AP Via Yahoo (h/t Nonny):

Thwarted in efforts to bring troops home from Iraq, Senate Democrats on Monday helped pass a defense policy bill authorizing another $150 billion for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The 92-3 vote comes as the House planned to approve separate legislation Tuesday that requires President Bush to give Congress a plan for eventual troop withdrawals.

The developments underscored the difficulty facing Democrats in the Iraq debate: They lack the votes to pass legislation ordering troops home and are divided on whether to cut money for combat, despite a mandate by supporters to end the war.

Hoping the political landscape changes in coming months, Democratic leaders say they will renew their fight when Congress considers the money Bush wants in war funding. Read more...

It is inconceivable that the Senate would pass this bill knowing how our tax dollars are being wasted, mis-managed and given to companies like Blackwater. In what might come as a shock to many, Blackwater pays it's managers more than twice as much as General David Petraeus makes for commanding some 160,000 troops. This go-along to get-along strategy by the Democrats will surely improve the poll numbers for Congress, no?

UPDATE: Meanwhile, Rep. David Obey has thrown down the gauntlet and said he is willing to fight Bush on funding.

The Obama administration continues to follow the Bush 43 administration's path on national security issues, to the chagrin of progressive defense analysts. There's three recent news events that seem to illustrate this. First there's the issue of putting US troops in Poland along with a Patriot air defense unit that isn't really protecting anything.

A contingent of U.S. soldiers has accompanied the air-defense system to an installation at Morag, which stands 37 miles from the Kaliningrad region in Russia. The soldiers are expected to provide training to Polish military personnel on using the Patriot system.
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The battery is expected to remain in Poland for one-month periods four times per year, along with about 150 U.S. soldiers, Reuters reported.

Deployments would continue for two years, AP reported.

What an incredibly dumb deal. I'm not so worried about the Russian government attitude against this capability, but rather that the Obama administration thinks it has to honor this commitment to the Polish government. It's a bribe to make them feel better about hosting a theater missile defense system eight years from now. Does this really make sense? and talking about making little sense, how about sending 1200 National Guardsmen to the south border?

Homeland Security officials said that the troops would provide support to law enforcement officers already working along the border by helping observe and monitor traffic between official crossing points, and would help analyze trafficking patterns in hopes of intercepting illegal drug shipments. They performed similar tasks in an earlier deployment along the border from 2006 to 2008, when they also assisted with road and fence construction. The troops have not been involved directly in intercepting border crossers.

I don't agree with Pat Lang's concerns that there are going to be issues with border interceptions and posse comitatus - as the NYT article noted, the US government did this before. I'm betting the legal issues have been worked out. But how much good will 1200 troops do on a 2000 mile border? Mind you, I don't agree with Sen. John McCain's request for 6000 troops and the Republican's demand for $2 billion in funds to pay for it. The point ought to be made that adding National Guard troops to the border for a temporary period didn't solve the problem before - it's not going to do it now either.

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Via Teddy Partridge at FDL, the shocking news that military weapons are now being deployed against civilians in the United States, just as many of us predicted:

You think your town hall meeting's law enforcement presence was authoritarian and heavy-handed?

Check this out: San Diego Sheriff Bill Gore deployed (but did not use) military type sonic crowd-control devices at two town hall meetings, one held by GOP Darrell Issa and the other by Democrat Susan Davis. These devices are the same as those used to control crowds of insurgents in the Iraq war theatre and have been linked to ear and brain injury.

Both town halls took place without incident; however the use of the military device concerned San Diegians. The LRAD [Long-Range Acoustic Device] crowd control is primarily used in Iraq to control insurgents and can cause serious and lasting harm to humans.

According to the manufacture, American Technology Corporation, the LRAD provides “military personnel the capability to transition through the rules of engagement to determine a target’s intent and also provides greater assurance that innocent lives on both sides of the device are not lost due to miscommunication.”

[...]“It’s very concerning,” Kevin Keenan, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, said. “ It is fine for the Sheriff’s Department to have new less-than-lethal weapons, but for their interactions with individuals these still-dangerous weapons need to be used only as substitutes for firearms. They can’t be used as just another tool on the tool belt. As we’ve seen with tasers and pepper spray, these types of weapons are being used to subdue people even though they pose the risk of serious physical harm.”

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One of the reasons I thought this war (in addition to being immoral) was so very stupid is that I remember the veterans from the Vietnam era - how many of them were a mess when they came home, and how many stayed that way. The power to send soldiers to war is a sacred trust, and it should not be used for anything less than the most compelling reasons.

As bad as it is for soldiers, recruiters have a uniquely stressful job in which they're expected to somehow turn their own war experiences into happy talk for potential converts:

Morning Edition, January 2, 2009 · The Army is investigating a cluster of suicides in the Houston Recruiting Battalion, where five soldiers have taken their own lives since 2001. Nationally, 17 recruiters have committed suicide during the same period.

Back in March of 2007, Aron Andersson locked himself in the cab of his Ford 150 pickup, called home to say he was going to kill himself, shot up the dashboard radio, and then put a bullet in his head. He had threatened suicide five months earlier, and back then his father, Bob Andersson, reported him to the military.

"I don't know if that was the right thing to do, but I called a major and told him his girlfriend had said he threatened to commit suicide, and she told me he was going through night terrors and a bunch of other things. And he'd get up to go to work in the morning and tell his girlfriend he was exhausted, and she'd say, 'Yeah you've been jumpin' over the couch, hidin' behind the chairs and stuff, like you're in battle,' and he wouldn't even realize it in the morning," Andersson says.

Aron Andersson served two tours in Iraq, and he was furious with his father for reporting him, saying his Army career would be ended.

"And I just simply told him, 'Well, Aron, if you don't talk to me ever again, I can live with that. But if I didn't turn you in and something happened, I don't think I could live with that,' " Bob Andersson says.

Andersson says his son had trouble delivering the required two recruits a month, especially after his experience in Iraq.

"How could you be over there and see some of the things he saw and dealt with, and try to hire people to go over there and do that?" he says.

Via USA Today:

At least 20,000 U.S. troops who were not classified as wounded during combat in Iraq and Afghanistan have been found with signs of brain injuries, according to military and veterans records compiled by USA TODAY.

The data, provided by the Army, Navy and Department of Veterans Affairs, show that about five times as many troops sustained brain trauma as the 4,471 officially listed by the Pentagon through Sept. 30. These cases also are not reflected in the Pentagon's official tally of wounded, which stands at 30,327.
Soldiers and Marines whose wounds were discovered after they left Iraq are not added to the official casualty list, says Army Col. Robert Labutta, a neurologist and brain injury consultant for the Pentagon.

More than 150,000 troops may have suffered head injuries in combat, says Rep. Bill Pascrell, D-N.J., founder of the Congressional Brain Injury Task Force. Read on...

Hiding the true human cost of their wars has proven difficult for the Bush administration. They don't want the world to know about the real numbers of injured -- or the staggering number of homeless vets or those who have killed themselves during or after their service in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Lieberman was on with Imus this morning and sounded like a man who doesn't have a clue about the situation in Walter Reed even though he supports sending more troops over to Iraq. He then thinks Lt. Gen. Kevin Kiley was a fine replacement for Weightman after it was reported that he is part of the urine problem. Then Joe backs down on that fact. Simply disgusting. Holy Joe has the audacity to weasel out of it by using the phrase "mea culpas."

Download | play

via Imus Blog--(thanks for the audio)

Imus: It would occur to me Senator Lieberman. Particularly if you were somebody who thought this war was such a wonderful idea as you did. And continue to support this idiotic exercise and you sit on some of these committees. That you would have a special responsibility to know what the hell is happening to these kids. It’s not enough to say you didn’t know or didn’t ask the right questions. I mean that’s why we elected you.

Lieberman: We all have responsibilities and I take it very personally because I have supported the war and I continue to believe we have to do everything we can to have it end successfully. I have a special responsibility and we should all be doing mea culpas. Battlefield medicine, I’ve been to battlefield hospitals when I’ve been over in Iraq, Walter Reed in the main building unbelievable. Unbelievable heroism by soldiers who have lost limbs and are just devoted to coming back as close to normalcy as they can. But the other stuff, just crazy and unacceptable and I think you’re going to see a change now.

IMUS: "How do we get this fixed?" (full transcript below the fold)

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From Americablog:

CNN's Barbara Starr has been breathlessly reporting the news that a B-52, loaded with nuclear warheads, flew across the country last week -- without anyone's knowledge. It has caused quite a stir in the military. Starr reports that Bush had to be informed about the mistake. Here's an NBC report:

An Air Force squadron commander has been relieved of his command after five nuclear weapons were mistakenly loaded aboard a B-52 and flown cross-country from North Dakota to Louisiana last week, NBC News reported.

Five 150-kiloton warheads were attached to cruise missiles that were flown from Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota to Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana to be dismantled, but they should have been removed, according to officials.

Military officials insist the warheads remained "under control" at all times and did not pose a danger.

That's comforting.

More information as it becomes available.

I really want to know who came up with this brilliant idea - asking the military spouses what they think about their husband/wife having to work with homosexual men and women.

Feedback from military spouses is an important aspect in the review, Ham said. The panel wants to know if spouses will be less likely to support their servicemember continuing his service if the law changes, [Gen. Carter] Ham said.

“We know for our married servicemembers, the most important influence on whether or not that servicemember decides to continue his service is his spouse,” he said. “So we need to know what the effects would be if the law was changed.”
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“We know that for our married servicemembers, their spouses’ views, the spouses’ satisfaction with the quality of service and the family readiness directly attributes to military readiness,” the general said. “Secretary Gates was focused at the very start to make sure that we understood what impact a possible repeal would mean to our family members.”

Can you believe this? "Excuse me, wife of SGT Smith. We'd really like to know if you feel that your marriage is threatened by the fact that your husband may or may not be working with Teh Gays." Her response: "Gee, maybe I'll get the chance to talk to him about it, you know, when he returns between his third and fourth deployment to the Middle East. Thanks for asking."

Fraking morons. Yes, the spouse has an influence on a military servicemember's opinion, but I don't think this is the primary disruption of their married life. Are they wasting time to push a decision after the mid-term elections, or are they just deliberately trying to tank the issue?

It's an amazing thing to see supposedly serious Republican pundits insist that the option of bombing Iran to stop its nuclear weapons program is not a partisan idea. No, it will only "help" President Obama's foreign policy platform of nonproliferation and multi-national engagement. That's what Eliott Abrams, former deputy national security advisor to GW Bush, would like us to believe, in this continuing series in The Atlantic on the dialogue that started with Jeffrey Goldberg's suggestion that Israel will bomb Iran, if the U.S. government doesn't get there first.

Jeffrey quotes Denis McDonough on the "serious threat to the global nonproliferation regime," but this is an understatement. If Iran acquires a nuclear weapon during his tenure, Obama would -- in his own eyes -- see the UN Security Council's resolutions made a mockery, the International Atomic Energy Agency transformed into a joke, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty come to an end. Multilateralism a la Obama would be finished, for Iran would have proved the "international community" to be toothless or non-existent. So if the president means what he has repeatedly said about world affairs, what is at stake is whether he leaves a legacy of disaster -- again, in his own eyes. In my eyes, he would be right in so concluding: the real issue in the Middle East today is whether we, the United States, will remain "top country" in the region or will allow Iran to claim some form of hegemony.

The political side of all this is equally plain. Obama will, by all accounts, suffer a tremendous setback in November and may well be defeated in 2012. Should Iran acquire the Bomb in the next two years -- the timetable Jeffrey suggests -- Republicans will have an even stronger case that Obama has weakened our national security. The Obama who had struck Iran and destroyed its nuclear program would be a far stronger candidate, and perhaps an unbeatable one. Now, from my perspective that is no reason to stop Iran's nuclear program, but I'm a Republican.

I want to quickly slide past the disingenuous "hey, Obama would be smart if he acted like a Republican" tone of the article - it's insultingly transparent, but hey, he's a Republican. The Atlantic already has a response to Abrams' idea that bombing Iran would boost Obama's re-election odds (not a hard argument to make). And certainly the QDR 2010 and the QDR independent panel's reports reflect the position that Dems also reinforce the US" super-cop" role. I want to comment on the amazing idea that, if Iran were to develop a nuclear bomb years from now, this reflects a failure of the non-proliferation regime and the United Nations, and would render the idea of multi-nationalism "toothless or non-existent." It perhaps goes to the Republican idea that international engagement is a waste of time, that if the United States does anything on the world stage, the rest of the world will follow.

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Straight from the Cold War, former ambassador John Bolton attacks Russia's decision to provide low-enriched uranium fuel to Iran's Bushehr nuclear reactor. Unsurprisingly, he uses the situation to suggest that Israel (or the United States) should attack Iran's nuclear energy infrastructure prior to the insertion of the fuel rods into the reactor. The fact that Iran has agreed to turn over the spent fuel rods back to Russia after their use doesn't appear to be a part of the discussion. The Faux News anchor helpfully feeds Bolton the lines needed to sensationalize the story and slam the United Nations as a bonus. From Newsmax:

Bolton made it clear that it is widely assumed that any Israeli attack on the Bushehr reactor must take place before the reactor is loaded with fuel rods.

"If they're going to do it that's the window that they have," Bolton declared. "Otherwise as I said before, once the rods are in the reactor, if you attack the reactor you're going to open it up and radiation will escape at least into the atmosphere and possibly into the waters of the Persian Gulf.

"So most people think that neither Israel nor the United States, come to that, would attack the reactor after it's been fueled."
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The failure to demand it be shut down began in the Bush years, he said, and continues with the Obama administration "under what I believe is the mistaken theory that Iran is entitled to the peaceful use of nuclear energy."

"I don't think Iran is entitled to that, or I don't think we ought to allow it to happen, because they're manifestly violating any number of obligations under the non-proliferation treaty not to seek nuclear weapons. But this has been a hole in American policy for some number of years, and Iran and Russia are obviously exploiting it," Bolton said.

The attitude that Iran isn't entitled "the peaceful use of nuclear energy" is not one shared by the many non-aligned nations who are signatories of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. It's also interesting that pundits like John Bolton and his Faux News cheerleaders always forget that it was the United States government that first encouraged Iran to develop nuclear energy.

No, this is just another opportunity for The Mustached One to get on his high horse and repeat his mantra on how Israel would be justified in attacking Iran, how Iran's threat is at least equal to the 9/11 highjackers, that containment and deterrence won't work on Iran and that only a pre-emptive attack will stop other Middle East countries from seeking nuclear weapons. He's quite mad, but the right wing still loves him.

As a side note, one might suggest to the Obama administration that it might consider abandoning the Bush administration's policy of not negotiating with Iran until it promises to abandon its nuclear weapons program and allow IAEA inspectors back into the country. Isolation tactics don't seem to work when countries with economic problems need to make deals with anyone willing to pay cash. A more nuanced (and sane) discussion of Russia's deal with Iran can be found at the Washington Post.