The Washington Post confirms that yesterday’s terrorist attack on the U.S. embassy in Sanaa was the work of an Al Qaeda affiliate, using tactics developed in Iraq:

The use of two vehicle bombs — one to breach the perimeter of a compound, a second to drive inside and explode — is a tactic used by the Sunni insurgent group al-Qaeda in Iraq. [...]

He said a new, less-compromising generation of al-Qaeda leaders emerged, many of them moving into action after escaping from a Yemeni prison that year, he said.[...]

The new leaders have found followers among al-Qaeda fighters returning from Iraq. “The quieter it is in Iraq, the more inflamed it is here,” as Yemeni fighters travel back and forth, said Nabil al-Sofee, a former spokesman for a Yemeni Islamist political party who is now an analyst.

Those who have been following the Iraq debate might remember “flypaper theory,” which was one of the earliest exponents of the “incoherent post hoc justifications for the Iraq war” genre. The idea was that there was some limited number of terrorists in the Middle East, and the presence of an occupying U.S. army would lure them to Iraq, whereupon they could all be conveniently killed, presumably as soon as they stepped off the bus.

This plan was prevented from working only by the fact that it was staggeringly dumb. The U.S. occupation radicalized scores of young Muslims, many of whom traveled to Iraq, where they learned terror warfare and were galvanized in the global jihad. And now they’ve begun returning home, to share the tactics and technology developed in a laboratory we provided for them by invading Iraq. The violence in the Nahr al-Bared refugee camp in Lebanon in May 2007 was one instance of this. Yesterday’s attack in Yemen is another.

Various Bush administration courtiers have tried to spin the containment of Al Qaeda in Iraq as a vindication of the invasion of Iraq, eliding the fact that Al Qaeda in Iraq was a direct consequence of America in Iraq. By mispresenting Al Qaeda as a single, united faction under the command of Osama bin Laden — rather than a collection of factions gathered beneath the banner of global jihad — Bush and his supporters have misrepresented successes against AQI as if they represented successes against Al Qaeda as a whole. In doing this, they have ignored the ideological and propaganda components of Al Qaeda’s continuing operations in the region, and the ways in which the Iraq war has profited both.

In an interview with the Omaha World-Herald, Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-NE) questioned whether John McCain’s running mate, Sarah Palin, has the experience to be president of the United States:

“I do think in a world that is so complicated, so interconnected and so combustible, you really got to have some people in charge that have some sense of the bigger scope of the world,” Hagel said. “I think that’s just a requirement.”

So is Palin qualified to be president?

“I think it’s a stretch to, in any way, to say that she’s got the experience to be president of the United States,” Hagel said.

In a recent interview with ABC News, Palin explained her national security credentials by claiming, “You can actually see Russia from land here in Alaska.” Hagel said that such answers are “insulting to the American people”:

“I think they ought to be just honest about it and stop the nonsense about, ‘I look out my window and I see Russia and so therefore I know something about Russia,’” he said. “That kind of thing is insulting to the American people.”

Hagel, who is retiring from the Senate, concluded that Palin “doesn’t have any foreign policy credentials.” “You get a passport for the first time in your life last year?” he asked. “I mean, I don’t know what you can say. You can’t say anything.”

Hagel has traveled to Iraq six times, most recently accompanying Sens. Barack Obama (D-IL) and Jack Reed (D-RI). While on the trip, Hagel repeated his calls for a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq. “It is now time for the United States to start accepting the sovereignty of that country in ways that are real,” he said. “And that means for us to responsibly start unwinding our military presence.”

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In a contentious segment on “Hardball” tonight, host Chris Matthews accused Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA) and his conservative allies of “taking off your uniforms,” pretending they’re not Republicans, and running against President Bush. “I’m not going to let anyone get away with that kind of foolery,” Matthews said. He asked Cantor at least five times whether he supported the job Bush is doing — and all five times Cantor refused to answer.

Noting that a “normal president” would be more visible during such a crisis, Matthews compared Bush’s response to the current financial turmoil to his handling of Hurricane Katrina:

MATTHEWS: I’m just asking you where’s the President of the United States tonight? You got Paulson out there. Where’s the President? He’s pulling one of these Katrinas again. Where is he? The country’s worried like hell when you lose this amount of value in the wealth of this country in a matter of days. You’d think the President would come on television and explain the situation to the American people. I’m just asking where he is. That’s all I’m asking.

CANTOR: Chris, you’ll have to ask — I don’t know where he is. I assume he’s in the White House.

Watch it:

Matthews was visibly frustrated, telling Cantor, “You have to take responsibility, sir, for the policies of this Administration that have gotten us into this mess. You can’t walk away and say, Oh we had nothing to do with this, can you? Say it if you want to. It’s your right.”

Matthews noted Cantor’s refusal to even mention the President: “You haven’t used the word Republican tonight, your party didn’t use it in the acceptance speech,” he said. “John McCain never said the word Republican, he never said the word Bush. You’re trying to take off your uniforms and run from the field of political battle and claim you’re not Republicans.” The GOP steered clear from both Bush and Cheney at their convention last month, mentioning Bush only once and never mentioning Cheney.

Yesterday, a big chunk of The American Foreign Policy Establishment came out in support of engagement with Iran:

Five former U.S. secretaries of state said on Monday the next American administration should talk to Iran, a foe President George W. Bush has generally shunned as part of an “axis of evil.” [...]

The five — Colin Powell, Madeleine Albright, Warren Christopher, James Baker and Henry Kissinger — all said they favored talking to Iran as part of a strategy to stop Tehran’s development of a nuclear weapons program.

Kissinger specifically came out in favor of negotiating with Iran “without conditions.”

The fact that McCain occasionally talks to Henry Kissinger is occasionally offered as evidence that McCain is hearing from a diverse group of foreign policy advisers. The fact that Kissinger advocates a course which McCain has derided as naive and irresponsible should be a huge clue as to whom McCain actually listens.

Hopefully, Kissinger’s statement will put to rest the idea that McCain’s foreign policy brain trust is divided between realists and neocons, which I’ve long argued is nonsense. McCain is a committed neoconservative, and has been for years. Back in 2006, McCain’s neoconservative foreign policy adviser Randy Scheunemann insisted that McCain’s foreign policy views were neoconservative. In an August 2006 interview, McCain declared “fundamentally, I agree with the neoconservatives.”

As a neoconservative, McCain’s policy toward Iran is pretty simple: The regime is evil, and it must be destroyed. Full stop. The fact that Iran might view this policy as provocative or threatening, and take steps to protect itself — perhaps, for instance, by working to develop a nuclear deterrent — is taken by McCain simply as more evidence that the regime is evil.

The Iranian problem is also needlessly complicated by McCain’s aggressive posture toward Russia. Many of America’s allies, including the Israelis, understand that “Russia’s cooperation is essential” for dealing with the Iranian nuclear program. The policy of confrontation that John McCain promises against Russia will make an Iranian bomb more likely.

But the bottom line is that productive engagement with Iran is impossible while regime change is the stated goal of U.S. policy. Understanding that Ayatollah Khamenei’s overmost priority is the preservation of the fruit of the Iranian revolution — he views the continued existence of the Islamic Republic as an Islamic Republic as a first order goal, to which all other goals can be subordinated — is essential for understanding the way that Khamenei views engagement with the United States. If Khamenei and those in his inner circle feel that talks are simply part of a larger U.S. strategy for undermining the Iranian regime, it makes sense that the regime would stall for time while moving toward a nuclear deterrent.

Of course, understanding this requires understanding A) who actually controls the Iranian regime, and B) what those people actually believe, neither of which McCain has shown any interest, preferring instead to appeal to the misconceptions of “average Americans” while he jokes about bombing Iran. It’s clear that Iran must be confronted and its ambitions contained, but McCain has offered no good ideas on how to do this, apart from mindless militarism. The fact is that, with these five foreign policy eminences coming out in favor of talking to Iran, McCain now finds himself on the margin of this extremely important debate.

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I’ve written about how, despite attempts by the McCain campaign to present McCain’s foreign policy views as “diverse,” McCain adheres tightly to a neoconservative view of the world. This is demonstrated both by the policies that McCain advocates, as well as by the fact that McCain’s own inner circle of advisers made up almost exclusively of hardcore neoconservative activists.

A recent Telegraph article described how these advisers are training up Gov. Palin in the neoconservative faith:

Sources in the McCain camp, the Republican Party and Washington think tanks say Mrs Palin was identified as a potential future leader of the neoconservative cause in June 2007. That was when the annual summer cruise organised by the right-of-centre Weekly Standard magazine docked in Juneau, the Alaskan state capital, and the pundits on board took tea with Governor Palin.[...]

A former Republican White House official, who now works at the American Enterprise Institute, a bastion of Washington neoconservatism, admitted: “She’s bright and she’s a blank page. She’s going places and it’s worth going there with her.”

Asked if he sees her as a “project”, the former official said: “Your word, not mine, but I wouldn’t disagree with the sentiment.”

Palin’s answers in her ABC interview, her simplistic presentation of the Russia-Georgia conflict, her mindless threat of war with Russia, asserting that America shouldn’t “second guess” Israeli policy, and her tiresome and dishonest conflation of 9/11 and Iraq, all confirm that she’s been getting the neocon talking points.

As the “former Republican White House official, who now works at the American Enterprise Institute” makes clear, as far as the neocons are concerned, the fact that Sarah Palin knows about as much about world affairs as your average sports reporter is a feature, not a bug, as this allows McCain’s neocon handlers to inscribe their various nutty theories about how the world works onto a “blank page.”

In a way, neoconservatism is a perfect fit for Palin. It’s an ideology is built upon a reflexive skepticism toward scholarly expertise, tending toward more emotionally satisfying — not to mention politically profitable — policy answers than the boring, reality-based stuff offered by analysts who have spent their entire careers studying these questions. The presentation of Palin as a rebel reformer is of a piece with the neoconservatives’ presentation of themselves as rebel intellectuals, and resistance to their ideas is offered as proof of the corruption of American governing institutions, rather than proof that their ideas are just really, really dumb.

Palin’s simplistic, moralistic answers to complicated foreign policy questions shouldn’t be taken as evidence that she’s not smart, she clearly is. Rather, Palin’s simplistic, moralistic answers stem from the fact that neoconservatism is a simplistic, moralistic ideology, one unsuited for actual governance, as the last eight years should have demonstrated beyond all doubt.

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The Washington Post’s Ann Kornblut catches Sarah Palin using the 9/11 anniversary to tie Iraq to 9/11:

Gov. Sarah Palin linked the war in Iraq with the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, telling an Iraq-bound brigade of soldiers that included her son that they would “defend the innocent from the enemies who planned and carried out and rejoiced in the death of thousands of Americans.”

The idea that the Iraqi government under Saddam Hussein helped al-Qaeda plan the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, a view once promoted by Bush administration officials, has since been rejected even by the president himself. But it is widely agreed that militants allied with al-Qaeda have taken root in Iraq since the U.S.-led invasion.

Bill Kristol thinks this is totally unfair, calling Kornblut’s interpretation “either stupid or malicious“:

It makes no sense for Kornblut to claim that Palin is arguing here that Saddam Hussein’s regime carried out 9/11—obviously Palin isn’t saying that our soldiers are now going over to Iraq to fight Saddam’s regime. Palin isn’t linking Saddam to 9/11. She’s linking al Qaeda in Iraq to al Qaeda.

Kornblut doesn’t claim that Palin is arguing that “Saddam Hussein’s regime carried out 9/11,” (even people like Bill Kristol and John McCain have stopped making that claim), rather Kornblut simply reports that Palin falsely asserted that the U.S. in Iraq to fight “the enemies who planned and carried out” the 9/11 attacks.

More generally, Kornblut correctly recognizes that Palin — having obviously been coached in this by McCain’s neocon brain trust — is now engaged in the same sort of meticulous deception that has characterized George Bush, Bill Kristol, and John McCain’s advocacy of the Iraq war all along, manipulating Americans’ fear and anger and confusion about 9/11 in order to gin up support for a radical agenda to reorder the Middle East.

Now that that agenda has proven to be a disaster, imbecilic in its conception as it was incompetent in its execution, people like Kristol are reduced to parsing language in the morning paper. But even though a strong majority of Americans now believe that the invasion of Iraq was a huge mistake, Kristol and McCain are part of a small extremist minority — the bulk of whom now work with John McCain’s campaign — who still believe in the underlying premise of the war, which is that an appropriate response to the 9/11 attacks was to invade and occupy a country that had absolutely nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks.

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During her much anticipated interview with ABC’s Charles Gibson, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin had a “deer-in-headlights moment” when Gibson asked her if she agreed with the Bush Doctrine. Surprised at the question, Palin asked Gibson what he meant. When Gibson asked, “Well, what do you interpret it to be?” Palin replied inquisitively, “His worldview?” Gibson then explained his understanding of the Bush Doctrine and asked if Palin agreed:

GIBSON: The Bush doctrine as I understand it is that we have the right of anticipatory self-defense and we have the right of preemptive strike against any country we think is going to attack us. Do you agree with that?

PALIN: Charlie, if there is legitimate and enough intelligence that tells us that a strike is imminent against American people, we have every right to defend our country.

Watch it:

While Gibson did not get the Bush Doctrine wholly correct, he was at least on the right track. In fact, the Bush Doctrine is predicated on “preventive war” not “preemptive war” — a sharp distinction in which the former justifies launching war in an attempt to “prevent” a threat from emerging (i.e. the Iraq war), while in the latter case, the threat has already materialized.

“Preemptive war” is, as Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-MA) once observed, something “the global community is generally tolerant of,” while “preventive attacks” — a policy that Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) has not rejected — “have generally been condemned.”

Indeed, as Matt Yglesias notes, Bush and McCain agree that the U.S. has “the right to use military force unilaterally even where there isn’t an imminent threat” and that “Palin’s view is sensible, so it would be interesting to learn her opinion of her running mate’s much less sensible view.”

UPDATE: The Jed Report posted this video of John McCain explaining the Bush Doctrine:

There’s something deeply troubling about the fact that the seventh anniversary of the September 11 attacks should mark the day on which 2008 became the deadliest year for U.S. troops in Afghanistan. After routing al-Qaeda and its Taliban hosts from their base in Afghanistan in late 2001 and 2002, in a military intervention that was broadly supported both in the United States and around the world, the Bush administration turned its attention — disastrously — to Iraq. The effort to build a stable Afghan state has suffered as a result, as CAP analysts Caroline Wadhams and Lawrence Korb showed in a 2007 report.

Dexter Filkins recently had an excellent story about the resurgent Taliban, and how Pakistan’s “largely ungoverned tribal areas have become an untouchable base for Islamic militants to attack Americans and Afghans across the border.”

There’s some indication that President Bush seems to have recognized — as always, a few years late — the severity of the situation in Afghanistan. Yesterday the New York Times reported that “President Bush secretly approved orders in July that for the first time allow American Special Operations forces to carry out ground assaults inside Pakistan without the prior approval of the Pakistani government.” While it’s necessary to eliminate insurgent bases across the border, the fact that the U.S. has to do so in the face of protests by the Pakistan government shows how poorly the Bush administration has managed that relationship over the last seven years. U.S. strikes also risk increased destabilization in Pakistan, which just underlines the fact that, after seven years of incoherent policy, we are left with few good options.

Yesterday, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Michael Mullen warned Congress that the United States is “running out of time” to succeed in Afghanistan, but that sending in more troops will not necessarily guarantee victory. CNN reported:

Mullen said he is convinced the Afghanistan war can be won but said the U.S. urgently needs to improve its nation-building initiatives and its cross-border strategy with Pakistan.

“We can’t kill our way to victory, and no armed force anywhere — no matter how good — can deliver these keys alone. It requires teamwork and cooperation,” Mullen said.

Mullen is basically making an argument for a progressive national security agenda here, one which encompasses more than military solutions for what are in fact economic and political problems. There’s no way that the United States can confront challenges like instability in Pakistan and standing up a state in Afghanistan all by itself, and other countries have shown that they will be less inclined to help us if we exhibit the sort of “with us or with the terrorists” nonsense that has characterized the Bush administration’s approach to national security. All this seems startlingly obvious, yet it’s not, because some people think the Bush administration’s approach has been just great.

In late July, Sen. Joseph Lieberman (I-CT) said he would introduce a resolution in the Senate to applaud the success of the surge “against enemies who attacked America on 9/11.”

Yesterday, Lieberman introduced the formal amendment (S. Amdt. 5368 to S. 3001), which “expresses the sense of the Senate recognizing the strategic success of the troop surge in Iraq.” In his statement, he linked the surge to 9/11 (via the Congressional Record):

If there is anyone in this Chamber who doubts the strategic stakes in Iraq, I urge them to listen to General Petraeus. Listen to General Petraeus who warned us in an interview published today in the Washington Post that “Iraq is still viewed as the central front for al-Qaida.” Let me repeat that: “Iraq is still viewed as the central front for al-Qaida,” which is to say by al-Qaida. Not Afghanistan, Iraq; not Pakistan, Iraq.

This is not the opinion of a Member of Congress. It is not the opinion of a politician running for office. It is the judgment of America’s most successful battlefield commander in the war on terror which began 7 years ago tomorrow when America was brutally attacked on 9/11/2001.

While the surge has certainly produced calmer streets in Iraq, it has not achieved its primary purpose of facilitating political reconciliation. The surge has essentially frozen into place “a fragmented and increasingly fractured country” and produced an “an oil revenue-fueled, religious Shia-dominated national government with close ties to Iran.”

Lieberman claimed to offer his “bipartisan amendment” (that has no Democratic co-sponsors) in hopes that the “Senate can unite” around it. But speaking in favor of the amendment, Sen. Lindsey Graham quickly politicized it: “General Petraeus said today in the Washington Post, I believe, that Iraq is still the central battlefront in the war on terror. Senator Obama has disagreed with that on numerous occasions, saying it is Afghanistan and Pakistan.”

As Yglesias explains, “An al-Qaeda offshoot only arose in Iraq in the first place because we invaded there and created an appealing venue in which to try to kill American soldiers and bleed American resources.” The current challenge is to refocus on the areas where al Qaeda poses the most significant strategic threat to the United States.

While serving as CentCom commander between March 2007 and March 2008, Adm. William Fallon consistently pressed the Bush administration for more engagement with Iran and criticized the calls for another war. “This constant drumbeat of conflict is what strikes me which is not helpful and not useful,” Fallon told al Jazeera last year.

In his new book “The War Within,” Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward details a telling White House meeting on Iran in spring 2007 (p. 334):

“I think we need to do something to get engaged with these guys,” Fallon said. Iraq shared a 900-mile border with Iran, and he needed guidance and a strategy for dealing with the Iranians.

“Well,” Bush said, “these are assholes.”

Fallon was stunned. Declaring them “assholes” was not a strategy. Lots of words and ideas were thrown around at the meeting, especially about the Iranian leaders. They were bad, evil, out of touch with their people. But no one offered a real approach.

Fallon’s advocacy for diplomatic engagement irritated administration officials, who were enamored with Gen. David Petraeus. Fallon — a “fan of transition” in Iraq — repeatedly challenged Petraeus’s personnel requests. According to Woodward, the commander was trying to ensure that the United States didn’t “send any more than necessary to the war zone” (p. 343).

In a March interview with Esquire, Fallon said that he was in “hot water” with the White House for meeting with Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak. Fallon noted that such meetings were essential to making sure that regional leaders don’t get “too spun up” by the administration’s war rhetoric. In “The War Within,” Woodward writes that as soon as that article came out, Fallon offered his resignation (pp. 408-9):

Fallon was in Baghdad on March 11 when the article was made public. He realized instantly the uproar it would case. Fallon knew he already was on shaky ground. Days earlier, he had warned Gates that the article was coming. But now he called again.

“I think I need to be gone,” Fallon said.

“Okay,” Gates said.

Fallon said he would have stayed if Gates had “offered a vote of confidence and backed his commander”; that, however, never happened.

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On the morning of the 9/11, just moments after the World Trade Center collapsed from the terrorist strikes, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) went on television and immediately began focusing the nation’s attention on Iraq. In an interview with CBS’ Dan Rather on 9/11, McCain said:

To be honest with you, Dan, I never thought that an operation of this sophistication and size would take place. I just never did. But I don’t think there’s any doubt that there are countries — Iraq, Iran, Libya, North Korea and others — who we know engage in proliferation of — of capabilities and, from time to time, involve themselves in state-sponsored terrorism. But never did we imagine on a scale such as this.

The next day, on 9/12, McCain reiterated the point in an interview with Chris Matthews. “It isn’t just Afghanistan,” he said, “we’re talking about Syria, Iraq, Iran, perhaps North Korea, Libya and others.”

Just a few weeks later — on Oct. 9, 2001 — McCain narrowed his focus, arguing that Iraq was “obviously” next:

PAULA ZAHN: And as you know, Senator, the U.S. and Great Britain notified the U.N. Security Council yesterday that they reserve the right to strike against other countries in this campaign. What countries are we looking at?

MCCAIN: Well, I think very obviously Iraq is the first country, but there are others — Syria, Iran, the Sudan, who have continued to harbor terrorist organizations and actually assist them.

On Oct. 18, 2001, McCain told David Letterman, “the second phase is Iraq” while linking Iraq to the anthrax attacks. Watch it:

In Jan. 2002, McCain visited a crowd of soldiers aboard the aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt and yelled: “Next up, Baghdad!”

The New York Times’ David Kirkpatrick recently noted that McCain “began making his case for invading Iraq to the public more than six months before the White House began to do the same.” The Times reported:

While pushing to take on Saddam Hussein, Mr. McCain also made arguments and statements that he may no longer wish to recall. He lauded the war planners he would later criticize, including Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney. (Mr. McCain even volunteered that he would have given the same job to Mr. Cheney.) He urged support for the later-discredited Iraqi exile Ahmad Chalabi’s opposition group, the Iraqi National Congress, and echoed some of its suspect accusations in the national media. And he advanced misleading assertions not only about Mr. Hussein’s supposed weapons programs but also about his possible ties to international terrorists, Al Qaeda and the Sept. 11 attacks.

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Our guest bloggers are Lawrence Korb, Senior Fellow, and Laura Conley, Special Assistant for National Security and International Policy at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

On the campaign trail Monday, Senator John McCain (R-AZ), the Republican nominee for president, attempted to portray his Democratic opponent as inconsistent and soft on national security issues. He blasted Senator Barack Obama (D-IL), the Democratic nominee, for proposing to increase defense spending, despite a past commitment to “slow our development of future combat systems” and “cut investments in unproven missile-defense systems.” McCain argued that the world has become too dangerous to even consider these options.

Yet, just over a month ago, McCain’s senior economic advisor, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, promised that McCain would de-fund these very same programs. In a submission to the Washington Post editorial board, Holtz-Eakin claimed that McCain would save $160 billion from reduced discretionary funding, some of it from Pentagon procurements, and another $150 billion from reduced deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan. Among the defense procurement programs McCain promised to ax from the budget were:

- The Airborne Laser (ABL), a project to develop plane-mounted anti-missile laser technology. The program could give the U.S. the capability to shoot down ballistic missiles in their boost phase, soon after launch.

- The Army’s Future Combat Systems (FCS), a program of combat support vehicles and technology, designed to make the army a more flexible, easily deployable force.

These programs should be the target of budget cuts, and both Obama and McCain are right to say so. Read more

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

With President Bush announcing that U.S. troop levels in Iraq will remain relatively unchanged for the remainder of his term and the last surge brigades returning home, it is time to take stock of Iraq’s internal politics. Streets may be calmer now, but it is a very tenuous calm, with the surge essentially freezing into place a fragmented and increasingly fractured country. Rather than advancing Iraq’s political transition and facilitating power-sharing deals among Iraq’s factions, the surge has produced an oil revenue-fueled, religious Shia-dominated national government with close ties to Iran.

As we argue in a new report (co-authored with Marc Lynch), the surge has helped to create a shaky political house of cards in Iraq. Prime Minister Maliki and his allies in the national government have worked to try to consolidate their power rather than take meaningful steps forward to advance Iraq’s political transition and national reconciliation. Maliki’s ruling Shia-Kurdish coalition has begun to fracture, offering evidence that decreased violence or increased capacity of the security forces does not necessarily translate into political progress and greater consensus. Moreover, the tension between U.S. support for the Awakenings and the Iraqi government is one of the shakiest elements of the house of cards that the surge helped to create.

Meanwhile, U.S. military dominance and support absolves the major political actors from having to make tough decisions necessary to achieve a power-sharing equilibrium and the active and intense U.S. interventions in the Iraqi political process actually interfere with the emergence of an authentic Iraqi political consensus. A long-term U.S. troop presence signals to Iraq’s leaders that the United States is prepared to provide a long-term safety net that keeps them in power, which fosters moral hazard, discouraging them from making the tough power-sharing compromises, and ultimately forestalls a sustainable power-sharing arrangement in Iraq.

The next U.S. administration will grapple with a different set of challenges on Iraq, but the core question remains the same for Iraq’s leaders: how to share power among the diverse ethnic and sectarian groups. Iraq’s leaders over the next year will increasingly demand greater control over their own affairs, and many of the power-sharing questions outlined in this report will likely remain unresolved for years to come.

In June — after months of kicking and screaming — President Bush finally signed a war supplemental spending bill that included a doubling of GI Bill college benefits for veterans.

Bush’s Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), however, doesn’t seem too happy about the increased work these new benefits will create and plans to outsource it all. Last month, VA Secretary James Peake wrote to the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) union announcing the plan. From Peake’s letter, obtained by ThinkProgress:

The challenges of creating the procedures and systems to support a new program and ensuring accurate and timely benefit payments under this new program effective August 1, 2009, will tax VA’s resources. … Therefore, the decision has been made to seek private-sector support to implement this new program.

The government wants to automate all GI Bill requests and is looking to hire a private contractor to set up such a system. AFGE is condemning this decision, which would dump the expertise of 850 government employees who are able to process a veteran’s request for GI benefits within 20 days.

The VA is arguing that with this new outsourcing plan, benefits could be processed in minutes. Veterans advocates point to the Bush administration’s abysmal record in hiring contractors who have no expertise in the area they’re hired to work:

Marty Conatser, American Legion: “Our newest generation of veterans deserve the benefits administered by the Dept. of Veterans Affairs, not outside contractors. Patients, critics and most media all cite the outstanding job the VA is doing. Outsourcing is not the answer.”

Rick Weidman, Vietnam Veterans of America: “If anything goes wrong, I’ll tell you what’ll happen, and it’s what always happens in these instances, is they’ll say, ‘Well, it’s not our job, it’s the VA’s.’ And the VA will say, ‘We can’t do anything, it’s contracted out. It’s the contractor’s job.’ And that is baloney. The problem isn’t the troops; the problem is the leadership.”

Rep. Harry Mitchell (D-AZ): “I just cannot believe that we’d ever allow this to happen. The level of service won’t be the same.”

So far, the Bush administration has treated this contracting process like it has so many others — with secrecy. As NPR reported today, the VA has so far “handpicked only a small number of companies to compete for the contract, and so far, officials won’t even reveal the companies’ names.”

Perhaps this move by the Bush administration is intended to take the agency one step closer to McCain’s dream of privatized veterans health care?

Matt Yglesias and Ezra Klein both have some good comments on this Newsweek interview with McCain foreign policy adviser Randy Schuenemann, whose shady history as a registered foreign agent, cog in the neoconservative war liberation machine, and shill for long cons has been covered in some depth on this blog. But there are a couple further comments that I want to highlight.

Scheunemann states that John McCain “recognizes there are certain people in the world who send children off to be suicide bombers or repress their citizens viciously whom you can’t use any word other than evil to describe.” That’s all fine, we know how conservatives get a huge charge out of calling various classes of people evil, but the point is, at least as regards McCain’s Iraq views, such people are only considered evil up until the moment when they decide to switch sides and ally with us against other evil people, at which point people like John McCain will, without batting an eye, stridently advocate giving our no longer-evil new allies millions of dollars to fight their still-evil former allies.

This is isn’t to suggest that paying one’s former enemies to fight one’s current enemies can’t be a wise tactical choice, it often is, just that when one was condemning one’s new allies as “evil terrorists” about five minutes ago, it tends to reveal one’s appeal to “moral clarity” as a mockery of a sham of a mockery of a travesty of two mockeries of a sham.

Speaking on McCain’s views on political progress in Iraq, Scheunemann says that McCain “has a realistic understanding of how you make peace“:

When you try to push parties that are unwilling to get together, you’re not going to have success. He’s said it’s important to keep moving forward, but we have to be realistic about the prospects.

Oops, sorry. Those are actually McCain’s views on the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, where he believes we must be “realistic about the prospects” for reconciliation, while doing all we can to prevent a Palestinian government dominated by Islamic extremists like Hamas.

Whereas in Iraq, McCain believes it’s important to be wildly optimistic about the prospects of reconciliation, while insisting that a government dominated by Islamic extremists like Da’wa and ISCI represents American victory.

As with majority of conservative commentary on Iraq over the last few months, Bush’s speech at the National Defense University today was almost completely focused on how much better things are now in Iraq than they were a year ago, with no substantive comment on the effects of the Iraq war on U.S. national security.

The reason for this is that, even in the most charitable interpretation, the U.S. military has been able suppress a fire which was allowed to rage out of control because of the incompetence of its commander in chief.

As the president recognized in his speech, the new reality in Iraq is largely the result of “the tribes in Anbar…growing tired of al Qaida’s brutality,” which “presented us with an opportunity to defeat al Qaida.” Let’s think about what this means: Because of the chaos created by the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq, Al Qaeda was able to come in to Iraq (where they didn’t exist before) and carry on a years-long campaign of mass murder against Iraqi civilians, such that Iraqis eventually turned against Al Qaeda. To suggest that this represents any sort of policy success is to make a mockery of the English language.

In case you’d thought that the least five years had added any intellectual heft to the president’s worldview, here’s his description of the “ideological battle” which we are fighting in the Middle East:

We must show the people of the broader Middle East a better alternative to a life of violence and despair, and that alternative is freedom. History shows that people who are given the choice between freedom and tyranny will ultimately choose freedom. And history shows that freedom will yield the peace we all want.

Quite right. Likewise, people who are given the choice between a tray of freshly baked brownies and a kick in the groin will ultimately choose the brownies. But given the choice between a kick in the groin and multiple amputations, most would choose the kick in the groin. Similarly, given the choice between tyranny and chaos, most people would choose tyranny, which at least offers order. After five long years in Iraq, it’s staggering that Bush still insists on defending his Iraq policy with these sorts of simplistic choices. Of course we’d like other to live in freedom, but Bush gives no indication that he understands that this is more complicated than removing bad governments and installing good ones. Read more

For weeks, the U.S. military has denied charges that its Aug. 22 attack on Azizabad, Afghanistan killed scores of civilians, despite the fact that Afghan witnesses, the United Nations, and other human rights and international officials all say roughly 90 villagers were killed. Yesterday, the military reversed course and requested an investigation into the strike in light of “emerging evidence.” Part of that evidence is cellphone images showing “at least 11 dead children,” according to the New York Times.

As Firedoglake points out, the Times of London revealed that the U.S. had been relying on accounts from an embedded journalist: Fox News’s Oliver North:

The US military said that its findings were corroborated by an independent journalist embedded with the US force. He was named as the Fox News correspondent Oliver North, who came to prominence in the 1980s Iran-Contra affair, when he was an army colonel.

Relying on North for a “fair and balanced” view is a major mistake. Even leaving aside his past as a central figure in the Iran-Contra scandal under President Reagan, North routinely makes biased and unsourced claims:

– “There is no such thing as an Islamic moderate.” [LINK]

– “Every terrorist out there is hoping John Kerry Is the next president of the United States.” [LINK]

– Politicians who raise the issue of Abu Ghraib “have blood on their hands.” [LINK]

– Abuse of Iraqi prisoners is “the kind of thing that you might find on any college campus.” [LINK]

Dismissing accounts about the attack from witnesses, such as a village doctor who “said he counted 50 to 60 bodies of civilians, most of them women and children,” the U.S. military repeatedly “accused the villagers of spreading Taliban propaganda.”

Today, Human Rights Watch warned that by continuing air strikes and killing civilians, the U.S. risked a public backlash in Afghanistan. Seeming to codify the report, Azizabad’s district chief told the Times, “If they continue like this, they will lose the people’s confidence in the government and the coalition forces.”

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Bob Woodward has an item this morning explaining more fully his book’s assertion that the 2007 troop surge “was not the primary factor behind the steep drop in violence there during the past 16 months.” Woodward notes the importance of the Sunni awakenings and Muqtada al-Sadr’s militia “freeze,” but stresses the innovative new counter-insurgency tactics employed by General David Petraeus, termed “‘collaborative warfare,’ using every tool available simultaneously, from signal intercepts to human intelligence and other methods, that allowed lightning-quick and sometimes concurrent operations.”

While the new tactics are indeed impressive, a few of Woodward’s comments last night on 60 Minutes raised some troubling questions.

Asked to describe these new tactics in more detail, Woodward said “I’d love to go through the details, but I’m not going to.” Woodward couldn’t hide how impressed he was with what the U.S. military has been able to do in Iraq, though, calling it “the stuff of which military novels are written”:

WOODWARD: From what I know about it, it’s one of those things that go back to any war, World War I, World War II, the role of the tank, and the airplane.

Q: Do you mean to say that this special capability is such an advance in military technique and technology that it reminds you of the advent of the tank and the airplane?

WOODWARD: Yeah…if you were an al Qaeda leader or part of the insurgency in Iraq, or one of these renegade militias, and you knew about what they were able to do, you’d get your ass outta town.

Back before the Iraq invasion, air power was all the rage. In the wake of the Kosovo intervention, advocates of invasion were celebrating “one of the great revolutions in military history: the revolution of air power,” and suggesting that, America having thus mastered the art of war, toppling Saddam Hussein’s regime and installing democracy in Iraq would not be difficult. It didn’t quite work out that way.

While it’s a positive thing that such a prominent figure as Bob Woodward is attempting to correct the record on the surge, pushing back on the simplistic establishment consensus which holds that “we were losing, then Bush sent more troops, and now we’re winning,” Woodward’s heavy breathing over “collaborative warfare” is distinctly evocative of the previous heavy breathing over bombs that can go down chimneys.

As with the national security establishment’s erstwhile romance with air power, the idea that we’ve discovered the “key” to counterinsurgency brings with it the possibility that, armed with a shiny new doctrine, U.S. policymakers will feel emboldened to propose and undertake — and media elites will be induced to support — all kinds of new and inherently unpredictable military interventions against various and sundry future new Hitlers, forgetting the most important lesson of counterinsurgency: Don’t get in situations where you have to engage in counterinsurgency.

Last night on 60 Minutes, host Scott Pelley interviewed Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward to discuss his new book “The War Within: A Secret White House History, 2006-2008.” Pelley noted that one part of the story Woodward tells is President Bush’s “frustration with the attitude of the Iraqi people”:

WOODWARD: He has a meeting at the Pentagon with a bunch of experts and he just said, ‘I don’t understand that the Iraqis are not appreciative of what we’ve done for them,’ namely liberated them.

PELLEY: But tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis have been killed in the invasion and through the occupation. He didn’t understand why they might be a little ungrateful about what had occurred to them?

WOODWARD: His beacon is liberation. He thinks we’ve done this magnificent thing for them. I think he still holds to that position.

Watch it:

Nearly 100,000 Iraqi civilians have lost their lives since 2003 (maybe more) and around 2 million have either fled the country or are internally displaced. For many years, ordinary Iraqis have had to deal with car bombs, suicide bombs, and other routine violence that ultimately resulted in civil war and the sectarian cleansing of Baghdad. Why wouldn’t Iraqis be grateful for all that?

Woodward also revealed during the interview that the “secret behind the success of the surge” was not the U.S. troop build-up but a “breakthrough” in “secret operational capabilities that have been developed by the military to locate, target and kill leaders of al-Qaeda in Iraq, insurgent leaders, renegade militia leaders.” Woodward would not provide any further details of the secret plan.

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