Playboy Magazine has a very useful, long article out titled “Lockheed Stock and Two Smoking Barrels” that does a great job of exposing the power of informal networks in Washington and how such informal networks are moving billions of dollars around and teeing up military conflicts like Iraq.

(New America Foundation Senior Fellow and Geopolitics of Energy Initiative Director Flynt Leverett: photo credit: NewsHour with Jim Lehrer) I asked former CIA and Bush administration National Security Council senior official Flynt Leverett for a quick summary of his thoughts on President Bush’s Address to the Nation.

Washington intelligence, military and foreign policy circles are abuzz today with speculation that the President, yesterday or in recent days, sent a secret Executive Order to the Secretary of Defense and to the Director of the CIA to launch military operations against Syria and Iran.

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.