Even though virtually all congressional Republicans — including the party’s Senate and House leadership — praised President Obama’s handling of the removal of Gen. Stanley McChrystal and his selection of Gen. David Petraeus to replace him as commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, a few Republican congressional hopefuls used the More…
It was a blind quote hitting the civil-libertarian solar plexus. Bad enough that, as ProPublica’s Dafna Linzer and The Washington Post’s Peter Finn reported late on Friday afternoon, the Obama administration was readying an executive order for a system for preventive detention in terrorism cases. President Obama More…
Not necessarily from the Taliban, but from a military coup responding to the threat the Taliban poses to the viability of Pakistan. Fox News reports that Gen. David Petraeus is telling people privately that the next two weeks (!) are a test of the Zardari government’s survivability. Anonymous sources More…
Following up on Spencer’s earlier post about President Obama’s meeting today with numerous members of his national security team, the White House released this statement from Obama about the meeting:
“This afternoon, I met with our Ambassador to Iraq, the commander in Iraq, and the overall theater
The good thing about staying on as defense secretary is that you can fly into Kandahar whenever you feel like it. And, like a baller, you can announce new troop deployments. Yochi Dreazen hangs out with Bob Gates and reports:
During his July trip to Iraq, Sen. Barack Obama met with a man who represents both an opportunity and an obstacle to his presidency: Army Gen. David H. Petraeus. Petraeus, a hero to many Americans for his management of the war in Iraq, argued in More…
On Friday, I flagged an ABC story reporting that Gen. David Petraeus had requested permission to talk with the Syrian government as part of his new job as head of Central Command, only to be shot down by the Bush administration. I speculated that it might be another example More…
Remember how I wrote earlier this month that Gen. David Petraeus’ public statements appeared to implicitly back Sen. Barack Obama’s foreign policy? Here’s another example.
According to ABC, the incoming Centcom commander — who takes over at 10 a.m. today, as a matter of fact — wanted to More…
In the course of a spittle-inflected Small Wars Journal diatribe against my friend Nir Rosen for the alleged moral failing of embedding with the Taliban, Atlantic correspondent Bing West — whose recent book I preliminarily praised in TWI — offers this bit of dubious moral outrage:
Having told
Something else that’s interesting in Joe Klein’s interview with Sen. Barack Obama.
Yesterday we saw John McCain severely misrepresent what the impending U.S.-Iraq Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) says, incorrectly insisting that its date-certain deadlines for U.S. troop withdrawals are based on “conditions” on More…
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