Most pundits don’t give much attention to pols’ middle names. But once Republicans found out Barack Obama’s middle name was ‘Hussein’, well … see for yourself.
If you’re a white collar defense attorney who specializes in defending corporate clients against congressional investigations, you can’t wait until January.
Bush-Maliki summit postponed. Because of the leaked Hadley memo? Or because a chunk of Maliki’s government just resigned? At least the adults are in charge.
U.S. forced to apologize in writing to the man who the FBI mistakenly arrested in 2004 for aiding terrorist bombings of Spanish commuter trains. Oh, and he also gets $2 million.
Over at TPMCafe, Todd Gitlin has a post up which, in turn, picks up on a column by Harold Myerson. And it reminds me of a conversation we had here at TPM a few days ago along the lines that the comparisons between Iraq and Vietnam may actually be far too optimistic.
During the Vietnam war (and to an extent during all the Cold War proxy wars) the US always had a substantial anti-Communist constituency in the country. You can debate how large that constituency was and how great a constituency they were to support. But there’s no questioning the fact that they existed, just as there was in pretty much all the Latin American insurgency/Cold War proxy wars in the 20th century. What’s more, in the country’s in question, those anti-Communist constituencies were often quite powerful — certainly, in most cases, powerful out of proportion to their numbers.
In Iraq, however, it’s not clear we have anything remotely like that. True, there’s a smattering of western-educated sophisticates and liberals who probably would like Iraq to be more like the US. But that’s not to say that they necessarily like what we’re doing in the country — a mistaken leap of logic that routinely gets made. And among the major, powerful groups in the country we have at best, contingent and often momentary support from whomever we’re not against. So, we have a marriage of convenience with the Shi’as while we’re mauling the Sunnis, and vice versa. The Kurds are a significant exception to this general observation, but because of their relatively small slice of the population, their inherent antagonism toward most of the neighboring states and the fact that they’re geographically limited to the north, I’m not sure it’s an exception that changes the general truth.
This bleak situation showed itself most clearly in the recent discussion of administration thinking on just whose side we would choose to support if and when we finally decide to start calling the situation in Iraq a ‘civil war’. Going on four years running the place (officially or in effect) we’re still not certain who our friends are. And that’s really a round-about way of saying we don’t have any.
Experts: Hadley has no friggin’ clue what he’s talking about.
WaPo: “As late as Wednesday afternoon, it appeared that the White House was planning to go ahead with a three-way meeting that evening among Bush, Maliki and King Abdullah of Jordan. But when reporters showed up at the palace where the meeting was to take place, they were told by White House counselor Dan Bartlett that the session was off.”
WashTimes: “Rival Shi’ite and Sunni groups are massing their militias in expectation of major confrontations, Iraqis say, even as President Bush prepares to meet today with the nation’s embattled prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki. Mr. Bush’s meeting in Jordan is part of a wider attempt to involve Iraq’s neighbors in efforts to end Iraq’s vicious sectarian violence before it spills over into a larger regional conflict. But Iraqis on both sides of their nation’s sectarian divide report worrisome signs that the conflict will soon evolve into pitched battles between large armed groups.”
Calling everybody’s favorite federal agency “Kafkaesque,” a judge forces FEMA to resume payments to thousands of Katrina victims whose aid had been cut off. That and other news of the day in today’s Daily Muck.