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From the LA Times:

In an interview with the German magazine Der Spiegel, Maliki embraced Obama’s plan, saying: “That, we think, would be the right time frame for a withdrawal, with the possibility of slight changes.” Maliki said he was not making an endorsement in the presidential race.

The endorsement of the Iraqi Prime Minister for a plan that calls for combat withdrawal - an effective end to the Iraq War - is enormous news. Ironically only the LA Times fronted the story, owing to pressure exerted from the White House for the Iraqi government to issue a retractment, which they (vaguely) did. When the New York Times ran the story they ran it as a story focused on the implications for al-Maliki given the disapproval his comments generated with senior White House and US military leaders. Even so, this offers the most real possibility of an actual conclusion to the Iraq War we’ve had since it began. The lead of Iraq, Prime Minister Maliki, effectively supports presumptive Democratic nominee Barack Obama’s 16-month time-table for withdrawal, and presumptive Republican nominee John McCain has repeatedly stated that he would respect Iraq’s sovereignty on the issue of withdrawal (though his plan calls for no immediate withdrawal and indefinite military presence). It’s unlikely that McCain would actually advocate such a speedy withdrawal since it would be near political suicide, but this is the clearest hope the American public has had yet for an actual termination to the War. A full rundown with the official responses of the candidates is here.

Related: While the mainstream press was slow to run this story, The White House press corps inadvertantly emailed this story to their entire list (instead of the intended internal list) immediately after Der Speigel, the source of the Maliki interview, ran the story on the wire.

From ProPublica:

An Arab-language television network and radio station, founded by the Bush administration to promote a positive image of the United States, has aired anti-American and anti-Israeli viewpoints, has showcased pro-Iranian policies and recently gave air time to a militant who called for the death of American soldiers in Iraq.

So far, U.S. taxpayers have spent nearly $500 million to fund those broadcasts. The television station, called Alhurra, and the radio network, Sawa, were meant to provide an American perspective on world events and counter the wave of global criticism that had been building against the Bush administration since the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

…

During a visit to Alhurra’s studios in June, reporters, producers, cameramen and technical staff were busy preparing broadcasts for an audience half-way around the world. Conniff, who is the president of Alhurra and Radio Sawa, sat in on a morning editorial meeting but could not understand it – his Middle Eastern staff discussed the day’s stories in Arabic and no one offered Conniff a simultaneous translation.

“There is no adult supervision there by people who know what is on the actual broadcasts,” said William Rugh, who served as U.S. Ambassador in Yemen and the United Arab Emirates. “You need bilingual managers who understand both languages and cultures and understand journalism.”

Financial accountability also appears to be lacking. In its four years, the network has been unable to provide full documentation to auditors to account for its spending, according to two people familiar with the records and a 2006 report by the Government Accountability Office.

Is there any other time when a $.5b waste of money would be largely ignored by the American public? Especially when that waste involves inadvertently airing calls for death to American soldiers? It’s a testament to the absolutely lack of confidence we have in American government that at this point stories like this just seem like business as usual.

The Big Picture has been generating buzz and adoration since its launch May 21. But until today I didn’t realize that the site was more than just a blurb and a giant photo. Clicking into any of the link and you get a deep resource of large photos - the kind newspaper can’t afford to make room for.
This isn’t just valuable for aesthetic reasons, though there’s irrefutable beauty in these images. It’s also valuable for the context it provides, and the balance in reported; Newspapers are very limited in the coverage they can offer, and if a picture is worth a thousand words then no column would ever have the room do fully do justice to the Ethopian food crisis, the present situation in Sadr City or the Euro Cup.

Photo of a boy carrying plastic toy weapons, approaching a U.S. Soldier of 1-6 battalion, 2nd brigade, 1st Armored Division patroling in the Shiite enclave of Sadr city, Baghdad, Iraq, on Monday, June 16, 2008. (AP Photo/Petros Giannakouris)

We’re out of troops?

After the last of the five “surge” brigades goes home this summer, the U.S. Army will have 13 brigade combat teams in Iraq (the Marines have two more) and two in Afghanistan. One BCT serves as a “global response force,” ready to respond to a small-scale emergency elsewhere in the world. One is in Korea. One is dedicated to homeland defense and security. One, at a base in Fort Riley, Kan., is training soldiers to become advisers to Iraqi and Afghan security forces. That adds up to 19 BCTs. All the other Army brigades are either between deployments or in their 12-month downtime periods, having fulfilled their 12-to-15-month deployment tours. (For a little more detail on these numbers, click here.)

And that’s it. There are no more combat brigades left.

Photo courtesy annibee at Flickr.

It’s been well documented that the American public is suffering Iraq fatigue. We’re tired of the war, tired of the death, tired of the cost and becoming therefore less and less interested in news about the war. During the Vietnam War a similar fatigue balanced against the steep and visible cost of drafted young men triggered a wave of resentment in America that helped bring about change. But but we are engaged in a distant war fought by volunteers and seem more willing to let the war in Iraq go on.

Realizing the fatigue must be battled to keep the American public engaged in the political discourse, anti-war advocates are turning to new methods to drive home salient points. Cue The $3 Trillion Shopping Spree, a fun site that lets you shop with $3t for goods like groceries for a year, sending someone to college, or ending our dependence of foreign oil.

It’s tongue-in-cheek to be sure, but as Lady Mary Wortley Montagu put it:

Satire should, like a polished razor keen,
Wound with a touch that’s scarcely felt or seen.

Vietnam needed the open wound of the drafted dead to raise the public to demand withdrawal. Perhaps satire will wound us enough to act.

From the NY Times:

Hussein has been held by the U.S. military since being detained by Marines on April 12, 2006, in Ramadi, about 70 miles west of Baghdad. Throughout his incarceration, he has maintained he is innocent and was only doing the work of a professional news photographer in a war zone. […]

The AP said a review of Hussein’s work and contacts also found no evidence of any activities beyond the normal role of a news photographer. Hussein was a member of an AP team that won a Pulitzer Prize for photography in 2005, and his detention has drawn protests from rights groups and press freedom advocates such as the Committee to Protect Journalists.

”The Amnesty Committee took only a few days to determine what we have been saying for two years. Bilal Hussein must be freed immediately,” said Curley, the AP’s president.

”The U.S. military has said the Iraqi process should be allowed to work. It has, and the military must finally do the right thing by ending its detention of a journalist who did nothing more than his job. Bilal’s imprisonment stands as a sad black mark on American values of justice and fairness,” Curley added.

It’s a great thing when a wrongly imprisoned man is set free. Of course he hasn’t been freed yet, he’s just been granted amnesty. The US is still holding him. But it’s a great thing he’s been exonerated. The question this raises, of course, is what has become of America that a prisoner we hold for 2 years can be rightly cleared of wrong-doing in a fraction the time from the courts of a barely functioning government.

81% of Americans believe we’re going in the wrong direction. It’s bad that we’re so lost, but great that nearly everyone recognizes that fact.

According to the Associated Press, 4000 Americans soldiers have now died in the war in Iraq.
The best commentary I’ve seen on that toll is at Obsidian Wings. Staggering.

(Photo of Trainwreck courtesy Diseuse at Flickr)