I was reading this piece over the weekend about Vice President Joe Biden and his role in the U.S. policy toward Iraq. Inside the magazine were several photos of the vice president in Iraq, including one we affectionately here at N&S call “the Paul Bremer look” –  when a pol goes to a war zone wearing a suit and combat boots. (Former CPA leader Paul Bremer first donned this look in 2003 while serving in Iraq; every politician since has adopted it. Indeed, it has become perfunctory.)

The piece reminded me that for all the time Biden has spent in Iraq, the president has yet to visit Afghanistan, even as he is about to deploy roughly 34,000 more troops there, in addition to the 21,000 he sent earlier this year. That is, for all the time the president spent deliberating, he never actually touched down on the ground and saw the mission for himself. He went once, in July 2008, when he was running for president, but not since.

Is this a good or bad thing? I can’t decide. On one hand, this trips are costly and largely vapid of actual fact finding. More then anything, they have become political missions. Yet, should the president visit a war zone before he doubles the number of forces going there? Readers, I kindly ask for your thoughts.

465,000 pounds worth the Pentagon announced today in anticipation of the Thanksgiving holiday.

The Defense Logistics Agency is shipping that much turkey so that the 180,000 troops serving in Iraq and Afghanistan can experience the holiday.  In addition, the agency is sending 63,000 pounds of potatoes; 8,700 cans of cranberry sauce; 61,000 pounds of stuffing and 67,000 pies and cakes, Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell said Tuesday.

Having spent several Thanksgivings in either Iraq or Afghanistan, I can tell you the DoD also goes to great efforts to send thousands of decorations, some more, well, interesting than others. My personal favorite was a life-sized mermaid (in a mermaid ever came to life) cut out of butter in a chow hall in Tikrit, Iraq in 2007.

In addition, third-country nationals who serve the troops will don Thanksgiving-themed hats. Here is one of my favorite pieces about the modem military effort to bring Thanksgiving to the troops.

Alas, Happy Thanksgiving everyone, particularly to those serving overseas now. I know many of our readers, as they sit down Thursday for a meal with family and friends, will count your service to country among the many things they are thankful for this year.

When an administration changes its stance on something, it often does so subtlety. After all, who wants to boast of  changing his or her mind, which suggests that he or she might have been wrong at one point? So when an administration wants to change its position on something, it sends key policymakers out to start telegraphing the change in their talking points. They tweak a sentence or the official  answer to a commonly-asked question in a way that only those who follow the issue closely are likely to catch. Usually, a coterie of policymakers working on the same issue alter their wording about an issue at around the same time.
 
Our friends in the intelligence community call this a "delta," from the mathematical symbol for change. If such tea leaf reading serves us well, Obama’s top national security advisors have begun tweaking their message on Afghanistan, and their latest remarks make it appear to us at Nukes and Spooks that President Barack Obama probably has decided to send thousands more troops there. After all, it doesn't make much sense to start making nice to Karzai if you're planning to tell him that you're not sending him any more troops even though the Taliban-led insurgency is gaining strength and territory and your top military commander there, Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal, has told you that he can't win without tens of thousands more troops.
 
Today, The Washington Post had what clearly was an authorized account of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's visit with Afghan President Hamid Karzai. Until now, the administration made little effort to hide its disdain for Karzai, whose government is riddled with corruption and whose August (but not august) election was tarnished by charges of widespread fraud. It was no secret, for example, that both Vice President Joe Biden and special envoy Richard Holbrooke had butted heads with Karzai. The administration, however, knows that it cannot ask Congress and the American public to support sending more troops to train Afghan forces that would serve a government  the administration thinks is corrupt and incompetent.
 
Today, though, we started hearing the administration say that Karzai is showing some potential for change and improvement. He brought a list of goals to his meeting with Clinton, the Post was told. The administration apparently thinks he's redeemable now, despite the fact that, as my alert colleague Dion Nissenbaum reported from Kabul yesterday, one of Karzai's most tainted cronies, Uzbek warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum, was front-and-center at Karzai's second inaugural yesterday _ seated at the opposite side from Clinton. (Keen-eyed readers also will spot a slap or two or three at Holbrooke in the Post story, which quotes one of several unnamed U.S. officials saying, fairly enough in our view, that it was a mistale for Holbrooke to try to bully Karzai the way he once bullied Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic.)
 
Also yesterday, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates hosted his first press conference with reporters in weeks, and what he said sounded a bit like the bureaucratic equivalent of what the military calls "preparing the battlefield." The usually cautious secretary, a veteran of many years at the CIA who most recently was expressing uncharacteristically public anger at officials who leaked word of the president's plans for Afghanistan, spoke with some certitude that more American troops are going. Yes, he included the usual caveats to every statement he makes about the way ahead in Afghanistan, but they increasingly sounded like throwaways, formalities to make sure he didn't  upstage the president’s announcement.
 
Most notably, he said: "I anticipate that as soon as the president makes his decision, we can probably begin flowing some forces pretty quickly after that."
 
If more troops go to train Afghan forces, the assessment of Afghan readiness will be made on a province-by-province basis, Gates said. If the United States decides to deploy troops quickly, the military will have to work aggressively to set up logistics for them because of Afghanistan’s limited infrastructure, he said. And the secretary rejected a timeline for their service in Afghanistan, saying it depended on how far the Afghans are coming along.
 
A few weeks ago, Gates refused to entertain such questions because the deliberations were ongoing. He wasn't talking about what would happen when the announcement is made, but about the process itself.
 
“I believe the decisions that the president will make for the next stage of the Afghanistan campaign will be among the most important of his presidency, so it is important that we take our time to do all we can to get this right,” Gates told a group of Army officers last month, adding: “Speaking for the Department of Defense, once the commander in chief makes his decisions, we will salute and execute those decisions faithfully and to the best of our ability,” he said.
 
Simply put, Clinton and Gates didn't make those comments on their own. They were speaking on behalf of the Obama administration and how it's looking at Afghanistan. The signs suggest that thousands more troops may be sent to Afghanistan, and that the Obama administration, having concluded that bullying Karzai doesn't work, will now try to turn the flow of additional forces on or off in an effort to maintain pressure on Karzai to clean up his government's act. 

Well, the Sarah Palin book tour is coming to some military bases.  It is not surprising since McCain/Palin ticket had large support from the military As such, fans are eagerly planninng to line up at Fort Bragg to get their copies of “Going Rogue” signed by the vice presidential candidate herself. The Army had announced that the media, however, could not cover the event.  We are now hearing they are planning to media in. Read the latest here.

According to this Associated Press report, the Army was going to keep the media out because it feared that the signing will turn into a political event, specifically an occasion for anti-Obama grandstanding.

My dear colleague, Erika Bolstad, pointed out to me that Palin is headed to Fort Hood on Dec. 4.  Here is what she wrote about it on her Facebook page about it: “I'm looking forward to seeing everyone in every stop on the tour, but I'm especially looking forward to meeting our brave men and women in uniform at Fort Hood. I'm joining the efforts of many others by donating my royalties from the book sales during our stop at Fort Hood to the families of the victims whose lives have been forever changed by the tragic events of November 5th. I am humbled to be able to join the larger effort called "Community Response to 11/5," which was established by the Central Texas-Fort Hood Chapter of the Association of the US Army (AUSA). You can read more about their great efforts here: http://www.forthoodausa.org/.”

I wonder how Fort Hood will handle her visit.

If you have been reading the coverage of the debate within the Obama administration about the way ahead in Afghanistan, you quickly noticed much of it hinged on unnamed sources. At the Pentagon, they were not hard to find…until now.

The military wants a decision about what to in Afghanistan as they feel is time is wasting away. Indeed, violence against Afghans and troops alike are at their highest levels of this eight-year war. And a resurgent Taliban is taking over large swaths of the country. Some feel the president is not properly supporting his top commander in Afghanistan, who has asked for thousands of troops.  And because the whole furtive deliberation only includes the top national security advisors, the environment had become ripe for leaking.

Sometimes, a leak would come out of the White House and the Pentagon would respond with a counter leak. Sometimes a military official would leak to get the commander’s viewpoint into the public discourse. The job of a journalist became sorting through the leaks and the leakers to determine what should be reported and why. You can read out breakdown of the leaks here.

But last week, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates announced that if he found out who in his building was leaking, it would be a “career ender.” He made the declaration while sitting in his plane en route to Osh Kosh, Wisc. At one point, he declared: “Everyone ought to just shut up.” He had little faith that we reporters traveling with him would report his comments. But we did. And the message had made its way into every hall of the maze that is the Pentagon.

Sources that eagerly talked to you now won’t. Sometimes sources volunteer they have nothing to say before you ask the question. Others are canceling appointments with reporters all together out of fear of being called a leaker by the secretary. 

But I can already feel the dam cracking as some officials are desperate to get their views out. Will this lock down hold until the president announces his decision? To really know, watch the stories coming out on this in the day ahead and see how many unnamed sources are in them. 

Let me begin by saying I know how overwhelming the events at Fort Hood have been for all those who serve. The idea that someone, whatever his reasons, would shoot fellow soldiers hits the military like “a punch in the gut,” as so many soldiers have said to me. I understand that times like these are incredibly stressful for those tasked to get information out as quickly as possible. That said, I feel compelled as a journalist to explain to you, dear reader, why you have been hearing so many conflicting stats and details about the incident;  the Army’s effort to get details out on this event has been abysmal.

There is, as Maj. Gen Kevin Bergner, an Army spokesman, said Friday the inevitable “fog and friction” in the initial hours after an incident like this ,  and mistakes happen.  But the Army has gotten nearly every major detail about this incident wrong in the hours – and sometimes days – after Thursday’s shooting. Here are just the ones I have noticed:
1. Hasan’s survival: It took the Army five hours to correct an earlier announcement that the shooter was dead, even as the military said it had an investigator with him the whole time shortly after the shooting. Indeed, Lt. Gen. Robert Cone, the base commander, said his injuries were not life threatening.
2. Hasan’s name: Originally reported as Malik Nidal Hasan, the military did not correct it until hours later, Nidal Malik Hasan. The following morning, Fort Hood put out this press release that had his name mangled yet again.
3. Hasan’s deployment: The Army gave various reports about where Hasan was scheduled to be deployed, finally settling on Afghanistan. As late as yesterday, however, some in the Army were still saying he was headed to Iraq.
4.  The number of wounded: That figure has jumped from 31 in the morning after the incident to 42 today.
5. The ages of the wounded: Today, the military put out a list of the wounded. Unfortunately, a basic background check shows that most of the ages are wrong.
6. The investigation: It is not clear what kind of investigation the Army is conducting, who is in charge of it and when officials expect to get the results.

Moreover, it is hard to know where to go for information. Ask Walter Reed Army Medical Center and they direct you to the Pentagon; ask the Pentagon and they say ask Fort Hood; ask Fort Hood and they say call the Army. At that point, the Army will say it does not know.

That is all to say, as you read the coverage, you will likely notice that facts change days later. And I don’t think the reporters who cover this know how to fix it other than to make adjustments in story. But it all means it will take longer for the public to get any clarity on what exactly happened.

Believe of not, who gets an H1N1 (Swine Flu) vaccine – and who chooses not to in light of the vaccine shortage – has become a political issue in this town.  The White House announced that President and Mrs. Obama would not get the vaccine until “needs of the priority groups identified by the CDC – including young people under the age of 24, pregnant women, and people with underlying conditions – have been met.”  A White House physician administered vaccines obtained through the D.C. Department of Health to the Obamas’ daughters, Malia and Sasha. 

On Wednesday, Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell said that he believed Secretary of Defense Robert Gates received the vaccine, even though the military only has enough of the vaccine to supply half of those serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. And according to the priority list Morrell outlined to reporters at the briefing, as a DoD civilian Gates was third of the list of five groups who should receive the vaccine when it becomes available. Those in uniform, of course, have the first priority, followed by health care workers who support them.

According to the government’s website on the issue Gates needs the vaccine less than most. “People age 65 and older are not at high risk of getting H1N1. They are not in the initial target groups for vaccination, but may get vaccinated when supplies become available,” the website states.

Gates is 66.

Now, perhaps Gates has an underlying condition that demands he get the vaccine first (Morrell has yet to answer my query about this.) Or perhaps Gates was able to get the vaccine outside his capacity as Secretary of Defense.

But if Obama won’t get it and Gates will, it begs the question: Should our national leaders be a priority on the vaccine list?  Should a war-time president and secretary of defense do everything they can to take care of themselves so their focus on the wars?

Or is it every Cabinet member for him/herself?

UPDATE: From Geoff Morrell about why the secretary got the shot. "It's not a political issue. He did it because he is the Secretary of Defense. He is the conduit through which the president gives orders to this department And at a time when we have security challenges around the world, even beyond wars we are fighting, the secretary thinks it is the responsible thing to do."

Reporting from Baghdad -- With U.S. military fatalities in Afghanistan at all-time highs, and terrorist attacks like last week's spectacular bombing against government ministries still common in Iraq, it's easy to overlook one important face: U.S. combat deaths in Iraq are at their lowest level since the March 2003 invasion.

In October, there were two U.S. combat-related fatalities in Iraq, according to the website Globalsecurity.org. That continues a trend that began last year, and accelerated with the departure of U.S. troops from Iraqi cities in June 30 of this year.

According to icasualties.org, another excellent source of data about U.S. and coalition casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan, there were four U.S. combat casualties each in August and September, and five in July.

Publicly available data sources differ a little bit, so we hesitate to be categorical about this, but October 2009 just may have been the safest month for American troops since the invasion, 6 1/2 years ago. (It's important to remember that non-combat operations can be dangerous, too. There were more non-combat deaths in October, from vehicle accidents and other causes, than combat ones.

One marked difference from my last, very brief, visits to Iraq in 2004 and 2006 is the absence of a visible U.S. military presence on Iraq's streets. They've been replaced by Iraqi security forces, mostly dressed in crisp new uniforms, whose performance is under stepped-up criticism since the October 25 bombing which killed 155 Iraqi civilians.

Thanks to that bombing, and other attacks, the trend for Iraqi civilians is not so good. According to this story today from Reuters, there were 343 Iraqi civilian deaths from political violence in October, a reversal from the downward trend of recent months.

(McClatchy special correspondent Mohammed al Dulaimy contributed).