The steady stream of bad news about Afghanistan this week served to highlight two inescapable truths regarding the conflict against Al Qaeda and the Taliban. First, Barack Obama was right that the ongoing commitment of American forces in Iraq is preventing the United States from successfully pursuing Al Qaeda along the Pakistan frontier. Second, the […]

Back in 2003, General Tommy Franks called Bush Iraq intelligence fabulist Douglas Feith "the f**king stupidest guy on the face of the earth." Two years later, Colin Powell's one-time aide Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson said of Feith "seldom in my life have I met a dumber man." Defending Condoleezza Rice's - and by extension, President Bush's […]

One day after he proclaimed that it is "not too important" when U.S. troops return from Iraq, John McCain commemorated an unfortunate five year anniversary. In the annals of McCain's dismal record of flawed forecasts and calamitous calls on Iraq, June 11, 2003 stands out. On that one day, George W. Bush's would-be Republican successor […]

Four years after Kansas Senator Pat Roberts triumphantly cleared the Bush administration of misusing pre-war Iraq intelligence, the Phase 2 report of the Senate Intelligence Committee he once chaired today reached a much different conclusion. After Roberts successfully stonewalled past the 2004 and 2006 elections the studies examining White House statements on the Iraqi threat […]

Aided and abetted by the conservative echo chamber, John McCain this week launched a campaign to rewrite his dismal history of faulty forecasts and disastrous predictions on Iraq. Demonstrating that experience is truly no substitute for judgment, John McCain like President Bush was sadly wrong at almost every turn in promoting the invasion and occupation […]

If nothing else, John McCain is an irony producing machine. On the very day Scott McClellan described the Bush administration "propaganda" used to sell an "unnecessary war" in Iraq, talking points McCain himself regurgitated, the Arizona Senator challenged Barack Obama to join him on a Baghdad visit. More ironic still, John McCain hasn't merely been […]

As FireDogLake, Huffington Post and others detail, former White House press secretary Scott McClellan revealed that it was President Bush himself who authorized the selective leaking of the 2002 Iraq National Intelligence Estimate. As he disclosed both in his book and during interviews today, McClellan says Bush admitted declassifying portions of the NIE to allow […]

In what was billed as a major address today on nuclear non-proliferation, John McCain offered the latest installment in the ongoing saga of strategic incoherence that passes for his foreign policy. Just months after calling for a "League of Democracies" and the expulsion of Russia from the G8, McCain today portrayed Russia as an essential […]

Senator John McCain used this Memorial Day to ask Americans to remember others' roles in the calamity that unfolded in Iraq. First proclaiming himself "sick at heart by the many mistakes made by civilian and military commanders" in the run up and conduct of the war, McCain then declared of a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq, […]

In Columbus today, John McCain made his pitch that he, and not Barack Obama, is the candidate of hope. In a major if theoretical reversal of his commitment to a perpetual 100, a thousand or a million year American presence in Iraq, McCain declared that he "would hope to have achieved" a drawdown of most […]