Some suggestion that this post was unfair to Barack Obama. An, certainly, this August 28 statement on Bush’s Iran / mushroom cloud remarks from Obama doesn’t sound like the words of a man looking to beat the drums of war:

There is an eerie echo to the President’s words today. Five years ago, he made a misleading case to the American people that the trail to al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden somehow led through Iraq, and too many in Washington followed without asking the hard questions that should have been raised. Now we are dealing with the consequences of that failure of candor and judgment, and the President is using the politics of fear to continue a wrong-headed policy. It’s time to turn the page on the failed Bush-Cheney strategy and conventional Washington thinking, remove our combat troops from Iraq, mount a long overdue surge of diplomacy, and focus our attention on a resurgent al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Similarly, one plausible (albeit frightening) interpretation of what’s happening here is that the Bush administration is blocking legislative efforts at an approach to Iran centered around sanctions and carrots specifically in order to be able to proclaim that the diplomatic approach “failed” and military strikes are needed. So, okay, I don’t think Obama’s trying to grease the skids for war. At the same time, his Daily News op-ed did get the head and subhead “Hit Iran where it hurts: Democratic presidential hopeful takes a get-tough stance against tyrant of Tehran.” Writers don’t pick their own headlines, but you’ve got to imagine that the campaign signed off on that framing on some level. What game is Obama playing? Well, according to the Jewish Week:

Capitol Hill insiders say Obama genuinely believes in the necessity of curbing Iran’s nuclear ambitions — but also that his championing of the Iran divestment measure is part of a concerted effort to reassure Jewish voters that began with his March speech to a Chicago gathering of AIPAC.

“There are soft spots in his campaign,” said Kean University political scientist Gilbert Kahn. “He doesn’t have a long record; he got negative attention for suggesting he would negotiate with Syria and Iran. So he wants to stake out a piece of the Mideast question where he knows he’s not going to get any Jewish flak.”

Basically, there seems to be one policy here, namely that curbing Iranian nuclear ambitions is an important priority that needs to be accomplished through a greater commitment to diplomacy on both the carrots (willing to hold talks without preconditions) and sticks (sanctions) front, and that a war with Iran would be a bad idea. But there also seem to be two messages here, one about a “get-tough stance” that’s supposed to “reassure Jewish voters” and another about an “eerie echo” that’s aimed at other people. I’m not sure how long an Iran message divided against itself can stand. I’m also not sure what the evidence is that Jewish voters (as opposed to AIPAC board members) have unusually hawkish views on Iran.

The New York Times takes a look at some Palestinian boys in Hebron who earn a living by digging through the local Jewish settlers’ trash to find salvageable objects.

Stoller’s right — this kind of thing is not endearing me to Barack Obama.

Newseek takes a healthy skeptical look at the surge:

The number of Iraqi civilians killed in July was slightly higher than in February, when the surge began. According to the Iraqi Red Crescent, the number of internally displaced persons (IDPs) has more than doubled to 1.1 million since the beginning of the year, nearly 200,000 of those in Baghdad governorate alone. [...]

When Gen. David Petraeus goes before Congress next week to report on the progress of the surge, he may cite a decline in insurgent attacks in Baghdad as one marker of success. In fact, part of the reason behind the decline is how far the Shiite militias’ cleansing of Baghdad has progressed: they’ve essentially won.

Maybe Bush can change his line to the idea that if we just keep staying the course for 4 or 5 more years, casualties will drop massively because everyone will already be dead or displaced. Or maybe someone can explain to me again about how we can’t leave Iraq because of the ethnic cleansing that’ll happen without us around.

Here I am reading David Sanger’s New York Times account of the latest twists and turns in the White House’s Iraq policy, and eventually he’s compelled to mention that “circumventing a central government that the United States itself set up is unlikely to prove easy.” Similarly, we hear that “Bush and his commanders weighed whether to reward the Sunnis with early provincial elections, restoring a degree of political power to them.” This, though, needs to be followed up with the revelation that “calling elections is no longer within the power of the United States.”

Perhaps the most interesting thing about the article, however, was an anonymous Defense Department official using the term “bottom-up reconciliation.” I see through Google that the term is a big hit already on hawkish blogs and Pentagon talking points. And, indeed, Spencer called it a couple of weeks ago:

In response to the inability of the national government to resolve Iraq’s multifaceted sectarian wars, over the last several months, administration mouthpieces have changed the subject. Baghdad politics is outré. The new fashion is what’s called “bottom-up reconciliation” — that is, political advances in Iraq’s 18 provinces meant to reveal a new spirit of Iraqi brotherhood. Expect to hear a lot about bottom-up reconciliation in next month’s congressional testimony from General David Petraeus and the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Ryan Crocker. And expect it to be as disingenuous as every other portrayal of political progress in Iraq.

The crux of the matter is that bottom-up reconciliation isn’t reconciliation at all. It’s the Anbar Awakening business given a new label in the hope of confusing people. But while Sunni Arabs falling out with AQI is welcome, it’s by no means the same thing as Sunni Arabs reaching a political accommodation with Shiite Arabs. Rather, while the Sunnis once thought that their best hope of regaining Sunni supremacy was to ally with AQI in fighting an American/Shiite front, they now think the best hope is to get America on their side and use our guns to fight Shiites later.

Meanwhile, you can see in this circumventing talk that the nature of the mission in Iraq has changed yet again. WMD are done, democracy is done, and now even stability is done, and we’re trying to circumvent the central government that, 18 months ago, we were desperately trying to bolster.