Obama Goes to Baghdad

The Commander in Chief showed up in Baghdad to praise the successful efforts of US troops and to kickstart his exit strategy: declare victory, then get the fuck out. But the US president remains prudent when it comes to staging the withdrawal. This follows from his steady performance in this respect as a candidate, which put moderates at ease and distinguished him from rivals within his own party whose timetable pissing contests churned out wildly irresponsible figures like Dennis Kucinich's 90 days. (Presumably Shirley McClane's UFOs would have played some pivotal role in the extraction.)

The president's timetable would see most US troops out by the end of 2010. Just as long as nothing goes wrong.

Death, Blood, and Glory

Bibi Netanyahu, just hours before taking the helm of Israel's new coaltion government, told The Atlantic magazine that Israel might put a military stop to nuke production in Iran if the United States isn't going to do anything about it. Echoing my chief concern, the new prime minister said:

“You don’t want a messianic apocalyptic cult controlling atomic bombs.”

No, Bibi, I sure as hell do not want that. That is the last thing I want. It is an actual danger. A mushroom cloud over Jerusalem courtesy of The Islamic Republic of Iran? Not so much. For once the religious miasma that hangs over the region sheds a bit of grace: although sacred to Jews and Christians, Jerusalem is far too holy a city in Islam also for any Muslim front to make it a glass parking lot, as one of Andrew Sullivan's readers points out. But Netanyahu, as if his remarks were not chilling enough already, goes on to say:

"When the wide-eyed believer gets hold of the reins of power and the weapons of mass death, then the entire world should start worrying, and that is what is happening in Iran...

"Since the dawn of the nuclear age, we have not had a fanatic regime that might put its zealotry above its self-interest. People say that they’ll behave like any other nuclear power. Can you take the risk? Can you assume that?”

The prime minister sends a message to the president that he's going to be a hardass, whatever accomodationist kabuki the White House is committed to carrying out. I say let the Israelis take care of business. It was hardly the end for US/Israeli relations when Ronald Reagan condemned our ally's action against nuclear facilities in Saddam Hussein's Iraq. It would hardly be the death knell if this president parted company on virtually the same issue.

Shitloads More to Afghanistan

Joe Biden may not consider thousands more American troops a full shitload, and I don't want to put words into his mouth, but it's certainly a shitload more than he was calling for according to Bill Gertz today, reporting from Inside the Ring. The Vice-President and Hillary's number two in the State Department weren't looking to scale up the effort in Afghanistan to any significant degree at all, it appears, beyond keeping it from becoming an al Qaida Magic Kingdom.

Although Mr. Obama made assurances he would place uncommonly high stock in Joe Biden's foreign policy advice, that did not appear to persuade him away from an ambitious nation-building agenda in this, his first deployment of military servicemen. The President must have been convinced by Richard Holbrooke, special envoy to the region, and David Petraeus, architect of restorative feats in Iraq, that a comprehensive, rehabilitative approach to what is widely considered Hell on Earth is preferable to periodic, low-maintenance policing. In other words, exactly the same argument that won over President Bush with respect to Iraq---unless you believe he went there for the earl, in which case take your head out of your ass.

Observers of the scene will remember how Democrats, including all of those mentioned above, made a lot of noise over the last several years about how Afghanistan was the good war, and if only Democrats were in power, we'd pull out of Iraq and "surge" in Afghanistan (because wild-eyed critics of the project in Mesopotamia are no slouches in the War on Terror since they'd gladly blow tons more goat herders into smithereens if only they got the chance). Well, now Iraq is stabilizing, but still requiring our commitment, Afghanistan truly does look like it's backsliding, and we're out of fucking money. So we're doubling down on our attempt to break a thousands of years long series of failures to tame a region which has been called, with good reason, "the graveyard of empires".

This is now Barack Obama's war.