Yesterday, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert made headlines by bravely saying what most people already know to be true, and what Olmert himself has spent almost his entire political career denying — that Israel must withdraw from nearly all of the West Bank as well as East Jerusalem to attain peace with the Palestinians.

Today, Israeli journalist Gershom Gorenberg — who authored an excellent history of Israel’s settlement enterprise — has an op-ed in the Washington Post describing the intractable situation Israel has created for itself through years of settlement building:

Nearly a thousand housing units are being built in Maale Adumim, according to Peace Now’s Settlement Watch project. At Givat Zeev, another of the settlements ringing Jerusalem, a 750-unit project was approved this year. The government has asked for bids on building nearly 350 homes in Beitar Illit, also near Jerusalem. Meanwhile, hundreds of homes have been added at settlements deep in the West Bank, with the government’s acquiescence if not approval.

All this fits a historical pattern: Diplomatic initiatives accelerate settlement building in occupied territory. When the peace effort fades away, the red-roofed houses remain as a monument.[...]

Since Annapolis, hard-line settlers have continued building, hoping to block any pullback. The government, meanwhile, is building in the so-called settlement blocs — settlements that it insists Israel must keep under any agreement. As in the past, it is writing its negotiating position in concrete on the hills.

Meanwhile, last week the New York Times reported on the increasing violence by Jewish settlers in the occupied territories:

There have been bouts of settler violence for years, notably during the transfer of Gaza to the Palestinians in 2005. Now, though, the militants seem to have spawned a broader, more defined strategy of resistance designed to intimidate the state.

This aggressive doctrine, according to Akiva HaCohen, 24, who is considered to be one of its architects, calls on settlers and their supporters to respond “whenever, wherever and however” they wish to any attempt by the Israeli Army or the police to lay a finger on property in illegally built outposts scheduled by the government for removal.[...]

Besides exacting a price for army and police actions, the policy also encourages settlers to avenge Palestinian acts of violence by taking the law into their own hands — an approach that has the potential to set the tinderbox of the West Bank ablaze.

Hard-core right-wing settlers have responded to limited army operations in recent weeks by blocking roads, rioting spontaneously, throwing stones at Palestinian vehicles and burning Palestinian orchards and fields all over the West Bank, a territory that Israel has occupied since 1967.

For Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, settler terrorism is simply a fact of life. Lawless rampages like the one in Asira al-Qibliya a few weeks ago — which Olmert called a “pogrom” — make news, but the less spectacular daily acts of harassment, intimidation, vandalism and violence rarely do. Read more

A new BBC poll (pdf) of citizens of 23 countries has determined that most people don’t think very much of U.S. efforts against Al Qaeda:

Some 29% of people said the “war on terror” launched by President George W Bush in 2001 had had no effect on the Islamist militant network.

According to 30% of those surveyed, US policies have strengthened al-Qaeda.

This is bad news, but not all all that surprising. The “war on terror” — at least as it’s been framed by the Bush administration — involves the relentless application of military force to what is actually an intelligence and propaganda problem. Where the focus over the last seven years should have been on devaluing the al-Qaeda brand, President Bush has instead focused on blowing things up. Blowing things up creates a lot of collateral damage, which is an anodyne way of saying that “a lot of innocent people get killed.” This results in outrage and opposition to U.S. policies, which in turn enlarges the pool of potential terrorists, which is a problem if your goal is that there be fewer terrorists.

This is particularly troubling:

The most commonly held view of al-Qaeda in the 23 nations polled was a negative one – except in Egypt and Pakistan.[...]

In Pakistan, where much of the battle against al-Qaeda is being fought, just 19% said they had a negative view of Osama Bin Laden’s organisation.

Doug Miller, from polling agency Globescan, said the findings from Egypt and Pakistan were “yet another indicator that the US ‘war on terror’ is not winning hearts and minds”.

Given that Pakistan is where Osama bin Laden and his top lieutenants are believed to currently reside, it’s obvious that the U.S. needs a new approach to Pakistan, to more effectively engage its population and government in the effort against Al Qaeda.

Last Wednesday, CAPAF’s Brian Katulis offered testimony before Congress on a new policy toward Pakistan.

Our guest blogger is Nina Hachigian, Senior Vice-President at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

I thought Senator McCain was backing away from his idea for a “League of Democracies” because he had not mentioned it much lately, but he raised it again in the debate on Friday in response to a question about Iran.

The League is one of McCain’s more radical foreign policy proposals. He has described a “global compact” that will “harness the vast influence” of some 100 nations to “defend our shared interests” and “revive the democratic solidarity that united the West during the Cold War.”

While, as my Dad points out, “it sure sounds lovely,” the League is an unworkable, divisive waste of time.

First, no one else wants to do it. Though McCain suggested in the debate that Britain, France and Germany would sign right up, on the contrary, diplomatic reaction in Old Europe has ranged from cool to dismissive. The bigger developing democracies like India, Brazil and South Africa appear no more enthusiastic, perhaps because they saw Charles Krauthammer on Fox News explaining that the ulterior motive of the LOD is to “kill the UN.” And they like the UN.

Second, the LOD is fundamentally conceptually flawed because one’s form of government is not the principal driver of a country’s foreign policy stances. In a 2002 report, (pdf) a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute laments that he cannot report a “high correlation” of voting behavior at the UN among democracies and, in fact, that “the democracies of Africa, Latin America and the Carribbean, with a few exceptions, have voting patterns that correspond more closely with the dictatorships of their regions than with the United States.” That should not come as a big surprise. Why does the United States cozy up to Saudi Arabia and look the other way at Egypt’s non-democratic behavior? Because we have strategic interests at stake. Other democracies have those interests too, and sometimes those interests conflict with ours, despite our shared ideals.

McCain uses the case Iran to illustrate the utility of the League, but it actually reveals why it will not work. Like many, McCain is frustrated that the UN Security Council will not approve tougher sanctions against Iran because of China and Russia’s veto power (though they have agreed to some sanctions). But the LOD would not do any better at providing a united, sanction-seeking front. India, the LOD’s largest would-be member, claims a “strategic partnership” (pdf) with Iran and has been negotiating for a large natural gas pipeline to meet its growing demand for imported fuel. Moreover, it is hard to imagine how you can cut a nuclear deal with Tehran if China, its largest customer, and Russia, its arms dealer, are not fully engaged.

Third, do we really need another “us against them” construct motivating US foreign policy? Remember that Cold War strategy of trying to drive a wedge between Beijing and Moscow? The LOD is the opposite– another reason for them to bond in solidarity against the west.

Fourth, what could the League do about global warming or non-proliferation or disease? Not much because key non-democracies hold cards in all those areas.

Of course we should deepen cooperation with democracies individually and in groups, like NATO. We should also continue to promote democracy abroad in effective and peaceful ways because it is the best form of government around. But we shouldn’t spend another 10 minutes thinking about the future of the League.

Digg It!

Commentary’s Noah Pollak states the neoconservative case against Israel’s “New Historians“:

Their cause is to expose the “founding myths” of Zionism, so as to undermine Israeli self-confidence.

Right, because true patriots understand that the only legitimate function of historical scholarship is the glorification of the state.

Also funny that Pollak deploys this critique of the New Historians — their work is politically harmful — by way of criticizing historian Tom Segev for suggesting that a certain work is politically harmful.

Fight on, Commentary!

In tonight’s debate, Sen. John McCain repeatedly asserted that his opponent “doesn’t understand” Iraq or national security. McCain demonstrated, however, that it is he who doesn’t understand the consequences that that the Iraq war has wrought for America’s national security.

- McCain said that withdrawing from Iraq would “increase Iranian influence.” In fact, it is the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq that has resulted in increased Iranian influence, not only in Iraq, but in the region.

- McCain correctly identified the resurgence in Russian power as driven by increased oil wealth, but avoided mentioning that Russia’s huge oil revenues, as well as Iran’s, are to a significant extent a result of the destabilization resulting from the Iraq war. According to a leading oil economist, the Iraq war “tripled the price of oil…costing the world a staggering $6 trillion in higher energy prices alone”:

Dr Mamdouh Salameh, who advises both the World Bank and the UN Industrial Development Organisation (Unido), told The Independent…that the price of oil would now be no more than $40 a barrel, less than a third of the record $135 a barrel reached last week, if it had not been for the Iraq war.

- McCain decried the fact that U.S. taxpayers are “sending $700 billion a year overseas to countries that don’t like us very much,” but continues to support sending $10-12 billion a month to a country, Iraq, whose people want our military to withdraw. As i wrote in July, “a strong political consensus exists among Iraqis in favour of a US commitment to withdraw its forces from their country”:

President Bush and John McCain have consistently tried to ignore this reality, each insisting that a US withdrawal would be contingent upon “conditions on the ground”, and not on “artificial timetables”. But there’s nothing artificial about Iraqis’ revulsion at the continuing presence of foreign troops in their homeland, and the political expression of this revulsion represents an important condition on the ground.

A condition on the ground that McCain consistently chooses to ignore.

The Washington Post asked a bunch of foreign policy types for their thoughts on what the candidates should discuss in the first debate. The American Enterprise Institute’s Danielle Pletka — who was last seen lamenting the fact that those rotten, ungrateful Iraqis don’t possess a “freedom gene,” and have proved undeserving of her splendid little war — skillfully demonstrates that if you radically misrepresent Barack Obama’s foreign policy views, those views can be made to seem radically at odds with each other:

Barack Obama has said that he opposes the Iraq war, opposes the surge and wishes to withdraw troops on a specific timeline regardless of our success on the ground or the views of our commanders. He has said that he wants to sit down with the Iranian leadership and negotiate without preconditions, a position rejected by America’s allies in Europe. He has also suggested that the United States should threaten to and possibly attack Pakistan for harboring al-Qaeda. Each of these positions can be explained in a vacuum, but together they add up to a confusing picture of how President Obama would defend America against enemies abroad.

Interesting that Pletka appears to be siding here with the Europeans against five former U.S. secretaries of state, who last week advocated negotiating with Iran “without conditions.” Someone really should ask Danielle Pletka why she thinks Europeans — many of whom don’t even worship God — should be given a veto over America’s national security.

In all seriousness, of course, as evidenced by her tendency to dismiss our European allies as “weak” and “without conviction” when they haven’t happened to agree with her boneheaded schemes for conquering the world ‘freedom agenda,’ Danielle Pletka really doesn’t care what our European allies think, except inasmuch as it’s useful to her making comically transparent bad faith arguments.

In an interview today with ThinkProgress, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) directly tied today’s fiscal crisis to the Iraq war:

The Iraq war has driven us deeply into debt. We borrowed $700 or $800 billion to finance that war, mainly from foreign companies, which have flooded our markets with investments — many of them in the big problem areas we talked about, like subprime mortgages. So they have just compounded the problem and we have invited them in, because of the debt that we have. This has been the first president in the history of America to ask for a tax cut in the midst of a war. He made the debt situation even worse.

Durbin also commented on the ballooning size of the debt, noting, “The accumulated debt of America from the beginning of this country to today is about $9.7 trillion.” But between the rescue of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, AIG, Bear Stearns, and now the bailout package, “the accumulated exposure added to the national debt over the last several weeks equals the entire debt that we have accumulated in the history of this nation.” Watch it:

The Iraq war — on which the Bush administration is spending $12 billion a month — combined with Bush’s tax cuts, have significantly contributed to the national debt. According to the Center for Budget Policy and Priorities (CBPP), Bush’s tax cuts accounted for 42 percent of the “unprecedented” explosion of the deficit in recent years, which of course adds to the debt. Durbin told ThinkProgress today that he supports repealing Bush’s tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans to help pay for the $700 billion bailout.

As Pat at the Wonk Room has pointed out, these irresponsible policies have meant that the United States has had to turn to foreign investment for financing. Currently, 45 percent of U.S. Treasury securities are owned by foreign nations; other nations owned fewer than 20 percent of these securities as recently as 1994.

Transcript: Read more

While Americans wait to see if our financial systems are going to melt down, a story that is getting far too little attention is the dangerously deteriorating situation in Pakistan, an important U.S. ally in the war against terrorism. Specifically, real questions now exist as to whether Pakistan can still be considered a U.S. ally in the war against terrorism. This is a critical issue for tonight’s debate and may be the most important national security item for the next president.

The Washington Post reported yesterday that “Pakistani troops and a U.S.-Afghan ground patrol exchanged fire near a frontier checkpoint… in a new heightening of armed tension between allies in the war against Taliban insurgents”:

According to the U.S. Central Command, the incident began when Pakistani troops at the checkpoint opened fire on two small American helicopters that were providing air support to the U.S.-Afghan unit while it was on patrol near the border. In response, Americans in the patrol fired shots into a hillside on which the checkpoint stood. Pakistani forces then fired on the patrol.

In an excellent article on the current situation, Dexter Filkins described a similar firefight in which U.S. forces out hunting the Taliban called in airstrikes after taking fire near the Pakistan border, resulting in the deaths of 11 Pakistani border guards.

Writing that Pakistan’s tribal areas “have become an untouchable base for Islamic militants to attack Americans and Afghans across the border,” Filkins suggests that the central question is “whether Pakistan really wants to control the Talibs and their Qaeda allies ensconced in the tribal areas — and whether it really can”:

This was not supposed to be a major worry. After the attacks of Sept. 11, President Pervez Musharraf threw his lot in with the United States. Pakistan has helped track down Al Qaeda suspects, launched a series of attacks against militants inside the tribal areas — a new offensive got under way just weeks ago — and given many assurances of devotion to the antiterrorist cause. For such efforts, Musharraf and the Pakistani government have been paid handsomely, receiving more than $10 billion in American money since 2001.

But as the incident on the Afghan border suggests, little in Pakistan is what it appears. For years, the survival of Pakistan’s military and civilian leaders has depended on a double game: assuring the United States that they were vigorously repressing Islamic militants — and in some cases actually doing so — while simultaneously tolerating and assisting the same militants.

On Tuesday, the Navy Times revealed that “Pakistani military forces flew repeated helicopter missions into Afghanistan to resupply the Taliban during a fierce battle in June 2007″: Read more

Our guest blogger is Ed Paisley, Vice President for Editorial at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

As an addendum to The Wonk Room’s National Security Debate Study Guide (pdf), here are six questions that need to be asked at tonight’s presidential debate:

1. Sweeping financial deregulation pushed by conservatives in Congress over the past decade alongside gross supervisory mismanagement by the Bush administration and their appointees at key financial regulatory agencies now requires a $700 billion taxpayer bailout of Wall Street financial institutions to avoid a global financial meltdown.

QUESTION: How will you restore prudent supervision so that foreign investors regain confidence in our financial markets?

2. Overseas financial institutions and investors were sold hundreds of billions of dollars worth of mortgage-backed securities over the past eight years, much of which is now worth substantially less in value due to the failure of the Bush administration both to prevent the origination of bad loans by unscrupulous mortgage brokers and to police the packaging of these mortgage-backed securities by Wall Street into supposedly AAA-rated bonds.

QUESTION: How will you reform the U.S. mortgage marketplace so that foreign investors once again have confidence to invest in the U.S. housing market, and what steps will you take to ensure that new mortgage-backed securities are accurately valued by Wall Street issuers of these bonds?

3. The U.S. housing market will not recover until the individual home mortgages of American families across the country are unraveled out of the complex mortgage-backed securities that were sold by Wall Street to institutional investors worldwide. U.S. Treasury Secretary Paulson wants to purchase these mortgage-backed bonds from Wall Street financial institutions, but it’s unclear how that will help the U.S. housing market recover.

QUESTION: What do you propose to do to protect the value of homes in this country?

4. Foreign financial institutions and foreign investors helped finance U.S. home mortgages during the recent housing boom.

QUESTION: How can you ensure that they return to invest in the U.S. housing market, which despite the current downturn boasts solid long-term value?

5. Our nation’s trade deficit with the rest of the world is a source profound instability on Main Street. The U.S. housing crisis only exacerbates the pain facing Americans across the country.

QUESTION: How would you ensure that our trade with other nations results in growing and broad-based prosperity at home and abroad?

6. Since the world rallied to our support after September 11, 2001 the Bush Administration has squandered that good will and undermined our stature in the world with its unilateral foreign policy and choice to invade Iraq. Now the failure to adequately oversee our markets has led to nations and foreign investors sustaining huge losses in their U.S. investments and sent world markets into chaos—threatening the value of the dollar and our economic credibility worldwide, and weakening our ability to attract foreign investment.

QUESTION: How would you address the damage done to U.S. stature and credibility through the conduct of our foreign and economic policy?

Clear answers to these questions as they relate to international economic policy, global financial stability and, most importantly, average American workers and homeowners, would go a long way toward demonstrating whether the two candidates truly understand the sorry conservative legacy that led to the need for a $700 billion financial rescue package.

In her interview with CBS’s Katie Couric that aired yesterday, Gov. Sarah Palin (R-AK) outlined some of her foreign policy positions. After laying out why Afghanistan is so different from Iraq, she then called for a surge of troops into Afghanistan, exactly as the Bush administration did in Iraq. She noted that it had led to “victory” in Iraq and would therefore do the same in Afghanistan:

COURIC: Why is it much more challenging there? Can you explain that?

PALIN: The logistics that we’re already suggesting here, not having enough troops in the area right now. The–things like the terrain, even, in Afghanistan and that border between Pakistan and Afghanistan where, you know, we believe that bin Laden is hiding out right now and is still such a leader of this terrorist movement. There are many more challenges there. So again, I believe that a surge in Afghanistan also will lead us to victory there, as it has proven to have done in Iraq.

Watch it:

There has not been victory in Iraq. Gen. David Petraeus has reportedly banned the use of words like “triumph,” “victory,” and “we’re winning.” “This is not the sort of struggle where you take a hill, plant the flag and go home to a victory parade. … It’s not war with a simple slogan,” he told BBC News earlier this month.

Like his running mate, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) frequently declares success in Iraq, recently stating that the country is now “peaceful and stable,” and the United States is “winning in Iraq.”

Digg It!

As Congress considers a $700 billion way out of the current economic crisis, it’s hard not to notice that this sum closely resembles the amount that the U.S. has spent so far in Iraq. (We will have spent far more than that by the time we withdraw.)

Many will remember Osama bin Laden’s November 2004 straight-to-video release where he discussed Al Qaeda’s stratey against the United States, saying it was “easy for [Al Qaeda] to provoke and bait this administration“:

All that we have to do is to send two Mujahedin to the farthest point East to raise a piece of cloth on which is written al-Qa’ida in order to make the generals race there to cause America to suffer human economic and political losses without their achieving for it anything of note other than some benefits to their private companies. [...]

So we are continuing this policy in bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy. [...]

And even more dangerous and bitter for America is that the Mujahedin recently forced Bush to resort to emergency funds to continue the fight in Afghanistan and Iraq which is evidence of the success of the bleed-until-bankruptcy plan with Allah’s permission… And it all shows that the real loser is… you. It’s the American people and their economy.

Anticipating the likely release of a new Al Qaeda video starring either bin Laden or Ayman al Zawahiri — both of whom remain at large, more than seven years after George W. Bush promised to bring them in “dead or alive” — we should remember that, as Ron Suskind reported in The One Percent Doctrine, the CIA’s strategic assessment that “bin-Laden’s [Nov. 2004] message was clearly designed to assist the President’s reelection“:

At the five o’clock meeting, [deputy CIA director] John McLaughlin opened the issue with the consensus view: “Bin-Laden certainly did a nice favor today for the President.”

McLaughlin’s comment drew nods from CIA officers at the table. Jami Miscik, CIA deputy associate director for intelligence, suggested that the al-Qaeda founder may have come to Bush’s aid because bin-Laden felt threatened by the rise in Iraq of Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi; bin-Laden might have thought his leadership would be diminished if Bush lost the White House and their “eye-to-eye struggle” ended.

But the CIA analysts also felt that bin-Laden might have recognized how Bush’s policies – including the Guantanamo prison camp, the Abu Ghraib scandal and the endless bloodshed in Iraq – were serving al-Qaeda’s strategic goals for recruiting a new generation of jihadists.

“Certainly,” the CIA’s Miscik said, “he would want Bush to keep doing what he’s doing for a few more years,” according to Suskind’s account of the meeting.

John McCain has been very clear that when it comes to national security, he would like to keep doing what Bush has been doing for a few more years. That is, he would like to keep jumping at the bait. Remember that when that new AQ video drops.

Yesterday, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) abruptly announced that he was suspending his presidential campaign in order “to return to Washington to help forge an agreement on a proposed $700 billion bailout of financial institutions before Congress.” Top McCain aide Mark Salter told the Washington Post that McCain wanted to lock himself “in a room for the next 100 hours” with Sen. Barack Obama, congressional leaders and administration officials until they can “achieve some kind of consensus on something that will have the congress’s support.”

But lawmakers on Capitol Hill are not enthusiastic about the presidential candidates injecting themselves. Time’s Jay Newton-Small reported last night that “leaders from the left and the right rejected the idea of McCain and Obama taking over the talks”:

But leaders from the left and the right rejected the idea of McCain and Obama taking over the talks. When asked by reporters if he wanted McCain sitting in blow-by-blow negotiations Rep. Adam Putnam, the No. 3 House Republican, simply smirked, mute for ten seconds as reporters laughed. Democrats were more voiciferous in their rejection of McCain-Obama negotiations; New York Senator Chuck Schumer and Rep. Jim Clyburn, the No. 3 House Dem, both said if McCain had really cared where have he — and his staff — been in the negotiations thus far.

Putnam told Politico that “McCain and Obama were most valuable in speaking to the need for action rather than getting into the legislative details.” Rep. Spencer Bachus (R-AL), the ranking Republican on the House Financial Services Committee, indicated he didn’t want McCain’s help, pointing “McCain away from the House and toward the Senate.” House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-MD) said the candidates return would “not be particularly helpful.”

House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank (D-MA), who is one of the chief negotiators of the bailout proposal, derided McCain’s “late entry into the negotiations“:

“McCain is Andy Kaufman in his Mighty Mouse costume – ‘Here I Come to Save the Day,’” Frank said as he left a Thursday morning caucus meeting with House Democrats, saying the Republican presidential candidate’s decision to enter the mix “is not helpful.”

“He hasn’t been involved,” Frank said. “He doesn’t know anything about it.”

Frank also mocked the idea that McCain could help with the details, quipping, “I guess if I wanted expertise there, I’d ask Sarah Palin.” One anonymous Republican ridiculed McCain’s plan to jump into negotiations, telling the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank, “Daddy’s coming home.”

Speaking at a retreat hosted by the Washington Institute for Near East Policy over the weekend, McCain adviser Max Boot threw President Bush under the bus:

McCain’s advisers attempted to deflect comparisons between McCain and Bush. In trying to turn such comparisons against the Obama campaign, Boot noted that eight years ago he favored “another presidential candidate with not much experience in national security policy” — George W. Bush — “and we’ve seen the implications.”

For a little background on how monumentally disingenuous this is, let’s go back to October 2001, when Boot penned an article arguing that the problem with U.S. foreign policy was too little military intervention. “The problem,” Boot wrote, “has not been excessive American assertiveness but rather insufficient assertiveness. The question is whether, having now been attacked, we will act as a great power should”:

Once Afghanistan has been dealt with, America should turn its attention to Iraq. It will probably not be possible to remove Saddam quickly without a U.S. invasion and occupation — though it will hardly require half a million men, since Saddam’s army is much diminished since the Gulf War, and we will probably have plenty of help from Iraqis, once they trust that we intend to finish the job this time. Once we have deposed Saddam, we can impose an American-led, international regency in Baghdad, to go along with the one in Kabul. With American seriousness and credibility thus restored, we will enjoy fruitful cooperation from the region’s many opportunists, who will show a newfound eagerness to be helpful in our larger task of rolling up the international terror network that threatens us.

Clearly, only someone with as little foreign policy experience as George W. Bush would actually follow such knuckleheaded advice. But what’s John McCain’s excuse?

In an al-Iraqiya interview on September 17, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki discussed the state of negotiations between the U.S. and Iraqi governments regarding the eventual withdrawal of U.S troops from Iraq. Maliki said that “perhaps one of the two most important points is deciding the final date.” Transcript via Open Source Center:

MALIKI: Actually, the final date was really the end of 2010 and the period between the end of 2010 and the end of 2011 was for withdrawing the remaining troops from all of Iraq, but they [the Bush administration] asked for a change [in date] due to political circumstances related to the domestic situation [in the US] so it will not be said to the end of 2010 followed by one year for withdrawal but the end of 2011 as a final date. Agreement has been reached on this issue. They are willing to respond positively because they, too, are facing a critical situation.

President Bush has repeatedly insisted that the U.S. withdrawal would be dictated by military commanders and the situation on the ground, and not by political considerations. Now, according to Prime Minister Maliki, the Bush administration has attempted to time a withdrawal in a way that would benefit John McCain and the Republican Party. I would say that I’m shocked, but of course, this is the way that the Bush administration has always treated national security, as just another piece in a political game.

Last week, the right-wing fever swamp was bubbling up over an article by Amir Taheri, in which Taheri claimed that Barack Obama had “tried in private to persuade Iraqi leaders to delay an agreement on a draw-down of the American military presence.” Not only did the story turn out to be a complete fabrication, now we find out that the complete opposite is the case: It is the Bush administration that tried in private to persuade Iraqi leaders to delay a draw-down of the American military presence, once again playing politics with America’s national security, and effectively repudiating past claims that a U.S. withdrawal will only be “dictated by the facts on the ground.”

Two questions: What did McCain know about this, and when did he know it?

Our guest blogger is John Halpin, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress Action Fund and co-author of “The Power of Progress: How Progressives Can (Once Again) Save Our Economy, Our Climate, and Our Country.”

Anyone who thinks that the Fed’s rescuing of AIG and Treasury Secretary Paulson’s unconditional, blank-check bailout plan somehow validate the beliefs of FDR needs a serious tutorial in the history of the Democratic Party.

Democrats, since the days of Thomas Jefferson, have always stood on principle against the predatory instincts of Wall Street, speculators, and bankers.

As political theorist Michael Sandel has noted, the fight between Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton over the First Bank of the United States (and Hamilton’s larger government-sponsored economic agenda) was a legendary battle about competing visions of the nation. Jefferson, seeking to uphold the civic republican tradition of the nation’s founding, argued that Hamilton’s national bank was unconstitutional and a “treasonous” tool of oppression supported by northern financial interests. Jefferson believed a central bank and national capitalism would undermine the economic independence and civic virtue of farmers and small producers. Hamilton, in turn, thought Jefferson’s economic vision for the country was quaint and would inhibit the nation from becoming a world leader in manufacturing and finance. He viewed the national bank as an essential engine of the American economy.

Hamilton won that debate but the Jeffersonian skepticism of a national bank and government-sponsored capitalism lived on. Sounding similar themes, President Andrew Jackson accused the Second Bank of the United States of supporting an economic elite that controlled Congress and was neglectful of southern and western agrarian interests. Three-time Democratic presidential candidate, William Jennings Bryan, picked up this strand of thought in his attacks on the early plans for the Federal Reserve system put forth by Republican Senator Nelson Aldrich, the Hamiltonian-inspired nemesis of progressives at the turn of the twentieth century. Aldrich, a close associate of J.P. Morgan, devised a plan to create a system of regional reserve banks with a central authority run by private bankers. The thought of turning the nation’s finances over to the “money trust” set the hair on fire of progressives like Bryan and Republican Senator Robert La Follette of Wisconsin who wanted full public control of the nation’s money supply and credit. After fierce congressional wrangling, President Wilson heeded Bryan’s warnings and eventually negotiated the hybrid Federal Reserve system we have today that preserves privately owned banks with a publicly controlled central board.

Which brings us to Franklin Roosevelt. Read more

Eli Lake reports that “America’s counterterrorism community is warning that Al Qaeda may launch more overseas operations to influence the presidential elections in November,” noting that “bin Laden has sought to influence democratic elections in the past”:

In the week before the 2004 American presidential election, Mr. bin Laden recorded a video message to the American people promising repercussions if President Bush were re-elected. In later messages, Al Qaeda’s leader claimed credit for helping elect Mr. Bush in 2004.

Interestingly, Lake doesn’t mention why bin Laden would claim credit for having helped elect Bush, or why the CIA concluded that electing Bush was, in fact, bin Laden’s aim: Because Bush’s war on terror has been a propaganda, recruiting, and training bonanza for Al Qaeda.

Given that the only difference between McCain’s and Bush’s approach to the war on terror is that McCain promises more of it and harder, it’s not really difficult to guess which of the candidates a new Al Qaeda intervention would be intended to help.

Looking ahead to this Friday’s presidential debate on foreign policy, it’s worth reviewing some of the items on John McCain’s promised agenda. McCain maintains that on “transcendent issues” like the war on terror, he is in “total agreement” with President Bush, and McCain’s ideas bear this out. Like Bush, McCain contends that Iraq is the “central front” in the war on terror, ignoring the fact that there was no Al Qaeda in Iraq before there was America in Iraq. Invading Iraq has radicalized scores of young Muslims, who have traveled to Iraq and learned terrorist tactics, which they have now begun to bring back to their home countries. In a speech in November 2003, McCain responded to a question about whether the U.S. would “finish the job” in Afghanistan by saying that “we may muddle through.”

Unfortunately, as a result of the diversion of resources and attention to an unnecessary war in Iraq, “muddling through” is precisely what we have been doing in Afghanistan. Al Qaeda and the Taliban have regrouped in the Afghanistan-Pakistan border areas and waged an increasingly lethal insurgency. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen recently told the House of Representatives Armed Services Committee, “I’m not convinced we are winning it in Afghanistan…Frankly, we’re running out of time.” In July, Mullen told reporters, “I don’t have troops I can reach for, brigades I can reach to send into Afghanistan, until I have a reduced requirement in Iraq.” Though McCain now says that he will support a “surge” in Afghanistan, he has consistently opposed drawing down troops from Iraq, so it’s unclear where he intends to find the troops. Read more

As legal adviser at Guantanamo Bay, Brig. Gen. Thomas Hartmann has been one of the most aggressive advocates for the Bush administration’s military commissions. In fact, three separate judges have barred him from acting as an impartial legal adviser at the trial of detainees. Judge Stephen Henley said that Hartmann had “compromised the objectivity necessary to dispassionately and fairly evaluate the evidence and prepare the post-trial evaluation.” In the case of Salim Hamdan, a military judge ruled that Hartmann had “exerted improper influence on the case.”

The Pentagon has now quietly removed Hartmann. But as the Miami Herald notes, instead of being fired, Hartmann has essentially become a “war court czar in charge of logistics.” Pentagon acting general counsel, Daniel Dell’Orto, released a statement yesterday, nowhere mentioning Hartmann’s inappropriate advocacy activities:

Gen. Hartmann has driven the commissions process forward since his arrival in July 2007. In no small part because of his efforts and his dedication, the commissions are an active, operational legal system. Due to the dramatic increase in the number of military commission cases, the more than doubling of personnel, and the various policy, logistics and systems issues that arise regularly and frequently in the commissions, it is necessary to establish a more comprehensive executive support structure.

In an interview with the Miami Herald, Hartmann said that in his new job, he would be making sure that war on terror prosecutions move along briskly. “I want those courtrooms to be as filled up as they can possibly be — six days a week,” he said.

At a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in December 2007, Hartmann repeatedly refused to call the hypothetical waterboarding of an American pilot by the Iranian military torture. Shortly thereafter, Lt. Cmdr. Andrew Williams, a JAG officer with the U.S. Naval Reserve, resigned, saying that Hartmann’s testimony was the “last straw” and “sold all the soldiers and sailors at risk of capture and subsequent torture down the river.”

In August, deputy prison camp commander, Army Brig. Gen. Gregory Zanetti testified that Hartmann was “abusive, bullying and unprofessional” and employed a “spray and pray” strategy to stage tribunals at Camp Justice.

Newsweek has more on Wednesday’s bombing in Yemen, including more on the Iraq blowback aspect:

A Yemeni source (who asked not to be identified because of political sensitivities) said the Yemeni government has been concerned about returning Iraq fighters for some time, and that that was one reason [Yemeni President Ali Abdullah] Salah’s government chose last year to release Jamal al-Badawi, the militant indicted in the United States for his role in the Cole bombing.[...]

The Yemeni source said Badawi’s [release] had a logic related to Iraq. The Yemeni fighters returning from Iraq were coming back having learned new and sophisticated techniques to avoid detection by security forces. They avoided use of cell phones and e-mail. The Yemenis hoped to follow Badawi in hopes that his status as a Cole bomber would lead them to other fighters returning from Iraq, the source said.

Following on what I wrote yesterday, the fact that our relationships with Middle Eastern governments like Yemen’s have been severely complicated — and various Al Qaeda affiliates inspired and empowered — by the Iraq war must be included in any tally of the wars costs.

Now go read Charles Krauthammer’s latest war prayer, in which Krauthammer suggests that “Bush is much like Truman, who developed the sinews of war for a new era”:

What the president did note with some pride, however, is that beyond preventing a second attack, he is bequeathing to his successor the kinds of powers and institutions the next president will need to prevent further attack and successfully prosecute the long war…

Truman left office disparaged and highly out of favor. History has revised that verdict. I have little doubt that Bush will be the subject of a similar reconsideration

Even granting that the Truman argument is, as Yglesias notes, “comforting to all unpopular presidents,” it seems that an obvious way of interpreting Krauthammer’s bust-polishing is that George W. Bush’s presidency has successfully preserved and expanded the various powers and prerogatives that the next president will need to deal with the the disastrous consequences of George W. Bush’s presidency.

In an interview earlier this week, John McCain would not answer whether he would be willing to meet with Spanish Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero. While some speculated that McCain either did not know who Zapatero was or thought he was some “Latin American bad guy,” McCain’s top foreign policy adviser Randy Scheunemann said McCain was not confused — he was simply articulating his policy of refusing to commit to a White House meeting with Zapatero.

The logic behind this particular policy is baffling, considering that Spain has long been a U.S. NATO ally and currently has troops in Afghanistan. So why would McCain shun Zapatero? If President Bush’s actions towards the Spanish Prime Minster give some indication, the answer is Iraq.

Zapatero withdrew Spain’s troops from Iraq soon after his Socialist Party swept to power in March, 2004 in a wave of Spanish anti-war sentiment, a move that reportedly angered Bush:

Zapatero’s first action was to make good on a long-standing campaign promise to remove Spanish troops from Iraq, to the overwhelming approval of Spaniards but the great irritation of Bush.

Eighteen months later, there has still been no one-on-one meeting between the two leaders, and rhetoric has been harsh. It got so bad at one point that Bush refused to take Zapatero’s phone call of congratulations last year after the president won reelection.

Since then, the White House has said Bush has “no plans” to meet with Zapataro. In 2006, National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley could not answer why the two leaders have not visited one another:

QUESTION: Is that the reason why there seems to be like a veto against our Prime Minister, Mr. Zapatero, who is an ally and has been Prime Minister for two years but hasn’t come to Washington yet?

MR. HADLEY: He has not come to Washington, that’s true. Whether that is a result of bad public opinion polls in Spain about the United States, I don’t know. I don’t have an answer for that. But there’s — at this point, I don’t think there’s any plans for a visit.

Just last March, when Press Secretary Dana Perino was asked if Bush would congratulate Zapataro on his re-election, she would not fully commit: “I expect he’ll be sending a message to him, sure.”

McCain’s incoherent answer to whether he would meet with Zapatero may indicate that he is interested in making Bush’s grudge against Spain permanent U.S. policy. As Max Bergmann notes, it is “beyond reckless” that McCain would refuse to meet with a democratic U.S. ally that has had soldiers killed in Afghanistan, was brutally attacked by Al-Qaeda and wields considerable influence in Europe and Latin America.

Perhaps Spain won’t be expecting an invitation to McCain’s League of Democracies?

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