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I'm not sure just who Charles Krauthammer thinks is supposed to be "surrendering" to the United States to finally end this so-called "war on terror," but that's one of the only two scenarios he offered to his cohort Bret Baier on Fox this Thursday as legitimate reasons to end the United States pretending we're at war with a tactic.

Krauthammer: Obama's View Of War "Is A Naive And Utopian Idea":

CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: Look, I give the president credit for moral seriousness. But there is a flaw at the center of it which has to do with the strategic idea that he has. He central idea here is that it explains why he wants to restrict the drone war, he explains why he wants to shut Guantanamo, he explains why he wants to change and ultimately repeal the law that authorizes the War on Terror. He wants all of that. But it derives from this notion which is every war has to come to an end. Every war in the past has and he said this war like all wars must end. That is a naive and utopian idea.

It is true that all other wars have ended. But to end a war you need two sides. You will either have the surrender like the Germans and Japanese. Even Kim Il-sung agreed to an armistice, it was not unilateral. You don't declare the war's over if there is no response, assume with your head in the sand it's over. And the Cold War there never was a surrender, but the Soviet Union disappeared. That was after half a century. Here we are 12 years in, it's as if Obama stood up in 1958 and said the Cold War has to end and I'm going to end it.

The problem is it doesn't end until either al Qaeda disappears or it renounces the declaration of war it made in 1996. And that's why all the proposals he wants are completely impractical and ultimately harmful.

Or in other words, never. That use of force should have never been given in the first place and it's long past due that President Obama is calling for it to be rolled back. I knew the heads would be exploding over at Fox following that speech. It's pretty pathetic watching Krauthammer twist himself in knots trying to justify his position.

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On the ten year anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, there has been an awful lot of naval gazing by our media, sadly with most of it being revisionist history on what happened during the run up to that invasion and occupation, with a lot of glossing over just how complicit the media was in helping the neocons beat the war drums. And as Jeremy Scahill noted during this interview on Martin Bashir's show, there's still a lot to answer for by our politicians on both sides of the aisles -- but in particular, the neocons and Bush administration.

It's too bad there wasn't any accountability for his fellow guest on the program, Michael O'Hanlon, who supported the invasion and who was as guilty as the rest of them with enabling the neocons. Scahill sadly didn't go after O'Hanlon, but I appreciate what he was given a chance to say during the segment.

SCAHILL: People like Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith should not be able to show their faces in public in this country without being confronted with what they did to Iraq. I mean, the reality is... having spent time in Iraq throughout the '90's... many of the Iraqis I knew are dead. Many of the Iraqis that survived the war are displaced and with the millions of others that have been displaced.

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From Go Left TV's Ring of Fire, Mike Papantonio with a reminder after this Monday's final presidential debate, about just who Mitt Romney is surrounding himself with as foreign policy advisers. It's George W. Bush/Dick Cheney all over again.

Mike Papantonio talks about how Mitt Romney's pitiful performance in the foreign policy debate, and why it should scare American voters.

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Chris Matthews didn't pull any punches with his "Let Me Finish" segment this Monday evening where he took Mitt Romney to task for who he's pandering to: Matthews: Romney is ‘a speaker system,’ not a candidate:

Let me finish tonight with this Romney character.

I don't think Romney cares all that much about the presidency except that he wants it. If he weren't running, do you think this guy would be watching this or any other show on politics? Forget about it!

Mitt cares about three things: his faith, his family, his business.

Right now, his business is running for president. That's why he's interested in the presidency. It's his business to be interested. Listen to him answer questions. If the interviewer doesn't ask the most obvious thing, something that Mitt's briefers have been over and over with him, he seems stunned. He doesn't have an answer. Why? Because he never thought of that one!

Fact is, he hasn't thought about many things outside his zone of interest, which again includes his faith, his family, his business. And this is the most dangerous thing about this guy. Since he doesn't have a foreign policy, he buys the foreign policies of the powers that be.

So he sings the song of his neo-con so-called "advisers." What they really are, of course, are people who advocate a point of view — the need for a new war with each new Republican president — and they need someone in the White House to push it for them. They need a president who speaks their language. So they write his speeches. They want war with Iran. They just put it in the next speech.

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Here we go again with these neocons pushing for the United States to get involved in another war in the Middle East. From this Wednesday's Andrea Mitchell Reports, too wrong to fail former George W. Bush adviser who is now advising the Romney campaign, Dan Senor joined Mitchell to carp about the United States not doing enough to try to stop the violence in Syria and called for arming the rebels there.

Never mind they're not an organized group and that arming them may just end up escalating the violence there, or that we might be starting a proxy war with Russia by doing so, these Bushies have never found an armed conflict they didn't want the United States to get involved in. Senor's statements here reek of political opportunism and another excuse to attack the Obama administration.

And never mind that this is the same guy who was the one out there telling everyone how wonderfully things were going in Iraq when the opposite was true. No matter how terribly wrong these neocons have been about our policies in the Middle East under the Bush administration, they're still going to be treated as credible by our media.

Senor and his fellow neocons have been carping like this for some time now. Here's more from Foreign Policy Magazine on the letter they sent to the Obama administration in February: Conservatives call for Obama to intervene in Syria:

Fifty-six leading conservative foreign-policy experts wrote an open letter Friday to U.S. President Barack Obama calling on him to directly aid the Syrian opposition and protect the lives of Syrian civilians.

"For eleven months now, the Syrian people have been dying on a daily basis at the hands of their government as they seek to topple the brutal regime of Bashar al-Assad. As the recent events in the city of Homs-in which hundreds of Syrians have been killed in a matter of days-have shown, Assad will stop at nothing to maintain his grip on power," wrote the experts.

"Unless the United States takes the lead and acts, either individually or in concert with like-minded nations, thousands of additional Syrian civilians will likely die, and the emerging civil war in Syria will likely ignite wider instability in the Middle East."

They got their title wrong. It should have read PNAC neocons call for Obama to intervene. Here's the list of those so-called "experts" that signed the letter.

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From our friends at News Hounds, Mr. "A Noun, A Verb and 9-11" is at it again, joining his fellow chickenhawk Sean Hannity and beating the drums for war with Iran -- Fox News Pretends Rudy Giuliani Is An Expert On Israel And Iran:

Since when did ex-New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani become an expert on the Middle East? Admittedly, he was the mayor of a city attacked on 9/11 but that hardly makes him an expert on Israel and Iran any more than getting caught in a horrific snowstorm makes me an expert on weather. As Brendan Nyhan noted in 2007, Giuliani didn’t know the difference between Sunni and Shiite even though he was ready to declare Iran as possibly “more dangerous than Iraq.” His current work is in security and law in the private sector. But Fox News’ Sean Hannity presented him last night to the “we report, you decide” network’s viewers as some kind of sage about what's going on and what the U.S. should do in the Middle East. Giuliani’s chief credentials seem to be a willingness to attack Obama and Iran. It’s hard to know which Hannity considers the bigger enemy.

It was clear that Hannity’s real interest in the problems in the Middle East was all about Obama. No sooner had Hannity finished his rundown of the rising tensions in the region when he introduced Giuliani as “the former New York City mayor” and said, “You know, the president said this was a democracy movement. Now we have radical Islamists who’ve come to power (in Egypt). (The Obama administration) talking about speeding up aid to the Muslim Brotherhood in the new Islamic government and now we’ve got a hostage situation – well, as far as I’m concerned – and they’re gonna put these Americans on trial.”

Giuliani joined in. “The president has no clue as to what’s going on there. I think he’s living in a fairly naïve world,” newly minted Middle East expert Giuliani opined. “Unfortunately, I mean, those of us who, I think have a little more knowledge of the Middle East realize that… you’re unleashing some really dangerous forces here.” As he spoke, a large graphic blared the suggestion, “HOSTAGE CRISIS?”

“What do we do with Iran?” Hannity asked. He’s been clamoring for war against Iran for years. So it’s a safe bet he had already vetted “expert” Giuliani on the subject. Read on...

Full transcript below the fold.

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As Rachel Maddow reported this Friday, on the 10th anniversary of the start of the war in Afghanistan, Mitt Romney decided to announce the members of his national security advisory team, and as she noted, of the twenty two people he named, fifteen of them are people who worked on foreign policy for the George W. Bush administration, and around a half dozen of them are former members of the neoconservative think tank and now defunct, PNAC, or The Project for the New American Century.

Apparently Mitt Romney thinks it's a good idea to make all that's old new again with bringing in a bunch of neoconservative war mongers to advise him on matters of national security. If Mitt Romney thinks running as George W. Bush 2.0 on national security issues with the mood of the country being what it is right now after all the money and lives that have been wasted with the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, I've got to wonder what bubble this man is living in.

From The Washington Post -- Mitt Romney taps foreign policy, national security advisers -- here's some of the list of those Romney has tapped to join his team:

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