CALIFORNIA YANKEE

Iraq tours to be cut to 12 months

President Bush confirmed Thursday that combat tour lengths for U.S. troops will be reduced to 12 months from 15 months:

Bush said this reduction "will relieve the burden on our forces and it will make life easier for our wonderful military families."

[. . .]

Bush said terrorists "are on the run" and that generally improved security likely will permit further U.S. troop reductions.

The Washington Post reports that the "leader of the Sunni insurgent group al-Qaeda in Iraq and several of his top lieutenants have left Iraq for Afghanistan."

The CBS Evening News reported "more encouraging news about the drop in violence" in Iraq. The US death toll "this month is nine -- the lowest since the invasion in 2003.

The New York Times reports Iraq and the US are close to a deal on a long-term security arrangement. The agreement will set the terms for the presence of American troops in Iraq.

The Financial Times reports, "Iraqi oil production has risen to its highest level since the 2003 invasion on the back of improved security across the country." Iraq pumped an average of 2.43m bpd between April and June.

If Obama had his way, U.S. troops would have been out of Iraq in March 2008, and there would have been no surge which made all this progress possible. No wonder the Obama scrubbed his website to remove his criticism of the surge.

The following video highlights the poor judgment Obama is trying to erase:

Military Veterans Favor McCain

A new Rasmussen poll finds voters who have served in the U.S. military favor McCain over Obama, 56% to 37%.

Another Rasmussen survey found 63% of Americans do not believe Obama's trip to Afghanistan and Iraq made the antiwar Democratic any more qualified to be president.

Less than a third of respondents, (32%), thought Obama learned from his trip to Iraq, and 40% said Obama's mind was already made up about how to deal with the war there.

New York Times Rejects McCain Editorial

Earlier today I wrote about the fact that the media is seen as biased, and reporters are trying to help Obama win. Now the New York Times provides more evidence about how the mainstream media makes it difficult for the voters to get information both sides of an issue to make an informed decision about whom to vote for.

Less than a week after the New York Times published an editorial written by Obama -- 'My Plan for Iraq,' the paper rejects McCain's direct rebuttal:

"It would be terrific to have an article from Senator McCain that mirrors Senator Obama's piece," NYT Op-Ed editor David Shipley explained in an email late Friday to McCain's staff. "I'm not going to be able to accept this piece as currently written."

[. . .]

NYT's Shipley advised McCain to try again: 'I'd be pleased, though, to look at another draft.'

[Shipley served in the Clinton Administration from 1995 until 1997 as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Presidential Speechwriter.]

A top McCain source claims the paper simply does not agree with the senator's Iraq policy, and wants him to change it, not "re-work the draft."

[. . .]

Shipley continues: "It would be terrific to have an article from Senator McCain that mirrors Senator Obama's piece. To that end, the article would have to articulate, in concrete terms, how Senator McCain defines victory in Iraq."

Here, courtesy of Drudge is the McCain editorial:

In January 2007, when General David Petraeus took command in Iraq, he called the situation “hard” but not “hopeless.” Today, 18 months later, violence has fallen by up to 80% to the lowest levels in four years, and Sunni and Shiite terrorists are reeling from a string of defeats. The situation now is full of hope, but considerable hard work remains to consolidate our fragile gains.

Progress has been due primarily to an increase in the number of troops and a change in their strategy. I was an early advocate of the surge at a time when it had few supporters in Washington. Senator Barack Obama was an equally vocal opponent. "I am not persuaded that 20,000 additional troops in Iraq is going to solve the sectarian violence there,” he said on January 10, 2007. “In fact, I think it will do the reverse."

Now Senator Obama has been forced to acknowledge that “our troops have performed brilliantly in lowering the level of violence.” But he still denies that any political progress has resulted.

Perhaps he is unaware that the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad has recently certified that, as one news article put it, “Iraq has met all but three of 18 original benchmarks set by Congress last year to measure security, political and economic progress.” Even more heartening has been progress that’s not measured by the benchmarks. More than 90,000 Iraqis, many of them Sunnis who once fought against the government, have signed up as Sons of Iraq to fight against the terrorists. Nor do they measure Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki’s new-found willingness to crack down on Shiite extremists in Basra and Sadr City—actions that have done much to dispel suspicions of sectarianism.

The success of the surge has not changed Senator Obama’s determination to pull out all of our combat troops. All that has changed is his rationale. In a New York Times op-ed and a speech this week, he offered his “plan for Iraq” in advance of his first “fact finding” trip to that country in more than three years. It consisted of the same old proposal to pull all of our troops out within 16 months. In 2007 he wanted to withdraw because he thought the war was lost. If we had taken his advice, it would have been. Now he wants to withdraw because he thinks Iraqis no longer need our assistance.

To make this point, he mangles the evidence. He makes it sound as if Prime Minister Maliki has endorsed the Obama timetable, when all he has said is that he would like a plan for the eventual withdrawal of U.S. troops at some unspecified point in the future.

Senator Obama is also misleading on the Iraqi military's readiness. The Iraqi Army will be equipped and trained by the middle of next year, but this does not, as Senator Obama suggests, mean that they will then be ready to secure their country without a good deal of help. The Iraqi Air Force, for one, still lags behind, and no modern army can operate without air cover. The Iraqis are also still learning how to conduct planning, logistics, command and control, communications, and other complicated functions needed to support frontline troops.

No one favors a permanent U.S. presence, as Senator Obama charges. A partial withdrawal has already occurred with the departure of five “surge” brigades, and more withdrawals can take place as the security situation improves. As we draw down in Iraq, we can beef up our presence on other battlefields, such as Afghanistan, without fear of leaving a failed state behind. I have said that I expect to welcome home most of our troops from Iraq by the end of my first term in office, in 2013.

But I have also said that any draw-downs must be based on a realistic assessment of conditions on the ground, not on an artificial timetable crafted for domestic political reasons. This is the crux of my disagreement with Senator Obama.

Senator Obama has said that he would consult our commanders on the ground and Iraqi leaders, but he did no such thing before releasing his “plan for Iraq.” Perhaps that’s because he doesn’t want to hear what they have to say. During the course of eight visits to Iraq, I have heard many times from our troops what Major General Jeffrey Hammond, commander of coalition forces in Baghdad, recently said: that leaving based on a timetable would be “very dangerous.”

The danger is that extremists supported by Al Qaeda and Iran could stage a comeback, as they have in the past when we’ve had too few troops in Iraq. Senator Obama seems to have learned nothing from recent history. I find it ironic that he is emulating the worst mistake of the Bush administration by waving the “Mission Accomplished” banner prematurely.

I am also dismayed that he never talks about winning the war—only of ending it. But if we don’t win the war, our enemies will. A triumph for the terrorists would be a disaster for us. That is something I will not allow to happen as president. Instead I will continue implementing a proven counterinsurgency strategy not only in Iraq but also in Afghanistan with the goal of creating stable, secure, self-sustaining democratic allies.

In January, the Times let its bias show in a slanderous hatchet job on McCain. For that bit of so-called journalism the Times even took a hit from their Public Editor, Clark Hoyt, "the [Times'] readers' representative," who monitors the paper's "journalistic practices."

The article was notable for what it did not say: It did not say what convinced the advisers that there was a romance. It did not make clear what McCain was admitting when he acknowledged behaving inappropriately — an affair or just an association with a lobbyist that could look bad. And it did not say whether Weaver, the only on-the-record source, believed there was a romance. The Times did not offer independent proof, like the text messages between Detroit’s mayor and a female aide that The Detroit Free Press disclosed recently, or the photograph of Donna Rice sitting on Gary Hart’s lap.

It was not for want of trying. Four highly respected reporters in the Washington bureau worked for months on the story and were pressed repeatedly to get sources on the record and to find documentary evidence like e-mail.

I guess Hoyt didn't hit the Times hard enough.

Troop withdrawal Timetable Could Jeopardize Progress In Iraq

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Michael Mullen, said Sunday a specific time frame for withdrawing U.S. combat troops from Iraq could jeopardize political and economic progress, leading to "dangerous consequences."

"Based on my time in and out of Iraq in recent months, I think the conditions-based assessments are the way to go and they're very solid. We're making progress and we can move forward accordingly based on those conditions."

[. . .]

Mullen, asked about the possibility of withdrawing all combat troops within two years, said, "I think the consequences could be very dangerous."

"It hard to say exactly what would happen. I'd worry about any kind of rapid movement out and creating instability where we have stability. We're engaged very much right now with the Iraqi people. The Iraqi leadership is starting to generate the kind of political progress that we need to make. The economy is starting to move in the right direction. So all those things are moving in the right direction," Mullen said.

The military buildup in Iraq that began more than 18 months ago has ended. In recent days, the last of the five additional combat brigades sent in by Bush last year has left the country.

In the following video from Mullen's appearance on Fox News Sunday, Mullen talks about the progress which has resulted from the surge:

The surge is a key issue on which we can evaluate the judgment of the presidential candidates.

Senator McCain, not only supported the surge, he long advocated that more troops were needed to win in Iraq.

Obama opposed the surge and incorrectly predicted it would not only fail, but could even make the situation in Iraq worse. Obama's criticism of the surge has been removed from Obama's campaign website in silly effort to hide how wrong Obama was about the surge.

Obama Visits Afghanistan

Obama has finally seen fit to make a fact-finding trip to Afghanistan.

Don't forget that Hillary Clinton correctly charged that Obama hasn’t done much of anything as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on European Affairs:

“I also have heard Senator Obama refer continually to Afghanistan, and he references being on the Foreign Relations Committee,” Clinton said. “He chairs the Subcommittee on Europe. It has jurisdiction over NATO. NATO is critical to our mission in Afghanistan. He’s held not one substantive hearing to do oversight, to figure out what we can do to actually have a stronger presence with NATO in Afghanistan."

Senator McCain's presidential campaign also takes Obama to task over Obama's failure to take care of business in Afghanistan in a television ad entitled "Troop Funding."
The ad highlights Barack Obama's record of failing to call a single oversight hearing on NATO's mission in Afghanistan, failing to visit our troops on the ground in Iraq for over 900 days and failing to support our troops when he voted against critical funding in 2007. You can watch the ad below:

Maliki Doesn't Endorse Obama Troop Withdrawal Plan

Bloomberg reports Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki hasn't endorsed any specific plan for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq:

Al-Maliki supports a "general vision"of U.S. troop withdrawal from Iraq and has not backed a plan by Obama, the presumptive U.S. Democratic presidential candidate, for a 16- month withdrawal window, government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh said in an e-mailed statement in Baghdad today.

Al-Maliki was quoted in an interview with Germany's Der Spiegel magazine published on its Web site yesterday as saying Obama's plan is "the right timeframe for a withdrawal, with the possibility of slight changes."

Comments al-Maliki made to the magazine were "misunderstood and mistranslated" and were not "conveyed accurately," al- Dabbagh said in the statement.

Remarks made by the prime minister or any member of the Iraqi government "should not be understood as support to any U.S. presidential candidate," the statement said.

President Bush and Maliki have agreed to a "general time horizon" for the reduction of U.S. combat troops in Iraq.

Watch NBC's Patty Culhane's report in the following video:

McCain: 'We Have Succeeded In Iraq'

Yesterday, Senator McCain issued the following statement on recent progress in Iraq:

"Progress between the United States and Iraq on a time horizon for American troop presence is further evidence that the surge has succeeded.

Most of the U.S. forces used in the surge have already been withdrawn. When a further conditions-based withdrawal of U.S. forces is possible, it will be because we and our Iraqi partners built on the successes of the surge strategy, which Senator Obama opposed, predicted would fail, voted against and campaigned against in the primary.

When we withdraw, we will withdraw with honor and victory. An honorable and victorious withdrawal would not be possible if Senator Obama's views had prevailed. An artificial timetable based on political expediency would have led to disaster and could still turn success into defeat.

If we had followed Senator Obama's policy, Iraq would have descended into chaos, American casualties would be far higher, and the region would be destabilized."

McCain also told an audience in Kansas City, Missouri, that as president he will make sure the country doesn't pull out of Iraq until the war is won. Watch the following video report from the Associated Press:

Michael Yon, an Independent reporter who has spent more time in Iraq embedded with combat soldiers than any other journalist, recently said "a fair-minded person could say with reasonable certainty that the war has ended":

The war continues to abate in Iraq. Violence is still present, but, of course, Iraq was a relatively violent place long before Coalition forces moved in. I would go so far as to say that barring any major and unexpected developments (like an Israeli air strike on Iran and the retaliations that would follow), a fair-minded person could say with reasonable certainty that the war has ended. A new and better nation is growing legs. What's left is messy politics that likely will be punctuated by low-level violence and the occasional spectacular attack. Yet, the will of the Iraqi people has changed, and the Iraqi military has dramatically improved, so those spectacular attacks are diminishing along with the regular violence. Now it's time to rebuild the country, and create a pluralistic, stable and peaceful Iraq. That will be long, hard work. But by my estimation, the Iraq War is over. We won. Which means the Iraqi people won.

Yon is a bit more optimistic than I am. But, this is all good, even if still subject to possible setbacks.

So What is Obama's Position On Iraq?

The Short answer is "Whatever the Politics Demand."

Watch the following video documentary released by the McCain's presidential campaign entitled "The Obama Iraq Documentary: Whatever the Politics Demand." The documentary examines Obama's multitude of inconsistent statements on Iraq over the last several years and presents a timeline of Obama's political positioning on Iraq, including Obama's incorrect judgment that the surge would fail.

Obama sounds as consistent as John Kerry.

Obama Erases His Criticism Of The Surge

In a silly effort to hide how wrong Obama was about the surge, Obama's criticism of the surge has been removed from Obama's campaign Web site.

The New York Daily News, was first to report that Obama's campaign website was scrubbed over the weekend to remove criticism of the U.S. troop "surge" in Iraq.

The following video highlights the poor judgment Obama is trying to erase:

Unlike Obama, McCain long advocated that more troops were needed to win in Iraq.

According to the Associated Press, McCain says "Obama is failing to acknowledge success." Someone should tell Obama it's usually best to simply admit when you are wrong. Scrubbing Obama's website to erase Obama's judgments that proved to be wrong won't work well in today's YouTube world.

Obama's Iraq withdrawal plan may prove difficult

Martha Raddatz reports that U.S. commanders in Iraq "warn of security dangers," and see a "logistical nightmare" in Obama's Iraq withdrawal plan:

Whatever nuance Barack Obama is now adding to his Iraq withdrawal strategy, the core plan on his Web site is as plain as day: Obama would "immediately begin to remove our troops from Iraq. He will remove one to two combat brigades each month, and have all of our combat brigades out of Iraq within 16 months."

It is a plan that, no doubt, helped Obama get his party's nomination, but one that may prove difficult if he is elected president.

Watch her video report:

Didn't Obama check with anyone before he proposed his "one to two combat brigades each month" withdrawal plan?

A higher quality version of the video report is available at ABC News, but you will have to suffer through an ad.