YOU'VE GOTTA LOVE POWERPOINT. A fun slide from a presentation at Central Command finds its way to the New York Times, upshot being that the situation is worse now than it ever has been before. The presentation was given to President Bush and SecDef Rumsfeld on October 18; maybe it helped spur the "We are not stay the course, we have never been stay the course" charade? By itself it's not all that great of a slide, as it attempts to boil down a dozen different variables into a one dimensional representation, but I suppose that you have to speak at a level your audience can understand. I wonder, though, how long it will be before the right-wing blogs start screaming for blood, since allowing that the Islamofascists are doing well is objectively pro-Islamofascist... In other news, I'm not sure what I think about the decision to withdraw from the blockades around Sadr City. Maliki clearly made the correct call from the Iraqi point of view, as furthering the disintegration of Baghdad's social structure in an effort to find one missing soldier could hardly be in Iraqi interests. U.S. military authorities probably understand this as well, and the Maliki order may have given them a convenient excuse for the withdrawal. It could also play out well for Maliki's standing among the Iraqis -- unless the Bush administration decides to displace him with a coup.
--Robert Farley
