This evening's music features Mississippi Delta blues singer and member of the Mississippi Sheiks, Sam Chatmon.

Here are a few stories from tonight's post:

“What did thousands of dead Americans get us?” Before granting war powers, let’s see where the last two got us

The president’s freshly minted National Security Strategy is first and foremost self-congratulatory and disconnected from reality. It reads like what could be the introduction to a sequel to the president’s “The Audacity of Hope,” which he could title “I Did My Best Under the Circumstances.” ...

Are we living in a safer world with a more peaceful and prosperous Iraq, Afghanistan or Libya? Isn’t there, as some experts have posited, a possible casual link between the way we prosecuted the war on terror so far, and the proliferation of violence so much of the world is still living with today? ...

So just what did several thousand dead Americans, and at least tens of thousands of civilian casualties, plus a couple of trillion dollars get us?

Even as the president says we are heading “home” from Iraq and Afghanistan records are being set for the numbers of killed and wounded civilians caught in these seething pits of sectarian violence we’ve left behind. The U.N. reported last month that for 2014 in Iraq more than 12,000 civilians were killed in the deadliest year for noncombatants since 2008. In Afghanistan the U.N. Assistance Mission there said close to 3,200 civilians were killed and more than 6,400 wounded, the deadliest year since the conflict started.

In the president’s 29-page National Security Strategy there is no mention of the fact that after thousands of lost American and Iraqi lives, and hundreds of billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars, the Iraqi state we stood up came close to collapsing after a near-death experience at the hands of ISIL, a threat the U.S. did not see coming. Now, ever so quietly, the Obama administration is sending U.S. troops back in to Iraq. ...

While details of how the president plans on using his refreshed war powers are still vague, the price tag is not. In the president’s proposed FY 2016 budget he calls for ending the so-called sequester that Congress approved back in 2011 when it pledged that, if it could not make sufficient progress on deficit reduction, the federal government would face across-the-board robo-budget cuts on all discretionary spending, both domestic and military. ...

As the White House and Congress get down to negotiating the budget, odds are the president’s lofty plans for new funding for things like Head Start and upward mobility for struggling households the “recovery” left behind will fall by the wayside. No doubt the new defense spending and end of sequester for the Pentagon will be hailed as a shining example of a great triumph of bipartisanship between the White House and the Republican Congress.

We’ve got to stay on a war footing. It’s all we know how to do.

Leaked cables show Netanyahu’s Iran bomb claim contradicted by Mossad

Binyamin Netanyahu’s dramatic declaration to world leaders in 2012 that Iran was about a year away from making a nuclear bomb was contradicted by his own secret service, according to a top-secret Mossad document.

It is part of a cache of hundreds of dossiers, files and cables from the world’s major intelligence services – one of the biggest spy leaks in recent times.

Brandishing a cartoon of a bomb with a red line to illustrate his point, the Israeli prime minister warned the UN in New York that Iran would be able to build nuclear weapons the following year and called for action to halt the process.

But in a secret report shared with South Africa a few weeks later, Israel’s intelligence agency concluded that Iran was “not performing the activity necessary to produce weapons”. The report highlights the gulf between the public claims and rhetoric of top Israeli politicians and the assessments of Israel’s military and intelligence establishment.

As Netanyahu Tries to Stop U.S.-Iran Deal, Leaked Cables Show Israeli Spies Reject His Nuke Claims

Rebels begin heavy weapon withdrawl, Kiev refuses to abide by Minsk ceasefire agreement

One of the most important aspects of the Minsk ceasefire for eastern Ukraine was the removal of heavy weapons from the front lines. Both sides were a bit slow in getting this going, with the rebels just finally starting the pullback over the weekend.

The two sides were supposed to do the pullbacks within two weeks of the ceasefire, and the rebels were about a week in when they began. That’s far better than the Ukrainian military, however, which is now refusing to pull weapons out at all.

The army is claiming that the rare skirmishes ongoing in the nation’s east justify them keeping their military assets on the front lines, even though that’s the opposite of what the ceasefire deal said.

Glenn Greenwald blasts Hillary Clinton: “The ultimate guardian of bipartisan status quo corruption”

Asked during a Reddit Q & A how citizens could ensure that surveillance is front-and-center in next year’s elections, Greenwald responded that the key obstacle to a genuine debate on such issues is “bipartisan consensus.”

“When the leadership of both parties join together – as they so often do, despite the myths to the contrary – those issues disappear from mainstream public debate,” Greenwald wrote, noting that President Obama, House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi, and House Speaker John Boehner joined forces to block legislation killing the NSA’s metadata program after whistleblower Edward Snowden laid bare the scale of the agency’s surveillance operations.

That legislation, Greenwald pointed out, was introduced by Tea Party conservative Rep. Justin Amash (R-MI) and liberal stalwart Rep. John Conyers (D-MI), underscoring that the debate boils down more to “insider v. outsider” than Democrats versus Republicans. What’s needed, he argued, is for leaders of one of the major parties to commit to making NSA reform a political issue.

“That’s why the Dem efforts to hand Hillary Clinton the nomination without contest are so depressing,” Greenwald continued. “She’s the ultimate guardian of bipartisan status quo corruption, and no debate will happen if she’s the nominee against some standard Romney/Bush-type GOP candidate. Some genuine dissenting force is crucial.”