Oh, great. Now our ambassador to Iraq is "panicking"

Nothing, absolutely nothing in George Bush's Iraq policy has gone right. Nothing. Now the new ambassador is saying his embassy can't do the job:

"In essence, the issue is whether we are a Department and a Service at war," Crocker wrote. "If we are, we need to organize and prioritize in a way that reflects this, something we have not done thus far." In the memo, Crocker drew upon the recommendations of a management review he requested for the embassy shortly after arriving in Baghdad two months ago.

"He's panicking," said one government official who recently returned from Baghdad, adding that Crocker is carrying a heavy workload as the United States presses the Iraqi government to meet political benchmarks.

"You could use a well-managed political section of 50 people" who know what they are doing, the official said, but Crocker doesn't have it because many staffers assigned to the embassy are "too young for the job" or are not qualified and are "trying to save their careers" by taking an urgent assignment in Iraq.

"They need a cohesive, coherent effort on all fronts," the official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media. "It's just overwhelming."

Read the rest of this post...

Lots of early polls. National polls. State polls. Do they matter this early?

So, big surprise. Hillary Clinton leads in the latest national poll:

Polling data showed Clinton leading Obama 39 percent to 26 percent in a Democratic primary race that does not include former Vice President Al Gore. With Gore in the match-up, Clinton leads Obama 33 percent to 21 percent.

An earlier USAToday/Gallup survey conducted June 1-3 had put Obama 1 percentage point ahead of Clinton, at 30 percent to 29 percent.

The political pundits are in overdrive talking about this new poll. But does it matter? It's June of 2007, six months before the first votes are cast. And, national polls give politicos something to obsess over, but the nomination party is decided by voters in states. Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina matter more.

In the latest South Carolina poll, which has a margin of error of +/- 5.5% (quite a big margin of error, by the way) Barack Obama is in the lead:

Barack Obama leads the Democratic presidential field in South Carolina, while Fred Thompson is challenging Rudy Giuliani for the top spot among Republican contenders, according to a new poll.

Obama, the Illinois senator who has drawn thousands of supporters to recent appearances in this early voting state, had the support of 34 percent of likely Democratic voters, compared to 25 percent for his nearest rival, New York Sen. Hillary Clinton. South Carolina native John Edwards, who won the primary here in 2004, garnered only 12 percent of support in the Mason-Dixon poll.

Last month's reliable Des Moines Register Poll showed John Edwards with lead -- and he's been leading in Iowa for awhile:

Presidential candidate John Edwards leads rivals Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton in a new Des Moines Register poll of Iowans likely to take part in the Democratic caucuses.

The Iowa Poll shows Edwards, a former U.S. senator from North Carolina, is the first choice of 29 percent of those who say they definitely or probably will attend the January caucuses, which kick off the nominating process for the nation.

Obama, a U.S. senator from Illinois, edges out Clinton for second place in the poll — 23 percent to 21 percent.

It's maddening to watch the parsing of the polls so early, especially the national polls, which are basically name recognition contests.

This presidential nomination process has already gone on too long. And, Gore, who isn't campaigning, keeps moving up. Interesting. Read the rest of this post...

Obama's senior staff defends racist attack on Indian-Americans, while Obama says his senior staff had nothing to do with it

You'll recall that I wrote last Friday about an offensive email that Obama's campaign sent to the media, trying to knock Hillary for having Indian-Americans attend her fundraisers (because, apparently, they're not real Amurricans). Obama today said that the memo was a screw up and that neither he nor his senior staff had seen it. Unfortunately, Obama's senior staff clearly approved of the memo retroactively as they were out telling the media that the memo was fine.

NYT: Asked about the document, Bill Burton, a spokesman for Mr. Obama, said: "We did give reporters a series of comments she made on the record and other things that are publicly available to anyone who has access to the Internet. I don't see why anyone would take umbrage with that."

Axelrod: "In this business, half the time we are being attacked for not being tough enough, and now we're being attacked for being too harsh," said David Axelrod, the campaign's chief strategist. "The truth is that this is a tough, competitive business."…. "Will we be judged by a different standard? We have, in many ways, held ourselves to a different standard," Mr. Axelrod said, but added: "When they throw the stink bomb at you, you can't be caught unaware." [New York Times, 6/16/07]

So Obama would like us to think that none of his senior staff had anything to do with the memo, but at the same time we're told that his senior staff has no problem with the memo and, we can only assume, would have approved it had they seen it, so why should we take any solace in the fact that they hadn't seen it first? A bit like saying, I didn't kill the guy, officer, but I would have.

I know some Indian-Americans with pretty good jobs here in town who were offended to their core at what they saw as a racist attack coming from the Obama campaign. Obama's people did a terrible job of handling this episode. They're only feeding the perception that perhaps they're not yet ready for prime time. Pac at FireDogLake has more. Read the rest of this post...

In Bush's D.C., lying is standard operating procedure

In his column yesterday, Frank Rich captured the current reality about lying in your nation's Capitol:

[T]here's been so much lying surrounding this war from the start that everyone is inured to it by now. In Washington, lying no longer registers as an offense against the rule of law.

The Bush team sees no consequences to lying. The media dutifully report the lies as truth, or at the very least, report the lies unchallenged, even if they know that they're not true, or at the very least know some other facts that contradict them (facts the media will never mention when reporting the lies). Read the rest of this post...

Petraeus says Iraq is like Northern Ireland

Oh, that's good. A conflict that's been going on 800 years is General Petraeus' recipe-for-success in Iraq. From the Washington Post:

Claiming steady, albeit slow, military and political progress, Petraeus said the "many, many challenges" would not be resolved "in a year or even two years." Similar counterinsurgency operations, he said, citing Britain's experience in Northern Ireland, "have gone at least nine or 10 years."

Nine or ten years? Try nearly a thousand. Anglo-Norman mercenaries invaded Ireland in 1169, and it was all downhill from there. I guess Korea's fifty-year military deployment wasn't enough of a template for General Petraeus, now he's looking for an American withdrawal from Iraq sometime in the year 2845. Read the rest of this post...

Former Marine IED expert Antonio Agnone who left the US military because he's gay

I got a chance to interview Antonio this morning at the Take Back America conference here in DC. He was appearing at a press conference launching a new video short by Robert Greenwald about the military's gan ban having fired dozens of Arabic-speaking linguists because they're gay. Antonio wasn't a linguist, but he was in charge of finding and destroying IEDs in Iraq - another crucial job. He left after becoming fed up with the anti-gay policy. Below is my interview with him (I mistakenly captioned him as "Anthony," sorry).

Click To Play

And here is the new video short by Robert Greenwald. It's quite good.

Read the rest of this post...

Iran and the hawks

Plenty of people were wrong about Iraq. Virtually all of the right, and no shortage of people on the left, screwed up, and many have internalized the lessons of Iraq. The chastened liberal hawks are able to endure or move past the cognitive dissonance created by the Iraq failure, and/or simply admit error, and apply the lessons of Iraq to other issues.

Some, however, are determined to maintain a hawkish orientation. I think liberals/progressives/Democrats are far more united on foreign policy than is generally represented by the press (and certainly by political opponents), and I hesitate to hammer people for differences that are probably more rhetorical than real. I also, however, can recognize an engaging argument when I see one, and Ezra Klein has a great Prospect piece up on liberal hawks and Iran.

As someone who recognizes the idiocy of bombing Iran to achieve our goals either in Iraq or with respect to their nuclear program, I find it disheartening when people loudly invoke the *potential* of military action as some great thing. Look, force is always an option in a hypothetical. Our military ability, especially our air power dominance, means that the possibility is always there. HOWEVER. "Can" does not equal "should", and it has been true for some time that talking about military action with Iran only serves to legitimize the crazier elements of the Bush administration.

Klein rightly skewers Ken Baer, for example, who insists (regarding Iran) that progressives must "not use anger at one war as an excuse to blink when confronting a future threat head on." This advice, however, does not come attached to any policy prescriptions for Iran, just a claim that "it would be a disservice to our progressive ideals if we allowed disgust with the Bush Administration to lead to a softness toward totalitarian, anti-egalitarian, atavistic regimes and movements." And this is precisely the problem: the false connection of being opposed to military action, which would be hugely counterproductive, with "softness."

As Klein says, "The remarkable thing about the growing liberal hawk literature on Iran is its evasiveness -- the unwillingness to speak in concrete terms of both the threat and proposed remedies . . . Baer's dodge is not rare. A while back, The New Republic demanded that "the West finally get ruthlessly serious about Iran." Unless "ruthlessly serious" describes some subset of containment theory that I'm unfamiliar with, this seems like mercilessly frivolous advice. But such is the sorry state of discourse on Iran: lots of hyperventilating, but relatively little in the way of actual diagnosis or prescription."

Attacking Iran would be a terrible idea, and anyone who currently supports such an initiative is wholly unserious and devoid of any foreign policy or security understanding. See how easy that was? That should be the party line, not because it's dovish, not because Iraq turned out badly, not because force is inherently bad, but because it's true. Liberal hawks -- and I might include myself in this general category, having supported military action in Kosovo and Afghanistan, among other times -- would do well to stop worrying about sounding tough and start getting these things right. Read the rest of this post...

Petraeus: If the surge doesn't work, we get to stay even longer in Iraq

The latest from the US' commanding general in Iraq, David Petraeus, is that if the surge doesn't work, then we get to stay even LONGER in Iraq. Most of us, hell, all of us, thought that if Petraeus reported in September that the last-ditch surge effort didn't work, the war would be over. Not true. Now, the failure of our last chance effort means we'll stay even longer (to try another last-chance effort?). And, I assume, if Petraeus reports that the surge IS working, we'll also stay longer (you know, to finish the job). So, either way, win or lose, we're staying no matter what. So what exactly is the point of Petraeus reporting anything at all?

Remember what I said about Iraq looking a lot like the Terri Schiavo fiasco: a never-ending effort to revive the dead. Read the rest of this post...

Afghanistan is a growing disaster

When Republicans run the government, and the nation embraces war without dissent, you end up facing multiple wars with limited resources, and ultimately losing everything. We invaded Iraq when we hadn't even finished Afghanistan (not to mention, we still haven't found Osama). The result? We didn't win in Afghanistan or Iraq.

The latest news from yesterday and today in Afghanistan is horrifying. It's Iraq all over again. We've known for a good year or more that Afghanistan was a mess, and slipping backwards. But everyone ignored it while focusing on the growing mess in Iraq. Now we have two messes, and are looking at two eventual defeats. And even worse, the one mess, Iraq, is feeding the other, Afghanistan - the Taliban and their friends are using terrorist techniques, like car bombs and IEDs, honed from lessons learned against our troops in Iraq. We have quite literally trained an entire generation of terrorists in state-of-the-art murder.

War without end, and government without dissent. That's what the Republicans wanted. And look what it got us. Atrios has more. Read the rest of this post...

"Voters are going to be mad with us until we end the war."

Joe Biden can be maddening. But, he does come up with some great lines. And, his statement to Reuters is right on target: "Voters are going to be mad with us until we end the war."

The Senate Democrats have promised there will be a series of votes on Iraq between now and the Fourth of July recess. They need to start delivering on Capitol Hill. The GOPers who let Bush start this war and enabled him along the way are holding up any progress. The Dems. need to roll them:

The new Democratic-led Congress is drawing the ire of voters upset with its failure to quickly deliver on a promise to end the Iraq war.

This is reflected in polls that show Congress -- plagued by partisan bickering mostly about the war -- at one of its lowest approval ratings in a decade. Surveys find only about one in four Americans approves of it.

"I understand their disappointment," said Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid of Nevada. "We raised the bar too high."

In winning control of Congress from President George W. Bush's Republicans last November, Democrats told voters they would move swiftly to withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq.

But they now say voters must understand they need help from Republicans to clear procedural hurdles, override presidential vetoes and force Bush to change course.

Democratic Sen. Joseph Biden of Delaware said he explained this recently to anti-war demonstrators. "'We know. We know,'" he quoted them as replying. "But we are so disappointed.'"

Biden, seeking the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination, said: "Voters are going to be mad with us until we end the war."

Read the rest of this post...

Monday Morning Open Thread

Another week starts.

There's a big conference of progressives here in D.C. this week, Take Back America. All the Democratic candidates will be speaking.

Let's get it started.... Read the rest of this post...

More problems at the VA uncovered

Despite being notified of problems at the Seattle-area VA four months earlier, little or no action had been taken to address risks in the psychiatric ward. Unfortunately it takes death and the public spotlight for the VA management to do anything. Read the rest of this post...

Sarkozy's party wins in Parliament, but left wakes up

On Friday the talk was all about a massive landslide in the parliamentary elections in France, with Sarkozy's UMP winning at least 400 seats and the Socialist party struggling to win 100 but it did not quite work out that way. Fears of a rubber stamp majority - well founded, as we know from recent experience in America - plus the left jumping on Sarkozy's plan to increase the VAT tax (to pay for tax cuts elsewhere) led to an actual decline for the UMP who dropped from 359 seats to 346 while the left gathered 226 seats in total. Sarkozy can still push through legislation with ease though it will not be quite as easy as he expected.

With the elections finished, Sarkozy will soon launch his program of reform for France, even keeping Parliament in session during the summer holidays when most of the country is away. This tactic has been used in the past, typically to announce what could be considered an unpopular reform, with the hope that it will get lost in the vacation shuffle, much like we see on Friday afternoons when the Bush administration announces unpopular news. With greater reform being discussed, most are bracing themselves for a lively return in September when most are predicting mass protests.

Also out yesterday was the news of the breakup of Socialist presidential candidate Segolene Royal and partner Francois Hollande, Socialist party leader and father of her children. Rumors had been widespread for months about trouble and the two have been publicly trading barbs during the campaign season so it comes as very little surprise. Read the rest of this post...