YOU CANNOT GET THIS WRONG

Is an American candidate for Presidency able to say: Our troops in Iraq, even during the surge, did not contribute to the nations security, abroad nor on our own soil?
Such a statement is unthinkable, but if given it to the public, it would be true.
All the progress to a better Iraq is the outcome of military and political progress of Iraqi, still not perfect, but on the way onward a unity-state with balanced power and growing confidence in a peaceful future for all, by the time the common enemy of terrorists and foreign occupiers are gone and no foreign dominant influence becomes instead.
That’s reasonable, because the Arab Shiite majority does not want the Sunni hegemony by support of Saudi Arabia and does not want the country ruled by Persian Shiites. Sunni Arabs don’t want to be cut off from the oil wealth in Kurdish an Shiite regions. The Kurds need the strength of a unity-state for their own security. So, at last Iraqi have discovered they need each other and together they can get rid of all the foreigners, Al Qaeda, the USA, the UK and all others. By then they demanded a planned withdrawal to be finished in 2010.
As true as this is, it can not be said by a presidential candidate.
So you read this:
Katie Couric: Senator McCain, Senator Obama says, while the increased number of US troops contributed to increased security in Iraq, he also credits the Sunni awakening and the Shiite government going after militias. And says that there might have been improved security even without the surge. What's your response to that?
McCain: I don't know how you respond to something that is as-- such a false depiction of what actually happened. Colonel MacFarland was contacted by one of the major Sunni sheiks. Because of the surge we were able to go out and protect that sheik and others. And it began the Anbar awakening. I mean, that's just a matter of history.
But we know that de Sunni Awakening Forces began to form with the help of Saudi Arabia to fight the foreign Al Qaeda combatants a year before the surge. In fact, as Spencer Ackerman and Ilan Goldenberg have reported, the record firmly establishes the opposite: instead of being caused by the surge, the key signs of the Anbar Awakening occurred not only before that strategy was implemented, but before it was ever conceived.
And here is the NY Times talking about the Anbar Awakening back in March 2007.
The formation of the group in September shocked many Sunni Arabs. It was the most public stand anyone in Anbar had taken against Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, which was founded by the Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

Residents in parts of Anbar say the split in the Sunni insurgency is widening, with moderate tribal leaders and nationalist guerrillas pitted against fundamentalist warriors and rival tribes. That has led to a sharp increase in Sunni-on-Sunni violence across Anbar, especially in the past week, deepening the chaos of Iraq's civil war.

And here is Colin Kahl in Foreign Affairs:

The Awakening began in Anbar Province more than a year before the surge and took off in the summer and fall of 2006 in Ramadi and elsewhere, long before extra U.S. forces started flowing into Iraq in February and March of 2007. Throughout the war, enemy-of-my-enemy logic has driven Sunni decision-making. The Sunnis have seen three "occupiers" as threats: the United States, the Shiites (and their presumed Iranian patrons), and the foreigners and extremists in AQI. Crucial to the Awakening was the reordering of these threats.
This is not controversial history. It is history that anyone trying out for Commander in Chief must understand when there are 150,000 American troops stationed in Iraq. It is an absolutely essential element to the story of the past two years. YOU CANNOT GET THIS WRONG.

Obama to press Europe on security in Berlin

BERLIN (Reuters) - U.S. presidential candidate Barack Obama is expected to call on Europe to do more in hotspots like Afghanistan when he speaks in Berlin on Thursday in his only formal address of a week-long foreign tour.
Obama held talks with Chancellor Angela Merkel on issues ranging from the global economy to Iran, Iraq and Middle East peace on a trip he hopes will burnish his foreign policy credentials and boost his election chances against Republican challenger John McCain.
His evening speech at the "Victory Column" in Berlin's Tiergarten park is already being compared in the German media to former President John F. Kennedy's 1963 "Ich bin ein Berliner" address.
Thousands of Germans and some tourists, wearing Obama buttons, "Yes We Can" t-shirts and carrying campaign balloons, streamed towards the podium where he will speak. Under sunny skies, people drank beer and ate sausages in a summer party atmosphere.
"Obama stands for political change," said Dero Steinbach, 49, from the western city of Gelsenkirchen, who was visiting Berlin with his family.
"For him this is clearly a way to boost his foreign policy profile, but it's also good for Germany. It's quite special that he's chosen to speak here."
In the 45-minute open-air appearance, Obama will ask Europe to shoulder more of the burden to help deal with global security threats, an aide to the Democratic senator told Reuters.
Obama has described the situation in Afghanistan as precarious and both he and McCain have said Europe must step up its efforts there. Merkel has said there are limits to what Germany, which has about 3,500 troops in Afghanistan and expects to raise that later this year, can do.

IRAQ DIFFERENCES
Relations between the United States and Germany reached a post-war low under Merkel's predecessor Gerhard Schroeder, who strongly opposed the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003.
But the conservative Merkel, who grew up behind the Wall in the communist East, has worked hard to repair ties and emerged as one of President George W. Bush's closest allies in Europe.
Robert Gibbs, a senior strategist for Obama, said the candidate and Merkel had discussed a range of international issues in their one-hour chat, in particular the "urgency" of stopping Iran from pursuing nuclear weapons.
Obama applauded Merkel for promoting international efforts to combat climate change and affirmed his own pledge to cut U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by 80 percent by 2050, Gibbs said.
Merkel opposed the Obama campaign's initial plan to hold Thursday's speech at the Brandenburg Gate, the historic landmark that stood on the eastern side of the Berlin Wall for decades and became a potent symbol of the Cold War.
She has said the landmark -- where President Ronald Reagan famously urged Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to "tear down this wall" -- is a place for presidents, not candidates to speak and her advisers tried to convince the Obama campaign to hold the speech at a university or another low-key location.
A Pew Research Center poll showed Germans favor Obama over McCain by a 49-point margin. But some German officials have said Obama, who could become the first black U.S. president, risks disappointing Europeans because their expectations are so high.
Around 700 policemen are helping with security around the "Siegessaeule", a 230-foot (70-meter) high column built to celebrate 19th century Prussian military victories over Denmark, France and Austria.

Missed Deadlines; Sadrists in the Streets; "Security Agreement" Watered Down

First there was going to be a status of forces agreement between the US and Iraq, which would be ratified by the Iraqi parliament and would grant the US long-term bases. Private security guards and US troops would be immune from Iraqi law. US commanders would launch operations at will, would decide who a terrorist was, and would arrest and imprison Iraqis at will.
Then al-Maliki went to Iran for consultations. And Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani forbade a giveaway of Iraqi sovereignty. And the Sadrists began demonstrating every Friday. Then the US launched a unilateral operation in al-Maliki's home town and killed his cousin.
So the private contractors won't have legal immunity. And the agreement will be just for a year, not long-term. And it won't be ratified by the Iraqi parliament, so it is just a vague agreement between two executives. It won't stipulate long-term arrangements, but its interpretive context will be one in which the Iraqi leadership has expressed a desire for US troops to leave in 2010. It isn't clear if US troops will have legal immunity or whether they will have full freedom of action or whether they will be able to arrest and incarcerate Iraqis at will.
And now, it won't be signed by the deadline of July 31.
You have to wonder whether the Iraqis and the Americans in the end won't have to go back to the UN for a troop mandate again. The Iraqis want out from under the UN but don't want to recognize that the American presence detracts from their sovereignty. D'oh.
No provincial election law again on Monday. Maybe Tuesday. Maybe not.
The Iraqi legislative calendar is more like "Waiting for Godot" than it is like ... a legislative calendar.
John McCain thinks that Iraq and Pakistan have a common border.
You have to wonder whether the Iraqis and the Americans in the end won't have to go back to the UN for a troop mandate again. The Iraqis want out from under the UN but don't want to recognize that the American presence detracts from their sovereignty. D'oh.
No provincial election law again on Monday. Maybe Tuesday. Maybe not.
The Iraqi legislative calendar is more like "Waiting for Godot" than it is like ... a legislative calendar.
John McCain thinks that Iraq and Pakistan have a common border.
[Hat tip to Think Progress.]
Hey, everybody, ask McCain if he'll pull out US troops by 2010 if that is what the Iraqi government says it wants.
McCain keeps boasting about being "right" about the "surge" and saying Obama was "wrong."
Look, it is more important that McCain was consistently wrong. He was wrong about the desirability of going to war against Iraq. He was wrong about it being a cakewalk. He was wrong about there being WMD there. He was wrong about everything. And he was wrong about the troop escalation making things better. The casualty figures dropped in al-Anbar, where few extra US troops were ever sent. They dropped in Basra, from which the British withdrew. Something happened. Putting it all on 30,000 extra troops seems a stretch. And what about all the ethnic cleansing and displacing of persons that took place under the nose of the "surge?" McCain has been wrong about everything to do with Iraq. And he is boasting about his wisdom on it!
Guerrillas used a tractor bomb to kill 7 persons and wound 8 others in Diyala Province near Iran, where there is a lively contest for power among Shiites, Sunni Arabs and Kurds.
Reuters reports other recent political violence in Iraq:
MOSUL -- A suicide car bomber killed two private security contractors serving as bodyguards to members of the Kurdish Democratic Party in an attack on their convoy in Mosul ... The blast also wounded eight civilians nearby.
MOSUL -- Gunmen killed two people when they opened fire on their vehicle in southeastern Mosul, police said.
MOSUL -- Gunmen killed two brothers and their cousin in a drive-by shooting in northern Mosul on Sunday, police said ...
MOSUL -- One body was found with gunshot wounds to the head in western Mosul, police said ...
BAGHDAD -- A parked car bomb killed one person and wounded four others on Sunday in Alawi district, central Baghdad, police said.
FALLUJA -- Five people were wounded by two roadside bombs exploding within minutes of each other on different streets in central Falluja, 50 km (30 miles) west of Baghdad, police said.

Cold Warrior

Dean Acheson arriving at the White House to meet with President Truman, April 1951.
Dean Acheson was perhaps the most vilified secretary of state in modern American history. Robert L. Beisner, in “Dean Acheson: A Life in the Cold War,” his sweeping and thoughtful account of Acheson’s tenure, cites a scholar who, with meticulous pedantry, discovered that during the four years — 1949-53 — that Acheson served as secretary of state, Republicans made 1,268 antagonistic statements about him on the Senate floor and only seven favorable ones (one wonders for what).

Dean Acheson with President Nixon, December 1970; he confessed that he was not immune to Nixon’s switch from “abusive hostility to respect.”

History has treated Acheson more kindly. Accolades for him have become bipartisan. Secretaries of state appointed by the party of his erstwhile tormentors have described him as a role model; Condoleezza Rice is the most recent example. Thirty-five years after his death, Acheson has achieved iconic status. This is all the more remarkable in view of his out-of-scale personality, so at odds with the present period, in which eminence seems to be tolerable only in the garb of the commonplace.
The debonair conduct, the bristling mustache, the Bond Street tailoring, the biting wit, the extraordinary analytical skill coupled with a defiant refusal to turn the other cheek bespoke an affirmation of the idiosyncratic over the conventional. Acheson was a man of high principle, whose hero was Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., an iconoclastic Boston Brahmin shaped by the 19th century, and whose best friend was Felix Frankfurter, the brilliant son of Jewish immigrants.
Though Acheson served during the transition when America emerged as a world power and enjoyed a nuclear monopoly, the scale of government was as yet relatively small, and Washington was still a comparatively provincial city. Its political conflicts were not shaped by public relations advisers or tested on focus groups; hence they were somewhat personal. That senior officials must remain blandly obliging while their veracity or honor is being systematically challenged was never part of the Acheson code. This explains the scene, unimaginable today, when Acheson, in the author’s words, at a hearing before the Senate Appropriations Committee, admonished Senator Kenneth Wherry of Nebraska not to shake his dirty finger in his face. When Wherry persisted, Acheson rose and launched a roundhouse swing at the senatorial gadfly, which was stopped at the last moment because Adrian Fisher, the legal adviser of the State Department, wrapped his arms around Acheson and pulled him down into his seat.
When Acheson became secretary of state, America had only just started its journey toward global involvement. Africa was still colonial; Britain was predominant in much of the Middle East; Indian democracy was only two years old; Germany and Japan were still occupied countries. The debate was not over aspirations to hegemony but over whether the nation should engage itself internationally at all, never mind permanently. It was appropriate that Acheson entitled his memoirs “Present at the Creation.”
The position of secretary of state is potentially the most fulfilling in the government short of the presidency. Its scope is global; ultimately it rests on almost philosophical assumptions as to the nature of world order and the relationship of order to progress and national interest. Lacking such a conceptual framework, incoherence looms in the face of the daily task of redefining America’s relationship to the world via the thousands of messages from nearly 200 diplomatic posts and the constant flow of communication from the Executive Department — all this against the backdrop of Congressional liaison and press inquiry.
Acheson served as under secretary of state and then as secretary during the period when a people that had known no direct continuing threat to its security since the early days of the Republic had to be brought to recognize that its permanent participation in the world was indispensable for peace and security. Inevitably this realization was painful and slow in coming, if indeed it has been fully achieved to this day. This is why Acheson was assailed from both political sides, by those insisting on an end to involvement through total victory over the threat and, on the other side, by those who thought there was no threat to begin with, or at least none that required Acheson’s militant response.
In this maelstrom, Acheson dealt with the five principal tasks of any secretary of state: the identification of the challenge; the development of a strategy to deal with it; organizing and motivating the bureaucracy in the State Department and in other agencies; persuading the American public; and conducting American diplomacy toward other countries. These tasks require the closest collaboration between the president and the secretary of state; secretaries of state who seek to base their influence on the prerogatives of the office invariably become marginalized. Presidents cannot be constrained by administrative flowcharts; for a secretary of state to be effective, he or she has to get into the president’s head, so to speak. This is why Acheson made it a point to see Truman almost every day they were in town together and why their friendship was so crucial to the achievements of the Truman years.
No secretary can fulfill all these tasks with equal skill — though Acheson came closer than any other of the modern period. His overriding challenge was to define a conceptual framework on which to base America’s involvement in global affairs. Beisner, a former president of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, describes this process in detail and with special emphasis on Acheson’s growing debate with George Kennan. Acheson turned Kennan’s seminal article, “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” into the operating principle of American foreign policy. He interpreted it to mean that the task of foreign policy was to create situations of strength around the Soviet periphery to deter any temptation for aggression. Negotiation with the Soviet Union was to be deferred until these situations of strength had come into being; any attempt to begin diplomacy prematurely would undermine the primary task.
Acheson’s overriding priority, in the years immediately following World War II, was to restore Western Europe and create an Atlantic community to resist what then appeared as the Soviet colossus. He built the structure that sustained democracy during the cold war, with the Marshall Plan, the creation of NATO and the return of Germany and Japan to the community of nations. But Acheson was less precise about the role of diplomacy in this process once the architectural phase was completed.
Kennan represented the other strand of American thinking. He rejected what he considered the militarization of his own views, inaugurating a debate that has not ended to this day. Acheson implicitly believed that situations of strength would be self-enforcing, and he played down the importance of diplomatic engagement with the adversary. Kennan raised the question of how to gain Soviet acquiescence in the process and urged negotiation, even while the ultimate structure was being built. Acheson treated diplomacy as the more or less automatic consequence of a strategic deployment; Kennan saw it as an autonomous enterprise depending largely on diplomatic skill. The danger of the Acheson approach has been stagnation and gradual public disenchantment with stalemate. The danger of the Kennan approach has been that diplomacy might become a technical exercise in splitting differences and thus shade into appeasement. How to merge the two strands so that military force and diplomacy are mutually supportive and so that national strategy becomes a seamless web is the essence of a continuing national controversy.
Beisner shows how the failure to do so with respect to the Korean War was the cause of the single greatest error of Acheson’s tenure: initially, the placing of Korea publicly outside the American defense perimeter (though this was conventional wisdom at the time) and, later, the inability, after the United States crossed the 38th parallel, to correlate military operations with some achievable diplomatic objectives.
For someone like myself, who knew Acheson, Beisner’s portrait does not always capture the vividness of his personality, which emerges too much as a list of eccentricities. Acheson’s relationship with the Nixon White House, and to President Nixon himself, is too cavalierly dismissed as the result of ego and an old man’s vanity. As a participant in all these meetings, I considered that relationship an example of Acheson’s generosity of spirit. Nixon had made essentially unforgivable attacks on Acheson during his 1952 campaign for vice president. But when he reached out to Acheson, it was received with the consideration Acheson felt he owed to the office, as a form of duty to the country. Acheson dealt with the issues Nixon put before him thoughtfully, precisely, without any attempt at flattery, in pursuit of his conception of national service and, unlike some other outside advisers, without offering advice that had not been solicited.
Acheson emerges from the Beisner book as the greatest secretary of state of the postwar period in the sweep of his design, his ability to implement it, the extraordinary associates with whom he surrounded himself and the nobility of his personal conduct. He was impatient with relativists who sought surcease from the complexity of decisions by postulating the moral equivalence of the United States and the Soviet Union. His values were absolute, but he knew also that statesmen are judged by history beyond contemporary debates, and this requires a willingness to achieve great goals in stages, each of which is probably imperfect by absolute standards.
This was the theme of an Acheson speech at the War College in August 1951: “There was not ‘one more river to cross’ but ‘countless problems stretching into the future.’ ... Americans must reconcile themselves to ‘limited objectives’ and work in congress with others, for an essential part of American power was the ‘ability to evoke support from others — an ability quite as important as the capacity to compel.’ ”
The importance of that perception has not changed with the passage of time.

John McCain’s Polish Moment, Iranian Style

John McCain has executed an Islamic-style divorce from reality. Three times he’s said that Iran is training al Qaeda.
Wrong. Once he even admitted he was wrong, but his campaign HQ went back to the original goofiness two days later.
To some, the Republican candidate’s strange behavior was a replay of that historic 1976 campaign gaffe, when President Gerald R. Ford declared that Poland was “independent and autonomous” from the Soviet Union.
Millions of Poles found that surprising.
Ford had a chance to regroup, but he passed it up. He insisted that “There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, and there never will be under a Ford administration.”
You could still hear the guffaws at the polling booth.
Likewise, McCain’s headquarters put out a reaffirmation of the candidate’s confusion about who was on what side in Iraq during a press conference in Jordan.
Mind you, this was two days after McCain, nudged by travelling companion Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman , I-Conn, corrected and amended his accusation that Iranian operatives in Iraq have been “taking al Qaeda into Iran, training them and sending them back.”
Lieberman whispered in his ear.
“I’m sorry,” McCain said, “the Iranians are training extremists, not al Qaeda”.
Well, yes, and some of those “extremists” are followers of Iraqi Shiite political parties in the government we are propping up in Baghdad.
McCain had it backward, in other words.
To be sure, elements in Iran, the Shiites’ Vatican, have indeed entered into a few marriages of convenience with their historical arch enemy, the Sunnis, by helping al Qaeda here and there.
But to insist that the fortunes of al Qaeda, whose roots go deep in Sunni asceticism, are tied to Shiite Iran, is absurd. It misses the whole point.
It’s like saying Northern Ireland’s Protestants were creatures of the Pope.
Haven’t we been here before?
Liberals bloggers and the media jumped all over McCain, the former Vietnam fighter pilot and prisoner of war, some recalling the widely circulated columns here exposing the ignorance of top American intelligence officials about the Middle East.
So, is McCain still a bottom-half-of-the-class student, like he was at the U.S. Naval Academy? Or does he understand the power of linking al Qaeda to Iran all too well?
Either way, it’s loser.
But what was missing in the heckling of McCain was the other half of the al Qaeda equation.
The inconvenient truth is that al Qaeda and its supporters gets their lion’s share of money and manpower from sources in Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Pakistan, Sunni bastions all, and America’s key allies in the war on terror.
In addition, Libya, a nascent U.S. ally (see below), and North Africa in general, has also proved to be fertile recruiting grounds for al Qaeda, according to a treasure trove of documents captured in Iraq last year.
The future suicide bombers are smuggled into Iraq in small groups from Syria, said the Combating Terrorism Center at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y., which analyzed the documents. They are Sunni Arabs, in other words, not Iraqi Shiites supported or trained by Iran.
Gerald Ford never recovered from his Polish moment, and lost to former Georgia Gov. and peanut farmer Jimmy Carter.
Of course, he had other problems — the Vietnam and Cambodian debacles, domestic spying scandals, his pardon of the disgraced Richard M. Nixon in the Watergate affair.
But ever since, Ford’s Polish moment has been the measuring rod for campaign gaffes.
Will McCain suffer a similar fate?

A number of factors argue against it.
It’s too early, for starters.
Ford stumbled at the climax of both campaigns, when millions of Americans were riveted to the television debate.
In contrast, McCain’s moment occurred far away, and involved issues too complicated for most Americans to understand, not to mention members of Congress and national security officials themselves.
As for his campaign staff’s bizarre statement repudiation of their candidate’s apology, it’s unlikely it made it past the blogosphere to the water cooler.
Finally, while Ford’s Polish moment drew a national howl, conservative writers such as the New York Sun’s Eli Lake have been making a somewhat effective counterargument by stitching together instances of Iran-al Qaeda cooperation.
So McCain probably escaped relatively unscathed.
Still, he and his supporters must know this: He cannot afford another moment like that.

McCain asks Petraeus, “Do you still view al Qaeda in Iraq as a major threat?” The general responded, “It is still a major threat, though it is certainly not as major a threat as it was say 15 months ago.” McCain added, “Certainly not an obscure sect of the Shi’ites all overall?” Petraeus answered, “No,” though McCain quickly added, “Or Sunnis or anybody else.”

I’ve watched the exchange a few times, and I keep coming to the same conclusion: by rhetorically asking if al Qaeda is a Shiite sect, McCain was once again demonstrating that he’s confused about the terrorist group’s religious background. He added, “Or Sunnis or anybody else,” not to necessarily to clarify, but to cover his bases — he figures al Qaeda has to be affiliated with an Islamic tradition, even if he doesn’t know which one.

Ilan Goldenberg added, “McCain did genuinely mix up Sunnis and Shi’a again…. Now, I know that there is a bit of gotcha going on here. But this man claims that his greatest qualification for the Presidency is that he understands foreign policy. But the differences between Sunni and Shi’a matter. They matter a lot! And this nasty habit of mixing it up just seriously needs to stop.”

Indeed, I’d say it’s the “nasty habit” that makes this morning’s mix-up especially interesting. If McCain had consistently demonstrated a firm grasp of events in the Middle East, it’d be easier to overlook confusion over whether al Qaeda is Sunni or Shi’ia.

But therein lies the point — McCain has struggled with this before.

* On Feb. 28, McCain told the Baker Institute for Public Policy in Houston, Texas, “Al Qaeda is there [in Iraq], they are functioning, they are supported in many times, in many ways by the Iranians.”

* On March 17, McCain appeared on Hugh Hewitt’s radio show and said, “There are al Qaeda operatives that are taken back into Iran and given training as leaders and they’re moving back into Iraq.”

* On March 18, McCain held a press conference in Jordan in which he repeated the same claim, twice, including his insistence that it was “common knowledge and has been reported in the media that al-Qaeda is going back into Iran and receiving training and are coming back into Iraq from Iran, that’s well known.”

Eventually, McCain backpedalled, but only after Joe Lieberman whispered in his ear that he was wrong. Asked why he would repeatedly insist that Sunni al Qaeda was benefitting from training from Shiite Iran, McCain would only say he “misspoke.”

Complicating matters, McCain also appeared confused last week about events in Basra.

As recently as November 2006, McCain couldn’t even talk about his own opinions on the war without reading prepared notes on national television. As recently as March 2007, McCain was embarrassing himself by insisting that Gen. Petraeus travels around Baghdad “in a non-armed Humvee” (a comment that military leaders literally laughed at, and which CNN’s Michael Ware responded to by saying McCain’s credibility “has now been left out hanging to dry.”)

Add up the errors, and we see a Republican candidate whose problem is not with words but with facts.

Intellectual Laziness and the ‘al Qaeda’ Shorthand

About a year ago, it became painfully obvious that the president started lying about al Qaeda in Iraq as part of a cynical approach to bolstering support for the war. While that was hardly unexpected, the more noticeable problem was that the media started playing along with the White House’s scheme, and began characterizing everyone who commits an act of violence in Iraq as an al Qaeda terrorist.
The New York Times’ public editor, Clark Hoyt, eventually tackled the subject head on in a terrific column; the paper took steps to make amends; and news outlets have generally been more responsible about not equating all Iraqi violence with AQI.
Now, if only John McCain had been paying attention at the time.
As he campaigns with the weight of a deeply unpopular war on his shoulders, Senator John McCain of Arizona frequently uses the shorthand “Al Qaeda” to describe the enemy in Iraq in pressing to stay the course in the war there.
“Al Qaeda is on the run, but they’re not defeated” is his standard line on how things are going in Iraq. When chiding the Democrats for wanting to withdraw troops, he has been known to warn that “Al Qaeda will then have won.” In an attack this winter on Senator Barack Obama of Illinois, the Democratic front-runner, Mr. McCain went further, warning that if American forces withdrew, Al Qaeda would be “taking a country.”
Critics say that in framing the war that way at rallies or in sound bites, Mr. McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee, is oversimplifying the hydra-headed nature of the insurgency in Iraq in a way that exploits the emotions that have been aroused by the name “Al Qaeda” since the Sept. 11 attacks.
Well, yes, critics do say that, but only because it’s true.
Some students of the insurgency say Mr. McCain is making a dangerous generalization. “The U.S. has not been fighting Al Qaeda, it’s been fighting Iraqis,” said Juan Cole, a fierce critic of the war who is the author of “Sacred Space and Holy War: The Politics, Culture and History of Shi’ite Islam” and a professor of history at the University of Michigan. A member of Al Qaeda “is technically defined as someone who pledges fealty to Osama bin Laden and is given a terror operation to carry out. It’s kind of like the Mafia,” Mr. Cole said. “You make your bones, and you’re loyal to a capo. And I don’t know if anyone in Iraq quite fits that technical definition.”
Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia is just one group, though a very lethal one, in the stew of competing Sunni insurgents, Shiite militias, Iranian-backed groups, criminal gangs and others that make up the insurgency in Iraq. That was vividly illustrated last month when the Iraqi Army’s unsuccessful effort to wrest control of Basra from the Shiite militia groups that hold sway there led to an explosion of violence.
The current situation in Iraq should properly be described as “a multifactional civil war” in which “the government is composed of rival Shia factions” and “they are embattled with an outside Shia group, the Mahdi Army,” Ira M. Lapidus, a co-author of “Islam, Politics and Social Movements” and a professor of history at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, wrote in an e-mail message. “The Sunni forces are equally hard to assess,” he added, and “it is an open question as to whether Al Qaeda is a unified operating organization at all.”
And McCain’s confusion on the issue inevitably leads him to say dumb things, such as making up Iran’s non-existent role in training AQI terrorists, getting confused about the difference between Sunni and Shi’ia, and exaggerating what AQI is even capable of in this reality.
The political news was: McCain takes a roundhouse swing at Obama; Obama counterpunches elegantly. But what caught my Iraq-obsessed eye was this statement from McCain:
“And my friends, if we left, they (al-Qaida) wouldn’t be establishing a base,” McCain said Wednesday. “They’d be taking a country, and I’m not going to allow that to happen, my friends. I will not surrender. I will not surrender to al-Qaida.”
They’d be taking a country? Last time I checked, Iraq has a Shi’ite majority. McCain thinks the Shi’ites–the Mahdi Army, the Badr Corps (and yes, the Iranians)–would allow a small group of Sunni extremists to take over? In fact, as noted above, the vast majority of indigenous Iraqi Sunnis aren’t too thrilled about the AQI presence in their country, either. (The usual caveats apply: AQI is barbaric, dastardly and intent on violating the Qu’ran by engaging in the annihilation of innocents. We can’t get rid of them fast enough.)
The sadness here is that McCain knows better. He knows the complexities of the world, and the region. But I suspect he’s overplaying his Iraq hand in order to win favor with the wingnuts in his party. That is extremely unfortunate: As McCain should know better than anyone, it is extremely dishonorable for politicians to play bloody-shirt games when the nation is at war.
It is dishonorable, but there’s no need to assume that McCain “knows better.” He’s either intentionally deceiving the public about the nation’s most serious terrorist threat, or he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. It’s a close call, but I’m leaning towards the latter.

Is Puttin the president of Germany, as the "foreign policy expert" John McCain said?

How Republicans Think: Wildebeest in Every Pot

Sometimes even the most altruistic notions come to naught. Take California GOP Rep. Duncan Hunter's nifty idea to help the neediest of the needy: the 230,000 refugees in Chad who have fled the slaughter in Darfur and are desperately in need of food.

Hunter's staff contacted the embassy in N'Djamena, Chad, last week to see whether Hunter could distribute food at a camp. Hunter also wanted to put together an outing to hunt wildebeest and distribute the meat to refugees.

The embassy was decidedly lukewarm. It worried about logistics and the need to divert scarce staff to coordinate Hunter's schedule. There also were concerns about coordinating with the World Food Program's distribution schedule. The embassy sought advice from Foggy Bottom as to what to tell Hunter, a former presidential candidate, who will Congress at the end of this term.

Here's State's response last week: "Talking Points Regarding CODEL Hunter":

· The embassy "welcomes Congressman Hunter's interest in food assistance to Darfur refugees in Chad. Given the significant" U.S. aid in the world program, the embassy "would encourage the congressman to time his visit to coincide with an already scheduled food distribution."
· The embassy will "make the necessary arrangements for" Hunter to watch a food distribution in a camp.

· "Regarding the Congressman's desire to hunt wildebeest and distribute the cured meat to refugees, wildebeest are not present in Chad." (We're told some have been there, mostly in a no-hunting wildlife refuge.)

And, in case Hunter was looking for other game:

· "The Government of Chad does not permit the hunting of large mammals."

Actually, there's not a whole lot of wild game roaming these days near the refugee camps in Chad. It's a desert, and it has been at war for the last few decades. (The wildebeest's annual migration between Kenya and Tanzania is under serious threat from poachers, CNN reported last week.)

Hunter's office called State on Thursday and said he had decided not to go and that he was looking instead at commercial hunting expeditions in Kenya, Tanzania and Southern Africa.

But Hunter's office said yesterday that his trip -- the idea was two separate trips, we were told -- was not intended to be an official CODEL. Hunter, his office said, had always intended them to be private trips. "At this point, neither trip has been settled," a spokesman said.
Well, happy hunting.
Is wildebeest best cooked medium-rare?

McCain was against a long-term presence in Iraq before he was for it (more than once)

John McCain’s stated position, repeated over and over again throughout the campaign, is that he’s willing to leave U.S. troops in Iraq up to a century, so long as we’re not taking major casualties. He compares this to a presence along the lines of U.S. troops who remain in Korea a half-century after the war there.
There’s no shortage of problems associated with such an approach. First, it’s based on truly ridiculous assumptions. Second, it wouldn’t work. And third, as Sam Stein reminds us, McCain has frequently disagreed with his own vision.
Three years before the Arizona Republican argued on the campaign trail that U.S. forces could be in Iraq for 100 years in the absence of violence, he decried the very concept of a long-term troop presence.
In fact, when asked specifically if he thought the U.S. military should set up shop in Iraq along the lines of what has been established in post-WWII Germany or Japan — something McCain has repeatedly advocated during the campaign — the senator offered nothing short of a categorical “no.”
“I would hope that we could bring them all home,” he said on MSNBC. “I would hope that we would probably leave some military advisers, as we have in other countries, to help them with their training and equipment and that kind of stuff.”
Host Chris Matthews pressed McCain on the issue. “You’ve heard the ideological argument to keep U.S. forces in the Middle East. I’ve heard it from the hawks. They say, keep United States military presence in the Middle East, like we have with the 7th Fleet in Asia. We have the German…the South Korean component. Do you think we could get along without it?”
McCain held fast, rejecting the very policy he urges today. “I not only think we could get along without it, but I think one of our big problems has been the fact that many Iraqis resent American military presence,” he responded. “And I don’t pretend to know exactly Iraqi public opinion. But as soon as we can reduce our visibility as much as possible, the better I think it is going to be.”
Keep in mind, McCain 2008 believes those of us who agree with McCain 2005 are terrorist-sympathizing defeatists.
I’d just add that the “evolution” of McCain’s thinking on a permanent U.S. troop presence in Iraq has taken a surprising number of twists and turns.

Consider:
* In 2005, McCain decided Iraqis resent our military presence, so we should reject a Korea-like model for long-term troop deployment. He insisted that “U.S. ‘visibility’ was detrimental to the Iraq mission and that Iraqis were responding negatively to America’s presence — positions held by both Obama and Clinton.”
* In 2006, McCain reversed course, and embraced the Korea model for a long-term military presence.
* In 2007, McCain reversed course again, saying the Korean analogy doesn’t work and shouldn’t be followed. “[E]ventually I think because of the nature of the society in Iraq and the religious aspects of it that America eventually withdraws,” McCain told Charlie Rose last fall.
* And in 2008, McCain reversed course yet again, deciding that we should be prepared to leave troops in Iraq, even if it means 100 years or more.
At each step, McCain was not only convinced that he was absolutely right, but dismissed anyone who dared to disagree with him as uninformed and unreliable.
Now, I should clarify that the point here is not just to embarrass McCain by exposing a spectacular series of flip-flops. Rather, the point is to highlight the fact that McCain apparently doesn’t have any idea what he’s talking about. He does 180-degree turns without explanation, and then insists that he’s been consistent the entire time.
Noting McCain’s wholesale reversals on tax policies over the last 10 years, Josh Marshall mentioned the other day:
Genuine political and ideological transformations are pretty rare in contemporary American politics. Two in a row in less than a decade is close to unprecedented. McCain went from conservative Republican, to embracing many core Democratic policy positions and actively discussing a possible party switch, to cycling back and re-embracing the same policies.
What’s gotten the most attention is McCain’s position on taxes — the same Bush tax cuts that he said earlier in the decade “offend[ed] his conscience”, he now says must be made permanent and added on to by another round of tax cuts on the Bush model. This can be reduced down to cheap charges of ‘flip-flopping’ or expediency. But it actually goes a lot deeper than that. McCain is absolutely gung-ho and certain that he’s right about whatever his position and ‘principles’ are at the given moment. But they change repeatedly.
On taxes, McCain changed his mind four times in 10 years. On long-term troop presence in Iraq, McCain changed his mind four times in four years.
Remind us again, campaign reporters, about McCain’s “consistency” and “straight talk.”