When Gen. David Petraeus looks to the future, and envisions the time commitment necessary to implement the president’s goals in Iraq, he’s picturing about another decade. [T]he real test came over a lunch with Gen. David H. Petraeus, who used charts and a laser pointer to show how security conditions were gradually improving — evidence, […]
Sen. John Warner of Virginia, the ranking Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, three days ago: “Let the president set the timetable; let’s not have the Congress set any timetable…. [T]he Congress has repeatedly tried to set timetables and a total plan by certain dates to have a withdrawal. I have voted against that, […]
U.S. News’ Paul Bedard often does a good job keeping his ear to the ground, but his latest rumor is an odd one. The buzz among top Bushies is that beleaguered Attorney General Alberto Gonzales finally plans to depart and will be replaced by Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff. Why Chertoff? Officials say he’s got […]
Today is the fifth anniversary of Dick Cheney’s 2002 speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars’ national convention, which was the first instance of the White House making its case for a war with Iraq. Looking back, it’s quite an oration. “The case of Saddam Hussein, a sworn enemy of our country, requires a candid […]
When a rock band’s creativity grows stale, their songs become formulaic. They take an old hit, change the key, alter the lyrics a little, and voila. A new single. When a newspaper columnist’s creativity grows stale, the same problem emerges. Take David Broder, for example, who’s been having a rough year. The formula is surprisingly […]
Reading William Kristol’s latest screed in the Weekly Standard, one is tempted to pause and double-check the source. Is the content from a random right-wing blog, some nutty talk-radio show, or a leading DC establishment player in one of the most widely-read conservative political magazines in the country? I naively thought I could no longer […]
We learned this week that former Sen. Sam Nunn, a conservative Democrat from Georgia who voluntarily left politics more than a decade ago, is considering teaming up with Unity08 as a way of returning to the national stage. “My own thinking is, it may be a time for the country to say, ‘Timeout. The two-party […]
One of the principal flaws in Rudy Giuliani’s presidential campaign is that he’s running, counter intuitively, on a platform based on subjects he knows nothing about — foreign policy and national security. But just as importantly, Giuliani keeps undermining his own credibility on all policy issues by exaggerating to the point of comedy. He can’t […]
The Guardian’s Ewen MacAskill had a good piece the other day about the president’s VFW speech, and included an anecdote in passing that caught my eye. The speech was aimed primarily at what White House officials privately describe as the “defeatocrats”, the Democratic Congressmen trying to push Mr Bush into an early withdrawal. In private, […]
Last weekend, the NYT published an op-ed from seven infantrymen and noncommissioned officers with the 82nd Airborne Division, who will soon be returning home frustrated and jaded. The piece, “The War as We Saw It,” was a sweeping condemnation of everything we’ve heard of late from the Kristol-McCain-Lieberman-O’Hanlon-Pollack crowd. For reasons that I still don’t […]