Abandoned by the Russian President, Kurds Find New Ally With Syria's Putin Backed Government. 

NY TIMES

Trump withdraws U.S. forces from northern Syria, and administration scrambles to respond

Mourners attend a funeral Sunday for Kurdish political leader Hevrin Khalaf and other people killed during the Turkish offensive in Syria. (AFP via Getty Images)

“This is total chaos,” a senior administration official said on a day when Cabinet secretaries denied that the United States had “abandoned” its Syrian Kurdish allies to invading Turkish forces.

• By Karen DeYoung, Dan Lamothe, Missy Ryan and Kareem Fahim

U.S.-allied Kurds strike deal to bring Syrian troops loyal to Assad back into Kurdish areas

The announcement by the Syrian Democratic Forces further undermines the prospect of any continued U.S. presence along the Turkish border.

• By Liz Sly, Louisa Loveluck, Asser Khattab and Sarah Dadouch

Turkish-led forces film themselves executing a Kurdish captive

Unswayed by top advisers, Trump doubles down on decision

Officials say the president has tried to convince advisers and lawmakers that the United States is not to blame for Turkey’s military offensive

• By Seung Min Kim and Josh Dawsey

Trump faces bipartisan criticism over troop withdrawal

Turkey Attacks Kurds, U.S. Allies in Syria with Airstrikes and Artillery 

NY TIMES

Airstrikes Effect Limited As U.S. Focus on ISIS Frees Syria to Battle Rebels

THE GUARDIAN

Turkish soldiers on the border with Syria, with Kobani visible beyond as smoke from a shell rises. Photograph: Lefteris Pitarakis/AP

US-led air strikes in northern Syria have failed to interrupt the advance of Islamic State (Isis) fighters closing in on a key city on the Turkish border, raising questions about the western strategy for defeating the jihadi movement.
Almost two weeks after the Pentagon extended its aerial campaign from Iraq to neighbouring Syria in an attempt to take on Isis militants in their desert strongholds, Kurdish fighters said the bombing campaign was having little impact in driving them back.
Isis units have edged to within two kilometres of the centre of Kobani, according to Kurds fighting a rearguard action inside the city. The jihadis, who this weekend generated further outrage with the murder of the British hostage Alan Henning, are simply too numerous to be cowed by the air assault by US fighter jets, the Kurds say.
“Air strikes alone are really not enough to defeat Isis in Kobani,” said Idris Nassan, a senior spokesman for the Kurdish fighters desperately trying to defend the important strategic redoubt from the advancing militants. “They are besieging the city on three sides, and fighter jets simply cannot hit each and every Isis fighter on the ground.”
He said Isis had adapted its tactics to military strikes from the air. “Each time a jet approaches, they leave their open positions, they scatter and hide. What we really need is ground support. We need heavy weapons and ammunition in order to fend them off and defeat them.”

An American-led airstrike on Wednesday in Kobani, Syria, on the Turkish border. A Turkish official said the bombs did not stop the militants’ advance into town. Credit Sedat Suna/European Pressphoto Agency        

 N.Y. TIMES

The United States’ focus on the Islamic State has given cover to Syrian forces, they say. That has freed Mr. Assad’s military from worrying about checking the militant group’s advances and allowed them to continue to focus attacks on the greater political threat — less extreme Syrian-based insurgent groups bent on ousting Mr. Assad and the communities where they hold sway.

The Syrian government had long focused its attacks on insurgents other than the Islamic State, a group that had seemed more interested in establishing Islamic rule in its territories than in ousting Mr. Assad. But after the group overran parts of Iraq and carried out a series of lightning routs of Syrian Army bases, terrifying many government supporters, Syrian warplanes began attacking it with more intensity in its eastern strongholds.

 

That dynamic is at the heart of Washington’s impasse with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, who is demanding that President Obama increase efforts to oust Mr. Assad before Turkey takes tougher action against the Islamic State.

The attacks by the Syrian government are creating other political problems for the United States. With both air forces in the sky, attacks by the Syrian government can be mistaken for American ones, including raids that kill civilians.

 

Mistrust of the United States is deepening among Syrian opponents of the government, including insurgents whom Mr. Obama hopes to train as a ground force against Islamic State militants.

 Some Syrians go further, saying that the simultaneous bombings are evidence that the United States is covertly coordinating with the Syrian government. Mr. Obama has publicly ruled out such coordination, saying Mr. Assad lost his legitimacy after using force against peaceful protesters and carrying out indiscriminate bombings.

 

Syrians feel abandoned by the world, and see Washington’s decision to prioritize the battle against the Islamic State as a victory for Mr. Assad’s strategy of eliminating moderate opposition and presenting his international opponents with a choice between him and extremists.

Since the American-led campaign began about two weeks ago, however, the need for Syrian forces to check the Islamic State has ebbed, and some insurgents who oppose the militant group say the government attacks on them have intensified.

 

A United States official said there were indications that since the American campaign started, Syrian fighter jets and helicopters had increased strikes somewhat in the core territories of non-Islamic State insurgents, such as Idlib, Aleppo and the Damascus suburbs.

“It would be silly for them not to take advantage of the U.S. doing airstrikes,” said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss confidential intelligence reports. “They’ve focused in the west and left off the east, where we are operating. Essentially, we’ve allowed them to perform an economy of force. They don’t have to be focused all over the country, just on those who threaten their population centers.” 

In Retaking of Iraqi Dam, Evidence of American Impact



JOY AT IRAQI DAM A Kurdish fighter with a black ISIS flag kissed the Kurdish flag at the recaptured Mosul Dam. Credit Lynsey Addario for The New York Times        

N.Y. TIMES

MOSUL DAM, Iraq — The two bodies lay festering in the midday sun on Tuesday, some of the only remnants of the Sunni militant force that until Monday night controlled the strategically important Mosul Dam.

Around them was the evidence of not just a fierce battle but also a different sort of fight: buildings reduced to rubble; cars churned into twisted metal; mammoth craters gouged from the road.

All bore testament to the deadly effect American airstrikes were having on the militants of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, who until this month were marauding over northern Iraq with little resistance and who two weeks ago seized control of the dam.

 

It was not until President Obama authorized airstrikes by the United States military on Aug. 7 that the Sunni fighters’ advance was halted. Two days of concerted air assaults starting Sunday around the dam then paved the way for Iraqi and Kurdish forces to reclaim the site. The dam itself, backed by a turquoise lake and surrounded by dun-colored mountains, was in fine condition, with little evidence of damage either from the fighting or from two weeks in militant hands.

 

The body of a dead ISIS fighter found within the Mosel Dam complex the morning after pesh merga and Iraqi Special forces retook the dam.        Credit Lynsey Addario for The New York Times        

 

The pesh merga have received the majority of the credit for retaking the dam. But the Iraqi Special Forces troops who worked alongside them, who were created in the image of their American counterparts, have gotten far less attention. Known as the Golden Force, fighters interviewed Tuesday said they came from Baghdad and were called into the fight several days ago.

 

 

Capitalizing on U.S. Bombing, Kurds Retake Iraqi Towns, Maliki Refusing to Resign

Men who volunteered to fight with Kurdish forces took up position in Mosul, Iraq, on Sunday. Credit Mohammed Jalil/European Pressphoto Agency       

With American strikes beginning to show clear effects on the battlefield, Kurdish forces counterattacked Sunni militants in northern Iraq on Sunday, regaining control of two strategic towns with aid from the air.

The developments came as political tensions mounted in Baghdad. Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki went on state television early Monday and redoubled his demands for a new term.

The American airstrikes, carried out by drones and fighter jets, were intended to support the Kurdish forces fighting to defend Erbil, the capital of the Iraqi Kurdistan region, according to a statement by the United States Central Command. They destroyed three military vehicles being used by the militant group, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, and damaged others, the statement said, adding that the warplanes also destroyed a mortar position.

 

 

 

President Obama and other American officials have said that more ambitious American support would be predicated on the Iraqi political leadership breaking a long deadlock and appointing a new prime minister, one who would head a more inclusive government than the Shiite-dominated administration of Mr. Maliki, and who could reach a political settlement with Iraq’s disaffected Sunni population.

 

 

But the political crisis deepened at midnight Sunday as a deadline expired for President Fouad Massoum to choose a nominee for prime minister. Mr. Maliki angrily accused Mr. Massoum of violating the Constitution by not choosing him. “I will complain to the federal court,” Mr. Maliki said.

 

One senior Iraqi official said that overnight Mr. Maliki had also positioned more tanks and extra units of special forces soldiers loyal to him in the fortified Green Zone of government buildings in Baghdad. The official said Mr. Maliki had “gone out of his mind, and lives on a different planet — he doesn’t appreciate the mess he has created.” A Kurdish news agency reported that presidential guards were “on high alert to protect the presidential palace,” and the capital swirled with rumors about what might happen next.

In Washington late Sunday, a senior administration official said that the United States had not confirmed reports of abrupt military movements in Baghdad, including rumors that tanks had surrounded the presidential palace, but that it would monitor the situation closely.

 

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Palestinian women grieved for Mohammed al-Anati, a boy who was killed in clashes with Israeli troops, at the Al-Fawwar refugee camp near the West Bank town of Hebron on Sunday. Credit Nasser Shiyoukhi/Associated Press        

 

Israeli and Palestinian negotiators on Sunday accepted Egypt’s proposal for a new 72-hour cease-fire in the Gaza fighting, which began one minute after midnight on Monday, and agreed to resume Egyptian-mediated negotiations toward a more durable solution.

But several previous cease-fires have collapsed or expired, followed by renewed fighting, and it was not immediately clear whether the sides had moved nearer to an agreement on the contested issues.

   

OBAMA OK'S AIRSTRIKES & HUMANITARIAN FOOD DROPS IN IRAQ AFTER ISIS TAKES MOSUL

Doug Mills/The New York Times  
 

N.Y. TIMES

Speaking from the State Dining Room at the White House, President Obama said he had directed U.S. military forces to conduct targeted airstrikes on Islamic militants if they moved to take the city of Erbil. He also said that U.S. military aircraft had dropped food and water to thousands of Iraqis stranded on a mountain in northern Iraq. Mr. Obama also declared that he had run for the presidency in part to end America’s involvement in the Iraq war, and he repeated his promise that the United States would not send ground troops back to that country.

Displaced people from the minority Yazidi sect, fleeing the violence in the Iraqi town of Sinjar west of Mosul, took refuge on Thursday in Dohuk province. Credit Ari Jalal/Reuters        

 

The crisis gripping Iraq escalated rapidly on Thursday with a re-energized Islamic State in Iraq and Syria storming new towns in the north and seizing a strategic dam as Iraq’s most formidable military force, the Kurdish pesh merga, was routed in the face of the onslaught.

The loss of the Mosul Dam, the largest in Iraq, to the insurgents was the most dramatic consequence of a militant offensive in the north, which has sent tens of thousands of refugees, many from the Yazidi minority, fleeing into a vast mountainous landscape.

 

Thousands of Yazidi and Christian people have fled from Mosul to the Kurdish capitol Erbil, also known as Arbil, after the latest wave of advances from Islamic militants that began on Sunday

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2719203/

 

ISIS forces are threatening to massacre thousands of people trapped in mountains in northern Iraq. "When many thousands of innocent civilians are faced with the prosect of being wiped out, we will take action," he said, earlier saying ISIS's plan for the 40,000 Yazidis constitues an act of genocide.

 

The Kurds had tried to seize on the chaos. protect their borders and consolidate their autonomy, while staying out of Iraq’s broader civil war. The pesh merga were considered well armed and well motivated, determined to protect their Kurdish enclave in the north.

But the latest fighting has shown that even the pesh merga are not up to the fight with ISIS. Kurdish officials have complained of a lack of ammunition and begged American diplomats for more weapons. But the United States, so far, has held off on significant arms shipments to the Kurds, fearing that it could undermine the central government in Baghdad.

 

Now, the Kurds have been battling a group of militants from ISIS who are using powerful American weapons they took from the battlefield, left by the Iraqi Army.

“They are literally outgunned by an ISIS that is fighting with hundreds of millions of dollars of U.S. military equipment seized from the Iraqi Army who abandoned it,” said Ali Khedery, a former American official in Iraq, who over the years has advised five American ambassadors and several American generals.

 

ISIS has already used Iraq’s water supply as a weapon. Earlier this year it seized control of the Falluja Dam, in Anbar Province, and flooded a vast area that sent thousands of refugees fleeing, submerged hundreds of homes and several schools and interrupted the water supply to southern Iraq.

 

Ammar Jassim, a 35-year-old resident of Falluja, fled the city earlier this year not because of the fighting but because of the flooding. “We lost everything,” he said. “It was a water invasion.”

If the Mosul Dam were to be damaged, “it would be like a tsunami coming down the Tigris,” said Azzam Alwash, a prominent environmentalist and engineer and the founder of Nature Iraq, a nonprofit group.

 

[There was]  the sense that the country was rapidly coming apart, as ISIS militants swept across northwestern Iraq. The militants, an offshoot of Al Qaeda, view Iraq’s majority Shiite and minority Christians and Yazidis, a Kurdish religious group, as infidels.

 

As chaos tore through northern Iraq, political intrigue unfolded in Baghdad, with political leaders meeting late into the night in the fortified Green Zone to choose a replacement for Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki.

 

 

American officials have worked to engineer his ouster, believing he is incapable of establishing a national unity government acceptable to Iraq’s main minority groups, Sunni Arabs and Kurds. American officials have implied that more military aid would be provided if Iraq’s political class chose a new leader.

As Iraqi leaders, the country’s top religious authorities and top Iranian officials, who wield considerable power within Iraq, pushed for Mr. Maliki’s removal, he was refusing to step aside Thursday night. Even those within his own State of Law bloc were demanding that he leave.

 

If he were to step down, Mr. Maliki has reportedly demanded immunity from prosecution for himself, his family and his inner circle, and a massive security detail, paid for by the state.

Given the number of enemies he has accrued over his time in power, and the well-documented instances of human rights abuses, torture and extrajudicial killings under his watch — not to mention wide-scale corruption at the highest levels of his government — many believe that Mr. Maliki would be immediately under threat of arrest, or assassination, were he to leave office without guarantees of immunity and protection.

 

 “Maliki knows if he steps down, virtually he is a dead man,” said Mr. Khedery, who was once close to Mr. Maliki himself.

ADM. EXPLORES TALKS W/IRAN IN IRAQ CRISIS. IRAQ LDR AL-MALIKI KEEPS SUNNIS & KURDS MARGINALIZED IN GOVT.

 N.Y. TIMES, MICHAEL GORDON & DAVID SANGER

A senior American diplomat met with his Iranian counterpart in Vienna on Monday to explore whether the United States and Iran could work together to create a more stable Iraqi government and ease the threat from Sunni militants.

The initial meeting took place after Secretary of State John Kerry signaled that the Obama administration was open to cooperating with Iran on Iraq,

The Obama administration’s strategy is to pressure Iraq’s prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, and his Shiite-dominated government to form a multisectarian government with Sunnis and Kurds in an effort to heal the rifts being exploited by the insurgents. But that goal could be frustrated if Iran decided to back hard-line Shiite leaders or sent Quds Force fighters into Iraq, aggravating the already inflamed tensions.

 

Complicating the picture are the parallel talks between Iran and world powers on its nuclear program.

With an initial July 20 deadline for an agreement looming, one expert who has periodically advised the American negotiating team said there was already “a recognition the Iranians will try to milk any help on Iraq to get any advantage they can” as they haggle with the lead negotiators over how much of their nuclear infrastructure can remain if a final nuclear agreement is reached.

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani

----

In a sign of the growing dangers in Iraq, Mr. Obama notified Congress on Monday that he is sending as many as 275 military personnel to augment security and provide support for the heavily fortified American Embassy in Baghdad. The United States has already announced plans to evacuate a significant number of embassy personnel.

----

The outreach to Tehran was a surprising turnabout for the Obama administration, which has not held talks over regional crises with Iran. Cooperation between the United States and Iran to contain the Iraqi crisis would represent the first time the two countries have jointly undertaken a common security purpose since they shared military intelligence to counter the Taliban in Afghanistan after the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.

Mr. Kerry, in fact, worked furiously in January to persuade the United Nations to disinvite Iran from the Geneva peace talks on Syria, arguing that Tehran’s military support to Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, disqualified it from participating.

 

 

N.Y. TIMES

 

Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki has presented himself as the man who could bring Iraqis together, but with the collapse of his army before a Sunni militant assault, he has taken on only one role — that of commander in chief of Iraq. 

He is spending much of his time on the military side of the presidential compound, while some of his close civilian aides have taken to wearing starched military fatigues. He spends the better part of his day running the war.

He meets with military commanders, travels to the front lines, makes speeches at recruiting drives rallying young Shiite men and, not infrequently, falls into fits of anger, according to members of his inner circle.

What he does not do, by all accounts, is spend much time on the political reconciliation with the Sunni Arabs and Kurds that his international allies in Washington and Tehran have insisted is his country’s only possible salvation. Even his top aide in charge of reconciliation said Monday that he thinks it is all but hopeless at this point.

 

 

President Obama has made it clear that the United States will not provide military support unless Mr. Maliki engineers a drastic change in policy, reaching out to Sunnis and Kurds in a show of national unity against the Sunni militants, whose shock troops are the extremist Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. Without that, analysts say, the country is at risk of a renewed sectarian war in which Baghdad could lose control over nearly a third of the country for the foreseeable future.

 

But Mr. Maliki is showing few signs of changing his ways. Just as he did in a similar, though not nearly as threatening, crisis in 2008 in Basra, he is pinning his hopes on the military option. He is determined to use the Shiite fighters he trusts to stabilize the country and, he hopes, rout the Sunni insurgents and reimpose the government’s control over its territory.

For now, Mr. Maliki’s public message to Mr. Obama is that it is just not possible to work with the Kurds and Sunnis right now, that the army first needs to retake lost ground.

Mr. Maliki, 63, has long shown a stubborn streak, an unwillingness to bend his principles. He spent much of his life as a dissident, working to oust the former president, Saddam Hussein.

 

Sectarian civil war: Shiite tribal fighters raise their weapons and chant slogans against the al-Qaeda-inspired ISIS group in Baghdad as Iranian-backed militias move in to spearhead what Shiites see as a fight for survival against Sunni militants

In the southern Iraqi city of Basra, Shiite tribal fighters on Monday chanted slogans against  the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. Credit Nabil Al-Jurani/Associated Press        

He lived in exile for 24 years, and secrecy became a way of life, in order to avoid arrest. The experience left him wary of all but his closest associates. He did not appear destined for higher office but was encouraged to run for prime minister in 2006 by Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, in part because he was viewed as incorruptible.

Mr. Maliki surprised the United States and other Western governments by sending his army forces in 2008 against Shiite militias loyal to the anti-American cleric Moktada al-Sadr, which at the time were destabilizing the country. But in more recent years he has not appeared willing to repeat that step and has hewed more to sectarian policies.

At times it has looked almost as though Mr. Maliki was going out of his way to alienate the Sunnis. After the Sunni tribes helped to defeat Al Qaeda in 2008, he cut off much of their funding.

In search of insurgents, Mr. Maliki has authorized mass arrests of Sunnis and held many of them in prisons outside the law. He has also accused a prominent Sunni politician, Tariq al-Hashimi, of running a death squad, driving him into exile in Kurdistan, and has similarly gone after other prominent Sunnis.

 

Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki of Iraq led a meeting with military officers during a visit to the city of Samarra on Friday. Credit via Agence France-Presse — Getty Images       

 

Convinced that there is a conspiracy to undermine him, Mr. Maliki speaks often of “failed politicians” who are working with the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, while his associates describe “dirty deals” between the Kurds, ISIS and the Sunnis. Sunnis have lost patience and now simply want the prime minister to resign.

 

Shiite politicians have said there are some immediate gestures Mr. Maliki could make that would help ease the tensions. He could release the thousands of Sunni prisoners detained by his security forces and being held without trial. He could make common cause with Sunnis and Kurds with statements against the Sunni militants, and he could work with them to bolster the military instead of turning to Shiite militias.

 

The worry is that, barring reconciliation, Iraq will split into a Sunnistan and a Shiastan, said a former ambassador, Ryan C. Crocker.

“Either we intervene at the White House and the secretary of state level or this is going to devolve into a bloody stalemate,” he said, “a line of demarcation between north and south, to be determined, but probably just north of Baghdad and the establishment of a de facto Al Qaeda state, and that’s completely terrifying.”

 

Many Shiite politicians, worried about the fate of the country, have begun offering alternatives to Mr. Maliki’s approach. [They urge him to] reach out to Kurds, thanking them for receiving refugees and recommending a national reconciliation.

 

That does not mean that Mr. Maliki has lost faith in all Sunnis. He still has words of praise for the Sunni tribes with whom he has long worked, and who have fought and lost large numbers in battling Qaeda-type extremists in western Iraq.

But Mr. Maliki has little faith in the Sunni political leaders,

As recently as last week in the wake of the fall of Mosul, Mr. Maliki appeared to have a chance to create a unified multisectarian, multiethnic block to fight ISIS and those who support it. In a long late-night meeting with Sunni and Kurdish leaders, it appeared they might emerge with a unified stand. Hours passed, and when they emerged there was no agreement.

It turned out the Sunnis proposed raising in effect a Sunni army, a sort of new version of the tribal Awakening Councils that fought Al Qaeda in 2007 and 2008. But that idea was rejected by Mr. Maliki, even as the Shiite militias were beginning to organize.

While the idea of separate Sunni and Shiite armies is an indication of the depths of the sectarian divide, Mr. Maliki’s inability to use the moment to try to build trust is telling,

 

The suggestion of many is that Mr. Maliki has lost so much credibility that the best thing that could happen would be to form a new government with a different leader who might inspire more trust. But for now Mr. Maliki is not stepping down, and it seems unlikely that there would be enough unity to anoint a successor anytime soon. [Further,] it is widely accepted in Iraqi politics that any plausible candidate for the post of prime minister must also be acceptable to Iran.

I READ THE NEWS TODAY: IRAQ CRISIS / U.S. POLITICAL POLARIZATION / BERGDAHL / VET HOSP REFORM / STUDENT LOANS

Daily Beast

Iraq plunged into chaos Thursday as Kurdish forces seized control of the northern oil city of Kirkuk, while fighters from the terrorist group ISIS headed toward Baghdad. The armed forces quickly abandoned their posts in the north. With no government troops maintaining order, Kurdish fighters seized Kirkuk, which the semi-autonomous people view as their historical capital. After seizing Mosul and Tikrit, militants from ISIS, which has links to al Qaeda, have now advanced to within an hour of Baghdad.

Daily Mail

Iraq's government has indicated a willingness for the US military to conduct airstrikes against radical Islamist militants

Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant have taken over Iraq's second biggest city Mosul and town of Tikrit

Government forces have stalled the militants' advance near Samarra, a city just 110km (68 miles) north of Baghdad

ISIS's goal is to create a Islamic caliphate (state) - it already controls territory in eastern Syria and western/central Iraq

Iran has sent special forces and a unit of elite troops to Iraq to assist the Iraqi government halt the advance

Turkey is negotiating for the release of 80 nationals held by Islamist militants in Mosul

Iraqi air force is bombing insurgent positions in and around Mosul - 1.3 million citizens still remain in the city

Oil price hit a three-year high this morning on worries that supply could be disrupted  

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DAILY BEAST:

The number of Americans who are consistently conservative or consistently liberal has doubled over the past 20 years, Pew Research reported Thursday. Twenty-one percent are now consistent liberals or conservatives, up from 10 percent in 1994. In addition, those partisan sentiments are stronger among those who profess them. Also, the number of people in each party who view the opposing party in a negative light has more than doubled since 1994. They believe the other guy’s policies “are so misguided that they threaten the nation’s well-being.” Good luck governing.

Charles Blow, N.Y. Times:

This phenomenon coincides, to a certain degree, with the rise of talk radio and the stridently ideological cable news — profit-driven provocateurs whose livelihoods ride on their abilities to rouse rabble, stir passions and diabolize opponents.

And many of their listeners, viewers and readers become the apostles of passion, enforcing rigid binary ideologies that accommodate little subtlety. Any seeming equivocation is deemed evidence of apostasy.

 

[Obama's] presidency, in many ways, has been hamstrung by opposition. In the wake of his ascension came the rise of the Tea Party, the incredible assertion by the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, that conservatives’ top priority should be to keep Obama from being re-elected (that didn’t work out so well), the stunning assault on voter rights, the influx of conservative billionaires like the Koch brothers into the political arena, blatant gerrymandering after the last census and the unprecedented levels of obstruction by Republicans in Congress.

================================ 

U.S. Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl is seen in this undated photo.

Courtesy of Kim Harrison

Washington Post, Paul Waldman

Today, the Post published excerpts of Bowe Bergdahl’s journal, along with emails and other writings, giving us the most intimate, complex, and in many ways sad view we’ve yet had of the young man who had been held prisoner by the Taliban for five years.
What the journal ultimately shows suggests that as a partisan political issue, Bergdahl’s release is likely to fade before long. The right has gotten about as much as they can out of it, and now that we know how troubled Bergdahl was before he wandered off his base, they may just let it go.
The idea that Bergdahl wasn’t sufficiently deserving of rescue has been central to the conservative criticism of the deal to obtain his release. Even as they wildly exaggerate the danger of the five former Taliban we released (to hear Fox News tell it, you’d almost think the five not only planned and executed the September 11 attacks, they also have super-powers that will enable them to reduce our nation to ashes any day now), many on the right attacked Bergdahl and his family relentlessly, accusing him of being not just a deserter but an outright traitor. Some even mobilized a PR campaign to promote soldiers who would go in the media to criticize Bergdahl.
But his writings, which were shared with the Post by a close friend, tell a story that doesn’t fit into the kind of box that can be easily used for partisan purposes. Among other things, we now know that Bergdahl joined the Coast Guard in 2006 and was quickly discharged for psychological reasons, though he claimed to friends that he had faked mental illness in order to get released (a claim about which they were skeptical). But it’s Bergdahl’s own words that are the most revealing:

The 2006 discharge and a trove of Bergdahl’s writing — his handwritten journal along with essays, stories and e-mails provided to The Washington Post — paint a portrait of a deeply complicated and fragile young man who was by his own account struggling to maintain his mental stability from the start of basic training until the moment he walked off his post in eastern Afghanistan in 2009.
“I’m worried,” he wrote in one journal entry before he deployed. “The closer I get to ship day, the calmer the voices are. I’m reverting. I’m getting colder. My feelings are being flushed with the frozen logic and the training, all the unfeeling cold judgment of the darkness.”

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Sponsored by Jeff Miller, the bill passes 421-0 with overwhelming bipartisan support. | AP Photo

Washington Post, Paul Waldman

Yesterday, the House passed a bill to reform medical services at the Department of Veterans Affairs on an unusual unanimous vote. Harry Reid indicated today that the Senate’s version of the VA bill, co-sponsored by Bernie Sanders and John McCain, will be fast-tracked and could come up for a vote in the next couple of days.
Which means that unlike every other scandal (both real and trumped-up) that the Obama administration has confronted, this time demagoguery and feigned outrage gave way to — brace yourself — actual problem-solving. How could such a thing have happened?
After all, Republicans have been allergic to passing legislation of any kind. This Congress is on pace to be the least productive in history, and John Boehner has said Congress “ought to be judged on how many laws that we repeal.”

And just today, Senate Republicans successfully filibustered a bill allowing students burdened by crushing debt to refinance their loans.  So what was different about the VA that allowed for an actual reform effort to succeed (granting that it hasn’t quite succeeded yet)?

The explanation is that as scandals go, this one just isn’t actually built to give Republicans that much mileage — unless they are willing to refuse to be part of the solution. But here is an area where that is impossible for them.
Indeed, for Republicans, the opportunities for demagoguery on the VA scandal have turned out to be limited. Sure, there have been some over-the-top statements here and there, and we have seen some desk-pounding for the cameras at hearings. But there is a specific need that demands action — and veterans groups are paying close attention — which means blaming our Kenyan Muslim Socialist president can only go so far. Every member of Congress has to be ready to answer the question, “What are you doing to solve the problem?”, and “I’m holding Barack Obama’s feet to the fire!” isn’t an answer any constituent is going to accept.

Beyond this is the fact that here is an area where Republicans and Democrats have fundamentally the same goal: they both want to see veterans get good health care. There are limits to their agreement — Republicans would also like to privatize the VA to whatever degree they can, just as they’d like to privatize Medicare and Medicaid. And this bill starts down that road, by allowing veterans who live more than 40 miles from a VA medical facility or who have been waiting for extended periods to take their VA coverage and get care at private providers. But unlike in previous controversies, both parties actually want to solve the problem.