From The New York Times…

Late last year, top Bush administration officials decided to take a step they had long resisted. They drafted a secret plan to make it easier for the Pentagon’s Special Operations forces to launch missions into the snow-capped mountains of Pakistan to capture or kill top leaders of Al Qaeda.

. . .

After the Sept. 11 attacks, President Bush committed the nation to a “war on terrorism” and made the destruction of Mr. bin Laden’s network the top priority of his presidency. But it is increasingly clear that the Bush administration will leave office with Al Qaeda having successfully relocated its base from Afghanistan to Pakistan’s tribal areas, where it has rebuilt much of its ability to attack from the region and broadcast its messages to militants across the world.

Afghanistan: Lowered Priority…

What is the purpose of our troops being in Afghanistan? At first, they were meant to capture Bin Laden, to topple the Taliban, so as to punish a regime that had allowed Al Qaeda to base itself there, and to deny Al Qaeda that base. But now? Presumably, they are meant to prevent the Taliban from coming back to power, and providing Al Qaeda a future base. But it’s one thing to strike at an enemy, another to deploy troops indefinitely to prevent a possible future threat. There is something to be said for defending a friendly Afghan regime, however weak, as opposed to the diplomatic and military costs of toppling an enemy regime once again–but still, the threat from Al Qaeda in Afghanistan must be taken as a diminishing hypothetical. And, yes, honor demands we capture Bin Laden — but we muffed our best chance, and keeping an army in Afghanistan in perpetuity is too great a price to pay.

What do you think?

[cross-posted at The Care2 Election Blog]

Stephen Colbert gave a “Tip of the hat and wag of the finger” to the U.S. troops in Afghanistan, for making President George W. Bush jealous. How? Well, on March 13th, Bush visited the troops there, and actually told them: “I must say, I’m a little envious…I think it would be a fantastic experience to be on the front lines.” No joke (pun intended).

READ FULL POST AT ConnieTalk.

This is from a post I’ve just done at the Care2 Election Blog.

Is it me, or did Bush just pull another bait and switch in the middle east?

Bush calls for Mideast Peace…

As he began his nine-day trip to the Middle East, President Bush said on Wednesday that he saw a historic opportunity for peace in the troubled region. Bush said he hoped to see an end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by the time he leaves office in January 2009.

Gateway Pundit

As President Bush spoke out about the prospects for peace between Israel and the Palestinians in 2008, protesters in Gaza were shouting “Death to America! Death to Israel!” in Gaza City.

TIME – Why the Arabs Are Skeptical

Bush Tells Israel’s Olmert: I don’t believe our Iranian intel either…

READ FULL POST AT CARE2 ELECTION BLOG

It’s a very hard decision for military families to publicly announce their disgust with a president. However, with all the lies and failures of Bush and his administration you have to applaud these brave families for speaking out. I’m sure the Republican spin machine and war profiteers will inform us of what the military families really meant to say.

WASHINGTON – Families with ties to the military, long a reliable source of support for wartime presidents, disapprove of President Bush and his handling of the war in Iraq, with a majority concluding the invasion was not worth it, a Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll has found.

• The views of the military community, which includes active-duty service members, veterans and their family members, mirror those of the overall adult population, a sign that the strong military endorsement that the administration often pointed to has dwindled in the war’s fifth year.

• Nearly six out of every 10 military families disapprove of Bush’s job performance and the way he has run the war, rating him only slightly better than the general population does.

READ FULL POST HERE

*More on this from Blue Girl, Red State. 

This is from a post at Blue Bloggin.

WASHINGTON, Nov 8 (IPS) – A National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran has been held up for more than a year in an effort to force the intelligence community to remove dissenting judgments on the Iranian nuclear programme, and thus make the document more supportive of U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney’s militarily aggressive policy toward Iran, according to accounts of the process provided by participants to two former Central Intelligence Agency officers.

Cheney’s grip on the empire is weakening.

But this pressure on intelligence analysts, obviously instigated by Cheney himself, has not produced a draft estimate without those dissenting views, these sources say. The White House has now apparently decided to release the unsatisfactory draft NIE, but without making its key findings public.

Giraldi said the White House had decided to postpone any decision on the internal release of the NIE until after the November 2006 elections.

Cheney’s desire for a “clean” NIE that could be used to support his aggressive policy toward Iran was apparently a major factor in the replacement of John Negroponte as director of national intelligence in early 2007.

READ FULL POST HERE

This is from a post by Libby at the Impolitic.

The NIE report on Iran continues to preoccupy the bloggers today. I’ve done my posts at Newshoggers where I unpacked some of the spin and at Detroit News where I point out that Bush doesn’t understand the concept acheiving goals by rewarding for good behavior, not punishing more severely to ‘prevent’ future bad behavior. No wonder his kids are so screwed up.

This story is moving fast. By the time I posted those two, a new video surfaced of the press conference showing Bush claiming that no one told him about the contents of the report until yesterday. Is it me, or can you almost see his nose growing while he struggles to keep that former incessant smirk off his face?

READ FULL POST

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See video and over 260 comments at Think Progress.

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The Usual Suspects are jumping all over a report about Iran released by the NIE that Iran had stopped its nuclear weapons program in 2003, contrary to prior intelligence reports. This, according to the predictable far left, is ‘evidence’ that Bush and Cheney have been “lying” all this time about Iran.

Contrary to their knee-jerk reactions, that’s not the case, as we learn from the Washington Post:

While concluding that Iran’s weapons program is now halted, the NIE presents a mixed view of Tehran’s nuclear ambitions. It portrays Iran’s ruling clerics as susceptible to international pressure, having abandoned an extensive and costly covert nuclear program in the face of threatened economic sanctions and global censure.

READ FULL POST

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*This is how Susie at Suburban Guerrilla sees it…

Fascinating that the neocons are spinning the new intelligence report as evidence they were right about Iran – and proof they need to continue their hard-line policies.

Now just you watch. Democrats will be coming out of the woodwork to support them.

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This is from The Impolitic on the NIE Report.

The National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) released today concludes that “in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program.” It adds that “Tehran had not restarted its nuclear weapons program as of mid-2007,” and the country is “less determined to develop nuclear weapons than we have been judging since 2005.”

The assessment, which relies on data collected through Oct. 31, was reportedly completed in 2006, but was blocked by administration officials who wanted it to be more in line with Vice President Cheney’s hardline views.

As The Washington Monthly’s Kevin Drum notes, the NIE’s “basic parameters were almost certainly common knowledge in the White House” at least by last year, when the document was finished. Yet even in the past two months, the administration has continued to push its faulty, inflammatory rhetoric and claim that Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons. Some examples:

READ FULL POST AND OVER 280 COMMENTS

During his time in office Donald Rumsfeld used to write 20 to 60 brief memos each day to his staff and he called these memos snowflakes. They gave advice on how to manipulate the press and the public and some of the worst were things like should terrorism be considered a “worldwide insurgency”, “go out and push people back”, “keep elevating the threat” and “link Iraq to Iran”.

High-ranking military experts say an attack would lead to world economic chaos, or even what Bush calls ‘World War III.’

US Vice President Dick Cheney — the power behind the throne, the eminence grise, the man with the (very) occasional grandfatherly smile — is notorious for his propensity for secretiveness and behind-the-scenes manipulation. He’s capable of anything, say friends as well as enemies. Given this reputation, it’s no big surprise that Cheney has already asked for a backroom analysis of how a war with Iran might begin.

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