There are any number of reasons to be way less than confident that our armies are ever leaving Iraq or Afghanistan, not least among which is that the people responsible for getting US troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan tend to define “getting out” as “not getting out.” In Iraq, for instance, the deal has always been that all the combat troops will be out of the country whenever they’re supposed to be out, unless they aren’t for some reason, but there will still be some number of other, presumably still armed, kinds of troops there. At the request of the Iraqi government, of course.

One US-related thing both countries have in common is that they’re home to these great honking US embassies. The one in Iraq cost more than a billion dollars and looks like it should be a Soviet-era Ministry of Recreation building. It’s supposed to be very attractive on the inside, though, like a starship where everyone is sealed in for years because the environment outside is what one might call inhospitable. The one in Afghanistan is cheaper but will ultimately carry more personnel than Starship Baghdad.

There are some staffing similarities as well, although they may not bear overmuch on our permanent presence in the two countries. In Iraq under the Bush administration, many embassy positions were filled by members of a secret high school clique with no expertise in anything other than being members of a secret high school clique. In Afghanistan, according to the State Department audit described in the Washington Post story about the rapidly expanding staff there, it’s sort of the reverse: rather than hiring people who don’t know how to do stuff and promoting them to fill critical positions, the department is hiring people who do know how to do stuff to fill jobs that don’t exist with responsibilities that are undefined.

Raise your hand if you think any US administration, be it labeled Obama or, perhaps, Petraeus, will be leaving upward of a thousand US embassy staff to be defended primarily by a Marine honor guard and crack military teams from their host countries.

So that’s one thing, and no one is really talking about it. But one needn’t resort to reading embassy tea leaves when the stuff people are talking about includes suggestions that we won’t ever be leaving. Not too long ago, “defense” secretary Robert Gates said that the Obama plan to exit Afghanistan in 2011 is really, really flexible.

And what the president has said is, he expects that we will be in a position to begin turning over certain districts and provinces in Afghanistan to provincial or district Afghan control beginning in July of 2011. There is no end date on that. And the — and the turnover of control to the Afghans will be based on conditions on the ground.

And so we don’t — we don’t want to have to refight for territory we’ve already had to fight for once. And so we want to make sure, when it’s turned over to the Afghans, it stays in Afghan hands.

But this is a gradual process, and there will soon be 100,000 American troops and 50,000 troops from 43 other countries around the world in Afghanistan. No one should expect to see them all start to head for the exits on — in July of 2011. There will be a substantial presence, in my view, well beyond that period of time.

Nobody is really talking about that, either, but unlike the question of embassy security, it’s out there on the record, if anyone, say perhaps the institutional press with its intrepid reporters who are supposed to ask questions about these kinds of things, were keeping a record.

In Iraq, the staged withdrawal plan calls for US troops to be out of the country by the end of 2011—2011 is a big year for the military, except if it isn’t—unless those pesky conditions on the ground dictate otherwise, and even if they don’t some troops will remain to help train Iraq’s military to use all the fancy military gear and weapons they’ll be buying from the US. Which won’t be enough to offset the trillion dollars we’ve dropped on the project, but should be sufficient to keep defense stocks healthy.

But look for conditions on the ground to get a little stormy before that happens.

So there you have it. In Afghanistan, it’s a 100% dead lock that a whole bunch of US troops will be there long after the Obama administration’s very Gumby-like suggestion of a potential date for the possible beginning of a less than full withdrawal, while with Iraq it’s probably about 75%. Peace in our time!

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Not all Nobel Peace Prize winners use their acceptance lectures as an opportunity to brand Martin Luther King and Ghandi as unrealistic saps who didn’t understand the heroic necessity of bombing the brown bejeebers out of impoverished peoples in far off lands. Mohammed ElBaradai, the former head of the International Atomic Energy Agency who was roundly hated by the Bush administration for advocating against blowing people up for stuff they weren’t doing, both in his capacity as the IAEA chief and in a Nobel acceptance speech that admittedly didn’t come close to Obama’s for sheer reluctant-cowboy-strapping-on-his-guns-and-riding-off-to-blow-some-bad-guy’s-shit-up-real-good drama but nevertheless had its moments, is now back home in Egypt stirring up trouble for America’s long-time Man in Cairo, Hosni Mubarak.

ElBaradai is a very smart man and an astute politician, and one hopes he isn’t setting himself up to get killed by the afore-mentioned Mubarak, something the US would no doubt find regrettable and requiring of the most stern recriminations.

I’m not a big fan of Howard Kurtz, the Washington Post’s “media” “critic”, but in this instance someone threw an acorn at him and when it glanced off his noggin and fell to the ground at his feet he recognized it for the seed of a story that it was, which is about how Ron Hubbard’s science fiction religion gone rogue hired some investigative journalists to investigate the St. Petersburg Times. The Church of Scientology commissioned the no-holds-barred, chips-fall-where-they-may report in response to many, many years of unfriendly press from the Times. Although actually it isn’t a chips-fall-where-they-may kind of thing, because if the chips fall somewhere the church doesn’t want them to fall, they’ve reserved the right to sweep them up and run them through the shredder.

I’m fond of the St. Pete Times because of its lineage, and of course any paper that can mess with Scientology for decades on end and live to tell the tale is inherently laudable.

If you want to shock and amaze your friends with your incredibly accurate predictions about the fate of financial industry regulation over the course of the Obama administration, here’s your secret decoder ring.

Megabank CEOs didn’t have time for President Barack Obama when he gave a major speech on Wall Street in September, but they had no trouble making it to Capitol Hill this morning to plead their case to the 20-something staffers who can help them stop reform in its tracks.

Kicking off a two-day event designed to “help” legislative aides who will be writing the rules designed to rein in and reform Wall Street, the CEOs made it clear that they would be there “anytime” a young, confused congressional aide needed help understanding a complex topic.

“Call us, say we met in Washington,” said Richard Davis, chairman, president and CEO of U.S. Bancorp. “We’d love to help.”

This regulatory climate is freezing! We’d better huddle together for warmth.

The number one reason I should have known that the Saints were going to beat the Colts, and if I’d seen this I would have changed my bet accordingly … remember Michael “Heck of a job, Brownie” Brown? The Federal Emergency Management Agency head who oversaw the homicidal Bush administration response to Hurricane Katrina? He’s now a talk radio host in Denver, and he picked the Colts. They were doomed from that moment forward. The only thing that could have saved them was if Brown had drawn up the Saints game plan.

Oh, and Brown’s classiest comment in the story? The former Bush administration official admits he has his fair share of callers bashing him, saying that some “can’t get over the whole Katrina thing.” Hmm. Imagine.

Mo betta latah …

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Those pesky Nuremberg precedents? Off with their heads!

Via IOZ, we learn that the Obama administration now claims the right to prosecute attorneys who have the temerity to provide legal counsel to anyone or any group that this administration, and presumably future administrations, and maybe past ones as well, given how solicitous this administration has been of that one’s feelings, says are terrorists.

In other words, the law is now against the law. Because the president says so. Hope and fucking change, indeed.

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You might if you studied them for more than eight years, the way the cryptographers at the FBI did.

Late last Friday afternoon, our nation’s top crime fighters wrapped up their investigation of the 2001 anthrax attacks, issuing their final report here. On pages 59 and 60 of that report, its authors lay out their theory that the texts reproduced above (the first was sent to NBC’s Tom Brokaw and the second to the New York Post, along with small quantities of anthrax spores) contain hidden messages encoded by making certain letters bolder than others. With my untrained eye, I can see that maybe two T’s and an A are a little heavier than the other letters, but according to the FBI’s experts, the following letters are bolded:

The ‘T’ in THIS
The ‘T’ in NEXT
The ‘T’ in TAKE
The ‘A’ in PENACILIN
The ‘A’ in DEATH
The ‘T’ in TO
The ‘T’ in the second TO
The ‘A’ in ALLAH
The ‘T’ in GREAT

String them together and you get TTT AAT TAT, which, with penetrating insight, the investigators recognized as the genetic code for the amino acids phenylalanine, asparagine, and tyrosine. Hmmmm, P…A…T, Pat. Aha!—the nickname of a former colleague of Dr. Bruce Ivins, once the U.S. government’s top anthrax scientist (he reportedly committed suicide when he learned that he was the FBI’s primary suspect). Not only was this ‘Pat’ “a close friend” of Dr. Ivins, “in fact one of his only friends,” she was also “the object of [his] excessive affection and attention.” In other words, mass murder as love note—typical government scientist behavior.

Even better, the letter symbols for phenylalanine, asparagine, and tyrosine are F, N, and Y, which, strung together in sequence, signify “a verbal assault on New York,” our Sherlockian agents induce. Additional evidence for this interpretation is provided on page 60 of the report:

According to numerous witnesses who knew him well, including Former Colleague #1, Dr. Ivins had a deep hatred for New York. For example, in the aftermath of 9/11, Dr. Ivins sent Former Colleague #1 an e-mail where he essentially accused “typical” New Yorkers of overplaying the tragedy and seeking attention, wondering “what about those folks in Oklahoma City, they deserve sympathy too.” Further, Dr. Ivins strongly associated Former Colleague #1 with New York, so this reference may well have been directed at her. His communications with her both when she worked at USAMRIID and in the years that followed were replete with references to the New York Yankees, her favorite baseball team, not always in the kindest of terms.

Damn Yankees, axis of evil, WMDs, bioterror…it all fits together so seamlessly.

There is much more of equal value throughout the 96-page report. I highly recommend it.

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In other shocking news, former Justice Department lawyers Jay Bybee and John Yoo, who wrote the after-the-fact memos creating the legal justification for torture, have been found by another Justice Department lawyer to be not guilty of anything other than “poor judgement,” although the people who actually conducted the investigation thought the pair should be disbarred (and people such as I think they should be in a dock charged with crimes against humanity). The decision was hailed as fair by everyone who might one day need their own retroactive ass-covering government lawyer memos. Yay!

Meanwhile, legislation establishing universal Medicare in the US, the lone health insurance reform measure likely to resolve about 98% of the health insurance issues in the US, is making sudden and dramatic progress against resistance from corrupt insurance and pharmaceutical industry shills in Congress and the White House.

Just kidding! Haha! It’s a bad bill or nothing for our Democratic party stalwarts! Yay!

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