator Chuck Hagel (R-NE) announces his retirement, which may just mean a return to the Senate for Bob Kerrey. (So, he’s not running…I guess the trial balloon popped.) In any event, I thought Hagel maddeningly buckled to party pressure more often than not when the heat was on, and I still hold his attempted poison-pill amendment to McCain-Feingold back in 2000 against him. But, he also possessed a definite maverick streak on the war and a penchant for speaking-truth-to-power every so often that’ll be sorely missed on his side of the aisle. So, farewell, Senator Hagel, and please give yourself at least a few weeks off before commencing the fundraising for 2012.
Tag: War in Iraq
Morning in Baghdad: The Petraeus and Crocker Show.
Declaring that “the military objectives of the surge are in large measure being met” (an assertion which rests, of course, on how one jukes the stats and skews the benchmarks), Army General David Petraeus, Dubya’s most recent man in Iraq, tells Congress he’s recommending a drawdown of troop levels in Iraq to pre-surge levels — around 130,000 troops — by July of next year. [Transcript.] Not a huge surprise — As Fred Kaplan noted both a few weeks ago and in his quality preview of today’s testimony, the Army would run out of troops by April anyway, so this was a foregone conclusion. Also, obviously, not what you’d call a real withdrawal (although the WP story’s cited experts suggest it may be taken as the “beginning of the end” by interested parties in Iraq…and Iran.) So, in effect, Petraeus punted to next July.
For his part, US Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker backed Petraeus’ “Things are Getting Better” remarks in his own testimony, and intimated that the surge had staved off a near-total collapse. He also warned the nation about the nature of our continuing commitment there: “‘There will be no single moment in which we can claim victory,’ and any turning point will be recognized only ‘in retrospect.’“
Juking the Stats in Iraq.
Are things getting better in Iraq? If so, it’ll be hard to prove with the statistics lately offered by the US military, which critics claim once again have been cherry-picked and “selectively ignore negative trends.” “In its December 2006 report, the bipartisan Iraq Study Group identified ‘significant underreporting of violence,’ noting that ‘a murder of an Iraqi is not necessarily counted as an attack’…Recent estimates by the media, outside groups and some government agencies have [also] called the military’s findings into question.“
In any case, it seems that, despite Dubya and Gen. Petraeus’s claims to the contrary, Iraqi security forces are nowhere close to being able to handle the load in Baghdad, according to a new report by a commission of retired military officers. “The report expresses concern about what it calls the massive U.S. military logistical ‘footprint’ in Iraq and its effect on perceptions and problems. ‘The unintended message conveyed is one of “permanence,” an occupying force, as it were,’ the report says. It recommends reconsideration of ‘efficiency, necessity…and cost’ and calls for ‘significant reductions, consolidations and realignments” of U.S. forces.’”
The WMD Lie, exposed.
“On Sept. 18, 2002, CIA director George Tenet briefed President Bush in the Oval Office on top-secret intelligence that Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction, according to two former senior CIA officers. Bush dismissed as worthless this information from the Iraqi foreign minister, a member of Saddam’s inner circle, although it turned out to be accurate in every detail. Tenet never brought it up again.” Did Dubya know for a fact that Iraq possessed no WMD prior to the March 2003 invasion of Iraq? With two CIA sources to back him up, Sidney Blumenthal says so. “‘The real tragedy is that they had a good source that they misused,’ said one of the former CIA officers. ‘The fact is there was nothing there, no threat. But Bush wanted to hear what he wanted to hear.‘”
The Vietnam-9/11 connection?
“There was another price to our withdrawal from Vietnam, and we can hear it in the words of the enemy we face in today’s struggle — those who came to our soil and killed thousands of citizens on September the 11th, 2001.” Every time he thinks he’s going to wake up back in the jungle…In a fit of self-serving revisionism, Dubya attempts to reinvent the lessons of Vietnam before the Veterans of Foreign Wars, arguing that our problems really began because we withdrew from Southeast Asia too early. (Also, apparently we lost the war because of Graham Greene’s The Quiet American.
So, on the bright side, it looks like Dubya is progressing along his high-school reading list.) As you might expect, this line of argument is not sitting well with many historians, among them the venerable Robert Dallek: “What is Bush suggesting? That we didn’t fight hard enough, stay long enough? That’s nonsense. It’s a distortion,’ he continued. ‘We’ve been in Iraq longer than we fought in World War II. It’s a disaster, and this is a political attempt to lay the blame for the disaster on his opponents. But the disaster is the consequence of going in, not getting out.‘”
Cronyism > Competition.
Where does the GOP’s commitment to free market fundamentalism reach its limit? Where there’s money to be made, of course. The Post looks into the rise of no-bid contracts under Dubya. “A recent congressional report estimated that federal spending on contracts awarded without ‘full and open’ competition has tripled, to $207 billion, since 2000, with a $60 billion increase last year alone.”
Sharpening the Knives | She Laughs Last?
“I find it amusing that those who helped to authorize and engineer the biggest foreign policy disaster in our generation are now criticizing me for making sure that we are on the right battlefield and not the wrong battlefield in the war against terrorism.” The attacks grow more pointed among the Dems at last night’s AFL-CIO debate (which I missed), and it sounds like both Obama and Edwards got in some good zingers. (Edwards: “The one thing you can count on is you will never see a picture of me on the front of Fortune magazine saying I am the candidate that big, corporate America is betting on.“) And yet, a new poll finds Senator Clinton widening her lead over Obama to 18 points and enjoying huge advantages in big states like Ohio, Florida, and Pennsylvania. Hmm. Is the race already over? The inveterate pessimist in me says definitely maybe, but let’s remember, Howard Dean was looking pretty solid in August of 2003. We have a ways to go yet. (I mean, the critical Jolie and di Caprio endorsements are still up for grabs, for example. And Obama does have Bourne and Clooney locked up.)
Basra to the Spoils.
“‘The British have basically been defeated in the south,’ a senior U.S. intelligence official said recently in Baghdad. They are abandoning their former headquarters at Basra Palace, where a recent official visitor from London described them as ‘surrounded like cowboys and Indians’ by militia fighters.” More bad news in Iraq: Once considered a comparative success story of sorts, the formerly British-held city of Basra now seems to be deteriorating as quickly as the rest of Iraq (except that, rather than experiencing sectarian conflict between Shiites and Sunnis, the more homogenous Basra is witnessing Shiite militias struggling amongst themselves.) “Much of Basra’s violence is ‘over who gets what cut from Iraq’s economic resources,’ a U.S. Army strategist in Iraq said.”
Now will we will touch the bottom of this swamp.
“With respect to the U.S. Attorneys, there has been, I think, a bit of a witch hunt on Capitol Hill as they keep rolling over rocks hoping they can find something,” In an interview with Larry King, Cheney calls the persecuted prosecutor probe a “witch hunt,” and defends loyal capo Alberto Gonzales as “a good man, a good friend, on a difficult assignment.” (In another interview yesterday, he also claimed the Libby jury was wrong.) I doubt anyone really needs a credibility check at this point, but just in case: Cheney is also the guy who told us “we’d be greeted as liberators,” the Iraq insurgency “is in the last throes,” that “there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction” and is amassing them to use against” us, that the administration is learning “more and more“ about pre-9/11 connections between Iraq and Al Qaeda, and that the evidence of said connections is “overwhelming.” Simply put, Dick Cheney is an inveterate teller of untruths, and I wouldn’t trust him to walk Berkeley at this point, much less run the country. Impeach him already. (Cheney pic via this post.)
The Fix is In.
“The White House report released today, on how far Iraq has progressed toward 18 political and military benchmarks, is a sham.” Well, Dubya may point to the split-decision Iraq interim report as grounds for optimism, but Slate‘s Fred Kaplan, for one, ain’t buying it: “[A] close look at the 25-page report reveals a far more dismal picture and a deliberately distorted assessment…The report card was rigged from the outset by how the White House defined ‘satisfactory.’“