Antiwar.com Blog

The Washington Post article on this weekend’s attack on a remote US military base in Afghanistan notes:

It is really hard to interdict the enemy,” said the base’s company commander in an interview with The Washington Post in late September. “There are literally thousands of trails around here. We just don’t have the numbers of troops we need to be effective.”
Although the village of Kamdesh is only about a mile from the base, U.S. and Afghan troops never visited it because it was too dangerous, the company commander said.

The Post noted that, since last year, the Pentagon has been meaning to get around to withdrawing the troops who were killed this weekend, but … well, the Pentagon has been so busy with its victory proclamations and its saber-rattling to send more troops to Afghanistan.

And the chances of any Pentagon official being held responsible for these deaths?

Tell it to Pat Tillman.

In a vote of 258-163, the House of Representatives passed a broad package of measures entitled H.R. 2892 “Making appropriations for the Department of Homeland Security for the fiscal year ending September 30, 2010, and for other purposes.”

The “other purposes” really ran the gamut, including one bizarre tack-on section allowing butane lighters on board airplanes and another allowing the importation of drugs from Canada for personal use. The interesting stuff (from our perspective at least) is among other things, the “Detainee Photographic Records Protection Act of 2009,” aimed at giving the Obama Administration legal cover in its battle to keep pictures of detainee abuse from becoming public. The bill also included a non-binding recommendation seeking to keep Guantanamo detainees from coming to the US to face trial.

The vote was spun as a defeat for the Obama Administration’s ostensible plan to close Guantanamo Bay, but really underscored the hawkish voting block that the administration will likely have to rely on to push through future escalations in Afghanistan and elsewhere.

Though only supported by 35% of voting Democrats, the bill passed easily, relying on a coalition of centrist Democrats and Republicans. Only one Republican, Congressman Ron Paul, voted against the measure.

Arianna Huffington is leading the neo-liberals in their pile-on against Iran.

Here she, and WAPO‘s Jonathan Capehart, go up against Glenn Greenwald:

A very good insight of what could be called the “Beltway Bubble” on foreign-policy thinking can be gained by a study of the September 19 National Journal’s “Insiders Poll” in which 115 Democratic and 116 Republican “insiders” ranked prominent columnists, bloggers, broadcast personalities, and other media types by their influence in “most help(ing) to shape (the insider’s) own opinion or worldview.” Each “insider” could name as many as five opinion-shapers, and, in tallying the rankings, a first-place vote was give 5 points, a second-place vote 4 points, and so on. While the website lists all of the 146 opinion-shapers rated by the poll (and is helpfully interactive), the actual magazine (p. 6 in the 9/19 edition) displays the top-ten vote-getters:

1) Thomas Friedman (335 votes divided between 230 Democratic and 105 Republican insiders);
2) David Brooks (282 votes evenly divided between 141 Dems and 141 Reps);
3) Charles Krauthammer (281 votes divided between 1 Dem and 280 Reps);
4) George Will (246 votes divided between 23 Dems and 223 Reps);
5) Paul Krugman (182 votes divided between 181 Dems and 1 Reps);
6) David Broder (165 votes divided between 106 Dems and 59 Reps);
7) E.J. Dionne (147 votes divided between 143 Dems and 4 Reps);
8) Karl Rove (126 votes divided between 1 Dem and 125 Reps)
9) Peggy Noonan (101 votes divided between 5 Dems and 96 Reps); and
10) William Kristol (91 votes) divided between 5 Dems and 86 Reps).

Of course, most of the 146 media personalities rated in the survey are concerned primarily with domestic issues, and a relative few write or talk frequently, let alone exclusively, about foreign policy. But a few general points about the rankings of those who do write about foreign policy, at least fairly regularly, stood out for me.

Read the rest of this entry at Jim Lobe’s Blog: