We can help with that bowel obstruction

Juan Cole does not think Admiral Fallon's resignation is about Iran but rather Iraq:

My guess is that the real reason for moving Fallon out is not Iran but Iraq, and that he is being made to step down for the same reason that Donald Rumsfeld was. He does not agree with the long-term troop escalation or 'surge' in Iraq. He doesn't believe that counter-insurgency will work in Iraq in the medium term. And as an admiral, he has his eye on potential trouble spots such as Taiwan and North Korea, and is frustrated that the hands of the US are tied as long as it is bogged down in the Iraq quagmire.

Having such a big dissenter as CENTCOM commander is inconvenient for the Republican Party at a time when John McCain is admitting that if he fails to convince the American people that the surge is succeeding, he will lose the presidency. That is, Fallon may have run afoul not of Cheney on Iran but McCain on Iraq. This may be Bush's first favor to the Republican nominee, who after all had a career as a naval officer himself.

Digby takes a much darker view:

I have often observed that one of the biggest problems with the march to war in 2002 (aside from the obvious immorality, mendacity and illegality) was the fact that the Bush administration pissed away any mystique the US ever had about it's intelligence capabilities. One of the reasons a powerful country should never show its hand like that is that when they turn out to have been lying they have no credibility the next time. (Just like when our mommies told us not to cry wolf when we were four year olds.) It's hard to imagine that anyone believes the administration now, but I have recently realized that a new credibility has replaced the old one --- the credibility that sociopaths have when they threaten to kill you. You know they are capable of anything. This is the foreign policy of crazy that little Tommy Friedman enthusiastically recommended after 9/11 (and which Nixon and Reagan also used, to a lesser degree.) They proved they meant it with Iraq.

...

If the Bush admnistration attacks Iran as lame ducks, based upon another laptop full of questionable secret evidence, they will have proven that the office of the president of the United States is basically a four (or eight) year dictatorship. But then, it is, isn't it? As long as he has 34 solid Senate cronies in safe seats, he can get away with anything. If he has a 72 year old would-be successor who is unlikely to get elected, then he might as well go for those oil fields while he has the chance. With oil over a hundred dollars a barrel and rising, an economy on the brink and an approval rating in the 20s, this would be the perfect time shoot the moon and show the world exactly what the unitary American president is capable of.

Click on Digby's name above and read the whole thing.


It is way past time to take our nation back from the crazies.

UPDATE:
If you are still constipated after that (1) bless your heart; (2) ponder this: Secretary of Defense Joe Lieberman.

Thought that would work!

--the BB

We saw this coming - updated

Top US Commander in Mideast to Retire Early
New York Times - 1 hour ago
By THOM SHANKER and DAVID STOUT WASHINGTON - Adm. William J. Fallon, the top American commander in the Middle East whose views on Iran and other issues have seemed to put him at odds with the Bush administration, is retiring early, the Pentagon said ...
Top US Commander For Mideast Resigns Voice of America
Centcom Commander Resigns ABC News

The official line is that he was NOT pushed out. But he had vowed we would not attack Iran under his watch and now his watch is over. What do you think?

We quoted Digby on this just last Wednesday.

UPDATE:
Digby's comments today may be found here.

UPDATE 2:
Josh Marshall is concerned:

It is widely believed in media and political circles that despite the difficulties in Iraq and Afghanistan, American foreign policy is back under some kind of adult/mainstream management. In other words, that we've left the Cheney/Rumsfeld era behind for a period of Gates/Rice normalcy and that Iran regime change adventurism is safely off the table. But put together what the disagreements with Fallon were about, the fact that the president chose him as someone he thought he could work with not more than one year ago, and the almost unprecedented nature of the resignation and it becomes clear that that assumption must be gravely in error.

--the BB