Petrified Truth

Harry Potter's back

Here's the first trailer for "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince." Looks cool.

McCain fights back

John McCain is fighting back strongly against the media's adulation over Barack Obama's content-free world tour.

Here's a new ad from the McCain campaign:

And here's McCain himself, part of a robust interview with ABC's George Stephanopoulos:

STEPHANOPOULOS: You've also taken some heat this week with your comments saying that Senator Obama would rather lose...

MCCAIN: Yes.

STEPHANOPOULOS: ... a war than win a political campaign.

MCCAIN: Yes.

STEPHANOPOULOS: I can't believe you believe that.

MCCAIN: Well, I'm not questioning his patriotism. I'm questioning his actions. I'm questioning his lack, total lack, of understanding. His...

STEPHANOPOULOS: But that is questioning his total...

MCCAIN: I...

STEPHANOPOULOS: When you say someone would rather lose a war, a candidate, that's questioning his honor, his decency, his character.

MCCAIN: All I'm saying is -- and I will repeat -- he does not understand. I'm not questioning his patriotism. I am saying that he made the decision, which was political, in order to help him get the nomination of his party.

STEPHANOPOULOS: So, putting lives at risk for a political campaign -- you believe he's doing that.

MCCAIN: I believe that, when he said that we had to leave Iraq, and we had to be out by last March, and we had to have a date certain, that was in contravention to -- and still is -- the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General David Petraeus.

When he never asked to sit down for a briefing with General Petraeus, our commander on the ground, when he waited 900 days to go back again, where young American lives are on the line, I think that's a fundamental lack of understanding. And I think the American people will make the appropriate choice.

STEPHANOPOULOS: But you're questioning his motives.

MCCAIN: I say that it was very clear that a decision had to made. And I made it when it wasn't popular. He made a decision which was popular with his base. And that is a fundamental difference.

And he does not understand, and did not understand and still doesn't understand, that the surge was the vital strategy in us not having to lose a war.

Chaos, genocide, increased influence of Iranians in the region. The consequences of failure would have been severe.

STEPHANOPOULOS: But...

MCCAIN: Now, the benefits are enormous of a stable ally in the region, of a country that is a friend of ours, a brake on Iranian influence -- certainly a brake on al Qaeda and other jihadist organizations.

So, he made the decision that that was the best way to go to get the nomination of his party.

STEPHANOPOULOS: There's also been a flap about Senator Obama's decision in Germany not to visit the troops at Landstuhl. He now says that, based on what he was hearing from the Pentagon, there was no way that wouldn't be seen as a political trip, which is why he decided not to go.

Do you accept that explanation?

MCCAIN: Well, I know this, that those troops would have loved to have seen him. And I know of no Pentagon regulation that would have prevented him from going there -- without the media and the press and all of the associated people -- nothing that I know of would have kept him from visiting those wounded troops. And they are gravely wounded, many of them.

STEPHANOPOULOS: He's done it many times in the past.

MCCAIN: In Landstuhl, Germany, when I went through, I visited -- I visited the hospital. But the important thing is that, if I had been told by the Pentagon that I couldn't visit those troops, and I was there and wanted to be there, I guarantee you, there would have been a seismic event.

And so, I believe he had the opportunity to go without the media. And I'll let the facts speak for themselves.

More like that, please.

Close encounter

Last week there were a lot of headlines, but few details, about a tough battle in Afghanistan's Kunar province that cost nine U.S. soldiers their lives. The Taliban threw a lot of resources into the fight, outnumbering and nearly outgunning the American platoon-sized unit.

Now Stars and Stripes has an account of the fight itself and the details are dramatic; our guys were tough as nails. Read the whole thing, but wounded Spc. Tyler Stafford summed it all up this way:

"It was some of the bravest stuff I’ve ever seen in my life, and I will never see it again because those guys," Stafford said, then paused. "Normal humans wouldn’t do that. You’re not supposed to do that — getting up and firing back when everything around you is popping and whizzing and trees, branches coming down and sandbags exploding and RPGs coming in over your head … It was a fistfight then, and those guys held 'em off."

As a follow-up, Stars and Stripes also has a reaction from a senior officer who doesn't quite agree with the early media reports.

"The sky is not falling," Col. Charles "Chip" Preysler, commander of the 173rd Airborne Brigade Combat Team, said Saturday from Jalalabad, Afghanistan. [...]

The Army did not "abandon" the base after the attack, as many media reporters have suggested, Preysler said.

He said the decision to move from the location following the attack was to reposition, which his men have done countless times throughout their tour, and to move closer to the local seat of government.

"If there’s no combat outpost to abandon, there’s no position to abandon," he said. "It’s a bunch of vehicles like we do on patrol anywhere and we hold up for a night and pick up any tactical positions that we have with vehicle patrol bases.

"We do that routinely.... We’re always doing that when go out and stay in an area for longer then a few hours, and that’s what it is. So there is nothing to abandon. There was no structures, there was no COP or FOB or anything like that to even abandon. So, from the get-go, that is just [expletive], and it’s not right."

He also didn’t like the media’s characterization that his men were "overrun."

"As far as I know, and I know a lot, it was not overrun in any shape, manner or form," an emotional Preysler said. "It was close combat to be sure — hand grenade range. The enemy never got into the main position. As a matter of fact, it was, I think, the bravery of our soldiers reinforcing the hard-pressed observation post, or OP, that turned the tide to defeat the enemy attack."

Belmont Club has, as usual, a better take than most on the whole incident, including the heroic defensive effort by the Americans.

[T]his was a tale whose ending the Taliban had hoped to write themselves. The entire purpose of the operation — what the Taliban hoped to achieve by their extraordinary exertion was probably not simply the death of 9 infidels — but press headlines saying ‘American unit massacred in Afghanistan’ or ‘Airborne outpost annihilated on the Pakistani border’. Had they succeeded in provoking those headlines the fight in Kunar would have become the focus of talking points in Congress, the subject of talk shows on the networks and speeches on the Presidential campaign trail. It was a story that many Taliban were undoubtedly prepared to give their lives to project. But they failed.

They failed because a new ending to the story was written at the last minute by the men of the 173rd Airborne. In the nature of the media coverage it will not necessarily be portrayed as a victory for US forces, but at least it won’t be trumpeted as a victory for the Taliban. What happened in Kunar was not only a saga of arms under desperate conditions but a defensive victory in the war of information.

From Iraq to Afghanistan

Here's George Friedman of Stratfor, considering implications of the coming drawdown of troops in Iraq and a new focus on serious challenges in Afghanistan.

Internal Iraqi factions want the Americans to stay, and regional powers want the Americans to stay. The Iranians and pro-Iranian Iraqis are resigned to an ongoing presence, but they ultimately want the Americans to leave, sooner rather than later. Thus, the Americans won’t leave. The question now under negotiation is simply how many U.S. troops will remain, how long they will stay, where they will be based and what their mission will be. Given where the United States was in 2006, this is a remarkable evolution. The Americans have pulled something from the jaws of defeat, but what that something is and what they plan to do with it is not altogether clear. [...]

Interestingly, the Iranians want the Americans in Afghanistan. They supported the invasion in 2001 for the simple reason that they do not want to see an Afghanistan united under the Taliban. The Iranians almost went to war with Afghanistan in 1998 and were delighted to see the United States force the Taliban from the cities. The specter of a Taliban victory in Afghanistan unnerves the Iranians. Rhetoric aside, a drawdown of U.S. forces in Iraq and a transfer to Afghanistan is what the Iranians would like to see.

To complicate matters, the Taliban situation is not simply an Afghan issue — it is also a Pakistani issue. The Taliban draw supplies, recruits and support from Pakistan, where Taliban support stretches into the army and the intelligence service, which helped create the group in the 1990s while working with the Americans. There is no conceivable solution to the Taliban problem without a willing and effective government in Pakistan participating in the war, and that sort of government simply is not there. Indeed, the economic and security situation in Pakistan continues to deteriorate.

Therefore, the Bush administration’s desire to withdraw troops from Iraq makes sense on every level. It is a necessary and logical step. But it does not address what should now become the burning issue: What exactly is the U.S. strategy in Afghanistan? As in Iraq before the surge, the current strategy appears to be to hang on and hope for the best. Petraeus’ job is to craft a new strategy. But in Iraq, for better or worse, the United States faced an apparently implacable enemy — Iran — which in fact pursued a shrewd, rational and manageable policy. In Afghanistan, the United States is facing a state that appears friendly — Pakistan — but is actually confused, divided and unmanageable by itself or others.

Now for the Hard Part: From Iraq to Afghanistan

By George Friedman

The Bush administration let it be known last week that it is prepared to start reducing the number of troops in Iraq, indicating that three brigades out of 15 might be withdrawn before Inauguration Day in 2009. There are many dimensions to the announcements, some political and some strategic. But perhaps the single most important aspect of the development was the fairly casual way the report was greeted. It was neither praised nor derided. Instead, it was noted and ignored as the public focused on more immediate issues.

In the public mind, Iraq is clearly no longer an immediate issue. The troops remain there, still fighting and taking casualties, and there is deep division over the wisdom of the invasion in the first place. But the urgency of the issue has passed. This doesn’t mean the issue isn’t urgent. It simply means the American public — and indeed most of the world — have moved on to other obsessions, as is their eccentric wont. The shift nevertheless warrants careful consideration.

Obviously, there is a significant political dimension to the announcement. It occurred shortly after Sen. Barack Obama began to shift his position on Iraq from what appeared to be a demand for a rapid withdrawal to a more cautious, nuanced position. As we have pointed out on several occasions, while Obama’s public posture was for withdrawal with all due haste, his actual position as represented in his position papers was always more complex and ambiguous. He was for a withdrawal by the summer of 2010 unless circumstances dictated otherwise. Rhetorically, Obama aligned himself with the left wing of the Democratic Party, but his position on the record was actually much closer to Sen. John McCain’s than he would admit prior to his nomination. Therefore, his recent statements were not inconsistent with items written on his behalf before the nomination — they merely appeared s o.

The Bush administration was undoubtedly delighted to take advantage of Obama’s apparent shift by flanking him. Consideration of the troop withdrawal has been under way for some time, but the timing of the leak to The New York Times detailing it must have been driven by Obama’s shift. As Obama became more cautious, the administration became more optimistic and less intransigent. The intent was clearly to cause disruption in Obama’s base. If so, it failed precisely because the public took the administration’s announcement so casually. To the extent that the announcement was political, it failed because even the Democratic left is now less concerned about the war in Iraq. Politically speaking, the move was a maneuver into a vacuum.

But the announcement was still significant in other, more important ways. Politics aside, the administration is planning withdrawals because the time has come. First, the politico-military situation on the ground in Iraq has stabilized dramatically. The reason for this is the troop surge — although not in the way it is normally thought of. It was not the military consequences of an additional 30,000 troops that made the difference, although the addition and changes in tactics undoubtedly made an impact.

What was important about the surge is that it happened at all. In the fall of 2006, when the Democrats won both houses of Congress, it appeared a unilateral U.S. withdrawal from Iraq was inevitable. If Bush wouldn’t order it, Congress would force it. All of the factions in Iraq, as well as in neighboring states, calculated that the U.S. presence in Iraq would shortly start to decline and in due course disappear. Bush’s order to increase U.S. forces stunned all the regional players and forced a fundamental recalculation. The assumption had been that Bush’s hands were tied and that the United States was no longer a factor. What Bush did — and this was more important than numbers or tactics — was demonstrate that his hands were not tied and that the United States could not be discounted.

The realization that the Americans were not going anywhere caused the Sunnis, for example, to reconsider their position. Trapped between foreign jihadists and the Shia, the Americans suddenly appeared to be a stable and long-term ally. The Sunni leadership turned on the jihadists and aligned with the United States, breaking the jihadists’ backs. Suddenly facing a U.S.-Sunni-Kurdish alliance, the Shia lashed out, hoping to break the alliance. But they also split between their own factions, with some afraid of being trapped as Iranian satellites and others viewing the Iranians as the solution to their problem. The result was a civil war not between the Sunnis and Shia, but among the Shia themselves.

Tehran performed the most important recalculation. The Iranians’ expectation had been that the United States would withdraw from Iraq unilaterally, and that when it did, Iran would fill the vacuum it left. This would lead to the creation of an Iranian-dominated Iraqi Shiite government that would suppress the Sunnis and Kurds, allowing Iran to become the dominant power in the Persian Gulf region. It was a heady vision, and not an unreasonable one — if the United States had begun to withdraw in the winter of 2006-2007.

When the surge made it clear that the Americans weren’t leaving, the Iranians also recalculated. They understood that they were no longer going to be able to create a puppet government in Iraq, and the danger now was that the United States would somehow create a viable puppet government of its own. The Iranians understood that continued resistance, if it failed, might lead to this outcome. They lowered their sights from dominating Iraq to creating a neutral buffer state in which they had influence. As a result, Tehran acted to restrain the Shiite militias, focusing instead on maximizing its influence with the Shia participating in the Iraqi government, including Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.

A space was created between the Americans and Iranians, and al-Maliki filled it. He is not simply a pawn of Iran — and he uses the Americans to prevent himself from being reduced to that — but neither is he a pawn of the Americans. Recent negotiations between the United States and the al-Maliki government on the status of U.S. forces have demonstrated this. In some sense, the United States has created what it said it wanted: a strong Iraqi government. But it has not achieved what it really wanted, which was a strong, pro-American Iraqi government. Like Iran, the United States has been forced to settle for less than it originally aimed for, but more than most expected it could achieve in 2006.

This still leaves the question of what exactly the invasion of Iraq achieved. When the Americans invaded, they occupied what was clearly the most strategic country in the Middle East, bordering Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria, Turkey and Iran. Without resistance, the occupation would have provided the United States with a geopolitical platform from which to pressure and influence the region. The fact that there was resistance absorbed the United States, therefore negating the advantage. The United States was so busy hanging on in Iraq that it had no opportunity to take advantage of the terrain.

That is why the critical question for the United States is how many troops it can retain in Iraq, for how long and in what locations. This is a complex issue. From the Sunni standpoint, a continued U.S. presence is essential to protect Sunnis from the Shia. From the Shiite standpoint, the U.S. presence is needed to prevent Iran from overwhelming the Shia. From the standpoint of the Kurds, a U.S. presence guarantees Kurdish safety from everyone else. It is an oddity of history that no major faction in Iraq now wants a precipitous U.S. withdrawal — and some don’t want a withdrawal at all.

For the United States, the historical moment for its geopolitical coup seems to have passed. Had there been no resistance after the fall of Baghdad in 2003, the U.S. occupation of Iraq would have made Washington a colossus astride the region. But after five years of fighting, the United States is exhausted and has little appetite for power projection in the region. For all its bravado against Iran, no one has ever suggested an invasion, only airstrikes. Therefore, the continued occupation of Iraq simply doesn’t have the same effect as it did in 2003.

But the United States can’t simply leave. The Iraqi government is not all that stable, and other regional powers, particularly the Saudis, don’t want to see a U.S. withdrawal. The reason is simple: If the United States withdraws before the Baghdad government is cohesive enough, strong enough and inclined enough to balance Iranian power, Iran could still fill the partial vacuum of Iraq, thereby posing a threat to Saudi Arabia. With oil at more than $140 a barrel, this is not something the Saudis want to see, nor something the United States wants to see.

Internal Iraqi factions want the Americans to stay, and regional powers want the Americans to stay. The Iranians and pro-Iranian Iraqis are resigned to an ongoing presence, but they ultimately want the Americans to leave, sooner rather than later. Thus, the Americans won’t leave. The question now under negotiation is simply how many U.S. troops will remain, how long they will stay, where they will be based and what their mission will be. Given where the United States was in 2006, this is a remarkable evolution. The Americans have pulled something from the jaws of defeat, but what that something is and what they plan to do with it is not altogether clear.

The United States obviously does not want to leave a massive force in Iraq. First, its more ambitious mission has evaporated; that moment is gone. Second, the U.S. Army and Marines are exhausted from five years of multidivisional warfare with a force not substantially increased from peacetime status. The Bush administration’s decision not to dramatically increase the Army was rooted in a fundamental error: namely, the administration did not think the insurgency would be so sustained and effective. They kept believing the United States would turn a corner. The result is that Washington simply can’t maintain the current force in Iraq under any circumstances, and to do so would be strategically dangerous. The United States has no strategic ground reserve at present, opening itself to dangers outside of Iraq. Therefore, if the United States is not going to get to play colossus of the Middle East, it needs to reduce its forces dramatically to recreate a strategic reserv e. Its interests, the interests of the al-Maliki government — and interestingly, Iran’s interests — are not wildly out of sync. Washington wants to rapidly trim down to a residual force of a few brigades, and the other two players want that as well.

The United States has another pressing reason to do this: It has another major war under way in Afghanistan, and it is not winning there. It remains unclear if the United States can win that war, with the Taliban operating widely in Afghanistan and controlling a great deal of the countryside. The Taliban are increasingly aggressive against a NATO force substantially smaller than the conceivable minimum needed to pacify Afghanistan. We know the Soviets couldn’t do it with nearly 120,000 troops. And we know the United States and NATO don’t have as many troops to deploy in Afghanistan as the Soviets did. It is also clear that, at the moment, there is no exit strategy. Forces in Iraq must be transferred to Afghanistan to stabilize the U.S. position while the new head of U.S. Central Command, Gen. David Petraeus — the architect of the political and military strategy in Iraq — f igures out what, if anything, is going to change.

Interestingly, the Iranians want the Americans in Afghanistan. They supported the invasion in 2001 for the simple reason that they do not want to see an Afghanistan united under the Taliban. The Iranians almost went to war with Afghanistan in 1998 and were delighted to see the United States force the Taliban from the cities. The specter of a Taliban victory in Afghanistan unnerves the Iranians. Rhetoric aside, a drawdown of U.S. forces in Iraq and a transfer to Afghanistan is what the Iranians would like to see.

To complicate matters, the Taliban situation is not simply an Afghan issue — it is also a Pakistani issue. The Taliban draw supplies, recruits and support from Pakistan, where Taliban support stretches into the army and the intelligence service, which helped create the group in the 1990s while working with the Americans. There is no conceivable solution to the Taliban problem without a willing and effective government in Pakistan participating in the war, and that sort of government simply is not there. Indeed, the economic and security situation in Pakistan continues to deteriorate.

Therefore, the Bush administration’s desire to withdraw troops from Iraq makes sense on every level. It is a necessary and logical step. But it does not address what should now become the burning issue: What exactly is the U.S. strategy in Afghanistan? As in Iraq before the surge, the current strategy appears to be to hang on and hope for the best. Petraeus’ job is to craft a new strategy. But in Iraq, for better or worse, the United States faced an apparently implacable enemy — Iran — which in fact pursued a shrewd, rational and manageable policy. In Afghanistan, the United States is facing a state that appears friendly — Pakistan — but is actually confused, divided and unmanageable by itself or others.

Petraeus’ success in Iraq had a great deal to do with Tehran’s calculations of its self-interest. In Pakistan, by contrast, it is unclear at the moment whether anyone is in a position to even define the national self-interest, let alone pursue it. And this means that every additional U.S. soldier sent to Afghanistan raises the stakes in Pakistan. It will be interesting to see how Afghanistan and Pakistan play out in the U.S. presidential election. This is not a theater of operations that lends itself to political soundbites.

This report may be forwarded or republished on your website with attribution to www.stratfor.com.

Dark Knight indeed

Well, we went to see The Dark Knight and it lived up to all its hype. This movie is crazy good. Dense with detail, it almost demands another viewing; we'll go again.

Note the PG-13 rating. The parents who brought their 3- and 6-year olds to the theater tonight are nuts.

Tony Snow, RIP

Our fears are now confirmed: journalist Tony Snow has died at age 53.

Best wishes to his family and friends.

Where we live

Will higher energy prices mean the end of suburbs? Urban planners and other utopians think so. More realistic Joel Kotkin says not so fast.

Continuing high energy prices will likely change the nation's geography, but not in ways some urban theorists are predicting. Rather than cramming more people and families into cities, they may instead foster a more dispersed, diverse archipelago of self-sufficient communities. From here, that looks like a far more pleasant scenario not only for suburban and exurbanites but for urban dwellers who don't want to live under dense conditions reminiscent of 19th century industrial cities or the teeming metropolises of the contemporary Third World.

Independence Day 2008

Happy 4th of July!

Historian Victor Davis Hanson notes the current anxieties and suggests, well, some perspective.

On this troubled Fourth we still should remember this is not 1776 when New York was in British hands and Americans in retreat across the state. It is not 1814 when the British burned Washington and the entire system of national credit collapsed — or July 4, 1864 when Americans awoke to news that 8,000 Americans had just been killed at Gettysburg.

We are not in 1932 when unemployment was still over 20 percent of the work force, and industrial production was less than half of what it had been just three years earlier, or July, 1942, when tens of thousands of American were dying in convoys and B-17s, and on islands of the Pacific in an existential war against Germany, Japan, and Italy.

Thank God it is not mid-summer 1950, when Seoul was overrun and arriving American troops were overwhelmed by Communist forces as they rushed in to save a crumbling South Korea. We are not in 1968 when the country was torn apart by the Tet Offensive, the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy, and the riots at the Democratic convention in Chicago. And we are not even in the waning days of 1979, a year in which the American embassy was seized in Tehran and hostages taken, the Soviets were invading Afghanistan, thousands were still being murdered in Cambodia, Communism was on the march in Central America, and our president was blaming our near 6-percent unemployment, 8-percent inflation, 15-percent interest rates, and weakening international profile on our own collective “malaise.”

We live in the most prosperous and most free years of a wonderful republic, and can easily rectify our present crises that are largely of our own making and a result of the stupefying effects of our unprecedented wealth and leisure. Instead of endless recriminations and self-pity — of anger that our past was merely good rather than perfect as we now demand — we need to give thanks this Fourth of July to our ancestors who created our Constitution and Bill of Rights, and suffered miseries beyond our comprehension as they bequeathed to us most of the present wealth, leisure, and freedom we take for granted.

Clearing the deck?

This has been the week when Barack Obama's inevitable move, at least rhetorically, to the political center has accelerated and become unavoidably obvious. As usual, Charles Krauthammer has a crisp and on-the-money take.

Obama's strategy is obvious. The country is in a deep malaise and eager for change. He and his party already have the advantage on economic and domestic issues. Obama, therefore, aims to clear the deck by moving rapidly to the center in those areas where he and his party are weakest, namely national security and the broader cultural issues. With these -- and, most important, his war-losing Iraq policy -- out of the way, the election will be decided on charisma and persona. In this corner: the young sleek cool hip elegant challenger. In the other corner: the old guy. No contest. [...]

As Obama assiduously obliterates all differences with McCain on national security and social issues, he remains rightly confident that Bush fatigue, the lousy economy and his own charisma -- he is easily the most dazzling political personality since John Kennedy -- will carry him to the White House.

Obama's steps are more than a bit clumsy, especially for a politician who's supposed to be above politics. But he's only got the summer to make his move, since putting away Hillary took longer than expected. So he's got to move fast and take his chances image-wise. Either that or he's really such a newbie that it's ineptitude.

Unbalanced

Here's another example of distorted federal thinking about border policy.

Besieged Texas sheriffs vowed Wednesday to press the White House and Congress to deliver emergency assistance to law enforcement officers battling drug cartels along the Mexican border to match the $400 million on its way to Mexico.

The sheriffs said they were frustrated that President Bush and Congress agreed to provide assistance to Mexico, as part of the Merida Initiative, without offering additional federal help to their departments. [...]

Implementation of the Merida Initiative is ''really disappointing and disheartening because Washington seems totally oblivious to what we're facing on the Mexican border," said Webb County Sheriff Rick Flores, chairman of the 19-county Texas Border Sheriff's Coalition.

''If they allocate resources and money to Mexico, they should also consider protecting our side of the border first."

Flores, who said he has faced death threats three times in the past three years, has received $1.8 million in federal assistance over the past 36 months. He said he needed $14.5 million in additional federal help over the next five years to hire 25 new deputies to join his hard-pressed department of 37 deputies.

Mexico will receive ''all the equipment," Flores said. ''They're going to be two notches above what we have. We would really like to have one of those helicopters in our neck of the woods."

Border security issues affect local citizens first and foremost. And with Mexico's internal drug war reaching anarchic proportions and coming to America big time, it would only make sense to beef up our side at the same time. Jeez.