Back in April, John McCain and his allies taunted Barack Obama as the choice of Hamas in the wake of remarks by a spokesman for that organization. Now with the news that Al Qaeda web sites are seemingly backing McCain for President, the Republican might want to reconsider that line of attack. And to be sure, John McCain should steer clear of touting "Osama the Terrorist" at his rallies.

As the Washington Post detailed Wednesday, Al Qaeda cadres see a McCain as the best bet to perpetuate the policies of President Bush they see bankrupting the United States and the West:

"Al-Qaeda will have to support McCain in the coming election," said a commentary posted Monday on the extremist Web site al-Hesbah, which is closely linked to the terrorist group. It said the Arizona Republican would continue the "failing march of his predecessor," President Bush...

...It further suggested that a terrorist strike might swing the election to McCain and guarantee an expansion of U.S. military commitments in the Islamic world.

"It will push the Americans deliberately to vote for McCain so that he takes revenge for them against al-Qaeda," said the posting, attributed to Muhammad Haafid, a longtime contributor to the password-protected site. "Al-Qaeda then will succeed in exhausting America."

Of course, the claim that John McCain is supported by Al Qaeda is hyperbole that normally would deserve no place in American politics. (That said, the ironies abound for the man who said "I know how" to get Osama Bin Laden and would follow him to "the gates of hell.") But as recent history shows, slanders have become the centerpiece of the McCain campaign.

In April, as you might recall, John McCain showed no compunction in claiming Barack Obama was supported by Hamas.

Continue reading »

(h/t Think Progress)

He's at it again. Backtracking from his promise in 2007 that he'd call for no more "Friedman Units", Mr. "The World is Flat" suggests that Obama's stated timeline-- one that is advocated by the Iraq government -- for withdrawal from Iraq would be improved by another Friedman Unit to "win" the war.

I think everything that we believe — there was a great piece in The Washington Post today by Bill Emmott, former editor of The Economist who was basically sort of examining all the sort of conventional wisdom about what will happen next, you know that America will become weaker, not stronger and what not. And I think he was on to something. I think everything we believe could be wrong. That is Iraq could turn out — that Osama — sorry, not searching for Osama bin Laden could be not the biggest issue for Obama. I think you could actually find out that Obama can win the Iraq war and he will want to actually continue our presence in Iraq for — until 2011.

When host George Stephanopoulos points out that even Gen. Petraeus admits that there is no "victory" in Iraq, Friedman back pedals slightly, but still stubbornly holds on to the notion that there is something achievable by our continuing presence in Iraq.

    I've some bad news for progressives - Iran isn't going to stop enriching uranium to reactor fuel standards. Both Iran's UN Envoy, Ali Asghar Soltanieh and Foreign Minister Mottaki have now said earlier reports that Iran would consider a halt to domestic enrichment if a "legally-binding instrument for assurance of supply" was available were based upon a misunderstanding. Talking to Iran's FARS news agency, Soltanieh said he had only talked about how, in the past, other nations broke their promises to supply Iran with enriched uranium. He said he rejects "whatever is reflected otherwise."

That's a blow to progressives who had hoped that exactly such an incentive could be used in diplomatic negotiations by an Obama administration, but isn't at all surprising. As Soltanieh pointed out, America and France both reneged on promises to supply Iran with nuclear fuel in the past. Russia, too, has temporarily suspended then restarted fuel supplies recently, playing the by now familiar game of great power energy politics and reminding Iran of just how dependent it is on Russian largess at the UNSC.

If George W. Bush were president of Iran, he certainly wouldn't suspend enrichment for any reason. Neither would John McCain or Barack Obama. All have backed the concept of domestic energy independence from the whims of other nations, from vagaries of resource availability and from intentional use of energy resources as leverage over America's actions. Why should Iran be any different?

Continue reading »

    Isn't it amazing how quickly Iraq has slipped down the list of defining issues for the presidential election, after every pundit in the country originally opining that it would be the defining argument to be fought? Of course, since those pronouncements we've had Georgia and the progressively chillier disagreement with Russia, we've had Afghanistan and especially Pakistan go to hell in a handbasket and we've had the economy do an impression of Chernobyl. Oh, and the Witchfinder from Alaska.

But there are still stormclouds on the Iraqi horizon, no matter that the Right wants to declare a whole new Mission Accomplished banner day. The Sunni Awakening is getting restless, the Shiite majority still have nasty internal feuds to resolve and the Kurds...well, Bush's bestest Iraqi allies throughout the occupation still have a damn good chance of being the spark that sets off a regional powderkeg. The Turks have already come very close to getting embroilled in an Iraqi mess when they sent a large force across the border last winter against Kurdish PKK separatist terrorists and are already set to do it again. The danger was always that the Kurds' military, the peshmerga, would turn out to resist the incursion and drag the Iraqi central government in too leaving the US torn between ripping up either the NATO alliance or years of Iraqi occupation.

So it was interesting recently to see an interview with Ahmet Davutoglu, the chief foreign policy aide to Turkey's prime minister, on the Council For Foreign Relations' website a few days ago. He warned that recent optimism on Iraq in the United States overlooks significant, dangerous problems which remain unresolved and set out a viewpoint that says Iraq should be seen as a Yugoslavia on the verge of breakdown.

Continue reading »

Last night, John McCain and Barack Obama put Iran firmly back in the "Axis of Evil" as far as future US policy is concerned - although at least Obama would talk to the Iranians before bombing them.

Download | play Download | play

I find myself at odds with most opinion about last night's Presidential foreign policy debate. I didn't think Barack Obama showed himself well, but maybe that's because I'm used to seeing Republicans play freely with the facts while I expect more from Obama. Yet both seems to equally prefer a constructed narrative on Iran over the opinions of experts.

McCain's contention that "the Iranians continue on the path to the acquisition of a nuclear weapon as we speak tonight" Obama agreed wholeheartedly with, saying that "have gone from zero centrifuges to 4,000 centrifuges to develop a nuclear weapon". Both thereby ignored a recent International Atomic Energy Agency report that said they've found no smoking gun for a current Iranian weapons program, that any program that did exist was cancelled years ago and in any case was only in its earliest stages, and that no nuclear material can be diverted to weapons production without the Agency knowing about it. They also ignored the most recent National Intelligence Estimate on Iran, which said exactly the same things.

Then there was McCain's claim that "the Iranians are putting the most lethal IEDs into Iraq". Obama should have challenged that. The last time the US military tried to trot out "proof" for this claim, it was so laughably inadequate that even Bob Gates and then Chair of the Joint Chiefs General Pace refused to embrace it. Since then, repeated promises to provide new proof have failed to materialize.

Continue reading »

    Think Progress reports that the Bush administration have been playing politics with Iraq withdrawal plans, pressuring Maliki to delay an agreed withdrawal date by a year because the White House was concerned that Maliki’s endorsement of a 2010 time line would damage Sen. John McCain’s (R-AZ) presidential campaign. The revelation came in an al-Iraqiya interview with Maliki last week:

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 [the Bush administration] asked for a change [in date] due to political circumstances related to the domestic situation [in the US] 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. Agreement has been reached on this issue. They are willing to respond positively because they, too, are facing a critical situation.

UPDATE:  Rachel Maddow covered the topic on her Monday show:   Download | play    Download | play (h/t Heather)

Matt Duss asks : "What did McCain know about this, and when did he know it?"

Maybe we could ask Iran/Contra liar and current Deputy National Security Adviser for Global Democracy Strategy, Elliot Abrams. Apparently, Abrams is regularly briefing the McCain campaign — McCain's favorite lobbyist for Georgia, Randy Scheunemann, appears to be the main contact — and has told friends and colleagues that he is confident that he will get a top post in a McCain administration.

Caroline Glick, deputy editor at Murdoch's Jerusalem Post and fellow of the neoconservative Center For Security Policy, is back on the Iran warpath in an article she entitles "It is time to act". She writes that "Iran is just a heartbeat away from the A-bomb", and to justify this claim she begins with three untruths.

Firstly:

Last Friday the Daily Telegraph reported Teheran has surreptitiously removed a sufficient amount of uranium from its nuclear production facility in Isfahan to produce six nuclear bombs. Given Iran's already acknowledged uranium enrichment capabilities, the Telegraph's report indicates that the Islamic Republic is now in the late stages of assembling nuclear bombs.

But the IAEA has already told the Telegraph that it's report, written by another neoconservative, Con Coughlin, is in error.

“The article, entitled ‘Iran renews nuclear weapons development’ published in [Friday’s] Daily Telegraph by Con Coughlin and Tim Butcher is fictitious,” IAEA Spokeswoman Melissa Fleming said in a statement.

“IAEA inspectors have no indication that any nuclear material is missing from the plant,” reads the statement.

Indeed, the IAEA guareantees that no uranium has been diverted to non-civilian programs or even can be without the Agency's knowledge.

Then, she says that "US spy satellites recently discovered what the US believes are covert nuclear facilities in Iran." Again - no. What was revealed (back in February) was an until-now unknown missile testing facility, revealed by commercial satellites rather than US ones. Whatever else it is it isn't a "nuclear facility". If it or any other more recent "finds" were, then the IAEA would be making a stink about it in their recent report, and they don't. Iran had enough problems putting together the Nanantz cascades and getting them to run. The notion that they might have been able to develop some other secret facility just as big is James Bond fantasy stuff - those "reporting" such fantasies, often sourced from the utterly-nutterly MeK, might as well photo-shop a white persian cat onto file pictures of Ahmadinejhad and claim it proves something.

Then, Glick writes:

As to the IAEA, this week it presented its latest report on Teheran's nuclear program to its board members in Vienna. The IAEA's report claimed that Iran has taken steps to enable its Shihab-3 ballistic missiles to carry nuclear warheads.

Continue reading »

Can you say "fatwa?" The Grand Ayatollah of Iraqi Shiites, Sayyid Ali Husaini al-Sistani, has had his website hacked by system crackers identifying themselves as “Group XP” and replaced by a video clip of US comedian Bill Maher making fun of said website.

Rock Richard of "Rock The Boat" and VetVoice brought this one to my attention, and writes:

It will be interesting to see the reaction to this in the Muslim world. Sistani is the most powerful Shia Cleric in Iraq, which pretty much means he is the most powerful, influential and respected person in that country. Once this story unravels and we see who is responsible (Western hackers? a rival Islamic group?) I would expect to see anything between strong rhetoric (best case scenario) and violent retaliation (worst case scenario).

The existence of email addresses ending with yahoo.com suggest Western hackers, though - and over at the Colorado Independent, Wendy Norris suggests it may be a badly thought out PR stunt.

The defaced site could well be a guerrilla marketing stunt to promote Maher’s new mockumentary “Religulous,” a scathing dissertation on faith that opens in theaters Oct. 3.

My guess is that "Group XP" might find themselves with more than just the FBI to be concerned with. Sistani is crucial to keeping the lid on in Iraq and I wouldn't be at all surprised if the new commander there, General Odierno, wasn't on the phone to the Pentagon shaking some of their own anti-hacker resources loose to help track the pranksters down.

Here's the clip that replaced Sistani's website:

    The International Atomic Energy Agency has just produced it's latest report on Iran's nuclear program. (Full report here in PDF, leaked by US officials as usual.) Mainstream media outlets are going with a US-pushed narrative that centers around increases in the number of centrifuges Iran is operating and around IAEA criticism of Iran for not being forthcoming enough about alleged previous work which may have had military applications. The report is being seen as giving added impetus to calls for more UN sanctions.

A confidential IAEA report said Iran had raised the number of centrifuges enriching uranium by 500 to 3,820 since May and was testing an advanced model able to refine nuclear fuel 2-3 times faster, in continuing defiance of U.N. resolutions.

But a senior U.N. official familiar with IAEA findings said Iran seemed at least two years away from enriching enough uranium for an atomic weapon, if it eventually chose to do so.

"On the issue of possible military dimensions to Iran's nuclear program, we have arrived at a gridlock. Without Iran's assistance and cooperation, we cannot move forward," said a second senior U.N. official.

... The United States called on Iran to shelve enrichment or face the possibility of more U.N. sanctions, adding to relatively modest punitive measures Tehran has shrugged off.

Britain went further, accusing Iran of showing "contempt for the IAEA by continuing to refuse to respond" to IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei's serious concerns about research with possible military nuclear dimensions.

"We will therefore push hard for further U.N. sanctions in the coming weeks," a British Foreign Office statement said.

Sanctions don't really worry Iran much, though. They have too much that the world needs in the way of oil and gas and have become an important diplomatic lever in containing American unipolar ambitions for Russia and China, both of whom have UN vetos. Neither will vote easily for really effective sanctions.

The best thing about the new IAEA report, though, is that it provides no new cause for war.

Continue reading »

Earlier, John Amato noted that General David Petraeus is using phrases like "Long struggle", "not irreversible", "still hard", "many clouds on the horizon"…and of course the ever fresh "fragile" progress.

John asks "Is that what success is, fragile?"

Well, yes.

- In the North, Kurdish peshmerga are facing off against the Iraqi Army and the Kurds are stealthily landgrabbing around the disputed city of Kirkuk. Amid accusations of kurdish oppression and ethnic clearing of Arabs in the region, it is "now on the verge of exploding." Any such explosion would lead to American forces choosing between three allies - the Kurds, Iraqi central government and NATO member Turkey, who would not sit idly by while a Kurdish independent state was formed.

- Also in the North, in the Sunni city of Mosul, violence is rising again. The number of attacks had fallen from 130 a week to 30 a week in July. But today they are back up to between 60 and 70 a week. The reason is simple - Maliki's Shiite majority are cracking down on other Sunni dissenters under the guise of hunting Al Qaeda.

- Across Sunni regions, there's a growing storm of discontent among members of the Awakening. The US says there are 100,000 Sons of iraq but the Iraqi government only admits to 50,000 - and they only plan to find new jobs for 20% of those. The rest are to be cut off and told that if they continue to carry weapons they are criminals. You can guess how that's going to go. If even 20% of the Sons of Iraq return to violence, they'll comprise an insurgency equal in size to the highest US estimates of Al Qaeda in Iraq at its zenith.

- In the Shiite South, the Sadrist movement still isn't dead or defeated. But it has been pushed into the arms of Iran, from whom it had previously mainteained a distance despite rightwing claims otherwise. Sadr is streamlining his movement into a massive political arm and a smaller military one, and his people are still observing his self-imposed ceasefire. But that could yet change - there's a move among the Green Zone elite to run provincial elections under the old laws since they can't get a new law passed. This would disenfranchise Sadrists along with all the other "powers that aren't" (like the Awakening movement) and, with no prospect for getting their voices heard peacefully, the pressure to return to violence to get some say will be overwhelming.

So, all this explains why Petraeus is telling the BBC that he will "never declare victory" in Iraq. Because he knows full well that there's every reason to believe that the entire country could blow up again and the "success' of the Surge even in reducing violence will be seen to be entirely temporary.

But all this hasn't stopped John McCain, Joe Lieberman and others pushing a "sense of the Senate" amendment on the fiscal year 2009 Defense Authorization bill. Lieberman introduced the amendment, which he described as "bipartisan" even though it has no Democratic sponsors. In part it reads:

[It is the sense of the Senate to] recognize the success of the troop surge in Iraq and its strategic significance in advancing the vital national interests of the United States in Iraq, the Middle East, and the world, in particular as a strategic victory in a central front of the war on terrorism

Which is simply a lie, according to the military's own assessments, and is purely designed to allow the McCain campaign to trot out the names of all those who vote for this amendment (and who vote against it)for political purposes. If you're a Democat and vote "Yay", you disagree with Obama; if you vote "Nay", you're a defeatist who won't acknowledge "the troops" success in McCain's precious Surge. Either way, McCain has a new attack.That the military itself doesn't really acknowledge that "success" - for good reasons - has nothing to do with McCain's cynical move.

Crossposted from Newshoggers

Check out this interview with Gen. Petraeus on the BBC.

In a BBC interview, Gen Petraeus said that recent security gains were "not irreversible" and that the US still faced a "long struggle".

Leaving his post, he said there were "many storm clouds on the horizon which could develop into real problems". Overall he summed up the situation as "still hard but hopeful", saying that progress in Iraq was "a bit more durable" but that the situation there remained fragile.

He said he did not know that he would ever use the word "victory": "This is not the sort of struggle where you take a hill, plant the flag and go home to a victory parade... it's not war with a simple slogan."

Long struggle, not irreversible, still hard, many clouds on the horizon... These aren't words of praise about Iraq being uttered by the General. Once again we hear the "fragile" word. Is that what success is, fragile? 

John McCain has made much of how he was correct about the Surge in Iraq when his opponent was saying it wouldn't work. Barack Obama has been moving gradually further towards McCain's position, propelled there by a narrative that questions his original judgement in the face of drastic cuts in Iraqi violence which have popularly been ascribed to the Surge. He's now at the point of saying it "succeeded beyond our wildest dreams.”

But how close to reality are McCain and Obama's positions? Well, for a start it's unclear that it's actually the Surge that has been instrumental in lowering Iraqi violence (to parity with some of the world's bloodiest conflicts instead of being in a class of its own). The Sunni Awakening and a ceasefire by the Shiite Sadrist movement must also take a large part of the credit and, despite McCain's attempt at rewriting history, both pre-dated the Surge. Indeed, even General Petraeus admits the possibility that, due to these entirely local developments, violence in Iraq might have fallen just as much even without the Surge.

Paying the Awakening movement some $30 million a month to not attack US troops wasn't originally a part of the Surge plan that McCain backed and it's unlikely he would have supported such a move in any case. John McCain has made much of Barack Obama's supposed wish for "appeasement" of terrorists in negotiating with Iran or Hamas - how much worse is it then to bring terrorists onto the payroll? Many of the Awakening's so-called Sons of Iraq were previously members of the insurgency.

Continue reading »

  With all the hubbub about baby mamas in the media snowballing, you'd almost think we didn't have troops risking their lives in Iraq and Afghanistan.  In fact, the US has ceded one more region to the Iraqi government on Monday:

The US military handed over Anbar province to Iraqi security forces yesterday, less than two years after it almost lost it to a Sunni Arab insurgency.

"We are in the last ten yards of this terrible fight. The goal is very near," Major-General John Kelly, commander of American forces in Anbar, told US, Iraqi and tribal officials at a ceremony in the provincial capital, Ramad, to mark the event.

"Your lives and the lives of your children depend on victory."

Maj-Gen Kelly and Anbar's governor, Mamun Sami Rasheed, embraced after signing a document making Anbar the 11th of Iraq's 18 provinces, and the first Sunni Arab one, to be returned to Iraqi control since the US-led invasion.

Police marched down a main street carrying Iraqi flags, followed by a parade of vehicles trimmed with flowers.

The US president, George Bush, praised the people of Anbar, scene of more than a quarter of US combat deaths in Iraq since 2003, for turning against al-Qaeda's Sunni Islam militants. "Today, Anbar is no longer lost to al-Qaeda - it is al-Qaeda that lost Anbar," he said.

UPDATE: Cernig has more on his blog: 

Although this is being claimed as unalloyed good news by US pro-occupation voices, the general in command of US forces in Western Iraq is rather more circumspect.  Read on...

   General James T. Conway, the Marine in charge of security in Iraq's Anbar province the Commandant of the Marine Corps [that'll teach me to pay attention to names when writing posts at 1am. I knew this], has said that US forces there could hand over control to the Iraqi government as soon as Monday, and is lauding the reduction in violence in the province. The general says that remaining US troops in the province will concentrate on bringing Sunnis and Shiites together. But the handover was intended to happen last month, though a sharp uptick in violence there delayed the event, along with a convenient sandstorm. Veteran and blogger Brandon Freidman documented that increase back in May.

 And wrote that:

While I do not profess to know exactly what change in the political climate precipitated this specific spike in violence, I do know that General Petraeus was correct when he said that the placidity in Anbar Province was reversible.  What most have failed to realize thus far is that, while al Qaeda is deeply unpopular in Anbar, U.S. forces are equally despised.  So it seems that those who've repeatedly used Anbar's relative peacefulness as a sign of impending U.S. success in Iraq know little about counterinsurgency and less about Iraq.

Success in Iraq is something that will be brought about by Iraqis--not the American military.  As long as we're there, the best we can hope for is extreme violence broken by periodic lulls--such as what we've witnessed in Anbar over the past seven months.  As long we remain in Iraq, the violence will remain cyclical.  It will rise and fall, contingent on the latest deal we've cut with tribal leaders or the latest deal that someone has brokered within the Iraqi government.  But our military will never completely solve this inherently Iraqi problem.  We're watching that unfortunate fact unfold before us in Anbar this month.

Continue reading »

Every time I turn on the TV and watch CNN and FOX (my hotel doesn't get MSNBC) every Republican operative controls the dialog and direction of the panel discussion and it's disgusting. Just one example---Hillary Clinton gave a brilliant speech last night, but every Amy Holmes-type talking head throws as much cold water on the speech as he or she can. The result is that the Dem talkers spend the rest of the time disputing the outrageous claims made and thus the GOP controls the entire framing and the entire segment. It's shameful that the networks are allowing this to happen. I saw Jeffrey Toobin tell Amy that she was out of her mind with some of her comments and the discussion continues to that end. Soledad O'Brien comes back and says "well, that was a lively discussion." Oh, no it was not. It's a calculated ratf&@k. This is going on all day and all night.

Why is the Democratic Convention being ruined by these creeps? And why do all the networks allow it to happen? Why do we need them on in force to counter what is supposed to be our event?

I'm in Denver and it's a completely different atmosphere. Party unison abounds, but you'd never know it from watching TV. Karl Rove acts like the biggest troll known to man---making sure to point out every little detail he dislikes. Well, his mission is to get McCain in the White House. But he's the expert that Chris Wallace goes to for his "unbiased" take.

Will the Democratic talkers be allowed to do the same to the Republican Convention? I think not. It will be viewed as being an incredible event.