Yeah, we made up fantastic tales about the death of Pat Tillman and the heroism of Jessica Lynch, but you guys blew it for reporting it.

I highly recommend David Schorr's takedown of the "timelines mean they can wait us out" argument bandied about by those unable to rethink the quagmire they've aided and abetted.  As Schorr notes, the argument is irrelevant;

A lot of talk about "signals" lately. Signals to the enemy. Signals to the troops. Anyone who has read Sy Hersh's 1982 book on Kissinger, Nixon, and Vietnam, The Price of Power (out of print, unfortunately), should be extremely wary of military action as a communication medium. We should always ask whether the signal we're sending is the same one being received by the other side.

Force is sometimes necessary to achieve military, political, and strategic objectives. It can also be an effective complement to diplomacy. But in all these contexts, the connection to the desired aims must be specific and explicit, rather than general and vague. Once you adopt the demonstration of resolve as your aim, you have put yourself in a box and will have a hard time getting out.

Which brings me to the critique of a timeline for withdrawal from Iraq. If we announce one, supposedly, our adversaries can just wait us out. Okaaaay... And if we leave it open-ended, they'll do what? Insurgencies are famous for being able to sustain themselves over long periods. I think we've got something backwards here. No matter how you slice it, the longer timeframe plays to the other side's advantage, not ours. Timeline or no timeline, either way the insurgents can wait us out. After all, they live there.

That's right Virginia, they can wait us out either way because gosh darn it they live there!  

Also, I think he correctly notes that over the long haul, time is on the side of the insurgency, not us.  For example, does anybody remember talking about Hezbollah before Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982?  No, well that's because it didn't exist yet, however, it did grow out of the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon.  Iranian support and eighteen years of guerilla warfare against the IDF and its proxy, the South Lebanon Army, transformed Hezbollah into not merely an incredibly formidable military organization but a major new player in Lebanese politics.  

I'd also like to say, be it Joe Lieberman, the White House or General Petraeus, let's stop talking about Iraq almost exclusively in terms of Al-Qaeda.  They weren't there when we invaded but they're there now and frankly they want us to stay-- or was Osama Bin Laden merely spouting off when he said his main aim was to get the United States bogged down fighting a war in a Muslim Arab country in the Middle East?  True, they have a lot of money and spectacular suicide car-bombings make a lot of news but the main insurgent groups are overwhelmingly Iraqi Sunnis .  Furthermore, much like the Shiia of southern Lebanon of the mid 80's, over the last few years these groups have become very savvy guerilla fighters.  The reason we've long associated the insurgency with Al-Qaeda is not merely the White House's political need to conflate the invasion of Iraq with 9/11 but also, if Thomas Ricks is to be believed, because that the US military has long been able to monitor Al-Qaeda electronic communications in Iraq so they tended to attribute much of what happening to a very small number of foreign fighters.  In fact, one of the more interesting passages in Rick's book Fiasco is an intelligence briefing in 2005 where for the first time President Bush is told just that, that the war is not going well and we don't know much about the organization of the Sunni insurgency because its based on blood and tribal relations we can't infilitrate and don't understand.  Nevertheless, the intelligence officer describes how millions of dollars from exiles in Syria are being hand delivered to groups in places like Ramadi on a monthly basis. 

In the long run it doesn't matter if we say we'll leave next month, next year or a decade from now; the insurgents live there, they have their own agendas, we don't know a hell of a lot about them and at this point there seems no hope of the Iraqi government and parliament reaching any sort of political solution that will bring them back into a national debate not dominated by guns and bombings. 

Update (4/27/07):  I think I meant to say "can't recommend any more highly" but neglected to put in the "any more highly."  Oh well...

Somehow I knew this was coming, but one of the reasons US officials are saying that there has been a dramatic drop in sectarian violence in Baghdad is that they aren't counting all the people killed in car bombings.  Crazy I know, but then again if you check you'll find that they did the same thing during the last big "surge" operation in Baghdad during the Summer of 2006.  In short, we're still only counting the corpses dumped in the street and obviously killed execution style while hundreds more have been killed in car bombings.  Ah, progress.

From the latest NBC/Wall Street Journal poll:

On the question of how things are going in Iraq, 2 percent of those polled thought the war was going very well and 29 percent said somewhat well, for a total of 31 percent. Thirty percent said the war was going somewhat badly and 36 percent said it was going very badly, for a total of 66 percent. Among just Republicans, 62 percent thought the war was going very or somewhat well, compared to 36 percent who said somewhat or very badly.

Two Fucking Percent. That's within the margin of error. Maybe nobody thinks the war is going very well. Actually, I really can't see how they could think that.

Things are going to start moving really fast. Really fast. 

Now, here's the key: after all Congress's document and information requests to DOJ, the Justice Department had not revealed the Renzi-Charlton contact. For some reason, they've held that back.

The AP sources that to a House Judiciary Committee official and I've also confirmed with House Judiciary investigators that the DOJ failed to give this information to congressional investigators.

Where there is a cover up, there is something to cover up.

I meant to say something about General Petraeus' comparison of the bombing situation in Iraq with that of Northern Ireland during the 1970's and 80's but Kieran Healy beat me to it.  All I would add is the reason for the vast difference in the number of civilians killed (British troops, RUC and loyalist paramilitiaries were always targets) by bombings in Northern Ireland versus Iraq was that the main purpose of the various IRA bombing campaigns was to wreak havoc upon the physical and economic infrastructure of Northern Ireland, and later England, in the hopes that continued British control would become not only unpopular in England but way too expensive for the British government and the Exchequer to maintain.  The car bomb was the principle weapon of the IRA but terror by mass casualty was not their aim, as seen in the fact that by and large the authorities received phone warnings well before the bombs went off which is something we haven't seen yet in Iraq .  This is not to minimize the impact of the violence in Northern Ireland but merely to point out that in some ways it seems we're talking about apples and oranges.

I don't have any major qualms about the latest PBS series on Iraq and the GWOT although I haven't seen all of the episodes so I have to take Gary Kamiya's criticism of it to heart.  I am already on record as saying Richard Perle should not continue to have a platform to spew lies to the American people so giving him his own segment was definitely a bad call on PBS's part.  I did however catch a little of the "Gangs of Iraq" episode and was pretty taken aback at some of the footage they had of American-Iraqi joint operations and the infiltration of the Iraqi military, security forces and police by sectarian (read Shiite) militias.  One segment pretty much did it for me and that was a joint US-Iraqi raid on a Mahdi army weapons cache.  What did I learn?

1. The American troops don't trust the Iraqis troops:  American advisors to the local police routinely confiscate cell phones so that the police can't inform the local militias they're coming.
2. The American's have good reason not to trust the Iraqis:  After the raid reveals a small weapons cache, we get the camera recording a small group of Iraqis and see the translation of their conversation in which an Iraqi army officer boasts that this is nothing, the Americans haven't found "the big stuff"and that he knows where a major Mahdi army weapons cache is because his own imam is hiding it.  Needless to say they watch the Americans crow over the small cache and never say a thing about the other.
3. The American troops really don't give a shit about the Iraqi troops they're working with:  At one point the Iraqi troops find a car bomb.  The American captain in charge orders the Iraqi officer to send one of his men over to cut the wires on the bomb.  Meanwhile the Americans move back and when the cameraman follows the Iraqi soldier he's told to move back because he doesn't want to be there if it explodes.  Its clear the Iraqi infantry man is clueless and naturally balks at doing anything at which point the American captain finally calls in American explosive ordinance disposal troops to blow it up.  Why the EOD guys weren't called in the first place is never answered but you got the sense that the Americans almost expected the Iraqi soldier to be blown up and didn't really care.

Since I have a long daily commute and do most of the family grocery shopping I've been amazed at the jump in both food and gas prices.  $0.70 a gallon increase in gas over the last month and a $0.30 a gallon increase in milk over the last six weeks have honestly been quite alarming, nevertheless, everytime I catch the news I'm reminded that while both food and gas prices are spiking, the core inflation rate hasn't budged so I have nothing to worry about?  This is what Barry Ritholtz has called "inflation ex-inflation", meaning except for inflation, there's no inflation. 

Since the mid-1970's, the Fed has been preoccupied with core inflation, the consumer price index stripped of items prone to volatile price increase, like oil and food, the idea being that temporary price shocks are not necessarily representative of inflationary pressures in the economy as a whole.  This I can understand, but its hard to fathom how you totally discount the effects of what are becoming large regular increases in the cost of food, transportation, energy and medicine at a time when most people's salaries and wages aren't even keeping up with core inflation?  Also, its clear that so-called volatile prices in most of the aforementioned areas aren't just spiking and returning to lower levels, but are remaining higher in most cases.  For instance, five years ago the most I spent on a gallon of gas was maybe $1.30, but even with seasonal adjustments I don't think I would have expected that same gallon of gas would cost at least a dollar more a gallon and almost never go below $2.00 a gallon which is where we've been at least the last couple years.   Sure, by concentrating on core inflation it means the Fed doesn't feel the need to raise interest rates every time gas hits $3.50 a gallon, but the cognitive dissonance is real and I think its easy to see why most polls show Americans don't believe the economy is doing well or the country is going in the right direction.  That doesn't mean core inflation isn't a useful tool to financial analysts and policymakers, it just means its increasingly irrelevant to everyone else.

General Sheehan does us a service today by explaining why he refused to become the nations "war czar" and probably explains why we are in such trouble in Iraq more succinctly than most commentators:

The day-to-day work of the White House implementation manager overseeing Iraq and Afghanistan would require a great deal of emotional and intellectual energy resolving critical resource issues in a bureaucracy that, to date, has not functioned well. Activities such as the current surge operations should fit into an overall strategic framework. There has to be linkage between short-term operations and strategic objectives that represent long-term U.S. and regional interests, such as assured access to energy resources and support for stable, Western-oriented countries. These interests will require a serious dialogue and partnership with countries that live in an increasingly dangerous neighborhood. We cannot "shorthand" this issue with concepts such as the "democratization of the region" or the constant refrain by a small but powerful group that we are going to "win," even as "victory" is not defined or is frequently redefined.

"Strategy" is a word often ill-used when talking about what has happened in Iraq.  As General Sheehan observes, strategy is not merely how many troops you throw into the fight and when and where, but the long term plan that provides the link between your overarching political, diplomatic and military goals and what you're doing with the troops on the ground.  Where there is none, none will be found. 

This makes sense.  Newt Gingrich came up with the idea for a "war czar."  Anybody else remember some other brilliant ideas Newt's come up with that the White House and Pentagon have acted on? 

Here's one:  When Donald Rumsfeld was looking for a new idea for how to invade Iraq, Newt hooked him up with a guy who advocated driving straight to Baghdad and then holding the city with something like 5000 men?  Okay, we didn't do that but you can't tell me it didn't have some influence on Rumsfeld's constant meddling in war planning and his overarching insistence on a ridiculously small invasion force.   

Companies pulling their advertisements from the Imus show due to its host's latest racist remarks is the corporate equivalent of Claude Raines declaring he's shocked, shocked to find gambling going on at Rick's place.  Frankly, I'm mystified as to why this particular utterance as opposed to tens of thousands of others over the years suddenly makes Imus radioactive, surely his producer McGuirk says more inflammatory things on a hourly basis, but so be it. 

Hey, why do I get the feeling that we're going to suddenly see stories on the 24 hour cable news channels about whether "shock jocks" are being treated unfairly due to society's long running collapse into silly political correctness?  Or is that so 5 years ago, or something?

I just wanted to say that I'm tired of hearing stories like this.  Another young man, funny, smart and well-liked by everyone in his community, dead.  For what?  Nobody really knows.

Okay, I don't have any idea how many subpoena's Henry Waxman has issued trying to get information from the Bush Administration, but its a bit beyond the pale for the (hard) Right Hon. Dan Burton (R-IN) to bitch about how Democrats, Waxman specifically, are abusing their subpoena power.  

If memory serves, Indianapolis' favorite cranky cousin made a name for himself as the head of the Government Oversight and Reform committee during the Clinton years where he not only showed himself a thorough investigator by taking 140+ hours of testimony on whether the White House Christmas list had been used for political purposes, but also personally reenacted the "suicide" of Vince Foster using a watermelon and a .38.  Not to be outdone, he also proceeded to issue nearly 1100 subpoenas of the Clinton White House which is probably a record in its own right since they all happened in Clinton's second four year term.  Remember a month ago when there was an uproar about claims of executive privilege and how presidential aides never testify before Congress, yet there'd been something like 61 in the last 60 years?  Well, at least 25 to 30 of those aides worked for Bill Clinton and me thinks most of them appeared at one time or other before Dan Burton's committee.  Anyway, nothing to see here folks!

I think Ruth Marcus misses something in this piece which is Fred Fielding's reputation as a dealmaker long rested on representing people who not only recognized their own fallibility but also understood the concept of compromise and actually pursued it when it was necessary to move things forward.  He currently represents that kid you remember from the playground who hogged the basketball and wouldn't let you play anything else but his game... you know, the jerk who constantly wanted to play best 2 out of 3, etc. everytime he lost at HORSE until you just said screw it?

A couple weekends ago I was struck by something my brother-in-law said.  I was telling him about Rajiv Chandrasekaren's Imperial Life in the Emerald City, and he remarked that there was once a time that there was a sense that we as a country could accomplish really big things but now it seems we can't do anything, even the little things, right. 

I thought of this when I read this little tidbit in the Washington Post, "3 Generals Spurn the Position of War Czar."  Since the current administration doesn't exactly know what it's doing in Iraq and is having an increasingly hard time bringing Afghanistan to heel, they've decided to try the next best thing:  appointing a "high-powered czar" to oversee the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan"?   

Talk about a the perverse "Great Man of History" notion of how things work, but even the people they're approaching know that it's the equivalent of the Captain of the Titanic looking for a new senior officer as everyone else is scrambling for the boats. 

Update (4/11/07):  Atrios nominates Joe Lieberman for the post.

Death by leak. Only a total traitor or someone throwing the Judge overboard would let these explosive words get out:

At a recent "prep" for a prospective Sunday talk-show interview, Gonzales's performance was so poor that top aides scrapped any live appearances. During the March 23 session in the A.G.'s conference room, Gonzales was grilled by a team of top aides and advisers—including former Republican National Committee chair Ed Gillespie and former White House lawyer Tim Flanigan—about what he knew about the plan to fire seven U.S. attorneys last fall. But Gonzales kept contradicting himself and "getting his timeline confused," said one participant who asked not to be identified talking about a private meeting. His advisers finally got "exasperated" with him, the source added. "He's not ready," Tasia Scolinos, Gonzales's public-affairs chief, told the A.G.'s top aides after the session was over, said the source. Asked for comment, Scolinos told NEWSWEEK: "This was the first session of this kind that we'd done."

Holy crap.  Who leaked this?

Or it could be the old Rove game--lower expectations so low that a middling performance buoys the coverage. The problem is that this isn't a debate. News editors will choose which parts of the Gonzales testimony will get on the evening news. And with Bush's popularity levels near historic lows for any president, the money call in news is that scandals sell papers, especially where hated men are at their core. Don't look for the Judge's soon-to-be selfless falling on his sword to abate the pressure.

From My Letters to America

Small Pieces Fly Easier to Heaven