Senator Barack Obama with Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top American military commander in Iraq, in a helicopter above Baghdad. Credit Ssg. Lorie Jewell/U.S. Army, July 2008
From Wikileaks: We believe we have negotiated an agreement that provides President-Elect Obama the authorities and protections he needs to exercise the full perogatives as Commander in Chief. We would like to offer, at your earliest convenience, a full briefing to you and your staff on the details of the SOFA. Ambassador Crocker and General Odierno would appreciate the opportunity to brief you personally, via SVTC, at a time that's amenable. Representatives from both Mr. Obama's and Mr. Biden's Senate offices are scheduled to receive a briefing on the text on Wednesday the 12th, and the text has and will continue to be available to those named staff in the Senate's secure facility.
The Iraqis are keenly interested in understanding President-Elect Obama's position on the SOFA. Indeed, a number of senior Iraqi officials - including a number of Prime Minister's most senior advisors -- are claiming that Mr. Obama will not support a SOFA signed by President Bush and interpreting the few messages publicly available as a pretext to reject the agreement on the table. After you have had time to review the SOFA text, we ask that the Obama transition team express support for the SOFA, lest the Iraqis use previous positions or the absence of comment to scuttle the deal.
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WNU Editor: This email is just more proof that President Obama never had any intention to stay in Iraq after he was elected President .... his lack of strategic thinking and his eagerness to fulfil the mandate that the U.S. electorate gave to him when he ran for office that if elected he would leave Iraq .... help shape this catastrophe that we are seeing today. President Bush will always be remembered for invading Iraq and the disaster that it has caused .... and will be cursed for all time because of it. But President Obama's decision to leave Iraq has produced a mess of its own, and I do not see when this current spiral of war and terrorism is going to end.
On a side note. Many have been emailing me on why I have only sporadically covered the Wikileaks email disclosures .... rest assure that I have been reading and cataloguing what I am discovering and I will be posting a comprehensive post Sunday night. I will be blunt .... there is a lot of information to cover .... and what I have already read surprises me .... and I am not easy to be surprised. Bottom line .... all of my worst fears on how corrupt the U.S. political/media/special interest/corporate establishment is has been validated .... and while there is a part of me that likes to believe that this entire Wikileaks dump is just one big con game .... another part of me believes that it is not, and this corrupt state of affairs has been ongoing for a very very very long time. The only remaining thing that baffles me is that the U.S. public knows instinctively how bad Washington is .... but they keep on voting these bastards in.
