confirms my earlier reporting that Petraeus and his team were

confirms my earlier reporting that Petraeus and his team were ds708 chafing against the administration-imposed timeline of progress, perhaps even pulling troops out, by August. As I ve written before, the surge is a glacier: slow-moving, with any possible success (a very dim prospect) coming three or more years down the road.
Which is why the administration is having so much trouble finding a military czar to run the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The very fundamental issue is, they don t know where the hell they re going, said retired Marine Gen. John J. Jack Sheehan, a former top NATO commander who was among those rejecting the job.
Juan Cole s plan to get us out of Iraq is fine, in principle. But I have trouble with airbag reset sentences like the first half of this one:
The Shiites will have to demobilize the Mahdi Army and Badr Organization as well, and Iran will have to commit to working with the Maliki government to make that happen.
It s pretty obvious that groups like the Mahdi Army and Badr Organization are the Shiites. They control the Maliki government. They aren t going to demobilize themselves especially when it seems obvious that the future of Shiite, and therefore Arab, Iraq is going to be determined by an internecine tussle between the two groups (which is to say the Hakim and Sadr families and friends). I wish I could be as optimistic as Cole that a solution is possible, but there are too many moving pieces here with too many conflicting agendas.
Joe Klein is TIME's political columnist and author of six books, most recently Politics Lost. His weekly TIME column, "In the Arena," covers national and international affairs.




Gaddafi’s Blood

It was not long after he received a secret warning from the Italian government in April 1986 and narrowly escaped being blown to bits by American bombers that Muammar Gaddafi declared his intention to become Emperor of Africa. What followed as the increasingly erratic Gaddafi pursued his megalomaniacal dream was one of the most obscene and violent episodes