From Ben Smith. While the Bush Administration hurriedly pushed out a statement through Centcom claiming that Maliki’s endorsement of Obama’s 16-month timeline for withdrawal which appeared in Der Spiegel was the result of a “mistranslation,” there’s one wee little problem: Der Spiegel has a policy of issuing transcripts to interviewees, like al Maliki, and allowing them to correct any mistakes prior to publication.

BushCo’s attempt to brush al Maliki’s statement under the rug reminds me of the indignant declaration of the title character in Greene’s The Captain and the Enemy:

Ah, you’ll have to learn to tell a lie properly. What’s the good of a lie if it’s seen through? When I tell a lie, no one can tell it from the gospel truth.

And that’s in English, so no translation needed.

“For the moment he had shut his ears to the remoter noises and was listening to the stuff that streamed out of the telescreen. It appeared that there had even been demonstrations to thank Big Brother for raising the chocolate ration to twenty grammes a week. And only yesterday, he reflected, it had been announced that the ration was to be reduced to twenty grammes a week. Was it possible that they could swallow that, after only twenty-four hours? Yes, they swallowed it. The fabulous statistics continued to pour out of the telescreen.”
— George Orwell, 1984

Another Mission Accomplished Moment for the Bush administration, although we have 147,000 troops left in Iraq now, as opposed to the 130,000 troops before teh Surge:

The U.S. troop “surge” in Iraq that President George W. Bush ordered last year has ended after the last of five additional combat brigades left the country, a U.S. military spokesman said on Tuesday.

The remaining troops from that brigade departed over the weekend, leaving just under 147,000 American soldiers in Iraq, the spokesman said.

“The final elements of the surge brigade have now left, getting out a few days ahead of schedule,” he said.

The U.S. military had 20 combat brigades in Iraq at its peak in 2007, with troop levels around 160,000-170,000.

The current number is well above the 130,000 troops in Iraq when Bush ordered the deployment in January 2007. The Pentagon said last February it expected 140,000 troops to be in Iraq once the five brigade drawdown had finished.

So. . . . teh Surge is supposed to improve conditions in Iraq so our troops could come home. . . and was such a smashing success, we end up with 10-17,000 more than when we started.

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.

The White House calls Maliki and tells him to retract the third statement by an Iraqi official which essentially concurs with Obama’s time frame for withdrawal?

Senator Barack Obama arrived in Baghdad on Monday, meeting with Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki and other senior Iraqi politicians, as an Iraqi spokesman said that the government was hopeful that foreign combat troops would withdraw in 2010.

Sixteen Months after taking office is about smack dab in the middle of 2010. Obama has always said he’d retain some flexibility in withdrawing troops based on conditions, and even the end of 2010 is a lot closer to Obama’s timeline for withdrawal Time Horizon for Aspirational Goal — several months — than it is to McCain’s non-timeline of 4-100 years.

Is Michael Mukasey as nutty as Alberto Gonzalez is dishonest?

Congress should explicitly declare war against al Qaeda to make clear the United States can detain suspected members as long as the conflict lasts, U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey said on Monday.

Mukasey urged Congress to make the declaration in a package of legislative proposals to establish a legal process for terrorism suspects held at Guantanamo, in response to a Supreme Court ruling last month that detainees had a constitutional right to challenge their detention.

“Any legislation should acknowledge again and explicitly that this nation remains engaged in an armed conflict with al Qaeda, the Taliban and associated organizations, who have already proclaimed themselves at war with us,” Mukasey said in a speech to the American Enterprise Institute.

“Congress should reaffirm that for the duration of the conflict the United States may detain as enemy combatants those who have engaged in hostilities or purposefully supported al Qaeda, the Taliban and associated organizations,” he said.

I don’t recall recall Francis Biddle telling Congress that December 7th was a date which will live in infamy and asking it to declare war on Japan. Presumably, if President Bush actually wanted a declaration of war against a non-state actor, he could have asked for such a declaration at any point in the last 7 years. A declaration of war is obviously a serious matter, and not one which should be taken to make an attorney general’s task of defending unwise and unconstitutional detention schemes any easier.

Who knows, maybe they’re thinking of issuing some Executive Orders and repopulating Manzanar? I do know that asking Congress to give the Bush administration even more executive powers after his systematic abuse and usurpation of power aided by a largely supine Congress is a non-starter.

I’m pretty sure that FDR didn’t tell a bunch of campaign contributors on June 4, 1944 that we were going to give the Germans hell in Normandy in a couple days.

Did McCain just tell al Qaeda where to find Barack Obama and other US Senators over the weekend?

Although Nixon did announce the invasion of Cambodia a few hours before it actually started. . . of course the NVA knew long before that.

Hilzoy:

This is not just another screwup from McCain. It is very, very serious. There are things you are just Not Supposed To Talk About. This is one of them. If McCain doesn’t have the common sense, the decency, and the discipline not to talk about them, that’s a very serious problem. Since I’m not willing to assume he did this out of malice, I have to conclude that he just let this slip. But if he were President, we would need to count on him not to let things like this slip. Apparently, we can’t. And that’s a very big deal.

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.”

John McCain has his own Mission Accomplished Moment:

The comments come a day after the Arizona senator appeared to make a rhetorical shift in how he described conditions the war-torn country, telling reporters aboard his campaign bus that “we have succeeded in Iraq.”

“I repeat my statement that we have succeeded in Iraq. Not ‘We are succeeding.’ We have succeeded in Iraq,” he said Thursday.

Naturally, victory will take the form of spectacular attacks in Iraq:

“I predict that they will make an attempt as we get in to the election season to make more of these spectacular kinds of attacks which they’re still capable of doing,” he said. “The suicide bombers, et cetera, would not surprise me and we’ve already found out that they’re going to try and step up their attacks and try and do things in a more spectacular fashion so that they can erode the support of the Maliki government.”

As a not-so-great man once said:

Or, attention Kathryn Lopez.

Pricing for infallible text messages starts at just 49 cents.

With staff and space reductions, the paper will not publish handicap charts and results.

Horse racing

Because of ongoing reductions to The Times Sports staff and space for news in the Sports section, the handicap charts and results from Del Mar will not be included in the daily sports report. There will be coverage of major events during the seven-week meeting. In addition, other weekly features that have been eliminated are the Gearing Up package on motor racing, Teeing Off on golf and Corner Kicks on soccer.