Appearing on MSNBC this afternoon, Iraq surge architect Fred Kagan criticized direct talks with Iran and made his case for attacking Iran, claiming it is the only means to “force” the country to halt its nuclear program:
Well, there’s nothing we can do short of an attack to force Iran to give up its nuclear program. … At the end of the day, the only way that you can make for sure that [a nuclear arm’s race] doesn’t happen is with an attack. There are a variety of things you can do short of an attack and hope that they will work, but hope is not a method here.
Ret. Gen. John Abizaid, the former commander of the US Central Command from 2003-2007, told a meeting of the Pacific Council on Monday that if the people of Iraq want the U.S. to leave, the U.S. should leave. “We can’t be in Iraq more than the Iraqis want us to be there,” Abizaid said. Reportedly, Abizaid predicted that by January the Iraqis “will be close to getting their act together.” “The Iraqis have moved beyond the American political debate,” he added.
Shock jock Michael Savage clearly has an overblown sense of the extent of his “expertise” on a wide range of topics, but he overstepped his bounds by attempting armchair psychology about a sensitive subject last week—autism—and drew fire from angry parents and supporters.
The World Bank, the international global capitalist lending institution, was criticized by an independent report after a critical examination of development activities funded by the Bank. The report, released Tuesday, railed against the environmental degradation caused by many projects in poor countries that harm local communities in the name of “development”.
The World Bank and its partners need to do a far better job of considering the environmental effects of projects they finance in poor countries, its internal review group concludes in a new report.
The review, released Tuesday, examined some of the $400 billion in investments in nearly 7,000 projects from 1990 to 2007. It found that recent pledges for environmental sustainability by the bank and sister institutions, including the International Finance Corporation, were often not put into practice when dollars were turned into dams, pipelines, palm plantations and the like.
The authors of the 181-page environmental report, the first by the bank’s Independent Evaluation Group since 2002, said it was crucial for the bank and its partners to intensify their focus on measurable environmental protection, given rising vulnerability to environmental risks and the increasing flow of financing for projects related to climate change.
Remember how Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki endorsed Obama’s plan for U.S. withdrawal from the country? And then remember how the endorsement suddenly became a question of “translation”? Well, it ends up that it wasn’t a botched translation at all, and that Maliki’s office personally reviewed the final interview before it was published.
Crooks and Liars:
We already knew that the Maliki “clarification” came only after pressure from the White House & CENTCOM, and that that “clarification” largely just reaffirmed his point that Obama’s time frame is more in line with the views of the Iraqi government. We also already knew that the original translation was done by Maliki’s official translator, not Der Spiegel. Well, now TNR is reporting that Maliki’s office personally reviewed the translation and signed off on it.
But it turns out that Maliki actually got a copy of the interview before it was printed and had the option to make any changes. A writer at Der Spiegel sent us this tidbit of info:
“The reason the magazine scores so many high level interviews is that the editors agree to allow the subjects to “authorize” the interviews before they go to press. It wasn’t just a slip of the tongue, in other words: Maliki not only endorsed Obama’s plans for withdrawing from Iraq, but his office then explicitly approved the endorsement before it was printed. The denials, then, were doubly facetious. Spiegel couldn’t say so, though, without revealing its embarrassing authorization policy.”
Marc Ambinder reports that John McCain's one press conference of the week has been abruptly canceled:
The one scheduled McCain press conference of the week has just been canceled, we are told. No word as to why. Grumble, grumble.
Why? Scheduling. Which is like answering "food" to "what did you eat for breakfast."
Ambinder offers a relatively innocuous explanation:
My bet is that the campaign much prefers local and regional interviews. Us national press folks will ask qualitatively different questions -- McCain v. the press, McCain v. history, McCain v. Obamania... The priority here in northern Pennsylvania's 10th Congressional district is on getting good local news coverage.
Despite the press crowd around Obama, McCain's avail today was the one with more promise to make news:
He hasn't explained what he meant by juggling the timeline on the surge and Awakening (though his staff did the best salvage job possible); whether he meant that Obama was deliberately selling out the country; whether he shares his campaign's grievance with the press; or what he thinks of his staff's genocide-themed attack.
CBS did air McCain's charge, also made earlier in the day, that Sen. Obama "would rather lose a war than lose a campaign," which, said Time's Joe Klein on CNN, "is the most scurrilous thing that I have heard a presidential candidate say in the nine elections I have covered." [Cursor.org]
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