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.”

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