The Wonk Room

McCain’s Foreign Policy Agenda: Doubling Down On Bush’s Failures»

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

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

Yet Another Lobbyist On The Straight Talk Express»

Michael Isikoff reports that the McCain campaign “has hastily assembled a team of former Bush White House aides to tutor the vice-presidential candidate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, on foreign-policy issues, to write her speeches and to begin preparing her for her all-important Oct. 2 debate against Sen. Joe Biden.”

Leading this team is Steve Biegun, who has been hired as chief foreign-policy adviser to Gov. Palin. Last Friday, “Biegun flew to St. Paul and, together with McCain’s foreign-policy guru Randy Schuenemann, began briefings for Palin on national-security issues — an area where her resume is conspicuously thin.”

A little background on Steve Biegun:

- In 2001, Biegun was appointed Executive Secretary of the National Security Council by President Bush.

- In 2003 Biegun joined the staff of Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist as national security adviser.

- In 2004, Biegun was hired by Ford Motor Co. as part of Ford’s effort to “rev up its Washington government affairs operation.” Biegun is now on leave from Ford to work for McCain.

Notably, from 1992 to 1994, Biegun served as the Resident Director in the Russian Federation for the International Republican Institute, a democracy-promoting organization for which McCain has served as chairman since 1993.

In July, the New York Times reported that “an examination of [McCain’s] leadership of the Republican institute — one of the least-chronicled aspects of his political life — reveals an organization in many ways at odds with the political outsider image that has become a touchstone of the McCain campaign for president”:

[The IRI is] something of a revolving door for lobbyists and out-of-power Republicans that offers big donors a way of helping both the party and the institute’s chairman, who is the second sitting member of Congress — and now candidate for president — ever to head one of the democracy groups.

Operating without the sort of limits placed on campaign fund-raising, the institute under Mr. McCain has solicited millions of dollars for its operations from some 560 defense contractors, lobbying firms, oil companies and other corporations, many with issues before Senate committees Mr. McCain was on.

As to the sort of foreign policy ideology with which Biegun will be inculcating Palin, Steve Clemons of the New America Foundation told Isikoff that Biegun “will turn [Palin] into an advocate of Cheneyism and Cheney’s view of national-security issues.”

Digg It!

McCain’s Proposed Cuts Insufficient To Pay For McCain’s Proposed Wars»

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.

In his two terms in office, President Bush has managed to turn a budget surplus of $236 billion in 2000 into a projected deficit of $482 billion in 2009. Last month, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, senior economic adviser to Senator John McCain (R-AZ), submitted the presumptive Republican nominee’s budget proposal to the Washington Post editorial board. In it, McCain proposes to balance the federal budget by 2013, in part by curbing defense expenditures. While there is certainly a need to cut wasteful and unnecessary spending in the Pentagon budget, this proposal is a tepid effort at best.

Holtz-Eakin suggests that McCain will achieve $470 billion in savings in the entire federal budget in 2013. He proposes to save $150 billion by reducing deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan by as much as half and another $160 billion from “slower discretionary spending in non-defense and Pentagon procurements.” While he indicates that a number of defense procurements can be terminated, he specifies only three: the C-17 Globemaster, the Airborne Laser (ABL), and the Army’s Future Combat Systems (FCS). Unfortunately for McCain, these three programs provide nowhere near enough savings to meet his proposed $160 billion reduction.

- The C-17 Globemaster, which provides the U.S. military with intercontinental airlift capabilities, should be a target for budget cuts. The Department of Defense (DOD) noted in its FY2009 budget justification that “There are sufficient C-17s to support our nation’s military airlift requirements as determined by the 2005 Mobility Capabilities Study.” Despite continued efforts by politicians and members of the Air Force to continue C-17 production, the DOD requested only $935 million in funding for support and equipment for the planes in the FY2009 budget. There is currently no money allocated in the DODs’ regular budget for FY2010 – 2013 for new aircraft, so terminating the program would yield zero savings.

- The Airborne Laser (ABL) program offers an opportunity for genuine but minimal savings. The ABL is designed to give the U.S. military the capability to destroy ballistic missiles soon after launch using a plane-mounted laser system. In FY2008, the DOD projected $970 million in spending on this program for FY2013, plus $57 million in program support funding. Thus, if McCain terminated this program in 2013, he could expect to save slightly more than $1 billion.

- The Army’s Future Combat Systems (FCS) offers the greatest potential for budget savings. FCS consists of a group of fourteen high technology manned and unmanned vehicles and systems designed to support the transition of the army to a more flexible, easily deployable force. Although completion of the FCS could consume substantial funding in the long-term, terminating funding for the project in 2013 would yield $8.1 billion in savings. This includes about $6.8 billion in saved procurement costs and approximately $1.3 billion from research and development funding in FY2013.

McCain’s plan offers unrealistic expectations for the amount that could be saved from the ABL, Globemaster, and FCS. Together, the cancellation of these initiatives would net approximately $9.1 billion dollars in FY2013. If McCain hopes to cut $160 billion in government procurement, he will have to offer to cut many more and larger defense programs, such as the National Missile Defense Program or the Joint Strike Fighter, or make more than $150 billion in reductions in non-defense discretionary programs.

Also dubious is McCain’s proposal to save $150 billion through reduced deployments of U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. According to CBO projections, about $82 billion could be saved in FY2013 if the U.S. dropped the number of troops in both countries from 200,000 to 75,000 by FY2013. This represents slightly more than half of McCain’s target savings. However, the candidate’s own policies call into question his ability to deliver these cuts. As long as McCain refuses to commit to a timetable for the withdrawal of the 140,000 U.S. troops from Iraq, it is disingenuous for him or his advisers to project any savings, much less an unjustifiable $150 billion, from their safe return home, especially since he also wants to send at least 10,000 more troops to Afghanistan.

After years of budget deficits driven by poor economic choices and failed security policies in the Middle East, the presidential candidates must address seriously how they intend to deal with America’s growing budget deficits. McCain’s proposal barely scratches the surface.

Violence Up On The Forgotten Front»

Our guest blogger is Colin Cookman, Special Assistant for National Security at American Progress.

In the deadliest ground combat exchange between international forces and Afghanistan insurgents since the 2001 U.S. invasion, 10 members of an elite French paratroop unit were ambushed and killed in fighting with over a hundred Taliban fighters. Another 21 French soldiers were wounded in the battle, which took place only 30 miles east of Kabul. The French casualties coincided with another sustained Taliban attack, as a group of Taliban fighters launched waves of mortar and rocket attacks on Forward Operating Base Salerno, in eastern Khost province, as cover for attempted suicide bomb attacks by between 10 and 15 militants. On Monday, Afghanistan’s independence day, a suicide car bomber attempted to breach Salerno’s gates, killing at least a dozen Afghan laborers near the entrance.

The sophistication and scale of these attacks are another sign that the security situation in Afghanistan is deteriorating badly. This deterioration has been borne out in public opinion: a new CBS News/New York Times poll found that 58% of those surveyed believe the conflict in Afghanistan is going badly, compared to 28% who perceived it to be going well. Contrast that with the situation in 2003, when only 14% believed things were going badly and 76% thought they were going well, and it’s apparent how much has changed in the five years since the Bush administration diverted its attention to Iraq. 2008 is on track to surpass 2007 as the deadliest year in Afghanistan since military operations began there in 2001, and international coalition death tolls there have surpassed those in Iraq for the past two months, a trend likely to continue through August. More »

The Good News Is, Unlike Peters, Nobody’s Campaign Is Interested In Peretz’s Advice»

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!

McCain’s Approach Would Make Us Miss The Deft Diplomatic Touch Of George W. Bush»

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.

U.S. Strategy In Somalia: ‘Whac-A-Mole’»

Our guest blogger is Colin Thomas-Jensen, a policy adviser for the ENOUGH Project.

Thursday, August 7, is the ten-year anniversary of the al-Qaeda bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. For the better part of ten years, the U.S. government has worked closely with intelligence agencies in Ethiopia and Kenya to track the movements of three al-Qaeda operatives alleged to be responsible for planning the operation, which killed more than 250 people and wounded thousands more. The suspects have frequently taken refuge in Somalia, exploiting the porous borders and ungoverned spaces of the world’s number one failed state. One of those suspects, the alleged leader of al-Qaeda in East Africa Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, has reportedly entered Kenya, where Kenyan authorities are currently on a manhunt.

Mr. Mohammed is believed to have masterminded the embassy bombings, and capturing or killing him should be a top priority for the United States and its allies. But a ten-year manhunt is not a strategy to deal with the root of violent extremism in the region — the 18 years of political unrest and bloodshed in southern Somalia. The U.S. supported Ethiopia’s December 2006 invasion of Somalia to oust Islamists from power and install a transitional government in the capital Mogadishu. Yet as in Iraq, the invaders had no post-war political strategy, and Ethiopia — Somalia’s historic enemy — was quickly bogged down in a brutal counter-insurgency against Islamist and clan-based militia groups.

The insurgent attacks and Ethiopia’s scorched-earth response have driven two-thirds of Mogadishu’s residents — some 700,000 people — into the harsh Somali countryside. With rising food prices and failed crops, aid agencies are warning of famine. Meanwhile, the Bush administration supports Ethiopia’s presence in Somalia and, with help from Ethiopian intelligence, U.S. forces have launched at least four airstrikes targeting al-Qaeda suspects and Islamist leaders inside Somalia. Only one airstrike killed its intended target, and U.S. attacks have resulted in civilian casualties. Behind closed doors, the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies refer to the U.S. strategy as ‘whac-a-mole.’ More »

Don’t Blame Human Rights Activists for Crimes Against Humanity»

Our guest blogger is David Sullivan, Research Associate at the ENOUGH project.

This weekend, human rights contrarian David Rieff’s op-ed in the LA Times castigated activists for “human rights triumphalism” after the International Criminal Court’s move to indict Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir and argued “it would make more sense to try to restart negotiations in a serious way with Bashir and his government than to indulge in ‘Count of Monte Cristo’-like fantasies of the wicked getting their comeuppance.”

Rieff’s timing could not have been worse: the very next day, Serbia captured indicted war criminal Radovan Karadzic, the man most responsible for the crimes against humanity in Bosnia that Rieff lambasted western governments for failing to stop in his book Slaughterhouse. Someone apparently forgot to tell Karadzic, former Liberian President Charles Taylor, and the late Slobodan Milosevic that The Hague was just a “Count of Monte Cristo”-like fantasy. Humor aside, Rieff’s argument is particularly galling because he directly denigrates the popular mobilization of Americans to stop genocide and crimes against humanity. In this regard Rieff joins former United States Special Envoy for Sudan Andrew Natsios who wrote in Foreign Affairs that “moral outrage is no substitute for practical policies aimed at saving lives and promoting stability.” This is a false choice that is as incorrect as it is condescending.

For all their expertise, Rieff and Natsios come off as more naïve than the average activist in repeatedly arguing that peace and justice are incompatible, despite so much evidence to the contrary. As with the charges against Milosevic in 1999 and Charles Taylor in 2003, the ICC’s move to charge Bashir presents an opportunity for the U.N. Security Council to exert leverage with his government. Article 16 of the Rome Statute (pdf) (the document that governs the ICC) allows the U.N. Security Council to suspend ICC investigations on an annual basis, creating an ongoing point of leverage that can be used to pressure Khartoum not just to sign peace deals, but to implement them. More »

NYT: Iraq War Allowed Al Qaeda To Regroup In Pakistan»

This New York Times article’s description of the Bush administration’s confused attempts to deal with the Al Qaeda threat emanating from Pakistan’s tribal areas is yet more evidence against conservatives’ claims that they can more effectively manage anti-terrorism:

After the Sept. 11 attacks, President Bush committed the nation to a “war on terrorism” and made the destruction of Mr. bin Laden’s network the top priority of his presidency. But it is increasingly clear that the Bush administration will leave office with Al Qaeda having successfully relocated its base from Afghanistan to Pakistan’s tribal areas, where it has rebuilt much of its ability to attack from the region and broadcast its messages to militants across the world.[…]

The White House shifted its sights, beginning in 2002, from counterterrorism efforts in Afghanistan and Pakistan to preparations for the war in Iraq.[…]

Current and former military and intelligence officials said that the war in Iraq consistently diverted resources and high-level attention from the tribal areas. When American military and intelligence officials requested additional Predator drones to survey the tribal areas, they were told no drones were available because they had been sent to Iraq.

The Center for America Progress’s Brian Katulis wrote last week that “Pakistan is most likely to create the biggest headache for the next U.S. president.”

[Pakistan] is the country that U.S. intelligence officials have repeatedly cited as the most important haven and training ground for global terrorist groups like Al Qaeda. It is also the place that is the best guess among intelligence agencies for where top Al Qaeda leaders like Osama Bin Laden and Ayman Zawahiri currently reside. Military and intelligence officials have warned that the next terrorist attack will most likely come from Pakistan.

In order to invade and occupy country where Al Qaeda wasn’t, President Bush diverted resources away from where Al Qaeda was, allowing Al Qaeda to regroup and reorganize and continue to plot against America. Many of the most prominent people responsible for this brilliant plan are now advising John McCain. More »

Would McCain Really Benefit From A Terrorist Attack?»

McCain strategist Charlie Black recently made the mistake of saying what was on his mind, suggesting that another terrorist attack on U.S. soil “Certainly…would be a big advantage to him [McCain].”

The elite commentariat have coalesced around the idea that this represents a gaffe in the Kinsleyan sense, “when a politician tells the truth.” That is, that Charlie Black’s words, while inartful, were essentially true, and that another attack would indeed advantage McCain.

This is all based upon the assumption that, if attacked, Americans would run to the arms of conservatives. So it’s worth asking: What would McCain do if another attack occurred? What would he do that makes us “stronger”? The best predictor of how McCain would handle a future attack is how he handled the past one. Given that he’s already told us that he’s “totally in agreement” George W. Bush’s anti-terrorism policy, McCain’s response to a terrorist attack would probably go something like this: After attacking, but not capturing, the people responsible, McCain would divert troops to another, unrelated front.

As early as December 2001, McCain was calling for war with Iraq. He continues to believe that an appropriate response to the 9/11 attacks was to invade and occupy a country that had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks.

- Like Bush, McCain justified the Iraq war with the theory that ‘we’re fighting them there so we don’t have to fight them here.’ Former anti-terrorism czar Richard Clarke pointed out that “the evidence is overwhelming that our presence [in Iraq] provides motivation for people throughout the Arab world to become anti-American terrorists.”

- Further demolishing the Bush/McCain “flypaper theory,” a new article in Democracy describes the phenomenon of foreign fighters returning from Iraq to apply their terrorist training in their home countries, another negative consequence of the Iraq war.

McCain seems blissfully unaware of any of the consequences of the policies that he has supported over the past seven years, and continues to advocate an anti-terror strategy that has shown disastrous results. Given all this, it’s a bit frustrating to have to contend with the idea that, were one of those results to take the form of an attack on the American homeland, McCain would benefit.

There are signs that this conventional wisdom is breaking down, however. The Raw Story reports on pundits who have questioned “the assumption that a terrorist attack would play to McCain’s advantage.”

It’s also interesting to note that, after Osama bin Laden’s video release right before the 2004 election, the CIA determined that bin Laden had been trying to help, not hinder, Bush’s reelection. Conservatives, including John McCain, should probably ask themselves why Osama bin Laden prefers their anti-terrorism policies to the progressive alternative.

What’s Arabic For ‘Always At War’?»

Hard at the task of rehabilitating the Iraq war on the grounds that such a war was “inevitable”, historian Arthur Herman claims “by the time George Bush entered the White House in January 2001, the United States was already at war with Iraq, and in fact had been at war for a decade, ever since the first Gulf war in the early 1990’s.”

There is obviously a huge difference between an economic sanctions regime backed by occasional airstrikes, and a hundred thousand-strong invasion force piling into Iraq. The latter is generally understood as war, the former as… an economic sanctions regime backed by occasional airstrikes. One can argue that the situation as it existed in the 1990s vis a vis Iraq was unsustainable — I agree that it was — but Herman’s retroactively redefining that situation as “war” is a pretty transparent attempt to downplay the radical nature of President Bush’s doctrine of preventive war, to ignore the massive and unprecedented propaganda campaign that was used to sell this doctrine to the American people, and to shift blame for the massive costs incurred by what is now correctly understood as an unnecessary war of choice.

But not only does Herman want to convince us that the U.S. was already at war with Iraq then, he also would have us to believe that the U.S. is “already at war with Iran” now. Making this argument back in October, Herman wrote that “a realistic war scenario with Iran would involve an extensive air and naval campaign without a single American soldier having to set foot on Iranian soil” :

From start to finish, such an operation would probably require no more than one more carrier group than is already in the area, as well as one Airborne Brigade Combat Team and one Marine Expeditionary Brigade, combined with Special Ops units-fewer troops than reinforced General Petraeus’s current surge in Iraq. In a matter of days or weeks, the key components of the Iranian oil industry would be in American hands even as Iran itself ground to a halt.

As if the spectacle of warmongers promising cakewalks in neoconservative magazines weren’t enough to set off alarm bells, note that Herman’s October item received admiring comment from none other than Michael Ledeen, who theorized (just to pick one of countless examples of Ledeenian silliness) back in 2003 that France and Germany had “struck a deal with radical Islam and with radical Arabs: You go after the United States, and we’ll do everything we can to protect you, and we will do everything we can to weaken the Americans.”

Smarter, please.

Better Late Than Never: Addressing Sexual Violence As A Security Threat»

Our guest blogger is David Sullivan, a Research Associate with the ENOUGH Project.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is at the United Nations Security Council today to discuss a real weapon of mass destruction, one that is employed on a daily basis around the world: the use of rape and sexual violence as a weapon of war.

In conflicts from East Timor to Liberia, armed forces have deliberately and systematically used rape as a means of terrorizing enemy communities and maintaining control over territory and populations. The worst epidemic of sexual violence is in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where rebel movements, militias, and the Congolese army have perpetrated horrific bouts of mass rape, sexual torture, and other violence against untold thousands of women and girls. Because victims are stigmatized and shamed, the full extent of this crisis may never be known.

The Security Council resolution (pdf) that the U.S. is expected to sponsor as part of today’s meeting may finally help to elevate the political profile of this horrifying issue. It will increase information gathering on the scope of the problem, strengthen peacekeeping mission’s mandates to respond, and demand accountability for perpetrators. A similar measure related to the use of child soldiers has proven somewhat successful in requiring the UN’s elaborate bureaucracy to focus on protecting children in armed conflict.

This issue needs all the attention it can get. Just a few weeks ago the International Criminal Court, the best means of ending impunity for sexual terrorism, had to drop all charges related to sexual violence in eastern Congo. This was due to difficulty protecting potential witnesses from retribution.

Ending this crime against humanity, in Congo and beyond, will require linking efforts to protect women and girls with broader peace processes and conflict prevention. The U.S. played a key role in recent diplomatic breakthroughs, largely thanks to Tim Shortley, a State Department Senior Advisor who focused entirely on Congo and the related issue of the Lord’s Resistance Army in northern Uganda. Regrettably, his portfolio has been broadened to include Sudan, risking the sustained high-level attention that these conflicts need. Assistant Secretary of State Jendayi Frazier needs to fill his shoes quickly with a diplomat of similar stature to consolidate recent gains and connect lofty Security Council rhetoric with meaningful protection for Congolese women.

Exclusive: McCain Gaffe On Status of Forces Agreement Raises More Questions About Iraq Knowledge»

Our guest blogger is Adam Jentleson, the Communications and Outreach Director for the Hyde Park Project at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

In all the hubbub over his comments that withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq was “not important,” McCain still hasn’t taken a clear position on the status of forces agreement (SOFA) currently being negotiated between the U.S. and Iraqi governments.

Maybe this is because McCain lacks familiarity with the topic. Earlier this year, he gaffed when George Stephanopoulos asked him about the SOFA:

STEPHANOPOULOS: President Bush is also negotiating a long-term status of forces agreement with Iraq. Both Sen. Clinton and Sen. Obama say that agreement has to come to the Congress.

MCCAIN: It wouldn’t bother me to bring it to the Congress. I don’t think that’s a huge deal. We have status of forces…

STEPHANOPOULOS: President Bush says he doesn’t want to, though.

MCCAIN: Well, look, if we succeed in Iraq, which I believe we are, the rest of it takes care of itself. We have status of force agreements with a number of countries that have never been approved by Congress; we have some others that have been approved by Congress.

STEPHANOPOULOS: But the big ones, Korea was approved by Congress.

MCCAIN: Yes, but we have some countries — we’re still in Bosnia. We don’t have a status of forces agreement there, as I recall. We have — look…

Problem is, the U.S. does have a status of forces agreement with Bosnia.

Perhaps McCain was thinking of another example of a country where we have a long-term troop presence but no SOFA. If not, he may need to come up with another answer to the question.

In theory, McCain should welcome questions about his stance on the SOFA. The SOFA is a binding legal agreement setting the terms for the U.S. presence in Iraq in the years to come. It’s necessary because the UN mandate authorizing the presence of U.S. troops in Iraq expires at the end of this year, and it will put on paper the answers to major questions like, how many bases will we have in Iraq? Will they be permanent or temporary? Who will be in charge of the Iraqi security forces? How many U.S. troops will be stationed in Iraq? What will their mission be, and how long will they be there?

So if McCain truly does not think it’s “not important” when we withdraw U.S. troops, and if he truly does not want us to be in Iraq for 100 years, then this should be the perfect vehicle for him to explain, in concrete terms, his vision for the U.S. presence in Iraq in the coming years.

But maybe he still needs some time to bone up on the issue.

Petraeus ‘Happy To’ Participate In Pentagon Propaganda»

Email correspondence from the Pentagon document dump reveals Gen. David Petraeus was “happy to” participate in its “puppet” TV military analyst program in 2005. The “talented” military officer was promoted by President Bush to lieutenant general in 2004, with the public mission of training Iraqi military forces. At the behest of Larry Di Rita, Rumsfeld’s “right-hand man” in the Pentagon, Petraeus took on another, secret mission that year, shaping the public perception of the Iraq War and the key question of whether American troops would be able to come home.

PETRAEUS’S PUBLIC RELATIONS MISSION

Larry Di Rita

The August 28, 2005 episode of Meet the Press — as Cindy Sheehan was asking to meet with the President in Crawford, Texas — was focused on Iraq, with U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad and a panel of retired generals. The generals were Wesley Clark, Wayne Downing, Barry McCaffrey, and Montgomery Meigs. As the New York Times revealed in its exposé, Downing, McCaffrey, and Meigs all participated in the secret briefing program managed by the Pentagon Public Affairs Office.

Documents released by the Pentagon (pp. 22-30) reveal that Pentagon spokesman Larry Di Rita wanted to make sure the Meet the Press appearance went as well as possible. Friday afternoon, Di Rita thought of using Petraeus. Bryan Whitman, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs, agreed — “Not a bad idea. That is a tough group and as you know have not been very supportive before.” Whitman sent the “thought downrange” in a message to “Dave,” who immediately went into action, calling and emailing the retired generals from Iraq.

Di Rita complained to Petraeus that “some of these retired military analysts are trying to have it both ways” — supporting generals like Petraeus but criticizing the “secdef,” Donald Rumsfeld, and “his supposed bad plans”:

Petraeus told Di Rita that he was concerned his conversation with McCaffrey didn’t go terribly well:

MISSION ACCOMPLISHED

Petraeus’s calls on behalf of the Pentagon convinced the analysts on Meet the Press to paint a rosy picture of the training of Iraqi forces — which they believed meant American troops would soon start coming home. McCaffrey said:

Well, Tim, to be honest, I’m reasonably optimistic about this. I talked to General George Casey in country and Dave Petraeus, the guy who’s actually in charge of trying to build the Iraqi security forces.

Meigs told Russert:

And when I ask senior Army officials who are longtime friends who aren’t going to give me a BS answer how we’re doing, “Are we winning or losing?” they’re saying, “We’re winning.”

McCaffrey believed that by August 2006:

You’ll have a huge Iraqi security force out in the field. And you’ll see a drawdown of a third or so of U.S. military forces starting in about another year.

Gen. Downing was even more enthusiastic:

I do think that in another year or 15 months, we’re going to be able to start taking the U.S. forces down somewhat, because I think the Iraqi forces are going to be in strength of about 150,000 of both police and army. So I’m very, very positive. And I’m giving you this without any political motive.

Petraeus failed to train a “huge Iraqi security force” independent of US support, and American forces were not drawn down. Rather, in 2007, President Bush promoted Petraeus to a four-star general in command of the Iraq occupation, directing him to oversee the “surge” — raising troop numbers by more than 20,000. One of Petraeus’s first acts as commander was to meet with the Pentagon’s cadre of military analysts.

How Do You Define Crank?»

National Review’s Lisa Schiffren thinks the question of whether Barack Obama studied the Qur’an as a child is relevant to the American presidential campaign:

Barack Obama has emphatically denied that he was ever a Muslim, practicing or otherwise. Other people, including family members and teachers, remember things differently. Daniel Pipes collects the varying information here. Several elementary-school teachers in Indonesia have told reporters that he was enrolled as a Muslim — and thus studied Koran instead of the Catechism — at the Catholic school he attended. One of his various half sisters says it too, and several passages in his autobiography seem to indicated the same thing. Make of it what you will. Certainly that he may have been educated or raised Muslim is no disqualifier, but if he is lying about his upbringing for political acceptance, it speaks to character. We don’t know if he is, but we know Daniel Pipes is no crank.

I suppose it’s stating the obvious to note how transparently disingenuous it is for Schiffren to insist that Barack Obama come clean (and prove a negative) about not “having been raised Muslim,” while assuring us, of course, that this would be “no disqualifier,” after she and the gang at National Review have worked so assiduously to make it a disqualifier.

I have to agree with Schiffren about Daniel Pipes, though. I tend to regard cranks as mostly harmless eccentrics, like people who believe that our planet was seeded by aliens who will soon return to harvest us, or people who design and construct hugely complicated machines to perform odd combinations of simple household tasks, or Dr. Phil. There’s nothing harmless about Daniel Pipes, a right wing scholar-activist who, since 9/11, has made a career of trafficking in hoary old Orientalist stereotypes in order to stoke Americans’ prejudice against, and fear of, Islam.

Pipes runs the Middle East Forum, an organization which answers the question “What if the John Birch Society had its own think tank?” Pipes also oversees Campus Watch, a project that keeps tabs on scholars it deems to be insufficiently pro-Israel.

Last summer Pipes spearheaded a campaign against the Khalil Gibran International Academy in New York, a public school focused on Arab culture and language. The campaign eventually caused the resignation of the school’s principal, Debbie Almontaser. Pipes based his hostility to the school on what he called “the basic problems implicit in an Arabic-language school: the tendency to Islamist and Arabist content and proselytizing.” Needless to say, Pipes offered no evidence for that claim.

In keeping with his stated belief that Arab- and Muslim-Americans deserve to be subjected to “special scrutiny,” Pipes apparently thinks the question of whether Barack Obama ever practiced Islam as a child is so important to the future of the American republic that, since December, he has penned three different articles on that subject, always making sure to apply a thin veneer of “scholarly rigor” over what is in fact nothing more than an attempt to smear by insinuation and innuendo. Despicable.

But no, Daniel Pipes is no crank. That would be an insult to cranks.

Yglesias: ‘Look At The Failures That The Right Has Brought On Us. Isn’t It Time To Do Something Different?’»

Continuing Matt Yglesias‘ interview with Think Progress about his new book, (reviewed here by Democracy Arsenal’s Ilan Goldenberg), Yglesias discussed some of the reasons why conservatives have successfully colonized so much of the territory around the foreign policy debate.

Yglesias said that “Democrats and liberals have not historically made [foreign policy] their big point of emphasis.” He also noted that, over the last several decades, the right has been much more audacious about foreign policy, building institutions, creating think tanks, and “work[ing] in a very organized and disciplined way to try to change our understanding” about how the world works, and about what policies American national security requires:

There wasn’t some organic popular hue and cry to invade Iraq. This was a movement that was built up over a period of years,…before September 11th—at a time when people would have said, “Well, you know, Paul Wolfowitz, that’s totally unrealistic. This is never going to happen.” And you know, it was never was going to happen. Except, then 9/11 came. That changed the dynamic. It made it possible to do things, and they laid the groundwork for it.

Yglesias suggested that “if liberals want to accomplish things in foreign policy…they need to lay the intellectual and popular ground-work for it,” building up organizations such as the Center for American Progress and creating the institutions to support progressive arguments for better foreign policy.

Yglesias also noted that this is a particularly opportune historical moment for such an alternative:

At the moment, what Bush has done has so clearly failed, that I think anyone has to at least stop and listen to what opponents have to say. That doesn’t mean necessarily you’ll convince people. You need to have good arguments. You need to have the fight. But there’s a chance to get the hearing for it. You can say, “Look at this. Look at the failures that the right has brought on us. Isn’t it time to do something different?”

Watch it:

Transcript: More »