George Packer notes that while the White House likes to assert that al-Qaeda is primarily responsible for the violence in Iraq, the CIA’s internal government reports say otherwise. Joe Klein also tackles this issue:

Recenntly, in his desperation, starting with his speech at the Naval War College on June 28, [Bush] has been telling an outright lie, and he repeated it now, awkwardly, in Cleveland: “The same people that attacked us on September the 11th is the crowd that is now bombing people, killing innocent men, women and children, many of whom are Muslims, trying to stop the advance of a system based upon liberty.”

That is not true. [...]

No, it isn’t.

This seems like a pretty effective ad to me:

It’s worth saying that the sort of cost estimates you see in this ad, while accurate, are substantial under-estimates of the real monetary cost of the war. Soldiers injured during wartime will, for example, continue to receive medical treatment for their wounds for years if not decades. Somewhat similarly, a lot of the equipment that gets damaged or destroyed in Iraq is either being replaced with money that doesn’t come out of the Iraq-designed funds or else hasn’t actually been replaced yet but will need to be replaced down the road.

The fiscal cost of the war isn’t the most important aspect by any means, but it is a good shorthand way of understanding why it is that we can’t just keep doing this out of a vague hope of rolling snake eyes thirty times in a row.

With regard to the post below, Marc Ambinder’s report on how John McCain hopes to revive his dying presidential campaign by giving a speech in which he “will steel his audience to prepare for a ‘Long War’” is a reminder of why McCain and Rudy Giuliani are both so dangerous. They both rely on mindless warmongering as their only hope of securing the nomination. The contract they’re making with the GOP base is “you may not like where I stand on X or Y, but at least I’ll go to war with Iran.” Romney’s stated views on foreign policy are no less idiotic than his rivals’ but one can at least imagine him flip-flopping away from them.

When McCain promises that his approach to resolving our failed policy in Iraq is to let that same failed policy continue for another 18 months, then take office as president, and keep continuing the same failed policy forever and ever, that’s all he’s got. That’s his pitch. He won’t — and, indeed, can’t — back down from the view that “Defeatism will not buy peace in our time” and we just need to continue our futile effort to occupy Iraq contrary to the wishes of Iraq’s population.

Photo by Flickr user Sooz used under a Creative Commons license

Via Robert Farley, some additional bashing of the White House’s interim Iraq report from Winslow Wheeler, from Fred Kaplan, and from Anthony Cordesman.

Most of today’s Krauthammer article is just the sort of deceptions you’d expect from him — attributing things that happened in regions where there was no surge to the surge, etc., etc. — but it’s noteworthy for making this line of thinking explicit:

It is understandable that Sens. Lugar, Voinovich, Domenici, Snowe and Warner may no longer trust President Bush’s judgment when he tells them to wait until Petraeus reports in September. What is not understandable is the vote of no confidence they are passing on Petraeus.

After that, the column is just full of “Petraeus,” “Petraeus,” “Petraeus.” You would have no idea that along with General Petraeus there’s a CENTCOM commander, a Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a Secretary of Defense, a President of the United States, a Vice President of the United States, etc. Apparently, now, the entire evaluation of the war is supposed to be grounded on the reputation of one upper-mid level official. It’s a very strange rhetorical move. I’m not sure, for example, where the idea that Petraeus is a magician who can make the impossible work came from.

This is the same Petraeus who ran the training of Iraqi security forces from June 2004 to September 2005 and nothing came of it. I have no reason to think he did a “bad job” of organizing the training, but good training as such wasn’t capable of accomplishing anything, anymore than doing a good job of commanding the 160,000 American troops in Iraq is going to accomplish anything at this point. It’s not a reflection on the personal competence of any individual soldier or officer — or even on any giant group of soldiers and officers — to understand that some things can’t be done.