Dave Weigel and Matt Yglesias are having fun picking on Marty Peretz's personal assistant and I can't resist piling on. Peretz's Kirchick wrote:

[ R]egime change in Iraq was the official, bipartisan policy of the United States government years before it became fashionable for journalists to write tiresome, 5,000-word articles linking Ahmed Chalabi, PNAC and Paul Wolfowitz.

(Emphasis supplied.) I am tired of those pieces too. But they at least have the virtue of being true. Chalabi, Wolfowitz and PNAC were intimately connected. Unlike the claims made in those once fashionable articles that connected Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden and mushroom clouds.

The other difference between those two types of tiresome articles is one type consists of rather meaningless blather. The other contributed to the launching of the most disastrous strategic blunder since Vietnam.

Iraqi PM Maliki says that the US can leave now as far as he is concerned:

Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki said Saturday that the Iraqi army and police are capable of keeping security in the country when American troops leave "any time they want," though he acknowledged the forces need further weapons and training. The embattled prime minister sought to show confidence at a time when congressional pressure is growing for a withdrawal and the Bush administration reported little progress had been made on the most vital of a series of political benchmarks it wants al-Maliki to carry out.

Even better is this from one of Maliki's lieutenants:

[O]ne of his top aides, Hassan al-Suneid, rankled at the assessment, saying the U.S. was treating Iraq like "an experiment in an American laboratory." He sharply criticised the U.S. military, saying it was committing human rights violations, embarassing the Iraqi government with its tactics and cooperating with "gangs of killers" in its campaign against al-Qaida in Iraq.

There seems to be no one but Bush, the GOP and the Neocons who want the US in Iraq. Oh, and Al Qaida.

From Sargent:

Senator Reid Appreciate these two former Chairmen coming forward and expressing their clear discontent with the Administration’s policies in Iraq.

They clearly recognize there is no purely military solution in Iraq and that the war, on its current course, is making this nation less secure.

But they put a lot of faith in the President that he will voluntarily change course and voluntarily begin to reduce the large U.S. combat footprint in Iraq.

Unfortunately, Senator Reid is not as confident in the President’s willingness to change course voluntarily. In the fifth year of the war, we need strong legislation that compels the President to change course, change the mission, and begin the reduction of U.S. troops. That’s what Reed/Levin does. It is binding legislation, and that is the approach he prefers.

But what if Warner-Lugar was binding?

This is interesting:

One of the main elements of [Warner-Lugar] amendment, which was filed shortly after noon today, would require the president to seek a new rationale for the war authorization by the time Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top military commander in Iraq, delivers a report in September on the progress of the troop buildup. The measure also would require the president to review and update the National Intelligence Estimate for Iraq no later than Sept. 4. “Many of the conditions and motivations that existed when we authorized force almost five years ago no longer exist or are irrelevant to our current situation,” Mr. Lugar said. He went on, saying the 2002 war authorization is “obsolete and requires revision.”

Think Republicans will embrace this? Having to vote a NEW war authorization? One Democrats will vote against almost uniformly?

At first blush, I think I am going to embrace this idea requiring from Bush a new war authorization. I wonder what Warner and Lugar imagine would be the upshot if continuing the war was NOT authorized?

The Government has rested its case in the Miami terrorism trial of Jose Padilla and his two co-defendants.

The Southern District of Florida blog has a wrap-up of coverage.

Journalist Lew Koch has been writing about the case for Firedoglake. His latest is here, focusing on the jurors playing dress-up.

More...

This just in from Yearly Kos (by e-mail):

The YearlyKos Convention team is pleased to welcome Senator Hillary Clinton to the second annual, historic gathering of the netroots in Chicago this August. Clinton joins Senators Edwards, Obama, Dodd, and Governor Bill Richardson as a participant in the first ever collaborative presidential forum with both a respected blogger(Joan McCarter of DailyKos) and a leading member of the traditional media (Matt Bai of The New York Times Magazine) as moderators, with author and blogger Dr. Jeffrey Feldman facilitating questions from attendees.

Yearly Kos is taking place August 2 to 5 in Chicago. I'll be there and joining Marcy Wheeler of The Next Hurrah and Christy Hardin-Smith from Firedoglake on a panel about blogging the Scooter Libby trial. Sheldon Snook from the U.S. District Court in D.C. who herded all of us and the MSM at the trial, will also be joining us.

Registration for Yearly Kos ends tonight at midnight. You can register here.

In my bloggingheads conversation with Conn Carroll of the National Journal's Blogometer, I tried to explain my view of using Presidential politics to influence Iraq policy. I tried to emphasize that a savvy and issues oriented Netroots could push our Presidential contenders to lead on getting us out by endorsing, embracing and promoting the not funding approach, the only possible way to end it during Bush's tenure. I think Jerome Armstrong's post on Obama and not funding is very much in line with what I have tried to do as well:

The recent attack from Obama that was directed toward Clinton and Edwards over Iraq made me wonder about which of the two, between Obama and Edwards, might be perceived as having more credibility on ending the Iraq War. . . . [E]nding the war means cutting off funding of the war, and that's not been something that Obama has been in favor of, until just recently.

. . . Obama wants to make a preemptive differentiation that only he is prepared to be the Democratic nominee based on his original opposition to invading Iraq. It's as if Obama is trying to become the Dean of '08 in attracting those of us who were against this war from the beginning. But the comparison of Obama to Dean ends in 2003. Dean never supported funding of the war, Obama continually did until the most recent vote.

. . . I applaud the change made by Obama. It's the direction those of us who want this war ended want every Democratic politician to take, in an effort to end the war in Iraq. But the notion that Obama has some sort of special appeal over the issue of Iraq, to those of us who are actually paying attention, seems full of folly.

I hope Jerome is right because it is my wish to see our Presidential contenders be pushed to be leaders in the Not Funding movement. More.

During the Connecticut Senate Democratic primary, Joe Lieberman said:

Ned Lamont seems just to be running against me, based on my stand on one issue, Iraq. . . . I'm a Democrat with a 35-year record of fighting for progressive causes, for the middle class, for civil rights, for women's rights, for human rights and a lot more. I voted with my Senate Democratic colleagues 90 percent of the time. . . .

Joe Lieberman, with Hugh Hewitt yesterday:

[JL:] . . . I’ve declared myself for now an independent. . . . So I’m just watching, and I’m not going to endorse anybody until after the two parties have their nominees, and I’m going to support whoever I think is best for the country, regardless of party. . . .

HH: Oh, that’s fascinating. Last question, how do you think history’s going to evaluate George W. Bush?

JL: . . . I think overall, over time, his ratings among the historians will be greater than his ratings in the polls today. . . .

Thank you Joe for demonstrating how right we were to oppose you for the Democratic nomination for Senate in Connecticut.

The conflicted jury in the Conrad Black case, which last week told the court it couldn't agree on all of the 16 counts against him, has returned a guilty verdict on three fraud charges and obstruction of justice.

Black faced 20 years in prison on the most serious counts. The three fraud charges carry a maximum penalty of five years each.

David Brooks, as always an apologist for the GOP, writes:

To simplify a bit, roughly 20 senators, led by John McCain and Joe Lieberman, believe in Gen. David Petraeus and the surge. There are roughly 30 Republicans, led by Dick Lugar, John Warner and Lamar Alexander, who believe that the U.S. should scale back its mission and adopt the Iraq Study Group’s recommendations. There are roughly 30 Democrats, led by Carl Levin and Jack Reed, who also want to scale back and adopt the study group’s approach. And finally, there are roughly 20 Democrats, led by Ted Kennedy and Russ Feingold, who just want to get out as quickly as possible.

(Emphasis supplied.) If it is true that "[t]here are roughly 30 Republicans . . . who believe that the U.S. should scale back its mission and adopt the Iraq Study Group’s recommendations[,]" then where is their proposal? Are we to expect the Lugar-Warner proposal today to do this in a meaningful fashion? I won't hold my breath. More.

We'll be reading a lot of these stories for a while:

An attorney who admitted leaking the confidential grand jury testimony of Barry Bonds and other athletes to a reporter was sentenced Thursday to two and a half years in prison, by far the harshest penalty to result from the government's sprawling probe of steroids in sports. . . . White also rejected Ellerman's argument that he should get a lighter sentence because President Bush commuted former vice presidential aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby's 2 1/2-year prison sentence for perjury to probation. White said to do so would open the door to doling out unduly lenient sentences for other white collar criminals. "If Mr. Ellerman is dissatisfied with his sentence, he should seek a commutation from the president," White said.

Watching the Iraq Debate in Congress, I noticed that there are still some GOP "dead enders" who argue the Debacle is going well. For the most part, these arguments are rightly ignored as foolish inanity. Indeed, it seems clear that in the country, and even in the Beltway, such arguments are dismissed as silly.

The new argument is, as mcjoan discussed the other day, we can't leave because even worse things will happen. Predictably, Fred Hiatt and David Ignatius and all the "Very Serious People" at the Washington Post and in the Beltway, who have gotten it wrong on every single issue regarding Iraq (I kid you not, look it up, wrong every time), are now mouthing the latest Bush talking point. Hiatt, writing for the Post Editorial Board, states:

Conditions in Iraq today are terrible, but they could become "way, way worse," as the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Ryan C. Crocker, a career Foreign Service officer, recently told the New York Times.

Way, way worse. Sure it is possible. Not very likely. But possible. The question is then what is the force of such an argument? Keeping things from getting "way, way worse" at the tune of thousands of American soldiers' lives and $120 billion a year is not a strategy. More.