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How did we get from McChrystal’s request for 50,000 troop requests in early October to Eikenberry’s “written reservations about deploying additional troops” just days before President Obama’s planned decision?

The Democratic party doesn't have the luxury of settling for a 'base hit' in a game in which there are only home runs. For the Democrats, that is! The GOP has the luxury of just putting a man on base! Democrats don't have the luxury of nominating anything less than a JFK or an FDR.

Tensions have flared between both China and India militaries along their disputed 2,175 mile-long border, with both sides alleging more frequent troop incursions in recent weeks. China is upset when the Indian prime minister recently visit the disputed region. China considers an Indian-occupied piece of it’s own Tibetan Autonomous Region, has added flames to the fire. China of course already deeply resents the fact that the top Tibetan leader, and several hundred thousand exiled Tibetans, are allowed to reside in India. India’s Maoist rebels are now present in 20 states and have evolved into a potent and lethal insurgency. In the last four years, the Maoists have killed more than 900 Indian security officers. Indian leaders are now preparing to deploy nearly 70,000 paramilitary officers to hunt down the guerrillas.The Maoists, however, do not want to secede or be absorbed. Their goal is to topple the system. India’s rapid economic growth has made it an emerging global power but also deepened stark inequalities in society. Maoists accuse the government of trying to push tribal groups off their land to gain access to raw materials and have sabotaged roads, bridges and even an energy pipeline.

Attorney General Eric Holder says a lawsuit in San Francisco over warrantless wiretapping threatens to expose ongoing intelligence work and must be thrown out. In making the argument, the Obama administration agreed with the Bush administration's position on the case but insists it came to the decision differently. A civil liberties group criticized the move Friday as a retreat from promises President Barack Obama made as a candidate. Holder's effort to stop the lawsuit marks the first time the administration has tried to invoke the state secrets privilege under a new policy it launched last month designed to make such a legal argument more difficult. Under the state secrets privilege, the government can have a lawsuit dismissed if hearing the case would jeopardize national security. [Note: Bush's old strategy.]

The Obama administration will soon make public a new approach to dealing with so-called "too big to fail" financial firms that would make it easier for the government to seize control of them and make major changes, an administration official said on Monday. The strategy would make it easier for the government to oust managers, wipe out shareholders and restructure the firm's outstanding loans, the official said.

n an interview with NPR on his latest New Yorker Article, titled ‘Preparing the battlefield', the renowned investigative journalist Seymour Hersh reveals more striking details of his findings on the aim of the $400 million budgeted US covert operations inside Iran. He provides valuable information on US military preparations to strike the country, on the total expansion of the Bush Administration's executive power, about the US recognition of Iran's overall positive role in Iraq and on the US support for the anti-Iran terrorist organisations Jondollah, PJAK and MEK. Hersh explains that the aim of the US covert operations inside Iran is to create a pretext for attack with the goal of regime change. “The strategic thinking behind this covert operation is to provoke enough trouble and chaos so that the Iranian government makes the mistake of taking aggressive action which will give the impression of a country in acute turmoil”, he said. “Then you have what the White House calls the ‘casus belli', a reason to attack the country. That is the thinking and it is very crazy.”

"Evidently some people were disappointed that Dick Cheney didn't receive the Nobel Peace Prize, and believe me, I sympathize -- I thought Philip Roth should've gotten the literature prize instead of that grumpy Romanian lady with the severe hair -- but it was Mr. Obama whom the Norwegians wanted to come visit Oslo in December and stand on the balcony of the Grand Hotel and wave to the crowd along Karl Johans Gate, and, face it, Mr. Obama is going to draw a bigger crowd than Mr. Cheney would have. When a man has shot somebody in the face with a shotgun, people are going to be reluctant to line up en masse in his presence lest he get excited again."

It's a quagmire built on lies, so many of them that DC leadership can't even keep them straight anymore.

Away from the limelight, Kilcullen, an Australian Army colonel, has been hugely influential in shaping recent policies in the "war on terror". He will help fashion the new strategy in Afghanistan, at a defining moment in the conflict. Yesterday, Kilcullen warned politicians in Washington and London, the two main allies in the battle against the Teleban, that they must steel themselves for a decade of hard combat on the battlefields of Afghanistan to avoid catastrophic failure.

Was it Ahmadinejad or his supporters? Simple answer: No Esam Al-Amin had “A Hard Look at the Numbers”, and he concluded that not only the western sponsored survey done by an institute connected to ABC news and the BBC, but also most inner-Iranian pre-election polls predicted that President Ahmadinejad would win the elections by a large margin. The Ahmadinejad government and those who support it, would have known that. They would have known that there was no reason for cheating even if they had any opportunity to rig the votes on a vast scale. Cheating is always risky, you could get caught. A certain winner and his supporters would never risk cheating, it would risk their legitimacy, a legitimacy they would gain easily by not cheating. Ahmadinejad is a true believer, not a diplomat. He believes that an Islamic society must show higher ethics than a non-Islamic society. He conceives that those higher ethics are honesty and justice. He has stated so in many of his public speeches. “Honesty” for him means non-corruption, and ” justice” means improvements of the life-conditions of the poor. When you follow the discussions in the Iranian Parliament, as they are presented in the English speaking Iranian media like “Iran Daily”, you see, that Ahmadinejad had during his last term been in a constant battle to defend his economic programs which benefited the lower sectors of the Iranian society and limited the privileges of the rich.

The anti-war crowd had waited years for this moment, when it could finally use its political muscle to end or at least sharply curtail American involvement in a war that seems endless. Instead, Congress' most vocal anti-war activists were badly outnumbered this week when they tried to define an exit strategy for U.S. involvement in Afghanistan. "We need a plan while we are there and a strategy for leaving," said Rep. Donna Edwards, D-Md., who last year defeated an eight-term incumbent Democrat who backed the Iraq war. "We don't have it." They weren't even allowed a vote on a plan. Note: Very nice stratety. Don't give activists a plan or exit strategy what can they protest besides the war. And who knows anything about that??

The GOP, rather than shrinking government, ended up shrinking its own party. By remaking its right wing into its core, it scared off less extreme, less dogmatic voters and elected officials including Arlen Specter. What should Democrats take away from this and learn from the GOP's strategic mistakes? Comment on the Democratic Party's best course.

"So, anyway, let us talk about pirates, and piracy and viable options. But first, and most importantly, let us consider the ways to think about the problem. At least, from a military perspective. What follows is a brief primer on military thought (yea, yea, "an oxymoron", I get it, LOL, etc) that may help each of you form your own opinions about the various options offered by pundits left, right, center, and everything in between. My cutting caveat is that the overwhelming (by which I mean, "every single one I've seen") majority of said commentators on "what we should do" has never actually studied military theory, served aboard a ship, or considered the practicalities involved in light of, well, reality. So, strap on your thinking caps and follow me.

Now that President Obama has announced his new strategy for Afghanistan, you may be focused on the number of new troops that will deploy there: 17,000 on the way, with 4,000 more trainers and advisers to join them by fall. Before you think "quagmire," consider what, to my mind, makes this plan so impressive: The troop increase is part of a much broader strategy encompassing the entire South Asia region. It emphasizes economic aid and diplomacy as much as guns. As Richard Holbrooke, Obama's special representative for AfPak, put it: "The media is talking about a military surge. What Obama is talking about is a comprehensive surge." The word comprehensive is key. This approach contrasts sharply with the Bush administration's narrow take on the Iraq war, which ignored Iraq's neighbors and permitted al-Qaeda and the Taliban to regroup on the AfPak border. After talking with key civilian and military contributors to Obama's new strategy, here are some points that I find especially hopeful in the plan. .....

US President Barack Obama has confirmed a fundamental rethink of US strategy in Afghanistan and Pakistan to combat an "increasingly perilous" situation. He said growing radical forces in the area posed the greatest threat to the American people and the world. He said an extra 4,000 US personnel would train and bolster the Afghan army and police, and he would also provide support for civilian development. Note: Civilian development? Does that sound familiar (as in reconstruction in Iraq)? The supposedly peace president has gone with war. How quickly he "changed".

There are some details which are coming to light today about the overall U.S. strategy in the region. One of the more reassuring reports actually came from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, as she returned from her trip to Italy, who said that the 17,000 troops slated for Afghanistan should not be seen as the beginning of an 'escalation'. While this does leave room for interpretation, perhaps we can surmise that there will not be additional troops sent to the area.

U.N. members are expected to sign a declaration this week extending for another 10 years a "war on drugs" policy critics say is flawed an only feeds organized crime, helps spread HIV and undermines governments. Drug policy campaigners, social scientists and health experts argue that strategy has failed, with statistics showing that drug production, trafficking and use have all soared during the decade, while the cost of law enforcement, both financially and socially, has rocketed, with vast numbers imprisoned. In the United States, where illegal drug use is highest, the government spends around $70 billion a year to combat drugs. But illegal drug use has risen steadily over the past decade and a fifth of the prison population is there for drug offences.

Wait. Stop. Hold your fire. We are screwing up big time in Afpak. The folks who know their history are telling us that. We'd better listen. Obama, time for that wisdom again.

Last week an all-star cast of progressives -- including Paul Krugman, Robert Kuttner, Theda Skocpol, Robert Borosage, and Deepak Bhargava -- gathered at a conference to start "Thinking Big, Thinking Forward." They plan on "reclaiming the public philosophy of activist government and an increased long-term public investment in areas vital to economic growth and social decency." Who could argue with that? And this year's conference was just "the kickoff event in a continuing campaign," its manifesto declared. "Future meetings will address the other core elements of a new economic strategy to create a widely shared and sustainable prosperity in a global economy." But why wait for the future to start thinking globally? And why think only about economics? In 2009, the domestic has to be tied to the foreign, and economics has to be tied to the whole range of foreign policy issues, right now.