"Maliki Suggests Bush Pushed To Extend U.S. Presence In Iraq To Help McCain"

According to Maliki:

Actually, the final date was really the end of 2010 and the period between the end of 2010 and the end of 2011 was for withdrawing the remaining troops from all of Iraq, but they asked for a change [in date] due to political circumstances related to the [U.S] domestic situation so it will not be said to the end of 2010 followed by one year for withdrawal but the end of 2011 as a final date.

If what Maliki claims is true, would that not be more than solid grounds to impeach and swiftly remove the POTUS?

In one sense those terms can mean the same thing. It's common in water-cooler speak to imagine a scene where our gigantic military is scrutinized, defended and discussed.

Hat tip to Publius Endures (PE) for this little expose' of the mind of a Modern Conservative.

The article he links to is from Michelle Malkin and written by "See-Dubya".

Says Mark at PE: (emphasis mine)

That's the title and topic of this month's Cato Unbound .

For those not familiar, see About Cato Unbound . It's basically a lead essay on a provocative topic followed by two reaction essays which is then followed by further discussion.

Promoted for discussion by Brendan

I know, believe me I know...

but if they were I think they could make a withdrawl from Iraq a winning national security issue. Right now our ability to react to any world events in a military manner is severely constrained by having our resources tied up in Iraq and Afghanistan.

So Bush has signed an exemption order overriding court ruling that prevented the Navy from conducting exercises involving "medium" frequency sonar near aquatic mammal population.

What does it all mean?

There is a significant amount of evidence that use of certain sonar systems is associated with whales and dolphins losing sense of direction and beaching themselves, often fatally.

This morning's New York Times carries a detailed account of how the U.S. relied on an Iraqi to distribute U.S.-supplied weapons, including AK-47 assault rifles, Glock pistols and heavy machine guns, to Iraqi police forces. Needless to say, the Iraqi "turned the armory into his own private arms bazaar with the seeming approval of some American officials and executives..."

Well, not that there was one thing that fits this category..or even just a few. But I'd like to point out a few that really pissed me off last night or provoked nausea or both.

First: The Hillary "Pinyata". LAME! DENSE! WORTHLESS! and very, very CHEAP!

In my daily run of reading today, I came across a review of World War IV , a new book by Norman Podhoretz about the threat of Islamofascism and the new war we are in.

Can anyone name a major Cheney-Bush policy that has worked out well for the American public?

• Iraq - $10-12 billion a month, 80-100 U.S. deaths a month, almost 20,000 injured, military stretched to the breaking point
• Oil/gas prices - Highest ever recorded
• Deficit - From a budget surplus to a current estimate of $9 trillion in debt with a renewed threat of inflation

I'm hoping to present the case for confronting Iran, which I think is roughly analogous to the conservative approach to our policy towards Iran. If you think the liberal approach would be more effective, think of this as an opportunity to play devil's advocate. I'm looking to fill in the outline below (constructed based on your comments in the previous thread) with primary source citations and brief summaries of each point. Feel free to provide material for any part (or for something not included) in comments and then I'll write it all up. Here is some background that may be helpful. Thanks!

Hey, everyone: there's already a a comment thread (h/t missliberties) on this, but I wanted to pull the Blackwater discussion into its own section so we can pull apart some of the many issues involved here. Iraq's demands that Blackwater leave the country immediately are highlighting some of the complex issues involved in outsourcing military functions to private firms, and the legal implications of doing so.

First, for the purposes of context, here are some important tidbits of info before we proceed:

*The executives from Blackwater are ex-Navy SEALS, so we're talking about a high level of professionalism.

*The funding for Blackwater is not determined by Congress, but by the State Department's own discretionary spending. Because of this, the actual legal status of contractors has never sufficiently been determined, although a number of pending lawsuits may change that in the near future.

*The number of Blackwater employees in Iraq has not been made public, but the most conservative estimate [edit:] of total private contractors is 20,000. The most liberal estimate of total private contractors is 100,000. For comparison's sake, the number of U.S. troops has consistently fluctuated between 100,000 and 200,000. This is a marked increase over typical usage:

In the first Gulf War 15 years ago, the ratio of private contractors to troops was 1 to 60; in the current war, it's 1 to 3.

There are a lot of things that the rightwing seems to be having trouble swallowing about their various presidential nominee candidates. Among the front runners you have serial marriage coupled with questionable divorce practices, abortion support (or at least tepid abortion opposition), big government practices, and so on. The one that still amazes me is that some get panty-torqued over Rudy Guiliani's history of "gun grabbing" as New York City Mayor.

Now whether Rudy deeply respects the second amendment or not is trivial me because the amendment itself is a joke. A bad joke with a lethal punch line.

Or, at least he would if he judged himself by the standards he set out in the Army/Marine Counterinsurgency Field Manual...

As many here know, General David Petraeus was one of two authors of the U.S. Army/Marine Counterinsurgency Field Manual (caution: large pdf).

Petraeus' manual calls for a force-to-population ratio that would have required 120,000 troops (U.S. and Iraqi) in Baghdad in order to achieve success.

Petraeus admitted in confirmation hearings before implementation of the surge that it was undermanned. As Director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard, Sarah Sewall, wrote in The Washington Post at the time of the hearings:

According to the new counterinsurgency field manual, the proper "troop-to-task" ratio for Baghdad requires 120,000 U.S. and allied security forces. During his confirmation hearings, Petraeus carefully predicted that the present numbers will rise to 85,000, but only with some important caveats: if there is a full surge of 21,500 additional U.S. troops (recent administration hints of stopping deployments midway through the increase raise questions about this, however), and if you count all Iraqi security forces (which presumes that the troops both report for duty and prove capable -- both large assumptions). If you also count private American and foreign security contractors and the Iraqi guards that protect government ministries, the counterinsurgent numbers increase by tens of thousands.

Petraeus has never denied that the numbers didn't add up to the ideal. Instead, he has said that he could accomplish the security mission by using these forces differently than they have been used in the past, aggressively pushing them out among the population that they are supposed to secure. Petraeus may conclude -- consistent with the field manual -- that he needs more U.S. forces for a longer period of time. But given current political calculations in Washington, neither the administration nor Congress is likely to provide them.

Petraeus's counterinsurgency doctrine also holds that 80 percent of any counterinsurgency effort should be political. Yet the military has always been the 800-pound gorilla in Iraq. Petraeus is politely urging other government departments to play larger roles, and in particular to increase economic assistance to support the security effort. But the State Department can't even fill the civilian slots on the planned additional provincial reconstruction teams it is sending to Iraq; it has asked the Defense Department to provide military officers instead of foreign service officers. And no one has much confidence that State, Treasury or Justice Department support in Iraq will suddenly become effective -- particularly if security continues to disintegrate.

Some key points there:

• With the collapse and failure of Iraqi police units into sectarian militias, and with the inability of Iraqi military units to stand up as predicted (those that aren't either functioning as sectarian militias, or actually show up to their assignments), the surge is monumentally undermanned by Petraeus' own field manual.

(excellent analysis of the spin machine, and the way presentations rely on consumers' lack of long-term memory -- promoted by pico)

Crossposted on DailyKos

One of the talking points that Iraq War supporters used for YEARS was that most of the violence in Iraq was taking place in "only" four provinces in Iraq (out of 18).

But now that there's some improvements in the security situation in just one of those provinces, Anbar, they've dropped the "only". Now, just one province-- one of the four provinces they've been minimizing for years-- has taken on paramount significance.

To summarize: if you're Alice and you live in Wonderland, I guess 1 > 4.

A dissection of the spin, after the fold...

crossposted on DailyKos

Michael Medved, the man who told us that the gay-hating point guard Tim Hardaway was right , has tonight written another loony piece about why gays need to be denied their rights to be treated as any other citizen. This time, Medved applies pretzel logic to the Larry Craig incident and somehow uses this to "prove" that openly gay individuals should not be allowed to serve in the military. More, after the fold...

With the issue of the Iraq war still at the forefront of the presidential race, this diary shows a route likely to be adopted by many on the right. Promoted by Specter

With public support for the Iraq war declining, and with it President Bush’s poll ratings, where will US Iraq policy be one or two years from now? Daniel Pipes has been writing for some time now about a kind of mid-way policy between leaving Iraq altogether and continuing the current intense and active ground operations. In today’s NY Sun, Pipes writes:

Two positions dominate and polarize the American body politic today. Some say the war is lost, so leave Iraq. Others say the war can be won, so keep the troops in place. I split the difference and offer a third route. The occupation is lost, but the war can be won. Keep American troops in Iraq but remove them from the cities.

Here is a graphical summary of three years of polls conducted by the Military Times on their active-duty subscribers. Assuming this is reasonably representative of the military as a whole, the results are that the military is much more conservative than liberal (unrepresentative of the US population) but that the military is split on the likelihood of success in Iraq (this is representative of the US as a whole , despite the conservative skew in military political views). The military is slightly more inclined than the general population to think we should have invaded Iraq.

The trend lines are particularly interesting: even within the military, enthusiasm for the war in Iraq is rapidly waning. Political affiliation is shifting too, and I doubt it's because lots of liberals are enlisting. Plots below the fold -- whaddya think?

Jerry Scahill, author of the book Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army testified on May 10 before the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense on the impact of private military contractors on the conduct of the Iraq War.

[W]e are now in the midst of the most privatized war in the history of our country. This is hardly a new phenomenon, but it is one that has greatly accelerated since the launch of the "global war on terror" and the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Many Americans are under the impression that the US currently has about 145,000 active duty troops on the ground in Iraq. What is seldom mentioned is the fact that there are at least 126,000 private personnel deployed alongside the official armed forces. These private forces effectively double the size of the occupation force, largely without the knowledge of the US taxpayers that foot the bill.

When the President, the Vice President and the military brass lie about how a soldier died on the battlefield, the soldier's family is betrayed, the soldier's fellow soldiers are betrayed and the people of the nation are betrayed.

So the question becomes, why do those in power lie about how the soldier died?

Today, we are getting some answers in a Congress that has decided to take seriously its responsibilities as a co-equal branch of government. (A responsibility all but ignored under Republican leadership.)