Director Steven Soderbergh and the superb actor Benicio delToro are bring CHE, a new movie about the Marxist guerrilla leader, to nextmonth’s Havana Film Festival. In a recent Standpoint Magazine Diary, Jonathan Foreman described the film as an overlong hagiography of the most gullible kind.”

One wonders if this is the film that the Cuban people, now living under the regime of Raul Castro, former head of the army, need at this moment.

Meanwhile, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev will visit Cuba on November 27, as well as Venezuela. A Russian naval flotilla is on its way to the Caribbean to hold join military exercises with Venezuelan armed forces.

Russia, of course, unlike Cuba, has given up any semblance of Marxism. An “adversary of my adversary” alliance can make for strange bedfellows.

There's a strange and disturbing debate at Pajamas Media about pro/anti Moscow dupes, propagandists and spies.

It began with an article entitled "Is Wired Magazine's 'Military Correspondent' a Kremlin dupe?" This article, by Kim Zigfeld, criticises Wired's correspondent, a blogger named David Axe, for rubbishing the claim that Russia had long planned to attack Georgia.

According to Zigfeld, who runs a blog called La Russophobe, Axe's only source is an email from a Professor Gordon Hahn who is linked to the Monterey Institute of International Studies and who runs a pro-Kremlin blog called "Russia: Other points of view."

That sounds bad. But then, at least according to one 'Steve J Nelson',  who runs a blog called La Russophobe Exposed, "Kim Zigfeld" isn't a real person but some kind of sinister propaganda project...

This may be one of those blogosphere spats that highlights the problems of our brave new world of pseudonymous comment.

Today the lead story in the NYT is headlined: No One Convicted of Terror Plot to Bomb Planes.

In fact three men involved in the airline bomb plot WERE convicted of conspiracy to murder, after earlier admitting to conspiracy to cause explosions.

Though it sounds like a disastrously mishandled trial (see the Daily Mail's "Farce" piece)  it's a legal technicality that they weren't convicted of targeting aircraft with liquid explosives.

Four other men face a retrial after the jury was unable to come to a verdict on thieir cases, and one man was found not guilty on all charges.

 

Democratic vice-presidential nominee Joe Biden said yesterday that he and running mate Barack Obama could pursue criminal charges against the Bush administration if they are elected in November.  

Via the Guardian.

Actually, it would not only energize the Democratic party base, it would make them even MORE popular abroad.

 

The WSJ editors consider the sobering effect Washington outsider Sarah Palin is having on those feed from the trough inside the Beltway. They write:

Even as the Obama camp ponders how best to handle John McCain's veep pick of Sarah Palin, the high priests and priestesses of the media have marked her as an apostate. The Beltway class is in full-throated rebellion against a nondomesticated conservative who might pose a threat to their coronation of Barack Obama and the return of Camelot-on-the-Potomac....

The media whose chant for weeks -- no, months -- has been "let McCain be McCain." If we know anything about John McCain, it is that he is by instinct a reformer, sometimes to a fault. Yet when he acts like McCain and picks a maverick reformer in his own mold, his former media cheering squad turns on him for not conforming to Beltway mores and picking someone they've all met 10 times in the CNN green room.

We are instructed that Mrs. Palin isn't qualified, because she lacks Washington experience. But until recently that was said to be a virtue in Mr. Obama, who is at the top of his ticket. Meanwhile, there's hardly a peep of media notice that the Obama campaign is preposterously trying to remake Joe Biden into a poor scrapper from Scranton when he's been in the Senate for 36 years. They all know Joe. But when Mr. McCain picks an authentic middle-class mother who is also a Governor, we are told she's not up to the job....

What's really going on here is that the Beltway class can see how popular the Palin pick is with Republicans outside Washington, and especially with middle-class conservatives...

There is nothing more dangerous to entrenched Washington power than a populist conservative who looks unlikely to buy into Washington's creature comforts. Take a close look at Governor Palin's record on ethics and energy in Alaska, and it becomes clear what this Beltway outburst is actually about. The irony is that while Senator Obama is running on change, his acceptance speech made explicit that he's promising only more power and money for Washington. Sarah Palin's history of taking on the career politicians of a corrupt Alaskan GOP machine -- her own party -- shows that she's the more authentic change agent.

 Link here.

 

Hamas apparently has an image problem.  This, via Strategypage:

"... and [the image problem] is getting worse. It's gotten so bad that the 30 year old son (Mosab Yousef) of one of the Hamas founders (Hassan Yousef) has not only renounced Hamas, but has become a Christian. Mosab is fed up with the terrorism/"destroy Israel" approach the Arab world has embraced over the last sixty years. Mosad notes, as have many other Arabs, that this has not worked. The conversion angle is something Moslems are trying to keep quiet. Mosab Yousef's father pleaded with his son to keep quiet about the conversion (which took place 18 months ago). The elder Yousef knows that this is not an isolated incident. Many young Moslems are abandoning Islam. Most do so quietly. In Iran, the clerics that run the country are shocked at secret police reports about a growing number of young Iranians who have, in effect, abandoned Islam. This sort of thing is happening all over the Moslem world, but especially in Arab countries. The people who switch to Islamic radicalism get all the headlines, not the larger numbers who just walk away from Islam are largely ignored."

In response to the above item a "Lost Illusions" correspondent writes: 'The numbers are not high and no one would give them out any way for fear of reprisals but the converts are a very impressive people subject to a lot of abuse  - torture, jail and murder, like the Baptist missionary in Gaza last year.  Last year I met a Palestinian convert to Christianity, actually in the West Bank.  Standing in an olive grove he used for a church, he said, "I think God is going to bless the Palestinian people and spread Christ's message of love and peace among us."  As it is, they generally have to hide their faith from family members.  I am very surprised Yousef's father actually knows his son is a convert and that he was allowed to live; the old man must adore him.'

link to Strategypage

 

 

Peggy Noonan writes:

"Let me say of myself and almost everyone I know in the press, all the chattering classes and political strategists and inside dopesters of the Amtrak Acela Line: We live in a bubble and have around us bubble people. We are Bubbleheads. We know this and try to compensate for it by taking road trips through the continent -- we're on one now, in Minneapolis -- where we talk to normal people. But we soon forget the pithy, knowing thing the garage mechanic said in the diner, and anyway we weren't there long enough in the continent to KNOW, to absorb. We view through a prism of hyper-sophistication, and judge by the rules of Chevy Chase and Greenwich, of Cleveland Park and McLean, of Bronxville and Manhattan.  And again we know this, we know this is our limit, our lack.  But we also forget it."

Read the whole thing here.

 

 

One-time presidential speechwriter returns to file a NYT Op-Ed parsing Senator Obama's speech accepting the Democratic Presidential nomination.

A new "Truth Movement" is born.  Full coverage of the specious Sarah Palin "cover-up" rumors HERE, some verging on the bizarre. (For Brit readers: Alaska Governor Sarah Palin is John McCain's choice for Vice Presidential running mate.  Left-wing bloggers have suggested that her youngest child, born earlier this year and afflicted with Down syndrome, was in fact born to Palin's sixteen-year-old daughter, making the Governor instead the newborn's grandmother.)

The most elaborate investigation, and perhaps the original, can be found on the left-wing Dailykos blog HERE.  Andrew Sullivan also wades in, HERE.   Whatever the truth (and we'll soon learn) these are fairly tasteless pieces.  As an exercise, such "truthing" is likely to alienate mainstream American voters.

Law professor and blogger Ann Althouse addresses this point with her post "Stop prying into other people's vaginas, even if you happen to oppose them politically," available HERE.

There is, however, an odd reversal at work.  (Please forgive the clumsy, charged "choice/life" terminology used ahead.)   For so long it's been pro-choice advocates who've said that others, especially the state, should not intrude into a woman's "privacy."  Yet the pro-choice Dailykos appears journalistically do be doing just that sort of intruding.  Meanwhile, Althouse defends a pro-life candidate, or perhaps candidate Palin's young daughter, with a line taken from pro-choice arguments.

Of course, such reversal of arguments may have been one strategy behind the selection of Governor Palin in the first place.  Generally, she doesn't so much argue positions against points in the Democratic platform, as embody those positions.  How, for instance, will Democratic strategists approach the issue of gun control against a Vice Presidential nominee who goes out and shoots dinner?

As for the change of atmosphere that accompanied the advent of the Palin rumors... a friend wrote to me, "Thank goodness the Democratic team has, in Biden, finally picked a brawler who'll get tough with the Republicans."  I had the opposite reaction.  For me the most appealing quality of Obama as a candidate has been his inclination to rise above conflict in an elegant way to try to build consensus.  His campaign had, for a time, seemed to evince a fundamental decency rare in Washington politics.

UPDATE: Sarah Palin's 17-year old daughter, Bristol Palin, is now in fact pregnant.  Anti-climactic good news, I suppose.  And Kaus reports Dailykos pulls back from the abyss and gets with the program.

 

Dave Kopel of Denver's Rocky Mountain News takes a look at Al-Jazeera English's coverage of the Democratic convention taking place in that Colorado city.

Overall, Kopel finds Al-Jazeera's extensive coverage accurate and nuanced, with the exception of analysis by Marwan Bishara, “Al-Jazeera's senior political analyst," of Senator Obama's Vice Presidential selection. Bishara's analysis of Joe Biden's Senate is both flawed and poorly researched.

Kopel's critique can be read HERE, and is worth a look. Al-Jazeera's election coverage, which compares well to that of most US networks, can be found HERE.

American viewers of their coverage should brace themselves for the British accents of the correspondents.

 

In the Foreign Affairs section of Standpoint Online, James Linville argues that by failing to cover fairly positive change in Iraq over the last two years, the mainstream media in the USA has done a disservice to the Democratic Party - as well as to the coalition and the general public.

One of the lessons of the Pentagon Papers from the Vietnam era was the danger inherit when the Pentagon provided inaccurate or biased reports assessments to the White House, Congress, and the American people.   In a strange reversal, we must now ask ourselves: have the leading news organizations done a disservice to the Democratic Party by inadequately reporting the positive changes that have taken place over the last two years in Iraq?  Early this month, as if following the script of the insurgents in Anbar, Muqtada al Sadr instructed members of his Shiite Militia, the Mahdi Army, to lay down their arms.  These extraordinary changes have caught Democratic leaders off-guard and scrambling to spin their recent calls for "immediate withdrawal" in, as they saw it, "the face of looming defeat."

Here in Room 101, we've come across an item via Pravda (English.pravda.ru)

Headlined "Russia Again Savior of Peace and Life," it claims:

"...Georgian troops attempted to storm the city much as Hitler ‘s Panzer divisions blazed through Europe. Also noteworthy is the fact that Georgian tanks and infantry were being aided by Israeli advisors, a true indicator that this conflict was instigated by outside forces."

 

La Stampa daily of Turin reports that the Russian billionaires who invaded the French and Italian Rivieras in the '90s have become so unpopular that local restaurants are refusing to serve them.

"From north to south, a rebellion is growing against those who show off their money and power."

Roman Abramovich, the friend of Vladimir Putin said to be worth $23.5 billion, was refused a table the other night at Bistrot in Forte dei Marmi on the Tuscan coast, The Times of London reports.

When restaurateur David Vaiani told Abramovich his eatery was fully booked and said, "You can try again tomorrow," the oil tycoon was so furious that he took off immediately for Sardinia on his yacht.

 

The BBC has apparently decided that the Russians are the good guys in the war with Georgia.

On Saturday, Russian planes bombed the Georgian port of Poti. This was reported as it took place by CNN and other international networks, and even discussed on the Pravda website despite Russia's denial that its air force has attacked Georgia proper. The BBC however, followed the Kremlin line, failing even to mention the Poti bombing, or any Russian air attacks except for that on the town of Gori which is next to the South Ossetia. It's website continues to avoid all mention the Poti bombing - not deigning even to report Georgian accusations and Russian denials.

Moreover, since the very beginning of the current crisis last week, James Rodgers, the BBC's main Moscow correspondent, has reported the situation as if receiving dictation from the Kremlin, consistently referring to the Russian military presence in South Ossetia as ‘peacekeepers.' Not ‘so-called peacekeepers' Not ‘self-designated peacekeepers' Not "a force that the Russians insist is present to keep the peace."

 Of course,  anyone who knows anything about the Caucasus knows that what the Russian military has been doing in the rebel sections of Georgia is far from peacekeeping.  The fact that "the peacekeepers" instantly turned into a crack invasion force the size of a full armoured division this weekend surely gives the whole game away - and ought to have been enough to prompt Rodgers to change his tune.  It did not.

Why would the corporation favour Russia over Georgia?  It presumably isn't out of love for the Putin regime - Russia is not the kind of authoritarian state for which the Beeb has a soft spot (it's not Venezuela or Syria). The answer, mostly likely, is because Georgia is an American ally.

Indeed, Georgia has actually sent troops to Iraq (and Afghanistan), supporting a war that the BBC fiercely opposed (yes the BBC has foreign policies just as if it were a kind of alernative government) and undermining the ‘unilateralist' myth that America had no allies in Iraq except Britain... These are unforgivable crimes and it's unlikely that the Beeb will be able to overlook them no matter what the Russians do to their former possession.

 

 

At 8.30 this morning the BBC Radio 4's flagship Today Programme managed to run a long segment about the death of Alexander Solzhenitsyn without ever mentioning communism.  The presenter seemed to think that the author of 'The Gulag Archipelago' and 'A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich' wrote about and against 'The Cold War.' 

Today's Wall Street Journal brings us an essay on the verse of former Guantanamo detainee Abdullah Saleh Al-Ajmi and his poetic romancing of various rights guaranteed detainees by a recent ruling of the US Supreme Court. 

Al-Ajmi's poetry was recited at a 2006 Seton Hall Law School 'teach-in' that was Webcast live to four hundred colleges and law schools in the US and abroad.

Al-Ajmi himself was released from Guantanamo in 2005.

On April 26th of this year, Al-Ajmi, a 29-year-old Kuwaiti, blew himself up in Mosul as part of a coordinated suicide attack on security forces of the democratically-elected government of Iraq.  Thirteen died and forty-two were seriously injured.        

When the Barack Obama World Tour arrived in Baghdad, the candidate, wearing shades and a suit coat, smiled and waved before descending the stairs from the plane. Later the Senator toured the city, and sat for interview with reporters. In shirt-sleeves, he gamely sunk a basketball shot from far out at the three-point line before grabbing a mike to address US troops, who applauded wildly. (His shot caught only the net, no rim or backboard. Truly the man has a light shining upon him.)

What we did not ever see was the candidate wearing a flak jacket, because during his time there he never needed to put one on.

For American viewers this may have come as a surprise, since they had long been told, by the New York Times, by the major network news programs, and by the Democratic leaders in Congress, that “the war” was being lost. In his remarks during the tour, Obama recognized the change made recently, and underscored that such success had come as a surprise to him, as well as to President Bush and Senator McCain. In truth, the inevitability of such success could clearly be seen a year ago, and was noted then by Bush. At the same time, in-theater commander General Petraeus, appearing before Congress, vastly underplayed change of which he was well aware, yet nonetheless was shamefully hectored as an administration mouthpiece. Actually the seeds of this success took root not one, but two years ago, and went largely unreported.

Curiously, the British left-leaning media, who had been so critical of Prime Minister Blair for his support of the 2003 invasion and his stalwart alliance with the hated Bush, was quicker to note progress than the supposedly impartial New York Times. With Blair out of office, it was perhaps easier for UK journalists and reporters to recognize that a de-stabilized Iraq was in no one’s interest. The NYT editorial page, in contrast, called for immediate withdrawal, even at the price, which they deemed likely, of managed ethnic cleansing and division of the country.

The Guardian HERE posted a clear-eyed video account of Iraqis in “the most dangerous province turning on al Qaeda.” Their report was taken from a late winter broadcast by UK’s Channel 4 News, whose host, Jon Snow, is taken to task in the current issue of Standpoint for his self-declared left-wing bias. The Guardian/Channel 4 video might, given the earlier US news black-out, be instructive.

Instrumental in such change in Iraq was Army Colonel Sean MacFarland. On September 29, 2006, he briefed the media on the fruits of his brigade’s implementation of a counter-insurgency strategy in Anbar province, the so-called "wild west." Of particular note were the efforts of Captain Travis Patriquin, an Arab speaker with a sophisticated understanding of Iraqi tribal society, who conducted discussions with the Army’s adversaries in Ramadi there, and convinced the tribal sheikhs to turn out the al Qaeda insurgents they'd been hosting and join sides with the the Iraqi police and army. (Speaking with the enemy is of course not a new phenomenon, nor solely the province of Democratic Senators.) Captain Patriquin was killed in Ramadi by an IED on 6 December 2006. He'd earlier won the Bronze Star with Valor for his participation in a fierce battle in Afghanistan. In Ramadi, Iraq, where a building has been named after him, he was honored by the locals as “Martyr Husham” – the brave and generous martyr.

In the run-up to the 2006 congressional elections, Colonel MacFarland's report was ignored. Along with Major Niel Smith, he resorted to offering his own account. Though participants in the events, it compares favorably, in terms of clarity, nuance, and fidelity to fact, to the news reporting by the major outlets.

Their account can be found HERE, and might be instructive…

As for MacFarland’s September 2006 news-briefing, no footage of that was ever run by any broadcaster. Accordingly, STANDPOINT magazine is able to join the Mudville Gazette in hosting the WORLD PREMIERE of MacFarland’s seminal briefing on the turning point in Iraq, the moment when Anbar “awoke.” The MacFarland footage, from two years ago, could be instructive to both the Senator and his staff, and a reminder to news editors of the time-line for the change in Iraq so much discussed over the last few weeks.>

 

The video is part of Mudville's project examining the history of military blogging.

The always underrated Richard Littlejohn uses his Daily Mail column to correct an annoying but persistent British media habit:

Some news sources still mistakenly describe the last 'British' inmate at Guantanamo Bay as a 'British citizen'. He's nothing of the sort. Binyam Mohammed came here from Ethiopia as an asylum seeker in 1994 but was never granted citizenship. He worked for a while as a janitor and then went to Pakistan 'to resolve some personal issues'. (At least he didn't claim to be on a computer course.) That's where he was picked up on terrorism charges and transferred to Club Gitmo. His lawyer is applying to the High Court to force the Foreign Office to secure his release. Technically, he's not even a British 'resident'. He's an Ethiopian citizen who happened to live here once and was resident in Pakistan when he was arrested. Now he's resident at Guantanamo Bay.

Here is a clip from an al Jazeera programme celebrating the birthday and career of released Lebanese child murderer and terrorist Samir Kuntar.

This is a news organization that employs large numbers of former BBC staffers. Both Sir David Frost and Rageh Omaar - the public school educated BBC 'scud-stud' who became such good friends of Saddam's information minister 'Comical Ali'-  work for the English language branch of the network.

For an example of American newspaper writing at its best, check out today's superb piece by John Pomfret in the Washington Post, puncturing current myths about China's 'inevitable' rise to global dominance. You would be hard-pressed to find comment this well-informed and thoughtful in any British paper.         

 

Israeli historian Benny Morris wrote in Friday's NYT, treating an Israeli strike on Iran’s nascent nuclear program, whether sooner or later, as a foregone conclusion. It’s a sobering, or rather a disturbing, read, especially as it takes into account such an attack's disastrous consequences.

It gives one pause, almost, over Standpoint’s treating the faked photos of Iranian missile launch in a humorous vein, as we did HERE and HERE.

The government of Iran, for its part, is taking the threat of such Israeli action seriously, and has issued an array of their own threats in recent weeks.

 

What follows here is a small sample of the whole catalogue of threats compiled by Y. Mansharof is a MEMRI Research Fellow and A. Savyon of the Middle East Media Research Institute.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad: Iran Will "Chop Off the Hands of the Attackers before They Can Attack"

In a speech at the conference of the Eight Islamic Developing Countries (D-8) in Malaysia, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said that Iran would "chop off the hands of the attackers before they could attack." He added that Iran attached no importance to threats or pressures, that nobody would dare to attack Iran's "sacred soil" today, and that only U.S. President George Bush still harbored such plans. Ahmadinejad stated further that America's hegemony was collapsing, and that the world should prepare for "a future that is free of the bullying powers"


Ahmadinejad advisor Mojtaba Samareh Hashemi said in a July 5, 2008 interview with The Washington Post: "The forces of any government that attacks Iran will no longer have any security in our region or anywhere else. They will no longer be safe, wherever they are."

Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki stated that Iran's response to a U.S. and Israeli attack would be "devastating."
On another occasion, he said that there could be “no fate for the usurping Zionist regime other than annihilation, as happened to the apartheid regime of South Africa.”

Iranian Oil Minister: Oil Prices Will Rise to Unforeseeable Heights
Oil Minister Gholam Hossein Nozari said at the World Petroleum Congress in Madrid that if attacked, Iran would hike oil prices "to unforeseeable heights."

Mojtaba Zolnour, Ayatollah Khamenei's representative in Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) said: "If the U.S. or Israel fires one bullet against Iran, the Iranian Armed Forces will not hesitate to strike at the heart of Israel and at the 32 U.S. military bases in the region. [This will happen] before the dust [even] settles…"
 


Ali Shirazi, Khamenei's representative in the IRGC navy, said that if Iran were attacked, "Tel Aviv and the American warships in the Persian Gulf would be the first targets to go up in flames as part of Iran's crushing response." He added, "The Iranian nation is a nation… that believes in jihad and self-sacrifice, and against such a nation warships and weapons are to no avail… Today, Iran's military strength and capabilities have grown to such an extent that Iran cannot be disregarded in any regional or international balance of power."

 

Benny Morris's Op-Ed can be read HERE.

Monocle magazine editor Tyler Brule has enlisted Alain de Botton and myriad others in an all-media-form effort to halt development of the White City Mall in West London. The enormous, shed-like structure is now being thrown down just west of the Shepherd’s Bush roundabout by Westfield, the Australian property developer. De Botton, in the current issue of Monocle, deems the plan unsightly, at odds with current shopping trends, and a disaster that will blight the area for the next two hundred years. Not to be outdone, Brule in his Sunday column in the Financial Times, identifies the development as the prime example of one of the most respected nations in the world bludgeoning its own brand. Together, in a video podcast available on I-Tunes, they extend the attack. Radio and sky-writing campaigns (“Surrender Westfield”) are now in the planning stages. De Botton cites architect Richard Rogers’s argument that the network of dormitory villages, office parks and shopping precincts connected by vast motorways should give way to the 19th century model of an integrated city, where sleeping, eating, consuming and working are fused into a vibrant whole.

They’re right. As urban theorist and former mayor of Bogota Enrique Penalosa opines: “When malls become meeting places, it’s a sign that a city is sick.”

 

Yesterday, Diwaniyah Province was handed over to Iraqi government control. For the first time a democratically-elected Iraqi government is in charge of a majority of the country (10 of 18 provinces). Top story of the day, and yet we search fruitlessly to read more on this.

 

Meanwhile, whether losing, as coalition forces assuredly were in 2006, or winning, as the coalition and the Iraq government may now indeed be, both US presidential candidates’s policies on Iraq seem rigidly unchanging, as noted HERE.

Since The (London) TIMES Marie Colvin left Mosul, where the Iraqi Army has been pounding the rump force of al Qaeda in Iraq in their last urban redoubt, news from that city has been sparse. As noted HERE, Marie told us that when she left last week she was the only western journalist at the Battle of Mosul. If there is a western journalist in the city of Mosul we’d like to hear from them. Please call us.

 

In the New York Times, but not the front page, an Iraqi general who admires Obama has a few incisive Hard Questions for him, HERE.

 

Our media reporting has been primarily a critique of news as it comes to us via London, New York and Washington. In the future we aim to provide on occasion space for news professionals from around world, including those from Iraq and Afghanistan, to comment on western reporting from their countries.

In the meantime, here is a report by Jane Arraf from The National newspaper of Abu Dhabi, of the graduation ceremony for the class of 2008 at the Rustamiyah Military Academy – Iraq’s Sandhurst:

This time it was not mortars or rockets hitting the hall south-east of Baghdad where the Iraqi military’s newest officers were graduating – it was a hail of hard candy.
…
Two hundred and thirty two new army and air force lieutenants graduated yesterday from the yearlong course.

(continued)

They joined in the midst of Iraq’s raging sectarian violence last year and are leaving into an Iraq that is much calmer but still divided and fraught with danger. “Let me remind you of one thing,” the Iraqi defence minister, Abdul Qadir Jassim, told the graduates: “The most important medal you can wear on your chest is the trust of the Iraqi people – all Iraqis. Our loyalty," he said pointedly, "is to Iraq and only Iraq."

…
“I’m so happy,” said Kholda Rahim from Baghdad. “My son is an officer. He’s going to protect the Iraqi people and protect Iraq.”

 

Hat tips instapundit, confederate yankee, and armed and curious.

 

One of Hillary Clinton’s major donors, a so-called “Hillraiser,” has just met with McCain’s campaign. Clinton’s camp had threatened defection from the Democratic campaign is she was not offered the Vice Presidential slot. Are they making good on that threat?

Michael Burleigh comments on his Standpoint blog about the attention paid to Obama’s Iraq plan… but, Burleigh asks, what of his Afghanistan plan? Quite right.

Recall that earlier this year Obama threatened, if Pakistan were not more cooperative in stabilization of Afghanistan, the location where he suggested the true war on terror was taking place, then that country might also need to be invaded and bombed. He meant presumably the restive and independent tribal provinces in the Northwest of that country.

Last Sunday a large and coordinated attack by Taliban fighters overran a small, isolated NATO base and killed nine US soldiers in Nuristan, eastern Afghanistan near the Pakistan border.

In the last few days there has been a build up of Western forces nearby, just opposite the North and South Waziristan Provinces. Reports on Tuesday of these Afghan and US forces killing some 150 Taliban fighters entering via Pakistan. On Wednesday reports of the Pakistan army engaging the Taliban force on their other side.

Evidently, Pakistan IS cooperating, and Western forces have not crossed into the tribal provinces. The consequences in terms of nationalist sentiment in Pakistan if they did do so would be profound. The Pakistan government would again be caught in an awkward position between the US and its own people.

What sayest Obama? It’s another Hard Question for him, to go along with others Here and Here.

 

Oh, and one more Hard Question.

Additional "Iranian Missile Launch Photos" have surfaced.

 

The dossier of photos, and details of alleged disruption of the launch in Daji, Isfahan Province, can be found HERE.

As noted on NY Times's blog, THE LEDE, Iran has faked video footage and photos of its recent missile test:

 

"As news spread across the world of Iran’s provocative missile tests, so did an image of four missiles heading skyward in unison. Unfortunately, it appeared to contain one too many missiles, a point that had not emerged before the photo [provided via Agence France-Presse] was used on the front pages of The Los Angeles Times, The Financial Times, The Chicago Tribune and several other newspapers as well as on BBC News, MSNBC, Yahoo! News, NYTimes.com and many other major news Web sites."

 

Really, if you can't trust the Iranian Revolutionary Guard who can you, and Agence France-Presse, trust? 

 

Meanwhile, somewhere east of Isfahan, SnappedShot has gone under-cover and obtained the actual photo's from that test, seen here.

Apparently there are still a few bug's in the system.

 

Hat tip Snapped Shot, Andrew Sullivan, and PhDiva.

 

... Senator Barack Obama offers his "Plan for Iraq” in an Op-Ed in this morning's New York Times... a vision now re-calibrated to reflect his acceptance that the Petraeus troop surge has proven a success.

This acceptance is a shift for a politician who attempted somewhat fecklessly to eviscerate the US commander during his appearances before the Senate. (It’s worth noting that in the same proceedings some of Senator Obama’s Democratic colleagues behaved toward Petraeus in a more shameful manner, essentially accusing the general of lying.) Obama’s plan would see major reductions, beginning immediately, over the next two years, leaving in a place over the long term a residual force to protect US service members and in support of anti-terror operations... this while, in a broad caveat, continuing to take account of recommendations from commanders on the ground.

His plan comes on the heels of the Bush administration's announcement last week of partial re-deployment from Iraq... in effect a reversal of the surge… now that relative security has been achieved. (As an indication of such achievement consider that last month, security for Anbar Province, the so-called “Wild West,” the heart of the insurgency and center of the Sunni Triangle, encompassing Fallujah, Ramadi and Saddam’s home-town of Tikrit, was transferred to the Iraqi Army.)

Obama's vision encompasses a permanent force considerably smaller than the US force deployed in South Korea (about 30,000 troop). Obama's new principal military advisor had recently taken part in an independent commission recommending a force slightly larger than that.

Senator McCain, the Republican candidate for the presidency, envisioning a long-term strategic partnership in the Middle East, has of course suggested US troops could be in Iraq for "100 years."

Obama's primary posturing, and McCain's hyperbole, aside, differences on Iraq are narrowing, and its worth keeping in mind that both politicians, by temperament, are consensus-builders.

Obama concludes his editorial by again underscoring his long ambition to "End the War"; but as I've twice asked in Standpoint on-line posts, HERE and HERE, what war does the candidate mean he is ending?

Over the last year, US, UK and Iraqi forces, fighting together, have virtually ended the conflicts against the various parties attempting to thwart establishment of civil society and democracy in Iraq. They’ve done so by defeating those malefactors.

It’s now clear that, over the last eighteen months, the best way to “support the troops” was to let them win.

Obama's NYT Op-Ed is well worth reading and can be found HERE.

In today's Sunday Times, in a piece almost identical to one he wrote for the Guardian last week, Simon Jenkins actually gets it right on a matter of foreign policy: he criticizes sanctions as a coward's way of war. He even cites the enrichment of Saddam Hussein by UN Sanctions - though he fails to mention the Oil for Food Programme that was essential to that enrichment. Essentially, though, Jenkins' argument is a counsel for despair - and accomodation with tyranny and genocide. He bitterly opposed the invasion of Iraq, as well as sanctions against Saddam, and believes that in the case of Zimbabwe and anywhere else 'invasion, in this post-Iraq age, is rightly considered a step too far'. Does Jenkins have any practical suggestions at all for helping the people of Zimbabwe? No. Merely barbs tossed at easy targets like Tesco and Mark Malloch Brown. Indeed he seems oddly pleased that there's nothing that can or should be done for the victims of the world's tyrants.