Does anyone else find it a bit absurd that we’ve reached a point where a major party presidential nominee needs to protest defensively that he hates war:

At any rate, as is often the case the issue here isn’t John McCain’s subjective attitude toward war. The issue is the likely consequences of his policies. McCain’s stated policy toward Iran is likely to lead to war. McCain has in the past called for a policy toward North Korea that he admitted at the time might well lead to war. McCain’s Iraq policy will lead to a prolongation of an ongoing war. McCain’s vision of a “League of Democracies” would create a Cold War-style standoff which would likely fuel proxy wars around the world. Whether or not McCain hates war, if you would like to see a president likely to try to avoid getting the country into further wars, you don’t want McCain in the White House.

Via Spencer Ackerman, an intriguing passage from Elizabeth Bumiller’s book on Condoleezza Rice:

[Bush] had never met anyone like Rice. She could talk baseball, football, and foreign policy all at the same time, but she did not sound like an intellectual and she never made him feel inadequate or ignorant. On the contrary, Rice made Bush feel sharper, particularly when she complimented him on his questions. Bush did not know many black people well, and it made him feel good about himself that he got along so easily with Rice. It was hard not to see that she was also attractive, athletic, and competitive, and, like him, underestimated for much of her adult life.

It’s nice to know that we’re governed by a dim-witted man of limited life experience who lets his key personnel and policy decisions be driven by his massive insecurities. Just a few months left to go.

One addendum to yesterday’s release from Jay Rockefeller about the administration’s misuse of intelligence before the war is to say that it sure would have been nice for Rockefeller to have been so on the ball about this stuff before the war. Instead, in a floor speech explaining his decision to vote “yes” on the AUMF resolution, he gave us this:

There is unmistakable evidence that Saddam Hussein is working aggressively to develop nuclear weapons and will likely have nuclear weapons within the next five years. And that may happen sooner if he can obtain access to enriched uranium from foreign sources — something that is not that difficult in the current world. We also should remember we have always underestimated the progress Saddam has made in development of weapons of mass destruction.

When Saddam Hussein obtains nuclear capabilities, the constraints he feels will diminish dramatically, and the risk to America’s homeland, as well as to America’s allies, will increase even more dramatically. Our existing policies to contain or counter Saddam will become irrelevant. [...]

But this isn’t just a future threat. Saddam’s existing biological and chemical weapons capabilities pose a very real threat to America, now. Saddam has used chemical weapons before, both against Iraq’s enemies and against his own people. He is working to develop delivery systems like missiles and unmanned aerial vehicles that could bring these deadly weapons against U.S. forces and U.S. facilities in the Middle East.

And he could make those weapons available to many terrorist groups which have contact with his government, and those groups could bring those weapons into the U.S. and unleash a devastating attack against our citizens. I fear that greatly.

It’s much easier for the president to mislead people when the erstwhile opposition party is doing more to echo his rhetoric than to debunk it.

In response to yesterday’s post on the likely political appointees in a McCain administration, Nathaniel comments:

Matt I would point out that Ryan Crocker is a Foreign Service officer not a political appointee. He served as Amabsssador in some pretty harsh posts before Bush came into office and less he chooses to retire, which he may due to the length of his service, he will be serving as an Ambassador in whatever adminstration is after Bush.

Very fair points. Still, I think the overall point stands. It’s reasonable to believe that many of the people who’ve served in noteworthy positions in the Bush administration would also serve in noteworthy positions in a McCain administration. And it would be interested to know what McCain’s thoughts on that matter are in a more specific way. Like most administrations, Team Bush has had its share of feuds and so forth. An incoming Republican administration that wants to bring back Richard Armitage is something you’d look at very differently from an incoming GOP administration that wants to bring back Doug Feith.

Thesis: If Barbara Boxer had run for President in 2004, she would have caught some of the Dean ’04 antiwar fire, and some of the Clinton ’08 feminist fire, and defeated a field split between the Gephardt/Kerry/Edwards/Lieberman tetrarchy of pro-war white guys.

What does the internet think about that?

Patrick Coburn: “The US is holding hostage some $50bn (£25bn) of Iraq’s money in the Federal Reserve Bank of New York to pressure the Iraqi government into signing an agreement seen by many Iraqis as prolonging the US occupation indefinitely, according to information leaked to The Independent.”

This exemplifies the Bush/McCain madness. To the majority of people, whatever they think about the details of getting out of Iraq, being in Iraq isn’t desirable. What we need to do is create conditions where leaving is viable. But to the people running our country, the goal is to stay in Iraq forever. It’s insane.

UPDATE: Some have written in to say that the actual cause of the holdup here is the Iraqis’ inability to reach a revenue-sharing agreement about what to do with their oil money. It’s just an issue that’s become more and more pressing as high oil prices mean that Iraq’s oil money is skyrocketing.

Looks like Obama’s not as unreasonable on the final status of Jerusalem as he tried to imply when talking to AIPAC:

Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama did not rule out Palestinian sovereignty over parts of Jerusalem when he called for Israel’s capital to remain “undivided,” his campaign told The Jerusalem Post Thursday. [...]

“Two principles should apply to any outcome,” which the adviser gave as: “Jerusalem remains Israel’s capital and it’s not going to be divided by barbed wire and checkpoints as it was in 1948-1967.”

He refused, however, to rule out other configurations, such as the city also serving as the capital of a Palestinian state or Palestinian sovereignty over Arab neighborhoods. [...]

“The Orthodox Union is extremely disappointed in this revision of Senator Obama’s important statement about Jerusalem,” said Nathan Diament, director of public policy for the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations. He had sent out a release Wednesday applauding Obama’s Jerusalem remarks in front of AIPAC.

It’s never really been clear to me if the AIPAC, Union or Orthodox Jewish Congregations, etc. crowd really means what they’re saying about this. If they had an otherwise solid deal that they felt would ensure Israeli peace and security while removing the stain of occupation from the country but it required them to give up the Arab neighborhoods of Jerusalem, would Nathan Diament really be so crazy as to see that as the deal-breaker?

Meanwhile, for Obama this seems much worse than simply going to AIPAC and saying something more honest.

To me, the best thing about this story is that the Defense Department’s reaction to the news that American counterintelligence operatives were concerned that Pentagon officials were being manipulated by Iranian intelligence was to shut the investigation down. Because, hey, that’s not the sort of thing you’d want more details on.