Current Events on the News - A New Beginning

[phil]

Judging from this morning George & Tony news conference
it's pretty safe to say Junior wont like the "Baker/Hamilton"
report on Irak one bit ...

Assuming that he will read it of course ... !

[Galactus]

It's pretty unbelievable that Bush been handed the best umbrella to get out of this mess and he doesn't look he's going to take it. The Baker report plays it safe and obvious, all he has to do is say"well, yeah this is the plan. There's nothing new here." Instead he says "Jim Baker can go back to his day job"? Holy fuck, this guy wasn't kidding when he said all he needed was the support of his dog. He really is just going to ride it out and dump it in the next guy's lap. At this point I can't buy that he just won't admit he's wrong, so the conclusion must be that he believes in it that much. He really and truly believes he can fix his way...or maybe he just doesn't believe it's that bad...it's just incredible. The pictures of this guy looking at the report, he looks like someone just handed gay midget porn (remember he doesn't like the gays, I don't know his feeling on midgets) anyway, it's just disgust. I can't imagine what's in that guy's head.

[phil]

The problem for Junior is that just the fact of discussing the report conclusions is to admit that that his entire course of action in Irak was a total failure.

He had the same discourse on Irak for the last 3 years now so it will take a while longer to emerge from his state of profound denial and start on the road of compromise and diplomacy …

[kmc]

I'm sure he'll read the graphic novel.

Worst. President. Ever.

[phil]

I'm sure he'll read the New York Post ...



THE COUNSEL OF COWARDS

December 7, 2006 -- After nine laborious months, the Iraq Study Group yesterday recom mended that there be peace in the Middle East.

Well, of course.

But how to achieve it?

One word: Surrender.

Surrender in Iraq - and, in due time but inevitably, beyond.

Not in so many words, of course.

The 10-member group, headed by Republican Jim Baker and Democrat Lee Hamilton, wants to pull out U.S. combat troops within 16 months.

It wants Washington to ask those fomenting violence in Iraq - Iran and Syria - to be good fellows and stop it.

And it wants Israel to begin another "dialogue" in pursuit of peace. (Translation: It wants Israel to surrender, too.)

"The situation is grave and deteriorating," the much-hyped report begins, adding: "There is no path that can guarantee success" and "There is no action the American military can take that, by itself, can bring about success in Iraq."

Of course there are no guarantees.

There are never guarantees.

The report decidedly avoids using the word "victory." Rather, it sees only the possibility of somehow improving the odds of "success."

But that's just putting lipstick on this pig of a report.

The fact is, the study group offers 79 recommendations adding up to a cowardly exit from Iraq - and the abandonment of tens of thousands of Iraqis who took America's promises at face value.

Also to be tossed overboard are regional allies who believed America has the will to finish the fight it began.

Does it? That is the question.

President Bush has said quitting the fight "simply has no realism to it at all."

Here's hoping he means it. Because Iraq is a key theater in the broader War on Terror. And anything short of a win there doesn't mean the larger war is lost - but it makes ultimate victory immeasurably harder to achieve.
The group's solution?

Talk to Tehran and Damascus.

But those regimes are already talking: Iran is actively supporting the Shia insurrection in Iraq, and Syria is murdering members of the freely elected Lebanese government.

Which brings us to the study group's focus on a new peace process for Israel and its enemies - which represents utterly breathtaking disregard for decades of failed earlier such efforts.

Israel has made every manner of concession, fruitlessly. To this day, Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran vow only to erase Israel from the map.
But the group wants more diplomacy, because it sees the Arab-Israeli conflict as central to the Middle East puzzle.

Which is nonsense: Israel, in fact, is a vivid symbol of the broader clash between Islamic fundamentalists and jihadis, and Western civilization.

Ending the conflict there can come only with victory in the War on Terror - not the other way around.

Why - absent a strong threat - would Iran, Syria and their puppet dispensers of terror quit, when their efforts to spread their power seem to be succeeding?

Why would they agree to help their enemies - America and Israel?

The answer: They wouldn't.

Baker himself all but admits it: "We didn't get the feeling Iran is champing at the bit to come to the table with us to talk about Iraq," he said. "And in fact we say they very well might not."

No fooling.

Call it anything you like, but this latest prescription for Iraq is nothing more than a plan for surrender. Notwithstanding the disaster that would surely follow.

President Bush should thank the ISG for its work - and promptly toss the report in the trash.

The president has a lot to answer for, but Operation Iraqi Freedom, while badly mismanaged, was a noble - and necessary -undertaking.

The war is not yet lost, nor need it be.

Bush needs courage right now.

The Iraq Study Group counsels cowardice - and, ultimately, a shameful defeat.

[phil]

Iraq Strategy Review Focusing on Three Main Options

By Robin Wright and Peter Baker
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, December 9, 2006; Page A01

As pressure mounts for a change of course in Iraq, the Bush administration is groping for a viable new strategy for the president to unveil by Christmas, with deliberations now focused on three main options to redefine the U.S. military and political engagement, according to officials familiar with the debate.

The major alternatives include a short-term surge of 15,000 to 30,000 additional U.S. troops to secure Baghdad and accelerate the training of Iraqi forces. Another strategy would redirect the U.S. military away from the internal strife to focus mainly on hunting terrorists affiliated with al-Qaeda. And the third would concentrate political attention on supporting the majority Shiites and abandon U.S. efforts to reach out to Sunni insurgents.

As President Bush and his advisers rush to complete their crash review and craft a new formula in the next two weeks, some close to the process said the major goal seems to be to stake out alternatives to the plan presented this week by the bipartisan Iraq Study Group. The White House denied trying to brush off the study group's report and said those recommendations are being considered alongside internal reviews.

But the growing undercurrent of discussions within the administration is shifting responsibility for Iraq's problems to Iraqis. Sources familiar with the deliberations describe fatigue, frustration and a growing desire to disengage from Iraq. The sources spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the deliberations.

"None of us see the situation in Iraq as favorable. We all see it as extremely difficult," Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said yesterday.

Bush will devote most of next week to his Iraq review. He plans to visit the State Department on Monday to consult with his foreign policy team, then he will host independent Iraq experts in the Oval Office. The next day, he will hold a videoconference with U.S. military commanders and U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad in Iraq. He will travel to the Pentagon for more consultations on Wednesday.

The crash White House review -- which involves the State Department, the National Security Council, the CIA and the Pentagon -- is tentatively expected to lead to a speech to the nation the week of Dec. 18, officials say.

While one of the options involves a surge of U.S. troops, there is no agreement on what the mission of those forces would be, sources say. Discussions center on accelerating the training of Iraqi forces and helping secure Baghdad before turning it over to the Iraqis. The goal generally could be to improve Iraq's defense capabilities so U.S. combat troops could begin to withdraw faster.

The second idea is the "al-Qaeda option," which would transform the U.S. mission to focus on fighting terrorism and would disengage forces from domestic aspects of the multisided conflict. U.S. troops would take a backseat on the Shiite-Sunni conflict and instead hunt down al-Qaeda operatives, the sources say.

On the ground, for example, that could mean a shift away from operations in Baghdad's volatile Sadr City slum, or from efforts to stop car bombs and sectarian attacks. The administration is increasingly resigned to the fact that it can neither prevent nor intervene in Iraq's sectarian war, which has begun to supersede both the Sunni insurgency and al-Qaeda's operations, the sources say.

The two military options are not necessarily linked. Some in the interagency discussions favor both, while others support the al-Qaeda option but not a military surge, the sources say.

On the political front, the administration is focusing increasingly on variations of a "Shiite tilt," sometimes called an "80 percent solution," that would bolster the political center of Iraq and effectively leave in charge the Shiite and Kurdish parties that account for 80 percent of Iraq's 26 million people and that won elections a year ago.

Vice President Cheney's office has most vigorously argued for the "80 percent solution," in terms of both realities on the ground and the history of U.S. engagement with the Shiites, sources say. A source familiar with the discussions said Cheney argued this week that the United States could not again be seen to abandon the Shiites, Iraq's largest population group, after calling in 1991 for them to rise up against then-President Saddam Hussein and then failing to support them when they did. Thousands were killed in a huge crackdown.

Of the major proposals under discussion, only the "al-Qaeda option" is reflected in the Iraq Study Group's report. Recommendation 43 calls for the United States to shift priority to "the training, equipping, advising, and support mission and to counterterrorism operations."

The study group says it could support a short-term troop surge but notes that "past experience indicates that the violence would simply rekindle as soon as U.S. forces are moved to another area." The report does not, in the end, recommend more troops.

Senior administration officials caution that the review process is still fluid. "I don't think we're at the stage where we're coalescing around an option," said a top official who declined to speak on the record about internal deliberations. "These are everything's-on-the-table kinds of discussions."

Yet, as it changes course, the administration is still struggling to resolve central issues, including how much it trusts Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to tackle the two issues basic to stability: reconciliation and the militias that are fueling the sectarian violence. Despite Bush's public endorsement of Maliki after their meeting last week in Amman, Jordan, U.S. officials have not yet decided whether he has the will or the capability to take on his brethren Shiites in the name of national reconciliation -- either by dismantling their militias or getting them to embrace the Sunni minority.

Bush aides said the president has been misinterpreted by those who believe he is giving the back of his hand to the Iraq Study Group, led by former congressman Lee H. Hamilton (D-Ind.) and former secretary of state James A. Baker III, and they insist that the report's ideas are now part of the administration's review. "There's not a purpose to distinguish or make a distinction from the Baker-Hamilton commission," the senior official said. "In fact, many of their proposals are being seriously considered."

If anything, the official noted, the commission gave Bush some running room by rejecting a rapid troop withdrawal, something some Democrats have advocated. "Nobody's going to go below what they said," the official said, meaning that because the study group set a goal of pulling out combat units by early 2008, that is now the earliest that troops could be withdrawn.

But the stature of the commission members is such that the White House will have to justify any deviations from their plan. "The onus will be on us to explain why we are doing something they recommended or why not," the official said. "They can't just be jettisoned. They have to be dealt with."

The president, who met yesterday with congressional leaders, vowed to work with Democrats to forge a common strategy. "We talked about the need for a new way forward in Iraq," Bush told reporters. "And we talked about the need to work together on this important subject."

[phil]

A revolt against broken forms of government


A crucial lesson from the Iraq war reveals hubris in the White House and the failure of centralisation in Downing Street

Martin Kettle
Saturday December 9, 2006
The Guardian


Most of what has been written about this week's Iraq Study Group report has concentrated on Jim Baker and Lee Hamilton's big policy critique of America's historic humiliation. And quite right too. It was a shatteringly critical verdict and it left George Bush looking more than ever out of his depth at his White House press conference on Thursday.

Less attention has been focused on an important subtext of the report. Consider this example: "The US military has a long tradition of strong partnership between the civilian leadership of the department of defence and the uniformed services. Both have long benefited from a relationship in which the civilian leadership exercises control with the advantage of fully candid professional advice, and the military serves loyally with the understanding that its advice has been heard and valued. That tradition has frayed, and civil-military relations need to be repaired."

Or take - and reflect on the full implication of - this one-sentence observation a little further on: "Good policy is difficult to make when information is systematically collected in a way that minimises its discrepancy with policy goals." Or this: "A lack of coordination by senior management in Washington still hampers US contributions to Iraq's reconstruction."

The ISG report is a repudiation of the Bush administration's foreign policy. But it also repudiates the way the Bush administration works internally. Nowhere is this more resonant than in what it says about the Pentagon. For it was the Pentagon that ran the administration's Iraq policy, and the senior civilian officials - Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith - who did things their own way and marginalised any service chiefs who disagreed with them.

But the Pentagon ran the policy because the president allowed and encouraged them to do so. This was a huge disfigurement of the traditional inter-agency way of doing things, in which the president, as commander-in-chief, was supposed to make the decisions after taking advice from the inter-agency policy-making apparatus coordinated by the national security adviser. It was institutional failure on the epic scale.

As a number of recent books describe, notably Bob Woodward's State of Denial and Ron Suskind's The One-Percent Doctrine, this has been a recipe for bad decisions. As Suskind puts it: "Sober due diligence, with an eye to the way previous administrations have thought through a standard array of challenges facing the United States, creates, in fact, a kind of check on executive power and prerogative."

But Bush has never wanted that kind of check or balance. He is suspicious of officials, bureaucrats and departments. He is impatient with policy intellectuals. He doesn't want information. He prides himself on his certainties. As Woodward says, Bush has a "distrust of the inter-agency". That instinct became even more pronounced after 9/11. And as the challenges of Iraq grew more daunting, he wanted a process even less.

The important American commentator Mark Danner sums it up this way in the current New York Review of Books: "What is striking is the way that the most momentous of decisions were taken in the most shockingly haphazard ways, with the power in the hands of a few Pentagon civilians who knew little of Iraq or the region, the expertise of the rest of the government almost wholly excluded, and the president and his highest officials looking on."

It is a terrible indictment of the way the Iraq policy was generated and maintained. Baker-Hamilton is in part a revolt against this broken form of government. In its recommendation 46, the ISG calls on the new defence secretary, Bob Gates (who just happens to have been a member of the group), to do what he can to rebuild the old pre-Bush/Rumsfeld system, so that the senior military "feel free to offer independent advice not only to the civilian leadership in the Pentagon but also to the president and the national security council".

...

In short, a crucial lesson of the entire Iraq war has been that bad forms of government contribute significantly to bad decisions. Bush has been unforgivably incompetent. Blair has centralised and personalised too much. Both men came into office suspicious of the systems they inherited and eager to change them. This was understandable but in retrospect mistaken. It meant there were fewer effective ways for reasoned objections to affect the decision-making process. The obvious lesson for any successor is to try to avoid such hubris. But will the suspicious and centralising Gordon Brown submit his decisions to a more collegiate and rigorous system of scrutiny, giving equal weight to the views of all departments and officials? I leave the answer to you.

[rockysigman]

If Tim Johnson doesn't get well soon then this New Beginning may be over before it begins.

[kmc]

Doesn't look promising, does it Rock?

[strat-0]

As long as he's capable of signaling "aye" or "nay" it'll be intact.

[Weeping_Guitar]

Oh, he'll be capable.

Believe me, you want the turd with a nice smile honorable Gov. Rounds making as few decisions for our country as possible.

[shin]

What you been up to lately, Mike?

[Kensterberg]

weepingguitar said:

Oh, he'll be capable.

Believe me, you want the turd with a nice smile honorable Gov. Rounds making as few decisions for our country as possible.

Oh for the days when Wild Bill Janklow was Gov. of South Dakota.

He may not have been smart, but he was entertaining.

[Weeping_Guitar]

shin said:

What you been up to lately, Mike Mark?

Not too much. Still waiting for our boy Clark to get in the Presidential race.

Ken, you know it was just so aweing after Janklow's vehicular manslaughter incident. All of a sudden everyone was talking about what a monster this guy had been and how dare he think he was above the law all those years. Naturally, as you know well, he was re-elected by landslides time after time.

I'm thinking we'll be ok as far as Johnson is concerned but I'm sure Gov. Rounds will be the next in line to try to take him out of his Senate seat when he's up for re-election since he can't run for governor again in four years. GOP might have to put a bit of an effort up as, as the news stories state rightly, Johnson excels at staying out of the spotlight, which Daschle did not and ended up getting taken down by dirty games. Man, that still burns.

[shin]

Mark, shit. That's how long it's been I guess