About the only thing more comical than Barack Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize was the reaction of those who deemed the award “premature,” as if the brilliance of Obama’s foreign policy is so self-evident and its success so assured that if only the Norway Five had waited a few years, his Nobel worthiness would have been universally acknowledged.

To believe this, you have to be a dreamy adolescent (preferably Scandinavian and a member of the Socialist International) or an indiscriminate imbiber of White House talking points. After all, this was precisely the spin on the president’s various apology tours through Europe and the Middle East: National self-denigration – excuse me, outreach and understanding – is not meant to yield immediate results; it simply plants the seeds of good feeling from which foreign policy successes shall come.

Chauncey Gardiner could not have said it better. Well, at nine months, let’s review.

What’s come from Obama holding his tongue while Iranian demonstrators were being shot and from his recognizing the legitimacy of a thug regime illegitimately returned to power in a fraudulent election? Iran cracks down even more mercilessly on the opposition and races ahead with its nuclear program.

What’s come from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton taking human rights off the table on a visit to China and from Obama’s shameful refusal to see the Dalai Lama (a postponement, we are told). China hasn’t moved an inch on North Korea, Iran or human rights. Indeed it’s pushing with Russia to dethrone the dollar as the world’s reserve currency.

What’s come from the new-respect-for-Muslims Cairo speech and the unprecedented pressure on Israel for a total settlement freeze? “The settlement push backfired,” reports the Washington Post, and Arab-Israeli peace prospects have “arguably regressed.”

And what’s come from Obama’s single most dramatic foreign policy stroke – the sudden abrogation of missile defense arrangements with Poland and the Czech Republic that Russia had virulently opposed? For the East Europeans it was a crushing blow, a gratuitous restoration of Russian influence over a region that thought it had regained independence under American protection.

But maybe not gratuitous. Surely we got something in return for selling out our friends. Some brilliant secret trade-off to get strong Russian support for stopping Iran from going nuclear before it’s too late?

Just wait and see, said administration officials, who then gleefully played up an oblique statement by President Dmitry Medvedev a week later as vindication of the missile defense betrayal.

The Russian statement was so equivocal that such a claim seemed a ridiculous stretch at the time. Well, Clinton went to Moscow this week to nail down the deal. What did she get?

“Russia Not Budging On Iran Sanctions: Clinton Unable to Sway Counterpart.” Such was the Washington Post headline’s succinct summary of the debacle.

Note how thoroughly Clinton was rebuffed. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov declared that “threats, sanctions and threats of pressure” are “counterproductive.” Note: It’s not just sanctions that are worse than useless, but even the threat of mere pressure.

It gets worse. Having failed to get any movement from the Russians, Clinton herself moved – to accommodate the Russian position! Sanctions? What sanctions? “We are not at that point yet,” she averred. “That is not a conclusion we have reached … it is our preference that Iran work with the international community.”

But wait a minute. Didn’t Obama say in July that Iran had to show compliance by the G-20 summit in late September? And when that deadline passed, did he not then warn Iran that it would face “sanctions that have bite” and that it would have to take “a new course or face consequences”?

Gone with the wind. It’s the U.S. that’s now retreating from its already flimsy position of just three weeks ago. We’re not doing sanctions now, you see. We’re back to engagement. Just as the Russians suggest.

Henry Kissinger once said that the main job of Anatoly Dobrynin, the perennial Soviet ambassador to Washington, was to tell the Kremlin leadership that whenever they received a proposal from the United States that appeared disadvantageous to the United States, not to assume it was a trick.

No need for a Dobrynin today. The Russian leadership, hardly believing its luck, needs no interpreter to understand that when the Obama team clownishly rushes in bearing gifts and “reset” buttons, there is nothing ulterior, diabolical, clever or even serious behind it. It is amateurishness, wrapped in naiveté, inside credulity. In short, the very stuff of Nobels.

Charles Krauthammer is a columnist for the Washington Post Writers Group. His e-mail address is letters@ charleskrauthammer.com.

“War will continue until the end …” (Daniel 9:26)

Like the Pulitzer Prize for journalism, along with the Oscar and Emmy for film and television, the Nobel Peace Prize is an inside job in which liberal, wishful-thinking humanists give awards to each other.

For all I care, the Nobel Committee could have given their useless (except for the money) prize to Homer Simpson. Like President Barack Obama, Homer has done nothing to earn it, though he may be the only character who has been on TV more than the president.

According to the Web site www.globalsecurity.org, there are currently “42 active conflicts and/or wars in the world today.” Not all are shooting wars at the moment and there are several civil wars and conflicts between Israel and various terrorist groups, but 42 wars is a lot of war.

Peace generally occurs when aggressive evil is defeated, which is why Germany and Japan no longer war with the United States. The Nobel Committee apparently believes that by diplomatically singing “All we are saying is give peace a chance,” evil people will study war no more and be so impressed by our intentions they will lay down their arms.

Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad could win the Nobel Peace Prize in an instant if he announced his god had told him not to eradicate Israel, or usher in Armageddon. But Ahmadinejad won’t, because he is evil and must be defeated. Neither will he respond to negotiations or sanctions. Same with Osama bin Laden. The United Nations would welcome him as a speaker and the Nobel Committee would award him their top prize if he would announce he no longer believes in terrorism and has become a follower of the Dalai Lama or some other “acceptable” pseudo-deity. He also will do no such thing because he is evil and must be defeated.

The Nobel Committee believes George W. Bush is evil, but apparently not bin Laden or Ahmadinejad. It cringes at leaders who wish to overcome evil by force rather than have the forces of evil overcome them. The Nobel Committee hates Israel, too. And this is because its members, and like-minded male wimps around the world, idolize Michael J. Fox instead of John Wayne and find their role models in the liberal ladies of “The View,” not in muscular characters like Jack Bauer (and Chloe, who gets it) on “24.”

The peace prize concept is flawed because the problem of war does not lie with those who would make peace, but with those who would make war. If the Nobel Committee were realistic, it would stop handing out peace prizes and start issuing awards for those who have confronted evil and produced peace in nations that have only known oppression. Candidates for such prizes would include Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and Pope John Paul II, who conspired to liberate Europe from the totalitarian hand of Soviet communism.

Bill Clinton would also be a legitimate candidate for his efforts that stabilized Bosnia. He could take some small credit for the peace in Northern Ireland, which, though worked on for decades, was finally brokered on his watch. President Obama was right when he acknowledged that he doesn’t deserve the prize. Neither did Yasser Arafat, Henry Kissinger, Le Duc Tho or Al Gore.

The question should be: Why, despite man’s best efforts, including the League of Nations and United Nations, have we been unsuccessful in eradicating war? The answer lies in this ancient wisdom: “What causes fights and quarrels among you? Don’t they come from your desires that battle within you? You want something but don’t get it. You kill and covet, but you cannot have what you want. You quarrel and fight. You do not have because you do not ask God. When you ask, you do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives that you may spend what you get on your pleasures.” (James 4:1-3)

That’s why a peace prize is meaningless.

Cal Thomas is a columnist for Tribune Media Services.

The genius of democracy is the rotation of power, which forces the opposition to be serious – particularly about things like war, about which until Jan. 20 of this year Democrats were decidedly unserious.

When the Iraq war (which a majority of Senate Democrats voted for) ran into trouble and casualties began to mount, Democrats followed the shifting winds of public opinion and turned decidedly anti-war. But needing political cover because of their post-Vietnam reputation for weakness on national defense, they adopted Afghanistan as their pet war.

“I was part of the 2004 Kerry campaign, which elevated the idea of Afghanistan as ‘the right war’ to conventional Democratic wisdom,” wrote Democratic consultant Bob Shrum shortly after President Obama was elected.

“This was accurate as criticism of the Bush administration, but it was also reflexive and perhaps by now even misleading as policy.”

Which is a clever way to say that championing victory in Afghanistan was a contrived and disingenuous policy in which Democrats never seriously believed, a convenient two-by-four with which to bash George Bush over Iraq – while still appearing warlike enough to fend off the soft-on-defense stereotype.

Brilliantly crafted and perfectly cynical, the “Iraq war bad, Afghan war good” posture worked. Democrats first won Congress, then the White House. But now, unfortunately, they must govern. No more games. No more pretense.

So what does their commander in chief do now with the war he once declared had to be won but had been almost criminally under-resourced by Bush?

Perhaps provide the resources to win it?

You would think so. And that’s exactly what Obama’s handpicked commander requested on Aug. 30 – a surge of 30,000 to 40,000 troops to stabilize a downward spiral and save Afghanistan the way a similar surge saved Iraq.

That was more than five weeks ago. Still no response. Obama agonizes publicly as the world watches. Why? Because, explains national security adviser James Jones, you don’t commit troops before you decide on a strategy.

No strategy? On March 27, flanked by his secretaries of defense and state, the president said this: “Today I’m announcing a comprehensive new strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan.” He then outlined a civilian-military counterinsurgency campaign to defeat the Taliban in Afghanistan.

And to emphasize his seriousness, the president made clear that he had not arrived casually at this decision. The new strategy, he declared, “marks the conclusion of a careful policy review.”

Conclusion, mind you. Not the beginning. Not a process. The conclusion of an extensive review, the president assured the nation, that included consultation with military commanders and diplomats, with the governments of Afghanistan and Pakistan, with our NATO allies and members of Congress.

The general in charge was then relieved and replaced with Obama’s own choice, Stanley McChrystal. And it’s McChrystal who submitted the request for the 40,000 troops, a request upon which the commander in chief promptly gagged.

The White House began leaking an alternate strategy, apparently proposed (invented?) by Vice President Joe Biden, for achieving immaculate victory with arm’s-length use of cruise missiles, Predator drones and special ops.

The irony is that no one knows more about this kind of warfare than Gen. McChrystal. He was in charge of exactly this kind of “counterterrorism” in Iraq for nearly five years, killing thousands of bad guys in hugely successful under-the-radar operations.

When the world’s expert on this type of counterterrorism warfare recommends precisely the opposite strategy – “counterinsurgency,” meaning a heavy-footprint, population-protecting troop surge – you have the most convincing of cases against counterterrorism by the man who most knows its potential and its limits. And McChrystal was emphatic in his recommendation: To go any other way than counterinsurgency would lose the war.

Yet his commander in chief, young Hamlet, frets, demurs, agonizes. His domestic advisers, led by Rahm Emanuel, tell him if he goes for victory, he’ll become LBJ, the domestic visionary destroyed by a foreign war. His vice president holds out the chimera of painless counterterrorism success.

Against Emanuel and Biden stand David Petraeus, the world’s foremost expert on counterinsurgency (he saved Iraq with it), and Stanley McChrystal, the world’s foremost expert on counterterrorism. Whose recommendation on how to fight would you rely on?

Less than two months ago – Aug. 17 in front of an audience of veterans – the president declared Afghanistan to be “a war of necessity.” Does anything he says remain operative beyond the fading of the audience applause?

Charles Krauthammer is a columnist for the Washington Post Writers Group. His e-mail address is letters@charleskrauthammer.com.

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BAGHDAD — Iraqis across the country voted Saturday in provincial elections that will help shape their future, but regardless of the outcome it is clear that the Americans are already drifting offstage — and that most Iraqis are ready to see them go.

The signs of mutual disengagement are everywhere. In the days leading up to the elections, it was possible to drive safely from near the Turkish border in the north to Baghdad and on south to Basra, just a few miles from the Persian Gulf — without seeing an American convoy. In the Green Zone — once host to the American occupation government, and now the seat of the Iraqi government — the primary PX is set to close, and the Americans have retreated to their vast, garrisoned new embassy compound. Iraqi soldiers now handle all Green Zone checkpoints.

American helicopters and drones may be in the sky, but Iraqi boots are on the ground. The Americans are already worried about securing the road to Kuwait because soon they will have to start hauling out much of the infrastructure they have built on bases across Iraq.

The end of an era comes not in a single moment, but looking back it has become evident that the mood has changed, power has shifted, the world is not the same.

In the United States, many Americans view the war as already over, even though more than 140,000 American soldiers remain on Iraqi soil.

President Obama has made it plain that Iraq is not his war; he wants to focus on Afghanistan. In an economic crisis, there is simply not enough money for the country to keep spending hundreds of millions of dollars a day in Iraq.

Any arguments that remain in Washington about the shape and timing of the troop withdrawal this year seem almost moot here, given how much Iraqis want to show they can govern on their own and how much Americans want to hand over responsibility to the Iraqis so they can meet withdrawal deadlines.

This is not to suggest that the war is over. In two provinces, Nineveh and Diyala, counterinsurgency operations are still under way, and the military is tracking signs of activity by Sunni extremist groups in the troubled areas surrounding Baghdad. For now, the rest of the country is mostly calm. The provincial elections will test political stability: whether Iraqis can begin to resolve still festering sectarian and ethnic tensions through the ballot box. The formal process of disengagement started in earnest in November, when the Iraqi Parliament approved a new security agreement with the Americans that sealed the date of departure, by the end of 2011, and almost immediately changed the balance of power.

The outlook of Iraqi citizens has changed as well. They are more confident that their problems are their own, and that the Americans cannot fix them and often have only made matters worse.

“The American military presence brought nothing to our streets but destruction and chaos,” said Omar al-Dulaimi, 57, a government employee who lives near the Um al-Khoura mosque, one of the largest Sunni places of worship in the capital. “We had nothing from them but tension and confusion. It’s much better for us and for them if they stay in their bases now.”

That resentment of the American presence boiled over in 2007 after Blackwater Security guards opened fire on Iraqi civilians in Nisour Square, killing 17 of them and wounding more than 30. That episode, which was widely publicized in Iraq and abroad, crystallized Iraqi loathing and resentment of what they saw as Americans’ casual disregard for Iraqi lives — and their own powerlessness to hold the Americans to account.

Such anger helped embolden Iraqis to drive a tough bargain on the security agreement, which cemented their sense that they were, at last, seizing control of their own destiny. The Iraqi resolve surprised the Americans, who in the end were forced to accept a hard deadline for departure, give up immunity for contractors like Blackwater and give Iraqis explicit authority over all military operations in the country.

Now, for both sides there is the feeling that something has changed and that whatever happens next, Iraq will not return to the way it was.

“We’re going through transition in Iraq at the same time we’re going through transition in our forces here,” said Gen. Ray Odierno, the commanding general for Iraq. “They will elect new provincial governments. I believe 75 percent to 80 percent of the provincial governments will change, and oh, by the way, we’ll begin to reduce our troops’ size.”

The shifts are subtle, often unspoken. The American military role now has less to do with protecting Iraqis and more with giving them the psychological reassurance that they can handle what comes their way. The Americans no longer tell the Iraqis what to do, and the Iraqis, especially Iraqi Army officers, no longer look to the Americans for approval. At least that is the case in areas where the fighting has stopped; less so in areas like Mosul where American military might is still required to keep violence at bay.

When General Odierno stopped to inspect a polling center in rural Medaen, south of Baghdad, on Wednesday, his conversation with the Iraqi Army general who oversees the area was respectful, a little formal: two military men exchanging information. It was not exactly a conversation between equals; each knew that the other was from a different world, each knew the Americans have superior arms and training, and each offered the other his observations.

“I see less Sunni-Shia issues than I do a lot of other issues here,” General Odierno said.

Gen. Qassim al-Maliki nodded. “We have a lot of Shia voting this time,” he said. “We didn’t have a lot in the last election,” he said.

As the American military slowly steps back, the diplomats and the civilians are emerging from the wings. Certainly, this is far from a normal diplomatic relationship. Iraqis entering any area close to the Americans are still subject to multiple humiliating searches and interminable waits. American diplomats cannot yet leave the embassy; they live like virtual prisoners, every movement beyond its gates an armed undertaking. But it is possible for Americans and Iraqis to talk about issues other than sheer survival.

Iraqis, too, are beginning to explore a different kind of relationship, one that no longer looks to the Americans only for protection. Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki has agreed to finance a substantial scholarship program to send Iraqis to the United States and British Commonwealth countries for study, in an effort to create a better educated professional class. Still, the American era in Iraq is nowhere near a final act. If this were an opera, it would be just past midway in the libretto. While both sides are disconnecting, neither can let go entirely.

The Iraqis need the Americans not just to dampen terrorist activities within the country but to protect them from predatory neighbors. Syria and Iran have interfered here since the invasion, and while the Iraqis are often uncomfortable with how the Americans have reined in these powers, they are reluctant to stop them because they fear their neighbors more.

When American forces pursued insurgents over the Iraqi border into Syria in late October, it was an international incident. Iraq was embarrassed in front of the Arab world. Such incidents are likely to recur and could become much more fraught.

For the United States, Iraq remains a strategic prize close to the Middle East flash points of Israel, Lebanon and Syria as well as Iran and the oil-rich Persian Gulf countries. It is not by chance that the Central Intelligence Agency has its largest station in the world in Baghdad.

It is inescapable that the United States exerts more influence here than in any other oil-producing country — and will be intent on continuing to do so. Iraq will be eager to demonstrate its independence; the United States will have to rely on levers other than a huge and continuing military presence. This promises considerable tension as each side redefines its relationship.

The elections on Saturday were a step toward a peaceful approach to settling disagreements among factions about the shape of the country. If new governments are seated from north to south and east to west, the United States and Iraq can begin the next act in earnest.

If all goes well, “The United States will not need big troops here,” said Jawad al-Bolani, the interior minister, a secular Shiite. “The Americans need to look at something besides security. Iraq needs America to start a new chapter.”

Riyadh Mohammed contributed reporting from Baghdad.

Current wisdom has it that if there had been a few less hanging chads in Florida in November 2000, the world would be a different place.

Al Gore would have won the presidency, the Iraq war wouldn’t have happened, and several hundred thousand people who perished in that war would be alive today. That conclusion is based on the generally unchallenged belief that Iraq is George W. Bush’s war: that he and a cabal of like-minded right-wingers conceived and executed the invasion for their own ideological motives. Or, as Frank Harvey, a research professor of international relations at Dalhousie University, puts it: “A few powerful ideologues exploited public fears (and international goodwill) in the aftermath of 9/11 to amplify Iraq’s WMD threat as a primary justification for an unnecessary, preventive invasion.”

That view, notes Harvey, “has emerged as the dominant narrative for explaining the U.S. attack. It represents the prevailing consensus running through dozens of the most popular books on the Bush administration, and hundreds of frequently cited (and widely circulated) scholarly articles, media reports and blog entries on the invasion. In fact, casual observers engaged in a cursory review of the literature will find the same thesis repeated (and usually defended) by prominent scholars, journalists and Washington ‘insiders’ on the left and right of the political spectrum.”

Harvey believes the conclusion is dead wrong. In a new paper for the Canadian Defense and Foreign Affairs Institute, he deconstructs the thesis and finds it “overlooks almost all of the relevant historical facts.” More than that, he asks a simple question: Had he been elected, would Al Gore have taken the same path as George Bush? He concludes, overwhelmingly, that he would have.

Given the prevailing mood in the aftermath of 9/11, the institutional structures that surround the president, the political and social pressures of the time, the accepted wisdom regarding Saddam Hussein and the international factors at work, says Harvey, Gore “[would have been] compelled … to make many of the same interim (generally praised) decisions for many of the same reasons. Momentum would have done the rest.”

There are several threads to Harvey’s argument, which you can read in its entirety here. At the risk of oversimplifying a very detailed examination, here are a few of the arguments he makes:

• Despite its universal acceptance, the prevailing theory of the war, which Harvey calls “neoconism” “remains an unsubstantiated assertion, a ‘theory’ without theoretical content, an argument devoid of logic or perspective … Even the most superficial review of its central tenets reveals serious logical, empirical and theoretical flaws.”

For instance, he notes, it presumes that Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and a few like-minded ideologues “had the intellectual prowess and political skills to manipulate the preferences, perceptions and priorities” of non-neocons such as Tony Blair and Colin Powell; the majority of both parties in both houses of Congress; the leadership of foreign policy and intelligence committees in the House and Senate — including every senior Democrat; most European leaders; “every member of the UN Security Council (including France, Russia and China) who unanimously endorsed UN Security Council Resolution 1441; and 60%-70% of the American people at the time.

• The “neocon” argument presumes Gore, in the same circumstances, would not have been presented with similar advice or faced pressures to act in a similar way. Harvey suggests this is wishful thinking. “In fact, all of the relevant evidence from Gore’s entire political career – his speeches on Iraq, contributions to the 2000 campaign debates on foreign affairs, policy announcements and interviews” argue Gore would have been at least as aggressive as Bush. As Harvey points out:

“Gore was a foreign policy hawk. He consistently opposed efforts to cut defense spending, supported Reagan’s decisions to bomb Libya, invade Grenada, aid the Contras in the 80s, and fund the B-1 and B-2 bomber and MX missile programs.” Gore and his running mate, Senator Joe Lieberman, both backed the 1991 Gulf War. As Vice President, Gore supported military actions in Bosnia and Kosovo, and “consistently adopted the hardest line in the Clinton administration when dealing with Saddam Hussein.” When President Clinton decided to abort his four-day bombing of Iraq in 1998, Gore opposed backing down “despite the absence of UN Security Council endorsement.”

Gore was surrounded by advisers who shared his hawkish views, whose speeches, statements and policy positions at the time give no hint they were reluctant to use force to bring Saddam Hussein into line.

• Bush did not invent the conditions or attitudes at the time. Gore would have been presented with the same flawed intelligence on Iraq’s weapons capabilities, faced the same public fears and pressures and the same international concerns. “Every member of the UN Security Council (including the war’s strongest critics, France and Russia)” unanimously endorsed the belief that Saddam had maintained proscribed weapons and was actively frustrating UN efforts to find them, Harvey writes.

“Anyone looking for reasons to be worried about Iraq could easily ignore speeches by Bush, Cheney or Rumsfeld and focus instead on those delivered by Clinton (Bill or Hillary), Gore and Kerry; they could ignore the 2002 [National Intelligence Estimate] and read the NIEs published over the previous five years; or they could simply read the  reports by UNMOVIC’s chief weapons inspector Hans Blix, or UNSCOM’s inspector Scott Ritter (one of the war’s strongest critics).”

• The faulty intelligence was backed up by Saddam’s bizarre efforts to encourage such beliefs, in hopes it would reduce the danger of a second conflict with Iran. There is no reason to believe Saddam would have acted differently under a Gore administration.

Harvey notes that the decision to invade was not made overnight but culminated from a series of escalating steps involving the UN and a host of international leaders, both friendly and otherwise.
“President Gore would have been compelled to make all of the same rational moves to get inspectors back into Iraq,” he concludes. “Strategically, the only way to accomplish this goal through multilateral diplomacy would have been to follow the same basic strategy. The competing counterfactual claim that none of these decisions would have been taken is simply not credible.”

He adds: “The only significant difference would have been the size of the invading force – Gore would probably have recommended a much larger troop deployment in line with General Anthony Zinni’s plan under the Clinton administration (OPPLAN 1003-98, originally approved in 1996 and updated in 1998, called for 400,000 troops). Boosted by the confidence of deploying this many troops, and concerned about the cost of sustaining such a large force through prolonged (and unsuccessful) inspections, Gore would have been more, not less inclined to accept the risks of war. It is highly unlikely that a sitting Democratic President would have survived the 2004 election if he decided against enforcing “all necessary means” or “serious consequences” in favour of the French-Russian position.

National Post

By Eugene Robinson

WASHINGTON — Understanding isn’t the same as forgiving. The history-be-my-judge interviews that President Bush and Vice President Cheney have been giving recently help me understand why they acted with such contempt for our Constitution and our values — but also reinforce my confident belief, and my fervent hope, that history will throw the book at them.

The basic argument that they’re making deserves to be taken seriously. I don’t think either man would object to my summing it up in one sentence: We did what we did to keep America safe.

That terse formulation of the Bush-Cheney apologia leaves out important details. Cheney came into office with preconceived ideas about restoring executive branch powers and prerogatives that he believed had been lost after Vietnam and Watergate; Bush either shared Cheney’s views or was willing to go along. But the main narrative of the Bush presidency began with the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks by al-Qaeda terrorists — the worst such assault on American soil.

In a not-for-attribution chat with a member of the Bush Cabinet a couple of years ago, conversation turned to 9/11. I said something like, “I can imagine what that day must have felt like for you.” The response was immediate: “No, you can’t.”

The official went on to describe the chaos and anguish — the shock of seeing the 110-story World Trade Center towers collapse into rubble, the fear that other hijacked planes might still be in the air, the gut feeling that the president and those around him were personally under attack. The official talked of how administration officials racked their memories to think of anything they might have done differently to prevent the 9/11 attacks. I doubt that anyone in the Situation Room actually quoted Malcolm X, but essentially a vow was taken to protect the country from another assault “by any means necessary.”

These were human reactions, understandable and appropriate at the time. The truth is that the administration had missed signs that an attack was brewing — most famously, the president’s daily brief titled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” But these portents were lost amid the avalanche of information that buries every president every single day. Anyone in Bush’s position would have been filled with grief, anger and resolve.

Initial reactions are supposed to give way to reasoned analysis, however. For Bush and most of his top aides, this didn’t happen until far too late.

For Cheney, apparently it never happened at all. In an interview broadcast Sunday, he invited Fox News’ Chris Wallace to “go back and look at how eager the country was to have us work in the aftermath of 9/11 to make certain that that never happened again.” People have since become “complacent,” he said, but the administration’s actions have “produced a safe 7.5 years, and I think the record speaks for itself.”

That record, admirably, includes the overthrow of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, the dismantling of al-Qaeda’s infrastructure and the killing or capture of some of the terrorist organization’s most important operatives. Shamefully, however, it also includes the violation of international and U.S. legal norms by subjecting terrorist suspects to indefinite detention and cruel, painful interrogation; the creation of a mini-gulag of secret CIA-run prisons abroad; and unprecedented domestic surveillance without court supervision — all justified, Cheney maintains, by a state of “war” that has no foreseeable end.

The Bush-Cheney record also includes the invasion of a country — Iraq — that had nothing whatsoever to do with 9/11. This misadventure has claimed more than 4,000 American lives, wasted hundreds of billions of dollars and grievously damaged our strategic position in the Middle East. In an interview with Martha Raddatz of ABC News earlier this month, Bush claimed credit for vanquishing al-Qaeda’s forces in Iraq. When Raddatz pointed out that there were no al-Qaeda forces in Iraq until after the U.S. invasion, the president answered, “Yeah, that’s right. So what?”

Here’s so what: Bush and Cheney, understandably shaken by an unprecedented act of terrorism, declared and prosecuted a “war” without specifying who the enemy is. Rather than focus on the architect and sponsor of the 9/11 attacks, Osama bin Laden, they turned away to lash out at others in pre-emptive blows that dishonored our nation’s most precious ideals.

History will note that the point of the Constitution is that the ends don’t always justify the means — and that nowhere in the document can be found the phrase “so what?”

By Ed Gillespie

As the year draws to an end and President Bush enters his final month in office, there is much commentary about the Administration’s record over the past eight years. Unsurprisingly, many of these stories assail and distort the President’s record and recycle myths and unfounded allegations that have been leveled for the better part of his two terms. Historical accuracy requires a response to the litany of attacks leveled against President Bush, and while there’s not enough space to respond to all of them, here are five of the most egregious:

Myth 1: The last eight years were awful for most Americans economically and President Bush’s deregulatory policies caused the current financial crisis.

Reality:

President Bush’s time in office is ending as it began, with our economy under stress. The recession President Bush inherited as he entered office ran through the attacks of September 11, 2001, but during the recovery that followed, and due in no small part to the tax relief President Bush worked with Congress to provide, this country experienced its longest run of uninterrupted job growth – 52 straight months, with 8.3 million jobs created.

This reflected six consecutive years of economic growth from the Fourth Quarter of 2001 until the Fourth Quarter of 2007. From 2000 to 2007, real GDP grew by more than 17 percent, a remarkable gain of nearly 2.1 trillion dollars. This growth was driven in part by increased labor productivity gains that have averaged 2.5 percent annually since 2001, a rate that exceeds the averages of the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s. In the same period, real after-tax income per capita increased by more than 11 percent, and there was a 4.7 percent increase in the number of new businesses formed. The current economic challenges, which the President and his Administration have responded to aggressively, threaten to reverse some of these gains – but the gains cannot be denied.

As for the current crisis, the President and his economic team have taken unprecedented actions to stabilize the financial sector and avert a collapse. While there are a number of causes of the housing and credit crises that are at the root of our current economic troubles, deregulation by the Bush Administration is simply not one of them. In fact, one of the circumstances that contributed to the crisis was the failure of the government sponsored enterprises (GSEs) Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which President Bush long tried to subject to greater regulation. In April 2001, three months after taking office, the President warned in his first budget that the size of the two GSEs were a “potential problem” that “could cause strong repercussions in financial markets, affecting Federally insured entities and economic activity.” In 2003, the Administration began calling for a new GSE regulator, and over the next five years, the Administration continued to call for GSE reform only to be accused by Democrats in Congress of creating artificial fears and advocating for ill-advised proposals. By the time Congress finally acted in 2008 to provide the oversight the President requested, it was too late to prevent systemic consequences. Had the Administration’s initial reform proposals been adopted, some of today’s turmoil in our financial markets may have been averted.

Myth 2: President Bush’s tax cuts only benefitted the wealthy and were paid for by sacrificing investments in health care and education.

Reality:

There are not 116 million “wealthy Americans,” but that’s how many taxpayers benefited from the President’s tax relief. The across-the-board tax cuts provided tax relief to every American who pays income taxes, created a new bottom 10 percent bracket rate, doubled the child tax credit to $1,000, and actually increased the share of the Federal income tax burden paid by the top 10 percent of individual earners from 67 percent in 2000 to 70 percent in 2005. Furthermore, this Administration removed 13 million low-income earners from the income tax rolls completely.

The economic growth spurred by tax relief also spurred growth in Federal tax receipts. In fact, the Federal Treasury realized the largest three-year increase of revenue in 26 years, and tax receipts grew more than $542 billion between 2000 and 2007. And yes, much of that money went to investments in health care and education.

President Bush provided more than 40 million Americans with better access to prescription drugs by creating the market-based Medicare Prescription Drug Benefit. And it is one of the rare government programs that actually costs less than expected. Projected overall program spending between 2004 and 2013 is approximately $240 billion lower, nearly 38 percent, than originally estimated, thanks to the market-oriented principles included at President Bush’s insistence.

Despite the heated rhetoric over children’s health insurance (S-CHIP) legislation last year, estimates from a 2007 Federal survey show that the number of uninsured children under the age of 18 actually declined by 800,000 from 2001 to 2007. From 2007 to 2008, the number of people covered by affordable and portable Health Savings Account-eligible plans increased 35 percent. Additionally, since President Bush took office, more than 1,200 community health centers have opened or expanded nationwide, which has helped provide treatment to nearly 17 million people.

Federal spending on education has increased nearly 40 percent under President Bush. Additionally, Pell Grant funding nearly doubled during the Administration, which is expected to help more than 5.5 million students attend college in the 2008-09 school year, 1.2 million more students than were assisted by Pell Grants in the 2001-02 school year. This financial aid assistance also helps account for the fact that 66 percent of high school graduates from the class of 2006 enrolled in colleges, compared to 63 percent in 2000.

Perhaps more importantly, the President’s No Child Left Behind Act has delivered tangible results to students. Since the law was enacted, fourth-grade students have achieved their highest reading and math scores on record, eighth-grade students have achieved their highest math scores on record, and African-American and Hispanic students have posted all-time high scores in a number of categories, narrowing the gap between minority students and white students.

Myth 3: The President’s “go it alone” foreign policy ruined America’s standing in the world.

Reality:

Rarely can one see revisionist history occurring in the present, but this charge is nothing short of that. The United States acted with a multilateral coalition of partner nations to remove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq after he failed to comply with the will of the international community, including numerous United Nations Security Council Resolutions. To ignore this fact is not only a distortion of history, but it is also an insult to the service members of our coalition partners who sacrificed their lives to contribute to the success we are now witnessing in Iraq. And in Afghanistan, approximately forty countries are currently deployed with American forces, including every one of our NATO allies.

The President also created a worldwide coalition of more than 90 nations to combat terrorist networks by sharing information, drying up their financing, and bringing their leaders to justice. To date, we have captured or killed hundreds of al-Qaeda leaders and operatives with the help of partner nations. Furthermore, the Administration established the Proliferation Security Initiative, which now includes more than 90 nations, and other multilateral coalitions to stop the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.

The President successfully pushed for expanding NATO membership, generated international pressure on Iran to stop it from developing nuclear weapons, and organized the Six-Party Talks, which have resulted in North Korea committing to give up its nuclear weapons and abandon its nuclear programs. Verifying North Korea’s commitment will be a challenge, but at the most recent Six-Party Talks meeting, there was strong consensus among the five parties that North Korea must submit to a comprehensive verification regime that accords with international standards.

U.S. ties in Asia have been strengthened over the past eight years, and the Administration has built strong relationships with China, Japan, and South Korea, among others. We have signed an historic civilian nuclear power agreement with India, reflecting a fundamental change in our relationship. Pro-American leaders have been elected in Germany, France, and Italy. Eastern European countries such as Georgia, Ukraine, and Kosovo treasure their relationships with the United States, and no president has done more to improve health and security in the nations of Africa. We have also strengthened cooperation with Latin America, including initiatives with Brazil on biofuels and with Mexico and Central America on fighting organized crime. Finally, when the President took office, America had trade agreements in force with only three countries, versus 14 today – with three additional agreements approved by Congress but not yet in force and agreements with three countries that are awaiting Congressional approval.

Myth 4: The war in Iraq caused us to “take our eye off the ball” in Afghanistan and with al Qaeda.

Reality:

Iraq and Afghanistan are two fronts in the same war, and while the success of the surge in Iraq has been visible, we have also had a quiet surge in Afghanistan. The U.S. has continuously and aggressively fought side-by-side with Afghans and our allies to defeat the Taliban and al Qaeda in Afghanistan. The United States has provided nearly $32 billion for security, political, and economic development assistance and the international community has provided more than $55 billion to Afghanistan since 2001.

An additional U.S. Marine battalion deployed to Afghanistan in November and they will be followed by an Army combat brigade of about 3,400 troops in early 2009. U.S. forces now total approximately 31,000, and are joined by nearly as many coalition troops. The United States and our allies are working with Afghanistan to help it nearly double the size of the Afghan National Army over the next five years, from 79,000 now trained to 134,000 in 2014.

We have also deployed Provincial Reconstruction Teams to ensure security gains are followed by real improvements in daily life, and we have helped local communities strengthen their economies and create jobs, deliver basic services, improve governance and fight corruption, and build or repair key infrastructure such as roads, bridges, hospitals, and schools. More than six million children, approximately two million of them girls, are now in Afghan schools, compared to fewer than one million in 2001.

In this Global War on Terror, we do not have the luxury to fight on one battlefront at a time. To defeat the terrorists, we must fight them overseas so we don’t have to fight them here at home. Since 9/11, we have successfully captured or killed dozens of al-Qaeda’s senior leadership and hundreds of al-Qaeda operatives in two dozen countries, removed al-Qaeda’s safe-haven in Afghanistan and crippled al-Qaeda in Iraq, and disrupted numerous al Qaeda terrorist plots against the U.S., including a 2006 plot to blow up passenger planes traveling from London.

Myth 5: This Administration has been bad for the environment and ignored the problem of global warming.

Reality:

Given the liberal media’s failure to acknowledge this Administration’s true record on alternative energy, conservation, and climate change, it’s not surprising this charge has stuck. But here are some irrefutable data points: From 2001 to 2007, air pollution decreased by 12 percent, and fine particulate matter pollution is down 17 percent since 2001. Ethanol production quadrupled from 1.6 billion gallons in 2000 to 6.5 billion gallons in 2007, wind energy production has increased by more than 400 percent, and solar energy capacity has doubled. In 2007, solar installations increased more than 32 percent and the U.S. produced 96 percent more biodiesel (490 million gallons) than in 2006. The Administration also provided nearly $18 billion to research, develop, and promote alternative and more efficient energy technologies such as biofuels, solar, wind, clean coal, nuclear, and hydrogen.

This Administration has improved and protected the health of more than 27 million acres of Federal forest and grasslands, protected, restored, and improved more than three million acres of wetlands, and established the Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument, the world’s largest fully protected marine conservation area (nearly 140,000 square miles).

Much of the misperception about the President’s environmental record is born out of the President’s withdrawing the United States from the Kyoto Protocol, which did not include the effective participation of major developing countries such as India and China. Instead, the President worked to address climate change by launching the Major Economies Process, which convened the leaders of the world’s major economies, both developed and developing, to work on ways to further reduce greenhouse gas emissions and improve energy security without harming our economies or giving any nation a free ride. Finally, the President set the country on course to stop the growth of greenhouse gas emissions below projected levels by 2025 and invested more than $44 billion in climate change-related programs.

Some other items that are infrequently mentioned about the real record of the Bush Administration but are worth noting: Teenage drug use has declined 25 percent; in 2007, the violent crime rate was 43 percent lower than the rate in 1998; between 2005 and 2007, the chronically homeless population decreased approximately 30 percent; funding for veterans’ medical care has increased more than 115 percent; and as of 2005, the most recent abortion rate is at its lowest since 1974.

And one last fact: Our homeland has not suffered another terrorist attack since September 11, 2001. That, too, is part of the real Bush record.

More on RCP: Gas Prices Shouldn’t Set Our Energy Policy

Page Printed from: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2008/12/myths_and_facts_about_the_real.html at December 22, 2008 – 04:44:29 AM

You probably sat in a fancier conference room the last time you refinanced or heard a pitch about life insurance. There’s a table, some off-brand mesh office chairs, a bookcase that looks as if it had been put together with an Allen wrench and instructions in Swedish.

To reach this room, you pass through a cubicle farm lightly populated by quiet young people. Either they have just arrived or they are just leaving, because their desks are almost bare. The place has a vaguely familiar feel to it, this air of transient shabbiness and nondescriptitude. You can’t quite put your finger on it …

“It’s like the set of The Office,” someone offers.

Bingo.

It is here that we find Barack Obama one soul-freezingly cold December day, mentally unpacking the crate of crushing problems — some old, some new, all ugly — that he is about to inherit as the 44th President of the United States. Most of his hours inside the presidential-transition office are spent in this bland and bare-bones room. You would think the President-elect — a guy who draws 100,000 people to a speech in St. Louis, Mo., who raises three-quarters of a billion dollars, who is facing the toughest first year since Franklin Roosevelt’s — might merit a leather chair. Maybe a credenza? A hutch?

But he doesn’t seem to notice. Obama is cheerfully showing his visitors around, gripping the souvenir basketball he received from Hall of Famer Lenny Wilkens, explaining a snapshot taken the day he played pickup with the University of North Carolina hoops team. (”They are so big and so fast and so strong, you know.”) Then, since those two items basically exhaust the room’s décor, Obama sits down on one of the mesh chairs and launches into a spoken tour of his world of woes. It’s a mind-boggling journey, although he shows no signs of being boggled — unless you count the increasingly prevalent salt in his salt-and-pepper hair. By now we are all accustomed to that Obi-Wan Kenobi calm, though we may never entirely understand it. In a soothing monotone, he highlights the scariest hairpin turns on his itinerary, the ones that combine difficulty with danger plus a jolt of existential risk. (See pictures of the Civil Rights movement from Emmett Till to Barack Obama.)

“It is not clear that the economy’s bottomed out,” he begins, understatedly. (The morning newspaper trumpets the worst unemployment spike in more than 30 years.) “And so even if we take a whole host of the right steps in terms of the economy, two years from now it may not have fully recovered.” That worries him. Also Afghanistan: “We’re going to have to make a series of not just military but also diplomatic moves that fully enlist Pakistan as an ally in that region, that lessen tensions between India and Pakistan, and then get everybody focused on rooting out militancy in a terrain, a territory, that is very tough — and in an enormous country that is one of the poorest and least developed in the world. So that, I think, is going to be a very tough situation.

“And then the third thing that keeps me up at night is the issue of nuclear proliferation,” Obama continues, sailing on through the horribles. “And then the final thing, just to round out my Happy List, is climate change. All the indicators are that this is happening faster than even the most pessimistic scientists were anticipating a couple of years ago.”

Score that as follows: one imploding economy, one deteriorating war in an impossible region and two versions of Armageddon — the bang of loose nukes and the whimper of environmental collapse. That’s just for starters; we’ll hear the unabridged version shortly.

But first, there is a bit of business to be dealt with, having to do with why you are reading this story in this magazine at this time of the year. It’s unlikely that you were surprised to see Obama’s face on the cover. He has come to dominate the public sphere so completely that it beggars belief to recall that half the people in America had never heard of him two years ago — that even his campaign manager, at the outset, wasn’t sure Obama had what it would take to win the election. He hit the American scene like a thunderclap, upended our politics, shattered decades of conventional wisdom and overcame centuries of the social pecking order. Understandably, you may be thinking Obama is on the cover for these big and flashy reasons: for ushering the country across a momentous symbolic line, for infusing our democracy with a new intensity of participation, for showing the world and ourselves that our most cherished myth — the one about boundless opportunity — has plenty of juice left in it.

See pictures of Obama’s nation of hope.

See pictures of Obama’s college years.

But crisis has a way of ushering even great events into the past. As Obama has moved with unprecedented speed to build an Administration that would bolster the confidence of a shaken world, his flash and dazzle have faded into the background. In the waning days of his extraordinary year and on the cusp of his presidency, what now seems most salient about Obama is the opposite of flashy, the antithesis of rhetoric: he gets things done. He is a man about his business — a Mr. Fix It going to Washington. That’s why he’s here and why he doesn’t care about the furniture. We’ve heard fine speechmakers before and read compelling personal narratives. We’ve observed candidates who somehow latch on to just the right issue at just the right moment. Obama was all these when he started his campaign: a talented speaker who had opposed the Iraq war and lived a biography that was all things to all people. But while events undermined those pillars of his candidacy, making Iraq seem less urgent and biography less relevant, Obama has kept on rising. He possesses a rare ability to read the imperatives and possibilities of each new moment and organize himself and others to anticipate change and translate it into opportunity. (See pictures of Obama’s nation of hope.)

The real story of Obama’s year is the steady march of seemingly impossible accomplishments: beating the Clinton machine, organizing previously marginal voters, harnessing the new technologies of democratic engagement, shattering fundraising records, turning previously red states blue — and then waking up the day after his victory to reinvent the presidential-transition process in the face of a potentially dangerous vacuum of leadership. “We always did our best up on the high wire,” says his campaign manager, David Plouffe.

Obama’s competence fills him with a genuine self-confidence. “I’ve got a pretty healthy ego,” he allows. That’s clear when he offers a checklist for voters to use in judging his performance two years from now. It’s quite an agenda. Listen: “Have we helped this economy recover from what is the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression? Have we instituted financial regulations and rules of the road that assure this kind of crisis doesn’t occur again? Have we created jobs that pay well and allow families to support themselves? Have we made significant progress on reducing the cost of health care and expanding coverage? Have we begun what will probably be a decade-long project to shift America to a new energy economy? Have we begun what may be an even longer project of revitalizing our public-school systems?”

There’s more: “Have we closed down Guantánamo in a responsible way, put a clear end to torture and restored a balance between the demands of our security and our Constitution? Have we rebuilt alliances around the world effectively? Have I drawn down U.S. troops out of Iraq, and have we strengthened our approach in Afghanistan — not just militarily but also diplomatically and in terms of development? And have we been able to reinvigorate international institutions to deal with transnational threats, like climate change, that we can’t solve on our own?”

And: “Outside of specific policy measures, two years from now, I want the American people to be able to say, ‘Government’s not perfect; there are some things Obama does that get on my nerves. But you know what? I feel like the government’s working for me. I feel like it’s accountable. I feel like it’s transparent. I feel that I am well informed about what government actions are being taken. I feel that this is a President and an Administration that admits when it makes mistakes and adapts itself to new information.’”

Can he really achieve all that? Plenty of voters will be happy if he aces only Item 1 on his list. But the essence of both Obama’s strength and his promise is that, according to a recent poll, a strong majority of Americans believe he will accomplish most of what he aims to do. For having the confidence to sketch that kind of future in this gloomy hour and for showing the competence that makes Americans hopeful that he will pull it off, Barack Obama is Time’s Person of the Year for 2008.

I. Simple Competence
In some tellings, Obama’s journey to the white house started with his little-noticed but carefully nuanced speech against the Iraq war in 2002. In other versions, it began with his electrifying address to the Democratic Convention in 2004. Those moments blazed with potential, true, but something more was necessary: a certain appetite among the electorate. The country had to be hungry for the menu he offered, and in that sense, his path’s true beginning lay in the drowned precincts of New Orleans in the sweltering, desperate late summer of 2005.

Hurricane Katrina blew away the last gauzy veil from an ugly specter of executive incompetence in American politics. When the people of New Orleans needed leadership, the Republican Administration in Washington proved useless. The Democratic governor and mayor were pitiful. At long last, our government was united — but under an appalling banner of fecklessness. The moral bankruptcy of the spin doctors was laid bare: no soul remained gullible enough to believe that Brownie was doing a heckuva job.

After Katrina, demand collapsed for the very qualities that Obama lacked as a candidate: empty boasts, finger-pointing, backstabbing and years of experience inside a government that couldn’t deliver bottled water to the stranded citizens of a major U.S. city. Spare us the dead-or-alive bravado, the gates-of-hell bluster, the melodrama of the 3 a.m. phone call. A door swung open for a candidate who would merely stand and deliver. Simple competence — although there’s nothing simple about it, not in today’s intricate, interdependent, interwoven, intensely dangerous world.

See pictures of Barack Obama’s campaign behind the scenes.

See pictures of Obama on Flickr.

His official theme was change, but a specific kind of change: the nuts-and-bolts kind you can see and measure. Voters were invited to believe because Obama kept delivering the goods. Certainly he made mistakes and gave up on some ideas while doubling back on others — his promise to stick to the existing campaign-finance system, for example. On the whole, though, he was a doer. Obama told people that a black man could win white votes. In Iowa he proved it. He said a broad-gauge campaign could win in GOP strongholds; along came Indiana and Virginia and North Carolina. He declared that a new approach to politics would topple the old Clinton-Bush seesaw, and topple it he did. He sank the three-pointer with the cameras rolling. Made a speech in a football stadium feel intimate. Some might say these are not exactly Churchillian achievements, but in the land of the hapless, the competent man is king. In the end, his campaign e-mail list numbered some 13 million people, of whom more than 3.5 million put actual skin in the game — money, volunteer hours or both. Obama’s most formidable opponent, Hillary Clinton, tried to convince voters that he was all talk and no action, a vessel empty but for intoxicating fumes. Yet he was the one whose campaign ran like clockwork, while hers was a fratricidal mess. And by Nov. 4, the strongest party in the U.S. was no longer the Republican Party or the Democratic Party; it was the Obama Party.

II. Filling the Vacuum
“A presidential campaign is like an MRI of the soul,” says David Axelrod, Obama’s chief strategist. “And one of the great revelations of this process, certainly the most thrilling revelation to me, was to learn what a great manager this guy is. We had no way of knowing that when we started. When he decided to run, we had no political infrastructure at all. There was just a handful of us, and we were setting off to challenge the greatest political operation in the Democratic Party.”

Keep in mind that Obama, as Rudy Giuliani put it at the Republican Convention in September, had “never led anything, nothing, nada” — certainly not a sprawling organization spread from coast to coast. But he did have a philosophy of leadership, which he explains like this: “I don’t think there’s some magic trick here. I think I’ve got a good nose for talent, so I hire really good people. And I’ve got a pretty healthy ego, so I’m not scared of hiring the smartest people, even when they’re smarter than me. And I have a low tolerance of nonsense and turf battles and game-playing, and I send that message very clearly. And so over time, I think, people start trusting each other, and they stay focused on mission, as opposed to personal ambition or grievance. If you’ve got really smart people who are all focused on the same mission, then usually you can get some things done.”

Stop and look back at those last few words, because they are a telltale sign of Obama’s pragmatism. A persistent question during the campaign — it became the heart of John McCain’s message in the closing weeks — was whether Obama was some kind of radical, a terrorist-befriending socialist masquerading as Steady Freddy. As he builds his Administration, though, he is emerging as a leader who just wants to “get some things done.” (Read “The New Liberal Order.”)

Obama is a businesslike boss. He prefers briefing papers tightly written and shows up for meetings fully prepared. He expects people to challenge him when they think he is wrong and to back up their ideas with facts. He’s not a shouter — “Hollering at people isn’t usually that effective,” he explains — but if he thinks you’ve let him down, you’ll know it. “What was always effective with me as a kid — and Michelle and I find it effective with our kids — is just making people feel really guilty,” he says. “Like ‘Boy, I am disappointed in you. I expected so much more.’ And I think people generally want to do the right thing, and if you’re clear to them about what that right thing is, and if they see you doing the right thing, then that gives you some leverage.”

Again, take a second to reread, this time the bit where he says “people generally want to do the right thing.” Trust of this kind has been in short supply for many years in American politics, where the dominant attitude is that every disagreement is a sign of bad faith and every opponent is assumed to be malevolent. Obama’s attitude was ridiculed as kumbaya naiveté during the campaign, but trust proved to be essential to his victory. His campaign entrusted millions of volunteers with unprecedented authority to download information about prospective voters, to assign themselves to make phone calls and canvass their own neighborhoods and apartment buildings, and to keep the campaign abreast of their progress. A typical presidential effort is top-down, intensely protective of its data and strategies. Obama’s approach seemed to court mischief or even chaos. “There was a lot of snickering among the political pros,” says Plouffe. “They couldn’t believe that we were giving people we didn’t know access to our data and trusting them to handle it honestly. But it was enormously important because it made people feel that much more accountable: ‘These are my three blocks, and everyone’s counting on me.’”

See pictures of Obama on Flickr.

See the Six Degrees of Barack Obama.

Yes, Obama could talk — like nobody’s business — but talk didn’t win the election. According to the daily tracking polls, the tumblers clicked into place precisely at the moment the financial hurricane hit, when the wizards of Wall Street proved as incompetent as Oz and neither the President nor the leaders of Congress nor the Treasury boss nor Senator McCain could deliver a rescue package. When this group failure provoked a stock-market crash in early October, Americans asked, “Can’t anybody here play this game?” Astounding as it would have seemed scant months before, their gaze fell on the one fixed point in the widening gyre: a guy named Barack Hussein Obama. (See pictures of Barack Obama’s family tree.)

III. Fear Itself
As White House Chief of Staff during the final years of the Clinton Administration, John Podesta became accustomed to short nights and emotional roller coasters. Still, he found it a bit strange to be headed to the airport in the predawn darkness of Nov. 5 — just a few hours after the election of a Democratic President. Was Obama really going to chair a major strategy session the morning after winning the longest and most grueling campaign on record? How about a day off?

Long before Election Day, Obama decided that an ordinary transition wouldn’t do. Given the shaky economy and two wars, he knew that the winner of the election — whoever it turned out to be — would face instant and daunting challenges. He wanted to be ready. “What I was absolutely convinced of was that, whether it was me or John McCain, the next President-elect was going to have to move swiftly,” Obama recalls. He deployed Podesta in midsummer to lead an unusually elaborate preparation for a possible Obama presidency. McCain accused him of overconfidence and vanity, of measuring the Oval Office drapes. To Obama, it was simply a matter of prudence. (See pictures from the historic Election Day.)

Podesta had long been planning the return of a Democrat to the White House, and his think tank, the Center for American Progress, was already preparing detailed briefings on conditions in the various departments of government. As the financial system went into free fall in September, Podesta’s team pressed the FBI to work overtime on security screenings of potential Obama nominees. Now, as he boarded a 6 a.m. flight to Chicago, Podesta carried a list of more than 100 candidates who had passed their background investigations and were ready for confirmation on Day One. Instead of taking a day off, the new President-elect celebrated his victory with a five-hour meeting.

Obama had been pondering whether he should step to center stage or wait in the wings as the turbulent last months of the Bush Administration played out. His aides were all over the map. Some advised him to go quietly about his business in Chicago and insist that America has just one President at a time. For Obama to succeed, they argued, the country needed to see his Inauguration as a clean break, a new sunrise. Others floated the idea of immediately starting the First Hundred Days, perhaps asking George W. Bush to appoint Obama’s choices to key offices so that they could get to work by late November.

Obama was leery of appearing to shoulder responsibility for problems before he had any real authority to fix them. Bush’s bank of political capital was busted, and Obama wasn’t about to take ownership of the toxic assets. On the other hand, he didn’t want to repeat the dysfunctional transition of power from Herbert Hoover to Roosevelt in the dark hours of the Great Depression. F.D.R.’s silence between his election and his Inauguration may have deepened the crisis. By 5 p.m. on Nov. 5, when Podesta walked out of that meeting — not 24 hours after the polls closed — Obama was far ahead of the normal transition process, having homed in on finalists for many of his key staff and Cabinet positions. But he hadn’t yet decided how public to be about it.

Within two days, however, events forced his hand. On Friday, Nov. 7, Obama convened a meeting of his economic advisers in Chicago, and the tone of their comments was chilling. The stock market was plunging; credit remained tight; fresh unemployment numbers were shocking. “There was just a very dramatic deterioration” in the days after the election, says Timothy Geithner, Obama’s choice for Treasury Secretary. On previous occasions when the group had gathered, someone could always be counted on to find potential upsides in dismal forecasts, while Paul Volcker, the 81-year-old former chairman of the Federal Reserve, reliably closed each meeting with a gloomy soliloquy. On this day, though, there was no positive scenario for Volcker to deflate. Everyone in the room was grim.

See pictures of the global financial crisis.

See pictures of Obama’s nation of hope.

Obama opened the meeting by reflecting on his dilemma: act now or wait until January? By the end of the session, he had concluded that, like it or not, he must “accelerate all of our timetables,” as he put it, “in appointments not just on the Cabinet but also our White House team, in structuring economic plans so that we can start getting them to Congress and hopefully begin work — even before I’m sworn in — on some of our key priorities around the economy, on laying the groundwork for a national-security team that can take the baton in a wartime transition.” There was no time for the “traditional postelection holiday.” Vacations would have to wait until Christmas.

Transition is such a gentle word. We make the transition from youth to adulthood or from the dinner table to the den. For Obama, though, the concept was freighted with danger. “He was very focused on the basic perils of the gap between the election and the Inauguration, at a time when the economy was clearly deteriorating and the markets were very fragile,” Geithner explains. In certain powerful respects, Obama felt compelled to begin his presidency immediately. Markets needed to size up his economic team and hear what he planned to do. Congressional leaders, contemplating a colossal economic-stimulus package, needed to know where he was headed. Military leaders, key allies and opportunistic enemies were all keen to know just how dovish the anti-Iraq-war President intended to be. Obama concluded that hanging back would create a dangerous leadership void in the short-term and compound his troubles come January. And nothing that has happened since that Nov. 7 decision — the crisis at Citigroup, the drama of the automakers or the assault on Mumbai — has made the transfer of power look any less perilous.

He could not have predicted when he set out to become President that he would face such circumstances. The distance from the birth of his campaign to these first days of his fledgling presidency could be counted in months but measured in light-years. When he announced his candidacy on a frigid morning in Springfield, Ill., in 2007, Iraq was a disaster, and the Dow was still headed upward past 14,000. So this moment was a test not only of his speed but also of his flexibility. Obama proved lithe, indeed, persuading Robert Gates, Bush’s Secretary of Defense, to remain in his post and asking Clinton, a constant critic of Obama’s foreign policy views during their primary battle, to be his Secretary of State. Priority 1 was the economic team, however. There his task was to find a mix of people familiar enough to signal stability but fresh enough to promise change, and to design a stimulus strategy dramatic enough to inspire markets to swallow their panic. (See pictures of Obama’s White House team.)

In the days leading up to Thanksgiving, Obama delivered. Having promised to govern from the middle, he rolled out a bright purple team of economic advisers, neither red nor blue. Geithner had served in various posts under both Bush and Bill Clinton. As president of the New York Fed, he was well known to Wall Street but relatively unknown on Main Street — just the blend of experience and newness that Obama was seeking. His budget director, Peter Orszag, had fans across the political spectrum, and his in-house oracle, Volcker, was a Democrat who fought inflation alongside Ronald Reagan. Larry Summers, named to run the economics team from the White House, was a Clinton stalwart.

Unveiling these and other picks at a series of daily press conferences, Obama assured the public that he wanted to move fast, so fast that trainloads of money might be ready for him to dispatch across the country with a stroke of his pen on Inauguration Day. The idea of another wave of spending horrifies America’s surviving conservatives, but most economists support it — some with enthusiasm, some with resignation. Obama realized that the stimulus package could be a vehicle for launching his broad domestic agenda. His ambitious campaign promises — to reform health care, cut taxes for low- and moderate-income earners and steer the U.S. toward a new energy economy — had seemed doomed by the yawning budget deficit (some $200 billion a month, according to the latest projections). But call these projects “stimulus,” and suddenly a ship headed for the reef of economic disaster might sail through Congress flying the flag of economic recovery. With even Republican economists talking about hundreds of billions in new spending, the sky’s the limit. A dream of health-care reformers — electronic medical records — is now economic stimulus because Obama will pour money into hospitals for computers and clerical workers. His tax cut is stimulus because it puts spending money in the pockets of working Americans. His pledge to repair the nation’s infrastructure is a stimulus plan for construction workers, while his energy strategy is stimulus for the people who will modernize government buildings, update public schools and improve the electrical grid.

See pictures of Obama’s nation of hope.

See pictures of Obama’s college years.

Of course, the bullet points are easy to list; far harder is the task of spending vast sums — perhaps $1 trillion over two years — efficiently, effectively and quickly enough to spur the economy. Washington’s three goblins — waste, fraud and abuse — are watching with hungry eyes. Obama has cast Orszag as a flinty keeper of the purse strings, but he has no intention of letting his opportunity go by. “I don’t think that Americans want hubris from their next President,” Obama says, noting that McCain received nearly 47% of the vote last month. However, “I do think that we received a strong mandate for change. And I know that people have said, ‘Well, what does this change word mean? You know that it’s sort of ill defined.’ Actually, we defined it pretty precisely during the campaign, and I’m trying to define it further for people during this transition,” he says. “It means a government that is not ideologically driven. It means a government that is competent. It means a government, most importantly, that is focused day in, day out on the needs and struggles, the hopes and dreams of ordinary people.”

IV. Into the Breach
More than 75 years ago, a new president took the oath of office amid economic catastrophe and admonished the nation that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” Today generations of Americans are experiencing a harsh tutorial in the true meaning of that resonant diagnosis. Fear is kryptonite to the economy, which cannot operate efficiently without broad and well-founded confidence — that wise investments will gain value, that balance sheets mean what they say, that contracts will be honored and bills paid.

The events of the past autumn produced the sharpest drop in consumer confidence ever recorded, and a similar wave of fear cratered credit markets. Obama notes the very real structural flaws in the economy, but he is also aware of the role that fear plays. “Nobody trusts other people’s books anymore. And people decide, ‘Well, I’m just going to hold on to my cash for a while,’” he explains. “And that compounds the crisis. And all that results in a contraction in lending, in consumer spending, which then has a real impact on Main Street. And so what starts off as psychological is now very real.”

Just like our banks and our carmakers, America’s shattered confidence is in serious need of a bailout. And the thing about competence is that it nourishes fresh confidence. “Yes, we can” is both an affirmation of optimism and the essential claim of the competent. When the slogan is rooted in a record of accomplishment — when tomorrow’s yes-we-can is backed up by yesterday’s yes-we-did — confidence and competence begin to feed on each other. This virtuous cycle of possibility isn’t the whole of leadership, but it is an important part and perhaps the element most needed in today’s sea of troubles. (See pictures of Obama’s nation of hope.)

After the election, veteran Democratic pollster Peter Hart convened one last focus group to ask Virginia voters why a state that gave Bush an 8-point victory four years ago chose Obama by 6 points this time. Their responses clustered around the crucial connection between competence and confidence. They told Hart they were drawn to Obama’s self-assured and calming personality. They felt he was “honest,” a “straight shooter” — in other words, a person who does what he says he will do. Their confidence in Obama wasn’t starry-eyed; they hadn’t been swept away by his stadium speeches. They saw a man who can get some things done, at a time when so many of their leaders, from Pennsylvania Avenue to Wall Street, cannot. He made moderates feel hopeful, and even among many core Republicans who did not ultimately vote for him, Obama inspired admiration. Viewing these comments through the results of his national surveys, Hart discerned a surge of good feeling that he had not seen in a generation: “a sense of real hope,” he says, “and the kind of broad bipartisan support that has not been in evidence since the 1980 Reagan election.”

Obama has begun to turn his thoughts to his Inaugural Address. According to strategist Axelrod, he is looking for the right mixture of bracing and boost in a speech that will be “both sober and hopeful.” He may signal a new day by announcing a plan to stem the foreclosure crisis, which aides say is in the works. As the gray Chicago sky frowns outside his conference-room window, Obama rehearses his message. Americans “should anticipate that 2009 is going to be a tough year,” he says. Then he adds, “If we make some good choices, I’m confident that we can limit some of the damage in 2009. And that in 2010 we can start seeing an upward trajectory on the economy.”

A few days after this interview, Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich reminded the country that some aspects of politics will never change. Government is a human enterprise, after all, and Obama, like everyone else, is bound by its limits and subject to human frailty. Nevertheless, if he has shown anything this year, Obama has made it clear that he knows how to write new playbooks and do things in new ways. Which is a compelling quality right now. His arrival on the scene feels like a step into the next century — his genome is global, his mind is innovative, his world is networked, and his spirit is democratic. Perhaps it takes a new face to see the promise in a future that now looks dark. What’s in store for Obama’s America? “I don’t have a crystal ball,” he says. But the measure of his success in menacing times can be found in the number and variety of people who consider the question with eagerness alongside their dread.

—David Von Drehle with reporting by Massimo Calabresi and Michael Duffy / Washington

See pictures of Obama’s college years.

See pictures of the Civil Rights movement from Emmett Till to Barack Obama.

It wasn’t so long ago that Barack Obama saw paths around many of the civil-liberty dilemmas that President Bush faced when he launched a war on al-Qaeda around the world. The freshman Senator from Illinois believed, and often claimed, that the White House could and should have avoided the shame of Guantánamo Bay, resisted the urge to engage in torture and shunned domestic eavesdropping.

Such easy exits may be harder to come by now that Obama is preparing to take over as Commander in Chief. Over the past eight years, the Bush Administration has erected a new array of military detention camps, interrogation methods and spy programs of questionable legality. During the presidential campaign, Obama promised to dismantle much of that apparatus, arguing that the Bush Administration’s walk on the dark side had eroded freedoms at home and damaged America’s reputation abroad. But doing so will take more time and prove more complicated than some of his supporters may realize.

In some ways, it makes political sense to go slowly. Ever since 9/11, Obama’s party has been squeamish about walking point on civil liberties out of fear that Republicans would wrap such a move around their necks at election time. And so, though civil libertarians may holler, the Obama team is likely to put the emphasis on national security as it begins to explore options for undoing the policies of the Bush-Cheney era. Here’s a look at what the new President may seek to change and what he may leave in place:

Torture

Once he is sworn in, Obama could simply order a government-wide halt to waterboarding and any other questionable interrogation techniques that have been judged legal during the past eight years. The Executive Order would have to be sweeping and reach deep into the government’s darker recesses. That’s because the Bush team has written so many legal memos okaying various techniques for interrogators working at a wide range of agencies. Some of those opinions have been disclosed publicly, but an unknown number remain classified. Obama will need to direct his Attorney General to issue new legal guidance that supersedes all those legal opinions, seen or unseen, if he hopes to prevent a return to such practices in the future. Former federal prosecutor and onetime trial judge Eric Holder, Obama’s pick to lead the effort as the top man in the Justice Department, earned a reputation as a relatively moderate legal thinker when serving there as a senior official in the Clinton Administration. That concerns some civil libertarians. “If you leave these on the books, you leave a bunch of loaded guns that future Presidents and agency heads can pull out and shoot when they want to,” says Anthony Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union.

Guantánamo

Obama could fulfill his campaign pledge to close Gitmo by simply issuing an Executive Order. But that would pose the question of what to do with the 225 suspected terrorists detained there who would suddenly have no home. If brought to the U.S. for trial, they would fall under constitutional guarantees of due process, which includes the right to confront their accuser and review all evidence against them. That may not fly with top terrorism hunters, who rely on informants and classified evidence. Because some of the evidence looks to have been gathered during harsh interrogations that may now be regarded as illegal and therefore inadmissible in court, building criminal cases against some detainees may be impossible. That raises the danger of avowed terrorists walking away from U.S. custody on a technicality. “These are enormously complicated problems,” says Benjamin Wittes, a Brookings Institution fellow. “It’s very easy to say, ‘Put everybody on trial.’ But we still haven’t figured out what our trial system looks like for these terrorism cases.”

And even if Gitmo is shuttered, that still leaves the matter of those militants captured more recently in the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere whom Obama says he intends to more fully prosecute. Such knotty questions have led some experts to bet that while he will scale Gitmo back as quickly as possible, Obama won’t fully close it in 2009. They point out that the Bush Administration has already quietly discharged some 500 of the 700 prisoners who have been held there.

Obama may opt to release dozens of others and insist that the remaining handful of high-profile cases be heard in either federal or military courts in the U.S. Already dozens of Guantánamo cases are moving through the federal court system following a pivotal Supreme Court ruling in June, and the Bush Administration is grappling with two separate rulings from federal judges ordering the release of 22 detainees.

Renditions and Secret Prisons

There is no doubt that the murkiest corner of the shadow war on terrorism has been the CIA’s kidnapping suspected terrorists and shipping them to secret prisons around the globe–where obeying the Geneva Conventions is more an exception than the rule–a practice known as rendition. Unfortunately, some of those snatched by CIA officers were innocent. German citizen Khaled el-Masri was one such victim. El-Masri was vacationing in Macedonia in December 2003 when authorities arrested him on wrongful suspicions that his passport was fake. A tragic case of mistaken identity then played out. El-Masri has the same name as an al-Qaeda operative being hunted at the time by CIA officials, and they took custody of el-Masri in Macedonia. Operatives from the agency beat and drugged el-Masri before whisking him to a secret prison in Afghanistan known as the “Salt Pit.” Eventually el-Masri’s captors realized they had the wrong man and let him go, dumping him on a mountain road in Albania.

No one knows how many suspected terrorists have been grabbed by the agency over the past eight years. Already, the CIA has transferred at least 14 detainees from secret prisons to Guantánamo. Dozens or even hundreds of others may still be imprisoned at secret CIA facilities around the world. As many as 20 may have been victims of mistaken identity, a study by the European Parliament found. As part of a broader pledge to end torture, Obama has vowed to halt the practice of rendition. But whether Obama plans to abandon the offshore facilities where interrogations have taken place remains unclear. If he does, any detainees remaining there would probably need to be relocated–possibly to Guantánamo, where their legal status would be examined anew.

Eavesdropping

Obama may leave intact, at least at the outset, one of the most controversial elements of Bush’s war on terrorism: a secret snooping program that spies on some Americans without benefit of a court order. Shortly after 9/11, the National Security Agency began intercepting communications to and from the U.S. by suspected terrorists and confederates in their network. The White House alerted key members of Congress about the program, in part because the Administration was skipping the long-standing practice of obtaining judicial approval in advance for surveillance, as prescribed by a 1974 law. When the program became public in 2005, Justice Department officials struggled to structure it to adhere more closely to existing law, but how much it was actually changed remains unclear. Not all civil libertarians were satisfied, and Obama vowed during the campaign to end warrantless wiretapping. But he is unlikely to halt the program outright; instead, he will probably ask a team of legal advisers to recommend a new approach.

Even after all these policies are modified or abandoned, Obama will face lingering questions about whether anyone should be punished for Bush-era excesses. The feds are now probing whether CIA officials knowingly destroyed tapes of illegal interrogations in 2005, and officials at Justice are looking into whether the department’s lawyers acted appropriately when they wrote legal opinions that approved waterboarding and other unconventional interrogation methods. A similar Justice Department review of attorney behavior regarding the domestic surveillance program is also under way.

Lawmakers from both parties have called for accountability in all these programs, but neither Obama nor top congressional Democrats have signaled much appetite for prosecuting Bush Administration figures once they are out of office. An incoming President will need every vote he can get on economic and energy matters, and is unlikely to spend political capital on a divisive effort to assess blame for the missteps of a previous Administration. But civil rights proponents say a full review may be the only way to ensure that such government abuses do not happen again. Vincent Warren, executive director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, says, “Criminal prosecution of some of the people involved does have a restorative aspect, and not just symbolically.” Obama will probably cooperate with congressional probes of Bush-era behavior. But he may find it trickier politically to go after officials who were, most likely, just following orders.

November 23, 2008

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates came into office wanting to close the American detention operation at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Nearly two years later, Guantanamo is still there. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has said she wants to close it. Guantanamo will outlast her. Yet, to watch the post-election Democratic triumphalism, you’d think that Guantanamo is as good as shuttered. President-elect Barack Obama has reiterated his campaign promise to close it, and some self-described advisers talk as though he’ll wave a magic wand on Jan. 20 and a problem that has bedeviled this country for seven years will evaporate.

Closing Guantanamo won’t be easy, at least not if Obama means to change the substance of American detention policy rather than merely altering its geography. Obama could, to be sure, fulfill his promise simply by moving detainees to a different facility while continuing to hold them as “enemy combatants.” The challenge of closing Guantanamo would then come down to a series of logistical and administrative questions.

Solving the Guantanamo problem means making important decisions about detention policy in combating terrorism more generally: When, if ever, should the United States engage in preventive detention of terrorism suspects? If and when it does, should it treat them as enemy combatants under the laws of war or under some other body of law, perhaps a new detention statute? What rights should they have? What should the government have to prove about them, to what standard of proof, and in what sort of forum?

Notwithstanding the idea projected by some members of his camp that closing Guantanamo is simply a matter of will, Obama cannot just wish these questions away. They defy answers in the absence of a systematic and rigorous review of the detainee population itself, including the classified information about each prisoner. This process, carried out properly, will not take place instantly.

There are three major groups of detainees at Guantanamo, each presenting distinct policy problems. For starters, there are detainees who could face trial. Most people regard criminal prosecution as the best means of neutralizing terrorism suspects and justifying their long-term detention, and some people regard trial as the only legitimate means of locking up America’s enemies. But how big is the group that might plausibly face charges? And to what extent does its size depend on which forum the government uses for prosecution? Is it a much smaller group if America tries these people in federal courts or courts-martial than if it continues using President Bush’s much-derided military commissions? Without knowing the answer to these questions, one cannot accurately assess the costs and benefits of America’s trial options.

Second, roughly 60 detainees have been cleared for release or transfer from Guantanamo but are stuck there because of fears of mistreatment at the hands of their own governments. Will Obama have an easier time than Bush in persuading third countries to accept these detainees, particularly if he accepts a few of them into the United States? That may well be the case, but without serious diplomatic engagement over the question, we simply can’t know how intractable this problem will prove to be. The ruling Thursday by a federal judge in Washington that five of six detainees in one case were held unlawfully raises the additional question of how many detainees should simply be released.

Third and most troublesome are the detainees too dangerous to be released but who cannot face criminal charges. How many this group contains, if any, will ultimately shape Obama’s policy. Detainees who pose a grave national security threat might be unprosecutable for a variety of reasons: because of deficiencies in the criminal law as it stood in 2001, because evidence against them would not stand up in court, because the government might not have enough evidence to convict or because it obtained key evidence under coercive conditions.

If there are only a few such detainees, and the danger they pose seems manageable, those of us who have advocated a preventive detention system should reconsider our position. On the other hand, some human rights advocates acknowledge privately that they may reconsider their categorical opposition to preventive detention if the group proves substantial and the danger it poses too significant to ignore. Right now, we can only guess at this group’s size.

It matters enormously, in short, who each detainee really is. Only a true ideologue – and Obama shows no sign of being that – would develop a policy concerning Guantanamo without studying the population carefully and thinking these questions through.

It’s reassuring simply to assert that these cases present no tension between America’s needs and her values. But that judgment is at least premature and may well prove dead wrong. In the short term, it does an injustice to the outgoing administration, many current and former members of which have struggled with these questions over seven long years. It also disserves the incoming administration, which will soon inherit detainees who defy such sloganeering and whose handling will require wrenching choices with no easy answers.

By Steven Stark

It doesn’t matter how many negative ads are broadcast or how many moose are slain on the tundra, candidates and their actions don’t transform our politics nearly as much as outside events and circumstances do. Thus, if Barack Obama ends up winning a substantial victory next month, it may as much mark a revolutionary turning of the page in our politics as it would be a triumph for him. A decisive Obama win could have profound effects for at least a generation, ushering in a new political era marked by Democratic Party dominance (and triggered by the failures of George W. Bush).

Our presidential politics tend to be fairly consistent, divisible into eras clearly defined by national traumas that radically redraw party lines. The Civil War not only gave birth to the Republican Party, for instance. It also launched a long era during which the GOP’s supremacy on the presidential level was rarely challenged. Of 18 elections held from 1860 through 1928, the GOP won 14. The Republicans lost only when the Democrats nominated an extremely conservative candidate (Grover Cleveland — who won twice) or when the Republicans split themselves in half (1912, with the effects extending to the 1916 election).

But the Great Depression redefined the political landscape (with an assist from Herbert Hoover’s initial bumbling reaction to the crisis), giving the Democrats the upper hand in almost a mirror image of what had previously transpired. From 1932 through 1964, the Democrats won seven of nine elections. They ultimately lost power in that period after the GOP nominated Dwight Eisenhower, an apolitical national hero whose ideology was so amorphous that even the Democrats had sought him as a national candidate shortly before he began his political career as a Republican.

In 1968 the political map again dramatically changed, when the unrest caused by the Vietnam War — combined with conservative reaction to the civil-rights revolution — gave the Republicans another demographic and cultural advantage. Beginning in that year and continuing until our most recent election, the Republicans have won eight of 11 presidential contests. Modern Republican dominance has, in fact, been broken only when both the Democrats nominated a more conservative candidate from the GOP’s southern base (Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton) and when the GOP was either split in half (thanks to the candidacy of H. Ross Perot in 1992 and 1996) or the nation was facing the aftermath of the only presidential resignation in history (1976, following the bowing out of Richard Nixon two years before).

History in the making?

Statistics confirm the uphill road Democrats have faced in every election in this modern era. Since 1968, the party’s presidential nominees have polled above 50 percent just once — in 1976, and then only barely.

If 2008 were to follow that pattern, Barack Obama — from the northern, liberal wing of his party — would seem to have little chance to win. Even if he could somehow upset the recent trend, history suggests that he couldn’t garner much more than 50 percent of the vote. But that may happen this year. And if it does, it could signal that a new era of Democratic political dominance, last seen in the 1960s, has arrived.

Perhaps when historians look back at this election, they will see this one — not 2004’s — as the first real post-9/11 contest, with the nation having taken several years to come to terms with the trauma and the meaning of that event. So let’s posit a scenario. Over the past eight years, the reaction of the Bush administration to both 9/11 and the current financial mess has been, ironically, one that is traditionally Democratic: running huge deficits while creating vast new government interventionist bureaucracies to deal with homeland security and the credit crisis. The current administration also decided that this new era required an expensive, expansionist foreign policy, fighting “terror wars” on various fronts.

Now, the public may be in the process of deciding that, if a new era requires a more activist and expansionist government, Democrats are better equipped to handle these tasks. Voters may also decide that they are willing to accept the “risk” of a far more rapid military withdrawal from Iraq — which is, after all, the major foreign-policy difference between the McCain and Obama candidacies. Right now, Obama’s alternative looks attractive, especially given that military action always carries a huge price tag in what may be a coming age of austerity.

And then there’s the credit crisis which has just hit; admittedly, its effects may not be known for months or even years. But if Obama is able to win big because of it, it could serve as the final crystallizing event that allows the Democratic Party to reap the benefit for years to come. If that should happen, George W. Bush may be forever linked with Herbert Hoover. How’s that for a legacy?

Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., left, and Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., face off at a presidential debate at the University of Mississippi in Oxford, Miss., Friday. (Associated Press)

OXFORD, Miss. — John McCain accused Barack Obama of compiling “the most liberal voting record in the United States Senate” tonight in their first debate of a close campaign for the White House. The Democrat shot back, “Mostly that’s just me opposing George Bush’s wrong-headed policies.”

Obama said his Republican rival has been a loyal supporter of the unpopular president across the past eight years, adding that the current economic crisis is “a final verdict on eight years of failed economic policies promoted by President Bush and supported by Sen. McCain.”

The two men clashed over spending, taxes, energy and — at length — the war in Iraq during their 90-minute debate.

McCain accused his younger rival of an “incredible thing of voting to cut off funds for troops in Iraq and Afghanistan,” a reference to legislation that cleared the Senate more than a year ago.

Obama disputed that, saying he had opposed funding in a bill that presented a “blank check” to the Pentagon while McCain had opposed money in legislation that included a timetable for troop withdrawal.

In 2002, befoere he was a member of Congress, Obama opposed the invasion of Iraq, while McCain voted to authorize the war as a member of the Senate.

“You were wrong” on Iraq, Obama repeated three times in succession. “John, you like to pretend the war began in 2007.”

McCain replied that Obama has refused to acknowledge the success of the troop buildup in Iraq that McCain recommended and Bush announced more than a year ago.

The two presidential candidates stood behind identical wooden lecterns on stage at the performing arts center at the University of Mississippi for the first of three scheduled debates with less than six weeks remaining until Election Day. The two vice presidential candidates will meet next week for their only debate.

The 47-year-old Obama is seeking to become the nation’s first black president. McCain, 72, is hoping to become the oldest first-term chief executive in history — and he made a few jokes at his own expense.

“I’ve been around a while,” he said at one point. “Were you afraid I couldn’t hear you?” he said at another after Obama repeated a comment.

It was a debate that almost didn’t happen. McCain decided at the last minute to attend, two days after announcing he would try to have the event rescheduled if Congress had not reached an agreement on an economic bailout to deal with the crisis now gripping Wall Street.

The two men were pointed but polite as they covered most issues, although at least once, McCain sought to depict his rival as naive on foreign policy. That was particularly true when it came to Obama’s statement that it might become necessary to send U.S. troops across the Pakistani border to pursue terrorists.

“You don’t say that out loud,” retorted McCain. “If you have to do things, you do things.”

McCain also seemed eager to demonstrate his knowledge of foreign policy, recalling the names of three former leaders of the Soviet Union in one sentence.

Moderator Jim Lehrer’s opening question concerned the economic crisis gripping Wall Street. While neither man committed to supporting bailout legislation taking shape in Congress, they readily agreed lawmakers must take action to prevent millions of Americans from losing their jobs and their homes.

Both also said they were pleased that lawmakers in both parties were negotiating on a compromise.

McCain made a point of declaring his independence from Bush.

“I have opposed the president on spending, on climate change, on torture of prisoners, on Guantanamo Bay, on a long — on the way that the Iraq War was conducted. I have a long record and the American people know me very well … a maverick of the Senate.”

He jabbed at Obama, who he said has requested millions of dollars in pork barrel spending, including some after he began running for president.

As he does frequently while campaigning, the Republican vowed to veto any lawmaker’s pork barrel project that reaches his desk in the White House. “You will know their names and I will make them famous,” he said.

The stakes were high as the two rivals walked on stage. The polls gave Obama a modest lead and indicated he was viewed more favorably than his rival when it came to dealing with the economy. But the same surveys show McCain favored by far on foreign policy.

Both candidates had rehearsed extensively, Obama prepping with advisers at a resort in Clearwater, Fla., and McCain putting in debate work at his home outside Washington.

The two presidential hopefuls are scheduled to debate twice more, at Belmont University in Nashville on Oct. 7 and at Hofstra University in Hempsted, N.Y., on Oct. 15. Vice presidential contenders Sarah Palin and Joe Biden are to square off in a single debate Oct. 2 at Washington University in St. Louis.

Now for the Important Part:  Who Won?

Opinion #1:  McCain

Oxford, Mississippi — A few minutes after the debate between John McCain and Barack Obama ended here on the campus of the University of Mississippi, I asked close McCain adviser Charlie Black whether Obama had performed as McCain’s debate team had anticipated.

“No, no,” Black said emphatically. “I never expected Sen. Obama to spend the entire debate on the defensive, and he did. He did.”

“I think Senator McCain’s absolutely right that we need more responsibility…”

“Senator McCain is absolutely right that the earmarks process has been abused…”

“He’s also right that oftentimes lobbyists and special interests are the ones that are introducing these…requests…”

“John mentioned the fact that business taxes on paper are high in this country, and he’s absolutely right…”

“John is right we have to make cuts…”

“Senator McCain is absolutely right that the violence has been reduced as a consequence of the extraordinary sacrifice of our troops and our military families…”

“John — you’re absolutely right that presidents have to be prudent in what they say…”

“Senator McCain is absolutely right, we cannot tolerate a nuclear Iran…”

Add it all up, and Obama was undeniably, and surprisingly, deferential to a man who in the past Obama has said “doesn’t get it.” Moments after the debate ended, I asked David Axelrod, Obama’s chief strategist, whether Obama had simply been too nice (not a question one often gets to ask in these situations). “The bottom line is, I don’t think the American people want us to disagree just for the sake of being disagreeable,” Axelrod told me. “I think he made a very strong case, absolutely.”

Well, you wouldn’t expect Axelrod to admit that his guy messed up. But here’s a prediction: The next time McCain and Obama meet in debate, on October 7 in Nashville, start a drinking game in which you take a big swig every time Obama says, “John is absolutely right.” I’ll bet you get to the end of the debate without ever lifting a glass – Disclaimer from Kautzman  DO NOT DO THIS – JUST IN CASE HE IS WRONG, I DO NOT WANT TO ADVOCATE UNDERAGE DRINKING.

But Obama’s problem wasn’t just saying “John is right” too many times. He also let McCain control the discussion even when — especially when — the conversation turned to issues that play to Obama’s strength. The debate was scheduled to focus entirely on foreign policy and national security, but for obvious reasons moderator Jim Lehrer devoted the first half-hour to the current financial crisis. Polls show Obama with a pretty big lead on economic issues, and yet McCain was able to turn the discussion — ostensibly about the $700 billion bailout proposal — into an extended examination of federal spending and earmarks, two issues about which McCain has strong feelings and a good record. When McCain pointed out that Obama had asked for $932 million in earmarks — “nearly a million dollars a day for every day that he’s been in the United States Senate” — Obama answered weakly that yes, the process has been abused, “which is why I suspended any requests for my home state, whether it was for senior centers or what have you, until we cleaned it up.” Not his best moment.

When the debate came around to the topic of the evening, McCain outshone Obama on topics like Russia and Pakistan while hitting him over and over for his comments, made in earlier Democratic debates, that he would meet Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad “without precondition.” On Iraq, the two men fought to a draw, with McCain arguing that Obama was wrong on the surge and Obama arguing that McCain was wrong on the war. It seems unlikely they will change anyone’s mind about that.

The bottom line was that Obama did well enough, but McCain did better. A number of post-debate observers suggested that Obama might emerge the winner on these topics because he was able to stand alongside McCain and argue as an equal despite McCain’s greater experience. Maybe viewers will handicap the contest that way, but if they judge it straight, McCain will come out on top.

One odd thing about the debate was that it never touched on the fact that it almost didn’t happen. McCain’s go-to-Washington-to-fix-the-bailout-and-postpone-the-debate gambit was the talk of political insiders before the debate, but once the discussion began onstage, it nearly disappeared altogether. “Yes, I went back to Washington, and I met with my Republicans in the House of Representatives,” McCain said at one point. (How surprised those House Republicans will be to learn that they are McCain’s Republicans.) But after that brief remark, McCain never mentioned it again, nor did Obama.

Perhaps that’s because the fact that the debate was held, and the world didn’t end, showed that there was no need to postpone it, but the fact that progress had been made in Washington showed that McCain was right to abandon his debate prep to play a role in the bailout talks. Both McCain and Obama turned out to be half right and half wrong.

And in the end, what a mistake it would have been for McCain to have stayed away from this debate. Several hours before it began, when it was finally clear that there was going to be a debate at all, the Obama campaign sent an e-mail to reporters attempting to lower expectations for their man’s performance. Nobody paid much attention; it was, after all, an entirely unremarkable bit of pre-spin. But in this case, it turned out to be right.

Byron York, NR’s White House correspondent, is the author of the book The Vast Left Wing Conspiracy: The Untold Story of How Democratic Operatives, Eccentric Billionaires, Liberal Activists, and Assorted Celebrities Tried to Bring Down a President — and Why They’ll Try Even Harder Next Time.

Opinion #2:  Obama

Obama Wins Debate On Tactics and Strategies

When does life begin?

The surge in Iraq

Governor Palin

Close Election

Jamie Barnett
The Washington Post
July 28, 2008

Did you know that your safety and security depend on gay men and lesbians?

An estimated 65,000 gay men and lesbians serve in the U.S. armed forces, though by law they cannot be open about their sexuality. As we fight two wars, our military is stretched thin. Those gay and lesbian soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines and members of the Coast Guard are essential.

Without them, we would stretch to a dangerous point the length of time troops must spend in Iraq and Afghanistan. Without them, we would lose crucial military leadership, expertise and skills. Without them, we would have a hard time meeting our military commitments worldwide.

A hearing of a House Armed Services subcommittee this week offered a critical opportunity to break the silence surrounding how military preparedness has been hurt by the 1993 “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy barring gay men and lesbians from serving openly. The military has spent more than $363 million since 1994 to throw out gay men and lesbians whose expertise we desperately need, including expensively trained and hard-to-recruit linguists, jet pilots, cyber-warriors, doctors and combat-tested master sergeants. This purging of talent takes place at the same time the military, in order to meet its manpower quotas, feels compelled to increase the number of waivers it grants to people who have had problems with the law – in some instances almost twice as many as in years past.

These patriotic gay and lesbian warriors want to serve. Yes, some “out” themselves to leave the service, usually because they have been made to feel unwelcome, unappreciated or even unsafe in their units. An estimated 3,000 gay service members depart each year rather than continue to serve under a policy that forces them to deceive their fellow warriors and to contradict the honor and integrity that are core values in our services. Those members who stay make an incredibly difficult personal sacrifice.

“Don’t ask, don’t tell” also damages our nation’s ability to recruit the best and the brightest. Competing with industry is hard enough already. The military estimates that only three in 10 high school graduates are qualified to serve; the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy further reduces the pool of eligible recruits. And would you want to serve when you have to hide an essential part of yourself or would be unable to tell the chain of command about discrimination or harassment without risking your career?

Some fear a backlash from heterosexual service members, but I don’t. I grew up in Mississippi and attended segregated schools until I was a sophomore in high school. Integration was tumultuous, but it led to respect, understanding and, ultimately, a greater opportunity for blacks and whites alike to succeed. I believe integration of lesbians and gay men in the military will be easier: It has already taken place. Sadly, we just don’t recognize the gay service members among us for who they are.

It is up to Congress and the president to craft policy on gay men and lesbians serving in the military, but it is the responsibility of senior military commanders to advise our nation’s leaders on how law and policy affect military readiness. I raised this issue in 2003 when a task force I served on worked on the Navy’s diversity strategy. Senior leaders must state plainly how “don’t ask, don’t tell” affects recruiting, retention and our ability to develop essential military skills. They should speak up about how it affects military honor and integrity. It is our duty, something military leaders understand well, to speak openly of how “don’t ask, don’t tell” injures our military and weakens our preparedness.

What Barack Obama is to do in the coming days sounds like a no-brainer for a presumptive nominee with limited foreign-policy experience.

Go overseas. Visit the troops. Drop by the Middle East. Hobnob with major European leaders. Try to avoid gaffes. Look presidential.

Except that historians say no one in his position has done it before.

Not Jimmy Carter in 1976. Or Ronald Reagan in 1980. Or Michael Dukakis in 1988, Bill Clinton in 1992, George W. Bush in 2000.

Then again, none of them was trying to get elected president in a time of war.

“If Obama says he represents a new politics, he’s certainly smashing an old paradigm by going,” said presidential historian Douglas Brinkley, of Rice University. “And for 10 days, he’ll own the media. It’s gigantic for him.”

The Democratic candidate, in his continuing attempt to establish his national-security credentials in a post-Sept. 11 world, is embarking on an expedition that reportedly will take him to Iraq, Afghanistan, Jordan, Israel, Germany, France and Britain.

Exactly when he’s going and where isn’t altogether clear. For reasons of security, official details have been closely guarded. It is known that the three main network news anchors will be with him next week.

Many analysts have described the journey as a savvy move in Obama’s campaign against Republican John McCain – even though it comes with risks attached.
“This is a high-stakes trip,” said veteran Democratic political consultant Robert Shrum. “But voters understand that for America to be strong in the world it’s important to have a president who handles himself well and is liked and admired overseas. And I think that’s what we’ll see with Obama.”

Republican strategist John Feehery highlighted the potential downsides.

“It diverts people from the big issue in the campaign, which is the economy, and it elevates the issues of experience and credentials and whom Americans trust on Iraq, which are strengths for McCain and not Obama,” Feehery said. “This is fraught with peril for him.”

By traveling overseas and visiting the war zones – that part is considered official Senate business, the rest a campaign trip – Obama is trying to address the reservations some voters have about his limited national security resume.

In a Washington Post/ABC News poll out this week, McCain outscored Obama 63 percent to 26 percent on which candidate has better knowledge of world affairs.

Almost three-quarters of respondents said McCain would be a good commander in chief; fewer than half said the same of Obama.

Such voter concerns are among the most significant drags on candidacy of Obama, even though he leads in the polls, and the trip is one way to quiet them.

This assumes, of course, that his performance abroad is seen as appropriate – not acting as if he already were president, or being overly critical of U.S. policy on foreign soil, or getting embroiled in local disputes – and free of mistakes.

The latter is not a given, as McCain demonstrated in March. The presumptive Republican nominee, in Iraq on a Senate trip, made a widely reported misstatement, saying that Iran was helping al-Qaida operatives in Iraq rather than Shiite extremists.

McCain’s error, which he corrected after a helpful whisper from Sen. Joseph Lieberman, I-Conn., had little lasting impact. But that trip didn’t get the attention this one will.

“If all goes well for Obama, he’ll be able to start chipping away at McCain’s advantages on foreign policy and national security experience,” said Bruce Buchanan, an expert on presidential politics at the University of Texas. “It’s also a way to get the attention of a somnambulant (American) public in the middle of the summer.”  (On a side note:  “somnambulant” is such a cool word that I will give the first person to use it correctly in class discussions on the first day 20 pts. extra credit – Kautzman)

In another time, Obama might have reason to worry about getting a too-enthusiastic response overseas. Foreign support, particularly from Europeans, has not always been seen as a plus for U.S. presidential candidates. In 2004, Democrat John Kerry was ridiculed for having French relatives and roots.

But now the image of the U.S. in the world is not good, and analysts say Americans are eager to see it improve. So pictures of adoring crowds abroad, should they materialize, might be a political asset at home.

In the Washington Post/ABC News Poll, Obama beat McCain 2-1 when voters were asked which candidate would do more for the U.S. image internationally.

Republicans say Obama was goaded into this trip, at least part of it.

Two months ago, the McCain campaign started providing a count, updated daily, of how long it had been since Obama had been to Iraq (now more than 920 days) as well as constant reminders that he’d never been to Afghanistan. McCain even offered to accompany Obama to Iraq.

Beyond that, McCain’s supporters claim that the visit to Iraq is pure show for Obama; he pledged again this week to withdraw the bulk of U.S. troops within 16 months of taking office.

“Let’s drop the pretense that this is a fact-finding trip and call it what it is: the first-of-its-kind campaign rally overseas,” Jill Hazelbaker, McCain’s spokeswoman, said on Fox News on Thursday.

McCain, who said Thursday that he welcomes Obama’s travels, has made several foreign trips since announcing presidential candidacy 15 months ago, most of them on Senate business.

In the last month, he’s made campaign visits to Canada, Colombia and Mexico, trying to highlight his ability to deal with foreign leaders and concerns.

He hasn’t, however, done anything as big as what Obama is about to do.

“It’s a huge event and probably a net plus for Obama,” said Allan Lichtman, a political historian at American University. “McCain couldn’t duplicate it because he wouldn’t get the same kind of reception abroad.”

“It is a gamble, but one worth the risk,” Buchanan said. “To shoot for the job of president is the biggest gamble in American politics.”

Sixty years ago this summer, the top story in campaign year 1948 was not the big poll lead of Republican nominee Thomas Dewey or the plight of President Harry Truman. It was the Berlin airlift.

On June 23, the Soviets cut off land access to West Berlin. Gen. Lucius Clay, the military governor in Germany, called for sending convoys up the autobahns, but Allied troops were vastly outnumbered by the Red Army, and everyone feared they would overrun Western Europe unless the United States retaliated with the atomic bomb.

Air Force generals said that there was no way planes could ferry the 8 million pounds of food and coal Berlin would need every day. Secretary of State George Marshall and Joint Chiefs Chairman Omar Bradley, two of America’s most respected generals, felt Berlin was indefensible and we should withdraw. One man disagreed. President Harry Truman, in one crucial meeting after another, said, “We’re not leaving Berlin.”

And we didn’t. Truman had no idea how Berlin could be supplied. But Clay persuaded him to order the Air Force to send more planes that it wanted to keep, pristine and at the ready for other missions, at home. Air Force Chief of Staff Hoyt Vandenberg, at the prompting of Gen. Albert Wedemeyer, appointed Gen. William Tunner, who had run the airlift “over the hump” from Burma to China, to run the airlift in Germany.

Tunner imposed brute efficiencies so a plane landed and took off every 90 seconds, and pilots devised ingenious ways to increase payloads and gain favor from Berliners by dropping handkerchiefs full of candy to the children lining the runways at Tempelhof Airport.

This tale of American expertise, ingenuity and generosity is told vividly by Andrei Cherny in “The Candy Bombers.” Today, we know how it ended: the airlift supplied West Berlin all winter until the Soviets opened up land access in May, and Truman was re-elected to almost everyone’s surprise in November. But Truman couldn’t know those things in those first days in June and July. He only knew that we weren’t leaving Berlin.

There are lessons aplenty in this story. One is that the kindness of American soldiers – the candy bombers – can be a national asset. There are many similar stories out of Iraq and Afghanistan, even if today’s media, unlike the media of 1948, are not disposed to tell them.

Another is that presidential determination to avoid defeat and retreat can prevail against the advice of experts. Just as Truman’s Pentagon opposed the airlift, so George W. Bush’s Pentagon mostly opposed the surge strategy in Iraq. In late 2006 and early 2007, the advice from experts, notably the Baker-Hamilton Commission, was the same as that Marshall and Bradley gave Truman: get out with whatever fig leaf you can. The surge, like the airlift, was said to put undue strain on the military, to degrade the readiness of men and materiel for other missions. All these claims were plausible and, in the case of the surge, dominated press coverage and were supported by the incoming leaders in Congress.

But Bush, echoing Truman, said, at least in effect, we’re not leaving Iraq. He embraced the proposals for the surge, which had been worked up by retired Gen. Jack Keane and American Enterprise Institute scholar Frederick Kagan. He found a commander, Gen. David Petraeus, who had rewritten the Army’s manual on counterinsurgency and who had the character and skill to put the surge into effect.

As was the case with Tunner, the men and women serving under him showed unexpected ingenuity and the ability to adapt to unpredicted turns of events, like the Anbar awakening, which enabled them to convert Iraq’s deadliest province into a friendly, peaceful territory. And, I am sure we will find out sooner or later, those troops also performed acts of generosity, which made their task easier and will produce goodwill that will last for decades to come.

The lessons are clear. Stand fast. Put the right men in charge. And never doubt the capacity of the men and women of the American military, when given the right orders, to perform far better than the experts predict.

Just shy of eight years after they squared off in the Florida recount battle, James A. Baker III and Warren Christopher have joined forces to clean up one of the ugly legacies of the Vietnam War: the misguided piece of legislation called the War Powers Act.

Passed in 1973 when Congress was mightily frustrated with the undeclared war in Southeast Asia, that statute is proof of the adage that hard cases make bad law. Cases don’t come any harder than Vietnam, and the War Powers Act has turned out to be one of the worst bills ever to reach the president’s desk and be signed into law.

Its constitutionality is suspect, but no one has ever found a way to test it in court. Now Baker and Christopher, both former secretaries of state before they became lawyers for George W. Bush and Al Gore, respectively, in the 2000 struggle over Florida’s decisive electoral votes, have found common cause as co-chairmen of a National War Powers Commission created by the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia.

When I went to see the two men during their visit to Washington, D.C., this week, I found no lingering sense of the partisan animosities that marked their Florida encounter. Instead, they communicated a shared passion to help the next president and Congress find a way to solve a problem that has vexed the capital since the early days of the Republic.

The Founders left a ton of confusion about a pretty important question: Who has the authority to make war? Article I of the Constitution gives Congress the exclusive right to declare war, but Article II makes the president the commander in chief. Nowhere does it say where the authority of one stops and the other begins.

The War Powers Act tried to resolve the question by putting a time limit on the president’s ability to deploy troops into a combat zone, but no president has accepted as legitimate that limitation on his authority, and Congress has never tried to enforce it.

Baker and Christopher told me that as they dug into the issue, they and their fellow commission members quickly concluded there was no way to nudge the Supreme Court into settling the issue. The court has an aversion to arbitrating a “political question” arising from a conflict between the elected branches.

But Baker and Christopher were reluctant to accept the status quo, in part because, as lawyers, it offends them to have a law that no one takes seriously governing a vital area of public policy.

Instead, they focused on the question of how to encourage substantive discussions between the branches before the weighty decision is made to put troops into combat. Their proposed substitute is called “The War Powers Consultation Act.”

It calls on the president to consult with key legislators before sending troops into “significant armed conflict,” defined as a situation in which fighting could last more than a week. It creates a Joint Congressional Consultation Committee, composed of leaders of both parties and senior members of six key committees, and it guarantees that the committee and its staff have access to all the relevant intelligence the president sees.

It requires Congress to vote up or down on a deployment within 30 days, and it permits a cutoff of funds for deployments disapproved by two-thirds of the House and Senate.

That complex procedure, Baker said, is designed to preserve the constitutional authority of both the president and Congress. It avoids some of the practical and legal infirmities of the current War Powers Act. But as he readily conceded, “You can’t legislate trust,” and without trust, no set of procedures can be guaranteed to work.

It could be argued that if there were trust between the leaders of the elected branches – as there has been for substantial periods of our history but not in recent years – you would need no statute to replace the War Powers Act.

But Baker and Christopher argue that with a new president and a new Congress arriving in January, agreement on a workable substitute for the War Powers Act could, in itself, be a confidence-building step.

I have trouble seeing this as a high priority on the 2009 agenda. But I do think the Florida antagonists have devised a clever way to signal a healthy change toward bipartisanship in foreign policy.

Message Machine

Behind Analysts, the Pentagon’s Hidden Hand

By DAVID BARSTOW

In the summer of 2005, the Bush administration confronted a fresh wave of criticism over Guantánamo Bay. The detention center had just been branded “the gulag of our times” by Amnesty International, there were new allegations of abuse from United Nations human rights experts and calls were mounting for its closure.

The administration’s communications experts responded swiftly. Early one Friday morning, they put a group of retired military officers on one of the jets normally used by Vice President Dick Cheney and flew them to Cuba for a carefully orchestrated tour of Guantánamo.

To the public, these men are members of a familiar fraternity, presented tens of thousands of times on television and radio as “military analysts” whose long service has equipped them to give authoritative and unfettered judgments about the most pressing issues of the post-Sept. 11 world.

Hidden behind that appearance of objectivity, though, is a Pentagon information apparatus that has used those analysts in a campaign to generate favorable news coverage of the administration’s wartime performance, an examination by The New York Times has found.

The effort, which began with the buildup to the Iraq war and continues to this day, has sought to exploit ideological and military allegiances, and also a powerful financial dynamic: Most of the analysts have ties to military contractors vested in the very war policies they are asked to assess on air.

Those business relationships are hardly ever disclosed to the viewers, and sometimes not even to the networks themselves. But collectively, the men on the plane and several dozen other military analysts represent more than 150 military contractors either as lobbyists, senior executives, board members or consultants. The companies include defense heavyweights, but also scores of smaller companies, all part of a vast assemblage of contractors scrambling for hundreds of billions in military business generated by the administration’s war on terror. It is a furious competition, one in which inside information and easy access to senior officials are highly prized.

Records and interviews show how the Bush administration has used its control over access and information in an effort to transform the analysts into a kind of media Trojan horse — an instrument intended to shape terrorism coverage from inside the major TV and radio networks.

Analysts have been wooed in hundreds of private briefings with senior military leaders, including officials with significant influence over contracting and budget matters, records show. They have been taken on tours of Iraq and given access to classified intelligence. They have been briefed by officials from the White House, State Department and Justice Department, including Mr. Cheney, Alberto R. Gonzales and Stephen J. Hadley.

In turn, members of this group have echoed administration talking points, sometimes even when they suspected the information was false or inflated. Some analysts acknowledge they suppressed doubts because they feared jeopardizing their access.

A few expressed regret for participating in what they regarded as an effort to dupe the American public with propaganda dressed as independent military analysis.

“It was them saying, ‘We need to stick our hands up your back and move your mouth for you,’ ” Robert S. Bevelacqua, a retired Green Beret and former Fox News analyst, said.

Kenneth Allard, a former NBC military analyst who has taught information warfare at the National Defense University, said the campaign amounted to a sophisticated information operation. “This was a coherent, active policy,” he said.

As conditions in Iraq deteriorated, Mr. Allard recalled, he saw a yawning gap between what analysts were told in private briefings and what subsequent inquiries and books later revealed.

“Night and day,” Mr. Allard said, “I felt we’d been hosed.”

The Pentagon defended its relationship with military analysts, saying they had been given only factual information about the war. “The intent and purpose of this is nothing other than an earnest attempt to inform the American people,” Bryan Whitman, a Pentagon spokesman, said.

It was, Mr. Whitman added, “a bit incredible” to think retired military officers could be “wound up” and turned into “puppets of the Defense Department.”

Many analysts strongly denied that they had either been co-opted or had allowed outside business interests to affect their on-air comments, and some have used their platforms to criticize the conduct of the war. Several, like Jeffrey D. McCausland, a CBS military analyst and defense industry lobbyist, said they kept their networks informed of their outside work and recused themselves from coverage that touched on business interests.

“I’m not here representing the administration,” Dr. McCausland said.

Some network officials, meanwhile, acknowledged only a limited understanding of their analysts’ interactions with the administration. They said that while they were sensitive to potential conflicts of interest, they did not hold their analysts to the same ethical standards as their news employees regarding outside financial interests. The onus is on their analysts to disclose conflicts, they said. And whatever the contributions of military analysts, they also noted the many network journalists who have covered the war for years in all its complexity.

Five years into the Iraq war, most details of the architecture and execution of the Pentagon’s campaign have never been disclosed. But The Times successfully sued the Defense Department to gain access to 8,000 pages of e-mail messages, transcripts and records describing years of private briefings, trips to Iraq and Guantánamo and an extensive Pentagon talking points operation.

These records reveal a symbiotic relationship where the usual dividing lines between government and journalism have been obliterated.

Internal Pentagon documents repeatedly refer to the military analysts as “message force multipliers” or “surrogates” who could be counted on to deliver administration “themes and messages” to millions of Americans “in the form of their own opinions.”

Though many analysts are paid network consultants, making $500 to $1,000 per appearance, in Pentagon meetings they sometimes spoke as if they were operating behind enemy lines, interviews and transcripts show. Some offered the Pentagon tips on how to outmaneuver the networks, or as one analyst put it to Donald H. Rumsfeld, then the defense secretary, “the Chris Matthewses and the Wolf Blitzers of the world.” Some warned of planned stories or sent the Pentagon copies of their correspondence with network news executives. Many — although certainly not all — faithfully echoed talking points intended to counter critics.

“Good work,” Thomas G. McInerney, a retired Air Force general, consultant and Fox News analyst, wrote to the Pentagon after receiving fresh talking points in late 2006. “We will use it.”

Again and again, records show, the administration has enlisted analysts as a rapid reaction force to rebut what it viewed as critical news coverage, some of it by the networks’ own Pentagon correspondents. For example, when news articles revealed that troops in Iraq were dying because of inadequate body armor, a senior Pentagon official wrote to his colleagues: “I think our analysts — properly armed — can push back in that arena.”

The documents released by the Pentagon do not show any quid pro quo between commentary and contracts. But some analysts said they had used the special access as a marketing and networking opportunity or as a window into future business possibilities.

John C. Garrett is a retired Army colonel and unpaid analyst for Fox News TV and radio. He is also a lobbyist at Patton Boggs who helps firms win Pentagon contracts, including in Iraq. In promotional materials, he states that as a military analyst he “is privy to weekly access and briefings with the secretary of defense, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and other high level policy makers in the administration.” One client told investors that Mr. Garrett’s special access and decades of experience helped him “to know in advance — and in detail — how best to meet the needs” of the Defense Department and other agencies.

In interviews Mr. Garrett said there was an inevitable overlap between his dual roles. He said he had gotten “information you just otherwise would not get,” from the briefings and three Pentagon-sponsored trips to Iraq. He also acknowledged using this access and information to identify opportunities for clients. “You can’t help but look for that,” he said, adding, “If you know a capability that would fill a niche or need, you try to fill it. “That’s good for everybody.”

At the same time, in e-mail messages to the Pentagon, Mr. Garrett displayed an eagerness to be supportive with his television and radio commentary. “Please let me know if you have any specific points you want covered or that you would prefer to downplay,” he wrote in January 2007, before President Bush went on TV to describe the surge strategy in Iraq.

Conversely, the administration has demonstrated that there is a price for sustained criticism, many analysts said. “You’ll lose all access,” Dr. McCausland said.

With a majority of Americans calling the war a mistake despite all administration attempts to sway public opinion, the Pentagon has focused in the last couple of years on cultivating in particular military analysts frequently seen and heard in conservative news outlets, records and interviews show.

Some of these analysts were on the mission to Cuba on June 24, 2005 — the first of six such Guantánamo trips — which was designed to mobilize analysts against the growing perception of Guantánamo as an international symbol of inhumane treatment. On the flight to Cuba, for much of the day at Guantánamo and on the flight home that night, Pentagon officials briefed the 10 or so analysts on their key messages — how much had been spent improving the facility, the abuse endured by guards, the extensive rights afforded detainees.

The results came quickly. The analysts went on TV and radio, decrying Amnesty International, criticizing calls to close the facility and asserting that all detainees were treated humanely.

“The impressions that you’re getting from the media and from the various pronouncements being made by people who have not been here in my opinion are totally false,” Donald W. Shepperd, a retired Air Force general, reported live on CNN by phone from Guantánamo that same afternoon.

The next morning, Montgomery Meigs, a retired Army general and NBC analyst, appeared on “Today.” “There’s been over $100 million of new construction,” he reported. “The place is very professionally run.”

Within days, transcripts of the analysts’ appearances were circulated to senior White House and Pentagon officials, cited as evidence of progress in the battle for hearts and minds at home.

Charting the Campaign

By early 2002, detailed planning for a possible Iraq invasion was under way, yet an obstacle loomed. Many Americans, polls showed, were uneasy about invading a country with no clear connection to the Sept. 11 attacks. Pentagon and White House officials believed the military analysts could play a crucial role in helping overcome this resistance.

Torie Clarke, the former public relations executive who oversaw the Pentagon’s dealings with the analysts as assistant secretary of defense for public affairs, had come to her job with distinct ideas about achieving what she called “information dominance.” In a spin-saturated news culture, she argued, opinion is swayed most by voices perceived as authoritative and utterly independent.

And so even before Sept. 11, she built a system within the Pentagon to recruit “key influentials” — movers and shakers from all walks who with the proper ministrations might be counted on to generate support for Mr. Rumsfeld’s priorities.

In the months after Sept. 11, as every network rushed to retain its own all-star squad of retired military officers, Ms. Clarke and her staff sensed a new opportunity. To Ms. Clarke’s team, the military analysts were the ultimate “key influential” — authoritative, most of them decorated war heroes, all reaching mass audiences.

The analysts, they noticed, often got more airtime than network reporters, and they were not merely explaining the capabilities of Apache helicopters. They were framing how viewers ought to interpret events. What is more, while the analysts were in the news media, they were not of the news media. They were military men, many of them ideologically in sync with the administration’s neoconservative brain trust, many of them important players in a military industry anticipating large budget increases to pay for an Iraq war.

Even analysts with no defense industry ties, and no fondness for the administration, were reluctant to be critical of military leaders, many of whom were friends. “It is very hard for me to criticize the United States Army,” said William L. Nash, a retired Army general and ABC analyst. “It is my life.”

Other administrations had made sporadic, small-scale attempts to build relationships with the occasional military analyst. But these were trifling compared with what Ms. Clarke’s team had in mind. Don Meyer, an aide to Ms. Clarke, said a strategic decision was made in 2002 to make the analysts the main focus of the public relations push to construct a case for war. Journalists were secondary. “We didn’t want to rely on them to be our primary vehicle to get information out,” Mr. Meyer said.

The Pentagon’s regular press office would be kept separate from the military analysts. The analysts would instead be catered to by a small group of political appointees, with the point person being Brent T. Krueger, another senior aide to Ms. Clarke. The decision recalled other administration tactics that subverted traditional journalism. Federal agencies, for example, have paid columnists to write favorably about the administration. They have distributed to local TV stations hundreds of fake news segments with fawning accounts of administration accomplishments. The Pentagon itself has made covert payments to Iraqi newspapers to publish coalition propaganda.

Rather than complain about the “media filter,” each of these techniques simply converted the filter into an amplifier. This time, Mr. Krueger said, the military analysts would in effect be “writing the op-ed” for the war.

Assembling the Team

From the start, interviews show, the White House took a keen interest in which analysts had been identified by the Pentagon, requesting lists of potential recruits, and suggesting names. Ms. Clarke’s team wrote summaries describing their backgrounds, business affiliations and where they stood on the war.

“Rumsfeld ultimately cleared off on all invitees,” said Mr. Krueger, who left the Pentagon in 2004. (Through a spokesman, Mr. Rumsfeld declined to comment for this article.)

Over time, the Pentagon recruited more than 75 retired officers, although some participated only briefly or sporadically. The largest contingent was affiliated with Fox News, followed by NBC and CNN, the other networks with 24-hour cable outlets. But analysts from CBS and ABC were included, too. Some recruits, though not on any network payroll, were influential in other ways — either because they were sought out by radio hosts, or because they often published op-ed articles or were quoted in magazines, Web sites and newspapers. At least nine of them have written op-ed articles for The Times.

The group was heavily represented by men involved in the business of helping companies win military contracts. Several held senior positions with contractors that gave them direct responsibility for winning new Pentagon business. James Marks, a retired Army general and analyst for CNN from 2004 to 2007, pursued military and intelligence contracts as a senior executive with McNeil Technologies. Still others held board positions with military firms that gave them responsibility for government business. General McInerney, the Fox analyst, for example, sits on the boards of several military contractors, including Nortel Government Solutions, a supplier of communication networks.

Several were defense industry lobbyists, such as Dr. McCausland, who works at Buchanan Ingersoll & Rooney, a major lobbying firm where he is director of a national security team that represents several military contractors. “We offer clients access to key decision makers,” Dr. McCausland’s team promised on the firm’s Web site.

Dr. McCausland was not the only analyst making this pledge. Another was Joseph W. Ralston, a retired Air Force general. Soon after signing on with CBS, General Ralston was named vice chairman of the Cohen Group, a consulting firm headed by a former defense secretary, William Cohen, himself now a “world affairs” analyst for CNN. “The Cohen Group knows that getting to ‘yes’ in the aerospace and defense market — whether in the United States or abroad — requires that companies have a thorough, up-to-date understanding of the thinking of government decision makers,” the company tells prospective clients on its Web site.

There were also ideological ties.

Two of NBC’s most prominent analysts, Barry R. McCaffrey and the late Wayne A. Downing, were on the advisory board of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, an advocacy group created with White House encouragement in 2002 to help make the case for ousting Saddam Hussein. Both men also had their own consulting firms and sat on the boards of major military contractors.

Many also shared with Mr. Bush’s national security team a belief that pessimistic war coverage broke the nation’s will to win in Vietnam, and there was a mutual resolve not to let that happen with this war.

This was a major theme, for example, with Paul E. Vallely, a Fox News analyst from 2001 to 2007. A retired Army general who had specialized in psychological warfare, Mr. Vallely co-authored a paper in 1980 that accused American news organizations of failing to defend the nation from “enemy” propaganda during Vietnam.

“We lost the war — not because we were outfought, but because we were out Psyoped,” he wrote. He urged a radically new approach to psychological operations in future wars — taking aim at not just foreign adversaries but domestic audiences, too. He called his approach “MindWar” — using network TV and radio to “strengthen our national will to victory.”

The Selling of the War

From their earliest sessions with the military analysts, Mr. Rumsfeld and his aides spoke as if they were all part of the same team.

In interviews, participants described a powerfully seductive environment — the uniformed escorts to Mr. Rumsfeld’s private conference room, the best government china laid out, the embossed name cards, the blizzard of PowerPoints, the solicitations of advice and counsel, the appeals to duty and country, the warm thank you notes from the secretary himself.

“Oh, you have no idea,” Mr. Allard said, describing the effect. “You’re back. They listen to you. They listen to what you say on TV.” It was, he said, “psyops on steroids” — a nuanced exercise in influence through flattery and proximity. “It’s not like it’s, ‘We’ll pay you $500 to get our story out,’ ” he said. “It’s more subtle.”

The access came with a condition. Participants were instructed not to quote their briefers directly or otherwise describe their contacts with the Pentagon.

In the fall and winter leading up to the invasion, the Pentagon armed its analysts with talking points portraying Iraq as an urgent threat. The basic case became a familiar mantra: Iraq possessed chemical and biological weapons, was developing nuclear weapons, and might one day slip some to Al Qaeda; an invasion would be a relatively quick and inexpensive “war of liberation.”

At the Pentagon, members of Ms. Clarke’s staff marveled at the way the analysts seamlessly incorporated material from talking points and briefings as if it was their own.

“You could see that they were messaging,” Mr. Krueger said. “You could see they were taking verbatim what the secretary was saying or what the technical specialists were saying. And they were saying it over and over and over.” Some days, he added, “We were able to click on every single station and every one of our folks were up there delivering our message. You’d look at them and say, ‘This is working.’ ”

On April 12, 2003, with major combat almost over, Mr. Rumsfeld drafted a memorandum to Ms. Clarke. “Let’s think about having some of the folks who did such a good job as talking heads in after this thing is over,” he wrote.

By summer, though, the first signs of the insurgency had emerged. Reports from journalists based in Baghdad were increasingly suffused with the imagery of mayhem.

The Pentagon did not have to search far for a counterweight.

It was time, an internal Pentagon strategy memorandum urged, to “re-energize surrogates and message-force multipliers,” starting with the military analysts.

The memorandum led to a proposal to take analysts on a tour of Iraq in September 2003, timed to help overcome the sticker shock from Mr. Bush’s request for $87 billion in emergency war financing.

The group included four analysts from Fox News, one each from CNN and ABC, and several research-group luminaries whose opinion articles appear regularly in the nation’s op-ed pages.

The trip invitation promised a look at “the real situation on the ground in Iraq.”

The situation, as described in scores of books, was deteriorating. L. Paul Bremer III, then the American viceroy in Iraq, wrote in his memoir, “My Year in Iraq,” that he had privately warned the White House that the United States had “about half the number of soldiers we needed here.”

“We’re up against a growing and sophisticated threat,” Mr. Bremer recalled telling the president during a private White House dinner.

That dinner took place on Sept. 24, while the analysts were touring Iraq.

Yet these harsh realities were elided, or flatly contradicted, during the official presentations for the analysts, records show. The itinerary, scripted to the minute, featured brief visits to a model school, a few refurbished government buildings, a center for women’s rights, a mass grave and even the gardens of Babylon.

Mostly the analysts attended briefings. These sessions, records show, spooled out an alternative narrative, depicting an Iraq bursting with political and economic energy, its security forces blossoming. On the crucial question of troop levels, the briefings echoed the White House line: No reinforcements were needed. The “growing and sophisticated threat” described by Mr. Bremer was instead depicted as degraded, isolated and on the run.

“We’re winning,” a briefing document proclaimed.

One trip participant, General Nash of ABC, said some briefings were so clearly “artificial” that he joked to another group member that they were on “the George Romney memorial trip to Iraq,” a reference to Mr. Romney’s infamous claim that American officials had “brainwashed” him into supporting the Vietnam War during a tour there in 1965, while he was governor of Michigan.

But if the trip pounded the message of progress, it also represented a business opportunity: direct access to the most senior civilian and military leaders in Iraq and Kuwait, including many with a say in how the president’s $87 billion would be spent. It also was a chance to gather inside information about the most pressing needs confronting the American mission: the acute shortages of “up-armored” Humvees; the billions to be spent building military bases; the urgent need for interpreters; and the ambitious plans to train Iraq’s security forces.

Information and access of this nature had undeniable value for trip participants like William V. Cowan and Carlton A. Sherwood.

Mr. Cowan, a Fox analyst and retired Marine colonel, was the chief executive of a new military firm, the wvc3 Group. Mr. Sherwood was its executive vice president. At the time, the company was seeking contracts worth tens of millions to supply body armor and counterintelligence services in Iraq. In addition, wvc3 Group had a written agreement to use its influence and connections to help tribal leaders in Al Anbar Province win reconstruction contracts from the coalition.

“Those sheiks wanted access to the C.P.A.,” Mr. Cowan recalled in an interview, referring to the Coalition Provisional Authority.

Mr. Cowan said he pleaded their cause during the trip. “I tried to push hard with some of Bremer’s people to engage these people of Al Anbar,” he said.

Back in Washington, Pentagon officials kept a nervous eye on how the trip translated on the airwaves. Uncomfortable facts had bubbled up during the trip. One briefer, for example, mentioned that the Army was resorting to packing inadequately armored Humvees with sandbags and Kevlar blankets. Descriptions of the Iraqi security forces were withering. “They can’t shoot, but then again, they don’t,” one officer told them, according to one participant’s notes.

“I saw immediately in 2003 that things were going south,” General Vallely, one of the Fox analysts on the trip, recalled in an interview with The Times.

The Pentagon, though, need not have worried.

“You can’t believe the progress,” General Vallely told Alan Colmes of Fox News upon his return. He predicted the insurgency would be “down to a few numbers” within months.

“We could not be more excited, more pleased,” Mr. Cowan told Greta Van Susteren of Fox News. There was barely a word about armor shortages or corrupt Iraqi security forces. And on the key strategic question of the moment — whether to send more troops — the analysts were unanimous.

“I am so much against adding more troops,” General Shepperd said on CNN.

Access and Influence

Inside the Pentagon and at the White House, the trip was viewed as a masterpiece in the management of perceptions, not least because it gave fuel to complaints that “mainstream” journalists were ignoring the good news in Iraq.

“We’re hitting a home run on this trip,” a senior Pentagon official wrote in an e-mail message to Richard B. Myers and Peter Pace, then chairman and vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Its success only intensified the Pentagon’s campaign. The pace of briefings accelerated. More trips were organized. Eventually the effort involved officials from Washington to Baghdad to Kabul to Guantánamo and back to Tampa, Fla., the headquarters of United States Central Command.

The scale reflected strong support from the top. When officials in Iraq were slow to organize another trip for analysts, a Pentagon official fired off an e-mail message warning that the trips “have the highest levels of visibility” at the White House and urging them to get moving before Lawrence Di Rita, one of Mr. Rumsfeld’s closest aides, “picks up the phone and starts calling the 4-stars.”

Mr. Di Rita, no longer at the Defense Department, said in an interview that a “conscious decision” was made to rely on the military analysts to counteract “the increasingly negative view of the war” coming from journalists in Iraq. The analysts, he said, generally had “a more supportive view” of the administration and the war, and the combination of their TV platforms and military cachet made them ideal for rebutting critical coverage of issues like troop morale, treatment of detainees, inadequate equipment or poorly trained Iraqi security forces. “On those issues, they were more likely to be seen as credible spokesmen,” he said.

For analysts with military industry ties, the attention brought access to a widening circle of influential officials beyond the contacts they had accumulated over the course of their careers.

Charles T. Nash, a Fox military analyst and retired Navy captain, is a consultant who helps small companies break into the military market. Suddenly, he had entree to a host of senior military leaders, many of whom he had never met. It was, he said, like being embedded with the Pentagon leadership. “You start to recognize what’s most important to them,” he said, adding, “There’s nothing like seeing stuff firsthand.”

Some Pentagon officials said they were well aware that some analysts viewed their special access as a business advantage. “Of course we realized that,” Mr. Krueger said. “We weren’t naïve about that.”

They also understood the financial relationship between the networks and their analysts. Many analysts were being paid by the “hit,” the number of times they appeared on TV. The more an analyst could boast of fresh inside information from high-level Pentagon “sources,” the more hits he could expect. The more hits, the greater his potential influence in the military marketplace, where several analysts prominently advertised their network roles.

“They have taken lobbying and the search for contracts to a far higher level,” Mr. Krueger said. “This has been highly honed.”

Mr. Di Rita, though, said it never occurred to him that analysts might use their access to curry favor. Nor, he said, did the Pentagon try to exploit this dynamic. “That’s not something that ever crossed my mind,” he said. In any event, he argued, the analysts and the networks were the ones responsible for any ethical complications. “We assume they know where the lines are,” he said.

The analysts met personally with Mr. Rumsfeld at least 18 times, records show, but that was just the beginning. They had dozens more sessions with the most senior members of his brain trust and access to officials responsible for managing the billions being spent in Iraq. Other groups of “key influentials” had meetings, but not nearly as often as the analysts.

An internal memorandum in 2005 helped explain why. The memorandum, written by a Pentagon official who had accompanied analysts to Iraq, said that based on her observations during the trip, the analysts “are having a greater impact” on network coverage of the military. “They have now become the go-to guys not only on breaking stories, but they influence the views on issues,” she wrote.

Other branches of the administration also began to make use of the analysts. Mr. Gonzales, then the attorney general, met with them soon after news leaked that the government was wiretapping terrorism suspects in the United States without warrants, Pentagon records show. When David H. Petraeus was appointed the commanding general in Iraq in January 2007, one of his early acts was to meet with the analysts.

“We knew we had extraordinary access,” said Timur J. Eads, a retired Army lieutenant colonel and Fox analyst who is vice president of government relations for Blackbird Technologies, a fast-growing military contractor.

Like several other analysts, Mr. Eads said he had at times held his tongue on television for fear that “some four-star could call up and say, ‘Kill that contract.’ ” For example, he believed Pentagon officials misled the analysts about the progress of Iraq’s security forces. “I know a snow job when I see one,” he said. He did not share this on TV.

“Human nature,” he explained, though he noted other instances when he was critical.

Some analysts said that even before the war started, they privately had questions about the justification for the invasion, but were careful not to express them on air.

Mr. Bevelacqua, then a Fox analyst, was among those invited to a briefing in early 2003 about Iraq’s purported stockpiles of illicit weapons. He recalled asking the briefer whether the United States had “smoking gun” proof.

“ ‘We don’t have any hard evidence,’ ” Mr. Bevelacqua recalled the briefer replying. He said he and other analysts were alarmed by this concession. “We are looking at ourselves saying, ‘What are we doing?’ ”

Another analyst, Robert L. Maginnis, a retired Army lieutenant colonel who works in the Pentagon for a military contractor, attended the same briefing and recalled feeling “very disappointed” after being shown satellite photographs purporting to show bunkers associated with a hidden weapons program. Mr. Maginnis said he concluded that the analysts were being “manipulated” to convey a false sense of certainty about the evidence of the weapons. Yet he and Mr. Bevelacqua and the other analysts who attended the briefing did not share any misgivings with the American public.

Mr. Bevelacqua and another Fox analyst, Mr. Cowan, had formed the wvc3 Group, and hoped to win military and national security contracts.

“There’s no way I was going to go down that road and get completely torn apart,” Mr. Bevelacqua said. “You’re talking about fighting a huge machine.”

Some e-mail messages between the Pentagon and the analysts reveal an implicit trade of privileged access for favorable coverage. Robert H. Scales Jr., a retired Army general and analyst for Fox News and National Public Radio whose consulting company advises several military firms on weapons and tactics used in Iraq, wanted the Pentagon to approve high-level briefings for him inside Iraq in 2006.

“Recall the stuff I did after my last visit,” he wrote. “I will do the same this time.”

Pentagon Keeps Tabs

As it happened, the analysts’ news media appearances were being closely monitored. The Pentagon paid a private contractor, Omnitec Solutions, hundreds of thousands of dollars to scour databases for any trace of the analysts, be it a segment on “The O’Reilly Factor” or an interview with The Daily Inter Lake in Montana, circulation 20,000.

Omnitec evaluated their appearances using the same tools as corporate branding experts. One report, assessing the impact of several trips to Iraq in 2005, offered example after example of analysts echoing Pentagon themes on all the networks.

“Commentary from all three Iraq trips was extremely positive over all,” the report concluded.

In interviews, several analysts reacted with dismay when told they were described as reliable “surrogates” in Pentagon documents. And some asserted that their Pentagon sessions were, as David L. Grange, a retired Army general and CNN analyst put it, “just upfront information,” while others pointed out, accurately, that they did not always agree with the administration or each other. “None of us drink the Kool-Aid,” General Scales said.

Likewise, several also denied using their special access for business gain. “Not related at all,” General Shepperd said, pointing out that many in the Pentagon held CNN “in the lowest esteem.”

Still, even the mildest of criticism could draw a challenge. Several analysts told of fielding telephone calls from displeased defense officials only minutes after being on the air.

On Aug. 3, 2005, 14 marines died in Iraq. That day, Mr. Cowan, who said he had grown increasingly uncomfortable with the “twisted version of reality” being pushed on analysts in briefings, called the Pentagon to give “a heads-up” that some of his comments on Fox “may not all be friendly,” Pentagon records show. Mr. Rumsfeld’s senior aides quickly arranged a private briefing for him, yet when he told Bill O’Reilly that the United States was “not on a good glide path right now” in Iraq, the repercussions were swift.

Mr. Cowan said he was “precipitously fired from the analysts group” for this appearance. The Pentagon, he wrote in an e-mail message, “simply didn’t like the fact that I wasn’t carrying their water.” The next day James T. Conway, then director of operations for the Joint Chiefs, presided over another conference call with analysts. He urged them, a transcript shows, not to let the marines’ deaths further erode support for the war.

“The strategic target remains our population,” General Conway said. “We can lose people day in and day out, but they’re never going to beat our military. What they can and will do if they can is strip away our support. And you guys can help us not let that happen.”

“General, I just made that point on the air,” an analyst replied.

“Let’s work it together, guys,” General Conway urged.

The Generals’ Revolt

The full dimensions of this mutual embrace were perhaps never clearer than in April 2006, after several of Mr. Rumsfeld’s former generals — none of them network military analysts — went public with devastating critiques of his wartime performance. Some called for his resignation.

On Friday, April 14, with what came to be called the “Generals’ Revolt” dominating headlines, Mr. Rumsfeld instructed aides to summon military analysts to a meeting with him early the next week, records show. When an aide urged a short delay to “give our big guys on the West Coast a little more time to buy a ticket and get here,” Mr. Rumsfeld’s office insisted that “the boss” wanted the meeting fast “for impact on the current story.”

That same day, Pentagon officials helped two Fox analysts, General McInerney and General Vallely, write an opinion article for The Wall Street Journal defending Mr. Rumsfeld.

“Starting to write it now,” General Vallely wrote to the Pentagon that afternoon. “Any input for the article,” he added a little later, “will be much appreciated.” Mr. Rumsfeld’s office quickly forwarded talking points and statistics to rebut the notion of a spreading revolt.

“Vallely is going to use the numbers,” a Pentagon official reported that afternoon.

The standard secrecy notwithstanding, plans for this session leaked, producing a front-page story in The Times that Sunday. In damage-control mode, Pentagon officials scrambled to present the meeting as routine and directed that communications with analysts be kept “very formal,” records show. “This is very, very sensitive now,” a Pentagon official warned subordinates.

On Tuesday, April 18, some 17 analysts assembled at the Pentagon with Mr. Rumsfeld and General Pace, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs.

A transcript of that session, never before disclosed, shows a shared determination to marginalize war critics and revive public support for the war.

“I’m an old intel guy,” said one analyst. (The transcript omits speakers’ names.) “And I can sum all of this up, unfortunately, with one word. That is Psyops. Now most people may hear that and they think, ‘Oh my God, they’re trying to brainwash.’ ”

“What are you, some kind of a nut?” Mr. Rumsfeld cut in, drawing laughter. “You don’t believe in the Constitution?”

There was little discussion about the actual criticism pouring forth from Mr. Rumsfeld’s former generals. Analysts argued that opposition to the war was rooted in perceptions fed by the news media, not reality. The administration’s overall war strategy, they counseled, was “brilliant” and “very successful.”

“Frankly,” one participant said, “from a military point of view, the penalty, 2,400 brave Americans whom we lost, 3,000 in an hour and 15 minutes, is relative.”

An analyst said at another point: “This is a wider war. And whether we have democracy in Iraq or not, it doesn’t mean a tinker’s damn if we end up with the result we want, which is a regime over there that’s not a threat to us.”

“Yeah,” Mr. Rumsfeld said, taking notes.

But winning or not, they bluntly warned, the administration was in grave political danger so long as most Americans viewed Iraq as a lost cause. “America hates a loser,” one analyst said.

Much of the session was devoted to ways that Mr. Rumsfeld could reverse the “political tide.” One analyst urged Mr. Rumsfeld to “just crush these people,” and assured him that “most of the gentlemen at the table” would enthusiastically support him if he did.

“You are the leader,” the analyst told Mr. Rumsfeld. “You are our guy.”

At another point, an analyst made a suggestion: “In one of your speeches you ought to say, ‘Everybody stop for a minute and imagine an Iraq ruled by Zarqawi.’ And then you just go down the list and say, ‘All right, we’ve got oil, money, sovereignty, access to the geographic center of gravity of the Middle East, blah, blah, blah.’ If you can just paint a mental picture for Joe America to say, ‘Oh my God, I can’t imagine a world like that.’ ”

Even as they assured Mr. Rumsfeld that they stood ready to help in this public relations offensive, the analysts sought guidance on what they should cite as the next “milestone” that would, as one analyst put it, “keep the American people focused on the idea that we’re moving forward to a positive end.” They placed particular emphasis on the growing confrontation with Iran.

“When you said ‘long war,’ you changed the psyche of the American people to expect this to be a generational event,” an analyst said. “And again, I’m not trying to tell you how to do your job…”

“Get in line,” Mr. Rumsfeld interjected.

The meeting ended and Mr. Rumsfeld, appearing pleased and relaxed, took the entire group into a small study and showed off treasured keepsakes from his life, several analysts recalled.

Soon after, analysts hit the airwaves. The Omnitec monitoring reports, circulated to more than 80 officials, confirmed that analysts repeated many of the Pentagon’s talking points: that Mr. Rumsfeld consulted “frequently and sufficiently” with his generals; that he was not “overly concerned” with the criticisms; that the meeting focused “on more important topics at hand,” including the next milestone in Iraq, the formation of a new government.

Days later, Mr. Rumsfeld wrote a memorandum distilling their collective guidance into bullet points. Two were underlined:

“Focus on the Global War on Terror — not simply Iraq. The wider war — the long war.”

“Link Iraq to Iran. Iran is the concern. If we fail in Iraq or Afghanistan, it will help Iran.”

But if Mr. Rumsfeld found the session instructive, at least one participant, General Nash, the ABC analyst, was repulsed.

“I walked away from that session having total disrespect for my fellow commentators, with perhaps one or two exceptions,” he said.

View From the Networks

Two weeks ago General Petraeus took time out from testifying before Congress about Iraq for a conference call with military analysts.

Mr. Garrett, the Fox analyst and Patton Boggs lobbyist, said he told General Petraeus during the call to “keep up the great work.”

“Hey,” Mr. Garrett said in an interview, “anything we can do to help.”

For the moment, though, because of heavy election coverage and general war fatigue, military analysts are not getting nearly as much TV time, and the networks have trimmed their rosters of analysts. The conference call with General Petraeus, for example, produced little in the way of immediate coverage.

Still, almost weekly the Pentagon continues to conduct briefings with selected military analysts. Many analysts said network officials were only dimly aware of these interactions. The networks, they said, have little grasp of how often they meet with senior officials, or what is discussed.

“I don’t think NBC was even aware we were participating,” said Rick Francona, a longtime military analyst for the network.

Some networks publish biographies on their Web sites that describe their analysts’ military backgrounds and, in some cases, give at least limited information about their business ties. But many analysts also said the networks asked few questions about their outside business interests, the nature of their work or the potential for that work to create conflicts of interest. “None of that ever happened,” said Mr. Allard, an NBC analyst until 2006.

“The worst conflict of interest was no interest.”

Mr. Allard and other analysts said their network handlers also raised no objections when the Defense Department began paying their commercial airfare for Pentagon-sponsored trips to Iraq — a clear ethical violation for most news organizations.

CBS News declined to comment on what it knew about its military analysts’ business affiliations or what steps it took to guard against potential conflicts.

NBC News also declined to discuss its procedures for hiring and monitoring military analysts. The network issued a short statement: “We have clear policies in place to assure that the people who appear on our air have been appropriately vetted and that nothing in their profile would lead to even a perception of a conflict of interest.”

Jeffrey W. Schneider, a spokesman for ABC, said that while the network’s military consultants were not held to the same ethical rules as its full-time journalists, they were expected to keep the network informed about any outside business entanglements. “We make it clear to them we expect them to keep us closely apprised,” he said.

A spokeswoman for Fox News said executives “refused to participate” in this article.

CNN requires its military analysts to disclose in writing all outside sources of income. But like the other networks, it does not provide its military analysts with the kind of written, specific ethical guidelines it gives its full-time employees for avoiding real or apparent conflicts of interest.

Yet even where controls exist, they have sometimes proven porous.

CNN, for example, said it was unaware for nearly three years that one of its main military analysts, General Marks, was deeply involved in the business of seeking government contracts, including contracts related to Iraq.

General Marks was hired by CNN in 2004, about the time he took a management position at McNeil Technologies, where his job was to pursue military and intelligence contracts. As required, General Marks disclosed that he received income from McNeil Technologies. But the disclosure form did not require him to describe what his job entailed, and CNN acknowledges it failed to do additional vetting.

“We did not ask Mr. Marks the follow-up questions we should have,” CNN said in a written statement.

In an interview, General Marks said it was no secret at CNN that his job at McNeil Technologies was about winning contracts. “I mean, that’s what McNeil does,” he said.

CNN, however, said it did not know the nature of McNeil’s military business or what General Marks did for the company. If he was bidding on Pentagon contracts, CNN said, that should have disqualified him from being a military analyst for the network. But in the summer and fall of 2006, even as he was regularly asked to comment on conditions in Iraq, General Marks was working intensively on bidding for a $4.6 billion contract to provide thousands of translators to United States forces in Iraq. In fact, General Marks was made president of the McNeil spin-off that won the huge contract in December 2006.

General Marks said his work on the contract did not affect his commentary on CNN. “I’ve got zero challenge separating myself from a business interest,” he said.

But CNN said it had no idea about his role in the contract until July 2007, when it reviewed his most recent disclosure form, submitted months earlier, and finally made inquiries about his new job.

“We saw the extent of his dealings and determined at that time we should end our relationship with him,” CNN said.

 [What was it that Eisenhower said about the "Military Industrial Complex"?  Kautzman]

President Bush plans to announce today that he will cut Army combat tours in Iraq from 15 months to 12 months, returning rotations to where they were before last year’s troop buildup in an effort to alleviate the tremendous stress on the military, administration officials said.

The move is in response to intense pressure from service commanders who have expressed anxiety about the toll of long deployments on their soldiers and, more broadly, about the U.S. military’s ability to confront unanticipated threats. Bush will announce the decision during a national speech, in which aides said he will also embrace Army Gen. David H. Petraeus’s plan to indefinitely suspend a drawdown of forces.

The twin decisions may set the course for U.S. policy in Iraq through the fall and perhaps for the rest of Bush’s presidency. Frustrated by their inability to force Bush to shift direction since they took over Capitol Hill more than a year ago, congressional Democrats began coalescing behind a strategy of trying to force the Iraqis to shoulder more of the costs of the war and reconstruction. Key Republicans signaled support for the approach.

The political maneuvering came as Petraeus, the top U.S. military commander in Iraq, and Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker completed two days of lengthy congressional hearings in search of continued support for the war effort. Their conclusion that Iraq has begun making significant but fragile progress on both security and political fronts changed few minds and left lawmakers in both parties impatient for a clear path to resolution.

The bottom line seems to be that after pulling out the extra forces Bush sent last year, the United States will keep about 140,000 troops in Iraq at least through the November presidential election. In the short term, the debate in Washington instead will focus more intently on trade-offs at home, including the strain on the armed forces and the Treasury.

The elimination of 15-month tours will restore deployments to an equal balance of one year in the war zone followed by one year at home. Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates extended the tours almost exactly a year ago to provide enough forces for Bush’s “surge” of 20,000 additional combat troops and 8,000 support troops. But Army leaders have complained about the strain.

Gen. Richard A. Cody, the Army’s outgoing vice chief of staff, told the House Armed Services Committee yesterday that the Army is “out of balance” and that the current demand for forces in Iraq and Afghanistan “exceeds the sustainable supply.” He added that “soldiers, families, support systems and equipment are stretched and stressed by the demands of lengthy and repeated deployments, with insufficient recovery time.”

Petraeus said he favors scaling back the combat tours. “I have certainly given my support to 12-month deployments,” he said. “Operationally, we would welcome that, both because of the strain and the stress, and really just a general recognition of the value in that. And hopefully, this reduction can allow that over time.”

But Bush’s decision will affect only those troops sent to Iraq as of Aug. 1 or later, meaning that those already there still have to complete 15-month tours. Bobby Muller, president of Veterans for America, an advocacy group, said that nearly half of the Army’s active-duty frontline units are currently deployed for 15 months, and that Bush’s decision leaves them out.

“In short, this is a hollow announcement; it has no immediate effect,” Muller said. “It is nothing more than political posturing at the expense of our troops. Our soldiers are unraveling and they need their commander in chief to provide immediate relief.”

House Armed Services Chairman Ike Skelton (D-Mo.) applauded Bush’s move. “But it only resets us to where we were last winter,” he added. “This pace will still wear our troops out.” Ilan Goldenberg, a scholar at the National Security Network, said on a conference call organized by antiwar activists that Bush cannot portray the move as a sign of progress. “The military is so strained, the president really didn’t have a choice,” he said.

Democrats moved to press Bush on another front, linking the sagging U.S. economy to escalating war costs. On a day when oil hit $112 a barrel for the first time, lawmakers said that energy-rich Iraq should be footing more of its own bills. “We’ve put about $45 billion into Iraq’s reconstruction . . . and they have not spent their own resources,” said House Democratic Caucus Chairman Rahm Emanuel (Ill.). “They have got to have some skin in the game.”

Sens. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.) and Susan Collins (R-Maine) met yesterday to craft a bipartisan bill to make Iraq take on a greater share of the financial burden. Under their plan, any future U.S. money for reconstruction would take the form of a loan to be repaid, and Baghdad would have to pay for fuel used by U.S. troops and for the training of its own security forces, and make payments to the predominantly Sunni fighters in the Awakening movement taking on al-Qaeda.

“It’s time, in fact long past time, the Iraqis start bearing a larger portion of the costs for this war,” Collins said. Rep. Steve Chabot (R-Ohio) echoed the sentiment. “Doesn’t it just make sense that record-high gas prices pay for the reconstruction of Iraq, rather than the American taxpayer?” he asked.

Even Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), one of the staunchest war supporters and a key ally of Sen. John McCain (Ariz.), the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, agreed that Bush made a mistake by not making Iraqis repay U.S. costs from the start. “The best thing we can do for the people of Iraq is to make them a stakeholder in their own country,” he said.

As Congress prepares to take up a new war spending bill, House Democratic defense appropriators agreed this week on three policy prescriptions: a government-wide ban on torture, a mandate that soldiers and Marines be given at least a month at home for every month in combat, and a withdrawal timetable that would be longer than past failed efforts and that would explicitly leave the details of withdrawal to military commanders.

That would force a new showdown with Bush, who has opposed all three ideas. During a meeting with congressional leaders at the White House yesterday, Bush also urged lawmakers not to pack domestic spending into the war-funding bill. But Rep. James P. Moran Jr. (D-Va.), an Appropriations defense subcommittee member, said war funding is likely to total $108 billion, with as much as $30 billion in domestic spending.

A White House budget document indicates that the administration is expecting Democrats to request $5.8 billion for continuing Gulf Coast hurricane relief, up to $400 million for Western wildfires, as much as $2 billion for the 2010 Census, $1 billion for nutrition for women and infants, $1 billion for food stamps and $500 million for Head Start. As much as $15 billion is expected for unemployment insurance.

Republicans quickly charged Democrats with loading pork-barrel spending onto the backs of soldiers. “The buffet is open,” the House Republican Conference said.

But Democrats said the economic downturn has changed the political equation. “There is a connection between the state of our economy and Iraq and what we’re spending over there,” said Rep. Baron P. Hill (D-Ind.). “We need to spend more money on infrastructure, on roads and bridges that would have a stimulative effect on the economy, and we’re not doing those things because of all the money we’re spending in Iraq.”

Staff writer Josh White contributed to this report.

Asked repeatedly yesterday what “conditions” he is looking for to begin substantial U.S. troop withdrawals from Iraq after this summer’s scheduled drawdown, Army Gen. David H. Petraeus said he will know them when he sees them. For frustrated lawmakers, it was not enough.

“A year ago, the president said we couldn’t withdraw because there was too much violence,” said Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.). “Now he says we can’t afford to withdraw because violence is down.” Asked Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.): “Where do we go from here?”

Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) said: “I think people want a sense of what the end is going to look like.”

But the bottom line was that there was no bottom line. In testimony before the Senate Armed Services and Foreign Relations committees, Petraeus, the top U.S. military commander in Iraq, and U.S. Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker echoed what they said seven months ago in their last update to Congress — often using similar words. Iraq’s armed forces continue to improve, overall levels of violence are lower than they were last year, and political reconciliation is happening, albeit still more slowly than they would like.

“Iraq is hard, and reconciliation is hard,” Crocker said in September. Yesterday, he added: “Almost everything about Iraq is hard.”

In eight hours of testimony, the two men danced around the question of what constitutes success in Iraq. “As I’ve explained, again, from a military perspective,” Petraeus said wearily as the day drew to a close, “. . . what we want to do is to look at conditions and determine where it is without taking undue risks. This is all about risk.”

“We’ll look at the circumstances and assess,” Crocker said, as he and Petraeus spoke of “battlefield geometry” and “political-military calculus.”

What worked in September — an overall sense of progress that gave the Bush administration additional time to pursue its “surge” policy of sending nearly 30,000 more troops to Iraq — sparked little enthusiasm this time among lawmakers who had hoped for a brighter light at the end of the tunnel. Much of their frustration appeared to stem from a realization that there was little they could do to affect policy in the administration’s final nine months.

Petraeus said he has recommended to President Bush that the planned withdrawal of the five “surge” combat brigades by the end of July be followed by a 45-day hiatus for “consolidation and evaluation.” Then, Petraeus said, he would begin “a process of assessment to examine the conditions on the ground” and determine whether to recommend “further reductions as conditions permit.”

The scheduled withdrawals, Armed Services Chairman Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.) said dismissively, are “just the next page in a war plan with no exit strategy.”

Several Republicans were effusive in their praise for Petraeus, Crocker and the administration’s policy. “We are no longer staring into the abyss of defeat,” said Sen. John McCain (Ariz.). Instead, the presumed GOP presidential nominee said that “success is within reach.”

McCain hedged his bets with other tough questions, but he left it to others to throw their support behind administration policy. “According to some, we should fire you,” Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) told the witnesses. “It sounds like . . . really nothing good has happened in the last year and this is a hopeless endeavor. Well, I beg to differ.”

Graham and others opened the door for Petraeus and Crocker to match White House rhetoric on the ongoing threat from al-Qaeda in Iraq and the rising menace of Iran. But while Petraeus noted that the recent Iraqi government offensive in Basra against the Iranian-backed Shiite militia of cleric Moqtada al-Sadr illustrated Tehran’s malign influence, Crocker repeated something he said in September: Persian Iran is up to no good in Iraq, but its role there is limited by deep Arab Iraqi antipathy.

Both Petraeus and Crocker described the Basra operation as a positive demonstration of Iraqi sovereignty and military determination, though one with operational flaws.

Petraeus confirmed that Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki had rejected his advice to delay the offensive until Iraqi troops were better prepared.

“There is no question that it could have been better planned,” Petraeus said. He agreed that the 1,000 Iraqi army troops and police who either deserted or refused to fight were “a disappointment.” But, he added, thousands of others had fought well, particularly in other areas of southern Iraq where simultaneous violence also broke out.

The witnesses also held firm on an issue raised on both sides of the aisle: whether the administration would submit a security agreement it is negotiating with Iraq to the Senate for ratification. Crocker said that the Iraqis intend to submit the accord to their own parliament, but he added that he does not know whether it would require a vote there. “It is our intention,” he said, that the pact will be an “executive agreement” not requiring U.S. congressional approval.

But many Republicans joined their Democratic colleagues in decrying the days of open-ended war and an open U.S. checkbook, and in demanding to know what the administration is doing to pressure the Iraqi government and military to take responsibility for its own fate. “We’re a generous people,” said Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.), “but our patience is not unlimited.”

Petraeus and Crocker repeated warnings that al-Qaeda in Iraq, while weakened, remains a threat. But they described an ongoing U.S. troop presence as necessary largely because no one is certain that security gains will endure if U.S. forces leave. The consequences of withdrawal, Crocker said, “could be grave.”

But after hours of questions, they acknowledged that they had gotten at least part of the message. The United States was still funding the roughly 90,000 Sunni security volunteers who Maliki’s Shiite-dominated government is reluctant to put on its payroll, Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) told Petraeus. “I’m just asking you why you would object to asking [Iraq] to pay for that entire program, given all we are giving them in blood and everything else.”

“It is a very fair question,” Petraeus responded, “and I think that if there’s anything that the ambassador and I will take back to Iraq candidly after this morning’s session and this afternoon’s is, in fact, to ask those kinds of questions more directly.”

Offensive raises serious questions

Robert H. Reid
Associated Press
March 31, 2008

BAGHDAD – The Iraqi capital locked down by curfew. U.S. diplomats holed up in their workplaces, fearing rocket attacks. Nearly every major southern city racked by turmoil. Hundreds killed in less than a week.

A declaration Sunday by Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr to pull his Mahdi Army fighters off the streets may help bring an end to the wave of violence that swept Baghdad and Shiite areas after the government launched a crackdown against militias in Basra.

That will ease the violence which has killed more than 300 people. But it won’t bring an end to the power struggle between Shiite parties that triggered the confrontation.

Nor will it ensure government control of Basra, Iraq’s second-largest city and headquarters of the vital oil industry.

And it could leave Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki politically weakened because he put his prestige on the line with promises to crush Basra’s “criminal gangs,” some of which he said were “worse than al-Qaida.”

The crackdown has dragged the United States into a bloody inner-Shiite fight at a time when the Bush administration would prefer to talk about success against Sunni extremists and argue that Iraq is finally on the road to stability.

Instead, the bloody confrontation serves as a reality check – even as top U.S. officials in Baghdad prepare to brief a skeptical Congress starting April 8 about prospects for bringing home troops. President Bush called the Basra crisis “a defining moment” because the government was finally taking on the Shiite militias.

But the crisis speaks volumes about the reality of Iraqi society and raises new questions about the effectiveness of the country’s leadership as America debates whether continuing the mission here is worth the sacrifice.

Iraqi and American officials portrayed the crackdown as a move to crush outlaw militias – some with close ties to Iran – that have effectively ruled the streets of the country’s second-largest city for nearly three years.

Many of those armed groups are without question deep into oil smuggling, extortion, murder and robbery.

But the picture is more complex. It involves deep-seated rivalries within the majority Shiite community.

Numerous other militias and armed groups operate in Basra and elsewhere in the south – some with close ties to political parties in the national and provincial governments.

All signs indicate the crackdown was directed primarily at the Mahdi Army, the armed wing of al-Sadr’s political movement. The Sadrists believe the goal was to weaken their movement before provincial elections this fall. Al-Sadr’s followers expect to make major gains in the regional voting at the expense of al-Maliki’s Shiite partners in the government.

That points to a significant difference between the Shiite crisis and the war against Sunni insurgents. Al-Qaida has been severely weakened because it lost much of its support within the Sunni community.

By contrast, al-Sadr’s movement commands a wide following, especially among impoverished Shiites who feel estranged from Shiite parties that appeal more to better-educated urban classes.

For months, al-Sadr and other Shiite parties have been locked in a power struggle for control of the Shiite south – which contains the bulk of the country’s oil reserves as well as major religious shrines.

In August, al-Sadr proclaimed a unilateral cease-fire nationwide in an effort to reorganize the force and rein in factions that had branched out into crime.

U.S. commanders acknowledge that truce helped bring down violence in Baghdad.

Nonetheless, U.S. and Iraqi forces continued to chip away at the Sadrists with raids and arrests in Baghdad and elsewhere. American officials insist the target was not al-Sadr’s movement, but Iranian-backed renegades.

Al-Sadr’s followers didn’t see it that way.

Once the crackdown began in Basra, they rose up all over the Shiite heartland, launching rockets into the Green Zone in Baghdad, firing on American patrols and burning offices of al-Maliki’s political party.

The fact that al-Maliki apparently miscalculated the response casts doubt on his judgment and raises serious questions about his commitment to national reconciliation.

Despite the Mahdi Army’s unsavory image, a number of key U.S. commanders have long maintained that it is a mistake to demonize the entire Sadrist movement, which enjoys a substantial following among millions of Iraqi Shiites.

The Basra confrontation also served as a test for U.S.-trained Iraqi security forces, which are majority Shiite and include many al-Sadr supporters.

In the campaign’s first days, Iraqi forces made little headway against Mahdi fighters, who unleashed rocket-propelled grenades and machine gun fire every time government troops tried to enter their neighborhoods.

The headquarters of the Iraqi army’s Basra operation has come under fire regularly since the fighting began. Iraqi commanders have had to turn to the British and American warplanes to take out militia fighters blocking their advance.

At least a dozen police, including some elite commandos, defected to the Sadrists in Baghdad. AP Television News video showed Mahdi fighters in Basra unloading weapons from an Iraqi army vehicle.

The vehicle didn’t have a scratch on it, suggesting it was either abandoned by the Iraqi soldiers or delivered to the Mahdi Army.

By JAMES GLANZ and STEVEN LEE MYERS

BAGHDAD — American-trained Iraqi security forces failed for a third straight day to oust Shiite militias from the southern city of Basra on Thursday, even as President Bush hailed the operation as a sign of the growing strength of Iraq’s federal government.

The fighting in Basra against the Mahdi Army, the armed wing of the political movement led by the radical Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr, set off clashes in cities throughout Iraq. Major demonstrations were staged in a number of Shiite areas of Baghdad, including Sadr City, the huge neighborhood that is Mr. Sadr’s base of power.

Although Mr. Bush praised the Iraqi government for leading the fighting, it also appeared that the Iraqi government was pursuing its own agenda, calling the battles a fight against “criminal” elements but seeking to marginalize the Mahdi Army.

The Americans share the Iraqi government’s hostility toward what they call rogue elements of the Mahdi Army but will also be faced with the consequences if the battles among Shiite factions erupt into more widespread unrest.

The violence underscored the fragile nature of the security improvements partly credited to the American troop increase that began last year. Officials have acknowledged that a cease-fire called by Mr. Sadr last August has contributed to the improvements. Should the cease-fire collapse entirely, those gains could be in serious jeopardy, making it far more difficult to begin bringing substantial numbers of American troops home.

Although Sadr officials insisted on Thursday that the cease-fire was still in effect, Mr. Sadr has authorized his forces to fight in self-defense, and the battles in Basra appear to be eroding the cease-fire.

During a lengthy speech at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, near Dayton, Ohio, Mr. Bush praised Iraq’s government for ordering the assault in Basra and portrayed the battle as evidence that his strategy of increasing troop strength was bearing fruit.

“This offensive builds on the security gains of the surge and demonstrates to the Iraqi people that their government is committed to protecting them,” he said.

“There’s a strong commitment by the central government of Iraq to say that no one is above the law.”

Mr. Bush also accused Iran of arming, training and financing the militias fighting against the Iraqi forces.

Mr. Bush spoke after three days of briefings with senior advisers and military commanders on the situation in Iraq and the options for reducing the number of American troops there beyond the withdrawals already announced. It was one in a series of speeches he has been giving to build support for his policy before Gen. David H. Petraeus, the senior commander in Iraq, testifies before Congress next month.

In a videoconference with the president on Monday, General Petraeus recommended taking up to two months to evaluate security in Iraq before considering additional withdrawals, officials said Monday.

On Thursday, medical officials in Basra said the toll in the fighting there had risen to about 100 dead and 500 wounded, including civilians, militiamen and members of the security forces. An Iraqi employee of The New York Times, driving on the main road between Basra and Nasiriya, observed numerous civilian cars with coffins strapped to the roofs, apparently heading to Shiite cemeteries to the north.

Violence also broke out in Kut, Hilla, Amara, Kirkuk, Baquba and other cities. In Baghdad, where explosions shook the city throughout the day, American officials said 11 rockets struck the Green Zone, killing an unidentified American government worker, the second this week.

Another American, Paul Converse of Corvallis, Ore., an analyst with a federal oversight agency, the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, died of wounds suffered in a rocket attack on Sunday, a spokeswoman for the agency said Thursday.

The Iraqi government imposed a citywide curfew in Baghdad until Sunday.

Thousands of demonstrators in Sadr City on Thursday denounced Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, who has personally directed the Basra operation, and Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, the Shiite cleric who leads the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, a political party that is a crucial member of the coalition keeping Mr. Maliki in power.

The Supreme Council’s armed wing, the Badr Organization, is one of the most powerful rivals of the Mahdi Army in Basra, where Shiite militias have been fighting among themselves for years to control neighborhoods, oil revenues, electricity access, the ports and even the local universities.

The third powerful element in the city is the Fadhila Party, which split from the Sadrists years ago and has its own militia. The three parties are expected to be rivals in the next round of provincial council elections, now scheduled for October. Many Sadr supporters pointed to those elections, and the possibility that their party might gain a majority of the seats, as a motivation for the Basra assault.

That assertion was rejected by Sadiq al-Rikabi, the prime minister’s political adviser, who said that the deteriorating security situation in Basra had left Mr. Maliki no choice but to act.

Witnesses in Basra said there was little evidence that security forces had moved the Mahdi Army out of neighborhoods they had long controlled. In the western Hayaniya neighborhood, where the Mahdi Army has fought with security forces, only gunmen and a few residents were seen on Thursday. Mahdi checkpoints were highly visible, often consisting of at least half a dozen fighters armed with weapons like rocket-propelled grenades.

“The gunmen are not allowing any military convoys to pass near the area,” said Ameen Ali Sakran, a Hayaniya resident.

Alaa Abdul Samad, an educational supervisor who lives in the Mahdi-controlled Kibla neighborhood a couple of miles south of the city center, said he had not seen any official army vehicles during the assault.

“The gunmen have controlled even the Kibla police station and taken all its weapons,” Mr. Samad said. “The area is now in the hands of the militias, and there is no army except some of the helicopters that fly around.”

Maj. Gen. Abdul Aziz Mohammed, the director of military operations in Iraq, echoed other Iraqi and American officials on Thursday by saying that the operation was not specifically aimed at the Mahdi Army but at any “criminals” who would not lay down their weapons. But witnesses said there was little fighting in neighborhoods that had been controlled by the Badr and Fadhila militias.

Estimates by Basra residents of how much of the city is in the Mahdi Army’s hands ranged from 50 percent to much higher. “We have soldiers in Basra, and they are doing fine,” said a militiaman in Baghdad named Abu Ali, who identified himself as a division commander for the Mahdi Army. “They are in full control.”

Those estimates of how much of the city was under Mahdi control were disputed by Mr. Rikabi. “No, this is not true, this is not true,” he said, though he offered no specific estimate.

But in another indication that parts of the south were slipping from the government’s hands, a major oil pipeline near Basra was struck with a bomb around 10 a.m. on Friday, igniting a huge fire, said Sameer al-Magsosi, a spokesman for the Southern Oil Company. Before the recent security gains, the southern pipelines had been frequent targets of insurgents, smugglers and militias, but few strikes had been recorded in the past year.

Mr. Bush, speaking at the National Air Force Museum, said he would not announce any decisions on the future in Iraq until after General Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker briefed Congress on April 8 and 9.

As before, however, he made it clear that he intended to maintain the maximum force needed to achieve what he called “a strategic victory.”

“As I consider the way forward, I will always remember that the progress in Iraq is real, it’s substantive, but it is reversible,” he said. “And so the principle behind my decision on our troop levels will be ensuring that we succeed in Iraq.”

One protester in Sadr City, Wissam Abdul Zahra, 27, made it clear that despite the wider implications of the Basra assault, he viewed it as a simple matter of local politics and power.

“We are expressing our freedom to defend the rights of our brothers in Basra under the pressure of Maliki and the Badr brigades.” he said. “They want to knock down the Sadrists before the provincial elections.”

Even the youngest participants in the protest seemed to have absorbed some of the reasons for the criticism.

“I watch the news with my family, and I see that Maliki is fighting the innocent people in Basra,” said Muhammad, 12. “I don’t understand it all, but it looks bad to me.”

James Glanz reported from Baghdad, and Steven Lee Myers from Ohio. Reporting was contributed by Qais Mizher, Ahmad Fadam, Mudhafer al-Husaini, Hosham Hussein, Erica Goode and Karim al-Hilmi, and employees of The New York Times from Basra, Kut, Baghdad, Hilla, Kirkuk and Diyala Province.

Robert Gates, left, and U.S. Navy Adm. Mike Mullen stand with President Bush Wednesday. Associated Press (Associated Press )

Robert Burns
Associated Press
March 27, 2008

WASHINGTON – Behind the Pentagon’s closed doors, U.S. military leaders told President Bush Wednesday they are worried about the Iraq war’s mounting strain on troops and their families. But they indicated they’d go along with a brief halt in pulling out troops this summer.

The Joint Chiefs of Staff did say senior commanders in Iraq should make more frequent assessments of security conditions, an idea that appeared aimed at increasing pressure for more rapid troop reductions.

The chiefs’ concern is that U.S. forces are being worn thin, compromising the Pentagon’s ability to handle crises elsewhere in the world.

Wednesday’s 90-minute Pentagon session, held in a secure conference room known as “the Tank,” was arranged by Defense Secretary Robert Gates to provide Bush an additional set of military views as he prepares to decide how to proceed in Iraq once his troop buildup, which began in 2007, runs its course by July.

“Armed with all that, the president must now decide the way ahead in Iraq,” said Pentagon press secretary Geoff Morrell. The discussion covered not only Iraq but Afghanistan, where violence has spiked, and broader military matters, said Morrell, who briefed reporters without giving details of the discussion. Some specifics were provided by defense officials, commenting on condition of anonymity in order to speak more freely.

The Joint Chiefs are particularly concerned about Afghanistan and an increasingly active Taliban insurgency.

The United States has about 31,000 troops in Afghanistan and 156,000 in Iraq.

U.S. forces in Iraq peaked at 20 brigades last year and are to be cut to 15 brigades, with a total of about 140,000 combat and support troops, by the end of July. A key question facing Bush is whether security conditions will have improved sufficiently by then to justify more reductions.

Gates has said he would like to see the total drop to 10 brigades by the end of this year, but that now looks unlikely.

Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, has proposed what is commonly called a “pause” to assess the impact of having withdrawn five combat brigades since December. He has argued that it would be reckless to shrink the American force so rapidly that the gains achieved over the past year are compromised or lost entirely.

Bush is expected to endorse Petraeus’ approach. If, as expected, Petraeus is given until August or September to weigh the effects of the current round of reductions, then it is unlikely that the force would get much below 15 brigades by the time Bush leaves office in January.

In their session with Bush, the chiefs laid out their concerns about the health of the U.S. force, several defense officials said.

“The conversations today with the Joint Chiefs were much broader than just Iraq,” Stephen Hadley, Bush’s national security adviser, said later. “It was a step-back look of what are the challenges we face here in the next decade.”

The president is to give a speech today in Ohio on the political and economic situation in Iraq.

Al-Maliki issues ultimatum to militants

Iraqi men greet U.S. Army Sgt. 1st Class Brian Flading as he patrols in Mosul, Iraq, on Wednesday. Associated Press (Associated Press ) Related news Saddam funded lawmakers’ trip » WASHINGTON – Saddam Hussein’s intelligence agency secretly financed a trip to Iraq for three U.S. lawmakers, including one from Western Washington, during the run-up to the U.S.-led invasion, federal prosecutors said Wednesday. » The three anti-war Democrats made the trip in October 2002, while the Bush administration was trying to persuade Congress to authorize military action against Iraq. While traveling, they called for a diplomatic solution. » Prosecutors say that trip was arranged by Muthanna Al-Hanooti, a Michigan charity official, who was charged Wednesday with setting up the junket at the behest of Saddam’s regime. Iraqi intelligence officials allegedly paid for the trip through an intermediary and rewarded Al-Hanooti with 2 million barrels of Iraqi oil. » The lawmakers are not named in the indictment, but the dates correspond to a trip by Democratic Reps. Jim McDermott, of Washington, David Bonior, of Michigan, and Mike Thompson, of California. None was charged, and Justice Department spokesman Dean Boyd said investigators “have no information whatsoever” any of them knew the trip was underwritten by Saddam.

Leila Fadel
McClatchy
March 27, 2008

BAGHDAD – With the United States providing air cover and embedded advisers, the Iraqi government on Wednesday expanded its offensive against Shiite Muslim militias from the port city of Basra to the capital of Baghdad – and many of the provinces in between.

The day saw street battles in Baghdad and Basra, mortar attacks by Shiite rebels against Baghdad’s Green Zone, bombing by U.S. aircraft and encounters that left government tanks in flames. More than 97 people were reported killed and hundreds were wounded since the operation began early Tuesday. Two U.S. soldiers were killed by hostile fire in separate attacks Wednesday in Baghdad, the military said.

In Baghdad, at least nine Iraqi civilians were killed and 42 were wounded in mortar attacks, police said. The Mahdi Army, loyal to firebrand Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, opened fire on civilians in downtown Baghdad and clashed with Iraqi security forces in Kadhemiya in north Baghdad.

In Baghdad’s Shiite Sadr City neighborhood, clashes between the Mahdi Army and Iraqi security forces supported by U.S. forces left at least 20 dead and 115 injured. By early afternoon, people took to the streets in protest of the Iraqi government.

Mortar rounds crashed into the heavily fortified Green Zone for the third straight day, injuring three U.S. government employees, all U.S. citizens, said U.S. Embassy spokeswoman Mirembe Nantongo.

Shiite Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, who’s directing the operation from Basra, gave the armed groups 72 hours to give up their weapons and surrender without consequences, warning that they’d be treated as outlaws if they didn’t.

But al-Sadr demanded that al-Maliki leave Basra and send a parliamentary delegation to hold a dialogue. Al-Maliki immediately rebuffed the demand.

Al-Maliki appears to be taking a huge risk in confronting the volatile city, which is dominated by the Mahdi Army.

There were growing signs that al-Sadr’s cease-fire, which he declared in August and renewed in February, was unraveling. The cease-fire is one of the principal reasons for the downturn in violence and U.S. troop deaths this year.

“I hope they will stay with the freeze, but I’m not sure currently if the Jaysh al Mahdi (Mahdi Army) is still freezing its activities,” said Sadiq al-Rikabi, al-Maliki’s adviser.

Ben Feller
Associated Press
March 25, 2008

WASHINGTON – Marking a grim milestone, a determined President Bush declared Monday the lives of 4,000 U.S. military men and women who have died in Iraq “were not lost in vain.” The White House signaled anew that additional troops won’t be pulled out soon.

A roadside bomb in Baghdad killed four U.S. soldiers Sunday night, pushing the death toll to 4,000.

That number pales compared with those of other lengthy U.S. wars, but it is much higher than many Americans, including Bush, ever expected after the swift U.S. invasion of Iraq five years ago.

Bush proclaimed the end of major combat operations in Iraq in May 2003. Almost all of the U.S. deaths there have happened since then.

“One day people will look back at this moment in history and say, ‘Thank God there were courageous people willing to serve, because they laid the foundations for peace for generations to come,’ ” Bush said after a State Department briefing about long-term diplomacy efforts.

“I have vowed in the past, and I will vow so long as I’m president, to make sure that those lives were not lost in vain – that, in fact, there is an outcome that will merit the sacrifice,” Bush said.

The news of 4,000 dead in Iraq came the week after the war rolled into its sixth year, dominating most of Bush’s presidency. Almost 30,000 U.S. service members have been wounded in the war.

The number killed in Iraq is far less than in other modern American wars.

In Vietnam, the U.S. lost more than 58,000 troops, passing the 4,000 mark in 1966 as deaths rose quickly along with escalating American involvement.

Early in April, Bush is expected to announce the next steps in the war, and he is likely to embrace a pause in any troop withdrawals beyond those scheduled to end this July.

Democrats in Congress and on the presidential campaign trail continue to push for a faster end to the war. But Bush still has the upper hand for 10 months.

“Americans are asking how much longer must our troops continue to sacrifice for the sake of an Iraqi government that is unwilling or unable to secure its own future,” said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. She said the cost to the U.S. reputation is immense, and the threat to the economy at home is unacceptable.

Meanwhile, both Democratic presidential contenders made note of the 4,000 deaths.

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton told a campaign audience in Pennsylvania that she would honor the fallen by ending the war and bringing home U.S. troops “as quickly and responsibly as possible.”

Her rival for the nomination, Sen. Barack Obama, said, “It is past time to end this war that should never have been waged by bringing our troops home, and finally pushing Iraq’s leaders to take responsibility for their future.”

The Associated Press count of 4,000 deaths is based on U.S. military reports and includes eight civilians who worked for the Department of Defense.

Tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians have been killed.

By MICHAEL KAMBER and JAMES GLANZ

BAGHDAD — Heavy fighting broke out Tuesday in two of Iraq’s largest cities, as Iraqi ground forces and helicopters mounted a huge operation to break the grip of the Shiite militias controlling Basra, and Iraqi forces clashed with militias in Baghdad. The fighting threatened to destabilize a long-term truce that had helped reduce the level of violence in the five-year-old Iraq war.

The battles, along with indications in recent weeks that militia and insurgent attacks had already been creeping up, raised fears across Iraq that Moktada al-Sadr, the renegade Shiite cleric, could pull out of a cease-fire he declared last summer. If his Mahdi Army militia does step up attacks, that could in turn slow American troop withdrawals.

There were also serious clashes in the southern cities of Kut and Hilla.

In Basra, American and British jets roared through the skies, providing air support for the Iraqi military. A British Army spokesman for southern Iraq, Maj. Tom Holloway, said that while Western forces had not entered Basra, the operation already involved nearly 30,000 Iraqi troops and police forces, with more arriving. “They are clearing the city block by block,” Major Holloway said.

The scale and intensity of the clashes in Baghdad kept many residents home. Schools and shops were closed in many neighborhoods and hundreds of checkpoints appeared; in some neighborhoods they were controlled by the government and in others by militia members.

Barrages of rockets and mortar shells pounded the fortified Green Zone area for the second time in three days. An American military spokesman said there were two minor injuries to civilians in the Green Zone.

Even before the crackdown on militias began on Tuesday, Pentagon statistics on the frequency of militia and insurgent attacks suggested that after major security gains last fall, the conflict had drifted into something of a stalemate. Over all, violence has remained fairly steady over the past several months, but the streets have become tense and much more dangerous again after a period of calm.

It is not clear how responsible the restive Mahdi militia commanders are for stalling progress in the effort to reduce violence. In recent weeks, commanders have protested continuing American and Iraqi raids and detentions of militia members.

If the cease-fire were to unravel, there is little doubt about the mayhem that could be stirred up by Mr. Sadr, who forced the United States military to mount two bloody offensives against his fighters in 2004 as much of the country exploded in violence.

Sadiq al-Rikabi, the prime minister’s political adviser, and other Iraqi officials said that just how the unrest in Baghdad was related to the crackdown in Basra was unknown.

Sadr City, the Baghdad neighborhood that is the center of the Mahdi Army’s power, was sealed off by a cordon of Iraqi troops and what appeared to be several American units. A New York Times photographer who was able to get through the cordon found more layers of checkpoints, each one run by about two dozen heavily armed Mahdi Army fighters clad in tracksuits and T-shirts. Tires burned in the city center, gunfire echoed against shuttered stores, and teams of fighters in pickup trucks moved about brandishing machine guns, sniper rifles and rocket-propelled grenade launchers.

“We are doing this in reaction to the unprovoked military operations against the Mahdi Army,” said a Mahdi commander who identified himself as Abu Mortada. “The U.S., the Iraqi government and Sciri are against us,” he said, referring to a rival Shiite group whose name has changed several times, and is now known as the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, which has an armed wing called the Badr Organization.

“They are trying to finish us,” the commander said. “They want power for the Iraqi government and Sciri.”

Basra, which until 2005 enjoyed relative peace, has since been riven by power struggles among the Mahdi Army and local Shiite rivals, like the Badr Organization and a militia controlled by the Fadhila political party, a group that split from the Sadr party.

In the weeks leading up to the operation, Iraqi officials indicated that part of the operation would be aimed at the Fadhila groups, which are widely believed to be in control of Basra’s lucrative port operations and other parts of the city. The ports have been plagued by corruption, draining revenue that could flow to the central and local governments. But the operation also threatens the Mahdi Army’s strongholds in Basra.

Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki’s government depends on support from the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq but is less dependent now on coalitions with the Mahdi Army.

In Basra, Iraq’s most important oil-exporting center, thousands of Iraqi government soldiers and police officers moved into the city around 5 a.m. and engaged in pitched battles with Shiite militia members who have taken over big areas of that city.

The Basra operation, which senior Iraqi officials had been signaling for weeks, is considered so important by the Iraqi government that Mr. Maliki traveled to the city to direct the fighting, several officials said.

Although Sadr officials said the cease-fire was still in effect, on Monday Mr. Sadr called for a nationwide civil disobedience campaign in response to what his followers said was an unwarranted crackdown. Some Mahdi commanders referred to an edict by Mr. Sadr saying their militias had the right of self-defense.

A member of Mr. Sadr’s political party in Basra, Sheik Abdul Sattar al-Bahadli, complained bitterly about the enormous operation, claiming that it was aimed at innocent people in Basra.

“We never witnessed such attacks even under the regime of Saddam Hussein,” Mr. Bahadli said. “Maliki gave orders and said, ‘Erase them.’ ”

But Mr. Maliki said in a statement that the operation was intended to root out “outlaws” who, he said, were working with local confederates inside and outside the government.

“The federal government, pressed by its obligations to support the local government in Basra and support its officials, has decided to restore security and stability and impose the law,” the statement said

An American military official said the American-led coalition forces had provided air transportation for the operation and were keeping “quick reaction forces” on standby.

The official said coalition forces had supported Iraqi security forces in clashes around Sadr City with “special groups” — a term reserved for what American commanders say are Iranian-backed Shiite splinter groups, which include portions of the Mahdi Army.

“A coalition forces helicopter also engaged targets north of Sadr City in support of this operation,” the official said, asserting that despite the fighting, most of Baghdad had been peaceful and that there were still signs of progress on security in most areas of Iraq and its capital.

“We feel that the cease-fire is being honored” by those loyal to Mr. Sadr, the official said. The cease-fire, he said, “is in the best interest of all Iraqis.”

Many places in Baghdad were tense. At a checkpoint downtown, a policeman’s radio crackled with the news of the sniper shooting of a police officer in a nearby neighborhood. “We’ve heard that Sadr has canceled the cease-fire, is this true?” he asked motorists whose car he was searching.

In a statement issued late Tuesday, the military said an American soldier was killed in Baghdad about 5 p.m. No other details were provided.

Witnesses in Basra said jets flew overhead as armored vehicles raced through the city and machine gun and canon fire reverberated through the streets. Civilians took refuge in their homes. Iraqi television showed images of civilian gunmen with grenade launchers taking up positions and ambulances ferrying the wounded to hospitals.

On Tuesday night, after about six hours of silence, armored vehicles and helicopters could again be heard moving through the city, witnesses said. Gunfire and shelling could be heard to the north.

In Baghdad, some areas were deserted as clashes broke out across the city. In downtown Baghdad, checkpoints blocked sparse traffic every 100 yards.

Saeed Ammar, a government employee, said he was standing near policemen in the Huriya neighborhood on Tuesday morning when he was approached by Mahdi Army members. “They told me not to stand near checkpoints. They said, ‘We are waiting for the word from Moktada Sadr to attack the checkpoints — it may come at any moment.’ ”

Despite the armed actions by many Sadr followers, members of Mr. Sadr’s party said the cease-fire was still in effect and called for peaceful civil disobedience. In Najaf, hundreds of followers carrying Korans and olive branches mounted a sit-in, chanting, “No to occupation, no to terrorism.”

Sahar Gani, a teacher, was taking students home along a nearly deserted Baghdad sidewalk. “The security situation is getting worse day by day,” she said. “The city is getting very bad now. We’ve been through this before, so we find it natural. But we don’t know what to do.”

Reporting was contributed by Joao Silva, Anwar J. Ali and Hosham Hussein from Baghdad, and employees of The New York Times from Baghdad, Basra, Hilla, Diwaniya and Kut.

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

Carl P. Leubsdorf
Dallas Morning News
March 24, 2008

WASHINGTON – For the third time since World War II, Americans are picking a new president amid sharp national divisions over a bloody, financially draining war in Asia.

In 1952 and 1968, the opposition party won the White House by capitalizing on anti-war frustration over stalemates in Korea and Vietnam and promising to end those involvements.

Now, as the nation enters its sixth year of the fighting in Iraq that began with the ouster of Saddam Hussein, Democrats hope to repeat that pattern. But while there is considerable evidence they can do so, polls also show that attitudes are not clear-cut about the war that has killed and wounded thousands and cost hundreds of billions of dollars.

A majority of Americans think the war was a mistake. And while one poll shows an even split over whether to stay or leave, others show that the main division is over how quick U.S. withdrawal should be.

“People want this resolved, and they want troops coming home,” says GOP pollster Bill McInturff.

At the same time, the public thinks the yearlong military “surge” is making progress in curbing violence. Two surveys showed that the public thinks the candidate best equipped to handle Iraq is the one who strongly backed the surge and has echoed the Bush administration’s warnings against an early troop withdrawal, Republican John McCain.

That may explain why McCain showed no hesitation in heading to Baghdad this week at almost the same time that Vice President Dick Cheney was there and echoing the administration’s optimism over the situation in Iraq.

“The surge is working,” McCain said. “We are succeeding.” But he warned that al-Qaida is not yet defeated and that a continuing U.S. military effort is necessary.

McCain’s rivals continue to draw sharp rhetorical lines between their calls for a phased withdrawal and his adherence to the administration’s more cautious approach on U.S. troop levels.

Declaring that the surge has not achieved its goal of prompting political progress, Hillary Clinton says she would begin a phased withdrawal of U.S. troops within 60 days of taking office. Barack Obama has promised to withdraw all U.S. combat troops within 16 months of becoming president.

Both candidates stop short of advocating total withdrawal of all American forces and concede that a pullout will take some time. Still, there is a clear contrast between their view and McCain’s.

So far, the Arizona senator is benefiting from his long identification with the issue and his military background. But the political impact of Iraq next fall is likely to reflect what Americans want to happen in the future.

Given that, it’s hard to see more voters favoring a slower rather than a faster pullout, especially independents whose anti-Iraq stance was a major reason they voted Democratic in last year’s midterm elections.

Ironically, many both in and out of the current administration believe next year’s reality will be different from this year’s rhetoric.

They think McCain will have to cut the U.S. role faster than he says and that events and military advice will force the Democrats to move more slowly.

It’s hard to see a President McCain moving faster than either Democrat, in part because Obama and Clinton will want to cut war costs to finance domestic measures such as health care.

Meanwhile, a related issue this fall could be the administration’s effort to reach an agreement with the Iraqi government on a legal basis to ensure the continued presence of U.S. forces. The administration sees it as a way to preserve options, but many Democrats think it’s an effort to tie the hands of the next administration.

Even if the country votes Democratic this November, concedes Sen. James Webb of Virginia, “it will be much harder to turn this thing around” than to continue the current policy. But the lesson of 1952 and 1968 is that a vote to change parties will be the best way to force an eventual policy shift.

By STEVEN LEE MYERS

WASHINGTON — President Bush used the fifth anniversary of the start of the war in Iraq on Wednesday to make the case for persevering in a conflict that could have many more anniversaries. Democrats accused him of lacking a strategy to win and withdraw.

Mr. Bush, speaking before members of the armed forces and defense officials at the Pentagon, said in his frankest acknowledgment yet that the costs of the war, in lives and money, had been higher and longer lasting than he had anticipated.

But he remained unwavering in his insistence that the invasion of Iraq, which began in March 2003, had made the world better and the United States safer.

“Five years into this battle, there is an understandable debate over whether the war was worth fighting, whether the fight is worth winning, and whether we can win it,” he said. “The answers are clear to me. Removing Saddam Hussein from power was the right decision, and this is a fight that America can and must win.”

The anniversary starkly illustrated the divide between Mr. Bush and Democrats, who control Congress — and between the Republican presidential candidate, Senator John McCain of Arizona, and the two senators seeking the Democratic nomination, Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton.

At a community college in Fayetteville, a military town in North Carolina, Mr. Obama noted that the war in Iraq had now lasted longer than the Civil War, World War I and World War II, though it has been fought on a scale far below those conflicts.

“Where are we for all of this sacrifice?” he said. “We are less safe and less able to shape events abroad. We are divided at home, and our alliances around the world have been strained.”

Mrs. Clinton, appearing at an American Legion post in Huntington, W.Va., argued for a cautious withdrawal of troops that would begin within 60 days of her taking office. “Every one of you who has served knows with drawing troops can be as dangerous as inserting them,” she said.

By contrast, Mr. McCain, who visited Iraq this week, issued a statement saying that the United States and its allies in Iraq stood “on the precipice of winning a major victory against radical Islamic extremism.”

The anniversary, as it has in the past, galvanized the war’s critics and, to a lesser degree, its supporters. Mr. Bush gave his speech as sporadic, relatively small but raucous protests erupted in Washington and in other cities, leading to dozens of arrests.

“How much longer?” read a banner along the president’s route to the Pentagon across the Potomac.

Iraq has receded somewhat as an issue in the campaign. And the scale and fury of antiwar protests appeared to have diminished from just a year ago, before Mr. Bush ordered “a surge” of still more American troops to Iraq that has resulted in a decline in overall violence there.

Still, the war stirs intense emotions on both sides. The House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, said the war had damaged the country’s reputation, strained its military and now threatened its economy.

“With the war in Iraq entering its sixth year,” she said in a statement, “Americans are rightly concerned about how much longer our nation must continue to sacrifice our security for the sake of an Iraqi government that is unwilling or unable to secure its own future.”

Mr. Obama criticized his rivals for their initial votes for the war. “Here is the stark reality,” he said. “There is a security gap in this country — a gap between the rhetoric of those who claim to be tough on national security, and the reality of growing insecurity caused by their decisions.”

He also seized on a gaffe Mr. McCain made Tuesday in Amman, Jordan, when he confused the main sects of Islam and the support for each from Al Qaeda, a Sunni dominated group, and Iran, a majority Shiite nation. Mr. McCain corrected his statement after Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, who is traveling with him in the region, whispered in his ear.

“Maybe that is why he completely fails to understand that the war in Iraq has done more to embolden America’s enemies than any strategic choice that we have made in decades,” Mr. Obama said.

He said that as commander in chief he would begin withdrawing a brigade or two each month starting immediately. His plan, he said, would reduce the American force to only the number required to secure the American Embassy and maintain a counterterrorist force.

Even that, he acknowledged, would take until 2010.

The number of troops in Iraq is at the center of the administration’s attention. The top American commander there, Gen. David H. Petraeus, is scheduled to appear before Congress in April to present his recommendations on what to do after a withdrawal of the 30,000 troops ordered to Iraq by Mr. Bush last year.

Those troops brought the total to a peak of more than 160,000; by summer, roughly 140,000 are expected to remain. Military and administration officials have indicated that there should be a pause in any further reductions to see if security in Baghdad and other cities deteriorates.

One administration official said Wednesday that the outstanding question was how long a pause would last.

Mr. Bush said he had made no decision but indicated that he would be reluctant to hasten withdrawals. “Any further drawdown will be based on conditions on the ground and the recommendations of our commanders,” he said, “and they must not jeopardize the hard-fought gains our troops and civilians have made over the past year.”

Mr. Bush announced the war’s start from the Oval Office on the night of March 19, 2003, declaring that the United States would “not live at the mercy of an outlaw regime that threatens the peace with weapons of mass murder.” (It later became clear that those weapons did not exist.)

His remarks each March 19 since have paralleled the ups and downs of the war.

In 2004, he appeared in the East Room of the White House with dozens of foreign diplomats and cast the war as “the inescapable calling of our generation.” By 2006, with the insurgency worsening along with ethnic and sectarian violence, he spoke for two minutes on the South Lawn and spent most of that time talking of soldiers’ sacrifices. “It’s a time to reflect,” he said.

Mr. Bush’s speech will be his last address as president on the anniversary, and he reflected at length on the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, the rise of the insurgency, the lurch toward civil war, and the decision to send more troops. The latter he declared a success, saying that it led the way to the decision by many Sunni Arabs to switch allegiances and join American forces against extremists that American officials say are foreign led. He called that the “the first large-scale Arab uprising against Osama bin Laden.”

“The challenge in the period ahead is to consolidate the gains we have made and seal the extremists’ defeat,” he added.

Vice President Dick Cheney, who declared in June 2005 that the insurgency was in “its last throes,” also acknowledged that the war had “lasted longer than I would have anticipated,” but he, too, defended the effort and brushed aside antiwar sentiment.

When told in an interview with ABC News that two-thirds of Americans said the war was not worth fighting, Mr. Cheney replied, “So?” When pressed, he added, “I think you cannot be blown off course by the fluctuations in the public opinion polls.”

Jeff Zeleny contributed reporting from Fayetteville, N.C., and Patrick D. Healy from Huntington, W.Va.

Jeff Zeleny contributed reporting from Fayetteville, N.C., and Patrick D. Healy from Huntington, W.Va.

Michael Barone
U.S. News & World Report
March 15, 2008

The abrupt resignation of Adm. William Fallon as the head of Central Command almost got lost amid the breaking news of Barack Obama’s victory in the Mississippi primary and Eliot Spitzer’s resignation as governor of New York. But it’s a much more consequential development – in the foreign and military policy of the Bush administration in its final year in office and in the relations between civilian commanders and military officers in the long run of American history.

Though everyone involved denies it, Fallon was kicked out for insubordination, or something very close to it. His conduct became impossible to overlook after the publication of a jauntily written article in Esquire by Thomas P.M. Barnett, author of “The Pentagon’s New Map.”

Barnett paints Fallon as a seasoned officer who coolly and wisely has been frustrating President Bush’s desire to invade Iran. He points out that Fallon opposed the surge in Iraq ordered by Bush in January 2007 and that he has tried to rein in Gen. David Petraeus, whose leadership of the surge has produced such impressive results. He seems to take it for granted that readers will applaud Fallon for opposing a move that converted likely defeat to a high chance of success.

Fallon also made it plain that he wants to withdraw troops from Iraq, as soon as possible – even though Defense Secretary Robert Gates has approved Petraeus’ request for a pause after currently scheduled troop withdrawals end in July.

Fallon is not the first subordinate to work openly to undercut the commander in chief. The authors of the National Intelligence Estimate headlined a conclusion that Iran had abandoned part of its nuclear program, while underplaying the more important news that the mullahs were continuing the critical parts of the nuclear program and retained the capacity to rev up the rest quickly at any time. Leaks from the State Department and CIA have been clearly designed to frustrate administration policy.

Civilian and military, those who have been undercutting administration policy do so in the belief that their views are more in the nation’s interests than the conclusion of the Texas cowboy whom the voters somehow elected president. State and CIA are filled with professionals educated in elite universities dominated by the left and, while not as wacky as their professors, have come away with the default assumption that liberals are always right. Many military officers, who increasingly have graduate degrees from such universities, seem to have imbibed similar habits of mind.

In addition, officers assigned to regional commands seem, like diplomats assigned to one area, inclined to go native. As head of Pacific Command, Fallon (at least as Barnett paints him) seemed transfixed on cooperating with China; at Central Command, he came to believe that pressuring Israel toward a settlement with Palestinians was the way to solve every problem in the region. After all, those are the things the Chinese and Arab military officers he’s been interfacing with have told him.

In my view, Bush has been unduly tolerant of the efforts of civilian career professionals to undercut his policies. But Fallon’s abrupt resignation suggests that he and-or Gates decided that things had gone too far when a commanding military officer was lionized for opposing the president’s policies in the pages of Esquire.

One of the firmest principles of American public life, established with great deliberateness by George Washington, is civilian control of the military. The vast majority of American military officers over our history have honored and cherished that principle. Fallon, as portrayed by Barnett, seemed to relish brushing it aside.

My guess is that Gates, who was a career professional and whose memoir stresses the continuity of U.S. government policy in different administrations, decided that enough was enough.

Tough questions remain about how civilian commanders should choose and interact with military professionals. Bush’s record, in my view, has been far from ideal. He has seemed content with letting others choose military commanders and then accepting their advice with little of the abrasive interaction recommended by Eliot Cohen in his 2002 book “Supreme Command.” Only after the debacle of the 2006 elections did he call on David Petraeus.

One wonders how much he pondered the installation at Central Command of Petraeus’ critic Fallon. It is surely a difficult thing for civilian presidents to choose able and apt military commanders – looking back in our history Franklin Roosevelt seems to have been the only commander in chief who had a consistent record of doing so early on. But at least Bush – and Gates – have rectified what they must now consider a mistake. And they have reaffirmed the ancient principle of civilian control.

Economist’s calculation subject of congressional hearing today

Kevin G. Hall
McClatchy
February 28, 2008

WASHINGTON – When U.S. troops invaded Iraq in March 2003, the Bush administration predicted that the war would be self-financing and rebuilding the nation would cost less than $2 billion.

Coming up on the five-year anniversary of the invasion, a new estimate from a Nobel laureate puts the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan at more than $3 trillion.

That estimate from Noble Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz also serves as the title of his new book, “The Three Trillion Dollar War,” which hits store shelves Friday.

The book, co-authored with Harvard University professor Linda Bilmes, builds on previous research published in January 2006. The two argued then and now that the cost to America of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is wildly underestimated.

When other factors are added – such as interest on debt, future borrowing for war expenses, continued military presence in Iraq and lifetime health care and counseling for veterans – they think that the wars’ costs range from $5 trillion to $7 trillion.

“I think we really have learned that the long-term costs of taking care of the wounded and injured in this war and the long-term costs of rebuilding the military to its previous strength is going to far eclipse the cost of waging this war,” Bilmes said in an interview.

The book and its estimates are the subject of a hearing today by the Joint Economic Committee of Congress.

The White House doesn’t care for the estimates by Stiglitz, a former chief economist of the World Bank who’s now a professor at Columbia University.

“People like Joe Stiglitz lack the courage to consider the cost of doing nothing and the cost of failure. One can’t even begin to put a price tag on the cost to this nation of the attacks of 9/11,” said White House spokesman Tony Fratto, conceding that the costs of the war on terrorism are high while questioning the premise of Stiglitz’s research.

“It is also an investment in the future safety and security of Americans and our vital national interests. $3 trillion? What price does Joe Stiglitz put on attacks on the homeland that have already been prevented? Or doesn’t his slide rule work that way?”

Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa., a decorated Marine Corp colonel and Vietnam War veteran, welcomed the effort by Stiglitz and Bilmes to quantify the ways in which the wars will cost taxpayers.

“It’s astounding that here we are about to mark the fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, and this administration still refuses to acknowledge the long-term costs of the war in Iraq,” he said.

By any estimate, the Bush administration’s predictions in March 2003 of a self-financing war have proved wildly inaccurate. Stiglitz cites operational spending to date of $646 billion for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and, working off estimates from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, presumes that spending on these wars over the next decade probably will amount to another $913 billion.

Pentagon officials had no immediate comment on Stiglitz’s book or his estimates.

Stiglitz and Bilmes first estimated war costs of $1 trillion in January 2006. Their research proved controversial and sparked debate about the costs of replacing equipment used by the armed forces and National Guard units. In the new book, they offer a figure of $404 billion for replacing equipment, planes and tanks and bringing military hardware back from Iraq and Afghanistan.

In an interview, Stiglitz said that too much of the public debate had been over the wars’ operational costs while the real budget strains would show up only years from now.

“The peak expenditures are way out,” he said, noting that the peak expenditures for World War II vets came in 1993.

The pair estimated that future medical, disability and Social Security costs for veterans of the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan range from a best-case $422 billion to what they call a more probable long-term expense of $717 billion.

It’s why the two call in the book for creating a Veterans Benefits Trust Fund to set aside money in a “lock box” to pay for future health-care needs of Iraq and Afghanistan vets. Although veterans’ health care amounts to a future promise, they said, it isn’t an entitlement and instead is funded through discretionary spending. In the future, funding for vets will compete with other government programs.

“We should not have an unfunded entitlement program like this,” Stiglitz said. “This is more like deferred compensation. … We require corporations to put money away but we don’t require the government to put money away, and we should be doing that … so when the focus turns away to some other problem, veterans aren’t given the shaft.”

Thousands of troops take on Kurdish rebels

Army tanks move along a road near the Iraqi border in southeastern Turkey on Friday. Associated Press (Associated Press )

Selcan Hacaoglu and Christopher Torchia
Associated Press
February 23, 2008

CIZRE, Turkey – Supported by air power, Turkish troops crossed into northern Iraq on Friday in their first major ground incursion against Kurdish rebel bases in nearly a decade. But Turkey sought to avoid confrontation with U.S.-backed Iraq, saying the guerrillas were its only target.

The offensive, which started late Thursday after aircraft and artillery blasted suspected rebel targets, marked a dramatic escalation in Turkey’s fight with the PKK rebel group even though Turkish officials described the operation as limited.

A military officer of the U.S.-led coalition in Iraq said on condition of anonymity that several hundred Turkish soldiers had crossed the border. The coalition has satellites as well as drones and other surveillance aircraft at its disposal.

Sky-Turk television said about 2,000 Turkish soldiers were in Iraq, operating against rebel camps about two miles in from the border. NTV television said a total of 10,000 soldiers were inside Iraq in an operation that had extended six miles past the frontier. The activity was reportedly occurring about 60 miles east of Cizre, a major town near the border with Iraq.

It was not possible to independently confirm the size or scope of the attack on the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, which is considered a terrorist group by the United States and European Union. CNN-Turk television, citing Turkish security officials, said the operation could last two weeks.

Late in the day, the Turkish military said five of its soldiers and 24 rebels had died in a clash inside Iraq and estimated at least 20 more rebels were killed by artillery and helicopter gunships. It said sporadic fighting was continuing.

Earlier, PKK spokesman Ahmad Danas said two Turkish soldiers were killed and eight wounded in clashes along the 240-mile border, but said nothing about rebel casualties. There was no way to confirm either report independently.

The advance was the first confirmed Turkish military ground operation in Iraq since the U.S.-led invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein in 2003. Turkey’s army is believed to have carried out unacknowledged “hot pursuits” in recent years, with small groups of troops staying in Iraq for as little as a few hours or a day.

The PKK militants are fighting for autonomy in predominantly Kurdish southeastern Turkey and have carried out attacks on Turkish targets from bases in the semiautonomous Kurdish region of northern Iraq. The conflict started in 1984 and has claimed as many as 40,000 lives.

Turkey’s government has complained that Iraqi and U.S. authorities weren’t doing enough to stop guerrilla operations. The Turkish air force has been staging air raids on PKK forces in the north since December with the help of intelligence provided by the U.S., a NATO ally.

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said that he called his Iraqi counterpart, Nouri al-Maliki, on Thursday night to give him advance warning of the operation. Erdogan said he later briefed President Bush in a telephone call.

Confirming the advance notice, White House spokesman Scott Stanzel said the Bush administration was urging Turkey to show restraint.

By Allisa Rubin 

BAGHDAD — Iraq’s parliamentary leaders on Wednesday pushed through three far-reaching measures that had been delayed for weeks by bitter political maneuvering that became so acrimonious that some lawmakers threatened to try to dissolve the legislative body.

More than any previous legislation, the new initiatives have the potential to spur reconciliation between Sunnis and Shiites and set the country on the road to a more representative government, starting with new provincial elections.

The voting itself was a significant step forward for the Parliament, where even basic quorums have been rare. In a classic legislative compromise, the three measures, each of which was a burning issue for at least one faction, were packaged together for a single vote to encourage agreement across sectarian lines.

“Today we have a wedding party for the Iraqi Parliament,” said Mahmoud al-Mashhadani, the speaker, who is a Sunni. “We have proved that Iraqis are one bloc and Parliament is able to find solutions that represent all Iraqis.”

But the parliamentary success was clouded because many of the most contentious details were simply postponed, raising the possibility that the accord could again break into rancorous factional disputes in future debates on the same issues.

The three measures are the 2008 budget; a law outlining the scope of provincial powers, a crucial aspect of Iraq’s self-definition as a federal state; and an amnesty that would apply to thousands of the detainees held in Iraqi jails.

An amnesty law was one of the so-called benchmark measures that the Bush administration had built the 2007 troop increase around, hoping to create better security to allow such legislative breakthroughs.

The vast majority of the 26,000 prisoners being held in Iraqi jails are Sunni Arabs, some of whom have been held without charges for months.

That made the law a driving issue for Sunni lawmakers and the Sunni co-vice president, Tariq al-Hashimi.

The budget measure was closely guarded by the Kurds, who wanted to maintain the Kurdistan regional government’s current allocation of 17 percent of the country’s revenues after subtracting the costs of ministries that serve the entire country, like Foreign Affairs and Defense. That is a larger portion than most lawmakers felt was fair, and the point will be renegotiated next year, when the whole battle could well be re-enacted.

Similarly, the provincial powers law, which includes a provision requiring that provincial elections be held by Oct. 1, will be difficult to carry out unless Parliament approves a new election law and fills a number of vacant election commission seats at the provincial level. Those details have been contentious in the past.

But on the abstract level, a law to increase provincial powers has been supported by members from all three major factions, Shiites, Sunni Arabs and Kurds, all of whom have fought for less central governmental authority, albeit in different ways.

The three measures were put to a vote as a single package and passed Wednesday afternoon. There were 206 legislators of the 275-member body at the session, according to Parliament’s press office.

Each article of each measure was voted on individually, with some lawmakers walking out when items they had opposed came up. But almost everyone returned in time for the final package vote.

The jubilation at the conclusion of the session and the atmosphere of amity contrasted sharply with the stinging accusations and walkouts that have characterized many of the negotiations in recent weeks.

Khalid al-Attiya, the deputy speaker and an independent Shiite, beamed as he told reporters right after the vote that the laws had passed “unanimously.”

“It is a big achievement,” he said, and promised that approval of the budget and spending associated with it would translate into as many as 700,000 new jobs for Iraqis.

Parliament members estimated that the overall budget for the fiscal year would reach 60 trillion Iraqi dinars, roughly $50 billion, of which more than two-thirds would go toward salaries and labor expenses.

Even factions that did not agree with some of the measures said they did not want to vote against the package as a whole.

“The Iraqiya list did not want to create a political crisis in a time when the country has suffered a lot, “ said Aliya Nesayef, a member of the Iraqiya Party, which agreed with the amnesty law but was uncomfortable with some provisions of the budget and the provincial powers law.

The decision to vote on the three measures together broke the logjam that had held up the legislation for months, despite pressure from the Bush administration and some senior Iraqi officials. Every group was able to boast that it had won, to some degree. After the legislation is approved by the Presidency Council, in this case a pro forma step since all of the political blocs agreed to their passage, it will be published. The particulars of the laws remained unclear in part because many changes were made in the last frantic days.

The most serious controversy on Wednesday was over the inclusion of a date for holding provincial elections, which President Bush has pushed for in the short term. Such elections would mean that two political parties, one Shiite and one Sunni, would stand to lose control of one or more provincial councils, so those groups have tried to defer the vote. But the majority of Parliament supported setting a date, and Mr. Mashhadani, the speaker, forced the inclusion of a deadline, Oct. 1, at the last minute.

The top American officials in Iraq, Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker and Gen. David H. Petraeus, issued a statement after the passage, congratulating Parliament and describing the provincial powers law, in particular, as a “landmark law” in which “Iraqi legislators have reached an historic compromise.”

But they sought to cover themselves in the event that poison pills were buried in the details of the legislation. That was the case in January, with the passage of a law that was promoted as a way to bring more Sunni Arabs into government jobs but that later appeared to have provisions that would actually force out at least as many as it brought in.

“There is also still more to learn about how this legislation will be implemented,” said the statement on Wednesday by Mr. Crocker and General Petraeus.

One example is growing concern over the commission that has been set up to organize provincial elections. There are allegations that the political parties have divided up the seats on the commission by party, but that not all parties ended up with a place at the table, raising questions about whether a vote will be viewed as fair or will merely deepen divisions.

And, still left out of the political bargain are the newly formed Awakening Councils, which are predominantly Sunni and in many cases represent powerful tribes. They have taken the lead in fighting extremist Sunni groups, and now their leaders are clamoring for a place at the table. They are outraged that the Iraqi Islamic Party, which is Sunni but has limited grass-roots support, dominates the provincial council in Anbar Province.

“In Anbar Province we want the provincial council disbanded and another one formed, we want elections to be held in March or April and we want the Iraqi Islamic Party to leave the province in 30 days,” said Sheik Ali Hatem, one of the leaders of the Anbar Awakening, who survived a suicide bomb attack this week.

On the amnesty law, much will hinge on the formation of a “competent committee” which will be charged with reviewing cases that had languished without review or charges. But detainees accused of any one of a long list of crimes would be excluded from the amnesty.

How the committee chooses to interpret the word “accused” — whether in the formal sense of charges being filed or the informal sense of people suspected of connection to such crimes — could alter considerably how many people remain in jail. Human rights experts said that at least on its face, the law appeared to have been written to free a large number of people.

Several legislators emphasized after the voting on Wednesday that achieving true sectarian reconciliation was far more complex than simply passing a law.

“Reconciliation will hang on more than a law, it needs political will,” said Mithal al-Alusi, a Sunni legislator. “I believe there is no political will to achieve reconciliation. The law of amnesty is good, but not enough.”

Abeer Mohammed contributed reporting.

Packed room cheers at call for end to war

Presidential hopeful Rep. Ron Paul signs an autograph Thursday in Spokane. The Spokesman-Review (BRIAN PLONKA The Spokesman-Review ) Online Follow news of Ron Paul and the other presidential candidates on our new campaign Web site: s-r.com/elections Inside Paul denies link to controversial newsletters. Clinton, Obama campaigns plan events in Northwest.

Jim Camden
Staff writer
February 1, 2008

U.S. Rep. Ron Paul may be having limited success in presidential contests in recent weeks, but his campaign message of more freedom, less government and an immediate end to the war in Iraq was a huge hit with a Spokane crowd Thursday evening.

An estimated 900 people who packed a ballroom at the downtown Doubletree Hotel shouted approval when he warned that government spending was weakening the country and creating “a nanny state.” They cheered raucously when he called for bringing troops home.

“There’s no need to be fighting all these wars,” he said. “What we need to do is bring the troops home as soon as possible.”

To those who might argue that would result in chaos in Iraq, he countered: “What’s over there now?”

People who say the war must continue are the same ones who were wrong in saying that Saddam Hussein had ties to al-Qaida and weapons of mass destruction, and that Iraqi oil would pay for the war, Paul added.

While this may sound like standard criticism of the Bush administration from a Democratic presidential candidate, Paul is seeking the Republican nomination.

As part of that effort, Paul and his campaign urged supporters in the room to attend the Washington state precinct caucuses Feb. 9, the start of the selection of delegates in Washington state.

There’s also a Republican presidential primary on Feb. 19, and the party will use both to award delegates.

But members of the Paul campaign were focused on the caucuses Thursday in an effort to repeat the success of another unlikely Republican candidate in 1988.

In that year, supporters of the Rev. Pat Robertson stunned GOP regulars by turning out at caucuses in large numbers across the state, electing delegates to their county conventions and sticking with the process through the state convention.

The Texas congressman’s speech Thursday was a mix of peace and populism, fiscal conservatism and limited government.

The crowd, some of whom had driven into the city on bad roads and waded across downtown intersections that more resembled slushy ponds, appreciated his message.

“Freedom is popular,” he told the cheering crowd. “It brings people together.”

He returned frequently to foreign policy and the war in Iraq, at one point contending the nation needs to learn a lesson from the 1960s and ’70s and its experience in the Vietnam War.

Americans elected a president in 1968 because they wanted to end the war, but the war continued for years until America eventually lost.

“We lost and we had to come home, and it was an utter tragedy,” Paul said.

But the consequences were not as predicted, all the dominoes didn’t fall and the world didn’t slip into communism, he said. Today the United States trades with Vietnam, and China not only is a major trading partner but it holds much of our debt.

The United States should heed the words of the Founding Fathers, avoid foreign wars and seek only trading alliances, he said.

Since Sept. 11, 2001, Americans have had their freedoms curtailed, with enhanced airport security, warrantless searches and laws allowing people to be jailed as enemy combatants, Paul said.

There’s a debate in Washington, D.C., whether a practice known as waterboarding is torture, he said. Anyone who thinks it isn’t should volunteer to try it, he suggested.

The country should abolish the income tax, return to money that is backed by gold and silver, and eliminate the Federal Reserve Board, Paul said.

Although the economy is hurting, it should not bail out the mortgage industry in the current housing crisis.

Instead, it should let the economy work itself out, which might cause difficult times for some people for a year or so, but would result in a stronger country in the end, Paul said.

Bringing U.S. troops home from all foreign stations would boost the economy, he said, because it would result in them, and the country, spending money in America that is being spent overseas.

“We want peace and we want prosperity and we don’t want perpetual war,” he said.

President Bush told the American people last night that his strategy to stabilize Iraq is achieving results “few of us could have imagined just one year ago,” even as he sought to reassure the public that his new stimulus plan will stave off a recession that threatens to hobble the nation’s economy during the final year of his presidency.

Appearing before Congress for his seventh and last State of the Union address, Bush claimed vindication for his controversial decision a year ago to send a “surge” of about 30,000 additional troops to Iraq. “The enemy is still dangerous, and more work remains,” Bush acknowledged, but with a decline in the number of high-profile attacks, sectarian violence and civilian deaths, he said, progress is unmistakable.

“Some may deny the surge is working,” Bush said, “but among the terrorists there is no doubt. Al-Qaeda is on the run in Iraq, and this enemy will be defeated.”

Bush’s address highlighted the shifting priorities of an administration that had planned to focus its final year on the war and other international challenges but has found itself moving quickly in the past month to address the growing crisis in the economy. The past year has brought an increasing tide of bad economic news, culminating in last week’s global stock market panic over a collapsing housing market and other financial woes in the United States.

The president called on Congress to finish work quickly on a $150 billion stimulus package, urging lawmakers not to “load up” the initiative with measures beyond the tax rebates and business incentives he agreed to last week with House leaders. “That would delay it or derail it, and neither option is acceptable,” said Bush, who also repeated his long-ignored call to make permanent his early-term tax cuts.

The president avoided grim economic talk and instead described conditions as mixed. “In the short run, we can all see that growth is slowing,” he said. “America has added jobs for a record 52 straight months, but jobs are now growing at a slower pace. Wages are up, but so are prices for food and gas. Exports are rising, but the housing market has declined.”

Bush appeared in a cheery mood during his valedictory State of the Union. He chuckled at the partisan rites of the annual speech, in which Democrats and Republicans roared at different junctures, interrupting him with applause more than 70 times in the 53-minute address. His remarks, however, came amid a fierce political campaign season in which many voters are looking beyond the Bush presidency to his potential successors.

In a nod to the political realities, the president did not revive the kind of ambitious reforms on Social Security and immigration that animated his past State of the Union addresses. He offered instead a menu of familiar initiatives, mixed in with modest new proposals on education, social services and assistance for military families, that his aides said stand a reasonable chance of congressional passage before the political conventions start in late August.

One new plan would devote $300 million to new grants for low-income children to attend private schools. The president also proposed writing into law rules that require federal agencies to give equal consideration to religious-based groups providing social services to the poor.

Bush, whose administration has come under fire in recent years over the poor treatment of injured soldiers, also unveiled several initiatives aimed at boosting federal assistance to families of veterans and active service members. One proposal would give hiring preferences throughout the federal government to military spouses; another would allow troops and veterans to transfer unused GI education benefits to spouses and children.

Bush’s approach suggested that he remains undaunted by the low approval ratings that have characterized his presidency in recent years. “We have unfinished business before us,” the president said, “and the American people expect us to get it done.”

Democrats chose a centrist red-state governor, Kathleen Sebelius of Kansas, to respond to Bush’s address. She described the stimulus package as only a “temporary fix” and blasted Bush’s foreign policy for leaving the nation with “fewer allies and more enemies.” But her message also struck a conciliatory tone: “There is a chance, Mr. President, in the next 357 days, to get real results and give the American people renewed optimism that their challenges are the top priority.”

The top two congressional leaders, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) offered faint praise for Bush. “We agree with the President that we must work together to make progress on our most pressing challenges,” they said in a statement. “Yet, tonight, the President offered little more than the status quo. At a time when our economy is on shaky ground and our leadership around the world is eroding, the status quo won’t do.”

Bush made clear to Democrats that he intends to employ fully the powers of the presidency until his final hours in office. He reiterated his demand that they approve new surveillance legislation by Friday, when a temporary wiretapping law is set to expire. He also said he will use his veto pen and administrative powers to try to rein in the proliferation of “earmarks,” the projects inserted by lawmakers into annual spending bills and totaling roughly $17 billion in the last budget.

Bush warned he would veto any spending bill that does not cut in half the number and cost of earmarks from the year before. He also said he will sign an executive order requiring agencies to ignore any earmark not included in the language of legislation. “The people’s trust in their government is undermined by congressional earmarks,” Bush said.

Bush’s pledge was met with skepticism from many Democrats and even some in the GOP, who noted that the practice increased dramatically while Republicans controlled Congress. “The number of earmarks exploded under Republican leadership in the House, and for six years President Bush did nothing to slow their growth,” said House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.).

In keeping with the traditional civility of the occasion, Bush was greeted warmly as he entered the House chamber. Among the lawmakers present were two of his would-be Democratic successors, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.) and Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.).

The White House invited a customary mix of prominent and ordinary citizens to sit with first lady Laura Bush as a way of humanizing some of the broader themes of the president’s speech. Last night, the guests included a single mother from Tanzania who benefited from the U.S. global AIDS initiative; the co-chairs of his commission on health care for veterans; and several troops who served with valor in Iraq and elsewhere. Bush did not introduce any of the guests, as he and past presidents have done.

Bush devoted special attention to the two main issues that could shape long-term perspectives on his presidency: the souring economy and the war in Iraq.

On Iraq, Bush made clear he is not ready to accelerate a drawdown of U.S. forces, which are scheduled to return to pre-”surge” levels of 130,000 by mid-summer. He cited a warning from Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, that pulling troops out too quickly risks the recovery of al-Qaeda in Iraq and an increase in violence.

“Members of Congress,” he said, “having come so far and achieved so much, we must not allow this to happen.”

Democrats challenged Bush’s upbeat portrait of conditions in Iraq. While even critics concede violence has ebbed because of the troop increase, many military experts are unsure whether this is a temporary phenomenon. And even senior U.S. military commanders are concerned that the military progress has not been matched by steps to forge a more lasting political accord.

Bush renewed his call to strengthen the No Child Left Behind Act, which set up a system of testing and other benchmarks for the nation’s schools, and urged Congress to ratify trade agreements with Colombia, Panama and South Korea. He also promised that the United States will do “everything we can” to achieve a peace deal between Palestinians and Israelis, which has become a major goal in his final year in office.

Bush also proposed to contribute $2 billion over three years to an international clean-energy fund. He will seek additional funds from countries such as Britain and Japan, and a donors’ committee will dole the money out in the form of grants, loans and loan guarantees. The money would probably go to firms selling such things as energy-efficient coal plants and would help make those less expensive for buyers from developing countries.

Staff writers Paul Kane, Lyndsey Layton and Steven Mufson contributed to this report.

Michael Barone
U.S. News & World Report
December 31, 2007

There are lessons to be learned from the dazzling success of the surge strategy in Iraq.

Lesson one is that just about no mission is impossible for the United States military. A year ago it was widely thought, not just by the new Democratic leaders in Congress but also in many parts of the Pentagon, that containing the violence in Iraq was impossible. Now we have seen it done.

We have seen this before in American history. George Washington’s forces seemed on the brink of defeat many times in the agonizing years before Yorktown. Abraham Lincoln’s generals seemed so unsuccessful in the Civil War that in August 1864 it was widely believed he would be defeated for re-election. But finally Lincoln found the right generals. Sherman took Atlanta and marched to the sea; Grant pressed forward in Virginia.

Franklin Roosevelt picked the right generals and admirals from the start in World War II, but the first years of the war were filled with errors and mistakes. Even Vietnam is not necessarily a counterexample. As Lewis Sorley argues persuasively in “A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of America’s Last Years in Vietnam,” Gen. Creighton Abrams came up with a winning strategy by 1972. South Vietnam fell three years later when the North Vietnamese army attacked en masse, and Congress refused to allow the aid the U.S. had promised.

George W. Bush, like Lincoln, took his time finding the right generals. But it’s clear now that the forward-moving surge strategy devised by Gens. David Petraeus and Raymond Odierno has succeeded where the stand-aside strategy employed by their predecessors failed. American troops are surely the most capable military force in history. They just need to be given the right orders.

Lesson two is that societies can more easily be transformed from the bottom up than from the top down. Bush’s critics are still concentrating on the failure of the central Iraqi government to reach agreement on important issues – even though the oil revenues are already being distributed to the provinces. We persuaded the Iraqis to elect their parliament from national party lists (reportedly to include more women) rather than to elect them from single-member districts that would have elected community leaders more in touch with local opinion.

But the impetus for change has come from the bottom up, from tribal sheiks in Anbar province who got tired of the violence and oppression of al-Qaida in Iraq, from Shiites and Sunnis who, once confident of the protection of American forces and of the new Iraqi military, decided to quit killing each other. They did not wait for orders from Baghdad or for legislation to be passed with all the i’s dotted and t’s crossed.

Our own recent history should have taught us that bottom-up transformation, in local laboratories of reform, can often achieve results that seemed impossible to national leaders. At the beginning of the 1990s we seemed to have intractable problems of high crime and welfare dependency. Experts argued that we couldn’t hope for improvement. But state and local leaders got to work and showed that change for the better was possible. They included Wisconsin Gov. Tommy Thompson on welfare and New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani on crime control and many others, mostly Republicans but many Democrats as well. The federal government came charging in only after success was achieved in states and cities across the country. By now welfare dependency and crime have fallen by more than half, and they have virtually disappeared as political issues.

Lesson three is that it doesn’t pay to bet against America. As Walter Russell Mead explains in his trenchant (and entertaining) “God and Gold: Britain and America and the Making of the Modern World,” first Britain and then America have built the most prosperous and creative economies the world has ever seen and have prevailed in every major military conflict (except when they fought each other) since the Glorious Revolution of 1688. Many of those victories have been achieved in conflicts far more grueling than what we have faced in Iraq.

Some of George W. Bush’s critics seem to have relished the prospect of American defeat and some refuse to acknowledge the success that has been achieved. But it appears that they have “misunderestimated” him once again, and have “misunderestimated” the competence of the American military and of free peoples working from the bottom up to transform their societies for the better. It’s something to be thankful for as the new year begins.

NEWSWEEK

Updated: 1:12 PM ET Nov 24, 2007

I have been troubled by the reluctance of my fellow liberals to acknowledge the progress made in Iraq in the last six months, a reluctance I am embarrassed to admit that I have shared.

Giving Gen. David Petraeus his due does not mean we have to start saying it was a great idea to invade Iraq. It remains the terrible idea it always was. And the occupation that followed has been until recently a continuing disaster, causing the death or maiming of far too many American soldiers and Iraqi civilians.

Still, the fact is that the situation in Iraq, though some violence persists, is much improved since the summer. Why do liberals not want to face this fact, let alone ponder its implications?

The problem is one that I have seen cripple our political life again and again and that seems to grow steadily worse. Liberals and conservatives are equally guilty. Neither side wants to face facts that don’t fit its case.

Consider abortion. Too many pro-lifers and pro-choicers seem determined to ignore the other fellows’ points as they cling to their own rigid positions. And abortion is just one example.

Conservatives refuse to face the fact that free markets need to be regulated to guard against chicanery and to protect the health and safety of consumers, workers and the public in general. Liberals are too prone to see government as the solution, which of course it can be, and not as part of the problem, a role in which it has also demonstrated impressive potential.

I have yet to find a conservative who acknowledges that our lowest unemployment rates since World War II have come in years when we had the highest income-tax rates, but it is a fact. And I have yet to hear a liberal express regret that it was not one of our own who had the courage and imagination to challenge Soviet leaders “to tear down this wall.”

Conservative and liberal rigidity joined to create a tragic end to the war in Vietnam. Liberals became so antiwar that they could not admit that every South Vietnamese was not a closet Viet Cong; in fact, a significant number of them did not want to live under the communist North. The Nixon administration could not admit that South Vietnamese leaders were too inept to prevail. This meant that neither the administration nor its liberal critics planned for our exit. In our chaotic departure, we abandoned hundreds of thousands of South Vietnamese who could only escape across the South China Sea in boats so rickety that many did not survive. Many of those who could not flee languished for years in North Vietnamese prisons and “reeducation camps.”

This sad story should inspire us to face similar facts in Iraq. General Petraeus has proved that many Iraqis will respond to the kind of empathetic approach with which he has replaced the previous strategy of banging down doors and shooting first. At the same time, we have seen Iraq’s politicians remain unwilling to get their act together. I agree with other war critics who believe these politicians will be motivated to reconcile their differences only when they know we are going to leave on a date certain and they will no longer be able to dither endlessly under our protection in the Green Zone.

Nonetheless General Petraeus’s success provides important lessons. By talking to enemies like the Sunni tribal leaders and by taking his troops out of isolated bases and putting them into Baghdad neighborhoods where they could learn to understand the people and the people could see them as human beings, he has taught us how to deal effectively with insurgencies. And liberals should be the first to point out to George W. Bush that talking to our enemies is a good idea.

Finally, the Iraqis who have responded to General Petraeus remind us of our obligation to all Iraqis who have helped us. Even believing as firmly as I do that we must leave, I recognize our duty to try to do so in a way that poses the least danger to our friends. Above all, we should never repeat the shame of Vietnam. We should make plans now so that if the worst happens we can extricate the Iraqis who have stuck their necks out for us.

URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/72030

Clausewitz is the name and war is my game. You’ll forgive a little levity from a dead Prussian, won’t you?

I, Carl von Clausewitz, wrote the book on war. It’s called “Vom Kriege” (”On War”), and I’m proud to say it’s been required reading at military academies for two centuries.

So when Herr Pinkerton told me he was writing a column about American military strategy in the Middle East, I told him to take the day off.

Ironically, my biggest single point about war was actually a point about peace: winning the peace. As I wrote, “War is a continuation of politics by other means.” That is, if Country A can’t get Country B to do what it wants through diplomacy, well, then, Country A might have to attack. War may or may not be just or glorious; that’s not my concern. I am practical-minded, albeit maybe a little cold-blooded.

So let’s think practically about your various wars, the ones America is fighting, or might be fighting – even the one it’s winning, even if most Americans don’t know about it.

Let’s start with Iraq. A recent front-page headline from the Washington Post – I keep up! – was revealing for its substandard Clausewitzian thinking: “Iraqis Wasting an Opportunity, U.S. Officers Say.” The gist of the story, reflecting the Pentagon’s “spin,” was that the American military had prevailed on the Iraq battlefield, but that squabbling Iraqi politicians, along with incompetent State Department diplomats, were squandering the victory.

Such a newspaper story is good for blame-shifting, but it’s not good for actual war-winning. Smart strategists know – because they read it in my book – that politics and war are a continuum. They are not separate. If you win a war and then lose the politics, well, you have lost the war.

If you don’t believe me, ask the Israelis. They’ve won all their fights against the Arabs, but they haven’t won the politics of the Middle East. And that’s why Israel is still at great risk. This coming week, the Americans are summoning the Israelis to “peace talks” in your town of Annapolis, Md., with foes that don’t really want peace. Why is the Bush administration doing this? Because the Arabs that America is relying on for help in Iraq – and against Iran – have insisted that the United States “do something” about Israel. All of which is a reminder that your country hasn’t won much in Iraq, to say nothing of Iran.

From your point of view, it’s great that the Americans and Israelis can defeat the Arabs. But until you have altered Arab/Muslim political thinking – by breaking or otherwise changing their political will – then peace conferences are mere mirage-castles in the air.

As for Afghanistan and Pakistan, let’s just say this: America sends lots of lawyers, guns and money, but you don’t seem to have true influence on the destiny of 200 million Muslims – including Osama bin Laden, lurking there somewhere.

But it’s not all bleak for America in the region. A bright spot is Sudan, which has long been a haven for Islamic radicalism and terrorism. Yes, I’ll admit, in the western province of Darfur, Muslims are massacring Muslims.

But in the southern part, the Christians have achieved many of their political objectives. How? By fighting! Give war a chance: It works sometimes.

In fact, the Christians – under the charismatic leadership of Salva Kiir, in Washington recently meeting with President Bush at the White House – are inching toward independence from the Khartoum regime.

Breaking up a hostile Muslim country? Carving out a new nation? Liberating millions of African Christians, along with substantial oil deposits, to seek new alignment with the West?

That’s a full politico-military victory, in the Clausewitzian sense, if you can keep it. You Americans should savor that success and, more to the point, study it.

Democrats stymied again on withdrawal

Shailagh Murray
Washington Post
November 17, 2007

WASHINGTON – Senate Republicans Friday blocked the latest effort by Democrats to end the Iraq war, rejecting a $50 billion military funding package that would have required President Bush to begin withdrawing troops.

The 53 to 45 tally fell seven votes short of the 60 needed and signaled that the contours of the war debate, now nearing its one-year anniversary, have barely changed. An alternative GOP proposal, which would have provided $70 billion with no strings attached, failed 53 to 45, falling 15 votes short.

The Democratic version was approved by the House earlier this week. It would have required President Bush to start a phased redeployment of U.S. forces within 30 days of enactment, while shifting the military role in Iraq to specific missions. Those include protecting U. S. diplomatic facilities, assisting Iraqi security forces and engaging in targeted counterterrorism operations. It set a Dec. 15, 2008, goal for completing the process.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said he may bring the Democratic bill back to the floor in December. He and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., have agreed that Bush will not receive more war funding this year unless he accepts Democratic withdrawal terms.

That’s out of the question, said White House spokesman Tony Fratto, who dismissed the Democratic vote as a political stunt.

“Once again, they tried to pass a bill that provides incremental funding, tries to micromanage the war from the halls of Congress,” said Fratto. Democrats “know that such a bill will be vetoed, should it ever come to the president’s desk.”

In May, Bush vetoed an Iraq spending bill that contained Democratic withdrawal conditions, and Congress backed off. Reid and Pelosi said they would not consider a new approach to the funding request until January. In the meantime, they said, the Pentagon could draw from its $471 billion annual budget to cover war expenses.

Republicans said they expect to win the funding showdown eventually – just as they did this summer, owing to the mathematical reality of the Democrats’ tiny 51 to 49 majority in the Senate.

Cal Thomas
Tribune Media Services
November 14, 2007

This will probably kill his career, but I rise to praise Sen. Joe Lieberman, the independent Democrat from Connecticut.

In a speech last week before Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies, Lieberman said, “Since retaking Congress in November 2006, the top foreign policy priority of the Democratic Party has not been to expand the size of our military for the war on terror or to strengthen our democracy promotion efforts in the Middle East or to prevail in Afghanistan. It has been to pull our troops out of Iraq, to abandon the democratically elected government there, and to hand a defeat to President Bush.”

Dictionary.com defines “patriot” this way: “a person who loves, supports, and defends his or her country and its interests with devotion.” The key words are “defends his or her country and its interests with devotion.” By this definition Joe Lieberman is a patriot.

Is it in America’s interest to lose in Iraq? Is it in America’s interest not to have a strong enough military – in personnel and in weapons – to defend us against the myriad threats confronting the country now and those that will likely confront it in the near future? Is it in America’s interest to see Democratic politicians dedicated to making a lame duck president a dead duck, not supporting him in any way for partisan political reasons just to win the White House?

Lieberman doesn’t think so, but he stands virtually alone among leading members of his party.

If you consider history, there were many Democrats who supported a vigorous foreign policy dedicated to protecting American liberties and encouraging them in other countries. Those Democrats rarely, if ever, criticized a president of either party for his foreign policies and ex-presidents mostly held their tongues when it came to criticizing their successors. Those days are gone.

The late Sen. Henry Martin “Scoop” Jackson, a Democrat from Washington state, was among the last of the modern leaders of his party to believe such things. Jackson, who died in 1983, was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom posthumously in 1984.

At the awards ceremony, Ronald Reagan said, “Scoop Jackson was convinced that there’s no place for partisanship in foreign and defense policy. He used to say, ‘In matters of national security, the best politics is no politics.’ His sense of bipartisanship was not only natural and complete; it was courageous. He wanted to be president, but I think he must have known that his outspoken ideas on the security of the nation would deprive him of the chance to be his party’s nominee in 1972 and ‘76. Still, he would not cut his convictions to fit the prevailing style. I’m deeply proud, as he would have been, to have Jackson Democrats serve in my administration. I’m proud that some of them have found a home here.”

One searches in vain for similar sentiments among leaders of today’s Democratic Party. When Jackson died, Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, another Democrat of the old school, said of his friend and colleague: “Henry Jackson is proof of the old belief in the Judaic tradition that at any moment in history goodness in the world is preserved by the deeds of 36 just men who do not know that this is the role the Lord has given them. Henry Jackson was one of those men.”

In his Johns Hopkins speech, Lieberman said of Senate colleagues who voted against his resolution to declare Iran’s revolutionary Quds Force a foreign terrorist entity (privately telling him they agreed, but don’t trust Bush): “There is something profoundly wrong – something that should trouble all of us – when we have elected Democratic officials who seem more worried about how the Bush administration might respond to Iran’s murder of our troops, than about the fact that Iran is murdering our troops.”

Exactly. God bless Joe Lieberman, a true patriot.

In a new book, former Bush speechwriter and NEWSWEEK contributor Michael J. Gerson warns against learning the wrong lessons from Iraq.

By Michael J. Gerson

NEWSWEEK

Updated: 3:54 PM ET Oct 27, 2007

Whatever the eventual outcome of the Iraq War—a precipitous, politically driven withdrawal, a gradual counterinsurgency victory, or something in between—it is necessary to begin drawing some lessons. The first is unavoidable: Regime change is the most difficult of foreign policy options, the most fraught with unintended consequences, and the least suited to the American style of war. Regime removal, it turns out, is relatively easy, given our country’s unrivaled military capabilities. But regime removal is different from regime change, which may require a massive and costly effort of nation building—especially when a society has been debilitated by decades of totalitarian rule. For nearly thirty years, Saddam Hussein instilled terror and distrust, fed divisions of clan and tribe, and encouraged the fears of the Sunni minority. Wounds so deep heal slowly and gradually, and only in an atmosphere of security and order—an atmosphere the Coalition did not initially provide.

Throughout most of my White House experience, I intuitively sided with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s combative confidence against Secretary of State Colin Powell’s caution and diplomacy. But it is now clear to me that, despite its indisputable utility on today’s battlefield, the Rumsfeld Doctrine, with its stress on light and flexible high-tech military power, is less well suited to an occupation like Iraq than are certain elements of the Powell Doctrine—especially the need for clear goals and overwhelming force. Defeating an insurgency is possible (a fact proven in Malaysia and El Salvador); and sometimes it is necessary. But this kind of counterinsurgency campaign cannot be conducted quickly or on the cheap. For years, lower-level officers had made the case that when American troops in Iraq came into an area and stayed, there was relative calm. But for years there were not enough troops to make that strategy work on a sufficient scale in Baghdad.

Another lesson concerns the power of dramatic acts of violence in a media age. Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi’s strategy in Iraq, in the end—even after his own end—was successful. Al-Qaeda was not responsible for most of the attacks in Iraq, but it authored the most spectacular and bloody ones—the destruction of mosques, the carnage at busy markets. And this had two effects. It created images of hopeless chaos in the American media, undermining public support for the war. Even more destructively, the attacks fed sectarian divisions within Iraq at the expense of democratic aspirations. The attraction of freedom is powerful. But hatred is not without its appeal, either, especially in the absence of order. A small group of ruthless men proved capable of fanning that hatred through spectacular acts of murder …

Not long before I left the White House, the president put the situation to me bluntly: “If the definition of success is no bombings on TV, America is in trouble. If the definition of success is steady progress in Iraq toward self-sufficiency, we can win.” This explains President Bush’s emphasis on public resolve. “The most important thing to know,” he continued, “is that I’m not going to waver.” Resolve is not a substitute for effectiveness and competence in the War on Terror—but effectiveness and competence cannot prevail without it …

… There is also danger in learning the wrong lessons from Iraq—or in overlearning the lessons of caution. Some claim the American project in Iraq was doomed from the beginning, because Iraqis and Arabs more broadly are culturally incapable of sustaining democracy. That is a familiar historical charge, made in other periods, against Catholics in Southern Europe, Hindus and Muslims in India, Eastern Orthodox in Eastern Europe, and Confucian cultures across Asia. All of these groups experienced difficult days in their democratic transitions—moments when the skeptics seemed to be vindicated. Did Indian democracy look to be successful when more than a million people died by violence during the partition process in the later 1940s? But in all of these cases, betting against the advance of democracy was a poor wager.

It may be possible that the Arab world is the great exception to this trend of history; but if so, Iraq does not prove it. Americans who first entered Iraq did not report an inevitable sectarian conflict. To the contrary, the Shia were remarkably patient during the first two years after the liberation. Iraqis of every background, including most Sunnis, were pleased that Saddam was gone and were generally inclined to withhold judgment about the occupation. There was little resentment at the size of the occupation force, and great hope that the arrival of the Americans would improve the lives of the Iraqi people. Nor were the successive elections an illusion. They were real achievements. Iraqis voted under considerable threat, in percentages greater than do Western democracies—advances that should not be forgotten or denigrated.

Given these events, an imperious contempt for the Shia—a belief that barbarians will always be barbarians—is neither fair nor helpful. Iraqi patience and goodwill were not lacking; rather, they were squandered when the Coalition failed to provide security and basic services. Sectarian conflict was not preordained—it intensified when many of the Shia lost confidence in the ability of the Coalition and Iraqi army to defend them and turned for protection and revenge to militias and death squads. Iraq does not demonstrate that democracy is impossible in the Arab world; it demonstrates that founding a new democracy is difficult in a nation overrun by militias and insurgents.

This is not to say that support for democracy in the Arab world always requires immediate elections. Such elections in Saudi Arabia, for example, would likely result in a government more oppressive and dangerous than the current one. But in Iraq there was no alternative to elections. After the invasion and liberation—undertaken, it bears repeating, primarily for reasons of national security—the president was not about to install a potential Shia dictator in place of the old Sunni dictator. That kind of cynical power game would likely have facilitated a massive Shia retribution and perhaps even genocide against the Sunnis. Democracy is necessary in Iraq precisely because it is the only political system that eventually can tame sectarian tensions, giving the Shia majority the influence it deserves, while guaranteeing the rights and representation of the Sunni minority.

But democracy in Iraq certainly has enemies—jihadists, Baathist holdouts, and religious militias—who happen to be some of the worst criminals on the global stage. We have been led by history to a simple choice: do we stand with the flawed democrats of Iraq, or abandon them to overthrow and death? Some foreign-policy realists argue that such considerations of honor mean little in international affairs. But this national commitment is more than a matter of chivalry. If America abandons Muslim leaders and soldiers who are risking their lives to fight Islamic radicalism and terror—in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere—the War on Terror cannot be won.

Another false lesson is found in the assertion that the Iraq War has actually been creating the terrorist threat we seek to fight—stirring up a hornet’s nest of understandable grievances in the Arab world. In fact, radical Islamist networks have never lacked for historical provocations. When Osama bin Laden proclaimed his 1998 fatwa justifying the murder of Americans, he used the excuse of President Clinton’s sanctions and air strikes against Iraq—what he called a policy of “continuing aggression against the Iraqi people.” He talked of the “devastation” caused by “horrible massacres” of the 1991 Gulf War. All this took place before the invasion of Iraq was even contemplated—and it was enough to result in the murder of nearly three thousand Americans on 9/11. Islamic radicals will seize on any excuse in their campaign of recruitment and incitement. If it were not Iraq, it would be the latest “crime” of Israel, or the situation in East Timor, or cartoons in a Dutch newspaper, or statements by the pope. The well of outrage is bottomless. The list of demands—from the overthrow of moderate Arab governments to the reconquest of Spain—is endless.

America is not responsible for the existence of Islamist ideology. Yet the shifting prospect of American success or failure in the Iraq War does have an effect on the recruitment of radicals. All “pan movements”—political ideologies that claim historical inevitability—expand or contract based on morale. Bin Laden talks of how the Arab world is attracted to the “strong horse”—the victor, the evident winner—and there is truth in that claim. In an ideological struggle, perception matters greatly, and outcomes matter most. Israel’s perceived defeat in Lebanon in 1982 helped produce a generation of terrorists, convinced that armed struggle could humble their enemy. If America were really to retreat in humiliation from Iraq, Islamist radicals would trumpet their victory from North Africa to the islands of the Philippines … increase their recruitment of the angry and misguided … and expand the size and boldness of their attacks.

Perhaps the most dangerous and self-destructive lesson that might be drawn from Iraq is a hyper-caution indistinguishable from paralysis. In a backlash to the Iraq War, some Democrats seem to argue that any future American action or intervention will require both certainty as to the validity of our intelligence and international unanimity. The evidence on weapons of mass destruction must always be conclusive, or else it must always be mocked and dismissed. The United Nations must always grant its blessing and legitimacy. Were America to accept these ground rules, we would become a spectator in world events. The demand for intelligence certainty would allow flickering threats to become raging fires before any action were taken to extinguish them. The demand for international unanimity would make interventions to prevent genocide or ethnic cleansing nearly impossible. America acted in the former Yugoslavia under President Clinton without U.N. support, and may need to do the same in other places in the future. At some point, caution becomes demoralization, and humility becomes humiliation …

URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/62313

Not to stoke any of the inane conspiracy theories running wild on the Internet, but if Osama bin Laden weren’t on the payroll of Lockheed-Martin or some other large defense contractor, then he deserves to have been. What a boondoggle 9-11 has been for the merchants of war, who this week announced yet another quarter of whopping profits made possible by George W. Bush’s pretending to fight terrorism by throwing money at outdated Cold War-style weapons systems.

Lockheed-Martin, the nation’s top weapons manufacturer, reaped a 22 percent increase in profits, while rivals for the defense buck, Northrop Grumman and General Dynamics, increased profits by 62 percent and 24.7 percent, respectively. Boeing’s profits jumped 61 percent, spiked this quarter by its commercial division. But Boeing’s military division, like the others, has been doing very well indeed since the terrorist attacks.

As Newsweek International put it in August: “Since 9-11 and the U.S.-led wars that followed, shares in American defense companies have outperformed both the Nasdaq and Standard & Poor’s stock indices by some 40 percent. Prior to the recent cascade of stock prices worldwide, Boeing’s share prices had tripled over the past five years, while Raytheon’s had doubled.”

Not bad for an industry in serious difficulty with the sudden collapse of the Cold War at the beginning of the 1990s, when the first President Bush and his Defense Secretary Dick Cheney were severely cutting the military budget for high-ticket planes and ships designed to fight the no-longer-existent Soviet military. Sure, they had Iraq to kick around, but the elder Bush never thought to turn the then very real aggression of Saddam Hussein into an enormously expensive quagmire. He both defeated Hussein and cut the military budget.

Not so Bush the younger, who exploited the trauma of 9-11 as an occasion to depose the defanged dictator of Iraq and thus provide a “shock and awe” showcase for the arms industry, which continues to benefit obscenely from the failed occupation. The second Iraq war, irrationally conflated with the 9-11 attack that had nothing to do with Hussein, provided the perfect threat package to justify the most outrageous military boondoggle in the nation’s history.

The bin Laden boys only had an arsenal of $3 box knives, but Bush claimed Hussein had WMD. Sadly for the military-industrial complex, Hussein’s army collapsed all too suddenly. But the insurgency, much of it fueled by the Shiites, who were ostensibly on our side, provided the occasion for pretending that we are in a war against a conventionally armed and imposing military enemy.

Of course, we are in nothing of the sort with this so called “war on terror,” a propaganda farce that draws resources away from serious efforts to counter terrorism to reward the corporations that profit from high-tech weaponry that has little if anything to do with the problem at hand.

As Columbia University professor Richard K. Betts points out in Foreign Affairs magazine: “With rare exceptions, the war against terrorists cannot be fought with army tank battalions, air force wings or naval fleets – the large conventional forces that drive the defense budget. The main challenge is not killing the terrorists but finding them, and the capabilities most applicable to this task are intelligence and special operations forces. … It does not require half-a-trillion dollars worth of conventional and nuclear forces.”

That half a trillion only covers the Pentagon budget for expenses beyond the cost of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars or the Department of Homeland Security. Those last three items total more than $240 billion in Bush’s 2008 budget requests. Add to that the $50 billion spent on intelligence agencies and an equal amount of State Department-directed efforts, and you can understand how we manage to spend more fighting a gang of mujahedeen terrorists, once our “freedom fighters” in that earlier Afghanistan war against the Soviets, than we did at the height of the Cold War.

“The Pentagon currently absorbs more than half of the federal government’s discretionary budget,” writes Lawrence J. Korb, “surpassing the heights reached when I was President Reagan’s assistant secretary of defense. … And much like the 1980s, we are spending billions of dollars on weapons systems designed to fight the Soviet superpower.”

Thanks to bin Laden and Bush’s exploitation of “war on terror” hysteria, the taxpayers have been hoodwinked into paying for a sophisticated military arsenal to fight a Soviet enemy that no longer exists. The Institute for Policy Studies calculated last year that the top 34 CEOs of the defense industry have earned a combined billion dollars since 9-11. They should give bin Laden his cut.

Cal Thomas
Tribune Media Services
October 20, 2007

Just as it appears the United States may have turned an important corner in Iraq with the reported disabling of al-Qaida, Turkey is threatening to invade northern Iraq in an attempt to stop attacks by Kurdish rebels on Turkish territory.

House Democrats added fuel to the combustible situation when the House Foreign Affairs Committee on Oct. 10 passed a resolution that recognizes as genocide the mass killings of Armenians by the Ottoman Empire during World War I. The resolution is opposed by the Bush administration, not necessarily because it disagrees that genocide occurred nearly a century ago, but because such a resolution will inflame passions at a time when there are passions enough in the neighborhood. Democrats, who control Congress, are playing a dangerous game that might severely damage America’s foreign policy, further diminish President Bush, hand over a weakened presidency to his successor and put more of our troops in jeopardy. That reality apparently began to reach the Democratic congressional leadership by midweek, as supporters of the resolution began a retreat and senior Democrats urged House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to drop her support for the measure.

Since Saddam Hussein was toppled from power, Turkey has been threatening to invade northern Iraq to settle old scores. Turkey has the provocation it believes it needs in the killing of 30 Turkish soldiers and civilians by members of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (known as the PKK) in just the last two weeks.

Writing in the publication Insight, Gallia Lindenstrauss notes, “(Turkish) President Abdullah Gul accused American politicians of sacrificing big issues for petty games of domestic politics.” That sounds about right. Are Democrats so cynical that they would stir an already boiling pot in hopes that it would negate whatever success America may finally be having in quelling terrorist acts in Iraq? One would hope that is not the case, but given their leadership’s rhetoric about the war already being lost and their refusal to acknowledge even the slightest progress in Iraq as positive lest it reflect well on the Bush administration, cynicism about their cynical actions might be justified.

If Turkey will not be dissuaded from entering Iraq to root out the rebels, the Bush administration might consider helping the Turks do the job quickly and as painlessly as possible so that they might hastily return to their side of the border. If the Kurds wish to continue with their prosperous and more peaceful lifestyles, they will help locate and expunge the rebels among them. The last thing the region needs is to inflame Islamic fundamentalists, who, despite tensions that have long threatened to topple Ankara’s secular government, have so far managed to peacefully coexist with moderate Muslims, as well as secularists.

A senior commander of the rebel group, Duran Kalkan, was quoted in an Associated Press story as saying the Turkish military will suffer a serious blow if it launches a cross-border offensive and would be “bogged down in a quagmire.” Another quagmire is precisely what is not needed in Iraq. Oil prices, which have increased in recent days in anticipation of Turkish military action, would go even higher should another front be opened in Iraq.

There should be no rush to condemn a genocide that took place more than nine decades ago (and the very word “genocide” is in dispute as a description of what happened). Politically, it might play well for Democrats, but it could backfire and have severe repercussions for American foreign policy, American forces in Iraq (supply lines could be disrupted) and American interests in Iraq and throughout the region for years to come. The next president cannot possibly enjoy long-term benefits from such shortsightedness by House Democrats.

Whatever immediate political gain Democrats might hope to extract from this misguided and ill-timed resolution will be overcome by the long-term pain it generates. Apparently, there are limits beyond which even Democrats are not willing to go in their pursuit of political gain. There are some issues that ought to transcend partisanship, and this is one of them.

Robert Scheer
Creator’s Syndicate
October 19, 2007

When will we listen to the troops? I’m not talking about soldiers used as props for a George W. Bush photo-op, telling reporters what Washington wants to hear. The military is disciplined and thus accustomed, from Gen. David Petraeus on down, to toeing the official line. But the Iraq war has also produced brilliant messages of dissent from the ranks that should cause us to stop in our tracks and reconsider what we have wrought. First, a group of sergeants came forward, and on Tuesday it was the captains’ turn to speak out.

In “The War as We Saw It,” an eloquent op-ed article published in the New York Times in August, seven Army sergeants summarized the futility of their 15 months fighting in Iraq: “To believe that Americans, with an occupying force that long ago outlived its reluctant welcome, can win over a recalcitrant local population and win this counterinsurgency is far-fetched.” After penning that cri de coeur, two of the soldiers died in Iraq, and a third was severely wounded.

On Tuesday, the Washington Post printed, “The Real Iraq We Knew,” by 12 Army captains, all of whom served in Iraq, which begins: “Today marks five years since the authorization of military force in Iraq, setting Operation Iraqi Freedom in motion. Five years on, the Iraq war is as undermanned and under-resourced as it was from the start. And, five years on, Iraq is in shambles.

“As Army captains who served in Baghdad and beyond, we’ve seen the corruption and the sectarian division. We understand what it’s like to be stretched too thin. And we know when it’s time to get out.”

How come those brave veterans know it’s time to get out, but leading Democrats, who voted for the war to be authorized, are still pussyfooting about quickly removing the troops from this ever-deepening quagmire? They’re jockeying for political advantage, knowing that drawing out the war hurts the Republicans.

It is a deeply cynical ploy that works only because, with our all-volunteer military, most Americans don’t have to face the choice of sacrificing themselves or their loved ones in a futile and losing war.

Yes, it costs the taxpayers, but so do the “Halo 3″ video games Americans are purchasing in record numbers, and for most, Iraq is a make-believe war. Even the cost seems unreal, as Bush is the first president in U.S. history to cut taxes in a time of war, with the result that more than a trillion dollars in long-term obligations will not come due while his administration has to foot the bills.

If there were a military draft, people would be in the streets demanding an end to this carnage, which now threatens to go on for decades. That is precisely why the neoconservative ideologues who got us into this mess built their fantasies on a volunteer force, supplemented by hundreds of thousands of contractors (including 50,000 mercenary troops like those from Blackwater) and the purchase of largely irrelevant but highly profitable high-tech weaponry – although they forgot about simple armor for the troops.

The most fraudulent neocon claim was that pro-Western, even pro-Israel, Iraqis, such as their favorite, the now totally discredited Ahmed Chalabi, would police the country as surrogates for the United States, and that Iraqi oil sales would pay for it all.

The 12 captains, who worked with the local Iraqi residents, are very clear as to the forlorn outcome of that plan. “And, indeed, many of us witnessed the exploitation of U.S. tax dollars by Iraqi officials and military officers. Sabotage and graft have had a particularly deleterious impact on Iraq’s oil industry, which still fails to produce the revenue that Pentagon war planners hoped would pay for Iraq’s reconstruction,” they wrote.

As for that other ongoing illusion – that we are turning over power to Iraqi forces we have trained – the captains write: “Iraqi soldiers quit at will. The police are effectively controlled by militias. And, again, corruption is debilitating. U.S. tax dollars enrich self-serving generals and support the very elements that will battle each other after we’re gone.”

Building an empire on the cheap and by proxy doesn’t work. If you want one, and of course most of us shouldn’t because only a few fat cats benefit from such imperial adventures, you need a vast conscript army. As the captains put it: “There is one way we might be able to succeed in Iraq. To continue an operation of this intensity and duration, we would have to abandon our volunteer military for compulsory service. Short of that, our best option is to leave Iraq immediately.” Enough said.

David Reinhard
The Oregonian
October 15, 2007

Things must be improving in Iraq, because you don’t read or hear about it as much these days. If things were getting worse – or staying the same – you can bet the big networks and newspapers would be out spreading the news. The prestige media would be declaring Gen. David Petraeus’ surge a bust and dissecting its failure in lavish, even loving, detail.

Now the best anyone can come up with is another story about Blackwater, which simply doesn’t pack the wallop of Abu Ghraib and Haditha. Moreover, the recent fixation on a U.S. security firm operating in Iraq is too obvious. (Come on, guys, everybody sees what you’re doing.) Abu Ghraib and Haditha became incantations of a war gone bad. The mounting war dead became an invitation for throat-clearing “quagmire” pronouncements. Abu Ghraib, Haditha, deteriorating security in Iraq – yeah, those were the days.

Now the nation’s naysayers are left with this: The U.S. military reported last week that troop deaths in Iraq went down for the fourth month in a row, and the Iraqi government reported that civilian deaths declined by half in September.

What to do? Well, CBS and NBC gave the new casualty figures a few sentences on their evening news programs, and the major papers played the news far from their front pages. Only ABC led with the story. In fact, the Washington Post’s media critic, Howard Kurtz, wondered about the short shrift the media gave this news after four years of “continuously depressing” news. On CNN’s “Reliable Sources,” he asked the Washington Post’s Robin Wright and CNN’s Barbara Starr whether the news should have received more attention. Perish the thought, they both said – we’re not sure there is a trend yet.

OK, four months is not a trend. But Kurtz then asked the obvious question: If those casualty figures had gone up, wouldn’t that have made front pages? “Oh, I think inevitably it would have,” replied Starr. “I mean, that … by any definition, is news.”

OK, bad Iraq news is news, good Iraq news is not.

Even the bad news out of Iraq isn’t what it used to be. Recall Haditha. In the spring of 2006, Rep. John Murtha said that Pentagon sources had told him Marines there had murdered 24 Iraqis “in cold blood” and that the cover-up of the November 2005 massacre “goes right up the chain of command.” It was, for a season, the “event” that told ever so many all they needed to know about what was wrong in Iraq. Murtha said it happened because our forces are stretched too thin. It was going to be this war’s My Lai – a dark incantation summing up the whole rotten mess, a one-word dirge of our immediate disgrace and inevitable defeat. Haditha, Haditha, Haditha!

All that was missing were … actual facts, completed investigations and court proceedings.

Last week Haditha became not-so-much news. That is, it became good news, which, in the media’s strange calculus of Iraq, is not big news.

A senior military investigator recommended dropping murder charges against Staff Sgt. Frank D. Wuterich, the last ranking enlisted Marine charged in the case. Lt. Col. Paul J. Ware recommended the charges be downgraded to negligent homicide if the case went to court-martial. Earlier he had recommended that all charges be dropped against the two Marines accused of murder in Haditha. His conclusion in all three cases: insufficient evidence.

The New York Times reported the latest Haditha news back on Page 8. In May 2006, the paper had a Page One story declaring that “Military Expected to Report Marines Killed Iraqi Civilians.” Front-page charges, back-page exonerations. “Last year, when accounts of the killing of 24 Iraqis in Haditha by a group of Marines came to light,” The Times’ Paul von Zielbauer wrote Saturday, “it seemed that the Iraq war had produced its defining atrocity.”

Perhaps Haditha did produce this war’s defining atrocity, just not in the way so many once imagined. Rushing to accuse Marines of murdering two dozen Iraqi innocents “in cold blood” and alleging a cover-up “right up the chain of command” before the facts are known – using the alleged massacre to serve your pet theories on the war’s conduct or your anti-war stand when the conflict is going poorly – this could be the war’s “defining atrocity” if the progress on the ground reported recently is sustained.

I know, let’s get back to Blackwater.

By Joe Klein

A long time ago, when the Soviet Union was beginning to shatter, a Russian friend cracked a joke, and I doubled up laughing on a snowy street in Moscow. “I wish I could smile the way you Americans do,” he said. I asked why he couldn’t. He said he’d been trained by his parents never to show emotions in public. A stray smile could be misinterpreted, could mean the Gulag. I realized then that my reaction to his joke had been a political statement–a reflexive demonstration of my freedom. I thought about that when the laughter began at Columbia University on Sept. 24. I wondered how quickly it took Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to realize they were laughing at him, not with him, after his blithe assertion that there are no homosexuals in Iran. He gazed out into the audience, bemused. He could understand those who found him reprehensible; he courted their disapproval, thrived on it. But to be found ridiculous? How devastating. How delightfully Western.

Ahmadinejad’s appearance was a small but telling moment in the rolling overhyped crisis that is George W. Bush’s so-called war on terrorism. The Iranian President’s words had no practical, only symbolic, global import. He has very little real power in Iran, none over foreign policy or the nuclear program. He has no more power than his predecessor, the failed reformer Mohammed Khatami, who came to be regarded in the West and in Iran as a well-dressed cipher. Indeed, Ahmadinejad has failed in the one area where he actually does have some authority: reforming the sluggish oligopoly that is the Iranian domestic economy. There have been riots over the rising price of gasoline. His political future is shaky. And yet this strange little man who brings to mind Peter Sellers more readily than Adolf Hitler–Sellers playing one of his brilliantly befogged simpletons–occasioned a classic, free-range American outrage festival, in which everyone, even Hillary Clinton, happily granted him exactly the opprobrium he desired.

Of course, Ahmadinejad is no simpleton. He knows precisely how to exploit one of the few powers he does possess, the power to offend. He gains status in Iran and in the Islamic world by sticking his thumb in the giant’s eye. His Holocaust denial is a flagrant ploy–the easiest way to get a rise out of the Jewish community and, inevitably, U.S. politicians. Clearly, he benefits from his falsely inflated prominence. But who else does?

Well, at the top of the list are our old friends the neoconservatives, the folks who provided the intellectual rationale for Bush’s war in Iraq, many of whom are now itching for a war with Iran. Norman Podhoretz, the neocon paterfamilias, has written a trifle called World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism and loves to posit Ahmadinejad and Osama bin Laden–a far more dangerous character–as the heirs to Hitler and Stalin. “They follow the path of fascism, Nazism and totalitarianism,” he writes. This is incendiary foolishness. Terrorists have the ability to wreak terrible damage intermittently, but they don’t represent an existential threat to the U.S. Ahmadinejad commands no legions–not even the Hizballah forces in Lebanon that attacked Israel in the summer of 2006–and if Podhoretz doesn’t know that, he should. Taking Ahmadinejad literally, as the neoconservatives do, is being disingenuous with lethal intent. It gives license to a conga line of politicians–especially Republicans running for President–to strut their stuff by jumping on Ahmadinejad and Columbia University and liberals in general. Mitt Romney runs an ad in which he brags that he denied the milquetoast reformer Khatami a police escort to Harvard University in 2006. Now there’s a man! The New York Daily News, owned by neoconservative Mort Zuckerman, runs the headline the evil has landed. The cable news networks hyperventilate. Even the president of Columbia University, Lee Bollinger, feels the need to demolish Ahmadinejad–elegantly, I must say–before the speech. A giant toxic bubble overwhelms the public square.

And then, there he is–and laughter is freedom’s only appropriate reaction. The bubble bursts. He denies not only the Holocaust but also homosexuality? Suddenly, it all becomes obvious: we are being played by extremists on both sides. To be sure, Iran does arm Hizballah, and it does have an active nuclear program that may or may not be proved to have hostile intent, and it is making trouble for the U.S. in Iraq, supplying weapons to our enemies. These are all problems to be addressed soberly and perhaps even, eventually, with multilateral force. But the neoconservative campaign to transform Ahmadinejad into Hitler or Stalin, to pretend that he has the ability to destroy the world, to make a hoo-ha over letting the little man speak, is a cynical attempt to plump for war. Ahmadinejad may be ridiculous, but Podhoretz–who recently spent 45 minutes with Bush arguing for more war–isn’t very funny at all.

Ed Morales
Progressive Project
October 2, 2007

The United States must stop relying on mercenaries in Iraq.

The Sept. 16 incident in Baghdad, where Blackwater USA, a private security company, killed at least 11 Iraqi civilians, has created a diplomatic crisis between the United States and Iraqi governments.

Worse, it has made a mockery of U.S. efforts to establish democracy in the country it invaded more than five years ago. Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has already called for Blackwater to cease operations, saying the mercenary army amounted to a challenge of his nation’s sovereignty.

While initial accounts of the incident said Blackwater was responding to gunfire, subsequent Iraqi reports claimed that there was no attack. Instead, they said Blackwater security guards opened fire at a car that didn’t stop when told to by a policeman, and its passengers – a couple and their infant – were killed.

Blackwater, which is the primary provider of security to senior U.S. officials, including Ambassador Ryan Crocker, operates outside the law and governmental supervision. Having received a no-bid contract and operating on billions of dollars in taxpayer funds, Blackwater plays the role of renegade cowboys, flying low in helicopters with guns drawn. It is despised by Iraqis, and even some U.S. military personnel.

This is not the first time that Blackwater operatives have been involved in serious incidents in Iraq. The Iraqi government has announced it is investigating five previous incidents that occurred earlier this year in which 10 Iraqis were killed and 15 wounded. Last Christmas Eve, an off-duty Blackwater contractor allegedly killed a bodyguard for the Iraqi vice president.

The reckless use of Blackwater greatly undercuts the moral authority of the United States as a beacon of democracy, and calls into question the true extent of Iraqi sovereignty. How can the U.S. claim to be bringing freedom and democracy to Iraq while imposing a mercenary army on an Iraqi government that is not empowered to prosecute it?

Blackwater’s role in maintaining security is so crucial that its removal presents a logistical nightmare. That, in itself, shows how reliant on mercenaries the United States has become.

This practice should end now, and those responsible for civilian deaths should be brought to justice.