Both Kevin Drum and Spencer Ackerman point out that various ninnies on the Right are attacking Obama for noting that many of the positive developments now attributed to teh Surge by McCain and other Iraq War enthusiasts in fact appear to have occurred not only separately and independently from the Surge, but also months before the Surge strategy was announced and even longer before it was embarked upon. Responding to NRO Obersttwit Andy McCarthy’s comment:

Does Obama think the Sunni Awakening and the Shia militia stand-down are somehow separate developments from the surge and the brilliant performance of American forces? If he really thinks that, it’s dumb.

Drum answers:

* February 2006: Muqtada al-Sadr orders an end to execution-style killings by Mahdi Army death squads.

* August 2006: Sadr announces a broad ceasefire, which he has maintained ever since.

* September 2006: The Sunni Awakening begins. Tribal leaders, first in Anbar and later in other provinces, start fighting back against al-Qaeda insurgents.

* March 2007: The surge begins.

Say what you will about the surge, which does indeed deserve a share of the credit for reducing violence and increasing security in Baghdad. But it pretty obviously wasn’t related to either the Shia militia stand-down or the Sunni Awakening, since both those things began before Petraeus took over in Iraq and before the surge was even a gleam in George Bush’s eye.

Responding to Presumptive Republican Nominee and non-geographer John McCain’s fatuous attack on Obama claiming that:

I don’t know how you respond to something that is as– such a false depiction of what actually happened. Colonel McFarlane [phonetic] was contacted by one of the major Sunni sheiks. Because of the surge we were able to go out and protect that sheik and others. And it began the Anbar awakening. I mean, that’s just a matter of history.

Ackerman points out that Colonel McFarland himself was explaining the success of the Anbar Awakening to Pam Hess of the UPI in September of 2006, several months before teh Surge was announced by Bush:

I think al Qaeda has been pushed up against the ropes by this, and now they’re finding themselves trapped between the coalition and ISF on the one side, and the people on the other.

Leading Ackerman to conclude:

For McCain to say that the Anbar Awakening is the product of the surge is either a lie or professional malpractice for a presidential candidate who is staking his election on his allegedly superior Iraq judgment.

I’m voting for the fuck up rather than the lie, personally.

Unless it can be demonstrated that teh Surge is so magic it can go back in time and cause the Anbar Sheiks to shift their allegiances, coerce Sadr to reign his militias, and then declare a ceasefire.

In which case I want teh Surge to go back in time again and put $100,000 on the Giants to win the Super Bowl, before the season started.

or a “Time Horizon” or a “Aspirational Goal.”

Bush, Maliki Agree on ‘Time Horizon’ for U.S. Troop Withdrawals

President Bush and Iraq’s prime minister have agreed to set a “time horizon” for the withdrawal of U.S. combat troops from Iraq as security conditions in the war-ravaged nation continue to improve, White House officials said here Friday.

The agreement, reached during a video conference Thursday between Bush and Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, marks a dramatic shift for the Bush administration, which for years has condemned any talk of timetables for withdrawal.

But Maliki and other Iraqi leaders in recent weeks have begun demanding firm withdrawal deadlines from the United States. Bush said earlier this week that he opposes “arbitrary” timetables but was open to setting an “aspirational goal” for moving U.S. troops to a support role.

Call it whatever mealy-mouthed crap you want to, W. You can even pretend it’s not a reversal of 5 years of “no timetable” policy.

Here’s the White House Press Release, which appears in parts to have been translated from English into gobbledegook:

In the area of security cooperation, the President and the Prime Minister agreed that improving conditions should allow for the agreements now under negotiation to include a general time horizon for meeting aspirational goals — such as the resumption of Iraqi security control in their cities and provinces and the further reduction of U.S. combat forces from Iraq.

Got that? It is so NOT a timeline — it’s a “general time horizon for meeting aspirational goals.”

Fred Kaplan of Slate has delved into the comments of General Wesley Clark about the qualifications of John McCain to be president. (Alex discussed the issue here).

Slate’s take has been that the remarks Clark made were not particularly beneficial to Barack Obama and Kaplan opines that we’ve seen the last of Clark as a national security adviser to Obama.

There are two explanations for Gen. Wesley Clark’s politically tin-eared remark about Sen. John McCain last Sunday.

First, Clark is politically tin-eared. Remember his 2004 presidential campaign?

Here, as a reminder, is what Clark said when asked about the Republican presidential candidate on the June 29 episode of CBS’s Face the Nation:

I certainly honor his service as a prisoner of war. He was a hero to me and to hundreds of thousands and millions of others in the armed forces as a prisoner of war.

That was where Clark should have zipped his lips. But, as if he couldn’t hold back some raging impulse, he went on:

He hasn’t held executive responsibility. … I don’t think riding in a fighter plane and getting shot down is a qualification to be president.

In a sense, of course, Clark is right. There’s nothing about flying a plane—or, for that matter, driving a tank or shooting a rifle—that indicates a talent for high office. But if the retired general wanted to be on the team and possibly in the Cabinet of Sen. Barack Obama—who also has never held an executive position and was, on that very day, fending off accusations of insufficient patriotism—he should have known that it’s best not to wander this turf.

But Kaplan’s second argument is more interesting. He believes that the remarks were motivated by the fact that Clark was an Army infantryman in Vietnam, while McCain was a Navy airman. Kaplan details the rivalry between the two service branches in ‘Nam (for example, the Navy — and the Air Force — refused to provide air cover to Army soldiers on the ground, instead returning to dine in the officer’s club after their missions while soldiers ate scraps in the jungle) and believes that Clark’s remarks were a manifestation of old rivalries.

The article then describes how the competition between branches has diminished over time, in part due to legislation and in part due to the fact that there is so much money in the military budget now, there is less reason for the Army, Navy, Marines and Air Force to compete — they all already just about get whatever they want.

But the rivalries haven’t altogether disappeared. I found this paragraph and the accompanying chart particularly interesting, prompting the entry you are reading:

Still, tensions persist. Some soldiers and Marines resent the Air Force and Navy for shouldering so light a burden in Iraq, bearing only 4 percent of the fatalities and 2 percent of the injuries in this war. (See chart below.)

That’s a large imbalance. Close to 4,000 of the 4,105 military deaths U.S. forces have suffered in Iraq have been taken by the Army and the Marines. Only about 150 were suffered by the Air Force or the Navy. Only about 1,000 of the 48,000 injured were Air Force or Navy personnel. The resentment by those in the Army and the Marines is understandable.

Kaplan concludes by summing up the Clark-McCain personal rivalry:

And that may explain what was going on in the mind of Clark on Sunday morning. In his case, the institutional resentments may have been stiffened by personal ones. McCain, as he noted, has never held a position of command. Clark, on the other hand, has held many—not just as a company commander in Vietnam and at Ft. Knox but also as the supreme allied commander in Europe and, in that capacity, as the commander of the air war in Kosovo. And yet in his bid for the presidency, Clark barely made it past the New Hampshire primaries, while McCain—this fighter pilot and war prisoner—is one of the two finalists to become the ultimate commander, the commander in chief.

Life, the Army man might have been thinking, just isn’t fair.

While David Brooks may have been busy earlier this week publishing the latest “Mission Accomplished” screed in the pages of the New York Times, Reality continues to rear its ugly head, suggesting that whatever improvements teh Surge may have accomplished, they are not enough to justify the level of gratuitous mutual dick-sucking Brooks and other war advocates have engaged in to celebrate the perceived vindication of their costly and still-ruinous war:

Two insurgent bomb blasts struck at pro-American Iraqi targets in Anbar province just west of Baghdad and in the northern city of Mosul on Thursday, and the police said at least 30 people were killed and 80 wounded.

Iraqi police officials said three American marines were among the dead in the Anbar attack, which came just as the American military command was preparing to hand control of the province, once considered the hotbed of the insurgency, over to Iraqi forces.

The bombings extended a pattern of multiple-casualty attacks in recent days that are clearly intended to kill local Iraqi leaders, in particular those who are believed to have collaborated with American forces against insurgents.

Yes, thanks to what Brooks called Bush’s “courageous and astute decision” in Iraq, we’re standing at the brink of victory in Iraq, it is said. Unfortunately Kamil al-Showaili, a judge on one of Iraq’s top two appeals courts, won’t be there to see it:

Top judge assassinated in Baghdad

A leading Iraqi judge has been ambushed and shot dead by gunmen in Baghdad.

Kamil al-Showaili, head of one of the capital’s two appeals courts, was driving home in the east of the city when the attack happened.

Police said masked assailants used two vehicles to block the judge’s path, before opening fire and driving away.

Mr Showaili, who was in his 50s, was one of the country’s most important judges, charged with handing criminal cases for eastern Baghdad.

Imagine if a US Supreme Court Justice was gunned down by assassins, and you get the picture.

And the day following Brooks’ triumphalist wankery, four Americans were killed at a meeting in Sadr City:

Ten people, including two US government workers and two US soldiers, were killed yesterday when a bomb went off at a council meeting in the Baghdad stronghold of the Iraqi Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.

Six Iraqis died and 10 were wounded in the attack on a local authority building in Sadr City. The US military blamed the bombing on renegade Shia militias called “special groups” – jargon for rogue elements of Mr Sadr’s Mehdi Army that America claims is supported by Iran. Tehran denies the charges.

To top things off, the GAO report casts doubt on the ability of Iraqi forces to act independent of US military support. More than a year after the surge was announced, it’s been so successful that we’re more committed to continuing our occupation than we were before its started, and have yet to withdraw all the forces committed to increase our troop presence.

Trainwreck Media lead dumbkopf Roger Simon:

Whatever one thinks about the neocons, they had virtually the only program, the only idea of how to right the world after 9/11.

Me:

If they have such a program of how to right the world, as Simon claims, it’s about time they tell us what it is, and try to implement it in place of the humongous clusterfuck of death, incompetence, and costly ruin they’ve inflicted on the US and the world the last 7 years.

My suspicion, however it that the program of how to right the world about which Simon speaks is every bit as imaginary as the non-existent Iraqi WMDs Roger claimed was transported through the mythical tunnels into Syria with the help of the Russians.

Via Instaputz.

David Brooks:

But before long, the more honest among the surge opponents will concede that Bush, that supposed dolt, actually got one right. Some brave souls might even concede that if the U.S. had withdrawn in the depths of the chaos, the world would be in worse shape today.

Winston Wolf:

Well, let’s not start suckin’ each other’s dicks quite yet. Phase one is complete, clean the car, which moves us right along to phase two, clean you two.

Reading Brooks’ column today, it’s clear that (put into The Wolf’s terms) he’s disregarded the advice of The Wolf and gone straight to sucking Bush and every other surge enthusiast’s dick. Phase one is complete — we’re now down to hundreds of political murders each month, instead of 2-3 thousand — but Iraq remains a patchwork of tribal, sectarian and ethnic divisions which the weak central government (from which Juan Cole reports another coalition party has withdrawn) remains unable to reconcile. The reduction of violence in Anbar has been accomplished by arming and paying former Sunni insurgents who have no fealty to the Shiite government in Baghdad. And never mind that the reduction in violence has been achieved in part due to the completion of ethnic cleansing which has resulted in 2.5 million internally displaced refugees, and a series of truces and ceasefires which periodically threaten to dissolve into more fratricidal violence on a massive scale. Pay no attention to the central government we are backing in Baghdad canoodling with Iran’s leadership and Iran exerting increasing influence in Iraq, by giving and withholding support for the various Iraqi Shiite factions, despite our emphasis on excluding Iran from Iraq’s power structure.

So here we are, with more troops in Iraq than we had pre-surge, negotiating an agreement to expand our presence from 30 to 58 bases on a indefinite basis, with no clear plan or clear path to ending our commitment in American lives and treasure in the foreseeable future.

Bush and Brooks are standing like Jules and Vincent, drenched in Marvin’s blood and brains, still without a plan that will get the car and Marvin out of sight and their own sorry asses cleaned up — or our troops out of Iraq in the next 10 years. Phase II or Phase III?? They’re too busy congratulating each other — not how The Wolf put it — to bother with that. . .

MORE: Right Blogostan is having an orgy of fellatial self-congratulation, but at least one conservative isn’t buying it. At the same time, a GAO report sheds more light on the administration’s ongoing political failures in Iraq:

While agreeing with the administration that violence has decreased sharply, a report released yesterday by the Government Accountability Office concluded that many other goals Bush outlined a year and a half ago in the “New Way Forward” strategy remain unmet.

The report, after a bleak GAO assessment last summer, cited little improvement in the ability of the Iraqi security forces to act independently of the U.S. military, and noted that key legislation passed by the Iraqi parliament had not been implemented while other crucial laws had not been passed. The report also judged that key Iraqi ministries spent less of their allocated budgets last year than in previous years, and said that oil and electricity production had repeatedly not met U.S. targets.

Gunned down a group of US troops?

A disgruntled local official opened fire Monday on U.S. soldiers attending a municipal council meeting southeast of Baghdad, killing two of them and wounding four other Americans, U.S. and Iraqi officials said.

The assailant died in a hail of gunfire after the attack, which occurred in the town of Madain, also known as Salman Pak, about 15 miles south of Baghdad in an area with a history of Sunni-Shiite tension.

U.S. officials confirmed two American soldiers died and that four Americans, including a civilian interpreter, were wounded.

Iraqi police and witnesses said the attack took place in front of the Madain municipal building where the Americans had come to confer with local authorities.

U.S. officials said the Americans were leaving the building when the assailant opened fire about 1 p.m. However, the U.S. officials released no further details except that the assailant was killed.

“The attacker came out of his car with an AK-47 rifle in his hand and started firing on the American soldiers until he was killed by the return fire,” said Hussein al-Dulaimi, 37, who owns an agricultural machine shop across the street.

McCain continues to peddle his fable about a warm, safe, friendly occupation of US troops in Iraq stretching on for decades, but he’s drinking the same Kool Aid as the “greeted as liberators” crowd who preceded him. Five years after the conclusion of conventional combat, Iraq is still a mess, economically, politically, and militarily. By committing our military beyond its resources we’ve been able to reduce the level of violence, but the causes and stresses which contribute to political violence in Iraq continue to boil slightly beneath the surface.

The combatants may have concealed their arms and may be standing down for the time being, but any attempt to compare our military presence in Iraq to post World War II experiences in Germany or Japan, which were stable and violence free for years by 1950, is an exercise in abject stupidity.

McClatchy nee Knight-Ridder is once again out in front reporting on the Bush Administration’s malfeasance. On the front page of the Washington Bureau’s web page:

The Army general who led the investigation into prisoner abuse at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison accused the Bush administration Wednesday of committing “war crimes” and called for those responsible to be held to account.

The remarks by Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba, who’s now retired, came in a new report that found that U.S. personnel tortured and abused detainees in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, using beatings, electrical shocks, sexual humiliation and other cruel practices.

“After years of disclosures by government investigations, media accounts and reports from human rights organizations, there is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes,” Taguba wrote. “The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account.”

Taguba, whose 2004 investigation documented chilling abuses at Abu Ghraib, is thought to be the most senior official to have accused the administration of war crimes. “The commander in chief and those under him authorized a systematic regime of torture,” he wrote.

Buried in the Washington Post’s site:

In a statement accompanying the report, retired Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba, who led the Army’s first official investigation on Abu Ghraib, said the new evidence suggested a “systematic regime of torture” inside U.S.-run detention camps.

I guess that’s what happens when you suckle up to the powers that be, and later lay off many of your best reporters, especially the ones who didn’t join a myopic editorial staff which still maintains that Bush was telling the truth about those non-existent WMDs and honestly relied on faked and blatantly flawed evidence in pimping the war to the American people like a bunch of Madison Avenue ad men.

PREDICTION: If other major news media pick up this story, Taguba will be labeled by the Right as “disgruntled.” Just because, you know, he was fired by Rumsfeld for making too thorough an investigation.

McClatchy’s Washington Bureau has more details on the formerly secret pact the Bush administration has negotiated with Iraq’s government, which calls for scores of US bases and an indefinite American presence in Iraq:

Iraqi lawmakers say the United States is demanding 58 bases as part of a proposed “status of forces” agreement that will allow U.S. troops to remain in the country indefinitely.

Leading members of the two ruling Shiite parties said in a series of interviews the Iraqi government rejected this proposal along with another U.S. demand that would have effectively handed over to the United States the power to determine if a hostile act from another country is aggression against Iraq. Lawmakers said they fear this power would drag Iraq into a war between the United States and Iran.

“The points that were put forth by the Americans were more abominable than the occupation,” said Jalal al Din al Saghir, a leading lawmaker from the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq. “We were occupied by order of the Security Council,” he said, referring to the 2004 Resolution mandating a U.S. military occupation in Iraq at the head of an international coalition. “But now we are being asked to sign for our own occupation. That is why we have absolutely refused all that we have seen so far.”

Other conditions sought by the United States include control over Iraqi air space up to 30,000 feet and immunity from prosecution for U.S. troops and private military contractors. The agreement would run indefinitely but be subject to cancellation with two years notice from either side, lawmakers said.

Incredibly, the “security pact” could actually expand US presence in Iraq:

The 58 bases would represent an expansion of the U.S. presence here. Currently, the United States operates out of about 30 major bases, not including smaller facilities such as combat outposts, according to a U.S. military map.

The agreement would be indefinite, but could be cancelled with two years notice. In attempting to institutionalize US occupation past his presidency, Bush is claiming the agreement does not rise to the level of a treaty and thus require submission to the Senate or approval.

The invasion of Iraq has destabilized Iraq and brought Shiite political parties with long and close ties to Iran into power in Iraq, while destroying the power of the Sunni and Baathist enemies of Iran. So all in all, it’s worked out pretty well for the mullahs, but was this awful result mere serendipity?

Did Iranian agents dupe Pentagon officials?

WASHINGTON — Defense Department counterintelligence investigators suspected that Iranian exiles who provided dubious intelligence on Iraq and Iran to a small group of Pentagon officials might have “been used as agents of a foreign intelligence service … to reach into and influence the highest levels of the U.S. government,” a Senate Intelligence Committee report said Thursday.

A top aide to then-secretary of defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, however, shut down the 2003 investigation into the Pentagon officials’ activities after only a month, and the Defense Department’s top brass never followed up on the investigators’ recommendation for a more thorough investigation, the Senate report said.

The revelation raises questions about whether Iran may have used a small cabal of officials in the Pentagon and in Vice President Dick Cheney’s office to feed bogus intelligence on Iraq and Iran to senior policymakers in the Bush administration who were eager to oust the Iraqi dictator.

Iran, which was a mortal enemy of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and fought a bloody eight-year war with Iraq during his reign, has been the primary beneficiary of U.S. policy in Iraq, where Iranian-backed groups now run much of the government and the security forces.

This follows the classic pattern of the Bush administration: the fuck-up (being the stooge of a foreign intel op) followed by the cover-up (killing the investigation into the matter).

Front and center as the witless conduits of foreign intelligence efforts are the familiar names of two of the leading dimbulb warpimps responsible for pushing the Iraq invasion:

According to the report, Ledeen, however, persisted, presenting then-Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith with a new 100-day plan to provide, among other things, evidence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction that supposedly had been moved to Iran — Saddam Hussein’s archenemy.

Ledeen, who regularly receives foot massages from Trainwreck’s Roger Simon, was really on top of things, though:

When the CIA and the State Department discovered that Ledeen and Ghorbanifar were involved, they opposed any further contact with the two. Ledeen’s contacts, the Defense Human Intelligence Service concluded, were “nefarious and unreliable,” the Senate committee reported.

Bear this in mind the next time Ledeen advocates nuclear strikes on Iran.

The name Ahmed Chalabi should fit into this story. Chalabi was the Iraqi exile who was promoted by the Neocon numbnuts at the Project for a New American Century (Bill Kristol’s intellectual sewer) as Iraq’s George Washington. As I write today, I find the PNAC’s website reads:
“This Account Has Been Suspended
Please contact the billing/support department as soon as possible,”
but the site once contained the PNAC’s lengthy hagiography of Chalabi, and an homage to his integrity and the value of his intelligence apparatus.

Of course, this was before it was determined that the information Chalabi provided to gullible neocon warhawks was purposely false and misleading, based on unreliable (and often drunken) sources, before Chalabi was accused of spying for Iran, and before Chalabi’s most recent notoriety, when earlier this month he was fired from his government post due to “his murky ties to Iran, including leaders of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), the country’s internal security force.” An earlier Salon.com piece on “How Ahmed Chalabi Conned the Neocons” touched upon both Chalabi’s influence with the PNAC hawks who steered administration towards invading Iraq, and his ties with Iran’s leadership. A money quote: “”Ahmed Chalabi is a treacherous, spineless turncoat,” from former ally Marc Zell.

Bellicose, feckless and duped is no way to run our foreign policy.