Chambliss Pulling Some Old Dirty Campaign Tricks Out of the Bag
Oct 29, 2008

With 6 days to go until election time, the Senate race in Georgia between incumbent Saxby Chambliss and Council-endorsed candidate Jim Martin is turning into one hot mess. The race, once considered a sailed ship for Republicans as Chambliss was expected to carry his seat in November, now has the attention of politicos on both sides, with both the RNC and the DNC pouring funds into the state.

This will be Chambliss’ first shot at re-election, and neither his team nor the RNC is going to let this go without a fight, and probably, a dirty one. Chambliss is well known for his dirty Karl Rove-style campaign tactics.  In 2002, his campaign made ads that put his opponent's face – then incumbent Max Cleland – next to Osama Bin Laden's and Saddamm Hussein’s face, even though Cleland was a disabled Vietnam War veteran. Heck, even McCain found it “reprehensible.”

In 2003, McCain told the Washington Post this:

"I've never seen anything like that ad. Putting pictures of Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden next to a picture of a man who left three limbs on the battlefield -- it's worse than disgraceful, it's reprehensible."

If only that McCain was still around today.

Will Iraqis still oppose pact?
Oct 17, 2008

Cross posted from Iraq Insider

For the past several months, the United States and Iraq have gone back and forth over negotiations on a proposed security agreement. Among the most contentious issues have been whether there should be a withdrawal date for U.S. forces and whether U.S. soldiers and contractors should be subject to Iraqi law.

It appears as if there was a breakthrough in negotiations this week. Yesterday, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice briefed senior American lawmakers about the draft agreement, which now apparently exists in textual form. This morning, U.S. negotiators in Iraq, along with Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker and Gen. Ray Odierno, will go over the text of the proposed accord with senior Senate and House aides in a video conference at the White House. Congressional attendance has been limited to 12 people from the leadership and the two relevant committees in the House and Senate.

It is impossible to predict what Congress will do about the agreement before we know what is actually in the text. Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki is scheduled to submit the draft agreement today to Iraq's political and national security council. If it passes the council and winds its way through other government ministries, it then will go to the Iraqi Parliament, where al Maliki has promised an up-or-down vote.

Even though the agreement mandates that U.S. forces leave Iraq by 2012, there may still be widespread opposition to the agreement among Iraqi parliamentarians because the pact reportedly limits Iraq's ability to try U.S. contractors or soldiers for major crimes committed off-duty and off-base.

Back in July, I tallied up the number of Iraqi leaders who publicly opposed the agreement. I counted at least 49 Shiites, Sunnis, Kurds, and Shabaks from most of Iraq's major political parties: Dawa, United Iraqi Alliance, Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council (SIIC), Fadhila, Sadrist Movement, Badr Organization, Iraqi Accord Front (al-Tawafuq), Iraqi National List, and National Dialogue Front.

Will this opposition continue? Will Iraqis be satisfied with an agreement that keeps Americans in their country until 2012? Or will they consider that continued presence too long to satisfy the demands of the Iraqi people, many of whom want the United States out now?

With Iraqi provincial elections scheduled for early next year, we should not underestimate the universality of political pandering. If Iraqis dislike this agreement and oppose U.S. forces remaining in their country until 2012, Iraqi politicians will feel immense pressure to torpedo the pact in order to save their political skins. If this were to happen, the Bush administration would be furious. How dare the democracy we built vote against the continued presence of U.S. forces! Ingrates!

Ah, democracy, even in flawed form.

If Iraq rejected the agreement, it might actually go a long way toward asserting its sovereignty and independence from the United States. This would earn al Maliki and other Iraqi leaders kudos from the Iraqi street. And it would enrage Bush and Cheney, which is usually a sign that you're doing something right.

Goodbye to Defense's Gilded Age?
Oct 16, 2008

Below is a commentary I had published yesterday in Foreign Policy in Focus about defense budgets and the financial crisis.

Goodbye to Defense's Gilded Age?
By Travis Sharp
Published in Foreign Policy in Focus on October 15, 2008

The recently passed financial bailout package has drawn the ire of citizens throughout the United States. Both conservatives and liberals have condemned Congress and the White House for rescuing Wall Street titans, who caused the economic death spiral in the first place, by transferring an enormous fiscal burden to middle- and working-class taxpayers. At a time when people are losing their homes and struggling to make ends meet, many Americans find the bailout's $700 billion price tag to be simply outrageous.

What many Americans may not realize is that the United States is likely to spend $711 billion on national defense in the fiscal year that began on October 1 (assuming fiscal year 2009 war costs are $170 billion, an estimate provided by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates). You read that correctly: the United States will spend more on defense over the next 365 days than on the $700 bailout package.

More after the jump.

Peter Galbraith sheds light on Iraq for McCain
Sep 29, 2008

Cross posted from Iraq Insider

Ambassador Peter Galbraith, Senior Diplomatic Fellow at the Council's sister organization, the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, just published his latest essay in the New York Review of Books. The title says it all: Is This a 'Victory'?

Galbraith's assessment of the ongoing sectarian disputes in Iraq is fantastic. He excels at explaining the hidden motivations behind different Iraqi leaders' seemingly altruistic actions.

Galbraith's essay also is extremely relevant within the context of the presidential race. I regularly take umbrage at John McCain and other surge enthusiasts' constant use of words like "victory" and "defeat." I posted last week about what George Kennan might say on the matter. The week before that I couldn't help but remind people that General David Petraeus said that he did not know that he would ever apply “victory” to Iraq.

In the foreign policy debate last Friday night, McCain again used the word victory without defining what exactly that means for the United States in Iraq. "We came up with a great general and a strategy that has succeeded," McCain said on Friday. "This strategy has succeeded. And we are winning in Iraq. And we will come home with victory and with honor."

Galbraith, on the other hand, grapples with the uncertainties:

Less violence, however, is not the same thing as success. The United States did not go to war in Iraq for the purpose of ending violence between contending sectarian forces. Success has to be measured against US objectives. John McCain proclaims his goal to be victory and says we are now winning in Iraq (a victory that will, of course, be lost if his allegedly pro-surrender opponent wins). He considers victory to be an Iraq that is "a democratic ally." George W. Bush has defined victory as a unified, democratic, and stable Iraq. Neither man has explained how he will transform Iraq's ruling theocrats into democrats, diminish Iran's vast influence in Baghdad, or reconcile Kurds and Sunnis to Iraq's new order. Remarkably, neither the Democrats nor the press has challenged them to do so.

[snip]

John McCain says that partly because of his persistent support of the surge, we are now winning the Iraq war. He defines victory as an Iraq that is a democratic ally. Yet he advocates continued US military support to an Iraqi government led by Shiite religious parties committed to the establishment of an Islamic republic. He takes a harder line on Iran than President Bush, but supports Iraqi factions that are Iran's closest allies in the Middle East. He praises the Awakening and but seems not to have realized that the Iraqi government is intent on crushing it. He has denounced the Obama-Biden plan for a decentralized state but has said nothing about how he would protect Iraq's Kurds, the only committed American allies in the country.

George W. Bush has put the United States on the side of undemocratic Iraqis who are Iran's allies. John McCain would continue the same approach. It is hard to understand how this can be called a success--or a path to victory.

Galbraith's realistic analysis or McCain's empty slogans? You be the judge.

George Kennan on 'victory'...and McCain
Sep 23, 2008

Cross posted from Iraq Insider

I just finished reading six famous lectures George Kennan delivered at the University of Chicago in 1951. The lectures were published as American Diplomacy, 1900-1950.

In the peroration of his sixth and final lecture, Kennan stopped to consider the nature of military victory in the modern world. Kennan writes:

It was asserted not long ago by a prominent American [Gen. Douglas MacArthur] that “war’s very object is victory” and that “in war there can be no substitute for victory.” Perhaps the confusion here lies is what is meant by the term “victory.” Perhaps the term is actually misplaced. Perhaps there can be such a thing as “victory” in a battle, whereas in war there can only be the achievement or nonachievement of your objectives. In the old days, wartime objectives were generally limited and practical ones, and it was common to measure the success of your military operations by the extent to which they brought you closer to your objectives. But where your objectives are moral and ideological ones and run to changing the attitudes and the traditions of an entire people or the personality of a regime, then victory is probably something not to be achieved entirely by military means or indeed in any short space of time at all; and perhaps that is the source of our confusion.

Sheds some light on the flaws of the Bush administration's mission in Iraq, no?

Contrast Kennan's measured, realistic view with that espoused by John McCain this past Sunday:

Because of the sacrifices and perseverance of all the troops -- active-duty, Guard, and Reserve -- victory in Iraq is finally in sight...Even in retrospect, [Obama] would choose the path of retreat and failure for America over the path of success and victory...In short, both candidates in this election pledge to end this war and bring our troops home. The great difference is that I intend to win it first.

When McCain tried to pass off this type of blather as fit for the op-ed pages of the New York Times, the Times editor told his campaign to try again. McCain needed, in a revised draft, to "articulate, in concrete terms, how Senator McCain defines victory in Iraq [and] lay out a clear plan for achieving victory," wrote Times editor David Shipley.

In the foreign policy debate this Friday, I hope McCain will explain what he means by "victory" in Iraq. Does he see victory in Iraq, as I suspect, in "moral and ideological" terms, much to the chagrin of thinkers like Kennan?

Smith goes 'Willie Horton' style in Oregon
Sep 22, 2008

If desperation is a stinky cologne, the campaign of Senator Gordon Smith (R-OR) is truly beginning to reek.

Ten days ago, Smith unveiled two vicious attack ads in his race against Democrat Jeff Merkley, an arms control expert endorsed by Council for a Livable World. The ads accuse Merkley of not being tough enough on rapists.

Watch the ads for yourself after the jump.

Senator Lieberman Crosses Many Lines: One Matters Most
Sep 16, 2008

Originally posted on Experience Advocacy August 21, 2008 by David Cohen.  
Senator Lieberman’s descent into political isolation will come after the election if the Democrats have at least 52 seats, no matter who is President. Lieberman has to pay a political price in the Senate for his endorsement of John McCain for President.