• Today: Slightly Invasive
• Tomorrow: An Afternoon Air Raid
• This Week: Scattered Showers
• Next Week: Endless Front Approaching

A top government scientist who helped the FBI analyze samples from the 2001 anthrax attacks has died in Maryland from an apparent suicide, just as the Justice Department was about to file criminal charges against him for the attacks, the Los Angeles Times has learned.

Bruce E. Ivins, 62, who for the last 18 years worked at the government’s elite biodefense research laboratories at Ft. Detrick, Md., had been informed of his impending prosecution, said people familiar with Ivins, his suspicious death and the FBI investigation.

. . . .

The extraordinary turn of events followed the government’s payment in June of a settlement valued at $5.82 million to a former government scientist, Steven J. Hatfill, who was long targeted as the FBI’s chief suspect despite a lack of any evidence that he had ever possessed anthrax.

The payout to Hatfill, a highly unusual development that all but exonerated him in the mailings, was an essential step to clear the way for prosecuting Ivins, according to lawyers familiar with the matter.

Except there now won’t be any prosecution. No testimony in open court. No hearing that might shed a little light on how the government chased the presumably wrong lead for five years before a shakeup at the FBI shifted focus to Ivins. Now we are to believe that the case is closed because the alleged suicide is somehow tantamount to a confession.

In Bush-Cheney terms, a dead “culprit” without having to go through open US courts is a BIG win.

* * * *

And then there’s the global part of the Global War on Terror™:

American intelligence agencies have concluded that members of Pakistan’s powerful spy service helped plan the deadly July 7 bombing of India’s embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan, according to United States government officials.

The conclusion was based on intercepted communications between Pakistani intelligence officers and militants who carried out the attack, the officials said, providing the clearest evidence to date that Pakistani intelligence officers are actively undermining American efforts to combat militants in the region.

. . . .

The information linking the ISI to the bombing of the Indian Embassy was described in interviews by several American officials with knowledge of the intelligence. Some of the officials expressed anger that elements of Pakistan’s government seemed to be directly aiding violence in Afghanistan that had included attacks on American troops.

Some American officials have begun to suggest that Pakistan is no longer a fully reliable American partner and to advocate some unilateral American action against militants based in the tribal areas.

Well, on its face, this would look like a complete failure for the Bush Administration: With the US no closer to capturing bin Laden or al Zawahiri, one of our chief allies in the hunt seems to be in league with the very folks that helped protect the al Qaeda leadership in the first place. But look at this again. The White House now has brand new excuse for why the US has failed to crush al Qaeda or the Taliban—we’re not just fighting a ragtag band of dead-enders or some such, we have to outwit a nuclear power, a country with a large and sophisticated intelligence apparatus and a well-stocked military (we should know, we stocked it). Why, that might require—wait, what is it? right—“unilateral American action.”

Really, when you’re looking at it through the Bush team’s binoculars, what more could you want?

* * * *

And speaking of unilateral action:

Seymour Hersh — a Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist for The New Yorker — revealed that Bush administration officials held a meeting recently in the Vice President’s office to discuss ways to provoke a war with Iran.

In Hersh’s most recent article, he reports that this meeting occurred in the wake of the overblown incident in the Strait of Hormuz, when a U.S. carrier almost shot at a few small Iranian speedboats. The “meeting took place in the Vice-President’s office. ‘The subject was how to create a casus belli between Tehran and Washington,’” according to one of Hersh’s sources.

. . . .

HERSH: There was a dozen ideas proffered about how to trigger a war. The one that interested me the most was why don’t we build — we in our shipyard — build four or five boats that look like Iranian PT boats. Put Navy seals on them with a lot of arms. And next time one of our boats goes to the Straits of Hormuz, start a shoot-up.

The team in Veep’s office apparently rejected the plan because “you can’t have Americans killing Americans.” Really? Sorry to sound the cynic here, but I can’t imagine Vice President Cankles getting all that upset about sending American troops to their death in order to accomplish his broader goals—“I mean, come on! This is the War on Terror, people! You gotta break some eggs to make an omelet! You saw Wanted—the ancient order must be preserved!”

Sorry, I got a little too into that. . . .

But, seriously, the team might have rejected that particular casus belli, but I can assure you there are plenty more where that came from. And, with the combination of a presidential directive allowing defensive fire from covert teams of US operatives already inside Iran, and the Congressional authorization that basically declared a large portion of the Iranian military a terrorist organization, the whizzing sound of shots fired in anger is only a heart-clogging breakfast away.

But there are some logistical matters to work out—namely, the US is woefully under-equipped for a third military incursion, the Secretary of Defense is not so hot to start a hot war, and Cheney’s favorite proxy warrior, Ehud Olmert, just had to step down from his PM post because he is an incompetent commander-in-chief and corrupt as the day is long.

Really, it’s like the Patty Duke Show of international affairs. . . .

But as far as a grade on this front in the GWOT™, because no Iranians are yet dying by America’s hand, we’ll have to give them an incomplete.

I know you are as excited as I am for the fall semester.

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(cross-posted on guy2k)

Until very recently, McCain rejected this view, repeatedly calling Iraq “the central front in the war on terror” and dismissing calls to redeploy troops to Afghanistan.  After Obama’s recent speech arguing that the misguided war in Iraq distracted us from Afghanistan and Pakistan, and calling for a new strategy that would take the fight to Al Qaeda in its safe haven, McCain claimed he, too, would move troops from Iran to Afghanistan (though he quickly “revised” his position, ambiguously suggesting some of new troops might come from other countries.) 

Seth Colter Walls at Huffington Post rightly concludes that McCain is adrift here, furiously trying to out-Obama on Obama. Much of the rest of the media, however, focuses on McCain’s chest-thumping claim that he “knows how to win wars” and will solve the problem simply by doing in Afghanistan exactly what has been done in Iraq. 

McCain’s rhetoric completely misses the mark.  First, we haven;t won anything–the surge that McCain keeps bragging about started 18 months ago and, while the military did exactly what it was asked to do, there is still no end in sight in Iraq.  As Obama put it, what Bush and McCain have is a strategy for keeping our troops in Iraq, not for ending the war there. 

Obama has also aptly observed that we can’t make the mistake of “fighting the last war.”  That is what we have done in Iraq, and that’s the misplaced approach McCain promises to transfer to Afghanistan.  This gets to the very core of our failed response to the 9/11 attacks.  Bush and McCan thought, and think, that the correct response is to fight conventional wars aimed at defeating nation-states.  This is a nonsensical approach–Al Qaeda, of course, is not a country and is not defeated when one country’s army is subdued.  Our military ends up in long, unwinnable counter-insurgency campaigns.

Obama recognizes that, while more troops in Afghanistan can help achieve specific objectives, that is not enough.  We need to use much more focused tools that allow us to target terrorists.  That means developing intelligence that tells us precisely where Al Qaeda is and then taking them out. 

Obama’s speech makes clear that he understands, no matter how effective our military is, we cannot succeed by military force alone.  We need to be smarter, we need to strengthen frayed alliances, we need to understand that long-term military occupations can end up making us less safe, above all, we need to learn from the mistakes made in Iraq.  McCain thinks that Iraq is a model for future action.  The last thing Americans want to see is the Iraq experience replicated somewhere else.

 

I am paraphrasing, as there is no transcript or video available yet.  This is dangerous stuff.  Active duty generals shouldn’t be just one more cable TV talking head.  I would have thought this was obvious, but Gen. Petraeus’s shows otherwise.

Congressman Darrell Issa made the latest bizarre comment on the matter, claiming today that “we treat our hospital patients worse than Al Qaeda [detainees].”  First, not all of the detainees we have held at Guantanamo and elsewhere are actually Al Qaeda members–we have released hundreds who were not, after holding them for years without charges. 

Second, I don’t know what hospital Issa goes to, but he is either badly misinformed about how we treat detainees or else he is being deliberately misleading.  As Think Progress points out, detainees have been subjected to waterboarding, severe sleep deprivation, forced nudity, sexual humiliation, and threats with military dogs.  In addition, hundreds of detainees have died in U.S. custody, and at least 25 were declared homicides.  We don’t treat hospital patients like that–if we did, it would be a crime (as much of the treatment mention here is).

Now, McCain argues that changing the tide in Afghanistan, where the Taliban is making a comeback and an increasing number of American soldiers have been killed in recent months, is as simple as doing the same thing in Afghanistan that we have done in Iraq.

McCain brags that “I know how to win wars“.  My question is: why doesn’t McCain implement his plan for Afghanistan now?  He has the president’s ear and claims to have turned the president around on Iraq–why not do the same now for Afghanistan?  Why wait, especially as the situation is taking a turn for the worse?

In fact, Iraq is not a model of success.  McCain claims that he knows how to win wars, but the surge, while a tactical success (US troops, once again, performed admirably), has not done anything to resolve Iraq’s poliitcal crisis and shows no signs of ending the war.

If McCain has a plan to fix things in Afghanistan, he should present it to Congress and the president.  Otherwise, his plan seems to be more about winning an election than winning any war.

McCain argues that the surge has worked, although it has actually failed to meet the benchmarks Bush and McCain set to measure its success.  In responding to Obama’s common sense, McCain offered only bluster, promising to personally hunt down Bin Laden and arrogantly declaring “I know how to win wars.”

Exactly which wars are you talking about Sen. McCain?  I have nothing but respect for Sen. McCain’s service, and for all the men and women who honorably served in Vietnam, but we didn’t actually win that war.  Our military won a victory in Iraq, a war launched on false pretenses, but political leaders like Bush and McCain are determined to keep them in Iraq indefinitely and have frittered away any fruits of the military victory.  Afghanistan is slipping away from us.  I know that the media constantly defers to McCain’s authority on all matters military, but will anyone in the press/barbecue corps have the courage to point out that McCain’s chest-thumping rhetoric about “knowing how to win wars” simply doesn’t make any sense? 

Obama’s right: Bush and McCain have obsessed over Iraq for too long, at the expense of other, more pressing threats in Afghanistan, Pakistan and elsewhere.  The war in Iraq has not made us safer and it has exacted a terrible toll on our military and their families, while the rest of us are not asked to sacrifice.  Most Americans have had enough of this obsession and understand that it is past time to end the war in Iraq.  Obama will do that.  McCain will not.

These advocates for unending war have never gotten Iraq right.  They were wrong about Saddam Hussein’s alleged ties to Al Qaeda, wrong about Iraq’s supposed stores of WMD, ready to be unleashed against the United States, wrong about how long the war would last, wrong about how much the war would cost, both in terms of human life and squandered resources, wrong about how this war would affect our national security–it has made us less safe, as our own intelligence reports tell us.

Barack Obama offers a common sense approach to Iraq, one that reflects the view of a sustained and substantial majority of Americans who understand that this war is not strengthening the United States.  In an op-ed today, he points out that the Iraqi prime minister himself is calling for a timetable for the removal of American troops (timetables, of course, are something Bush and McCain once decried as the refuge of the defeatist).  He rightly obseves that this is an opportunity for us to do what is long overdue–remove our troops from Iraq and re-focus our military on the real threat that confronts us–a regrouping Al Qaeda establishing safe havens in Pakistan and elsewhere.

For far too long, we have acted as if Iraq was the biggest threat the U.S. faces.  It is not, and it never was, and it has distracted us from real threats.  Al Qaeda has capitalized on our obsession with Iraq by building new bases. 

Obama understands that keeping troops bogged down in Iraq has more than one cost.  Of course, there is the awful cost in human life.  There is the enormous financial cost.  But there is also the cost of inaction elsewhere.  We have finite capabilities and all the time, energy, and military talent we focus on Iraq cannot, of course, be devoted to confronting the real threats we face elsewhere.

It’s in writing.  Obama will end the war in Iraq, he will carefully and gradually withdraw and redeploy the troops over a 16 month period.  He is not a pacifist: he understands that we face real threats in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and elsewhere.  Ending the war in Iraq will allow us to deal with these threats.  McCain’s does not understand what staying in Iraq means, that there are other matters demanding our attention.  McCain knows only one approach in Iraq–stay the course.  Stubbornness can be a necessary quality, but not when it blinds us to reality.  It is well past time for common sense on Iraq.  Obama offers common sense, McCain offers an open-ended commitment to keeping troops in Iraq, whether Iraqis want them there or not.

This isn’t diplomatic, it’s not presidential, it’s not even funny. McCain’s friends in the media may lap up this bluster as further evidence of McCain’s supposed bona fides on foreign policy. The reality is that McCain is unpolished and lacks the tact necessary to be a statesman. This is hardly the first time he has said something intemperate, tone-deaf, or just plain stupid when it comes to foreign affairs.

By the way, does McCain think our beef is with Iran’s leaders, or the Iranian people? His painful joke suggests he makes no distinction.

I understand the McCain campaign is desperate, but this is completely unserious, and I wish the media would treat it accordingly.  Obama simply acknowledged that the contours of his policy in Iraq are not set in stone.  Unlike Bush and McCain, he is capable of adjusting his plans to fit reality.  Obama wants to initiate a 16-month phased withdrawal from Iraq.  If circumstances change and it makes more sense to do this in 14 months, or 18 months, he would “refine” his policy, as he said.  That’s called common sense flexibility.  It’s not evidence of a shifting position.

Bush and McCain think they are in a John Wayne movie, that saying something, no matter how off base, and sticking to it, immovable as stone, is what matters most. 

Here are some of the problems with McCain’s “policy” in Iraq, which is essentially “we’ll stay until we win”.  First, it’s not working, and it makes no sense.  There’s nothing to “win” at this point.  The US military accomplished its objectives.  Iraq is ungovernable and beset by violence that demands political solutions beyond the US military’s bailiwick.  Second, and more to the point of this piece, McCain is completely oblivious to the need for flexibility.  What happens if a greater threat presents itself–as is actually the case.  What if Al Qaeda has found a safe haven and reconstituted itself in Pakistan?  Actually, that is what US intelligence officials say is happening.  McCain’s tunnelvision focus on Iraq leaves us incapable of focusing on threats elsewhere–McCain has already decided that the biggest threat we face is in Iraq, and nothing can change his view on that.  That is inflexibility, and it is what we have lived with for seven years under Bush.  It is not a real policy–it is stubbornness and bravado n place of rational thought.

Here are some basic questions I’d love to see the media ask McCain: if your current policy in Iraq isn’t working, what would you do?  If we are in the same place in 1 year that we are right now, what will you do?  What if things get worse in Iraq?  What if things get worse elsewhere?  What if Al Qaeda continues to build a safe haven in Pakistan?  What if the military tells you that, we only have so many troops to go around, and you have to choose between continuing to keep 150,000 troops in Iraq, or sending sufficient troops to destroy Al Qaeda in Pakistan?

Essentially, the question is: Sen. McCain, if your current plan doesn’t work, what is your plan B for Iraq?

It’s worth having the ability to modify your plan when circumstances change.  That’s not a flip-flop, it’s understanding how the world works and recognizing that stubbornness isn’t always the best policy.