Point:
BLITZER: Here’s what you told Bill Bennett on his radio show on Monday.
MCCAIN: Yes.
BLITZER: “There are neighborhoods in Baghdad where you and I could walk through those neighborhoods today.”
MCCAIN: Yes.
BLITZER: “The U.S. is beginning to succeed in Iraq.”
You know, everything we hear, that if you leave the so-called green zone, the international zone, and you [...]

I just saw a wonderful talk by Lawrence Wright who was in Toronto accepting the Gelber Prize for his book The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and The Road to 9/11. It is refreshing to see such a soft spoken yet tremendously authoritative treatment of this topic. An exemplar of the type of analysis fundamentally [...]

What metrics should we be using to measure the success of the surge? Some are beginning to note a decrease in bombings in Baghdad, but given that it was widely believed that the insurgents (of some stripes anyways) would simply lay low until the surge was over, is this really a viable indicator? The first [...]