Mark Benjamin writes in Salon about the "little noticed" criticism of Bush's surge plan coming from party hawks -- specifically McCain and Kagan. Not criticism of the surge itself, but criticism of "the split command structure for the operation [which] violates basic military doctrine."
The Baghdad surge plan, announced by the president on Jan. 10, calls for the new U.S. soldiers to be embedded with Iraqi forces, who will take the lead. But while the U.S. troops would report to American officers, their Iraqi counterparts, in an apparent sop to national sovereignty, would report to Iraqi officers. The potentially disastrous result: two separate and independent command structures within the same military operation.
"I know of no successful military operation where you have dual command," McCain told Lt. Gen. David Petraeus, the new commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, during a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing last Tuesday. Petraeus, heralded by the Bush White House as the man who would make the surge work, signaled his agreement, telling McCain, "Sir, I share your concern." These concerns threaten to deprive Bush of the support of many of the outside military experts who originally championed a plan for escalating the war by surging troops into Baghdad. The American Enterprise Institute's Frederick Kagan expressed his fears in an interview Friday...
Tim Grieve has an update on the curious move on the part of the Libby defense team to get Ari Fleischer's testimony thrown out because it's the result of a deal. Looks like the judge will say "no deal" to the defense.
Libby's lawyers want to use Fleischer's "deal" with prosecutors to argue that his testimony shouldn't be trusted -- that is, that Fleischer was afraid of prosecution for his role in the Valerie Plame leak and therefore might have sweetened his story about Libby in order to get immunity. At the same time, Libby's lawyers don't want the government to argue -- or the jury to infer -- that Libby might have changed his own story about Plame in order to avoid prosecution. Judge Reggie Walton clearly isn't going to go for that. He just told Libby lawyer William Jeffress that he could take the issue "off the table" and "go back to square one" by simply refraining from raising any question about Fleischer's credibility. Jeffress' response: "Thank you, your honor, no."
