Obama and Iraq: Mission Accomplished!

NYT:

Aides to the president said Mr. Obama approved his withdrawal plan at a meeting with his national security team Wednesday and would tell an audience of several thousand Marines and their families at Camp Lejeune, N.C., on Friday that he is bringing the current phase of the war to a close in August 2010.

“The combat, current combat mission in Iraq will end on August 31, 2010,” a senior administration official told reporters at a briefing under ground rules that he not be identified to avoid upstaging the president’s announcement. “At that point, the U.S. forces remaining in Iraq will undertake a new mission, a more limited mission.”

After August 2010, the Obama plan will leave behind 35,000 to 50,000 of the 142,000 American troops now in Iraq to advise and train Iraqi security forces, conduct discrete counterterrorism missions and protect American civilian and military personnel working in the country, including State Department reconstruction teams.

The residual troops, which the Obama administration is calling a “transition force,” will remain only through December 2011, when a strategic agreement negotiated by President George W. Bush before he left office mandates the withdrawal of all American troops.

A month or two after George W. Bush stood in front of the “Mission Accomplished” banner, I was sitting in a news meeting at the Kansas paper where I worked. I criticized a headline that referred to the most serious outbreak “since the end of the war.”

“The war’s not over,” I said.

“The president said it was,” responded the editor who had written the headline.

“No he didn’t,” I said, though I understood why the editor thought so. “He said major combat operations are over. There’s a difference, and it was a purposeful difference.”

I bring this up to make a point: The idea that the “combat mission” of U.S. troops in Iraq will end on August 31, 2010 is either extremely misguided. Or it is a lie.

That’s not fun to say about a president I supported, but there you have it. The fact of the matter is that the “training mission” of the remaining American troops will require those troops to accompany the Iraqi military on patrols. However diminished it is, there will almost certainly still be at least a low-level war going on at that point. There will almost certainly be combat. And and as a result of that combat, American troops will have to kill. They will be injured and die.

It won’t happen at quite the same rate as during the worst violence of 2006, to be sure, because the American footprint will be substantially reduced. Perhaps the president is banking on the American public and press to overlook substantially reduced numbers of casualties. But in proclaiming the end of the “combat mission,” President Obama is essentially asking the public to believe that 2010 will mark the end of combat.

It won’t.

UPDATE: Don’t get me wrong. I’m glad that all the troops will be out in 2011, according to the president’s comments today. But we should be honest about the likelihood of their combat involvement up to that point.

Barack Obama told you this was coming

My conservative friends at Infinite Monkeys are somewhat alarmed at the priorities reflected in President Obama’s new proposed budget. They’re trying to reconcile themselves that we’re now in a “liberal moment” that’s a Bizarro World version of the early 1980s “conservative moment.”

Dr. Zaius, in particular, worries about how quickly the Obama agenda is being enacted, and concludes:

If Obama ran on any of the policies he’s cramming down our throats today, he would have taken exactly zero of the Red States he did to gain election in November. That is not an insignificant point. And, that’s, as I said, more than a bit troubling.

Leave aside, for a moment, the apparent attempt to deny the legitimacy of a duly elected president and Congress. Zaius is dead wrong on the facts.

Obama did run on the idea that taxes would go up for people making more than $250,000 a year — it was that proposal, in fact, that gave us both Joe The Plumber and the socialism meme that dominated the last weeks of the campaign.

Obama did run on expanding access to and reforming healthcare: It was a major bone of contention during the primary campaign because Hillary Clinton and her supporters charged that Obama’s plan didn’t go far enough.

He did promise big new investments in green energy and an effort to reduce oil consumption. That’s why we got cries of “drill baby drill” during the GOP convention.

I’m not going to make the case that Obama told us everything that was coming. But the broad outlines were certainly clear enough — and debated widely enough — that John McCain and the conservative establishment were making the case against them last fall.

And yet: Obama still won some red states.

My baby boy is frickin’ cute

I promise not to do this often. But good God, this is a cute baby!

That's my boy!

The death of the Rocky Mountain News

About a year ago, I spent a few days huddled in the offices of the Rocky Mountain News with Editor John Temple and some other bright, friendly folks, trying to launch a little political website that — unfortunately for me — died before it had been fully birthed.

Tomorrow, the Rocky prints its final edition after nearly 150 years.

I’ll dispense with analysis for now — except to note that this is probably the beginning of a very bloody year for American journalism. When the dust settles, there will be journalism. It will look very different, however. And that’s fine, but there’s a great deal of pain to endure before we get to that point.

Right now, that pain is being borne by Temple, Linda Sease and Vincent Carroll, among other good people I got the chance to know during my brief time at Scripps. I wish them well. They are in my thoughts.

Ban on casket photos to be lifted

AP:

News organizations will be allowed to photograph the homecomings of America’s war dead under a new Pentagon policy, defense and congressional officials said Thursday.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates has decided to allow photos of flag-draped caskets at Dover Air Force Base, Del., if the families of the fallen troops agree, the officials told The Associated Press.

This seems reasonable to me.

Kenneth the Page responds to Bobby Jindal

Just so you know, this may be the only worthwhile thing that Jimmy Fallon ever does on his show:

Karl Rove calls kettle black

Mr. Obama portrays himself as a nonideological, bipartisan voice of reason. Everyone resorts to straw men occasionally, but Mr. Obama’s persistent use of the device is troubling. Continually characterizing those who disagree with you in a fundamentally dishonest way can be the sign of a person who lacks confidence in the merits of his ideas.”

–Karl Rove in today’s Wall Street Journal

Some of Rove’s darker tactics cut even closer to the bone. One constant throughout his career is the prevalence of whisper campaigns against opponents. The 2000 primary campaign, for example, featured a widely disseminated rumor that John McCain, tortured as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, had betrayed his country under interrogation and been rendered mentally unfit for office. More often a Rove campaign questions an opponent’s sexual orientation. Bush’s 1994 race against Ann Richards featured a rumor that she was a lesbian, along with a rare instance of such a tactic’s making it into the public record—when a regional chairman of the Bush campaign allowed himself, perhaps inadvertently, to be quoted criticizing Richards for “appointing avowed homosexual activists” to state jobs.

…Some of Kennedy’s campaign commercials touted his volunteer work, including one that showed him holding hands with children. “We were trying to counter the positives from that ad,” a former Rove staffer told me, explaining that some within the See camp initiated a whisper campaign that Kennedy was a pedophile. “It was our standard practice to use the University of Alabama Law School to disseminate whisper-campaign information,” the staffer went on. “That was a major device we used for the transmission of this stuff. The students at the law school are from all over the state, and that’s one of the ways that Karl got the information out—he knew the law students would take it back to their home towns and it would get out.” This would create the impression that the lie was in fact common knowledge across the state. “What Rove does,” says Joe Perkins, “is try to make something so bad for a family that the candidate will not subject the family to the hardship. Mark is not your typical Alabama macho, beer-drinkin’, tobacco-chewin’, pickup-drivin’ kind of guy. He is a small, well-groomed, well-educated family man, and what they tried to do was make him look like a homosexual pedophile. That was really, really hard to take.”

–Joshua Green, “Karl Rove in a Corner,” 2004

Scientists Target Sheep Belching to Cut Methane

That’s the title of this Wall Street Journal story that, I think, is supposed to get us wringing our hands about the madness of government regulation run amok. Consider:

Methane is among the most potent greenhouse gases, and researchers now believe livestock industries are a major contributor to climate change, responsible for more greenhouse-gas emissions than cars are, according to the United Nations.

Plenty of people, including farmers, think the problem of sheep burps is so much hot air. But governments are coming under pressure to put a cork in it, and many farmers fear that new livestock regulations could follow. They worry that environmentalists will someday persuade the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to seek to tax bovine belches.

Tax belching? That’s crazy!

Well, yes. But.

It’s important to consider that the existence of giant herds of cows and sheep roaming around the world is not really a natural phenomenon, but rather the result of human activity — the industrialization of the food chain, really. Michael Polian documents this phenomenon rather well in The Omnivore’s Dilemma; suffice it to say that Western cultures are manufacturing meat in a manner not too different from how we manufacture cars, and with all the attendant environmental effects. This would be one thing if we needed meat to feed the planet, but — and I say this as a hypocritical carnivore — meat’s actually a hugely inefficient way of producing calories for human consumption.

So considering — and trying to limit — the environmental impact of meat manufacturing isn’t really all that crazy. Framing it as a “fart tax” is effective, but it misses some important points.

The Republican austerity movement

Gail Collins in the New York Times:

Louisiana has gotten $130 billion in post-Katrina aid. How is it that the stars of the Republican austerity movement come from the states that suck up the most federal money? Taxpayers in New York send way more to Washington than they get back so more can go to places like Alaska and Louisiana. Which is fine, as long as we don’t have to hear their governors bragging about how the folks who elected them want to keep their tax money to themselves. Of course they do! That’s because they’re living off ours.

Bill Kristol has a newspaper column again!

Standing athwart history, yelling "Maybe later!"

Now he’s at the Washington Post. And today’s he’s giving advice to Congressional Republicans: Obstruct President Obama. Obstruct him some more. And when that’s done, obstruct him again.

There’s no talk about Republicans putting forth a competing agenda, because — as Kristol himself admits — Republicans don’t have one. That’s something they’ll have to come up with in between obstructing:

Long term, they need fresh thinking in a host of areas of domestic policy, thinking that builds on previous conservative achievements but that deals with the new economic and social realities. In the short term, Republicans need to show a tactical agility and political toughness far greater than their predecessors did in the 1960s and the 1930s.

Right. Figuring out how to solve today’s challenges can wait. There’s too much obstructing to do.