But another news item of immense import surfaced today as well: the agreement by the Iraqi and American governments on a deadline for the withdrawal of most U.S. troops by 2011.

Now, aside from the groundbreaking nature of this agreement, I would like to suggest a possible impact on the presidential election.

Given that a large part of the campaign (aside from the economy) is centered around foreign policy (especially Iraq, Afghanistan and, more recently, Georgia), does this agreement not, in some respects, take the issue of when to bring the troops home off the table?

And, if so, does that not hurt Obama more than McCain? As it is, Obama has been able to hammer McCain on his judgment in sending troops to Iraq (while Obama opposed it in the first place) and his (out of context) comment about remaining in Iraq for a hundred years. By losing this as an issue, Obama loses one of his most effective talking points and the motivation for some of his supporters to work so diligently for the campaign.

Hopefully, I am overestimating the impact this agreement will have on the campaign, but it should be interesting to watch unfold.

For the conspiracy theorists out there: Does this also not smack of a President Bush playing politics with the war?

Next up:

An item entitled “Watch ‘Charlie Rose – An hour with General David Petraeus’” I sent myself through Google Reader on 10 SEP 2007 at 8:18 AM. I think the title is self-explanatory. The reason I want to watch it — and still save it? Because I love me some Petraeus. Link still works. Delete.

Next is a really old e-mail (17 OCT 2007 at 3:25 PM) with a link to The Blakes’ (a band) Myspace page. I’m deleting without looking further. Can’t remember why I saved it. If anyone knows if they’re any good, let me know and I’ll look into ‘em this time around.

22 OCT 2007 at 11:12 AM: Another Google Reader e-mail with a link to the Mother Jones’ issue focusing on leaving Iraq. The e-mail itself contains an interview with T.X. Hammes that was posted on the Kings of War blog, written by various faculty and research students of the Department of War Studies, King’s College London. The link still works.

Okay, I’m going to stop here again for a while. Maybe I’ll aim for getting rid of three old e-mails per post.

Does anyone else find random stuff on the Web, e-mail it to themselves and then let it sit there lingering forever?

Matt Taibbi on Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat from an old issue of the New York Press.

On an ideological level, Friedman’s new book is the worst, most boring kind of middlebrow horseshit.

And this:

On page 174, Friedman is describing a flight he took on Southwest Airlines from Baltimore to Hartford, Connecticut. (Friedman never forgets to name the company or the brand name; if he had written The Metamorphosis, Gregor Samsa would have awoken from uneasy dreams in a Sealy Posturepedic.) Here’s what he says:

I stomped off, went through security, bought a Cinnabon, and glumly sat at the back of the B line, waiting to be herded on board so that I could hunt for space in the overhead bins.

Forget the Cinnabon. Name me a herd animal that hunts. Name me one.

This would be a small thing were it not for the overall pattern. Thomas Friedman does not get these things right even by accident. It’s not that he occasionally screws up and fails to make his metaphors and images agree. It’s that he always screws it up. He has an anti-ear, and it’s absolutely infallible; he is a Joyce or a Flaubert in reverse, incapable of rendering even the smallest details without genius. The difference between Friedman and an ordinary bad writer is that an ordinary bad writer will, say, call some businessman a shark and have him say some tired, uninspired piece of dialogue: Friedman will have him spout it. And that’s guaranteed, every single time. He never misses.

Also by Taibbi: “Jesus Made Me Puke,” Rolling Stone, May 1, 2008.

Conservatives such as Noonan hoped that 9/11 would bring back the best of the 1940s and ’50s, playing Pearl Harbor to a new era of patriotism and solidarity. Many on the left feared that it would restore the worst of the same era, returning us to the shackles of censorship and conformism, jingoism and Joe McCarthy. But as far as Hollywood is concerned, another decade entirely seems to have slouched round again: the paranoid, cynical, end-of-empire 1970s.

He then goes through many film genres and compares recent films to those made in the ’70s. He even gives shout-outs to some of my favorite television shows: The Wire and Battlestar Galactica.

. . . [T]he first great revisionist sci-fi serial, Battlestar Galactica, helmed by an ex–Star Trek writer and featuring enough sex, violence, and religious fanaticism to set Gene Roddenberry spinning in his grave.

Most important, though, is that he questions the reason we have returned to such a style:

This last reality brings us to the question of how authentic our back-to-the-’70s moment really is. The Vietnam War was a cultural phenomenon in part because it couldn’t help being one—there was no way for Americans to keep the war at arm’s length, not with more than 50,000 dead, a million deployed over the course of the war, and every able-bodied teen and twentysomething at risk of conscription. In contrast, the Iraq War, a lower-casualty conflict fought by an all-volunteer military, takes place at a greater distance from the everyday lives of those Americans who don’t have a family member deployed overseas. The objective correlatives needed for a truly pessimistic era simply don’t exist for many Americans today. The last time around, we were participants; this time, we’re voyeurs.

It’s an interesting view. Read it yourself.

In other news, the Supreme Court has just ruled “that states can require voters to produce photo identification without violating their constitutional rights, validating Republican-inspired voter ID laws.” This is just bad public policy that hurts the poor, minorities, the elderly and the disabled. Ugh.

Army Gen. David Petraeus, the four-star general who led troops in Iraq for the past year, will be nominated by President Bush to be the next commander of U.S. Central Command, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Wednesday.

Gates said he expected Petraeus to make the shift in late summer or early fall. The Pentagon chief also announced that Bush will nominate Army Lt. Gen. Ray Odierno to replace Petraeus in Baghdad.

Central Command oversees the wars in Iraq and in Afghanistan.

. . .

At a hastily arranged Pentagon news conference, Gates said the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and other problems in the Central Command area of responsibility, demand knowledge of how to fight counterinsurgencies as well as other unconventional conflicts.

“I don’t know anybody in the U.S. military better qualified to lead that effort,” he said, referring to Petraeus.

Asked if moving Petraeus from the Iraq command could interrupt momentum against the insurgency, Gates said that by waiting until late summer or early fall he hoped to “ensure plenty of time to prepare for a good handoff.” He said it also would help that Odierno has had experience as “Petraeus’ right-hand man” over the last year.

If confirmed by the Senate, Petraeus would replace Navy Adm. William Fallon, who abruptly stepped down in March after a magazine reported that he was at odds with President Bush over Iran policy. Fallon said the report, while not true, had become a distraction.

[Emphasis Mine]

A truer statement than Secretary Gates’ I could not make.

Some of my favorite COIN bloggers, though, disagree with Gen. Petraeus’ appointment — and its possible after-effects.

Hamas, on the State Department Designated Foreign Terrorist Organization list, has all but endorsed Senator Obama . . .

–The Tank, a National Review Online blog

Well, we knew this would come around sooner or later. The primary isn’t even over yet! Can’t these Hamas guys at least hold out until the convention, like Hillary’s doing?

But, seriously, this is the first Republican “terrorists-support-the-Democrats” attack I’ve seen from a prominent conservative blog and magazine this election (which isn’t to say there haven’t been more).

The State Department is warning U.S. diplomats they may be forced to serve in Iraq next year and says it will soon start identifying prime candidates for jobs at the Baghdad embassy and outlying provinces, according to a cable obtained Tuesday by The Associated Press.

A similar call-up notice last year caused an uproar among foreign service officers, some of whom objected to compulsory work in a war zone, although in the end the State Department found enough volunteers to fill the jobs.

Now, the State Department anticipates another staffing crisis.

. . .

Some diplomats have privately expressed unease about volunteering for Iraq duty amid deep uncertainty over how the administration following President Bush will deal with Iraq, and how that might affect security or change Washington’s focus on the country.

Read my old post for my comments on this. Nothing has changed. Whiny FSOs.

The story is all over the Web, but the Columbia Journalism Review blog has the best rundown so far:

The National Review’s W. Thomas Smith, a regular contributor and author of the magazine’s milblog The Tank, has been caught reporting fabrications fed to him by sources during a trip to Lebanon this fall. According to several critics—and Smith and the NRO themselves—Smith fell for the falsehoods his sources fed him completely, without ever bothering to try to corroborate or confirm them independently, while making it sound like he had witnessed more than he really had.

The CJR takes him to task (you should read the entire post), but I’d just like to remind him of a few of the things he wrote promoting his own reporting and fact-checking skills over my, admittedly lesser, blogging skills earlier this year:

In fact, my obsession with “verifying” often causes me [W. Thomas Smith, Jr.] to spend more time than I should checking with multiple sources on a single point before posting a comment at “The Tank.” And let’s face it, blogs are far less formal — and for most people, entries are often posted on a whim — than actual story writing.

. . .

Had this been for one of my articles and not a blog post, I can assure you my sources and verification would have gone even deeper. Not because I’m a good journalist, but because it is my responsibility as a professional journalist to do so.
.
I understand there is a difference between a professional journalist and a blogger. And some — like me — actually get to do both. But it doesn’t mean that just because we’re blogging we should shoot from the hip (pardon the cliché).
.
People – potentially millions — read what we write. That is a huge responsibility. And truth is truth whether we want it to be or not.

So, Smith, looks like we’re in the same boat. Except yours is filling with putrid water a helluvalot faster.

It reminds me of that quote from Kurt von Hammerstein:

I divide officers into four classes — the clever, the lazy, the stupid and the industrious. Each officer possesses at least two of these qualities. Those who are clever and industrious are fitted for the highest staff appointments. Use can be made of those who are stupid and lazy. The man who is clever and lazy is fit for the very highest command. He has the temperament and the requisite nerves to deal with all situations. But whoever is stupid and industrious must be removed immediately.

I once thought Bush fit in the clever and lazy category which is good for a President. After a while it became clear that stupid and lazy was closer to the mark which is a bad thing but not the worst. But it’s clear that around him are serried ranks of the stupid and industrious and the sooner the whole lot are gone the better. Is this the worst, most willfully blind wartime leadership in American history? I think it is.

[Hotel Tango: Kings of War]

Several hundred U.S. diplomats vented anger and frustration Wednesday about the State Department’s decision to force foreign service officers to take jobs in Iraq, with some likening it to a “potential death sentence.”

Oh, boo-fucking-hoo. Half the problem in Iraq is the fact that we’re asking military personnel to perform the jobs of other government agencies — the State Department, USAID, et cetera. The armed forces aren’t built for diplomacy, nation-building and extensive public affairs — they’re built for fighting and winning wars. So stop your crying and pack your gear, bitches.

And death sentence? Talk to a military member recently? At least you bastards get to stay inside the wire most of the time.

“It’s one thing if someone believes in what’s going on over there and volunteers, but it’s another thing to send someone over there on a forced assignment,” [Jack Crotty, a senior foreign service officer who once worked as a political adviser with NATO forces,] said. “I’m sorry, but basically that’s a potential death sentence and you know it. Who will raise our children if we are dead or seriously wounded?”

You know, you signed up to serve your country. Feel free to resign. I bet you like the benefits, though, don’t you. The benefits of traveling around the world for free, getting great government wages, free health care, and on and on and on.

I seem to remember telling the FSOs who interviewed me during my attempt at the entrance exam that I was there to serve my country. In fact, that’s the thing — you serve the interests of your country; not yourself. Just because you “don’t believe in it” doesn’t mean you get out of it. Just like our soldiers, airmen, sailors and Marines. And who takes care of their kids? Whiny bastards, all of you.

American Foreign Service Association President John Naland said that a recent survey found that only 12 percent of the union’s membership believed Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was “fighting for them.”

“That’s their right but they’re wrong,” [Foreign Service Director General Harry Thomas] said, prompting a testy exchange.

“Sometimes if it’s 88 to 12, maybe the 88 percent are correct,” Naland said.

“88 percent of the country believed in slavery at one time, was that correct?” shot back Thomas, who is black, in a remark that drew boos from the crowd. “Don’t you or anybody else stand there and tell me I don’t care about my colleagues. I am insulted,” he added.

Ooooooh, burn!

Guess what? The State Department isn’t a democracy. Put up or shut up.

Ugh. This shit pisses me off. Do your job, State. Not everything is the military’s responsibility. When State finally starts doing something right, their FSOs cry like little babies. Get. Over. It. Or. Get. Out.

UPDATE 05 NOV 2007 1411: A couple of other folks have picked up on this story and agree with my sentiments. I’m sure there are a helluva lot more where those came from.