GOP to oust Cheney?

Yesterday, the Washington Post had an opinion piece titled "A GOP Plan To Oust Cheney", by Sally Quinn. While it highlights an interesting idea (a Republican revolt against Cheney), it consists solely of conjecture, hypotheticals and vague unsourced claims written in the passive voice, with the occasional personal attack (like a sarcastic reference to Cheney's lesbian daughter). But given Sally Quinn's position as a Washington socialite (daughter of an important general, married to the former editor of the Washington Post, has no accomplishments to speak of - as DC-establishment as you get), the article is pretty important. To me, it is a signal that the Washington establishment has finally completely rejected Cheney, and adopted Fred Thompson as their own - naturally, for reasons that have nothing to do with policy.

Quinn nominates Fred Thompson to replace Cheney because the Republican Party's top 3 2008 candidates are poor fits.

That leaves Fred Thompson. Everybody loves Fred. He has the healing qualities of Gerald Ford and the movie-star appeal of Ronald Reagan. He is relatively moderate on social issues. He has a reputation as a peacemaker and a compromiser. And he has a good sense of humor.
He could be just the partner to bring out Bush's better nature -- or at least be a sensible voice of reason. I could easily imagine him telling the president, "For God's sake, do not push that button!" -- a command I have a hard time hearing Cheney give.

The reasoning here is pretty ridiculous. Apparently Fred Thompson is qualified to be Vice President (and President, as Quinn states he should use the VP spot to run for President in 2008) not because of managerial skill, or intelligence, or judgment, and not because of any accomplishments he has to his name (he has none). Instead it is because he has "movie-star appeal", can tell a good joke, and because of what Sally Quinn can imagine him saying.

The most absurd thing about Quinn's endorsement of Fred Thompson is that, on the issues that Quinn states are alienating Republicans from Cheney (Iraq and Iran), there is no appreciable difference between Cheney and Thompson. According to Quinn,

As the reputed architect of the war in Iraq, Cheney is viewed as toxic.

Fred Thompson, March 2003, pre-OIF:

FRED THOMPSON, ACTOR: With all the criticism of our president's policy on Iraq lately, Americans might ask, What should we do with the inevitable prospect of nuclear weapons in the hands of a murderous and aggressive enemy? Can we afford to appease Saddam, kick the can down the road? Thank goodness we have a president with the courage to protect our country. And when people ask what has Saddam done to us, I ask, what had the 9/11 hijackers done to us -- before 9/11?

And now:

WALLACE: What would you do now in Iraq?
THOMPSON: I would do essentially what the president's doing.

Quinn says:

...as the administration's leading proponent of an attack on Iran, [Cheney] is seen as dangerous.

Fred Thompson says:

"I think the bottom line with Iran is that nothing is going to change unless there is a regime change."

Sally Quinn belongs in a gossip column, not on the op-ed page.

USA wins gold cup

The USA won its fourth Gold Cup this past Sunday, beating Mexico 2-1. Here's the game-winning goal from Benny Feilhaber:

Feilhaber Goal USA 2-1 Gold Cup
Uploaded by thecrazyitalian81

The extended highlights are on CONCACAF's Youtube site.

Books and such

I haven't had time to post much lately - work has been longer than the 9-5 (I keep suckering myself into staying longer because I am too vain to put my name on something that I haven't gone over 5 times). Also most of the stuff I'm currently reading for work is stuff on truth and reconciliation commissions, or battlefield medicine techniques - not something I feel comfortable enough with my knowledge to post on.

Also, since I got a bunch of books lately, I've been reading rather than writing. I finally finished Philip Bobbitt's marathon 900-page "The Shield of Achilles." I also finished John Robb's 190-page "Brave New War." I started Nassim Taleb's "The Black Swan," which is fantastic so far, but I forgot it at my girlfriend's place in Rochester this past weekend. I'm reading V. E. Tarrant's "The Red Orchestra" until I get it back (The Red Orchestra will be a quick read).
Bobbitt's book could easily have been half the length. One problem I had reading his book was that I couldn't stand his writing style. He fills his book with sentences like:

"Partly it was [Acheson's] demeanor: great success in law school often conveys to young men who achieve it a certain haughtiness owing to their discovery that they are easily measured as superior to other brilliant young men at a way of thinking that is supposed to encompass all human endeavor.*" (656)
*"Perhaps women will not fall prey to this conceit; in Acheson's day there were virtually no females at the Harvard Law School."

I hope this is ironic, seeing as he clearly succeeded in law school (prestigious clerkship, professorship, etc.).
He also repeats himself endlessly. He organized his book as two books that could each stand alone - one about war and one about law. This was clearly a mistake, as the entire point of his book was linking war and law, and it led to endless repetition.
That said, I'm glad I read it. The most valuable parts for me were when he charted the clear relationship between tactical innovation, strategic innovation and domestic and international legal evolution.

Also, a funny fact about Bobbitt is that he's LBJ's nephew.

I'll do a write-up on Brave New War (adding to the list of those who have already) once I get it back from work. It's currently being passed around the office.

Candid Combat Camera

This is interesting both from a historical perspective (great primary sources) and from an Information Operations (IO) perspective:

Combat Camera Units Document Military Operations

Each U.S. military service now has "combat camera" (COMCAM) units that provide a unique visual record of military operations, according to a new manual on COMCAM tactics and procedures (pdf).

Deporting soldier's wives

Over on TDAXP (still don't know where that name comes from), there was a post a while ago called "Improving Americans", on immigration. I left a comment, the last sentence of which was

Citizenship for foreigners who lay their life on the line for our country really should be a no-brainer.

Meaning non-citizens who join the American military should get an expedited path to citizenship (this is close to becoming reality). I don't really see how anyone could object to that proposal. Everyone else at TDAXP agreed.

So, from Rude Pundit, I bring you this:

Alex Jimenez's wife, Yaderlin, faces deportation because, yup, she's illegal. The woman pictured cuddling with her Army hubby may be sent back to the Dominican Republic, where she would have to stay for ten years before she could apply to come back. Her status as an illegal immigrant was discovered because, yup, Alex applied to get her a green card and legal status. The cruelest irony, if there isn't enough here, is that because Alex Jimenez is missing, a judge has put a hold on a hearing over her status. So now Yaderlin Jimenez gets to wait for the inevitable news that Alex was treated like a beef cow in the slaughterhouse and whether or not she's allowed to continue to live in the country that her husband suffered and probably died for.

Nothing to say about it really. It's just disgusting.

The Rude Pundit would like to see Malkin and Dobbs and Tom Tancredo standing at an airport, watching Yaderlin led to a plane to take her back to Santo Domingo. Maybe they could manipulate the corpse of her husband, an all-American puppet hero, so it waves good-bye and good riddance, that no sacrifice is enough to get into their special club of citizenship.

Republicans can't stand their own candidates

Why else would Fred Thompson, who hasn't even announced yet and hasn't participated in any debates, be the leading Republican candidate in South Carolina? His website has links to help you give him money, raise money for him, ask friends to give him money, call talk radio, etc., but his political positions are buried within his biography - basically nobody has any real idea of what he would do as President. They just know that he isn't Mormon (Romney), doesn't support "abortion on demand" (Giuliani), and isn't a "maverick" (McCain). As long as Fred Thompson doesn't open his mouth and try to say anything substantive, he doesn't alienate anyone. Looks like right now, that's good enough.

USA through to the semi-finals & other soccer items

The US beat Panama today by a score of 2-1 to advance to the semi-finals of the Gold Cup, where they will play Canada. It was a strange game - they dominated the first half but couldn't score, with Taylor Twellman hitting the crossbar and post. Panama played very rough and could have had an ejection or two by halftime. In the second half, the US played poorly, but scored off a penalty and a free-kick. Then Panama did finally have a player ejected. After that, the US fell asleep, Panama scored and the last five minutes were rather stressful. They will have to play much better to beat Canada, which has actually looked pretty good.

More possible corruption in Italian soccer, involving (surprise surprise) Juventus.

Real Salt Lake (dumbest name ever) was playing a exhibition match in Utah against the Chinese national team, when several fans were kicked out for waving Tibetan flags (Chinese flags were allowed). There's more at Blue Blooded Journo, including video. From the video, it seems to me like the protesters were just messing around and trying to heckle a soccer team, rather than make a political statement.

And as a grand finale:

Americans are soccer-savvy ... and that scares little Englanders

Some choice quotes:

Witness the fact that soccer-playing America is massively liberal, loving, caring, socially conscious and nice. While soccer-hating America consists of increasingly isolated gangs of Bush-supporting, bible-bashing, gun-crazed, dungaree wearing, banjo-playing, quasi-fascist chicken-lovers and their twelve fingered, pin-headed, cyclopic, drooling monster children.

...

Why are we scared? Because as a nation we have a desperate need to feel superior to the vibrant barbarian culture that's replaced us as top global ass-kicker.
Face it, feeling superior to Americans is about all we've got left. But the list of things we actually do better than the Yanks is slim and getting slimmer. Did you know that the bastards even brew decent beer these days?

The Tenet Plan

From Kent's Imperative:

If true, this story illustrates why the machinery of intelligence and covert action should always be kept separate from the other instruments of policy and national power.

It is also one of those times when one looks back at the decision to involve DCI George Tenent directly in negotiations in the Middle East (in his titular capacity, no less) as the height of folly.

Another issue - how in the world is Tenet as head of the CIA, or anyone working for him, going to give objective reports on the situation there if Tenet is stamping his name on diplomatic initiatives like the"Tenet Plan"?

Historians generally don't analyze events until they have historical perspective, because the distance allows them to see a broader picture. Most of the journalists doing the best work today are the ones outside of the Washington cliques (Murray Waas, Charles Savage, Knight Ridder/McClatchy), because they are able to be most objective. Similarly, good intelligence is aided by distance that allows objectivity, something you can't get when you are reporting on plans that you wrote yourself.

(Trackback)

Obama's "New Kind of Politics"™

From Talking Points Memo (the guys who broke the attorney scandal, as well as forced Trent Lott to resign as Majority Leader):

We've just obtained an email that shows that the Obama campaign yesterday circulated a negative, and ultimately false, story about Bill Clinton...

Campaigns, of course, circulate negative stuff about each other all the time. This email is unusual in that it is flagging something potentially negative not about a primary rival but about the former President -- one who obviously isn't running in the Democratic primary and who remains popular with Dem primary voters.

One of the things I dislike about Obama is that he frequently uses Republican-friendly memes to criticize fellow Democrats. Kind of like when he said (paraphrasing) "Democrats are 'unserious' about national security, but I am different."
Just because a guy talks well doesn't mean he's trustworthy, or would make a good President.

Blogroll

On the right side of the blog, I made a blogroll. It should go without saying that I don't agree with every crazy thing these people say, so in thirty years when I'm facing Senate confirmation, don't ask me to defend them!

I figured I would create a blogroll after Michael Tanji added me to his. To my knowledge it's the only one I'm on, but quality over quantity!

A post about blogs is an excuse to post an XKCD comic:

Switching sides in Iraq?

In Iraq, the United States is attempting to co-opt the only groups with any legitimacy to much of the Sunni population by forming alliances with and arming Sunni tribes and insurgents.

The Sunni groups we are arming are, at least in Al Anbar, the groups with the most political legitimacy. The official government of Iraq has no legitimacy and no power, and hasn't for months if not years. Our presence has no legitimacy and little power - we can destroy, but we cannot create. Al Qaeda in Iraq is in a similar situation. That leaves the Sunni insurgents and the local institutions that they are tied to (rather than thinking of the insurgency infiltrating local governments, it makes more sense to see both the local governments and the insurgencies as receiving their strength from the same source, the consent, freely given or not, of the local population).

Looking at the Iraqi provinces, it makes sense to strengthen the hand of those organizations that are going to face the least resistance from their local populations, and if you can create tactical alliances with American forces, so much the better. Absent the tactical alliances, then arming the Sunni tribes/insurgents simply becomes a method of effecting our withdrawal and ensuring that there isn't a vacuum behind us (if that were the case, this might be a good scenario to use Nagl's Advisory Corps).

The problem comes when you look at Iraq as a whole. If (likely when) the Sunnis we help are unwilling to give up their maximalist objectives of control over Iraq, the civil war will intensify, as Sunnis will be able to focus their resources away from fighting a three-front war (against Al Qaeda, the USA, and Shi'ites) to fighting only Shi'ites after Al Qaeda is defeated with American assistance, and then America leaves. That would mean that out of the chaotic situation now in Iraq, we'd be creating a Sunni pole that may eventually unite against a Shi'ite pole (if the Shi'ites stop fighting each other for long enough). In such a conflict I think it'd be more likely that neighboring states would intervene, because the actors would be more familiar-looking. We'd be substituting the choatic "open-source" violence for more organized yet potentially widespread violence.

It is a risky trade-off. One risk is that Al Qaeda in Iraq will be defeated quickly, and Sunni insurgents will then refocus on killing American soldiers with their American weapons. However, as it should be clear by now, the United States is unable to cleanse Iraq of the Al Qaeda presence it has brought by itself, and so the risk may be worth the reward of an Al Qaeda-less Iraq.

The Sunni tribes/insurgents could probably get rid of Al Qaeda in Iraq by themselves if they put their minds to it, but in the current environment they'd be foolish to do so. Focusing on Al Qaeda would decrease their focus on killing Americans, which is a large part of why their power is accepted in their communities. It could also conceivably leave them weaker in any eventual showdown against Shi'ites.

This post is too long already and I want to go to bed. My last thought is this: that this whole train of thought only makes sense if you view the American presence in Iraq as something worth preserving indefinitely. In that case, American troops would be able to either turn on and eliminate the armed Sunnis after they've done their job of eliminating Al Qaeda, or, if the Sunnis give up the goal of dominating a unitary Iraqi state, they could aid the Sunnis in creating "Sunnistan," a largely independent Sunni area of Iraq that would have its own military force (like Iraqi Kurdistan has the Peshmerga). If you think American troops should just leave, as I do, then this policy is misguided. It will prolong the Sunni/Shi'ite civil war by arming the weaker party in that conflict, prolonging the time that it takes for the Shi'ites to crush the Sunnis in Baghdad. Prolonged aid to Sunnis, driven by our desire to appease our Sunni allies outside of Iraq, could convince the Sunnis that their maximalist objectives are feasible, and thus "perpetuate a state of war indefinitely by shielding the weaker side from the consequences of refusing to make concessions for peace."

We shouldn't even be in this situation.

Bunch of stuff

Here's a random assortment of stuff I never got around to posting about (had a busy week and won't be posting over the weekend).

How a Democrat Can Get My Vote: Advice from seven recent war veterans.

I don't have anything to add, but pretty interesting.

Andrew Sullivan - "Verscharfte Vernehmung."

Comparing current American interrogation policy with the interrogation policy of Nazi Germany. I am not completely sure whether it's absurd or not. The most important thing to remember when thinking about loosening regulations on interrogation policy, however, is

As time went on, historians have found that all the bureaucratic restrictions were eventually broken or abridged. Once you start torturing, it has a life of its own.

True pretty much across history, due to the psychological impact torture has on the torturer.

Rising to a New Generation of Global Challenges - Mitt Romney.

Renewing American Leadership - Barack Obama.

Notable only for their blandness and mediocrity.

DNI Inadvertently Reveals Key to Classified National Intel Budget - RJ Hillhouse.

The intel budget is $60 billion (for FY 2005), not $40-45 billion as previously thought. 70% of that money goes to private contractors.

Giuliani: Worse Than Bush - Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone

Yes, Rudy is smarter than Bush. But his political strength -- and he knows it -- comes from America's unrelenting passion for never bothering to take that extra step to figure shit out. If you think you know it all already, Rudy agrees with you. And if anyone tries to tell you differently, they're probably traitors, and Rudy, well, he'll keep an eye on 'em for you. Just like Bush, Rudy appeals to the couch-bound bully in all of us, and part of the allure of his campaign is the promise to put the Pentagon and the power of the White House at that bully's disposal.

...

The Paul incident went to the very heart of who Giuliani is as a politician. To the extent that conservatism in the Bush years has morphed into a celebration of mindless patriotism and the paranoid witch-hunting of liberals and other dissenters, Rudy seems the most anxious of any Republican candidate to take up that mantle. Like Bush, Rudy has repeatedly shown that he has no problem lumping his enemies in with "the terrorists" if that's what it takes to get over. When the 9/11 Commission raised criticisms of his fire department, for instance, Giuliani put the bipartisan panel in its place for daring to question his leadership. "Our anger," he declared, "should clearly be directed at one source and one source alone -- the terrorists who killed our loved ones."

Matt Taibbi is no Democratic Party apparatchik - I remember him being quite critical of John Kerry in 2004.
I recently got John Dean's Conservatives Without Conscience for my birthday. Hopefully I'll get around to it this summer (still working on The Shield of Achilles).

Possible Glimmer of Some (Modest) Hope in Iraq - Counterterrorism Blog.

The reason for optimism is that some Sunni tribes will go after Al Qaeda without American help. And in other news, other Sunni tribes are concluding cease fires with Al Qaeda (H/T John Robb).

Of course, Al Qaeda isn't really the biggest problem in Iraq - the problem is the total lack of state legitimacy. Hopefully I'll be co-authoring a paper this summer on reconciliation in Iraq as a path to state legitimacy. If we get it published I'll post a link on the blog.

USA vs Guatemala

The USA beat China pretty easily on Saturday. They won 4-1 and should have won by more - the US team looked pretty disjointed at times (a lot of players playing who wouldn't have normally seen the field). Tonight they go against Guatemala in their first Gold Cup match with a full strength team. Guatemala is better than China, but the US should still win fairly easily. My prediction is 3-0 USA.

Since Eddie Johnson scored a second hattrick in a row last Saturday against New York, I'm going to revise the starting eleven that I posted last week for this game in order to get him in there. My new starting eleven is:

-------Twellman---Johnson-------
Beasley-----Donovan-----Dempsey
------------Feilhaber--------------
Simek-Onyewu-Parkhurst-Spector
------------Howard---------------


I don't think Feilhaber will have too much trouble controlling the midfield against Guatemala, and if does, Donovan, Beasley and Dempsey can all drop back to help him out. One thing's sure - this lineup would get a lot of goals.

The game is 9pm ET on FoxSoccerChannel and Telefutura.

Thoughts on the decision to fund the Iraq war

After the most recent Iraq funding vote (House roll call, Senate roll call), I was pretty pissed that Congress had backed down to President Bush. I, like many others who wanted to end our military involvement in Iraq, was of the opinion that Congress should have passed the same bill over and over to force the President to sign it. I thought backing down showed that Congress was spineless. As I've thought about it more, I've changed my mind.

Essentially passing the bill over and over again would be an endurance contest with the President. I came up with a clever metaphor to describe how I thought this would play out: it would be like playing chicken with a suicide car-bomber. Bush is undeterrable and has no problem with using the United States military as political hostages. He believes that he is right on this issue and there is absolutely nothing that will be able to convince him otherwise. Meanwhile, every time the bill is re-passed by Congress, more and more members of Congress and the Senate would be peeled off by the Whitehouse, and we would have ended up with a bill without benchmarks anyway.

In the end I guess I am OK with the Democrats who voted against the bill on principle, knowing it would probably pass anyway, yet I also agree with the Congressmen and Senators who voted for the bill so we didn't have to go through this process ten times, leading to the same result.

Congressman Joe Sestak (D-PA), who voted for the bill without benchmarks, explains his vote:

We are presently taking money from the gas, etc, of those troops training in America and using that money until it runs out in July for troops in Iraq (by law, you cannot shift money between procurement accounts into money to operate and provide supplies to our troops; there are legal firewalls preventing that). It took us 6 months to redeploy from Somalia safely after Black Hawk Down. With alot more troops (140,000) and thousands of US civilians, it will take at least that long to safely come out via the roads or by limited flights from Iraq. There was no back room deal. This is one purely where we would would run out in July of the resources needed to protect our troops. There would be more causualties than one might imagine, if we tried, in the next 40 days, to get everyone out.
That is why I have been persistent that a date certain (my bill says 31 december) with sufficient time, is not only the right strategy to leave behind an unfailed state, but is also one to protect those we, America, sent to war, while doing so. Even if we all disagree with that war. I will never, ever, play chicken with the sons and daughters of America, and put them in greater danger by voting for a bill that gives them no funds to protect themselves in the next 5-7 weeks. I understand if you disagree, but these are Americans we sent in harms way, and I will never vote to make them less safe as I work to redeploy them in a timely and safe manner.

Climate change monitoring cut

LA Times:

America will lose much of its ability to monitor global warming from space unless the Bush administration reverses course and restores funding for the next generation of climate instruments, according to a confidential report prepared by government scientists.

Cost overruns and technology problems recently caused the federal government to cut the number of planned monitoring satellites from six to four. Those four will focus on weather prediction rather than climate research, according to the report.

"The recent loss of climate sensors … places the overall climate program in serious jeopardy," said the report, which was drafted by government atmospheric and space scientists for the White House Office of Science and Technology.

My predicted scenario - as monitoring climate change becomes an increasing priority (and the War on Terror™ moves to the back burner), intelligence customers will demand more data on the environment. In order to compensate for the shortfall of satellites designed to monitor the environment, Defense and Intelligence Community (IC) satellites will be taken off their original targets and retasked to monitor environmental factors. This will result in poor environmental data (the satellites probably weren't designed with this mission in mind) as well as a lack of data on traditional intelligence targets.

Customer: "Why didn't you warn me Luxumbourg was going to invade Belgium!?"
IC: "You told us not to monitor militaries and to instead monitor the environment."
Customer: "The intelligence agencies are a big waste of money. Now I will cut your budget even more because you clearly can't do your job."

Thoughts on the JFK plot

A few thoughts on the JFK plot:

• On the spectrum from "entirely homegrown" to "entirely foreign," this seems to be somewhere in the middle. They were naturalized citizens and had to travel back to Guyana and Trinidad to get money and support. However the plot was conceived while Defreitas was working at JFK and living in NYC. So - was JFK a target of opportunity? Or a symbolic target? Or an economic target? Probably all three.
  
• Defreitas & co. felt like global jihad was being monopolized by Arab Muslims (page 8). Might part of their motivation have been to claim recognition as non-Arab Muslim mujahideen? Apparently the Trinidadian group they tried to get funding from, Jamaat al Muslimeen, has roots in an Afro-Trinidadian (as opposed to West Indians) ideology that evolved from pan-African nationalism (Jamestown).
• The JFK airport was targeted because of its symbolism:
  

  "Anytime you hit Kennedy, it is the most hurtful thing to the United States… If you hit that, this whole country will be in mourning. It's like you can kill the man twice." (page 18)

  But it would not be a symbolic target like the Pentagon, White House, Capitol, etc., because it is a functional target as well as a symbolic target. This might mean that an aim as important as the symbolism would be economic disruption (which Defreitas rambles about elsewhere). They targeted a key node in our transportation network, and their attack would have had cascading second and third-order effects (I haven't even started Robb's book yet and I'm already a true believer™!).
• The profiles of Russell Defreitas and his co-conspirators do not mesh well with the general profile of successful terrorist leaders, who tend to be educated and middle class. He was homeless for periods of time and no education is listed in his profile. Instead, his case better matches the profile of the individual disconnected with society who turns to violence to find meaning:

  These forms of violence are not generated by religion, but in the absence of political ideologies, the actors involved take religious themes to construct meaning.
  The actors construct themselves as generic, abstract Muslims, disconnected from cultures and living traditions. Their abstraction and disconnection make them global people.

Steve Gilliard

Steve Gilliard, of The News Blog, recently passed away. He was fighting some sort of heart disease for a while, and finally it got him. He was one of the first blogs I read at his old site and at DailyKos. He'd write a lot about politics, but also about random stuff like cooking and soccer. I was going to do an actual post today, as it is crummy outside, but then I saw that I had 99 posts published, and I figured it would be fitting to honor one of the guys who inspired me to blog with this blog's 100th post.

RIP.

U.S. Men's National Team

A bunch of U.S. Men's National Team (USMNT) games coming up.

USA vs. China - June 2nd, 8pm (All times EST)
USA vs. Guatemala - June 7th, 9pm
USA vs Trinidad & Tobago - June 9th, 5pm
USA vs El Salvador - June 12, 7pm

The China game is a friendly, serving as a warmup for the other three games which are part of the Gold Cup, the biannual championship of North America (including Latin America and the Caribbean). This year, the Gold Cup is being held in the US. For some reason, the friendly game is the only one that will be on ESPN2, with the other games on Telefutua and FoxSoccerChannel.

In my eyes the United States is the favorite to win. Our main competition is Mexico, although Trinidad & Tobago and Costa Rica have decent teams as well. Since 2000, the US has played Mexico on American soil 7 times, winning 6 and drawing one, all of which have been shutouts.

Assuming the US wins its group (you can assume nothing in this sport), the US'll play its first quarterfinal on June 16th. Both semifinals are on June 21st, and the final is June 24th.

A lot of the MLS players will be missing for the China friendly, as there are MLS fixtures scheduled on that date. However, with a full camp, here is how I would line them up against Guatemala on Thursday:

-------Twellman---Donovan-------
Beasley-------------------Dempsey
-------Feilhaber-----Bradley-------
Simek-Onyewu-Parkhurst-Spector
------------Howard---------------

As a New England Revolution fan, I am very curious to see how Parkhurst, a quick player who reads the game well and has great positioning, will pair up with Onyewu, a very physical player. In theory they should complement each other well.
Donovan would drop deep, grab the ball, and if he's on his game, make some runs with the ball and unbalance the defense. If he's not on his game he can just get it wide to Beasley and Dempsey so Twellman can knock in some crosses (he's good at that).
I'd be sure to get Eddie Johnson and Justin Mapp on the field at some point as well.

Point of interest - midfielder Michael Bradley is coach Bob Bradley's son.

Link to the Gold Cup roster for the USMNT.

Link to the USMNT schedule.