Beginning October 1, U.S. military units have been ordered to begin turning over the distribution of funds for the 100,000 Sunni members of the pro- U.S. Awakening Movements to the predominantly Shia Iraqi army.
There is widespread – very widespread – skepticism that the Iraqi army will actually continue to make the payments.
In fact, in recent weeks there has been growing evidence that the Iraqi army, under Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki’s orders, now intends to try and militarily crush the pro-US Awakening groups.

(1) A wave of arrests and raids against major sheiks across Iraq has driven hundreds of Sunni Awakening Movement members and many key tribal leaders underground. Threats of a return to insurgency have become widespread.
(2) Top Iraqi government spokesmen have begun to demand that all Sunni militias be disarmed and disbanded.
(3) Leading military figures have increasingly begun to describe the Sunni militias as “cancers” and “terrorists” that must be systematically destroyed. (The documentation for these statements is presented below).

Under these circumstances, America must now face the very real possibility that renewed ethnic and religious civil war may break out in Iraq sometime in the next few months. As a result, it is urgent that Democrats demand that McCain tell the nation now what policy he will pursue if elected.
The critical question is this — if renewed civil war breaks out in Iraq, will McCain order US troops back into combat to try to control it – and even deploy more troops if necessary — or will he order them to stand down and allow events to take their course?
For the next 60 days Democrats should insist that this is far and away the most important question about Iraq in the 2008 campaign and that all the arguments about who was right or wrong about the original invasion, the surge or any other past decisions are now entirely secondary.
McCain will make every effort to avoid answering this question directly. The election may very well depend on whether the Democrats can force him to do so.

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There is usually a division of labor between the “positive” Presidential candidate and the “attack dog” Vice-President and other surrogates in a political convention – but this was downright ridiculous.
As today’s New York Times editorial says “Rather than remaking George W. Bush’s Republican Party in his own image, Mr. McCain allowed the practitioners of the politics of fear and division to run the show…he has decided he can have it both ways. He can talk loftily bipartisanship and allow his team to savage his opponents.”
In fact, the contrast between Wednesday night and Thursday night was so stark that the only real question is now whether McCain could actually still control the Republican Party even if he wanted to. Is it really his Party or Sarah Palin’s?
Democrats should quickly and energetically press this question – specifically in speaking to moderate and undecided voters. Is the real Republican Party “nice-guy” John McCain or conservative culture warrior Sarah Palin?
To get the ball started, here are a few ways this challenge can be presented in brief, sound-bite fashion.

“The McCain – Palin ticket offers a ‘Choice, not an Echo’ – and that’s just between the two of them”.
“Maybe McCain should demand a special debate – with Sarah Palin.”
“It sounds to me like John McCain disagrees with Sarah Palin more than he does with Barack Obama”
“Voting Republican will be hard this November – you’ll never know which Republican Party you’re voting for – John McCain’s or Sarah Palin’s.”
Refresh my memory, did McCain pick Palin or did Palin pick McCain?
“The most decent things McCain said on Thursday night would have gotten more applause in Denver then they did in St. Paul…….. and some of the worst things the Republicans said on Wednesday night could have been directly applied to some of the most decent things McCain said on Thursday night.”
“When McCain promised to attack corruption, the audience wasn’t sure whether to cheer or boo…and when McCain praised bi-partisanship the audience knew exactly whether they wanted to cheer or boo, but they also remembered that they were on TV.”
“Why is the Republican Party like The Incredible Hulk? — because you don’t want to see it when it’s angry.”

Democratic strategists have been temporarily caught off guard by the surprise selection of Sarah Palin. The Western right-wing populism of which she is an example is an extremely varied and highly idiosyncratic political ideology and strategists both inside and outside the Obama-Biden campaign are requiring additional time to fully understand her particular constellation of views.
No matter what additional information and analysis may appear in the next 5-10 days, however, one likely conclusion will be that no single message or master narrative will be effective as a response. Rather, the Democratic response to Palin will need to be disseminated as a series of highly targeted messages specifically designed for particular audiences.
The four facts below provide the foundation for a series of 6 targeted messages.

1. That McCain rejected Mitt Romney in order to pick Palin
2. That Rush Limbaugh energetically promoted Palin’s candidacy and Ralph Reed, James Dobson and Richard Viguerie all consider her one of their own. A number of articles suggest that the desire to satisfy this group played a very significant role in McCain’s decision to choose her.
3. That Palin has extremely limited experience.
4. That Palin has a history of pressuring and firing political opponents. This is not just in relation to a single case regarding a particular State Trooper, but in other cases as well when she was mayor of her small town.

Using this information, the following targeted messages can be developed.
1. Target Audience: Republican businessmen
Theme: “Palin – An irresponsible choice”
Narrative: Any 79 year old CEO of a major multinational corporation who appointed a successor who lacked any international experience at all would be judged by most businessmen to have acted in a terribly irresponsible way and possibly even be liable to legal action. McCain’s selection of Palin is actually a great deal more irresponsible and represents a profound and deeply disturbing failure of good judgment and thoughtful decision-making.

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Ed Kilgore’s post (see below) about the inclusion of a timetable for withdrawal in the new U.S. Iraq status of forces agreement is right on target. In the real world of foreign policy, the agreement marks a fundamental shift to the policy outlook and world-view of Barack Obama.
The Neo-conservative fantasy was to make Iraq a stable, pro-western state economically oriented toward the U.S. and favorable to U.S. interests. To accomplish this inescapably implied a very substantial long-term U.S. military presence – possibly for decades – and any timetable for withdrawal or other explicit agreement that U.S. forces had to leave the country had no part in the Neo-con plan.
As political issue, however, the negative consequences for John McCain’s presidential campaign can to a significant degree be controlled. The administration and the McCain campaign are already redoubling their efforts to make convoluted semantic distinctions between “aspirational goals” and “inflexible deadlines” in order to maintain the fiction that there is some difference between what Bush and McCain have been forced to accept and what Obama has advocated throughout his campaign. They are also energetically promoting the notion that the demand for a timetable is actually a piece of superficial political theater the Iraqi leadership is employing to pose as nationalists in upcoming elections and not really a serious diplomatic demand.
These semantic games – unconvincing as they are to serious observers – will be sufficient to satisfy many ordinary voters because for a large number the specific issue of timetables is ultimately a small subordinate part of two larger political narratives.

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The debate over McCain’s “the One” anti-Obama ad that erupted last Friday raises several profound questions about the nature of the McCain presidential campaign.
First, the easy question – does the ad actually intend to subtly suggest a resemblance between Obama and the anti-Christ or was it – as the McCain campaign argues – simply a tongue-in-cheek satire of Obama’s supposed presumptuousness and inflated self-opinion?
One can review the quite substantial body of evidence cited by Amy Sullivan in the Time magazine article that brought the controversy to national attention here, and draw one’s own conclusions, but a very easy analytical short-cut is simply to note that the combination of the faux biblical words “The World Will be Blessed, They Will Call Him ‘The One’” and the image of a politician speaking before huge cheering crowds effortlessly invokes mental images from several dozen major Hollywood films, TV movies and mass market paperback books of the last 30 years dealing with the Devil/Satan/Anti-Christ.
This very substantial genre of popular entertainment began with “The Omen” series in the 1970’s and has continued unabated to the present (leaving in its wake a vast trail of earnest village priests impaled by iron fence stakes, eaten by ants or killed by vicious giant hounds as they raced to warn an unsuspecting world). Quite apart from the massive niche audience of the Left Behind series, there is probably not a single popcorn-eating movie-goer in America who is not familiar with the “Satan or Anti-Christ as sinister, charismatic politician” trope in American popular cinema, TV and paperback books. The ad’s creators, as communications professionals, knew this perfectly well.
If one therefore sets aside as totally implausible a “Gee, it never even crossed our minds” excuse from the ads creators, the remaining possibilities raise several deeply disturbing questions about the nature of John McCain’s presidential campaign. The designers of the ad could not possibly have avoided knowing that during the primaries the “Obama as Anti-Christ” notion was being widely circulated and discussed in conservative Christian circles. This leads to three mutually exclusive possibilities.

1. That John McCain understood that the ad might be interpreted as having an “Obama as anti-Christ” theme and nonetheless approved it.
2. That John McCain understood that the ad might be interpreted as having an “Obama as anti-Christ” theme and disapproved of it, but was overruled by his new campaign managers who ordered its release anyway.
3. That John McCain did not realize that the ad might be interpreted as having an “Obama as anti-Christ” theme because his campaign managers deliberately avoided discussing that possibility with him when they requested his go-ahead.

It is difficult to decide which of these three possibilities has the most disturbing implications, but the press should certainly take it as their responsibility to try and find out. The question goes to the heart of John McCain’s character, his ability to manage and what kind of president he would become if elected.

With the recent appointment of Steven Schmidt and several other staffers to the highest levels of the McCain campaign, the political protégés of Karl Rove have now taken almost complete control. As a result Rove’s basic political strategy has been elevated to the core approach of the campaign.
At its heart, Karl Rove’s approach for the last 20 years has been an essentially class-based attack on Democrats – one that portrays them as representing an out-of-touch, educated elite who have little in common with average Americans. In this strategy, individual Democrats are not simply wrong about specific issues; their errors all arise from deep, pathological defects in their basic values and character.
This general strategy can be traced back to the campaigns of Richard Nixon and George Wallace in 1968 and 1972. But one of Rove’s distinct additions was to recognize that attacks on a candidates’ character must be psychologically plausible – they must be fine-tuned to exploit weaknesses the opposing candidate actually appears to reflect in his behavior.
In this regard, Rove has always had an exceptionally sinister aptitude (one that is reminiscent of Hannibal Lector’s perverse but penetrating form of psychological insight) for being able to recognize subtle human weaknesses and frailties. For example, although Al Gore and John Kerry were both products of relatively advantaged, prep school environments and were clearly not working class “ordinary guys”, they were nonetheless quite distinct. On the one hand Gore was vulnerable to being portrayed as somewhat pompous, self-important and egotistic. Kerry, in contrast, invited the caricature of being a long-winded, detached, emotionally remote New England Yankee. The overall class-based frame worked for both men, but the political hit-man’s art lay in recognizing and exploiting the subtle variations between them.
Obama presents an even more complex challenge. Although meditative, professorial, articulate and elegant, he nonetheless does not fit the image of a typical left-wing college professor (or, for that matter, of a Black militant, a well-to-do New York limousine liberal or corrupt Chicago pol).
The solution the Rove team developed, only days after taking control of the McCain campaign, was to portray Obama as a resident of the rarified world of the “Hollywood movie star liberals” – a pampered universe of exclusive health and exercise clubs, expensive hotel suites and fancy bottled water. The implication was that, like other Hollywood stars, Obama must be “self-infatuated and effete” or “vain and out of touch” or “effete, elite and equivocal” – in short, a weak and vain man without real character; a male fashion model living a movie stars’ life and not the real life of ordinary Americans.

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As the McCain campaign has rolled out its new, “Karl Rove style” personal attack on Barack Obama, Democrats have begun to feel a very familiar sense of frustration.
On the one hand, for many Democrats the “high road” taken by the Barack Obama campaign in replying to the attacks until several days ago did not seem adequately aggressive. At the same time, the DNC and other third party Democratic attacks on McCain’s close financial ties to oil companies and other lobbyists and his subservience to the policies of the Bush administration seem somehow to be glancing blows that do less damage to his personal image than do his attacks on Obama.
There is a reason for this. One fundamental element of the Karl Rove approach is to focus the most visceral and aggressive attacks on the opposing candidate’s character and personality rather than his policies. The recent Democratic attacks on McCain criticize, sometimes very bitterly, his positions and actions, but the Republican attacks on Obama are directly aimed at impugning his character.
In the past, Democrats often felt that focusing one’s attacks on an opposing candidates’ character was inappropriate – that politics should be about issues and policies, not personalities. But repeated muggings by the Rove Republicans have made many, if not most, Democrats now quite willing to respond to personal attacks in whatever way seems required.
The more difficult problem is that McCain is not, at first glance, an easy target for attacks on his character. His youthful military experience as a pilot and POW and his well-cultivated media reputation as an occasional “maverick” in the 80’s and 90’s present no obvious vulnerabilities. Current characterizations of him as old, ill-tempered, easily flustered and prone to blundering, while certainly true, are also essentially trivial. Comparing McCain to “The Simpsons’” Mr. Burns or to a clichéd grouchy grandpa simply has no meaningful political effect.
But, in fact, McCain is actually profoundly vulnerable to a powerful, aggressive and damaging attack on his character. McCain’s actions in recent weeks have provided compelling evidence for three genuinely disturbing propositions about his character, core values and integrity.

1. That John McCain has become desperate to win this election and is willing to sacrifice his deepest principles and his personal honor in order to do it
2. That the John McCain we see today is only a pale, diminished shadow of the man he once was in his early years.
3. That John McCain is allowing men he once despised and held in complete contempt to manipulate him and tell him what to do – to literally put words in his mouth and tell him what to say.

At first glance these statements are so strong that they sound almost defamatory. But each is supported by McCain’s recent actions (as described below) and they fit together into a single coherent narrative of ambition overcoming integrity and moral character.
Here is how this narrative can be presented in the format of a typical 45-60 second TV spot

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Print Version
In recent days the press has clearly noted one major misunderstanding John McCain has regarding the “surge” – his mistaken belief that it made possible alliances with Sunni tribal leaders in western Iraq when those arrangements actually preceded the surge by some time.
But in the same period McCain expressed an even more profoundly and shockingly mistaken notion — that we have now actually achieved “success” in Iraq.
In a July 22nd town meeting in New Hampshire, McCain said:

“We have succeeded. Sadr city is safe. Basra is safe. Mosul is safe. The people of Iraq are now leading normal lives.”

This is an absolutely extraordinary claim. In fact, it could very easily be dismissed as just another of McCain’s increasingly frequent “gaffes” or “blunders” except that it has actually become a critical pillar of the basic Republican “party line” – one that is particularly emphasized by the Wall Street Journal and other Rupert Murdoch-owned media.
Until a few weeks ago the standard way this was expressed was that the US was “on the verge of” success or victory. In the last 10 days, however, the rhetoric has actually been ratcheted up to an even higher level. In a major Wall Street Journal op-ed commentary on July 16th – one titled “The New Reality in Iraq” — Fredrick Kagan, Kimberly Kagan and Jack Keane, all major military analysts, made the following quite breathtaking assertion:

All of the most important objectives of the surge have been accomplished in Iraq. The sectarian civil war is ended.

They then elaborated:

The fighters have not simply hidden their weapons and gone to ground to await the next opportunity to kill each other. The Sunni insurgency, as well as AQI, has been severely disrupted. Coalition and Iraqi forces have killed or detained many key leaders, driven the militants out of every one of Iraq’s major cities (including Mosul), and are pursuing the remnants vigorously in rural areas and the desert..The Shiite militias have also been broken apart, sending thousands of their leaders scurrying for safety in Iran.

This conclusion was echoed in a July 18th editorial in a the New York Sun:

“A fair-minded person could say with reasonable certainty that the war has ended. A new and better nation is growing legs. What’s left is messy politics that likely will be punctuated by low-level violence and the occasional spectacular attack… [But] the Iraq war is over. We won.”

These are remarkably bold assertions. Yet only three days earlier one of the three authors of the Wall Street Journal piece – Kimberly Kagan – wrote a commentary that was also published in the Wall Street Journal. Titled “Moving Forward in Iraq,” it presented a radically different picture.

[Since June 15th] Gens. David Petraeus and Raymond Odierno have encircled Baghdad with a double cordon of U.S. and Iraqi forces… U.S. forces have begun blocking major road, river, and transportation routes around Baghdad. They are also deployed in critical neighborhoods around the outskirts and the interior of the city…
“Phantom Thunder” is the largest operation in Iraq since 2003, and a milestone in the counterinsurgency strategy. For the first time, U.S. forces are working systematically throughout central Iraq to secure Baghdad by clearing its rural “belts” and its interior, so that the enemy cannot move from one safe haven to another.

This hardly seems compatible with McCain’s assertion that “success” has already been achieved, that the major cities are at peace or, in fact, with the assertions Kagan herself makes in the article she co-authored or at least co-signed three days later. The US military leadership would hardly be launching the largest military operation since the invasion if all of the most important objectives of the surge had already been accomplished
The notion that the surge has successfully produced something resembling “normal life” becomes even more grotesque when one reviews the on-the-scene descriptions of conditions within Baghdad itself. In an article entitled “Baghdad’s Walls Keep Peace but Feel like Prison,” AP writer Hamza Hendawi describes conditions as follows:

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