In his American Legion speech, President Bush hauled out that old canard again: "If we give up the fight in the streets of Baghdad, we will face terrorists in the streets of our own cities."

Thanks to today's Wall Street Journal, we have Rep. Curt Weldon's formulation: "We either fight them there or we fight them in the supermarkets ... here." In the supermarkets? Does Weldon see terrorists among the melons?

I guess Tom Shales’ ideas about what’s news are different than mine. In today's Post, the gross Shales ridiculed Katie Couric and the CBS Evening News for leading with a report on the Taliban in Afghanistan, calling the report a sign of a “no-news day.” Said Shales:

Yesterday, though, was apparently a no-news day in the opinion of Executive Producer Rome Hartman, the staff and Couric herself, since the half-hour began with a "60 Minutes"-style piece on the resurgence of the Taliban in Afghanistan.

In fact, the report packed a punch, showing as it did an armed phalanx of 100 Taliban fighters, replete with heavy weapons and rocket-propelled grenades, strutting their stuff just ten miles from a U.S. base. Thanks to Alternet, the whole report, by Lara Logan, can be seen here.

I’m not sure what Shales considers news. But this report certainly qualifies. Logan showed a clip from a 2004 visit to the same region that she undertook, accompanied by U.S. troops, who were showing off the great U.S. victory in Afghanistan. Ooops!

Especially in the context of yesterday’s other news, that Pakistan signed a deal to halt its military actions against the Taliban in North Waziristan, a deal it signed with a seven-member Taliban council there, the CBS report hit Americans in the face with another big failure by the Bush administration.

Polls can be wrong, but polls that show overwhelming tilts in one direction or another are usually on the mark. In this case, it's the Rasmussen poll: It shows that Republicans believe that Iraq had ties to Al Qaeda before 9/11 by a stunning margin of 59 to 19. (Among Democrats, 46 per cent believe that there were no such ties - a view that was confirmed in spades last week by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence -- and 34 think there were such ties.)

As a matter of fact, both results underline the critical importance of spending part of the next seven weeks before the November elections reiterating over and over that Saddam Hussein was not behind 9/11. You know it, and I know it -- but Americans don't. Long before getting to sophisticated arguments about the nature of the terrrorist threat and strategies for getting out of Iraq, we have to explain to Americans that the most basic premises of the Iraq war were falsehoods. Then explain it again. And again.

Speaking in full evangelical cry to a collection of right-wing journalists, President Bush yesterday said that he ties the so-called war on terror to religious reawakening. Spouting nonsense about America undergoing a great Third Awakening (the first was 1730-1760 and second, 1800-1830), Bush added:

A lot of people see this as a confrontation between good and evil, including me.

Bush's typical bungled syntax allows that to be read two ways. The first is the way he meant it. The second is that "evil" includes him.

P.S. You can read a lot more about Bush's meeting with the right's scribblers here.

I’ve been following closely Jim Baker’s work on Iraq for the Iraq Study Group (see my article in the Washington Monthly).

Now comes an interview with the notoriously close-mouthed Baker in the Texas Monthly. The last, italicized sentence is probably closest to where Baker wants to take Bush. Here are some relevant quotes:

Obviously there’s some sense of urgency. The longer this goes on, the more of our sons and daughters who die. It seems like this is the sort of thing you’d want to do as fast as possible.
In order for it to be credible, we’re not bringing out any reports until after the election, because we do not want it to seem to be political. We said we expected to issue a report within a year, and the year is up around April 1. We’ll probably come in before that.

You’ve been to this dance before, having advised previous presidents at war. What’s your view of the situation in Iraq?
If we’re able to achieve the goals the administration originally articulated, it will have been worth it. If we’re not, there are serious costs to American interests in terms of the lives of brave young men and women and of our diplomatic standing on military, economic, and political issues. As we sit here today, I think most everybody understands the tremendous cost to America’s reputation and stature of just picking up and pulling out.

A number of columnists, including David Broder, of the Washington Post, and Thomas Friedman, of the New York Times, have written recently something to the effect that even if you accept that withdrawing is a mistake, the prospect of achieving our original goal is so small that continuing to remain for the sake of staying the course amounts to throwing good lives after good lives.
You’ve got to weigh that against the tremendous cost to America’s credibility, and the tremendous adverse impact in the region, if we were to just say, “We’re out of here.” Even though it’s something we need to find a way out of, the worst thing in the world we could do would be to pick up all our marbles and go home, because then we will trigger, without a doubt, a huge civil war. And every one of the regional actors—the Iranians and everybody else—will come in and do their thing.

You don’t believe the military folks who testified recently to Congress that Iraq’s already in a civil war?
That’s not what [Army General] John Abizaid [the commander of U.S. Central Command] said. If you go back and look at his testimony, he said that if we’re not able to get control of our security situation in Baghdad, there is the potential for civil war. Of course, a lot of people in the press said, “Aha! General Abizaid said we’re in a civil war.” That’s not true. That’s not what he said.

You mentioned the effect of a pullout on the reputation of the United States. Our reputation around the world right now is already pretty bad. How much worse could it be?
It could be a hell of a lot worse in terms of emboldening the terrorists. The Iranians, particularly, could be saying, “Aha! We’ve defeated the Great Satan! They’re tucking their tails between their legs and going home!” If you’re talking about extricating yourself, there has to be a strategic plan that would permit a reasonable and responsible type of drawdown, one that wouldn’t invite the kind of chaos that would be invited if we just picked up and left.

The wrongheadedness of the Bush administration's current posture on Iraqi politics -- throwing its hands up and muttering about the Sunni-Shiite conflict -- is that the United States, since March 2003, has clearly sided (and heavily so) with the Shiite side. That would be the death-squad-sponsoring, Sharia-imposing, militia-harboring, Iran-sympathizing Shiites. And now, more than three years later, Ambassador Khalilzad is shocked, shocked to find that the Shiites have militias?

This does deserve an inquisition. Maybe the latest talk (see today's New York Times) about the Leahy Law will get us there. That's the U.S.law that prohibits U.S. aid to human rights-violating police agencies abroad. Reports the Times:

American officials have warned Iraqi leaders that they might have to curtail aid to the Interior Ministry police because of a United States law that prohibits the financing of foreign security forces that commit “gross violations of human rights” and are not brought to justice.

If the Shiite militias are carrying out massacres, it's the Bush's administration's responsibility. How deep that goes is a fit subject for Democrats to investigate if they take the House or Senate. It certainly isn't trivial.

That Khalilzad is directly his wrath at the Iraqi government, rather than the American government, is typical of his record of U.S. imperial proconsul.