Washington Extra – End in sight
President Obama didn’t bite when asked by a White House reporter today if he still thought the U.S. war in Iraq was “a dumb war.” Back in 2002, he could get away with such a blunt statement. As president, and with the Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki at his side, he needed to be more subtle.
Up the two men went to Arlington Cemetery, their motorcade driving past the white grave stones of wars past and present, canon shots firing in the background, until they arrived at the Tomb of the Unknowns. A military band played both countries’ anthems, Obama stood with his hand over his heart for both songs while Maliki stood erect with his hands by his sides.
Obama said it was Maliki who wanted to go to Arlington, but it turned out to be a fitting, if somber way for Obama to close this chapter. By going to a place where the costs of war are so much in evidence, he was able to answer the “dumb war” question in a serene, statesman-like way.
Obama must feel relieved to be pulling the last troops out of Iraq by year end. There may be some celebration and even some political points to score out on the campaign trail. But today was about remembering the untold number of Iraqis and nearly 4,500 Americans who died in the war, not to mention the tens of thousands of troops wounded and maimed and the more than 1 million Americans who deployed to Iraq. Obama urged Americans and Iraqis “to build a future worthy of their sacrifice.”
Here are our top stories from Washington…
Obama says US will be loyal partner for Iraq President Barack Obama pledged that Washington would remain a strong partner for Iraq as U.S. troops exit by year-end, and played down the risk this departure creates a power vacuum Iran can exploit. The withdrawal of almost all U.S. troops from Iraq by Dec. 31 has created uncertainty at a time the region remains roiled by the Arab Spring, and amid fear Syrian instability could spread sectarian strife into neighboring Iraq.
For more of this story by Alister Bull and Jeff Mason, read here.
Lugar warns U.S. against war in Libya
In recent days some U.S. senators have been urging President Obama to consider military intervention to help Libyan rebels fighting Moammar Gaddafi.
Not Richard Lugar.
The top Republican on the Senate foreign relations committee said little while a senior member of his own party, John McCain, repeatedly urged the United States to pursue setting up a no-fly zone over Libya.
On Sunday Democrat John Kerry, the chairman of the foreign relations committee, suggested that Washington might want to ”crater” runways used by Gaddafi’s forces.
On Tuesday, Lugar issued a strong warning against U.S. intervention in what he called Libya’s civil war.
“The United States should not, in my view, launch military intervention into yet another Muslim country, without thinking long and hard about the consequences and implications,” Lugar said in a statement.
“ If a no-fly zone doesn’t stop the street-to-street fighting, are we prepared to escalate further, to put boots on the ground? Would that involve taking control of the country? Would we be obligated to stay until democracy is established?”
Lady Gaga, WikiLeaks and :’(
Washington has been buzzing for days about Bradley Manning, the 23-year-old U.S. Army intelligence analyst at the heart of the investigation into the leak of a quarter-million State Department diplomatic cables by the whistleblower website WikiLeaks.
And then there’s the Lady Gaga connection.
Manning said he listened to the flamboyantly-dressed singer’s “Telephone” as he pulled the documents off a military server in Baghdad, according to a transcript of online chats Manning had with a former hacker, Adrian Lamo. The chats, which occurred earlier this year, were posted by Wired.com on June 10. Lamo confirmed details of the chats to Reuters.
“i would come in with music on a CD-RW labeled with something like ‘Lady Gaga’ … erase the music … then write a compressed split file … no-one suspected a thing. listened and lip-synched to Lady Gaga’s Telephone while exfiltrating possibly the largest data spillage in american history,” Manning wrote in the uncapitalized, lightly punctuated style of a webchat.
“pretty simple, and unglamorous … weak servers, weak logging, weak physical security, weak counter-intelligence, inattentive signal analysis … a perfect storm”
“funny thing is … we transferred so much data on unmarked CDs … everyone did … videos … movies … music … all out in the open”
For those who ask, reasonably enough, how an Army private apparently got access to this kind of government data, this looks like one possible answer.
Maybe it’s less about attention, and more about military war crimes? I like the efforts to smear the kid as an emotional light-weight. They are clever. Reflects on the high intelligence of the establishment media and their handlers.
Washington Extra – No victory lap
President Barack Obama will not be running a “victory lap” when he addresses the nation on Iraq this evening. Quite rightly, he points out that there is still a lot of work to be done to make sure Iraq “is an effective partner for us.”
There are several other reasons why tonight’s speech cannot be a victory lap. The first, Republicans argue, is that Obama is trying to take credit for the achievements of his predecessor George W. Bush, and specifically the “surge” in troop numbers (a policy Obama opposed at the time). The second, as the White House well knows, is that a victory lap might seem inappropriate in light of the nation’s economic woes. Indeed, Obama will be talking about the economy tonight, and the need to refocus resources back home.
A third reason, perhaps, is that it could sound disingenuous to triumphantly declare the end of combat operations in Iraq while 50,000 armed American troops remain in the country. Not all of them will be working as trainers or instructors, and it is obvious that the troops will still be ready for combat if that should prove necessary.
Today’s other top story is our Reuters/Ipsos poll from Pennsylvania, where Republican Pat Toomey has opened a 10-point lead over Democrat Joe Sestak among likely voters in the race for Arlen Specter’s Senate seat. Specter first won this seat as a Republican 30 years ago before turning Democrat in 2009 and subsequently losing the Democratic primary, despite Obama’s endorsement. This was never going to be an easy seat for Democrats to hold, but defeat would be a disappointment after the state voted for Obama in 2008. Interestingly, nearly one in five Democrats said they were more likely to vote for Sestak because Obama had endorsed his rival in the Democratic primary.
Finally, a couple of stories to bring to your attention if fashion and decor are your thing. Read about the battle between a patent lawyer with a penchant for bow ties and Brooks Brothers, over the company’s exquisitely named “Adjustolox” bow ties. Or take a look at the newly upholstered and repainted Oval Office, pictured here. Less yellow, less blue, and lots more beige.
Here are our top stories from today…
POLL-Republican leads Senate race in Pennsylvania
Iraqi political haggling a big headache for American spies
What keeps U.S. spies awake at night? Iran. Al Qaeda. The bickering of Iraqi politicians.
With the United States officially ending its combat role in Iraq, one senior American spy said he was more worried about the lack of political reconciliation in Baghdad than whether Iran gets more meddlesome in Iraq or al Qaeda’s Iraqi affiliate makes a new, violent push there.
“I’m more concerned about the internal (Iraqi) situation than Iranian influence or the long arm of al Qaeda, which really doesn’t exist,” the senior intelligence official told reporters. He asked not to be named (as spies do).
Tehran could be expected to try to influence Iraq, because that has been its attitude historically, he noted.
As for Al Qaeda in Iraq, it has been “substantially degraded.” It has only about 10 percent of the manpower that it had at its peak in 2006 and 2007. And it is only “loosely” affiliated with al Qaeda elements outside the country, he said.
But the fact that coalition-building talks between Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki and former premier Iyad Allawi have stalled repeatedly: that is a bigger worry.
“For me personally, the greater concern is the political reconciliation,” the senior intelligence official said. The stalemate “can’t drag on indefinitely,” because people might “take things into their own hands.” Violence already has mounted as insurgents seek to exploit the political vacuum.
Iraq … It’s not like Charlie Wilson’s war
Ambassador Chris Hill, the retiring U.S. envoy to Baghdad, is confident the Iraq war will not end up like Charlie Wilson’s war.
Wilson, the late Texas congressman, was a driving force behind the U.S. funding of mujahideen rebels who fought a Soviet occupation force in Afghanistan in the 1980s. After the Soviet withdrawal in 1989, U.S. attention shifted elsewhere and Afghanistan slipped into civil war. Not a likely scenario in Iraq, Hill told a State Department briefing Tuesday.
“During my 16 months there I never lacked for senior people being, first of all, well-informed, and secondly, engaged and visiting, so I never had that (inattention) problem,” he said.
“I never lacked for the Washington bureaucracy offering me tips on how to do my job,” Hill added, warming to the theme. “It was amazing. Every day it was a new idea that I never thought of. And, uh, I appreciated every one of them.”
While lack of attention from Washington might not be a problem, money might be.
Hill said Iraq is headed back toward being a major oil producer. While it has so far failed to produce a new oil law, the country has worked around the problem by signing oil service contracts with major international firms.
Production is now at 2 million barrels per day, and Hill said if things go well Iraq could be producing 8 million barrels per day in seven to 10 years.
I hope it’s not like Charlie Wilson’s war, our support of the mujahideen is what gave birth to both the Taliban and Osama bin Laden.
Biden finds irony in Iraq palace
Vice President Joe Biden and his wife, Jill, spent Independence Day on a mission to Iraq, visiting with some of the 80,000 U.S. troops still serving there.
The visit included a naturalization ceremony for about 150 service members who chose the holiday to become U.S. citizens.
When Biden took the microphone, he pointed out that the ceremony was taking place inside what used to be one of Saddam Hussein’s many palaces.
“The thing I love so much about the day is the irony,” Biden said.
“Here we are in the hunting lodge of a dictator who subjugated a people, who in fact stood for everything that we don’t stand for, and we are in the middle of this marble palace making a lie of everything that he stood for. I find it delicious.”
Biden also took care of some political business, meeting with Iraqi politicians.
Here’s an indepth look at that aspect of the vice president’s Iraq visit:
Obama transport security pick avoids Iraq contract pothole
President Barack Obama’s pick to oversee U.S. transportation security appears to have dodged a major pothole on the road to being confirmed by the Senate after assuaging concerns about a government contract his old firm won to provide interrogators in Iraq.
Retired Major General Robert Harding was under the microscope at the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee on Wednesday for his nomination to head the Transportation Security Administration, a job that has been filled on a temporary basis since Obama took office.
Harding spent more than three decades in the U.S. military, including a stint as deputy to the Army’s chief of intelligence and director for operations in the Defense Intelligence Agency. After retiring, he set up his own security consulting firm which he sold last year.
The top Republican on the panel, Maine Senator Susan Collins, grilled Harding about a $6 million contract his former company, Harding Security Associates, won from the Defense Intelligence Agency in 2004 to provide interrogators and debriefers in Iraq — the company had to reimburse the government nearly one-third of that amount.
Harding told the committee that he hired 40 people, but three months into the contract the government decided that it no longer needed the outside interrogators and debriefers and terminated the contract. One concern raised during an audit of the contract was that he tried to get about $800,000 reimbursed for severance he paid to the employees.
The two sides settled the case and Harding’s firm paid back about $1.8 million.
“I’m convinced that I made a mistake. This was our largest, and our most important contract. And in an effort to stay engaged with my client, in an effort to stay engaged with my employees and take care of them, in an effort to take care of my stakeholders, which is the Iraq support group, I lost sight of the fact that I also had to be cognizant of what was going on in my back room, in the accounting shop, in the contract shop,” Harding told the panel.
What trumps a car bomb, a blizzard and a trip to Kabul?
If you watched U.S. morning television or went online early today, you already know the answer to this media riddle. Top stories — a deadly car-bombing in Baghdad, a massive winter storm rolling across the United States and an unannounced flight to Afghanistan by Defense Secretary Robert Gates – took a back seat to a new development in the tabloid tale of Tiger Woods.
The latest turn in the super-golfer’s travails occurred overnight, when a Florida television station reported an unidentified woman was taken by ambulance from Woods’ home to a nearby hospital.
WESH-TV showed footage of a blond woman on a stretcher.
UPDATE: The woman wheeled out of Woods’ home was identified as his mother-in-law, who was suffering from stomach pains.
Evidently interest is so high that it can push arguably more influential stories out of the Washington limelight.
For example: President Barack Obama is set to talk about boosting jobs in this seemingly jobless economic recovery. Christina Romer, chairwoman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, previewed the president’s message but was lower on the lineup than the little that could be reported about Tiger.
Or how about climate change? The EPA moved yesterday toward regulating planet-warming greenhouse gases as an international conference on climate change opened in Copenhagen. That didn’t make the morning news threshold, at least in the earliest hour, though Sen. James Inhofe, an Oklahoma Republican who is arguably the most vocal global warming skeptic in Washington, commented on CNN that no cap-and-trade bill would pass the Senate.
The First Draft: Afghanistan inspires Freudian slips about that other battlefield – Iraq
President Barack Obama may have invoked Vietnam to banish that ugly specter of defeat from his shiny new Afghan strategy. But a day later, Iraq seems to be the wartime nightmare dogging two congressional veterans of the Bush wars.
Vice President Joe Biden, who was a Democratic senator from Delaware during Rummy’s “Shock and Awe” bombardment of Baghdad, let the musings of his unconscious psyche slip out Freudian style in an interview with ABC’s Good Morning America.
While refuting worries among critics that the Afghan strategy’s 18-month timeline might embolden the Taliban, Biden said: “How are they emboldened knowing that by the time we train up the Afghanis, we’re going to be gradually handing off beginning in 2003?”
2003 was the year of the Iraq invasion. The big year for the Obama plan is 2011.
Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona, long a forceful voice on military policy, proved a bolder Freudian by actually mentioning that other battlefield by name.
“I support the president’s decision to have a properly resourced counterinsurgency strategy with the addition of 30,000 troops, plus additional commitments from our allies, and I’m confident that we can succeed in Iraq and come home.”
…confident that we can succeed in Iraq…
Ironically, the Obama strategy in Afghanistan is identical to the Bush Iraq strategy in 2006: troop surge, improve security, enhance native forces, and clear/hold territory. The exact same strategy that Sen. Obama detested is the one he took 3 months to ponder and came to. Now the question is, will he be steadfast until victory is achieved?http://neoavatara.com/blog/?p=9 017
