"Anthony Cordesman, a military specialist at the Center for Strategic and International Studies who regularly visits Iraq, put it this way: 'You have to grade all the candidates between a D-minus and an F-plus. The Republicans are talking about this as if we have won and as if Iraq is the center of the war on terrorism, rather than Afghanistan and Pakistan and a host of movements in 50 other countries.
'The Democrats talk about this as if the only problem is to withdraw and the difference is over how quickly to do it.'
On the ground with the troops, it is clear that a major military change was in fact made in Iraq last year — not so much the addition of 30,000 troops, but the shift to a counterinsurgency strategy for using them."WP: back story on foreign-born Iraqi insurgents
Ind: fighting continues in south of Iraq between police forces and Shia cult
NYT: Pentagon might reassign Petraeus to NATO post
LAT: Bush administration lowers expectations on foreign policy goals (who knew it was possible)
"The upshot is that the Bush administration is going to be spending the next year managing crises and tidying up messes until the next president takes over, rather than reaching legacy milestones, as officials recently had hoped."
WP: the Post is not so pessimistic
NYT: Kenya killings might have been planned pre-elections
"Several local chiefs of the Kalenjin and Masai communities said they held meetings before the election discussing how they would attack Kikuyus and push them off their land. Top opposition politicians have said they were not involved and that there were no plans for violence...The disappointing reality is that all this has happened before in Kenya: the same places, the same ethnic fault lines, even the same tactics, down to the mud-smeared faces. Both of the times that ethnic violence has swept across the Rift Valley, the early 1990s and now, local tensions have been ignited by politics."
Gdn: militia leader and tribal sheik given government post in Sudan
"Musa Hilal, who is accused of leading militias on a state-sponsored campaign to cleanse parts of Darfur of non-Arab farmers, will act as special advisor to the minister of federal government, local media reported...Hilal has admitted recruiting local Janjaweed militias for the government, but denies personal involvement in the scorched earth campaign that has driven more than two million people from their homes, and seen more than 200,000 people die." [unclear how recruiting does not imply personal involvement]
Gdn: Israel blocks fuel to Gaza, threatening humanitarian emergency
WP: run-off likely in Serbia
NPR: focus on Turkish women in Germany
"One of the biggest problems in these multi-ethnic societies is the wall of silence behind which tens of thousands of uneducated Muslim women live...In 2004, the German ministry for family affairs claimed that 49 percent of Turkish women had experienced physical or sexual violence in their marriage. And in the last decade, there have been 49 known cases of honor killings, 16 in Berlin alone...'The Muslim institutions, they see these problems, that families are having problems,' [a social worker] explains. 'They say, 'If you become again religious or get back to your roots and your religious beliefs, then everything will become better.' And that's why we have this movement, religious institutions are becoming bigger and stronger...[At the same time,] Under the guise of religious tolerance, [a rights leader] says, German institutions turn a blind eye to women's rights violations."
New Yorker: the Obama-Clinton choice
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