McCain Wins Iowa and New Hampshire Endorsements

John McCain has received all the key newspaper endorsements for the Iowa caucus and New Hampshire primary, despite being a non-factor in the polls in the former and trailing in the latter. The Des Moines Register backed McCain despite his being in 5th place in their own polls; apparently, they're not so much trying to influence the outcome as to ...

Fallout From NIE Iran Nuke Assessment

Yesterday's release of a National Intelligence Estimate reporting that Iran stopped its nuclear weapons program in 2003 has, as Steven Lee Meyers points out, dramatically shifted the landscape. Rarely, if ever, has a single intelligence report so completely, so suddenly, and so surprisingly altered a foreign policy debate here. An administration that had cited Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons ...

Bill Clinton Says He Opposed Iraq War from Start (UPDATED)

Bill Clinton, who as president committed the country to a policy of regime change in Iraq, now claims he was opposed to the Iraq war "from the beginning," Patrick Healy reports for the NYT. During a campaign swing for his wife, former President Bill Clinton said flatly yesterday that he opposed the war in Iraq “from the beginning” — a ...

Washington Post: the Surge is Working

In an editorial this morning the Washington Post asserts that by any objective standard “the Surge” is working: A month later, there isn't much room for such debate, at least about the latest figures. In September, Iraqi civilian deaths were down 52 percent from August and 77 percent from September 2006, according to the Web site icasualties.org. The Iraqi Health Ministry ...

Moving the Goalposts in Iraq?

In an Analysis piece fronting today's WaPo, Karen DeYoung and Thomas Ricks argue that yesterday's testimony by General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker may well have succeeded in buying more time for the mission in Iraq. Petraeus and Crocker have long complained that the Washington clock -- with congressional demands that the time has come for Iraqis to take over ...

Disbanding Saddam’s Army Revisited

In a strange coincidence of timing, on the day the news is led by a report urging the dismantling of the Iraqi National Police, the NYT runs an op-ed by former Coalition Provisional Authority head L. Paul Bremmer arguing that he didn't decide to disband Saddam's army but that it was nonetheless the right thing to do. Most of it is ...

Iraqi Police Should Be Scrapped, Army Far From Ready

A blue ribbon commission chaired by former Supreme Allied Commander James Jones* has concluded that the Iraqi national police are so corrupt that they should be disbanded and recreated from scratch and that the Iraqi army is still more than a year away from being able to operate independently. Karen DeYoung's report on A1 of today's WaPo: Iraq's army, despite measurable ...

Iraq Withdrawal Logistics (Updated)

Phil Carter draws my attention to a report by Lawrence Korb and colleagues on the logistics of troop withdrawal from Iraq. The study's working assumption, that the Surge will inevitably fail and that withdrawal must commence immediately, is a political question that's hotly contested. The military-logistical questions, though, are interesting in their own right. Those who argue for a rapid and ...

Three Iraq Wars

Christopher Hitchens begins his latest Slate column with an easy set-up: "When people say that they want to end the war in Iraq, I always want to ask them which war they mean." "All of them!" is, of course, the rather obvious reply. In reality, though, it's a bit more complicated than that. There are currently at least three wars, along ...

Overhyping Petraeus

Andrew Bacevich has a piece in The New Republic under the headline, "Army of One: The Overhyping of David Petraeus." It makes some good points, including some made here (see, especially, Petraeus Fetishism). He'll get no argument from me, certainly, that politicians and the press have placed too much emphasis on Petraeus' skills and too little on the realities ...