OK, peace in the ME, then cleaning up financial irregularity.
What’s on the agenda for June and July?

Thanks very much bmaz.

In Africa AFRICOM continues the militarization of political space. Mostly the same people are running Africa policy that ran it under Bush. As Steve Coll writes:

The larger issue here is the momentum that military liaison creates when it becomes the heavily funded nexus of U.S. policy. Africa Command’s mission is to “engage” with brother armies, its commanders have a professional bias to action, and they often do not take strategic direction from civilians until they are ready to present their war, engagement and training plans, whether in Colombia or Pakistan or Uganda. Military liaison, even if it is conceived progressively, becomes its own self-fulfilling destination, especially when the rest of the U.S. government is starved, by comparison, for resources.

I am hoping there will be a change in direction, funding, and focus for Africa as well.

I’ve got a buddy in the Green Party who I work with and respect a lot, but I did a piece on The US, Russia and Georgia showing that (Thank Heavens!) we’ve apparently decided to ditch Georgia and what looks like the entire neocon policy of hostility to Russia. My buddy responded with the Naderite assertion that there are no differences between the Rs and the Ds. Sorry, but the above piece and the news that Boehner wants to freeze spending in the midst of an economic downturn convinces me that, despite Obama’s actions on presidential authority (Very bad), that yes, there are indeed very substantial differences.

Thanks ratfood, macaquerman. I hope the truth will out whatever happens.

Interesting that in that feel-good piece, the word “Iraq” did not appear by BMaz. It’s almost as if it were the Bush administration speaking, who didn’t want to talk about the fact that there are more troops now in Iraq than were there at the beginning of the surge, and that it’s still costing us that $2.5 billion a week to string this out…to what purpose is not fully known.

I’m not into optimistic “mid-east” reports just now. When we leave Iraq what is left is not going to be user friendly to us. Nor, to the Fortune 500. And we ARE leaving, because if Obama hasn’t made substantial withdrawals by the mid-terms, we will lose most of what we gained in 2008, and if he doesn’t have us down to a bare minimum, by 2012, he may be a one-term president.

I’m also not hopeful that the factionalism that Bush released/created is going to continue to lie relatively doggo if we even cut our troop levels by half. Baghdad is a rat’s maze of checkpoints, blast-barriers, and ethnically cleansed neighborhoods. The south, where most of Iraq’s reserves are, will have very little incentive to continue to support the central government, without our troops there to back up Maliki’s security forces.

Iraq has never been anything but a ticking time bomb, as long as we occupy it and try to determine it’s future.

As regards Hillary; it IS encouraging that Obama seems to have put her on a short leash and has told her to stay the hell out of Iraq, and to not lend Petraeus and Odierno, the vestigial warbots, any credibility by staging photo-ops with them. I hope that restriction continues long enough for him to get a time-window to “reassign” those two worthies before they get into full-on monkeywrench mode.

Now, are “the good old” days in Iraq. The Brits are pulling their 4,000 troops out by June and when Al-Sadr decides to start flexing his street muscle, and when the Sunnis don’t have to worry as much about CentCom sending troops back into their turf, it’s going to get rather dicey, to put it mildly.

Oh; the last time I checked, Iraq was part of the mid-east.

I think that appointing George Mitchell was a great move, but that most of Hillary Clinton’s actions have not helped. She really hasn’t said anything that the Bush administration wasn’t saying, and hasn’t done anything about healing the wounds inflicted by the Gaza conflict, which has greatly damaged Obama’s position in the Arab world. It was one thing to say “we have only one president at a time”, but then for Clinton to mouth the same awful platitudes that American politicians feel they must say for domestic audiences, only on an international stage, is just disasterous (justifying Israel’s destruction of Gaza as legitimate self-defense) and harmful to US interests.

Leen @ 97

Thanks for the heads up for http://www.thewashingtonnote.com. Worthy site.

It is not difficult to encounter very real pushback at many sites if one chooses to take the blinders off regarding Israel’s occupation history in West Bank and Gaza.

Needless to say one can easily imagine how Nazi Germany was able to pull off what it did during the 1930’s out thru 1945.

Gaza is now getting the same basic treatment here in United States.

Too many Americans refuse to face and see what Israel is doing in West Bank and Gaza. Do not want to take the blinders off.

It is easier to stay blind. To find comfort in false myths and storytell.

Israel is not the innocent victim. Is not worthy of the levels of American funding/militarism support it gathers or demands from WashingtonDC. Israel is not the victim in ME to be sure.Going right back to the start Israel has inflicted much death dealing on the Palestinians.

Israel likes to portray itself as the eternal victim but Israel is a liar in doing so.

Just ask the children of Gaza. Those the IDF and IAF have not killed.

Yet.

Maq; here’s something positive: write pieces that include the situation in Iraq

He did win, for which I am thankful, but I think he made a mistake in giving Clinton state.

There ARE other countries, but none of them has the importance of Iraq. Not even Afghanistan. Offering a timetable was tough enough, when the current military leaders there clearly didn’t want one. We won’t even start drawing down until September, when 12,000 troops are scheduled to leave. What’s it going to be like when we get down to half of that 142,000?
Tell us, Maq; do you think that the Iraqi security forces will go into Sadr City to shut down mortar attacks on the green zone without our help?
Excuse me, but I am negatively skeptical.

The Iraqi parliament STILL can’t meet outside of Fortress Amurka.

What you and the rest of the people who don’t want to talk about Iraq are betting on is the same come-card that Bush and Co. were peddling to us; that we were creating something in which the Iraqis would join hands and sing the song. In plainspeak, I think it was bullshit when Bush said it, and it’s bullshit when a democrat says it.

When we leave, the best that can happen is a fractious-to-the-point-of-random-killing “country” most of which will be dominated by the nearly 2/3rds Shiite majority there. Which will also be exchanging ass-rubs with Iran; the big winners in operation endless clusterfuck. BTW: Hillary’s jawboning of them is as laughable as was Rice’s. Time is on their side, and they know it.

Additionally, the kurds give fuck-all about “greater Iraq” and what they will do is anyone’s guess, but article 140, the referendum on who rules Kirkuk, is their hole card, and they can play it anytime they want to.

It’s not that I don’t see enough pieces on Iraq. It’s just that when some blogger starts talking about progress in the mid-east, WITHOUT mentioning the realites of Iraq, little bushian bells start going off. That they don’t for you, is your problem, not mine.
So far, all that Obama has done is agree to keep stringing out this wretched mistake. Ostensibly, for another 19 months, with all kinds of vaguery about “combat forces” V.
“training units”, etc., etc.
The fact is, he’s going to have to bite the bullet and get us out, and when that happens, what’s left is not going to be an asset to us, in any way, shape, or form. What he needs to do is can Petraeus and Odierno, preferably in the next 3-4 months, and then move that schedule up, with WAY more numbers leaving, in this period of relative tranquility. Now is the time for the bandaid-on-the-hairy-leg solution. If he waits until just before the mid-terms (and the withdrawal, at this point, is so end-loaded that, as YOU chose, the operative word IS “offered”) then the risks from getting us out will be compounded times over.

The short of it is this: The surge succeeded. It kept the lid on until the people who created this bloody Venusian firedrill, could get out of town and drop the pinless hand-grenade in Obama’s lap. The longer he waits to dispose of it, the worse it’s going to be when he does…IF he does. And ignoring this while chortling about Hillary’s maiden junket, is toting the hod for the people who helped get us into this mess. We don’t need to be doing that.

Watch Basra and it’s environs, for the results of the Brits leaving. If the Sadrists and the other militias start moving and stirring, and Maliki sends troops in again, it’s likely that they won’t be able to suppress it, without our military to help them. And that’s the first little mine canary that bears watching.

I think the top end of our military, now purged of realists like Fallon, would, in their heart of hearts, be perfectly at ease with a reversion to the bad old days. It would validate their staying, and cut the legs off Obama’s plan to leave. Which is why I say he should take advantage of the stability that’s there now, to make big draw-downs relatively soon.

It’s also why I say that talking about mid-east progress without mentioning Iraq, is laughable.