Iraq

The Spirit of America announces the launch of the 68,000 Remember campaign:

Yesterday, the Treasury Department designated Ali Musa Daqduq, “a senior Hizballah commander responsible for numerous attacks against Coalition Forces in Iraq, including planning an attack on the Karbala Joint Provincial Coordination Center (JPCC) on January 20, 2007, which resulted in the deaths of five U.S. soldiers.”

In Barack Obama's latest ad, the president's campaign claims, "A decade of war that cost us dearly and now for president a clear choice. President Obama ended the Iraq war. Mitt Romney would have left 30,000 troops in Iraq and called bringing them home tragic. Obama’s brought 30,000 soldiers back from Afghanistan and has a responsible plan to end the war. Romney calls it Obama’s 'biggest mistake.' It’s time to stop fighting over there and start rebuilding here."

It's worth recalling President Barack Obama's foreign policy instincts before tonight's presidential debate on that topic.

Yesterday, speaking at a campaign event in Florida, Vice President Joe Biden said, "I ask every day, what's the exact number of the fallen angels -- not generally, not an estimate, the exact number -- because for every one of those women or men, it has transformed a family, a family we owe. And thus far, as of today, there are 6,437 fallen heroes, 49,871 visibly wounded, and tens of thousands of invisible wounds -- posttraumatic stress, traumati

If Syria is a testing ground for the larger struggle of the American-led order in the Middle East against the Iranian-led resistance bloc, it’s also an example of the importance of the Kurds. An ethnic community with almost 30 million people spread across the Middle East—most densely in Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria—the Kurds have become a major player in this larger struggle, with regional powers, like Turkey, Iran and Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, courting various Kurdish parties and figures in order to advance their own interests.

The United States has some 68,000 troops fighting in Afghanistan. Over two thousand Americans have died in the more than ten years of that war, a war Mitt Romney has supported.

One of the minor disgraces of this year's campaign is that the presidential candidates act as if the war in Afghanistan doesn't exist. We have 84,000 troops fighting over there in very difficult circumstances; they've had a tough few weeks, with 41 killed in the last month, but the candidates barnstorm the country with barely a mention of the war or the troops.

Republican congressman Allen West, a freshman from Florida, has a new television ad featuring Robert Delgado, a retired Army sergeant. In the ad, Delgado claims West saved his life when the two men were serving in Iraq. Watch the ad below:

Tom Friedman is a genius. It’s very, very difficult to write a frequent column that expresses deeply conventional wisdom in a fresh, hey-kids-I-just-thought-of-this voice.  He is the id of the Washington Establishment.

In a web video released Monday, the Obama campaign celebrated the withdrawal of American forces from Iraq. “As your commander in chief, and on behalf of a grateful nation, I'm proud to finally say these two words, and I know your families agree - welcome home. Welcome home," Obama says in a clip from a speech he gave at Fort Bragg in December. The president repeats that phrase again for dramatic effect, “Welcome home.”