Josh Marshall notes the, shall we say ironic, qualities of using James Woolsey as a surrogate to call Barack Obama “delusional.” There’s a lot of Woolsey-ania out there, but it’s important to recall that his September 24, 2001 New Republic article “Blood Baath: The Iraq Connection” (in the magazine’s first post-9/11 issue) was one of the very first and boldest strokes in the journalistic campaign for the Iraq War:

In the immediate aftermath of Tuesday’s attacks, attention has focused on terrorist chieftain Osama bin Laden. And he may well be responsible. But intelligence and law enforcement officials investigating the case would do well to at least consider another possibility: that the attacks–whether perpetrated by bin Laden and his associates or by others–were sponsored, supported, and perhaps even ordered by Saddam Hussein.

To this end, investigators should revisit the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. A few years ago, the facts in that case seemed straightforward: The mastermind behind the bombing, who went by the alias Ramzi Yousef, was in fact a 27-year-old Pakistani named Abdul Basit. But late last year, AEI Press published Study of Revenge: Saddam Hussein’s Unfinished War Against America, a careful book about the bombing by AEI scholar Laurie Mylroie. The book’s startling thesis is that the original theory of the attack, advanced by James Fox (the FBI’s chief investigator into the 1993 bombing until his replacement in 1994) was correct: that Yousef was not Abdul Basit but rather an Iraqi agent who had assumed the latter’s identity when police files in Kuwait (where the real Abdul Basit lived in 1990) were doctored by Iraqi intelligence during the occupation of Kuwait. If Mylroie and Fox (who died in 1997) are right, then it was Iraq that went after the World Trade Center last time. Which makes it much more plausible that Iraq has done so again.

Like a lot of other TNR content, the article’s vanished from their website and I don’t want to infringe their copyrights. But I will post a link to this other guy who seems happy to infringe the copyright on the web version of the article that seems to have been posted on 9/13/2001 and is identical as far as I can tell.

The talking points of the day from the McCain camp involve the idea that Barack Obama wants to fight terrorism with law enforcement alone, that he has a “September 10 mentality.” As Richard Clarke pointed out on a conference call earlier today, this is a pretty hoary chestnut “they said that about the Clinton administration, they said that about Senator Kerry, and now they’re saying it about Senator Obama” but it’s never been true. Michael Goldfarb at McCain’s blog alleges that “Obama wants to take us back to the bad old days of going after terrorists with prosecutors rather than predators.” This is, of course, not what Obama is proposing — as Jon Chait says “Obama did propose going after terrorists, which prompted McCain to accuse him of having ‘once suggested bombing our ally, Pakistan.’”

But of course the GOP philosophy has for years now been that we need to hit the terrorists hard where they aren’t, while letting problems in Central Asia fester because they’re difficult. Meanwhile, the “old days” Goldfarb is talking about never existed. In retrospect, I think we all wish the Clinton administration had been somewhat more aggressive in its approach to al-Qaeda, but as I note in the book more Americans (and many, many more people overall) have died as a result of the idiotic response to 9/11 that Bush and McCain embraced than actually died on that day.

The shortcomings of previous policy are no reason to go implement a worse policy. Military force will play a role in U.S. counterterrorism strategy, but it simply has a limited utility in dealing with the problem. If you don’t recognize that, you wind up blundering down the Bush/Rumsfeld/McCain/Feith road of sending troops to Iraq because Iraq contains good military targets rather than coming up with an actual strategy for fighting terrorism.

Jeff says “I really want you, as critically thinking journalist, to address the reality that Barack Obama is not committed to a real ‘troop withdrawal’ at all.” From Iraq, that is. The tone of the rest of his comment suggests that he thinks I’m part of some kind of conspiracy to cover up for Obama on this. But I’m not. For a while during the primaries I was writing about this a lot, hoping that either Clinton or Obama would join Bill Richardson in really committing to end the war. But neither did.

As best I can tell, it’s wrong to assume that there’s a real fact of the matter as to what it is Obama is planning to do about Iraq when he becomes president. At the moment, he’s running for president and would like as wide a swathe as possible of people to believe that he agrees with them. All indications are that Obama wants some kind of substantial reduction in the number of U.S. forces in Iraq, and some of the people who I’d expect to be serving in an Obama administration favor a complete withdrawal. But other people who I’d expect to be serving in an Obama administration favor various kinds of schemes for a reduced long-term presence. Obama’s rhetoric is compatible with either of those alternatives.

To me, the middle ground option doesn’t sound viable. My hope would be that when Obama’s sitting in the Oval Office talking to people, he’ll reach that conclusion, too. But maybe he won’t. Presumably the attitude of congress will make a difference. I’d guess that the more Responsible Plan candidates who win, the more likely we are to see an Obama administration leave Iraq expeditiously. But of course in addition to events in congress and events in Obama’s mind, events in the world — including what, if anything, comes of Obama’s proposed regional diplomatic initiatives — are going to make a difference. Fundamentally, presidential campaign season is a bad moment to get a sense of what people are “really” thinking. It is a good moment to try to pin people down to make unambiguous commitments, and during the primary season, the period when liberals had maximum leverage, neither Obama nor Clinton was willing to make such a commitment.

Senate Committee obtains documents and other evidence that “contradict previous accounts by top Bush administration appointees, setting the stage for new clashes between the White House and Congress over the origins of interrogation methods that many lawmakers regard as torture and possibly illegal.” Lawmakers, eh? Well, it’s not just lawmakers who regard illegal torture as torture and illegal, it seems that “military lawyers raised strong concerns about the legality of the practices as early as November 2002.”

We also learn that “Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld started to research the use of waterboarding, stress positions, sensory deprivation and other practices in July 2002, months before memos from commanders at the detention facility in Cuba requested permission to use those measures on suspected terrorists.” Read the whole thing.

Who, exactly, thought this was a good idea?

he government is testing drugs with severe side effects like psychosis and suicidal behavior on hundreds of military veterans, using small cash payments to attract patients into medical experiments that often target distressed soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, a Washington Times/ABC News investigation has found.

In one such experiment involving the controversial anti-smoking drug Chantix, the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) took three months to alert its patients about severe mental side effects. The warning did not arrive until after one of the veterans taking the drug had suffered a psychotic episode that ended in a near lethal confrontation with police.

Appalling.