Hillary Rodham Clinton, who has in the past tried to “out-tough” President Bush in discussion of America’s Middle East challenges, really nails it in her rejection of the President’s escalation proposal last night: Statement of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton on the President’s Speech on Iraq “Based on the President’s speech tonight, I cannot support his…

President Bush is planning to pull troops out of Afghanistan to deploy to Iraq.

There is a lot of criticism on the political right and left of the Iraq Study Group report — but all in all, the report does a very good job suggesting that Iraq’s internal problems cannot be addressed without addressing the absence of regional equilibrium.

For those who are frequent visitors to The Washington Note, you’d know that my Apple G4 turbo-charged powerbook went on the fritz last week, and I hope to be back up and running with a new hard disk on Thursday this week.

This report is disturbing. I met former General Zvi Shtauber last year at Tel Aviv University’s Institute for National Security Studies and sensed that he was more of a quick hit hawk than a complex strategist.

Chris Nelson’s Nelson Report of Friday, 5 January, does a great job of capturing the competing games going on around the President’s “surge proposal.” The President will be outlining his plan Wednesday at 9 pm Eastern and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice will be testifying tomorrow in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

We still need to hear what the President’s speech specifically includes regarding a new strategy for Iraq, but the key question will be whether there are any clear, undisputed benchmarks by which the public can measure the relative success or failure of the President’s plan.

While the book exposed a lot of the systemic rot in the Bush administration’s Iraq-related decision-making process, there were several things wrong with Bob Woodward’s State of Denial. To discuss one of these, Woodward was duped about the diminishing power of Vice President Cheney and his team.

It has become a sad cliche that Americans deserve better from their leadership than they are getting.

I do think that this is a good move. Khalilzad, who has been both Ambassador to Iraq and Afghanistan, may have signed a number of PNAC letters, but he is a realist. The situation has deteriorated around him in Iraq — but he knows how to deal in the region.