John McCain is starting to get specific about his plan for the presidency. I think this release signals a subtle shift in McCain’s campaign and I hope that he continues to add layers of detail as the race continues. This initial effort is not really a tactical plan but it does clearly lay out his objectives. More importantly, he uses fairly specific language that in essence tells the American people that he can and will be held accountable for his time in office. He covers a lot of ground but the national security portion is the most interesting piece:

After four years of a McCain administration, America will be more secure and working with its allies and partners around the world to make us safer. In 2013:

The Iraq War has been won, Iraq is a functioning democracy, violence is much reduced, and America has welcomed home most of the servicemen and women who have sacrificed terribly so that America might be secure.

The United States maintains a military presence in Iraq, but a much smaller one that does not play a direct combat role.

The threat from a resurgent Taliban in Afghanistan has been greatly reduced.

There is a functioning League of Democracies that has effectively applied pressure on Sudan to agree to a multinational peacekeeping force to stop the genocide.

There is no longer any place in the world al Qaeda can consider a safe haven. An increase in actionable intelligence leads to the capture or death of Osama Bin Laden and his lieutenants.

Through increased international cooperation and concerted use of American power, we have disrupted terrorist networks and exposed plots around the world.

The United States and its allies have made great progress in advancing nuclear security.

The size of the Army and Marine Corps has been significantly increased, and are now better equipped and trained to defend us. A substantial increase in veterans educational benefits and improvements in their health care has aided recruitment and retention.

Here he does what the Hillary, Edwards, and Obama cannot. He offers a realistic, and honest, way forward in Iraq and the greater war on terror. He knows that many people will not like what they hear but McCain is the only adult in the race. He’ll do what needs to be done and say what needs to be said even if it is difficult.

He touches on economic, healthcare, and other issues as well. You can read the entire statement on his site.

Parts of the older Blogs of War archives have been offline for over a year. This weekend I started republishing material from the earliest days of the war.

Thousands of updates were posted in the initial weeks of the war. The mainstream media was still moving at a snail’s pace online in those days and the constant stream of updates earned Blogs of War global media attention. Here are the first 24 hours:

The War: Hour 1
The War: Hour 2
The War: Hour 3
The War: Hour 4
The War: Hour 5
The War: Hour 6
The War: Hour 7
The War: Hour 8
The War: Hour 9
The War: Hour 13
The War: Hour 14
The War: Hour 16
The War: Hour 17
The War: Hour 18
The War: Hour 19
The War: Hour22
The War: Hour 23
The War: Hour 24

10:00am CST
Rick Leventhal interviewed a Marine and mentioned that they were under order to be ready to roll in 15 minutes. The Marine replied “Marines are always ready to roll”. Iraqi troops near the border are being engaged by ground forces and helicopter gunships. From the sound of it we are giving them hell and taking little or nothing from them in return. - Fox News broadcast

10:05am CST
Donald Rumsfeld is briefing reporters at the Pentagon. “The days of the Saddam Hussein regime are numbered”. “To the Iraqi people let me say that the day of your liberation will soon be at hand.”

10:18am CST

Now that was really unexpected. When the sirens went on we thought we will get bombs by the tom load dropped on us but nothing happened, at least in the part of the city where I lived. Air-craft guns could be heard for a while but they stopped too after a while and then the all clear siren came.

Today in the morning I went with my father for a ride around Baghdad and there was nothing different from yesterday. There is no curfew and cars can be seen speeding to places here and there. Shops are closed. Only some bakeries are open and of course the Ba’ath Party Centers. There are more Ba’ath people in the streets and they have more weapons. No army in the streets. We obviously still have electricity, phones are still working and we got to phone calls from abroad so the international lines are still working. water is still running.

- Where is Raed? (Iraqi Blogger)

10:23am CST
More oil field fires reported in Southern Iraq. First reported as 2 now 3 or 4. - Sky News broadcast

10:27am CST
“There is considerable belief in this government that they may, in fact, have gotten Saddam.” - Drudge Report

10:32am CST
Coalition forces moving into Iraq and heading for a “specific target” - Sky News broadcast

10:54am CST
Reporters in Kuwait ordered into bunkers due to expected “barrage of missles” - MSNBC broadcast

10:56am CST
MSNBC sums up the events of the last 15 hours pretty well in this article

They sang Joy to the World as well. Hopefully Baghdad will see more joy, and many more silent nights, in 2008.

A soldier sends Christmas greetings to his family in West Virginia and reminds folks to remember the origin of the holiday.

Trends are positive across the board:

Violence is down about 60 percent in Iraq since the June troop surge, and the top military commander in Iraq said today that he wants the trend to continue in 2008.

“Every trend we watch is down roughly about 60 percent: civilian deaths, numbers of attacks, and thankfully our casualties are down as well,” Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, commander of Multinational Force Iraq, said on “Fox News Sunday.” “As we go into the new year, we clearly want to build on the momentum that has been achieved by our forces working closely together with Iraqi forces.”

Petraeus said Iraqi forces also had a surge this year, with 110,000 new Iraqi soldiers and police.
Petraeus appeared on the morning news program to discuss the release of this week’s quarterly report, “Measuring Stability and Security in Iraq.” With the success of the surges comes the question of reducing the number of U.S. forces in Iraq while maintaining the positive trends, he said.

Some areas, including sections of Baghdad itself, are seeing even more remarkable advances:

“We have seen attacks drop from an average of 150 a week in (the) late January and February timeframe, to less than 10 attacks a week,” Funk said. “The result has been nothing short of phenomenal. When I walk through the local markets, they are full. Small businesses are erupting everywhere.”

The decrease in violence has fostered a feeling of growing civil stability among Iraqis that has encouraged local entrepreneurs to take advantage of economic grants provided by the U.S. military, the U.S. Agency for International Development and other sources, Funk explained.

“A sense of the return of normalcy has caught on, and there has been remarkable progress,” the colonel said.

Michael J. Totten has filed another excellent dispatch from Iraq:

“Were they good fighters?” I said.

“They’re not good fighters,” he said, “but they got a bunch of us. They knew we were clearing every building. And they’d learn from us. Whenever we went to a position we always filled sandbags and stuff like that.”

“And they would do the same thing,” he continued. “They knew that if we couldn’t come through the front door, we’d go through the back door. So they would barricade one door and leave one open. And they’d put a bunker and a machine gun down that main hallway. They would sit in the back corner of a room and soon as you kicked open the door they would just keep firing. So maybe they weren’t very good fighters, but they were quick to adapt and were actually pretty smart.”

“I’ve read that some of these guys injected themselves with drugs,” I said.

“Yeah,” he said, “we found syringes, different types of drugs. The corpsman tried to explain to me what they were at the time, but I didn’t really pay attention to him. They found a lot of medical stuff like that, but for the most part they were just smart. They basically knew what we were going to do every time. We would clear the house, so all they had to do was wait.”

“Do you talk about this stuff with your friends and family?” I said. I was curious if he, like Corporal Koch, kept the war all bottled up inside to himself.

“If they ask, I’ll tell them,” he said. “It doesn’t really bother me. The more people understand what’s really going on over here, the more support they’ll give us.”

There’s much more, including photos, on Michael’s blog.

Marine Corps Commandant Gen. James T. Conway said the Marines are ready if needed but he and the SECDEF agreed that it isn’t the best use of their talents:

Being a garrison force is not what the Marine Corps brings to the table, the commandant said. “We’re expeditionary, and we do not get engaged in some of the long-term duties that you see in Germany, or Japan or Korea,” Conway explained. “We are much more mobile than that, and we want to keep that mobility and that flexibility and not get tied down.”

And they still have work to do it Iraq.

Getting Syria to the table was a bit of a coup but it’s nearly impossible to believe that we’ll see see any substantive results from this event. If there is consensus it’s only on that very point - nothing much will come of this. Peace will come when Arab leaders and anti-Zionist forces worldwide (mostly on the far-left) no longer view the Palestinians as mere canon fodder. Arab leaders have spent decades manufacturing this crisis. They’re not walking away from it any time soon. Doing so would bring all of the ugly truths about their own societies, and their leadership, into focus. True peace will only be possible after the Arab world is transformed.

Anyway, there is an official site for those who are interested. Wikipedia has more information including a pretty comprehensive rundown on the participants.

National security advisor Steve Hadley recently laid out some goals, if you can call them that, for the event:

…the focus of these discussions are the Israelis and the Palestinians launching a negotiating process, supporting them in their efforts to implement the road map, which we still think is the critical path for achieving peace, and, in parallel, building Palestinian institutions and making sure there’s international support for that. That’s what really this meeting is all about and that’s what we hope will come out of it.

In other words, they’re not hoping for much. Or as Rick Richman puts it:

So the conference will “launch negotiations” — since the last few months of actual negotiations over a “document” have failed. Since failure is not an option, this will be called a success.

Frank Viviano is bit more optimistic:

The atmosphere is marked by weakness, uncertainty and pessimism. Yet that may prove to be the Annapolis conference’s greatest strength, an unexpected prelude to breakthrough on the 60-year road to an Arab-Israeli-settlement. It is between the lines of bleak editorials, op-ed columns and analyses in the press of the Middle East itself that this hope, however slim, can be read. From Riyadh and Beirut to Cairo and Jerusalem, pre-conference media coverage has been a strange mosaic of dark foreboding and unusual glimmers of light. No less unusual is the fact that Annapolis will bring together all of the governments and mainstream players in this unending conflict for the first time – precisely because because all of them are reeling in crisis. In a sense, there could be no more potent chemistry for success at the negotiating table. The closest equivalent is the “Nixon shock” of 35 years ago, when a fiercely anti-Communist U.S. president, faced with riots in the American streets and a war about to be lost in Southeast Asia, suddenly found common ground with a marxist China gravely enfeebled by cultural revolution.

John Bolton is cranky, pessimistic, and right (as usual):

“If there is a conference and it fails, we are not simply in the status quo that we had before,” Bolton said during a Web-based question-and-answer session. “We are in a worse position, because it will show a decline in American influence, a failure in a very visible way. I wish we weren’t doing this at all.”

And The Washington Post falls somewhere in the middle:

If there are causes for optimism, they lie in the hopeful public rhetoric of Mr. Olmert and Mr. Abbas — and the fears that lie behind it. Mr. Olmert has publicly pledged several times that Israel will negotiate seriously, and he said last week that he believed there was a chance to complete a peace deal by the end of next year. His government, like many in the Middle East, is deeply worried by Iran’s attempt to expand its influence throughout the region and believes a failure of the talks would play into Tehran’s hands. That prospect may be enough to produce some progress at the Annapolis meeting and in the months to come. But the breakthrough that Ms. Rice thought was possible still looks remote.

While, Henry Siegman hits all of the Arab talking points on the way to this ridiculously one-sided conclusion:

If the international community has been largely indifferent to—or impotent to do anything about—what some have tried to portray as a quarrel between Israel and Palestinians over where to draw the border between the two, it is far less likely to remain indifferent to an Israel intent on permanently denying its majority Arab population the rights and privileges it accords to its minority of Jewish citizens. It would be an apartheid regime that, one hopes, a majority of Israelis would themselves not abide.

It looks like Howard is out:

The results of a major exit poll of voters in today’s federal election has predicted Kevin Rudd will be the next prime minister of Australia and that John Howard will lose his seat of Bennelong.

The Sky News exit poll taken in 31 key seats predicts a two-party preferred result of 53 per cent to Labor to 47 per cent to the Coalition.

Howard was a strong ally in the war on terror and he helped keep the global warming wackos at bay. His successor will hurt us on both fronts:

Rudd, a 50-year-old former diplomat who speaks fluent Chinese, says the 68-year-old Howard is ill-equipped to deal with new challenges like global warming and a high-speed Internet network.

He says his first priority if he is elected will be to sign the Kyoto Protocol on greenhouse gas emissions, something Howard has refused for years to do.

Rudd says he would withdraw Australia’s 550 combat troops from Iraq, leaving twice that number in mostly security roles. Howard says all the troops will stay as long as needed.

Well, at least France is sucking less these days.