The Most Disappointing President

Karen DeYoung writes in The Washington Post: "Iraq is resisting U.S. proposals for a pair of new bilateral security agreements, saying it expects Washington to compromise on 'sensitive issues,' including the right to imprison Iraqi citizens unilaterally, Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari said Monday.

"Other problematic areas now being negotiated, Zebari said in an interview, are provisions in U.S. drafts to give American contractors immunity from Iraqi law and allow the United States to conduct military operations without Iraqi government coordination. 'These are the main ones, but there could be others,' he said, among them 'issues of sites, of locations, of access' by U.S. troops.

"The Iraqi people 'expect to see a change in the relationship on internment, and on some sovereignty issues,' Zebari said. About 23,000 Iraqis are currently held in U.S. military prisons there."

DeYoung explains: "The United States and Iraq are negotiating a status of forces agreement and a separate 'strategic framework' to replace the existing U.N. mandate governing the U.S. troop presence. The mandate expires at the end of this year. A growing and bipartisan number of U.S. lawmakers have demanded that the Bush administration submit the agreements for congressional approval.

"Democrats have charged that the Bush administration is attempting to tie the next administration to its military policy in Iraq. Republicans fear that President Bush's refusal to seek congressional ratification will compound public dissatisfaction with the war and become a negative campaign issue.

"The White House has said that Bush can use his executive authority to sign the agreements and that they do not require congressional approval. He has pledged they will not include authorization for specific U.S. troop numbers or 'permanent' military bases."

Bush's Army

Ann Scott Tyson writes in The Washington Post: "The Army admitted about one-fourth more recruits last year with a record of legal problems ranging from felony convictions and serious misdemeanors to drug crimes and traffic offenses, as pressure to increase the size of U.S. ground forces led the military to grant more waivers for criminal conduct, according to new data released yesterday.

"Such 'conduct waivers' for Army recruits rose from 8,129 in fiscal 2006 to 10,258 in fiscal 2007. For Marine Corps recruits, they increased from 16,969 to 17,413.

"In particular, the Army accepted more than double the number of applicants with convictions for felony crimes such as burglary, grand larceny and aggravated assault, rising from 249 to 511, while the corresponding number for the Marines increased by two-thirds, from 208 to 350."

Lizette Alvarez writes in the New York Times that military analysts "say these are exactly the kinds of recruits who would never have been allowed into the Army before the war in Iraq. To reach its recruiting targets, the Army has had to soften many of its requirements. It now allows in more recruits who did not graduate from high school and who received lower test scores in their service entry exams. Recruits are older and less physically fit. And there are more people in the service with medical conditions that would have otherwise disqualified their enlistment.

"'With the Iraq war being as controversial as it is and absent any higher level call to service, it's a very difficult challenge to all the services, particularly the Army,' said Michele Flournoy, the president and co-founder of the Center for a New American Security, a centrist research organization that focuses on national security and military policies."

Cheney Watch

Here's the transcript of Cheney's largely warmed-over speech to the Manhattan Institute yesterday. He charged Democrats with trying to "force the mission into failure" in Iraq. He spun Iraqi Prime Minister's abortive Basra offensive as "exactly the kind of initiative we seek from Iraq's leaders." He insisted the surge has "accelerated" legislative accomplishments there. And he predicted that if American troops left Iraq, the majority-Shiite country would be taken over by al-Qaeda loving Sunnis.