Today, the Wall Street Journal joins Sean Hannity and Karl Rove in promoting Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) for Secretary of State in a McCain administration, praising his “first-rate” national security judgment:

Our own view is that Mr. Lieberman would make a fine Secretary of State, and that, given the political risks, making him vice president would probably be too great an election gamble. But Mr. Lieberman’s national security credentials are first-rate, and we’ve known him long enough to remember his opposition to an income tax in Connecticut, and his support for lower capital gains taxes, school vouchers and private Social Security accounts. Liberated from having to run as a Democrat, he might recall those policy instincts.

Today, Lieberman showed exactly what type of diplomacy he’d practice as Secretary of State. Speaking in Poland after a trip to Georgia with fellow McCain ally Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), Lieberman proposed kicking Russia out of the G-8:

“We’re not going to let Russia, so soon after the Iron Curtain fell, to again draw a dividing line across Europe,” said Lieberman, an independent from Connecticut and close friend of Republican presidential hopeful John McCain. “It is simply unacceptable.” [...]

“The G-8 should become for a while the G-7 until Russia proves that it is capable of being a law-abiding member of the international community,” he said.

McCain first proposed this idea in October 2007, and again in March. Not only do senior government officials consider this plan to be “dumb,” it’s also most likely “impossible,” as most other developed nations would never go along. In April, the LA Times reported that McCain was beginning to back away from the plan because it was greeted with alarm by his supporters.

Much of the McCain campaign’s condemnation of Russia has been based on hyperpbole and inaccurate facts. On Tuesday, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney blasted Russia for deciding to “act militarily against a sovereign nation.” Last week, McCain declared that “in the 21st century, nations don’t invade other nations.”

Digg It!

Earlier today, President Bush delivered his final speech as president to the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) and once again — like Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) two days prior — tried to portray himself as a champion of the 21st century GI Bill. Bush said that his administration worked “closely and effectively” with the VFW. As an example, he cited the legislation:

BUSH: When the history of the last eight years is finally written, it will show how closely and effectively my administration and the VFW have worked together on behalf of America’s veterans. [...] Earlier this year, I was pleased to sign a piece of legislation that the VFW has long championed, a GI Bill for the 21st century.

Watch it:

Not only is Bush misleading the VFW about his support for the bill, but the VFW actually opposed a competing measure that Bush supported.

The Pentagon and the White House consistently resisted Sen. Jim Webb’s (D-VA) strong bipartisan effort to pass the bill. They warned of the “harm” Webb’s bill would do to the military and objected to its generous education benefits to returning veterans.

Moreover, the Bush administration wasn’t working very close with the VFW on the bill as Bush suggested. The VFW endorsed Webb’s proposal in June 2007, and continued to press for the bill this year, rejecting the White House’s concerns. In fact, the VFW said they “didn’t have much input” on the competing proposal Bush (and McCain) supported and called it “very partisan.”

While the VFW honored Webb — the real champion of the GI Bill — with a gold medal and citation of merit for his leadership on the issue, Bush can probably trust Fox News to take his bait.

Digg It!

Today at a townhall meeting, an audience member praised Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) for his vow to “follow bin Laden to the gates of hell.” After a long question about veterans’ care, the questioner said she believed we needed to reinstate the draft, to which McCain seemed to readily agree:

QUESTIONER: If we don’t reenact the draft, I don’t think we’ll have anyone to chase Bin Laden to the gates of hell.

[Appaluse]

MCCAIN: Ma’am, let me say that I don’t disagree with anything you said.

Watch it (via Progressive Accountability):

In June, McCain said it would take an “all-out World War III” to make the draft necessary — which seems to mean he’d consider it. In July 2006, when asked to react to Newt Gingrich’s claim that “You’d have to say to yourself this is in fact World War III,” McCain said, “I do [agree] to some extent.”

Asked about the draft last September, McCain said, “I might consider it, I don’t think it’s necessary, but I might consider it if you could design a draft where everybody equally could serve.”

Considering McCain’s vow that “there’s gonna be other wars” and that we could stay in Iraq for 100 years, a draft might seem reasonable to him.

Digg It

Transcript: Read more

Our guest blogger is Nina Hachigian, a Senior Vice President and Director for the California office at American Progress.

For decades now, American presidents have come to office having promised to be tougher on China than the last guy. Sometimes outside events — as in 2001, when an American EP3 airplane collided with a Chinese fighter — fuel a confrontational stance. It can take months or years for the relationship to return to the pragmatism that it always eventually does because of our deep interdependence with China. In the interim, neither American nor Chinese interests are well-served.

Today, Senators Obama and McCain are also under pressure to take a tougher position on China. A tanking U.S. economy, high gas prices and Chinese ascendancy make the politics of bashing China very tempting (even if, at the moment, Russia’s invasion of Georgia is making Beijing seem downright responsible by comparison) and we have serious policy differences with China — human rights, Tibet and currency, to name a few.

But the urgency of our shared challenges, like climate change and North Korea’s nuclear program, as well as the legacy of foreign policy debacles to which the next administration will need to devote much of its time, make it essential that the next president take a forward-looking and clear-eyed approach to China from day one, and not waste political capital or time we don’t have. Read more

On Monday, USA Today reported that barracks for wounded soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan at the Army’s Fort Sill were infested with mold. In addition, soldiers living in the units said that “their complaints about mold and other problems” have been ignored for months and that they were told to keep quiet about the problems:

Twenty soldiers, who spoke to USA Today early last week, said their complaints about mold and other problems went unheeded for months. They also said they had been ordered not speak about the conditions at Fort Sill.

The base commander, Maj. Gen. Peter Vangjel, said in response to inquiries about the ongoing problems, “We’re going in and we’re going to take care of this for these guys.” In a later Associated Press report, Vangjel acknowledged that soldiers who knew about the mold were ordered to “remain silent,” but added that suggestions that the complaints were ignored are “simply not true.”

But now the Army appears to have retaliated against the Army social services official, Chuck Roeder, who first reported the poor conditions at Fort Sill — and their neglect — to the media. USA Today reports that Roeder has been forced out of his job:

An Army social services coordinator…who told USA Today about poor conditions at Fort Sill’s unit for wounded soldiers has been forced out of his job, the employee and base officials said Tuesday.

Soldiers meeting with Army Secretary Pete Geren…on Tuesday said Chuck Roeder, 54, was a strong advocate for their problems and should not have been forced to leave. [...]

Roeder, a retired soldier, said he was told to resign or he would be fired.

An executive officer at Fort Sill said Roeder’s departure is “purely coincidental.”

The episode at Fort Sill is reminiscent of the handling of the deplorable conditions at Walter Reed uncovered by the Washington Post last year. In the aftermath of the Post’s report, CQ Today revealed that Walter Reed’s problems were long-known to officials in the Army and Congress, the Army accused the media of propagating “misinformation,” and the Pentagon tried to quiet criticisms by blocking the congressional testimony of the former Walter Reed Chief.

Noting that Fort Sill is the second Army installation in recent months to have such problems with barracks for returning soldiers, VetVoice writes, “this is pathetic.”

Digg It!

Taking a break from this week’s main project of expelling great volumes of sanctimonious gas over whether John McCain falsely shared the “cross in the dirt” story as his own — or only just happened to remember this totally true anecdote right around the time he needed to ingratiate himself with the religious right — McCainblogger Mike Goldfarb falsely attributes some comments to Barack Obama.

Goldfarb writes that last August, Obama “threatened to send troops across the Afghan border,” and now Obama is “criticiz[ing] McCain for not echoing his own ill-advised comments on Pakistan.”

Goldfarb is probably referring to this speech at the Woodrow Wilson Center, in which Obama declared:

If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets, and President Musharraf won’t act, we will.

“Threatened to send troops across the Afghan border”? Looks like Goldfarb just made that part up.

Of course, John McCain had already signaled back in February that we could expect this sort of dishonesty from his campaign when he attacked that speech by claiming that Obama had “suggested bombing our ally, Pakistan.”

Unfortunately for Straighttalk McSurge, that very same week the Washington Post ran a story detailing how, weeks earlier, the CIA had had actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets in Pakistan, and President Musharraf wouldn’t act, so the CIA did. On Jan. 29, a CIA Predator aircraft killed Abu Laith al-Libi, “a senior al-Qaeda commander and a man who had repeatedly eluded the CIA’s dragnet.” The Post described the operation as “the first successful strike against al-Qaeda’s core leadership in two years”:

Having requested the Pakistani government’s official permission for such strikes on previous occasions, only to be put off or turned down, this time the U.S. spy agency did not seek approval. The government of Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf was notified only as the operation was underway, according to the officials, who insisted on anonymity because of diplomatic sensitivities.

Officials say the incident was a model of how Washington often scores its rare victories these days in the fight against al-Qaeda inside Pakistan’s national borders: It acts with assistance from well-paid sympathizers inside the country, but without getting the government’s formal permission beforehand.

To sum up, the United States scored this victory against Al Qaeda by following precisely the policy that McCain derided, and which, according to Goldfarb, McCain still considers “ill-advised.” (I guess McCain will follow Osama bin Laden “to the gates of hell” — just not into Pakistan?)

It’s clear that it was McCain who was confused here — after all, he was for Musharraf before he was against him — so it’s unsurprising that his campaign is now trying to muddy the record.

On Sunday, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told Fox’s Chris Wallace that U.S. asylum for former Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf was “not on the table.” However, she refused to explicitly rule the option out, insisting that he had been a “good ally.” Watch it:

But now that Musharraf has officially stepped down, the Bush administration appears to be increasingly receptive to opening America’s doors to the former military leader. State Department spokesman Robert Wood told reporters that Musharraf “has a right to live wherever he wants.” AFP reports:

“We haven’t been asked to provide him with any asylum or place of residence,” State Department spokesman Robert Wood said amid speculations that the former staunch US “war on terror” ally who quit Monday might stay abroad, including in the United States.

“If he chooses to take up residence somewhere, I mean if he were to request that, we would obviously look at it, but it’s not an issue that we’ve been approached with,” Wood explained.

This willingness to grant Musharraf asylum may be coming from the top ranks of the White House. Nearly nearly three weeks after Musharraf declared emergency rule last November, President Bush continued to insist that the Pakistani president had “advanced democracy in Pakistan.” According to the Pakistani newspaper Dawn, Bush was the “last holdout” of support for Musharraf in the Bush administration, outlasting both Rice and Vice President Cheney.

Shuja Nawaz, a former Pakistani journalist and International Development Agency official, told PBS on Monday that “a possible immediate destination [for Musharraf] may be Dubai, and then eventually may be New Mexico in the United States.”

Our guest blogger is Henry Fernandez, a Senior Fellow at the Center For American Progress Action Fund working on state and municipal issues.

Henry Cejudo’s uniquely American story started with a single mother who taught him what it meant to truly fight. His mother Nelly – an undocumented immigrant — moved him and his siblings several times chasing work and opportunity, scraping by, ensuring her kids got an education. And along the way, the family found a channel for both the tough resilience she modeled and the country they loved through the sport of freestyle wrestling.

With the brothers he shared a bed with growing up cheering from the stands (as well as his sister), Cejudo repeatedly got off the mat to come back and win in a tough match against Tomohiro Matsunaga of Japan. And now America has both an unexpected gold medal and a new hero.

Today in Beijing, our nation proudly called Cejudo one of our own:

“What Henry has accomplished is an American success story,” USOC spokesman Darryl Seibel said. “This is a story of perseverance and determination. We couldn’t be more proud of Henry, not only for what he has accomplished on the mat, but for how he has represented our country.”

It has become commonplace on the right to talk about how recent immigrants, and particularly undocumented immigrants and their children, do not want to assimilate, learn English or identify themselves as truly American.

Yet this family – all of them proud to be the cheering voice of the United States in a city on the other side of the planet – did our country proud:

They all wore or waved American flags, an entire family decked in the stars and stripes. A family that started with illegal immigrants and advanced to right here, this moment, their very own gold medalist resting in their lap.

“Only in America,” Cejudo said.

Pakistan’s President Pervez Musharraf resigned today in order to avoid impeachment charges for illegally seizing power and mishandling the economy. AFP reports that Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) “welcomed” the decision in a statement:

The resignation of President Pervez Musharraf is a step toward moving Pakistan onto a more stable political footing. Pakistan is a critical theater in countering the threat of al Qaeda and violent Islamic extremism, and I look forward to the government increasing its future cooperation.

While McCain praises the resignation today, the developments also highlight McCain’s poor judgment on the matter. In Dec. 2007, after Musharraf imposed emergency rule and after Benazir Bhutto was assassinated, McCain resisted calling for Musharraf’s to step down, calling the Bush ally a “key element”:

COOPER: Is there any other option but Musharraf?

MCCAIN: I think that the new chief of staff of the army is a person who’s clearly going to be a player, because the army will play a role in whatever and however any unrest is addressed. But I think Musharraf, as the president of the country, is probably — and he has stepped down from his military position, as you know — is probably also a key element.

Throughout Musharraf’s reign, Pakistan’s woes grew, including an abysmal economy and a growing al Qaeda, to name a few. McCain, however, stood by Pakistan’s dictator:

– Called Musharraf a “personally scrupulously honest” man who deserved “the benefit of the doubt” on uniting Pakistan. [12/29/07]

– “I continue to believe Musharraf has done a pretty good job, done a lot of the things that we wanted him to do … I would like to give Musharraf some credit for taking the measures that we asked him to do.” [12/28/07]

– “Prior to Musharraf, Pakistan was a failed state. … They had corrupt governments and they would rotate back and forth and there was corruption, and Musharraf basically restored order. [12/28/07]

Caroline Wadhams and Brian Katulis have more on Musharraf’s resignation.

Digg It!

A familiar refrain from John McCain’s speech today to the annual convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars:

Though victory in Iraq is finally in sight, a great deal still depends on the decisions and good judgment of the next president. The hard-won gains of our troops hang in the balance.[...]

[Senator Obama] opposed the surge and confidently predicted that it would fail. Then he tried to prevent funding for the troops who carried out the surge. Not content to merely predict failure in Iraq, my opponent tried to legislate failure. This was back when supporting America’s efforts in Iraq entailed serious political risk. It was a clarifying moment. It was a moment when political self-interest and the national interest parted ways. For my part, with so much in the balance, it was an easy call.

Since McCain is basically building his whole run for the presidency around his support for the surge, it’s important to get some facts on the table about this. First, the real clarifying moment was back before the war, in 2001, 2002 and 2003 when John McCain was among those whipping up American paranoia and pushing questionable intelligence about Iraq. Back then, making the right call and opposing the war entailed serious political risk.

Second, in regard to recent victories against Al Qaeda in Iraq, I’ll refer to something John McCain said back in December 2004:

The good news is we went into Fallujah and we dug then out of there… The bad news is we allowed Fallujah to become a sanctuary to start with.

The good news is we have Al Qaeda on the ropes in Iraq. The bad news is we allowed Iraq to become a sanctuary (and recruiting poster and training ground and sectarian killing field) to start with, by invading Iraq.

Third, even as McCain constantly tries to cover himself in glory for the surge, to this day he has yet to demonstrate that he actually grasps the various factors that led to the decline in violence in Iraq. McCain has tried very hard to elide the difference between his calls for “more troops” and the actual counterinsurgency strategy that was implemented by General Petraeus. According to Lt. Colonel John Nagl, who has written extensively on the practice of counterinsurgency and Iraq, this new strategy “was far more important than the relatively small increase in the number of troops that the ‘surge’ label overemphasizes.” Read more

Speaking to the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) today, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) once again tried to steal credit for the 21st Century G.I. Bill, which McCain had vigorously opposed, even submitting his own proposal to undermine the chances of success for the main bill. Today, McCain told the audience of veterans that he “sought a better bill” and declared the final passage of the GI bill “the result” of his efforts:

As a political proposition, it would have much easier for me to have just signed on to what I considered flawed legislation. But the people of Arizona, and of all America, expect more from their representatives than that, and instead I sought a better bill. I’m proud to say that the result is a law that better serves our military, better serves military families, and better serves the interests of our country.

It is audacious for McCain to go before the VFW and claim credit for a bill he nearly destroyed, considering the VFW was one of the bill’s strongest backers. It first endorsed the proposal in June 2007, and continued to press for the bill this year, rejecting McCain’s supposed concerns about military retention and stridently criticizing his alternative proposal:

VFW’s deputy director for legislative affairs Eric Hilleman: The Graham-Burr-McCain plan is “very partisan and is seen as a way to convolute the GI bill, or to slow the Webb-Hagel proposal down.”

VFW National Commander George Lisicki: “People are leaving after their first enlistment because they are tired of being shot at, and their families are tired of the frequent deployments…Whether they stay in four years or 20, we owe this newest, greatest generation the gift of education.”

In fact, tomorrow the VFW will award Sen. Jim Webb (D-VA), the original sponsor of the GI Bill, a gold medal and citation of merit for his leadership on the measure. Lisicki praised Webb as the “champion” veterans needed:

The VFW had been pushing for a new GI Bill for 10 years. We had called, written, testified, and met with every (congressional) member and staffer. We were greeted with sympathetic ears, but what we needed was a champion in the corner of America’s newest ‘Greatest Generation.’ We needed someone who could reason and negotiate across party lines like a gentleman, yet push through obstacles with bulldog tenacity. That someone was Jim Webb.

McCain also promoted his radical veterans health plan, which the VFW actively opposes.

UPDATE: Watch McCain’s comments here:

Digg It!

As proof that we here in the Wonk Room are interested in calling out bigotry in a totally non-partisan fashion, since I posted on Ralph Peters yesterday, today I note that former New Republic owner and editor in chief/continuing liberal embarrassment Marty Peretz — who TNR’s current editors have stashed in the attic and away from the children while he indulges his obsessive anti-Arab racism like a deranged uncle with a ham radio — has now seen fit to sneer at the death of beloved Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish not once, not twice, but thrice.

Way to elevate the discourse, TNR!

Our guest blogger is Will Straw, Associate Director for Economic Growth at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Arguably the most interesting and important area of McCain’s technology plan is where he reasserts his commitment to open world markets. John McCain has long made a play of his commitment to lowering barriers to trade and chose to visit Latin America rather than Europe to emphasize this point. This new announcement appears to be the first time that McCain has put in print his commitment to promoting “fair trade agreements.” It is a shame, however, that he does not expand on what he means.

The Center for American Progress published a report last year, Virtuous Circle, which sets out what a fair trade policy actually looks like. One important way to ensure that the benefits of globalization are broadly shared by Americans is to ensure that the global market place for U.S. exports continues to expand. It is essential that middle income countries move away from short-term export-led growth strategies and build a middle-class with a rising standard of living that will create greater domestic consumption.

For this to happen, the United States must not be afraid to shout foul play when its trade partners compete unfairly. The IMF, World Bank, International Labour Organization and WTO have important responsibilities to ensure that trade rules are obeyed, carbon emissions reduced, labor rights protected, and currencies not manipulated. By engaging rather than dismissing these bodies and providing adequate funding, the United States can help induce middle-income countries to become more cooperative, ensuring a level playing field for its exports.

But cooperation and rising living standards don’t come for free. In order to ensure that the United States’ trading partners stick to their international obligations and put in place necessary social safety nets requires expertise, institutional capacity building, and encouragement. While Barack Obama has pledged to double annual investments in foreign assistance to $50 billion, John McCain is unwilling to make any such commitment. Searching for the words “development” and “aid” on McCain’s website leads to an astonishing lack of any policy at all. It appears that McCain has not even thought about the raising living standards for the world’s poor as a means to foster America’s next export market.

The other piece of the puzzle is to ensure poverty and inequality at home are tackled so that the gains from trade are shared more evenly. Aside from more sickly sweet apple pie outlining the need to “educate [American] workers for the innovation age” and necessary reforms to unemployment insurance, McCain makes no mention of other crucial measures like increasing the minimum wage to half the average hourly wage, expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit and Child Tax Credit, protection of workers’ right to organize, and a guarantee of childcare assistance for low-income families.

Only this combination of policies can ensure that the global market place expands, America competes, and all in society benefit.

Our guest blogger is Peter Swire, a Senior Fellow at the Center of American Progress Action Fund and the C. William O’Neill Professor of Law at the Ohio State University. He served as Chief Counselor for Privacy under President Clinton.

There have been lots of criticisms of Senator McCain for not being savvy about the Internet, such as for his statement last month that he has “never felt the particular need to e-mail.”

It turns out, though, that Senator McCain and his campaign aren’t even savvy about something they absolutely, truly should know — his own record about the Internet and privacy. After all, Senator McCain has been the ranking Republican on the Senate Commerce Committee for most of the past ten years, with jurisdiction over many Internet issues.

On August 14, a full 16 months after he formally announced his campaign for President, Senator McCain finally released his first policy paper on the Internet, privacy, and security.

The paper has the bland and unobjectionable title of “Ensuring the Personal Security and Privacy of Americans in the Digital Age.” The content is similarly bland. We learn that it is important to protect kids, and that the “Internet and other, advanced technologies can deliver many benefits to society, but sometimes can also pose new threats.” Important stuff, well worth the wait.

The striking thing to me, however, is how the description of Senator McCain’s own record is filled with factual inaccuracies matched with embarrassing puffery. Read more

Speaking on the Russia-Georgia crisis at an American Enterprise Institute panel yesterday, John McCain foreign policy adviser/military fetishist Ralph Peters delivered this bit of straight talk:

The Russians, on whom I have wasted far too much of my life, are drink-sodden barbarians who occasionally puke up a genius.

As anyone who has read Peters’ work knows, Ralph’s world is full of barbarians who need killin’. In October 2006, as part of a column calling on the U.S. to withdraw from Iraq, he declared:

If we can’t leave a democracy behind, we should at least leave the corpses of our enemies. The holier-than-thou response to this proposal is predictable: ‘We can’t kill our way out of this situation!’ Well, boo-hoo. Friendly persuasion and billions of dollars haven’t done the job. Give therapeutic violence a chance.

We are all, of course, deeply impressed by pundits who bravely call for “therapeutic violence” from the safety of their home offices.

Last November, Peters offered his learned interpretation of the Israel-Palestine conflict:

In the end, the problem’s difficulty can be put in New York City terms: A shiftless, violent family that turned an apartment into a slum was evicted. The new tenants cleaned up the place and made the apartment a showcase. Now the former tenants hate them for it – and want the apartment back.

While Peters is not the nuttiest of McCain’s advisers — that honor clearly belongs to James “Saddam Is Behind Everything!” Woolsey — it’s cause for concern that a man with a violent, bigoted mentality such as Peters has John McCain’s ear.

Despite McCain’s standard disclaimer in his press conference today that “now is not the time for partisanship,” it’s very clear that, reminiscent of the way that the Bush administration has wielded U.S. national security policy as a political weapon in a permanent negative campaign, John McCain intends to politicize and personalize the Russia-Georgia conflict as much as he can. His campaign has been relentlessly touting McCain’s personal relationship with Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili — this story has McCain foreign policy adviser and former Georgia lobbyist Randy Scheunemann claiming that McCain and the Georgian president are “speaking daily throughout the crisis” — raising the very serious question of whether McCain’s bonehead straight talk is further inflaming an already tense crisis.

McCain’s response to the Russia-Georgia crisis — and the uniform response of his neoconservative war cabinet — is typical of their deeply ideological approach to foreign policy. Trapped within an outdated “great power conflict” foreign affairs framework, this ideology requires treating each and every international crisis as a potential affront to American dignity, regardless of how that particular crisis actually impacts on America’s national security interests, and going all-in with grandiose statements of principle, with little consideration of or appreciation for how those statements can and do affect events. Senator McCain’s words and behavior, and that of his advisers, suggest that a President McCain’s approach to global affairs would make us long for the deft, sensitive diplomatic touch of George W. Bush.

As Iraq has slowly emerged from years of civil war and open insurgency to stabilize at merely unacceptable levels of violence, a steady stream of war supporters have undertaken to rehabilitate their reputations by interpreting recent events as vindication of that support.

A few choice examples:

- The Washington Times’ Tony Blankley praising the Iraq war exterminating the hundreds of terrorists who “otherwise would have been plying their trade elsewhere,” ignoring the overwhelming evidence showing that the Iraq war itself was the main factor in the radicalization of foreign fighters in Iraq.

- Commentary’s Peter Wehner suggesting that giving Al Qaeda the opportunity to kill and maim thousands of Iraqis so that Iraqis would eventually reject Al Qaeda’s brutality represents a significant U.S. foreign policy victory.

- The Washington Post’s Fred Hiatt trying to recast the WMD debate through selective editing of the Senate report on pre-war intelligence.

- And, of course, Doug Feith, who can’t order dinner without lying erring six times, blaming the CIA for not producing good enough intel for Feith to cook.

These people are up to their elbows in blood over the Iraq war, and thus aren’t above resorting to the most transparent dishonesty in order to present the invasion and occupation of Iraq as a success.

Christopher Hitchens certainly belongs to this group, and he recently offered this instant classic of the genre:

I think we should be glad that the luridly sadistic and aggressive Saddam Hussein regime is no longer in power to be the beneficiary of the rise in oil prices and thus able to share its wealth with the terrorists, crooks, and demagogues on its secret payroll.

It takes a very, shall we say, baroque intellectual sensibility to defend the Iraq war on the grounds that it prevented Saddam Hussein from profiting from skyrocketing oil prices that have resulted from the war to remove Saddam Hussein.

Given how many reputations of important, influential people are tied to the Iraq war, we should expect a lot more of this sort of thing. Thus it’s important to hold the line and insist that, while it’s certainly good news that we seem for the moment to have averted an even worse disaster, the fact that Iraq is no longer a killing field free-for-all does not vindicate the decision to invade. Given all that’s occurred in the last five years, the staggering human and financial costs, there is no defensible moral or strategic calculus by which the Iraq war can be judged to have been a policy success.

The New York Times reported that earlier today, Russian President Dmitri Medvedev had ordered a cease fire in Georgia saying that “the goal of the [military] operation has been achieved.”

His announcement, however, may have come as a shock to some neoconservatives. Within the last 24 hours, many have been latching onto another “domino theory” to justify U.S. involvement in the conflict — predicting that Russia would expand the war outside Georgia to other nations in the region, particularly Ukraine:

– Max Boot: “The Russian attacks on Georgia, if left unchecked, could easily trigger more conflict in the future. [...] Today, Georgia; tomorrow, Ukraine; the day after, Estonia?”

– AEI Fellow and McCain adviser Gary Schmitt: “It is also about resisting Russia’s openly hegemonic designs on its neighbors — including Ukraine.”

– Wall Street Journal: “Unless Russians see that there are costs for their Napoleon’s expansionism, Georgia isn’t likely to be his last stop.”

But staunch neocons John Bolton and Charles Krauthammer went a step further. Krauthammer said the U.S. should “protect Ukraine,” station U.S. troops there, and admit them into NATO, while Bolton claimed Russian Prime minister Vladimir Putin is trying “to recreate the Soviet Union.” Watch it:

Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), who has issued harsh rhetoric towards Russia in recent days, thinks that Bolton’s idea isn’t too far off the mark. McCain told a Pennsylvania radio station today that “it’s very clear that Russian ambitions are to restore the old Russian Empire. Not the Soviet Union, but the Russian Empire.”

The neocons have been eager to see U.S. military action against Russia in order to defend Georgia so it seems then that Medvedev’s announcement may come as sad news.

Digg It!

Our guest bloggers are Brian Katulis, Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress Action Fund, and Peter Juul, a Research Associate at the Center.

Earlier this spring, the Center for a New American Security issued an Iraq policy paper with an identity crisis, a paper that poses as an exit strategy but ultimately advocates a course of action that looks a lot like what the Bush administration and its conservative supporters have endorsed in Iraq.

At its core, the “conditional engagement” strategy, as described in the report Shaping the Iraq Inheritance, tries to carve out a “moderate middle” dependent on simplistic renderings of competing policy proposals on the left and the right. But it is important not to get distracted by the framing mechanism CNAS presents on Iraq; the core arguments of the CNAS suffer from four major internal inconsistencies and disconnections from key realities in Iraq and the Middle East.

1. The strategy of conditional engagement does not differ from the Bush administration’s current approach because it fails to clearly define — in precise terms — when the Iraq mission would be accomplished, and when U.S. troops could depart.

2. The strategy assumes that the carrots of continued military, economic, and political support are more appetizing then they are.

3. The strategy doesn’t describe how it would be implemented to achieve its stated ends, however vague those ends are.

4. The strategy is wedded to a narrow, bilateral, U.S.-Iraq prism at the expense of a broader regional view.

What these flaws ultimately reveal is an unrealistic vision for the future of the United States and Iraq, grounded in a narrow focus on U.S. military power as the main determinant of events on the ground. It ignores the complexities of Iraqi politics in favor of a simple military lever American leaders can pull to get the desired outcome. Ultimately, it is less a plan for achieving political progress in Iraq than it is a plan for staying in Iraq.

Over the weekend, Iraq’s foreign minister said that the U.S. should set a “very clear timeline” for withdrawal from Iraq. Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) — like President Bush before him — has repeatedly rejected setting a date for withdrawal.

A newly updated report from the Center for American Progress, entitled “How to Redeploy,” demonstrates that refusing to set a date for withdrawal risks endangering the gains of the last year and a half. As the report notes, the recent declines in violence are “due in large part to the emergence of Sunni ‘awakening’ groups and Sons of Iraq militias,” who cooperated as a result of their belief in the fall of 2006 that the U.S. would soon be withdrawing:

Brigadier Gen. Sean McFarland…credited the ‘growing concern that the U.S. would leave Iraq and leave the Sunnis defenseless against Al-Qaeda and Iranian-supported militias …’ as the main reason for the turn around in Al Anbar.

While introducing the report, Center for American Progress Senior Fellow Larry Korb explained, “[N]ow — more than ever — it is important to set a date”:

We would argue now — more than ever — it’s important to set a date, because this is the one thing that all of the factions in Iraq agree on and we need to bring them together. [...]

A lot of people have argued that if you set a date to get out now, you will undermine the gains that have occurred in the last year and a half. In our view it’s exactly the opposite, if you don’t set a deadline you will in fact undermine those gains, because if the…people who have been part of this awakening movement that started in Al Anbar province think the United States will be there indefinitely, they will no longer cooperate with us.

Watch it:

In addition, the report — prepared in consultation with “military planners and logistics experts” — finds “that an orderly and safe withdrawal” from Iraq “is best achieved over an 8 to 10 month period.” The proposed timeline is possible because the U.S. does not need to remove from Iraq “every nut and bolt belonging to the U.S. government”:

The United States clearly wants to remove all equipment of value or sensitive nature from Iraq as it withdraws, but it does not need to remove every nut and bolt belonging to the U.S. government. A 10-month timeframe should be sufficient to remove most heavy or sensitive American assets from Iraq while leaving behind non-essential equipment and supplies.

Digg it!