Apart from Sen. Barack Obama's trip abroad, the top political campaign story of the past two days has been the accuracy of a claim by Sen. John McCain concerning the "surge" in Iraq.    McCain accused Obama of not knowing his history on this subject -- but Obama forces, bloggers and some media outlets quickly charged that it was McCain whose account of the timing of the  "Anbar awakening" was false.  

It then became a TV story when it was revealed that CBS had edited an interview with McCain on this subject, substituting his answer to the key question (where he allegedly got his facts wrong) with his reply to another one (an attack on Obama).  

But The New York Times' summary today, in seeking "balancing" quotes, did not reveal the background of its key pro-McCain source.

Put Zakaria's new show on CNN in the conservative column. Last weeks show featured Douglas Feith and Henry Kissinger. This week's show includes the dynamic duo of Michael O'Hanlon and Ken Pollack.

This is an effort to spread some real knowledge about Iran and it's influence in Iraq.
Yes, knowledge gained by one who knows the area like few commentators do.
Knowledge, not propaganda, which is all we hear from The Washington Post, and most media types and "experts."

What we used to simply call "truth" has gone by the wayside.

Politicians such as McSame, Bush/Cheney, Rice, and sadly, Hilliary "obliterate"-Iran Clinton all seem to have the same goal and it is not protecting our freedoms. It is trying to controll oil-rich countries. McCain just accidentally admitted it. What they are good at is in obfuscating the truth. They have taken on the nefarious practice of confusing a lot of propaganda with a snippet of truth, and then blurring it all together with the hope that The People will not understand and see through their shameful tactics.

What does a true expert know? Can you stand the truth, America?

Below you will find truths, reported by the man I believe to be the most objective and knowledgeable source on Iraq and the Mideast today.Nir Rosen's article.

Whatever happened to Colin Powell's Pottery Barn Rule: "You break it, you buy it"?

Iraq's Financial Free Ride May End

By ANNE FLAHERTY

WASHINGTON (AP) — Iraq's financial free ride may be over. After five years, Republicans and Democrats seem to have found common ground on at least one aspect of the war. From the fiercest war foes to the most steadfast Bush supporters, they are looking at Iraq's surging oil income and saying Baghdad should start picking up the tab, particularly for rebuilding hospitals, roads, power lines and the rest of the shattered country.

"I think the American people are growing weary not only of the war, but they are looking at why Baghdad can't pay more of these costs. And the answer is they can," says Sen. Ben Nelson of Nebraska.

Ben Nelson, of course, was one of the bright lights who voted to invade Iraq in the first place.

Today, March 4, Diane Rehm held discussion on her NPR program on the cost of the occupation of Iraq.  She allowed Michael O'Hanlon of the Brookings Institution all the room he needed to spout Bush neo-con rhetoric, and did not challenge it a bit.  What gives?

The program began with a call-in from Linda Bilmes, a Harvard prof at the Kennedy School of Government, who along with Joseph Stiglitz (Columbia prof and Nobel economist) authored the new book  The Three Trillion Dollar War.  The authors present a comprehensive accounting of the staggering cost of the invasion and occupation of Iraq.

'...for when he's commander in chief." -- Tracy Jopek, speaking about her son Ryan David Jopek.

I'll explain the quote in the diary below.  It has to do with one big reason why this election is about a lot more than cable bloviators' snide comments, campaign consultants' spin, ads about who will and won't debate, or diary flame wars.  

One big reason why we need to move forward.  And how we might.

Barack Obama, according to Michael O’Hanlon in his recent Wall Street Journal opinion piece, “has some work to do.” Obama advertises himself as the candidate who will harmonize all the voices, raucous and discordant and vehemently partisan, contending on the stage of American politics. But for O’Hanlon it is already clear that Obama has no intention of drawing together all the rowdy and dissonant factions into one all-inclusive chorus of comity and hope. Quite the contrary, Obama is being deliberately exclusionary and shunting off to the wings a significant portion of the American electorate. The loss, O'Hanlon warns, will be Obama’s, for by cutting himself off from that portion, he is also cutting himself off from the “non-ideological, nonpartisan wisdom of the American people that he seeks to lead.”

Crossposted at Progressive Historians

Everybody is aware of the mess that is Pakistan.  It was getting messy even before Bhutto's assassination.  But did you know there were plans afoot to send troops to Pakistan to "stabilize" it?

This is not good. So not good.

The man who devised the Bush administration's Iraq troop surge has urged the US to consider sending elite troops to Pakistan to seize its nuclear weapons if the country descends into chaos.

In a series of scenarios drawn up for Pakistan, Frederick Kagan, a former West Point military historian, has called for the White House to consider various options for an unstable Pakistan.

These include: sending elite British or US troops to secure nuclear weapons capable of being transported out of the country and take them to a secret storage depot in New Mexico or a "remote redoubt" inside Pakistan; sending US troops to Pakistan's north-western border to fight the Taliban and al-Qaida; and a US military occupation of the capital Islamabad, and the provinces of Punjab, Sindh and Baluchistan if asked for assistance by a fractured Pakistan military, so that the US could shore up President Pervez Musharraf and General Ashfaq Kayani, who became army chief this week.

Over the weekend we sent John Negroponte over to Pakistan to do the old lean on Pervez Musharraf.  This was the beginnings of the "surge of diplomacy" that people are calling for in Iraq.  The problem, as it would be in Iraq, is that it's too late and the Bush Administration is too discredited for any of it to matter.

A special US mission to the embattled Pakistan president Pervez Musharraf ended in failure yesterday, and the Bush administration is inceasingly alarmed about the possible collapse of the government. There are also fears that its nuclear weapons could end up in the hands of Islamist extremists.

John Negroponte, the US deputy secretary of state, flew out of Islamabad after Musharraf, a close ally of the US, rejected his call to end emergency rule, to free political prisoners, resign from his post as army commander and hold free and fair elections in January.

Just days after revelations of fake FEMA press conferences and the altering of a CDC report to Congress, the Bush disinformation machine is at it again.  As ThinkProgress reports, the White House redistributed to reporters an edited version of an ABC story in the hopes of painting a picture of unvarnished progress in Iraq.  Apparently, deleting damaging references to the stillborn political process in Iraq is all in a day's work for a White House committed to helping President Bush "catapult the propaganda."

One of the zillion infuriating aspects of the post-9/11 world has been deceptive claims by various people about what they said in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. It's hard to choose the worst of this very bad lot, but "liberal" hawk Michael O'Hanlon certainly ranks high on the list. Like many of others in that category, O'Hanlon criticizes the Cheney-Bush Administration's "mismanagement" of the Iraq war and occupation. But, thanks to the media's willingness to give a forum to people who were utterly wrong about the Iraq attack, he still has a perch from which to say the attack was the right thing to do, and that things are getting better.

He, of course, isn't alone. It's not just the "liberal" hawks that make this argument, but the barons of the NeoCon cabal like Bill Kristol, as well. They're perfectly willing to blast the administration for screwing up a good thing. But not to concede that it wasn't a good thing. Which can only make you wonder what the real ideological difference is between them.

Obviously not everything said by those who were opposed to the Iraq attack from the beginning turned out to be right. But in wwwLand five years ago,  "amateurs" displayed common sense and prescience that seems to have been utterly forgotten by the traditional media and the likes O'Hanlon - whom the trad-med now ludicrously call longtime war critics. Despite their connections to people who supposedly had the best inside information, these purveyors of hawk wisdom got it completely wrong over and over again. The amateurs - who in those days relied simply on what they knew of history and what they could glue together from tidbits that did manage to sneak into the public sphere - repeatedly got it right.

Here is an example from Daily Kos exactly five years ago, October 15, 2002:

Bush has made some pretty asinine comments while trying to justify a war with Iraq. But this one tops them all:

   

"We need to think about Saddam Hussein using al-Qaida to do his dirty work, to not leave fingerprints behind," Bush said Monday at a rally for Michigan's GOP candidates.

   "This is a man who we know has had connections with al-Qaida. This is a man who, in my judgment, would like to use al-Qaida as a forward army," Bush said later at a Dearborn, Mich. fund-raiser.

For the record, there are no known ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda, and all evidence suggests the two entities are fundamentally opposed (Al Qaeda is a fundamentalist organization, Hussein is veheme[n]tly secular). If they have a common bond, it's that they both hate the US -- definitely not enough to suggest any alliance. ...

So Bush will keep making stuff up, throwing his b.s. justifications out and hoping one of them, someday, sticks.

Five years later, according to an early September The New York Times/CBS News Poll, 60% of Americans now believe Mister Bush did make things up to mislead the country into the Iraq attack. But the effectiveness of that lying is shown by the fact that 33 percent of all Americans - including 40 percent of Republicans and a shocking 27 percent of Democrats - believe that Saddam Hussein was personally involved in the attacks on September 11.

Many liberal hawk enablers assisted in that deceit. And yet they still are accorded respect and a podium from which to provide fresh advice on how to proceed in foreign policy - both in Iraq and elsewhere. As if yesterday never happened.

Michael O'Hanlon, one of Hillary Clinton's foreign policy advisers, and a well-known Democratic hawk, took aim at retired General Ricardo Sanchez for Sanchez's pointed criticism of the Bush administration, the hollow "surge strategy," and our nation's never-ending "nightmare" in Iraq.

(more)

Perhaps, like me, you're less than convinced that any of the leading presidential candidates can be trusted entirely to adopt a mature foreign policy, however essential. Perhaps you're wondering whether they'll definitively and forever sweep into the landfill of history all the many outrages against decency that President Bush has mounded up around the White House, like a fortress of so much unkempt manure.

Perhaps you're concerned that once again "liberals" will try to compete with "conservatives" in bellicosity, chest-thumping, strong-on-defensism, mine-shaft-gapism, and so forth—thus insuring some kind of continuity in the insane policies of the Bush administration. Perhaps, for example, you fear that each and every one of them would ultimately refuse to withdraw from Iraq (notwithstanding everything), out of an excess of caution regarding what the "serious people" in Washington might think of their hawkish credentials.

There's reason to be worried, because by now virtually every one of the candidates has publicly taken an obstreperous or incautious stance on some foreign policy issue...threatening Iran, for example. It already looks like a race to the bottom, and I fear that there'll be a lot of table-pounding before the primaries are over.

Well, whadya know about that?  Strange how this "librul" voice from such a "librul" Think Tank coulda written such glowing, wonderful things about the SURGE! and the unbiased SURGE! general Petraeus.  As Glenn Greenwald and others exposed this fraud of a "librul" voice on Iraq to be nothing more than a fervent pro-invasion, pro-SURGE! supporter at all stops, it was maddening enough to see our darn "librul" media fail to unveil that tiny piece of information about O'Hanlon's background and true support.

Welp, looks like our durn "librul" media missed something else rather important to know about our "librul" friend.  Strangely, Faux News picked it up rather inadvertently.  

The Atlantic Community Think Tank in Germany presents a comparative overview of the most discussed strategies for Iraq.

Seriously, why does this man still get any ink at all, much less access to the op-ed page of the Washington Post? Ostensibly there to answer his critics, O'Hanlon reasserts the basic lie that should have discredited him and Pollack before the Times printed the op-ed that created the furor that O'Hanlon is supposedly responding to.

But back to the most recent lie, which frames the entire piece:

Unfortunately, much of the blogosphere and other media outlets have emphasized the wrong question, challenging the integrity of anyone who dares to express politically incorrect views about Iraq. Last week, Jonathan Finer criticized on this page [" Green Zone Blinders," Aug. 18] a New York Times essay that Ken Pollack and I wrote, as well as the comments of several senators, for claiming too much insight based on short trips to Iraq. Finer suggested that we did not leave the Green Zone, although we frequently did, on this and other trips, and he ignored how critical Pollack and I have been of administration policy in the past.

Talk about emphasizing the wrong question. For the umpteenth time, O'Hanlon and Pollack have been among the most steadfast supporters of this administration's Iraq policy from the outset, and as Yglesias demonstrates, have had ample opportunity to express their support in the traditional media.

But just to refresh everyone's memories on that, there's Greenwald's definitive post on O'Hanlon's greatest hits (my personal favorite--"On April 9, 2003, he published a piece for the Brookings Daily War Report entitled 'Was the Strategy Brilliant?' -- in which he struggled with the deeply Serious question of whether Don Rumsfeld's strategy was unprecedentedly brilliant or merely mind-blowingly smart"). There's also Greg Sargent, and Think Progress.

Beyond that, how many times has this guy been proven wrong? He and Pollack are among those Very Serious People who screwed up, who got this whole mess wrong from the very beginning--from WMD to the escalation. So not only was he incredibly wrong from the very beginning on what has turned out to be the most serious foreign policy blunder of modern times, but he's lying about his role in it. Seriously, why does this man have any credibility at all anymore?

From Steven Hurst at the AP come this article I expect to see in many of the Sunday Newspapers, by the title Iraq Body Count Running at Double Pace. This should inject some reality into the spin that we are being swamped with and not a min. too late. Let's take a look at a few of those numbers that have grown while O'Hanlon and Baird make their outrageous claims of success.

Iraq is suffering about double the number of war-related deaths throughout the country compared with last year - an average daily toll of 33 in 2006, and 62 so far this year.

More real facts on the flip.