One Utah

The war in Afghanistan has been the third-longest longest conflict in American history, after the Revolutionary War and Vietnam. Yet there is no end in sight, the situation is deteriorating, and our allies have concluded that U.S. strategy cannot succeed.

Over-reliance on air strikes has caused civilian casualties disproportionate to any military goals, making these [...]

Senator McCain’s genius political consultants are trying to steer the presidential campaign away from the economy and its down-spiraling fundamentals. Instead, they want to talk about “past associations” of the candidates.
Well, let’s talk. How about Senator McCain’s long friendship with Ahmed Chalabi, the crooked Iraqi politician and former exile who played a leading [...]

Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles, the British Ambassador in Kabul, believes that U.S. strategy is wrong and the war is as good as lost. The potentially explosive views were published by Le Canard Enchaîné, a respected French weekly, which said that they were direct quotations from a diplomatic cable written by François Fitou, the French Deputy Ambassador [...]

Well, not in reality. He won it in McCain World, where this morning McCain campaign manager Rick Davis declared: “McCain won the debate– hands down.” Of course, the actual real-world presidential debate doesn’t take place until tonight.
The subject of the first debate between Senators Obama and McCain will be U.S. foreign policy. [...]

Via Raw Story: The Bush administration is keeping a new National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Afghanistan under wraps until after the election.

Brian Ross of ABC News reports that the NIE describes the Afghanistan situation as “grim”, but there are “no plans to declassify” any of it before the election, according to one US official familiar [...]

Via Think Progress:
In an al-Iraqiya interview on September 17, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki revealed that the Bush administration has attempted to time Iraq withdrawal in a way that would benefit John McCain and the Republican Party.
MALIKI: Actually, the final date was really the end of 2010 and the period between the end of [...]

From Reagan (1980) through first two years of Bush I, 1990, our public debt grew by 300% from $930.2 billion to $3.233 trillion. After two more years of Bush and eight of Clinton, the debt grew 50% to $5.674 trillion and we were left with a decent economy and a $559 billion budget surplus.
In [...]

Amid all the excitement of recently-minted Bush administration fiascoes, let’s not forget about Iraq. We still have 144,000 troops stuck there, not accomplishing anything positive for U.S. national security –but they’re working very hard and still getting shot at.

Combat outpost in Mosul, Iraq
Phillip Robertson of the Associated Press reports from Mosul, where the U.S. [...]

I was a die-hard McCainiac in 2000, part of a small band of Utah loyalists. We didn’t all agree with Senator McCain on every single issue, but we agreed with him that straight-talking candidates are the only ones worth voting for. I know now that McCain supported a war of aggression against Iraq, [...]

National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, May 16, 2002
I don’t think anybody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center, take another one and slam it into the Pentagon; that they would try to use an airplane as a missile, a hijacked airplane as a missile. [...]

We have been told by oh-so-serious media pundits that Senator John McCain is some kind of foreign policy expert, despite the fact that he supported and helped bring about the worst strategic blunder in modern times, the invasion and occupation of Iraq.
Few people seem worried about McCain’s foreign policy team, which includes hard-core [...]

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After the election of 2004, voting rights activists everywhere were wondering why the exit polls, which had been clearly favoring John Kerry all day, puzzlingly flipped 180 degrees, and ultimately reflected the official voting results. If you haven’t heard about this, you are definitely not alone. Although the organization that ran the exit polls still [...]