war

John McCain says:

"Let me be very clear, I am not questioning his patriotism, I am questioning his judgement. Senator Obama has made it clear he values withdrawal from Iraq above victory in Iraq.

"He has made these decisions not because he doesn't love America but because he doesn't thinks it matters whether American wins or loses."

Yeah, that makes sense. Right, John. Ramble on.

Meanwhile, as McCain talks about the Iraq surge ("That's what this is about! That's what this is about!"), Barack Obama offers a reality check, pointing out that we should focus on the Taliban, sponsors of al Qaeda and co-sponsors of 9/11.

"As commander-in-chief, I will have no greater priority than taking out these terrorists who threaten America, and finishing the job against the Taliban," Obama said.

He said he would add two U.S. combat brigades, 7,000 fighters and support staff, and would provide an additional $1 billion in non-military assistance for Afghanistan....

..."Six years ago, I stood up at a time when it was politically difficult to oppose going to war in Iraq, and argued that our first priority had to be finishing the fight against Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan,'' he said. "Senator McCain was already turning his sights to Iraq just days after 9/11, and he became a leading supporter of an invasion and occupation of a country that had absolutely nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks."

Do you, dear reader, really thing that this election is about a tactical surge in Iraq that happened last year?

Greg Mitchell tries to claim in Editor & Publisher that many major papers five years ago were in fact against the war on Iraq.

You may be surprised to learn that, precisely five years ago, at least one-third of the top newspapers in this country came out against President Bush taking us to war at that time. Many of the papers may have fumbled the WMD coverage, and only timidly raised questions about the need for war, but when push came to shove five years ago they wanted to wait longer to move against Saddam, or not move at all....

...Once equivocal editorial pages got straight to the point. "This war crowns a period of terrible diplomatic failure," The New York Times argued, "Washington's worst in at least a generation. The Bush administration now presides over unprecedented American might. What it risks squandering is not Americans' power, but an essential part of our glory."

Other papers were even more blunt. The Sun of Baltimore, consistently one of the most passionate dissenters on the war, began their editorial with the sentence, "This war is wrong. It is wrong as a matter of principle, but, more importantly, it is wrong as a matter of practical policy."

USA Today asked Bush to finally disclose risks, costs, and democratic government estimates for Iraq while the St. Louis Post-Dispatch wondered "what 'the peaceful entry' of 280,000 troops would look like." The Arizona Republic in Phoenix said that Bush and his "coalition of the willing," with prodding by the French, "have left the United Nations in tatters."

Well editorial pages are certainly where people turn to first, right? Never mind the war-fostering headlines on the front pages. Never mind the lazy absence of any meaningful fact-checking on Administration claims.

Never mind ignoring the sometimes massive anti-war demonstrations in New York and elsewhere.

No, the editors clucked and tutted and therefore should get a pass on their crappy coverage.

Any wonder why newspapers are still in trouble and mistrusted by so many?

Sometimes the partisan blinders end up being blindfolds.

Big Tent Democrat at TalkLeft gets it all backwards:

Obama's Unity Schtick is precisely what the DLC and Joe Lieberman have been preaching for decades and that the progressive blogs were supposed to be fighting AGAINST.

Not.

Barack Obama is a progressive who pitches his rhetoric in rational, moderate, common sense tones to appeal to centrists and independents and even disaffected Republicans, drawing them to his point of view.

This is just the opposite of Joe Lieberman, who has been voting with the right on important issues (and let's start with the war on Iraq and go from there), while pitching his rhetoric against the left.

Equating the two seems to be simply -- as Barack himself might put it -- intellectually lazy.

It seems that John McCain said that MoveOn.org "ought to be thrown out of this country":

Speaking before a group in Hudson, New Hampshire last night, McCain took criticism of MoveOn’s Petraeus ad to a whole new level, saying that they should not only be ashamed, but “ought to be thrown out of this country.”

That is patently ridiculous, of course. This is America. We don't throw people out for things for saying stupid, distasteful things.

The thing is, MoveOn.org did fuck up with their Petraeus/"Betray Us" ad. It was stupid, juvenile rhetoric, and it succeeded in making the week as presented by the mainstream media to be about this stupid ad, instead of about the fucked up state of the Iraq occupation.

The Republicans were against the ropes, and MoveOn.org made them look like statesmen opposed by a bunch of snot-nosed kids.

SilentPatriot writes:

It’s almost comical to see Republicans run around condemning MoveOn for daring to attack a member of the military and calling into question their character or integrity, considering that’s the rhetorical weapon they usually wield.

Is that where we are now? Measuring our integrity and standards on a Rush Limbaugh scale?

There are plenty of rational and intelligent and cogent and clear arguments that can be made in New York Times ad buys against perpetuating President Bush's stubborn occupation. Lame-ass rhymes don't cut it.

Watch Ms Digby!

On this day, the Democrats in Congress seem very very small, while Al Gore is like a giant.

I wish he would run. Then I would get really interested. I want to be inspired by the frontrunners. They hit the right notes, mostly, but really I feel like I'm watching a bunch of children fighting for the spotlight in the school musical.

And they have been almost inspiring so far because the Republican candidates are just so much more pathetic and stupid.

Help!

Via Shakesville, we learn that Hearst Newspapers did a little reading between the Pentagon lines:

The Bush administration is quietly on track to nearly double the number of combat troops in Iraq this year, an analysis of Pentagon deployment orders showed Monday.

The little-noticed second surge, designed to reinforce U.S. troops in Iraq, is being executed by sending more combat brigades and extending tours of duty for troops already there.

The actions could boost the number of combat soldiers from 52,500 in early January to as many as 98,000 by the end of this year if the Pentagon overlaps arriving and departing combat brigades.

Separately, when additional support troops are included in this second troop increase, the total number of U.S. troops in Iraq could increase from 162,000 now to more than 200,000 -- a record-high number -- by the end of the year.

I'm speechless.

"It doesn't surprise me that they're not talking about it," said retired Army Maj. Gen. William Nash, a former U.S. commander of NATO troops in Bosnia, referring to the Bush administration. "I think they would be very happy not to have any more attention paid to this."

I really really hope this analysis is wrong. What is definitely not reassuring is that we now have a military surge industry that is making very very big bucks on the war, and stand to lose out on mega cash flows when we withdraw. Dina Rasor writes in The Huffington Post:

When the surge doesn't work, what does the Bush Administration do? Surge some more!

New orders awaiting the signature of Defense Secretary Robert Gates will put 12,000 National Guard troops on alert to prepare to deploy to Iraq, the report said.

I think we've reached Benjamin Franklin's definition of instanity.

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.

Can we wait 21 more months? Back to the AP:

More than four years into the U.S.-led war in Iraq, the U.S. military shows increasing signs of strain.

On Monday, the Pentagon said it would send another 9,000 U.S. troops to Iraq, with about half of them returning to combat ahead of schedule.

Two of the affected Army units, totaling about 4,500 troops, will return to combat short of their promised year at home, reflecting the strain placed on U.S. forces by operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

So sad.

What would happen if we really need the Army for something else?

Jon Stewart called it "Iranian Hostage Crisis: The Next Generation" (with the requisite cool cable-news-like graphics), but now Iranian dissidents are saying it really is like old times: The Iranian government planned to take British soldiers hostage.

Abedini told a London press conference that an Iranian Revolutionary
Guard naval garrison had been on alert from the night before the
kidnapping, to prepare for the operation.

Mohammad Mohaddessin, who handles foreign affairs for the council,
said in a statement that Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei,
had ordered the detention of the Britons in the hope of pressuring the
British government over a threat to toughen U.N. sanctions.

"You can see that the clerical regime had in a premeditated act
arrested British sailors in order to win concessions from the
international community and divert attention from its nuclear project,"
Abedini said. "Claims that the sailors were arrested in Iranian
territorial waters are baseless."

They just hate to be left out of all the war-making fun.

The Pentagon is stretched to the limit.

Faced with a military buildup in Iraq that could drag into next year, Pentagon officials are trying to identify enough units to keep up to 20 brigade combat teams in Iraq. A brigade usually has about 3,500 troops.

The likely result will be extending the deployments of brigades scheduled to come home at the end of the summer, and sending others earlier than scheduled....

...The complex scheduling must identify which units would have been home for 12 months and be trained and ready to go, plus whether the needed equipment would be available and what impact a schedule change has on other plans for the equipment or troops months down the road.

Combat troops, meanwhile, are coming to realize that the Pentagon can't fulfill its commitment to give soldiers two years at home for every year they spend deployed.

This is what happens when a war has no popular support and its biggest supporters are chickenhawks.