Via Matt Y., a video on the “hidden” cost of our wars.
I was curious, in the first presidential debate, to hear John McCain say he’d freeze all federal spending - except military. We never think to take a hard look at military spending, do we? And here I thought Obama missed a golden chance. The […]

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Via Matt Yglesias, we see John McCain having a few memory problems as he asserts that “in the 21st century, nations don’t invade other nations”:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3h_ZbW2REcI

Notes Matt:
We all recall, of course, John McCain’s outrage when the United States violated this rule back in 2003.
But that’s different. Because it’s us.

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Ron Suskind’s new book has ignited a whole bunch of controversy, particularly on its claim that a key letter - supposedly from the head of Iraqi intelligence to Saddam Hussein linking the dictator to the 9/11 terrorists - was forged. Suskind’s sources claimed the CIA was behind the forgery, which has unleashed a flurry of […]

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Been following the new war between Russia and Georgia over South Ossetia, and it’s alarming for a lot of reasons - in a lot of ways, this really does seem the opening salvo in what might be a wider war between Russia and the west, or Russia and western interests.
But an aspect of the reporting […]

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Address it to Saddam.

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I’m sorry, but McCain is simply losing it here.
Republican John McCain is pushing back against Democratic criticism that he misstated the timing of the buildup of troops ordered by President Bush in early 2007. He says parts of the new strategy began months earlier.
The Arizona senator has told reporters during a stop at a super […]

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So this, then, is the neoconservative position on why we ought to just ignore Maliki and stay in Iraq as long as we like, conveniently (and predictably) supplied by Max Boot:
But Maliki’s public utterances do not provide a reliable guide as to when it will be safe to pull out U.S. troops. Better to listen […]

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You know, as well as I do, that John McCain wanted to goad Barack Obama into visiting Iraq in hopes of a “Dukakis moment.”
This ain’t it:

And indeed, as the New York Times notes, Obama’s trip couldn’t have been more disastrous for McCain:
The central tenet of Mr. Obama’s foreign policy is suddenly aligned with what the […]

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Via Hilzoy over at Sullivan’s place, Spencer Ackerman notes how Maliki has McCain boxed into a corner:
 ”There’s nowhere left for McCain to go here. Either he endorses a timetable for withdrawal, which he has consistently said would be a disaster, and cedes his only big issue to Obama — and more importantly, concedes that Obama’s […]

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Continuing the weekend’s theme, we now see that Iraqi officials want the Americans out of their country by 2010.
I’m here to tell you that’s not happening, even if Obama is elected president.
Two thoughts here. The first is that John McCain’s campaign absolutely hits the wall with these developments. Because it places him in the position […]

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Iraqi prime minister Maliki: Obama is right when he talks about withdrawing troops in 16 months.
News prompts memorable response from one GOP consultant who occasionally advises McCain. And that memorable response is correct.
It has not been a good week for John McCain. With Bush talking about “time horizons” - hmmm, “time horizons” sounds suspiciously like “time frame,” […]

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…over at the Washington Post, where in an editorial we learn that Barack Obama is wrong in saying the war in Iraq takes our eye off the terrorist ball because:
That’s an irrational and ahistorical way to view a country at the strategic center of the Middle East, with some of the world’s largest oil reserves. […]

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Yeah. You know how we “found” that uranium in Iraq, thus Validating Everything Teh Leader Ever Said!!!!
Not so much:
Nothing has emerged to change the basic conclusion of U.S. weapons inspector David Kay, who led a post-invasion effort to find WMD in Iraq. As Kay famously said, “It turns out that we were all wrong.”
No secret […]

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Speech today, and it’s a good one.

Sullivan has the text. Obama talks of opportunities missed as a result of the relentless focus on Iraq; and what he would do to bring the war to a close. Anyone who says “surrender” is simply lying:
George Bush and John McCain don’t have a strategy for success in Iraq - […]

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Sullivan, continuing to argue with Max Boot, makes a very good point:
But let me remind Boot that there was no mention before the war that we were there to secure oil supplies as he now argues.
In fact, that very idea was regarded as a left-wing smear. Nor were we told that we would invade and […]

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Juan Cole notes how the sudden Iraqi interest in timetables for a U.S. withdrawal doesn’t bode too well for Mr. McCain:
McCain always had a difficult case to make to the American people about why they needed to expend blood and treasure to stay in Iraq. McCain maintains that it is for their own safety, but […]

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Come now. Was there ever any doubt?
The United States on Tuesday rejected a demand from Iraq for a specific date for pullout of US-led foreign troops from the country, saying any withdrawal will be based on conditions on the ground. “The US government and the government of Iraq are in agreement that we, the US […]

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Iraq wants a U.S. timetable for withdrawal.
Gee, do you think that’s going to happen?
Kidding aside, this will test the right-wing mythology of Iraq as a sovereign nation. If Iraq is and is to be sovereign, and they want a timetable for withdrawal - then they have to get one, don’t they? And if we refuse […]

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Naomi Klein is author of one of the most fascinating pieces I’ve ever read, “Baghdad Year Zero,” in which she talked about her theory of “shock doctrine” and the rise of “disaster capitalism,” which she later turned into a book.
At its core, as she describes in a new piece in The Nation, disaster capitalism is “today’s […]

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Andrew Bacevich on Obama’s big chance:
The burden of identifying and confronting the Bush legacy necessarily falls on Obama. Although for tactical reasons McCain will distance himself from the president’s record, he largely subscribes to the principles informing Bush’s post-9/11 policies. McCain’s determination to stay the course in Iraq expresses his commitment not simply to the […]

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