Linked is a WaPo article (entitled "Report Finds Little Progress On Iraq Goals : GAO Draft at Odds With White House") covering a GAO study which assesses Iraq's progress in meeting the Congressional benchmarks set some months ago.

Here PM Maliki says that his country does need the American forces in place, though perhaps barely so. He has some very critical things to say about their methods and the results thereof.

Finally, perhaps only tangentially related, and unverified, we have here a quote from General Wesley Clark which appears to reveal that as far back as 2001 there were plans describing an apparent domino effect series of wars in the Middle East, culminating in the fall of Iran. Assuming for a moment that this plan was real, I'm not sure if it's comforting or depressing to know that the execution was so handled so incompetently that 6 years later we've not only not conquered 7 nations, but haven't even pacified the first. A little of both, I guess.

Additional data points in preparation for the Petreus / White House report

Richard Jewell is dead, at the age of 44.

...

For those of you who don't immediately recognize the name -- which would almost surely be the way the man himself would've wanted it in the first place -- Jewell was, for 88 days in 1996, the prime suspect in the Olympic Park bombing in Atlanta, which killed one person and wounded more than a hundred others.

Jewell was a security guard at the park and found the suspicious bag containing the bomb. He warned others about it and attempted to move them out of harm's way; there's little doubt that the death toll would've been much higher had Jewell not intervened, and indeed, at first he was hailed as a hero. But then something happened -- something entirely unsurprising when you consider the grotesque nature of modern media saturation and just what's required to keep it running in a manner that's satisfying to both the unscrupulous monsters at its helm and the hungry public it supposedly serves: Richard Jewell was turned into a villain -- the perfect villain actually.

An interesting obit cum indictment of the US media apparatus.

Sidenote : Last night I watched Good Night, and Good Luck, which likewise takes media companies, and the "journalists" employed by them, to task for lazy, unscrupulous or outright absent attention to topics of substance. It's worth a watch if only for the cinematography and acting but was otherwise, despite one or two missteps, quite exceptional.

Deus Ex Malcontent: The Quiet Man

with Grace is Gone, it appears you've created such a believable and depressing character that I'm forced, for once, to think maybe I don't want to be John Cusack. Maybe being John Cusack is a horribly morbid experience where your wife has died in Iraq. I hate that John Cusack.

In the future, please take exclusively romantic comedy roles, or at least portray your depressing characters less believably. Even if you have to break character, give us a wink to let us all know, "Hey, don't worry. It's just me, Lloyd Dobler, and I'll be right over with my Peter Gabriel tape."

Ha!

All joking aside, I do want to see this film...

I Watch Stuff - Grace is Gone Trailer

The mishearing that gives us 'curry favour' is of the second word. This was originally not 'favour' but 'favel'. John Palsgrave's Lesclarcissement de la langue fran�oyse [The clarification of the French language], 1530, records a curryfavell as 'a flatterar'.

Favel comes from the 1310 poem by the French royal clerk Gervais du Bus - Roman de Fauvel [The Romance of Fauvel]. That morality tale relates the story of Fauvel, an ambitious and vain donkey, who deceives and corrupts the greedy leaders of church and state. The name Fauvel or Favvel, which is formed from 'fau-vel' (in English 'veiled lie'), is an acrostic made from the initial letters of a version of the seven deadly sins: flaterie (flattery/pride), avarice (greed/gluttony), vilanie (wrath), variété (inconstancy), envie (envy), and lacheté (cowardice).

In the poem, the rich and powerful humiliate themselves by bowing down and stroking the coat of the false leader, i.e. by 'currying Fauvel'.

I love this site...

Curry favour

Decius wrote

You can follow links through to Baird's editorial if you wish. The bottom line is that this sort of thinking simply isn't allowed in the Democratic party. "I have committed even before setting pen to paper the essential crime that contains all others unto itself."

For those who don't want to click 3 links to read it, it's here.

It's a perfectly articulate op-ed which makes all the usual assertions, with no new information :

a) things are now changing for the better,
b) the soldiers want to finish the job; not letting them would be doing a disservice to their sacrifice,
c) we destroyed Iraq, so it's up to us to fix it,
d) leaving will, at least, embolden terrorists and at worst permit a complete fundamentalist takeover of the entire middle east,
e) we're substantially leaving anyway... all we're talking about is leaving some people there to help out.

Suffice it to say that (a) is presented as a fact without support besides personal anecdote, which I find unconvincing. Nonetheless, (a) is the one element I have genuinely conceded MIGHT make a difference. I certainly don't intend to base my feelings on Petreus's report, since I don't find him sufficiently objective, but I'm willing to be convinced that this is true.

As for the rest, (b) is offensive, (c) is facile, (d) is speculative and unproven and (e) is almost certainly understating the reality.

I personally believe that *staying* is as likely to cause assertion (d) as leaving is, and quite certain to cause (as, in fact, it already has caused) different, equally dangerous results.

I agree that a 100% pullout represents a massive humanitarian clusterfuck. I'm just not at all convinced that staying with anything like our current troop levels prevents it.

As for "Democrats" at large, I definitely think there's a tendency to reject anything associated with Bush out of hand, and this is, in fact, not a bad policy, as I've argued, given history.

For this case in particular, the concern I have is that the whole business has been planned from the beginning, including the apparently poorly planned invasion. I know there are elements in our culture that have wanted for many years to have us engaged in a massive, region-conquering war that pacifies and Americanizes the entire middle east. It's galling to think that one is playing into such a plan, especially if you feel like doing so is the "right" choice at the moment. The fear of being manipulated into effectively supporting this culture war mentality is one I think a lot of Dems feel, if only at a subconscious level.

Rep. Baird Gets Blasted for Iraq war views

18. Okay, maybe VICK gave another pooch or two the Atomic Drop. But you know what, Mr. Prosecutor Man? I don’t see you raising much of a fuss when you have, like, steak for dinner and shit. VICK saw “Faces of Death”, man. Those cows get their throats fuckin’ slit, man. And they don’t even get to have fun while they’re alive! VICK gave those dogs a taste of athletic glory, bitch! Those dogs were gladiators. Legends. I got a plaque of Priscilla on my wall and everything! She didn’t die! She lives forever! She was a champion! Until she started losing. Then VICK held her down and sawed her head off with a penknife. But what choice did VICK have? You ever try and tell a dog to retire?! They don't fucking listen, man! And it ain't like that bitch didn't LIKE to fight. She wanted to do it! VICK didn't "fight" dogs, per se. He simply released them to go and fight. They was just doin' what they do! That's, like, natural selection and shit! Fuck.

Wow.

Kissing Suzy Kolber: Michael Vick’s Plea Agreement – The Rough Draft

When is a paddy not a paddy? When it's a canvas, of course.

Extremely cool...

Homegrown art | The Japan Times Online

You know that dream where you are standing in front of a large group of people. You are giving a lecture. And you look down and you realize you aren't wearing pants. And then you look at the screen and you don't understand what you are supposed to be presenting on.

Yeah. That kind of sums up my Summercon experience.

Only I was wearing pants. I think. Yeah, I most likely had pants.

And I knew what I was supposed to talk about. How well I articulated is another matter.

But I don't fully remember giving the presentation. Something about source code mutation? Anyone? Bueller?

...

I don't drink beer. Why does my laptop smell like beer?

...

I vaguely recall something about screwing with spammers by throttling SMTP transactions, but it seems that talk was mixed with a detailed discussion of Scotch, and why Whisky doesn't have an "e"

[ Damn, sounds fun... particularly the part about scotch. Wish I'd heard about it sooner since I ended up already having plans this weekend (though I do appreciate the text message, Billy)!

Alas, drunken shenanigans will have to wait 'til phreaknic for me... -k]

Life and Dreams... and Summercon

Decius wrote:
The core question is whether or not there is a reason to think that we will "prevail." The correct answer is that it is simply not possible to know right now, because we've changed tactics, and the new tactical approach won't pan out enough to tell if its working until the middle of next month.

Which you assert with the same degree of absolutism you deride in others. I think it's absurd. My analysis tells me that the surge is too little, too late. Granted, I'm not an expert on military tactics, but neither are 99.99% of other humans with an opinion. The fact of the matter is that I don't think the situation is salvageable. I don't think I have to wait another 20 days to say that.

And assuming we'll know more at that time further presupposes that one expects to get any genuine facts next month. As if it's suddenly it's all gonna become clear... some day in mid-September is a magical day when all the real facts on the ground will become transparent and indisputable. Is it really believable that this administration's going to honestly report if the surge is failing miserably? I think not. That level of trust is quite simply naive at this point, and there's no other word for it.

For example, Hillary Clinton is positioning that we're going to withdraw even if the evidence demonstrates that if we keep fighting we'll succeed.

We've begun to change tactics in Iraq, and in some areas, particularly in Al Anbar Province, it's working. We're just years too late changing our tactics.

Assuming she's saying what you think she's saying, she's also probably wrong. There's evidence that Al Anbar was becoming safer well before the surge took effect, so any supposed decline in violence there is difficult or impossible to link to the surge. I was able to quickly find a few references here and here.

From the latter :

I was deployed to Ramadi as little as six months ago, working a counter-IED mission, and I can assert that violence levels started to decline back in the fall. Furthermore, [Senator] Graham made this argument to Sen. Jim Webb, whose son just returned from service in Ramadi.

So why has the violence dropped? Well, the locals were tired of getting killed by foreign insurgents, so they organized. This is primarily due to the work of the most powerful Man in Western Iraq, Sheikh Abdul Sattar al-Rishawi. Sheikh Sattar has organized militias to snuff out al-Qaida all over al-Anbar, and his forces have moved into Diyala province of late.

The US military is not defeating al-Qaida in Iraq -- locals with torches and pitchforks are.

As for this claim :

There is no relationship whatsoever between an observat... [ Read More (0.4k in body) ]

RE: Obsidian Wings: Bush's Speech

We should never allow ourselves to get used to the idea that our President, the man who commands our armed forces and deploys our diplomats, has absolutely no idea what he's talking about.

That's why it's worth dwelling on the speech he gave yesterday. It was an absolutely appalling mishmash of error, illogic, and slander. Admittedly, it's a little hard to get your hands around: as Josh Marshall said, "To get a grasp on an argument, to support it or take it apart, requires that it have some grounding in reality or actual fact." Bush's speech had no such grounding: it was a sort of free-floating fantasy whose only discernible connection to the actual world was in its lethal effects. Still, it's worth trying to understand. I do my best below the fold.

I give this one a gold star, as much as a proxy for hilzoy's writing in general as for this article, which is quite exceptional.

Obsidian Wings: Bush's Speech