The war in Iraq has become “a major debacle” and the outcome “is in doubt” despite improvements in security from the buildup in U.S. forces, according to a highly critical study published Thursday by the Pentagon’s premier military educational institute.

The report released by the National Defense University raises fresh doubts about President Bush’s projections of a U.S. victory in Iraq just a week after Bush announced that he was suspending U.S. troop reductions.

Where’s Obama on Israel and the Palestinians? On both sides.

Since running for President, he’s become an outspoken supporter of Israel. While in the Illinois legislature, he was a friend, supporter and beneficiary of Palestinians whose organizations trashed Israel.

Yesterday, when asked on the campaign trail about why he didn’t denounce Louis Farakahn before he became an issue in the campaign, Obama said:

Obama reminded the crowd that he’d denounced his church’s praise of Farrakhan, saying, “I’ve been very clear about saying that was wrong. And nobody has spoken out more fiercely on the issue of anti- Semitism than I have.”

Jake Tapper of ABC News responds:

Really? No one? Elie Wiesel? Simon Wiesenthal? Alan Dershowitz? No one? Wow.

More…

From the LA Times article linked above:

It was a celebration of Palestinian culture — a night of music, dancing and a dash of politics. Local Arab Americans were bidding farewell to Rashid Khalidi, an internationally known scholar, critic of Israel and advocate for Palestinian rights, who was leaving town for a job in New York.

A special tribute came from Khalidi’s friend and frequent dinner companion, the young state Sen. Barack Obama. Speaking to the crowd, Obama reminisced about meals prepared by Khalidi’s wife, Mona, and conversations that had challenged his thinking.

….Today, five years later, Obama is a U.S. senator from Illinois who expresses a firmly pro-Israel view of Middle East politics, pleasing many of the Jewish leaders and advocates for Israel whom he is courting in his presidential campaign. The dinner conversations he had envisioned with his Palestinian American friend have ended. He and Khalidi have seen each other only fleetingly in recent years.

…And yet the warm embrace Obama gave to Khalidi, and words like those at the professor’s going-away party, have left some Palestinian American leaders believing that Obama is more receptive to their viewpoint than he is willing to say.

Their belief is not drawn from Obama’s speeches or campaign literature, but from comments that some say Obama made in private and from his association with the Palestinian American community in his hometown of Chicago, including his presence at events where anger at Israeli and U.S. Middle East policy was freely expressed.

Then there’s this:

Ali Abunimah, a Palestinian rights activist in Chicago who helps run Electronic Intifada, said that he met Obama several times at Palestinian and Arab American community events. At one, a 2000 fundraiser at a private home, Obama called for the U.S. to take an “even-handed” approach toward Israel, Abunimah wrote in an article on the website last year. He did not cite Obama’s specific criticisms.

Abunimah, in a Times interview and on his website, said Obama seemed sympathetic to the Palestinian cause but more circumspect as he ran for the U.S. Senate in 2004. At a dinner gathering that year, Abunimah said, Obama greeted him warmly and said privately that he needed to speak cautiously about the Middle East.

Abunimah quoted Obama as saying that he was sorry he wasn’t talking more about the Palestinian cause, but that his primary campaign had constrained what he could say.

Obama denies saying “those words” to Abunimah. David Axlerod explains:

“He always had expressed solicitude for the Palestinian people, who have been ill-served and have suffered greatly from the refusal of their leaders to renounce violence and recognize Israel’s right to exist.”

One more example:

In 2000, the Khalidis held a fundraiser for Obama’s unsuccessful congressional bid. The next year, a social service group whose board was headed by Mona Khalidi received a $40,000 grant from a local charity, the Woods Fund of Chicago, when Obama served on the fund’s board of directors.

At Khalidi’s going-away party in 2003, the scholar lavished praise on Obama, telling the mostly Palestinian American crowd that the state senator deserved their help in winning a U.S. Senate seat. “You will not have a better senator under any circumstances,” Khalidi said.

The event was videotaped, and a copy of the tape was obtained by The Times.

While some members of the Jewish community have praised Obama, others, as well as some Jewish leaders, are skeptical:

“In the context of spending 20 years in a church where now it is clear the anti-Israel rhetoric was there, was repeated, . . . that’s what makes his presence at an Arab American event with a Said a greater concern,” said Abraham H. Foxman, national director for the Anti-Defamation League.

To be fair, Obama has repudiated Wright’s anti-Israel remarks.

In Pennsylvania a few weeks ago, Marcel Groen, the chairman of the Montgomery County Democratic Party had this to say at a “gathering of Jewish communal and organizational leaders in Philadelphia.”

Jews “don’t have the luxury to decide if someone may be OK down the road…We have one candidate we know, the other we don’t,” Groen said, referring to U.S. Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.)

The highest ranking Jewish leader in PA is Governor Ed Rendell, who supports Hillary, as does Rep. Allyson Schwartz.

The way I see it: It’s true that Obama has been a supporter of Israel since becoming Senator and especially since running for President. But, as a state legislator in Illinois, he more often expressed his support for Palestinian rights and opposition to Israel’s militarism.

What will he do as President? Will he support one at the expense of the other or be committed to a two-state solution? Toss a coin, you have a 50% chance of being right.

Related: One reporter complains of the “tight rein” Obama’s campaign is keeping on its staffers and surrogates when it comes to speaking about the issue. She asks,

Who else are the Obama powers hiding while there are still so many serious questions floating out there among Jews about the man who would be president?

Tags: obama, israel, palestine

Senator John McCain has long made his decades of experience in foreign policy and national security the centerpiece of his political identity, and suggests he would bring to the White House a fully formed view of the world.

But now one component of the fractious Republican Party foreign policy establishment — the so-called pragmatists, some of whom have come to view the Iraq war or its execution as a mistake — is expressing concern that Mr. McCain might be coming under increased influence from a competing camp, the neoconservatives, whose thinking dominated President Bush’s first term and played a pivotal role in building the case for war.

The concerns have emerged in the weeks since Mr. McCain became his party’s presumptive nominee and began more formally assembling a list of foreign policy advisers. Among those on the list are several prominent neoconservatives, including Robert Kagan, an author who helped write much of the foreign policy speech that Mr. McCain delivered in Los Angeles on March 26, in which he described himself as “a realistic idealist.” Others include the security analyst Max Boot and a former United Nations ambassador, John R. Bolton.

Full story here.

Technorati Tags: mccain, foreign policy, campaign 2008, republicans, neoconservatives

(Via ABC News.)

Retired Gen. Colin Powell insists he hasn’t yet decided who he’ll back in the 2008 presidential election.

“I’m looking at all three candidates,” Powell said in an exclusive interview with Diane Sawyer for Thursday’s “Good Morning America” on ABC. “I know them all very, very well. I consider myself a friend of each and every one of them. And I have not decided who I will vote for yet.”

Powell, who served as President Bush’s first secretary of state, is a Republican, but that apparently is not enough to sway him toward Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., the GOP’s presumptive nominee.

McCain has staked much of his presidential prospects on the success of the surge strategy in Iraq, a subject of great debate in Washington this week as Gen. David Petraeus took his case to Capitol Hill.

“The United States Armed Forces are very, very stretched. It appears that after the surge is over, we’re going to go down to 140,000 troops in Iraq. That’s 10,000 more than we had before the surge,” Powell observed, reacting to the testimony Petraeus delivered over two days.

Full story ABC Newshere.

Technorati Tags: obama, powell

Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr raised the stakes Tuesday in his showdown with government, threatening to end formally a seven-month cease-fire unless authorities stop attacks on his followers in Baghdad.

Formally ending the cease-fire could trigger renewed fighting throughout southern Iraq, nine days after a deal brokered in Iran calmed the region.

But there was no letup in the clashes in the capital Tuesday, as American and Iraqi soldiers stepped up the pressure against Shiite militants in their Sadr City stronghold of northeast Baghdad. U.S. troops fired missiles at three mortar positions, killing 12 militants, the American command said. Iraqi police and hospitals said 14 people were killed and 37 wounded in Sadr City.

Two more U.S. troops were killed in the Baghdad fighting, the U.S. command announced. At least 12 American service members have died in Iraq since Sunday. Also Tuesday, rockets or mortar shells also slammed into the U.S.-protected Green Zone, but the U.S. Embassy said there were no casualties.

The bloodshed served as stark reminders of Iraq’s continuing instability five years after U.S. troops swept into Baghdad and toppled Saddam Hussein’s regime on April 9, 2003. The euphoria of victory was soon dissipated — first by a Sunni insurgency, then Sunni-Shiite slaughter and now battles against Shiite militiamen.

Full story here.

(Via ABC News.)

Retired Gen. Colin Powell insists he hasn’t yet decided who he’ll back in the 2008 presidential election.

“I’m looking at all three candidates,” Powell said in an exclusive interview with Diane Sawyer for Thursday’s “Good Morning America” on ABC. “I know them all very, very well. I consider myself a friend of each and every one of them. And I have not decided who I will vote for yet.”

Powell, who served as President Bush’s first secretary of state, is a Republican, but that apparently is not enough to sway him toward Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., the GOP’s presumptive nominee.

McCain has staked much of his presidential prospects on the success of the surge strategy in Iraq, a subject of great debate in Washington this week as Gen. David Petraeus took his case to Capitol Hill.

“The United States Armed Forces are very, very stretched. It appears that after the surge is over, we’re going to go down to 140,000 troops in Iraq. That’s 10,000 more than we had before the surge,” Powell observed, reacting to the testimony Petraeus delivered over two days.

Full story ABC Newshere.

Technorati Tags: obama, powell

At this stage, the United States has no good option in Iraq. But the drawbacks and dangers of the current bottom-up approach demand a change of course. The only alternative is a return to a top-down strategy. To be more effective this time around, Washington must return to the kind of diplomacy that the Bush administration has largely neglected. Even with 160,000 troops in Iraq, Washington lacks the leverage on its own to push the Maliki government to take meaningful steps to accommodate Sunni concerns and thereby empower Sunni moderates. (The legislative package and the de-Baathification reform law passed earlier this year were seriously flawed and did more to spur the Sunnis’ anxieties than redress their grievances.) What the United States could not do unilaterally, it must try to do with others, including neighboring countries, European allies, and the United Nations (UN). In order to attain that kind of cooperation, Washington must make a public commitment to a phased withdrawal. Cooperation from surrounding countries and European partners is unlikely to be forthcoming without a corresponding U.S. readiness to cede a degree of the dubious control it now has over events in Iraq.

Full article here.

The top U.S. commander in Iraq told Congress Tuesday that hard-won gains in the war zone are too fragile to promise any troop pullouts beyond this summer, holding his ground against impatient Democrats and refusing to commit to more withdrawals before President Bush leaves office in January.

In testimony that featured questioning by the major presidential candidates, Army Gen. David Petraeus painted a picture of a nation struggling to suppress violence among its own people and to move toward the political reconciliation that Bush said a year ago was the ultimate aim of his new Iraq strategy, which included sending more than 20,000 extra combat troops.

Security is getting better, and Iraq’s own forces are becoming more able, Petraeus said. But he also ticked off a list of reasons for worry, including the threat of a resurgence of Sunni or Shiite extremist violence. He highlighted Iran as a special concern, for its training and equipping of extremists.

The sharp differences between the Democratic and Republican presidential candidates over the war in Iraq shared the spotlight Tuesday during Senate hearings.

Sen. John McCain, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, said that success in Iraq was “within reach” at the beginning of the high-profile hearing on Iraq involving Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. general in Iraq, and Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker, the top American diplomat in Baghdad.

“Our goal — my goal — is an Iraq that no longer needs American troops, and I believe we can achieve that goal, perhaps sooner than many imagine,” McCain said.

“But I also believe that the promise of withdrawal of our forces regardless of the consequences would constitute a failure of political and moral leadership.”

“Success — the establishment of peaceful, democratic state, the defeat of terrorism — this success is within reach,” he said. “Congress must not choose to lose in Iraq. We must choose to succeed.”

In apparent response to McCain, Sen. Hillary Clinton said Tuesday that the opposite was true: It would be “irresponsible” to continue a failed policy in Iraq. Video Watch the candidates take part in the hearings »

She said it was “time to begin an orderly process of withdrawing our troops” from Iraq in order to focus on Afghanistan and other U.S. interests.

“It might well be irresponsible to continue the policy that has not produced results that have been promised time and time again,” she said, noting a “lack of political progress over the past six months” in Iraq.

And Sen. Barack Obama, a member of the Foreign Relations Committee, questioned whether the conditions set by U.S. commanders for withdrawal would lead to a war that could last 20 to 30 years.

He called the invasion of Iraq a “massive strategic blunder” that enabled al Qaeda and Iran to spread their influence into Iraq, and he said the United States should pressure Iraqi officials to settle the war by threatening to leave.

“Nobody’s asking for a precipitous withdrawal. But I do think it has to be a measured, but increased, pressure and a diplomatic surge that includes Iran,” Obama said. “Because if [Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki] can tolerate normal neighbor-to-neighbor relations in Iran, then we should be talking to them as well. I do not believe we’re going to be able to stabilize the situation without them.”

Adm. William Fallon has resigned as chief of U.S. forces in the Middle East and Central Asia after more than a year in the post, citing what he called inaccurate news reports that put him at odds with the Bush administration over Iran.