"I don't think Congress should be running the war; it should be funding the troops."
The inverse, of course, is that Congress can also defund the troops. But apparently that's not an option. Bush's position is that Congress can make one decision - to go to war - and then their role is to pay for it indefinitely, regardless. He'll listen, but he won't hear. He's the decider.
I don't know whether this performance is going to persuade anyone. It seems to me that the report only offers one real sign of success: that the Iraqi government came up with its pledged troops for Baghdad. That's it. It also seems to me, alas, that when the president speaks spontaneously about the war, he reveals vast amounts of ignorance, denial and deception, self and otherwise. The patronizing soundbites stick in the craw at this point. His formulation that we do not know whether the war can succeed but that it nonetheless must succeed is about as disorienting a leadership call as I have heard. The rank condescension toward the American people is also staggering. Look, Mr President, most Americans aren't as dim as you seem to be. Maybe it's time you realized that.
He's just out of his depth, I'm afraid. And others are sinking - and dying - as a consequence.
Bush: "Expect 'heavy fighting' in Iraq this summer"
As Congress was poised to approve money for U.S. forces in Iraq on Thursday, President Bush warned Americans to expect "heavy fighting" this summer during a critical time in his war strategy.
Answering reporters' questions at a White House news conference, Bush said the developments would occur once U.S. military reinforcements are in place in mid-June.
"We can expect more American and Iraqi casualties," Bush said. "We must provide our troops with the funds and resources they need to prevail."
Read on for what he did not say....
The President did not say, but we know he was thinking it....
"No matter how fubar this war is, we will continue to expend American Lives and Treasure, until the Democrats get some BALLS and force us to pull out, or REALLY get some balls and impeach me. Neither of which is likely to happen. So we will continue to send our young to fight in a civil war we created, and yes, they will continue to die. You see, I am like a gambler who will continue to sit at the table as long as the house grants me credit..."
I appreciate the fact that Jay Tea comes over from Wizbang to debate me from time to time...
How he can read stories like these and still rah rah Bush's war, I dont know.
Deployed troops battle for custody of children
She had raised her daughter for six years following the divorce, handled the shuttling to soccer practice and cheerleading, made sure schoolwork was done. Hardly a day went by when the two weren't together. Then Lt. Eva Crouch was mobilized with the Kentucky National Guard, and Sara went to stay with Dad.
A year and a half later, her assignment up, Crouch pulled into her driveway with one thing in mind — bringing home the little girl who shared her smile and blue eyes. She dialed her ex and said she'd be there the next day to pick Sara up, but his response sent her reeling.
"Not without a court order you won't."
Within a month, a judge would decide that Sara should stay with her dad. It was, he said, in "the best interests of the child."
What happened? Crouch was the legal residential caretaker; this was only supposed to be temporary. What had changed? She wasn't a drug addict, or an alcoholic, or an abusive mother.
Her only misstep, it seems, was answering the call to serve her country.
Crouch and an unknown number of others among the 140,000-plus single parents in uniform fight a war on two fronts: For the nation they are sworn to defend, and for the children they are losing because of that duty.
A federal law called the Servicemembers Civil Relief Act is meant to protect them by staying civil court actions and administrative proceedings during military activation. They can't be evicted. Creditors can't seize their property. Civilian health benefits, if suspended during deployment, must be reinstated.
And yet servicemembers' children can be — and are being — taken from them after they are deployed.
Some family court judges say that determining what's best for a child in a custody case is simply not comparable to deciding civil property disputes and the like; they have ruled that family law trumps the federal law protecting servicemembers. And so, in many cases when a soldier deploys, the ex-spouse seeks custody, and temporary changes become lasting.
Even some supporters of the federal law say it should be changed — that soldiers should be assured that they can regain custody of children after they return.
"Now, they've got a great argument when Johnny comes marching home that the child should remain where they are, even though it was a temporary order," says Lt. Col. Steve Elliott, a judge advocate with the Oklahoma National Guard, referring to non-deployed parents.
Military mothers and fathers, meanwhile, speak of birthdays missed. Bonds, once strong, weakened. Returning from duty not to joyful reunions but to endless hearings.
They are people like Marine Cpl. Levi Bradley, helping to fight the insurgency in Fallujah, Iraq, while battling for custody of his son in a Kansas family court.
Like Sgt. Mike Grantham of the Iowa National Guard, whose two kids lived with him until he was mobilized to train troops after 9/11.
Like Army Reserve Capt. Brad Carlson, fighting for custody of his American-born children in a foreign land after his marriage crumbled while he was deployed to the Middle East and his European wife refused to return to the States.
And like Eva Crouch, who spent two years and some $25,000 pushing her case through the Kentucky courts.
"I'd have spent a million," she says. "My child was my life ... I go serve my country, and I come back and have to go through hell and high water."
In the midst of World War II, back in 1943, the U.S. Supreme Court held that the soldiers' relief law should be "liberally construed to protect those who have been obliged to drop their own affairs to take up the burdens of the nation."
Shielding soldiers, after all, would allow them "to devote their entire energy" to the nation's defense, as the law itself states.
But in child custody cases, the opposite often happens.
Battlefield ethics study finds lapses
WASHINGTON (AP) — In a survey of U.S. troops in combat in Iraq, less than half of Marines and a little more than half of Army soldiers said they would report a member of their unit for killing or wounding an innocent civilian.
More than 40% support the idea of torture in some cases, and 10% reported personally abusing Iraqi civilians, the Pentagon said Friday in what it called its first ethics study of troops at the war front. Units exposed to the most combat were chosen for the study, officials said.
"It is disappointing," said analyst John Pike of the Globalsecurity.org think tank. "But anybody who is surprised by it doesn't understand war. ... This is about combat stress."
The military has seen a number of high-profile incidents of alleged abuse in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, including the killings of 24 civilians by Marines in Haditha, the rape and killing of a 14-year-old girl and the slaying of her family in Iraq and the sexual humiliation of detainees at Abu Ghraib prison.
"I don't want to, for a minute, second-guess the behavior of any person in the military — look at the kind of moral dilemma you are putting people in," Christopher Preble of the libertarian Cato Institute think tank, said of the mission in Iraq. "There's a real tension between using too much force, which generally means using force to protect yourself, and using too little and therefore exposing yourself to greater risk."
But I am sure Jay will find the silver lining in this cloud...
Published: May 01, 2007 10:25 AM ET
NEW YORK Tuesday marked the fourth anniversary of President Bush’s jet landing on the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln and his speech declaring major fighting in Iraq over, all in front of a giant “Mission Accomplished” banner.
At the time, it was heralded by much of the mainstream media as a fitting moment of triumph. "He won the war," boomed MSNBC's Chris Matthews. "He was an effective commander. Everybody recognizes that, I believe, except a few critics."
Since then, it has become -- during four more years of death and war -- a symbol of American hubris and setbacks in Iraq. Today it is often lampooned as a tragic “photo op.” Rock singer Neil Young, in a song referencing the event, sings, "History is a cruel judge of overconfidence."
When Bush spoke, the U.S. had 150,000 troops in Iraq; the number now stands at 160,000 or more. American casualties at the time were 139 killed and 542 wounded. A year ago they stood at 2,400 killed and now it's 3,350 dead.
With that in mind, here are excerpts revealing how one newspaper, The New York Times, covered the event and aftermath four years ago. They include this nugget: "The Bush administration is planning to withdraw most United States combat forces from Iraq over the next several months and wants to shrink the American military presence to less than two divisions by the fall, senior allied officials said today."
*
By Elisabeth Bumiller
WASHINGTON, May 1 -- President Bush's made-for-television address tonight on the carrier Abraham Lincoln was a powerful, Reaganesque finale to a six-week war. But beneath the golden images of a president steaming home with his troops toward the California coast lay the cold political and military realities that drove Mr. Bush's advisers to create the moment.
The president declared an end to major combat operations, White House, Pentagon and State Department officials said, for three crucial reasons: to signify the shift of American soldiers from the role of conquerors to police, to open the way for aid from countries that refused to help militarily and -- above all -- to signal to voters that Mr. Bush is shifting his focus from Baghdad to concerns at home….
''This is the formalization that tells everybody we're not engaged in combat anymore, we're prepared for getting out,'' a senior administration official said….
*
From published transcript of President Bush's speech on aircraft carrier, May 1:
"The liberation of Iraq is a crucial advance in the campaign against terror. We have removed an ally of Al Qaeda, and cut off a source of terrorist funding.
"And this much is certain: No terrorist network will gain weapons of mass destruction from the Iraqi regime, because that regime is no more.
"In these 19 months that changed the world, our actions have been focused, and deliberate, and proportionate to the offense. We have not forgotten the victims of September 11th -- the last phone calls, the cold murder of children, the searches in the rubble. With those attacks, the terrorists and their supporters declared war on the United States. And war is what they got."
*
By Judith Miller
Believe it or not, I take no pleasure in Bush's failure. It is a failure that will impact all of us for years to come, but it is time, once and for all, for the last hard line Bush Supporters to get their heads out of the sand and understand that we are at best in a desperate situation, and at worst in a DISASTER that there is no way to recover from.
We may have just created a POST SOVIET Afghanistan, right in the middle of the Middle East....
Pat Tillman's brother's testimony was devastating...
Pat Tillman's brother accused the military Tuesday of "intentional falsehoods" and "deliberate and careful misrepresentations" in portraying the football star's death in Afghanistan as the result of heroic engagement with the enemy instead of friendly fire.
"We believe this narrative was intended to deceive the family but more importantly the American public," Kevin Tillman told a hearing of the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee. "Pat's death was clearly the result of fratricide," he said.
"Revealing that Pat's death was a fratricide would have been yet another political disaster in a month of political disasters ... so the truth needed to be suppressed," said Tillman, who was in a convoy behind his brother when the incident happened three years ago but didn't see it.
He said the Tillman family has sought for years to get at the truth about Pat Tillman's death.
"We have now concluded that our efforts are being actively thwarted by powers that are more interested in protecting a narrative than getting at the truth and seeing justice is served," he said.
Tillman was killed on April 22, 2004, after his Army Ranger comrades were ambushed in eastern Afghanistan. Rangers in a convoy trailing Tillman's group had just emerged from a canyon where they had been fired upon. They saw Tillman and mistakenly fired on him.
Committee chairman Rep. Henry Waxman (news, bio, voting record), D-Calif., contended that the federal government invented "sensational details and stories" about the death of Pat Tillman and the rescue of Jessica Lynch from Iraq.
"The government violated its most basic responsibility," said Waxman.
Jessica Lynch is up now... And the Hollywood storty is being ripped apart... You know, Jessica deserves a medal, for being brave enough to cut through the propaganda and bullshit and to acknowledge the real heroes.
In the meantime, our young people continue to die in Iraq, and there is no end in sight.
Funny how this is the biggest story of the day, and the Right's biggest blog is ignoring it.
Word of the extension arrived almost by accident here at the rambling villa in the countryside east of Ramadi that the men from Company B, First Battalion, 26th Infantry Regiment of the First Infantry Division, have turned into an American-Iraqi military base.
Shortly after midnight, First Sgt. Jody Heikkinen spotted an article about it on the Internet, and the company officers were caught off guard. “We’re trying to figure out what it means,” said Capt. Chris Calihan, 31, the company commander.
The soldiers had been scheduled to return home in June, but the announcement appeared to extend their stay until September.
Among those soldiers who were still awake, there were muffled outbursts of anger and frustration laced with dark humor.
“If I get malaria, I get to leave, right?” Specialist Rodney Lawson, 30, said to no one in particular.
The soldiers wondered if their relationships back home could weather an extension and predicted that divorce rates in the military would spike. They muttered about three additional months of forced celibacy and fretted half jokingly about impatient wives and girlfriends. “Now a lot of cheating be going on,” said Sgt. Jonathan Wilson, 29. “I’m serious.”
Specialist Lawson had planned to take a vacation with his former wife, with whom he has two daughters, after he got back to the division’s home base in Schweinfurt, Germany. They were going to give the relationship another try.
“This has totally wrecked everything I had planned,” he said as he slumped on an empty explosives crate.
“Now I’m never going to get together with my ex-wife,” he said. “I’m scared that the longer it takes, more things could happen.”
The soldiers also worried about the extra months of dodging snipers’ bullets and roadside bombs.
To all those Conservatives who are living in a fantasy world of these guys all having wonderful morale and wanting to be over there.... Time to fucking suit up and do your part.
BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- Bombings in Karbala and the Baghdad area killed at least 56 people and wounded scores of others Saturday morning, police and medical officials said.
A car bomb blast in a crowded shopping area of central Karbala, a holy Shiite city about 70 miles southwest of Baghdad, killed at least 43 people and wounded 55, according to an official at Hussein Hospital in Karbala.
The explosion went off near a bus station and just 200 yards from the Imam Hussein shrine. (Watch chaos as rescuers try to evacuate bomb victims Video)
Video of the scene broadcast on Iraqi television showed hundreds of people crowded around the bomb site as emergency workers placed victims in ambulances.
A short time later, a car bomb exploded on the Jadriya bridge, which spans the Tigris River in southern Baghdad, killing at least 10 people and wounding 15 others, Iraqi police said. It was not immediately clear how badly the bridge was damaged.
The Jadriya bridge attack came two days after a suicide car bomb detonated on the Sarafiya bridge, which crosses the Tigris in northern Baghdad, also killing 10 people. Two large sections of the bridge collapsed into the river.
Eleven major bridges cross the Tigris River in Baghdad.
In other violence Saturday morning, a roadside bomb blast that targeted a police patrol in Madaan killed two Iraqi police officers and one civilian. Madaan is about 12 miles southeast of Baghdad. Four police officers and four civilians were also hurt.
Also, gunmen attacked the home of a Sunni member of Iraq's parliament Saturday morning. Five guards were wounded in the half-hour battle at the western Baghdad residence of Adnan al-Dulaimi, the head of the Sunni political party known as the General Conference of People of Iraq.
Five other Iraqis were wounded in two separate roadside bomb explosions in Baghdad.
British soldiers killed eight insurgents who were planting roadside bombs on the outskirts of the southern Iraqi city of Basra Friday night, a statement from the British military said.
Schools, hospitals and parks continue to be built by Halliburton in Iraq, as conservative supporters of the administration debate the EXACT location of the Iraqi parliament building.
In spite of the media's overwhelmingly negative reporting on Iraq, the left's rooting for failure, and the characterization that Bush's war is a quagmire and we need to get out fast, the American people, according to this poll done by a respectable polling company, want to win in Iraq and believe we can win in Iraq. They apparently have not bought into the Bush is Hitler mentality as the left has hoped.
This poll also supports what conservatives have argued about the significance of the November 2006 elections: that the Democrats weren't given control of Congress because the American people agreed with their position that we should pull out of Iraq but because they were ticked off at Republicans.
Well, the fact that the so called poll results appeared first on Drudge should give you an idea of it's credibility.... But it did not take long for a reader to point out just how RESPECTABLE and non partisan this polling company really is...
A partisan pollster? What a shock. Chances we'll get to see the data?
Seems the conservative types are really starting to show their truecolors when it comes to Barak Obama. How many lives have been lost in Baghdad in the last week, month, six months? Does the electricity run 24/7? Is Iraq safer than when we entered the war? How do YOU define wasted. I am sorry, but I take nothing away from the sacrifice of our troops when I say, "This war has been a disaster unparalleled in the history of our country, and if return for sacrifice is any measure of whether our soldiers lives were, "wasted," or not, I would say they were wasted, and all the spin and Conservative Bullshitista rhetoric in the world, will not change that fact...
Looks like the conservatives are jumping all over the Australian PM's recent comments about Senator Obama.
In a strongly worded foray into US politics today, Mr Howard said an Obama victory in the presidential election would be disastrous for the war on terrorism.
"I think he's wrong. I think that will just encourage those who want to completely destabilise and destroy Iraq, and create chaos and a victory for the terrorists to hang on and hope for an Obama victory," Mr Howard said on Channel 9.
"If I were running al-Qaeda in Iraq, I would put a circle around March 2008 and be praying as many times as possible for a victory not only for Obama but also for the Democrats."
"If he's ginned up to fight the good fight in Iraq, I would suggest that he calls up another 20,000 Australians and send them to Iraq," Mr. Obama said. "Otherwise, it's just a bunch of empty rhetoric."
Eh, last time I checked, the Aussies were not feeling the pain in Iraq as we are, so I would agree with Obama. aside from that, this guy has his head so far up Bush's ass, he can tell what he had for breakfast. To use a British term, "Piss off Mr. Prime Minister," no one other than the Fringe Right, gives a rats ass about what you think, and if you dont know by now, Obama just jumped in the polls as a result of your drivel, so thanks. You see, Americans don't take too kindly to politicians from other countries telling us how we should feel about our own...
Over the past months and years, those on the left have gone to great effort to paint the mission in Iraq as "failed," "doomed" and a "disaster." They have failed to acknowledge the accomplishments of the U.S. military in Iraq, but have been quick to talk about those in our armed forces as child victims of a failed policy or (worse) as bloodthirsty thugs engaging in torture and terror.
It is certainly not a pleasant thing to accuse fellow Americans, particularly ones entrusted by the citizenry with the nation’s well being, of playing politics with American lives or of providing moral support to her enemies, but I think it is time to ask some hard questions.
Why have so many critics of the war spent more time talking about alleged abuses at Gitmo than they have talking about the new freedoms being enjoyed by those in Afghanistan and Iraq as a result of actions taken by the U.S. military?
Why is it that many war critics seem to believe the U.S. is capable of addressing the conflict and genocide in Darfur, but that they are not capable of achieving victory in Iraq?”
Why is it that when generals, or more frequently former generals, express a lack of confidence in the President, the Secretary of Defense, or our policy and mission in Iraq, their word is not only accepted without question, but their opinions are treated as absolute fact, but when other generals say that it is still possible to win in Iraq, and that condemnations of the President and his policies encourage the enemy, they are ignored?
Why, when given a choice between defeat through surrender or the possibility to pursue victory, there are so many so eager to choose the former?
I happen to agree that it is time to ask some questions. Though my questions are probably not what she or Rob expect. First some background.
I was against this war from day one. I honestly believe that we should have utilized the resources we commited to Iraq to DESTROYING AQ in Afghanistan, and routing the Taliban completely. I also believe we were decieved about the war and that it was poorly planned. We now have a situation where Afghanistan and even Pakistan remain a haven for those responsible for the 9/11 attacks, and we have literally destroyed Iraq. Putting aside the horrendous violence that is taking place in Iraq every day, it laughable to talk about freedom in Iraq, when people dont even have sufficient water and electricity, and when college students are being blown to bits, and people can not leave their homes or go to work without fear of being slaughtered. And yes, we have committed atrocities in Iraq. Unspeakable atrocities, made even more heinous by the fact that our mission was supposed to eliminate such horrors. Over 2000 of our young men and women are dead, thousands more wounded, some so badly that their lives will never be the same... And it has now become clear to anyone but the most hardened partisan, that this war was a misguided one, run poorly and has created instability in the region...
Having said all of that, I still would not vote for a withdrawal. Because the one area where I agree with my conservative brethren is that if we withdraw now, we will simply create another Afghanistan. We will also do something that I think is more immoral than the invasion. We will leave that country in a state of chaos, with destroyed infrastructure and in a state of civil war. As Collin Powell once said, "We broke it, we own it."
But I regress... What are my questions?
1. Why do some conservatives feel that we should not challenge and question a failed strategy.
2. If a Democratic President had led us into Iraq under the same circumstances and with the same results, would conservatives be singing the same song?
3. What are the positives you keep talking about? And how do those positives weigh against the negatives.
4. Do conservatives think we should ignore the negatives in Iraq? Do they think that no one should be held accountable for the poor planning and for the failures to stabilize the country?
5. How much more should we spend in blood and treasure?
6. When is enough, enough?
7. Do they really believe that 20,000 more troops will solve the problem? If so, why aren't they upset that the additional troops.... something many have called for for over a year, was not done before.
Those are my questions. I have many more. But I doubt they will be addressed. Based on the Vice President's comments yesterday, it seems that many on the Right are simply delusional. I am still looking for evidence that they are not.
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Vice President Dick Cheney on Wednesday dismissed as "hogwash" the suggestion that blunders may have hurt the administration's credibility on Iraq.
In an interview with CNN's Wolf Blitzer, conducted a day after Bush delivered his State of the Union address, Cheney was asked to respond to some Republicans in Congress who "are now seriously questioning your credibility, because of the blunders and the failures."
To that, Cheney answered, "Wolf, Wolf, I simply don't accept the premise of your question. I just think it's hogwash."
What kind of drugs is Cheney taking... Or what kind does he think WE are taking. This guy is so arrogant, and so out of touch, that NO credible news operation should be polluting the airwaves with this man's drivel. But the fact that he is indifferent to the impact of the war is understandable, he had "more important things," to do during the Vietnam conflict, his opportunity to serve.... The only "Hogwash," here Mr. Vice President, is your own arrogant, self serving state of denial. But then again, who want to admit how stupid they have been? I havent checked, but I imagine that most of the conservative blogs are making hay today about Wolf Blitzer asking about Cheney's pregnant Lesbian daughter... Oh the outrage!
The "Jamil Hussein" story is one important item on our agenda, but not the only one. As Curt and other bloggers on this story have noted from the beginning, Jamilgate isn't just about "Jamil Hussein." Bryan and I plan to do as much on-the-ground reporting as we can to nail down unresolved questions--not only about Jamil Hussein and the Hurriya six burning Sunnis allegations, but also about the AP four burning mosque story discrepancies and the many other AP sources that our military has publicly challenged--including "Lt. Maitham Abdul Razzaq" and more than a dozen police officers listed by U.S. military spokesman Navy Lt. Michael Dean. There's also the issue of detained AP photographer Bilal Hussein. And we are looking forward to reporting first-hand on the security situation in Iraq outside the so-called "Green Zone" (International Zone) and talking to as many American and Iraqi Army troops with insights on these and other broader matters.
I am really interested in following this story. If Michelle actually does leave the security of the Green Zone and goes out to meet with ordinary Iraqi's and troops and whatnot, she will get kudos from me. But I don't believe it will happen beyond a few staged events...
The conservatives all said that the Democrats had no plan for Iraq?
I am still waiting for one from Bush... I guess I could get behind this whole "Troop Surge," thing, if I thought it would work. At this point I dont...
But then again, that seems to be the only plan they have... That and Bashing the Democrats about not wanting to send more troops to Iraq to be killed, without a plan for what to do with them once they get there... I guess it is easy to second guess when you aint a "surger," yourself?
I dont know ONE singe progressive blogger who is mourning the death of Saddam Hussien. Not one. The man was a cold hearted killer, with balls the size of Watermellons who went to his grave without a tinge of remorse, or apparently fear, which was every WIngnuts fantasy, that the man would break down crying or something... Well he didn't, which I am sure pissed off Bush to no end. I mean how sweet can revenge be when the guy you are revenging on is more fucking heroic than you... It also also probably backfired on a lot of the wingnuts who saw this as a propaganda opportunity... It was, for the Jihadist, who will promptly canonize a psychopath, and write songs and poems about how in the face of death, Saddam taunted his captors....
Apparently, Hussien went to his grave thinking he was right, and arguing with his executioners, hell even making fun of them. Like I said, BALLS LIKE WATERMELLONS... An image the Iraqi Security officials tried unsuccessfully to deny and twist. Whatever...
He's dead, May God have mercy on his soul. Now, where are the people who actually attacked America? 3000 dead service men and women, a destroyed country, Gazillions of dollars down the toilette, and these pathetic idiots want to fantasize that some of us are mourning Saddam's death? Tell me it has not come to that.
Eh guys, where the hell is Ossama? You want to talk about bleeding heart Liberals? I tell you what, you heroes go find him, and I will volunteer to pull the switch... Until then, I realize you need something to gloat about. Even going so far as to post the Saddam Snuff video.... I can understand, I really can. It's been a tough couple of months for ya. But lets try to maintain SOME semblance of reality.... 'Kay?
The Left has tried very hard to deny that truth. The mainstream media revels in showing video of bombings and reporting kidnappings, never noting the stability and economic growth in many parts of Iraq. Kevin McCullough has written a compelling article to show that Iraq is, by any reasonable standard, a clear success. The notion that Iraq is becoming a foothold for democratic republicanism is terrifying for the Left. Enough so that they will denounce even its possibility, much less the growing evidence for it.
Durbin said he challenged Bush's analogy, reminding him that Truman had the NATO alliance behind him and negotiated with his enemies at the United Nations. Durbin said that's what the Iraq Study Group is recommending that Bush do now - work more with allies and negotiate with adversaries on Iraq.
Bush, Durbin said, "reacted very strongly. He got very animated in his response" and emphasized that he is "the commander in chief."
I can just imagine him pouting and stomping his feet!
I understand why so many conservatives, especially bloggers, just keep defending this guy. He is just too much of an embarrassment for them to acknowledge how monumentally wrong they were... This guy has been playing Generalisimo for the last six years, spent hundreds of billions of our dollars, sent thousands of our young people to Iraq to die, while it appears that NO ONE in his family has come close to serving in "Bush's war." A civil war rages in Iraq... The situation in Afghanistan is deteriorating daily. The World hates America. Our President is considered a buffoon at best... And conservative bloggers focus on whether an Iraqi Police Captain is REAL OR NOT? I mean whether some people were set on fire outside a Mosque may or may not be true... But the reality is that dozens die daily in Iraq, including our soldiers. Where is the outrage about that...
I guess for people who have been writing about how much "better" things are in Iraq for the last two years, it's hard to pass up dissecting some bad news, that may not have happened. I mean, they all want the Media to write "smoke rings up your ass stories," about hospitals and schools, and how many Iraqis love the Invasion. Or maybe, with the devastating loss in November, they are longing for the days of Rathergate, Cigars champaign and, "taunting the Liberals." Sorry dude, it will be two years before you can even THINK about taunting a Liberal again. Every day looks worse, and the Frat Boy YOU elected President has done more damage to our international prestige... And our wallet:
And even if we're able to constrain discretionary spending for the next ten years to the rate of inflation, which we haven't for a long time, we still face large and growing structural deficits in the years ahead. Bottom line? The status quo is unacceptable and unsustainable. We're on an imprudent and unsustainable fiscal path. Tough choices are required. We will not be able to grow our way out of this problem. Anybody who says that suffers from two problems. Number one, they have not studied economic history adequately; and number two; they probably wouldn't do real well at math. Because the numbers just don't add up.
Than generations can hope to fix...
Well, at least somepeople came to their senses, or maybe it's not that at all... Maybe it's just that some people have integrity and don't march in lockstep when the people in front of them are all farting... I don't know. But I am glad there are people out there who put principle before political party.
I would like to ask Dean, and all the other war supporters out there, a simple question...
Let me preface it by saying as I have said before, I dont want to see us leave Iraq in a state of Civil War either....
But running stories like this one... I just don't get it. You talk about a STATE OF DENIAL! For every post Dean and others run about soldiers who are indignant about the coverage of the war, there are others who are and have, stated that the situation is FUBAR.
So my question to Dean is simple, how many have to die. Iraqis and Americans, before you are ready to stop hawking smoke rings up the collective asses of Americans. I would have a lot more respect for Dean and others if they would just admit the obvious. We are losing the "second," war in Iraq. We won military victory and lost war for hearts and minds.
The news media are not propagandist. They may have been for a long time, but even they can no longer ignore the stench of a failed policy, a failed war, and the gross incompetence that got us into both. So spare us the patriotic Sargent Slaughter stories. I frankly don't give a rats ass. We need to start focusing on reality, and figure out how to turn this around, before the sheer weight of public opinion, forces a withdrawal, not down lanes paved with "flowers and candy," but more like the American Embassy in Saigon...
The Iraq Study Group report released yesterday might well be titled "The Realist Manifesto."
From the very first page, in which co-chairmen James A. Baker III and Lee H. Hamilton scold that "our leaders must be candid and forthright with the American people," the bipartisan report is nothing less than a repudiation of the Bush administration's diplomatic and military approach to Iraq and to the whole region.
Throughout its pages, the report reflects the foreign policy establishment's disdain for the "neoconservative" policies long espoused by President Bush and his aides. But while many of its recommendations stem from the "realist" school of foreign policy, it is unclear at this point whether a radically different approach would make much difference nearly four years after the invasion of Iraq.
The administration's effort to spread democracy to Arab lands is not mentioned in the report, except to note briefly that most countries in the region are wary of it. The report urges direct talks with Iran and Syria, both of which the administration has largely shunned. It also calls for placing new emphasis on resolving the Israel-Arab conflict, including pressing Israel to reach a peace deal with Syria, on the grounds that the issue shapes regional attitudes about U.S. involvement in Iraq. Overall, it strongly suggests that Bush, Vice President Cheney and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice have bungled diplomacy in the region with unrealistic objectives and narrow strategies.
"We took a very pragmatic approach because all of these people up here are pragmatic public officials," Hamilton told reporters, referring to the five Democrats and five Republicans who unanimously endorsed the report's conclusions and recommendations. The bipartisan nature of the report -- and the fact that Baker was secretary of state for Bush's father -- will make it difficult for the White House to ignore. By endorsing the critics' view of the war, the report will also help incoming Democratic congressional leaders frame the debate over Iraq as a disaster largely of the administration's making.
In a lengthy preamble to the recommendations titled "Assessment," the report gives a dispassionate account of the "grave and deteriorating" situation in Iraq, echoing books and news reports that the administration had previously criticized as one-sided or overly negative. The report's description of the violence in Iraq, which amounts to an attack on the administration's understanding of the facts on the ground, will likely set the new baseline for how the Iraq conflict is portrayed.
"The ability of the United States to influence events within Iraq is diminishing," the report warns.
Funny how this assesment seems to jibe with the MSM's. Don't see many conservative bloggers commenting on that. Not that I expected them to. I have some good friends on the Right who must wince when they go back and read their "schools and hospitals are opening every day, and things are getting better," memes. Some have been regular cheerleaders for this war since day one.... It will be interesting to see how long, if EVER, it takes them to recognize that the situation if FUBAR in Iraq, and that the reason for it is gross incompetence on the part of the people who led us into it.
With Rick Moran, but I must agree with most of what he writes in this post (Please read it all):
I don’t know if there is a way to “victory” in Iraq. Clearly the rest of the world has already made up its mind (not to mention the American media) that we have lost so that no matter what we do in Iraq, how we leave it, what we accomplish from here on out, the onus of defeat will accompany our withdrawal.
Is the ISG simply acknowledging this fact? Or are they encouraging it?
Both, probably. But in the end, it comes down to doing the best we can to bring some kind of definitive denouement to our Iraqi adventure. And it appears that at least some Democrats – whether chastened by victory or freed from having to engage in partisan sniping to differentiate themselves from Republicans – are realizing that Iraq is not Viet Nam and that simply walking away now would be catastrophic:
Collin Powell once said that if we invaded Iraq, "we own it."
My position on the war in Iraq has been consistent from day one, I was against the war, and always will feel that we made a big mistake by invading Iraq. I felt that our focus should have been on capturing Ossama Bin Laden. Instead we focused on Bush's pet hard-on with Saddam Hussien. Well, Saddam is facing death, his country is in a ruinous civil war, and we have accomplished little there except to defeat a half assed army and create chaos.
I have said, and will say again. We can NOT pull out of Iraq and leave it in a state of civil war. Not only is that immoral, but impractical. By doing so, we have simply replaced Afghanistan as a Jihadi training ground, with Iraq. The Iraq Study group has just released its report. I have not yet read it, but the excerpts I have seen are not pleasant. It seems that the Secretary of Defense's analysis of the war being
"lost," is shared by the Iraq Study Group.
I am not a military strategist. And I don't have any solutions. I only know that pulling out of Iraq and leaving it Balkanized is NOT the solution. It is absolutely criminal what the Bush administration did in Iraq. Donald Rumsfeld's memo on changing the strategy in Iraq, is a footnote on a shame filled chapter of American History. A chapter where an Administration was allowed to run amok, while supporters and conservative bloggers cheered on the dissaster with idiotic commentary about new schools and hospitals opening, while terror and chaos spiraled out of control.
There may have been a time when we could have won this war. There may have been a time when we could have helped the Iraqi people to create a new democracy in the Middle East. That time may be passed, but one thing is for certain... Whether our high goals of a beautiful new Democracy in the Middle East are met or not, we CAN not leave chaos... Too much blood has been spilled.
Do we really want the world to remember Iraq by images of torture (Not the Saddam kind, but our own), of Iraqis, and a daily flood of casualty figures from the Civil War we left behind?
How many innocent deaths will there have to be, before conservative commentators can stop using Saddam's carnage, to justify that which WE created?
FORT CAMPBELL, Ky. - A soldier was sentenced Thursday to 90 years in prison with the possibility of parole for conspiring to rape a 14-year-old Iraqi girl and kill her and her family.
Spc. James P. Barker, one of four Fort Campbell soldiers accused in the March 12 rape and killings, pleaded guilty Wednesday and agreed to testify against the others to avoid the death penalty.
"This court sentences you to be confined for the length of your natural life, with the eligibility of parole," said Lt. Col. Richard Anderson, the military judge presiding over the court-martial.
Under the plea agreement, Barker got a life sentence but will not serve more than 90 years in prison, Anderson said. He will be eligible for parole in 20 years.
Put up against a wall and shot. And yeah I support the troops, yada yada, And yeah I realize that 99% of them are doing/did and honorable job in Iraq, yada, fucking yada. Maybe it is just my perception, or maybe it is modern news reporting, or what the fuck ever, but this war has produced more disgusting filth, on both sides, than any I can remember since arriving on this big green ball 46 years ago.
The Redstaters love to talk about Rape Rooms, torture, murder, etc., I guess they just don't consider it to be as heinous when WE DO IT! As a father, as an American, hell on a lot of levels, this just disgusts me... On second thought, save the bullet and give him a space next to Saddam, and a hemp necktie to match!
I remember sitting with Richard Perle in his suite at London's Grosvenor House hotel and receiving a private lecture on the importance of securing victory in Iraq. "Iraq is a very good candidate for democratic reform," he said. "It won't be Westminster overnight, but the great democracies of the world didn't achieve the full, rich structure of democratic governance overnight. The Iraqis have a decent chance of succeeding." Perle seemed to exude the scent of liberation, as well as a whiff of gunpowder. It was February 2003, and Operation Iraqi Freedom, the culmination of his long campaign on behalf of regime change in Iraq, was less than a month away.
Three years later, Perle and I meet again at his home outside Washington, D.C. It is October, the worst month for U.S. casualties in Iraq in almost two years, and Republicans are bracing for losses in the upcoming midterm elections. As he looks into my eyes, speaking slowly and with obvious deliberation, Perle is unrecognizable as the confident hawk who, as chairman of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee, had invited the exiled Iraqi dissident Ahmad Chalabi to its first meeting after 9/11. "The levels of brutality that we've seen are truly horrifying, and I have to say, I underestimated the depravity," Perle says now, adding that total defeat—an American withdrawal that leaves Iraq as an anarchic "failed state"—is not yet inevitable but is becoming more likely. "And then," says Perle, "you'll get all the mayhem that the world is capable of creating."
According to Perle, who left the Defense Policy Board in 2004, this unfolding catastrophe has a central cause: devastating dysfunction within the administration of President George W. Bush. Perle says, "The decisions did not get made that should have been. They didn't get made in a timely fashion, and the differences were argued out endlessly.… At the end of the day, you have to hold the president responsible.… I don't think he realized the extent of the opposition within his own administration, and the disloyalty."
Perle goes so far as to say that, if he had his time over, he would not have advocated an invasion of Iraq: "I think if I had been delphic, and had seen where we are today, and people had said, 'Should we go into Iraq?,' I think now I probably would have said, 'No, let's consider other strategies for dealing with the thing that concerns us most, which is Saddam supplying weapons of mass destruction to terrorists.' … I don't say that because I no longer believe that Saddam had the capability to produce weapons of mass destruction, or that he was not in contact with terrorists. I believe those two premises were both correct. Could we have managed that threat by means other than a direct military intervention? Well, maybe we could have."
Having spoken with Perle, I wonder: What do the rest of the pro-war neoconservatives think? If the much caricatured "Prince of Darkness" is now plagued with doubt, how do his comrades-in-arms feel? I am particularly interested in finding out because I interviewed many neocons before the invasion and, like many people, found much to admire in their vision of spreading democracy in the Middle East.
I expect to encounter disappointment. What I find instead is despair, and fury at the incompetence of the Bush administration the neoconservatives once saw as their brightest hope.
It is pretty easy to see at this point... No matter what happens on November 7th, this administration has lost credibility... Even with those who supported it...
An editorial scheduled to appear on Monday in Army Times, Air Force Times, Navy Times and Marine Corps Times, calls for the resignation of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.
The papers are sold to American servicemen and women. They are published by the Military Times Media Group, which is a subsidiary of Gannett Co., Inc.
Here is the text of the editorial, an advance copy of which we received this afternoon.
----------------
Time for Rumsfeld to go
"So long as our government requires the backing of an aroused and informed public opinion ... it is necessary to tell the hard bruising truth."
That statement was written by Pulitzer Prize-winning war correspondent Marguerite Higgins more than a half-century ago during the Korean War.
But until recently, the "hard bruising" truth about the Iraq war has been difficult to come by from leaders in Washington. One rosy reassurance after another has been handed down by President Bush, Vice President Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld: "mission accomplished," the insurgency is "in its last throes," and "back off," we know what we're doing, are a few choice examples.
Military leaders generally toed the line, although a few retired generals eventually spoke out from the safety of the sidelines, inciting criticism equally from anti-war types, who thought they should have spoken out while still in uniform, and pro-war foes, who thought the generals should have kept their critiques behind closed doors.
Now, however, a new chorus of criticism is beginning to resonate. Active-duty military leaders are starting to voice misgivings about the war's planning, execution and dimming prospects for success.
Army Gen. John Abizaid, chief of U.S. Central Command, told a Senate Armed Services Committee in September: "I believe that the sectarian violence is probably as bad as I've seen it ... and that if not stopped, it is possible that Iraq could move towards civil war."
Last week, someone leaked to The New York Times a Central Command briefing slide showing an assessment that the civil conflict in Iraq now borders on "critical" and has been sliding toward "chaos" for most of the past year. The strategy in Iraq has been to train an Iraqi army and police force that could gradually take over for U.S. troops in providing for the security of their new government and their nation.
But despite the best efforts of American trainers, the problem of molding a viciously sectarian population into anything resembling a force for national unity has become a losing proposition.
For two years, American sergeants, captains and majors training the Iraqis have told their bosses that Iraqi troops have no sense of national identity, are only in it for the money, don't show up for duty and cannot sustain themselves.
Meanwhile, colonels and generals have asked their bosses for more troops. Service chiefs have asked for more money.
And all along, Rumsfeld has assured us that things are well in hand.
Now, the president says he'll stick with Rumsfeld for the balance of his term in the White House.
This is a mistake.
Read the entire thing...
It sort of wipes the conservative fantasy about Iraq completely off the map, doesn't it. No, not really, you see, it's all about the elections.
While the media is obsessed parsing the ad libs of someone on no ballot this fall, something truly ominous has just happened in Iraq. The commander-in-chief has abandoned an American soldier to the tender mercies of a Shiite militia. Yes, there are nuances here, and the NYT fleshes out the story today. But the essential fact is clear. In a showdown for control of Baghdad, the Iraqi prime minister took orders from Moqtada al-Sadr, and instructed the U.S. military to withdraw from Sadr City. The American forces were trying both to stabilize the city but also to find a missing American serviceman. He is still missing. Money quote from the WaPo:
The move lifted a near siege that had stood at least since last Wednesday. U.S. military police imposed the blockade after the kidnapping of an American soldier of Iraqi descent. The soldier's Iraqi in-laws said they believed he had been abducted by the Mahdi Army as he visited his wife at her home in the Karrada area of Baghdad, where U.S. military checkpoints were also removed as a result of Maliki's action.
The crackdown on Sadr City had a second motive, U.S. officers said: the search for Abu Deraa, a man considered one of the most notorious death squad leaders. The soldier and Abu Deraa both were believed by the U.S. military to be in Sadr City.
The U.S. military does not have a tradition of abandoning its own soldiers to foreign militias, or of taking orders from foreign governments. No commander-in-chief who actually walks the walk, rather than swaggering the swagger, would acquiesce to such a thing.
Maybe it's because the trooper has Iraqi roots, I mean we all know how much this government cares about Iraqis!
Does that qualify as understatement of the year... or what? I think the situation in Iraq has BEEN chaos for a LONG time!
WASHINGTON, Oct. 30 - A classified briefing prepared two weeks ago by the United States Central Command portrays Iraq as edging toward chaos, in a chart that the military is using as a barometer of civil conflict.
A one-page slide shown at the Oct. 18 briefing provides a rare glimpse into how the military command that oversees the war is trying to track its trajectory, particularly in terms of sectarian fighting.
The slide includes a color-coded bar chart that is used to illustrate an “Index of Civil Conflict.” It shows a sharp escalation in sectarian violence since the bombing of a Shiite shrine in Samarra in February, and tracks a further worsening this month despite a concerted American push to tamp down the violence in Baghdad.
In fashioning the index, the military is weighing factors like the ineffectual Iraqi police and the dwindling influence of moderate religious and political figures, rather than more traditional military measures such as the enemy’s fighting strength and the control of territory.
The conclusions the Central Command has drawn from these trends are not encouraging, according to a copy of the slide that was obtained by The New York Times. The slide shows Iraq as moving sharply away from “peace,” an ideal on the far left side of the chart, to a point much closer to the right side of the spectrum, a red zone marked “chaos.” As depicted in the command’s chart, the needle has been moving steadily toward the far right of the chart.
An intelligence summary at the bottom of the slide reads “urban areas experiencing ‘ethnic cleansing’ campaigns to consolidate control” and “violence at all-time high, spreading geographically.” According to a Central Command official, the index on civil strife has been a staple of internal command briefings for most of this year. The analysis was prepared by the command’s intelligence directorate, which is overseen by Brig. Gen. John M. Custer.
The number of Iraqi civilians killed in violence may have jumped to another record high in October, data from the Iraqi government indicated on Wednesday.
Statistics issued by the Interior Ministry for Iraqis killed in political violence put civilian deaths last month at 1,289, nearly 42 a day and up 18 percent from the 1,089 seen in September, itself a record for this particular series of data.
Bloodshed intensified in the holy month of Ramadan, which ended last week, as rival Shi'ite and Sunni Muslim communities vied for power in a continuing cycle of sectarian reprisals.
Such figures have become increasingly controversial, notably since the United Nations put the monthly civilian toll at over 3,000 this summer and a group of medical statisticians estimated that over 650,000 may have died since the U.S. invasion of 2003.
U.S. officials, mindful that dismay over violence in Iraq could cost President George W. Bush's Republicans control of Congress in elections on Tuesday, question the U.N. estimate.
Bush and Iraq's prime minister dismissed the statisticians' survey in the medical journal The Lancet last month.
Calls for a U.S. troop withdrawal have also strengthened with the deaths of 104 U.S. soldiers in Iraq in October, the bloodiest month for Americans in nearly two years.
Evidence of civilian casualties is scarce and collecting data fraught with danger. The Iraqi government has also tightened rules to prevent officials outside the prime minister's office releasing figures.
Reuters typically reports between a dozen and several dozen killings a day in Iraq, most of them of civilians.
The Interior Ministry data is a nationwide compilation of reports from its officials as well as the Defense and Health ministries, the official who provides the statistics said.
It does not include all violent deaths but those judged the result of political, sectarian or ethnic killings, as opposed to criminal murder, the Interior Ministry official added. He would give no further detail on how the distinctions are drawn.
The figures also showed 139 Iraqi soldiers and police were killed in October -- substantially fewer than the more than 300 that the U.S. military commander in Iraq said were killed in the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, which ended a week ago.
TRENDS
Nonetheless, the Interior Ministry figures have matched trends reported by other officials, both Iraqi and U.S., this year -- notably a sharp increase in killings after the bombing of a Shi'ite shrine in February and a decline in deaths at the start of a major military operation in Baghdad in August.
The Interior Ministry said 582 civilians were killed in political violence in January, rising to 782 in March. It said 889 died in June, 1,065 in July and 769 in August.
Officials at Baghdad morgue, which has routinely taken in over 1,000 bodies a month this year, many suffering from gunshot and torture wounds, say they have been told not to release data.
Emphasis mine....
But not to worry, my Conservative friends assure me that the Iraqis remain grateful... That is the ones who are not yet dead...
"If you listen carefully for a Democrat plan for success, they don't have one. Iraq is the central front in the war on terror, yet they don't have a plan for victory."
This is one of the most profound... saddest... thing I have ever read...
Written last month, this straightforward account of life in Iraq by a Marine officer was initially sent just to a small group of family and friends. His honest but wry narration and unusually frank dissection of the mission contrasts sharply with the story presented by both sides of the Iraq war debate, the Pentagon spin masters and fierce critics. Perhaps inevitably, the "Letter from Iraq" moved quickly beyond the small group of acquantainaces and hit the inboxes of retired generals, officers in the Pentagon, and staffers on Capitol Hill. TIME's Sally B. Donnelly first received a copy three weeks ago but only this week was able to track down the author and verify the document's authenticity. The author wishes to remain anonymous but has allowed us to publish it here — with a few judicious omissions.
All: I haven't written very much from Iraq. There's really not much to write about. More exactly, there's not much I can write about because practically everything I do, read or hear is classified military information or is depressing to the point that I'd rather just forget about it, never mind write about it. The gaps in between all of that are filled with the pure tedium of daily life in an armed camp. So it's a bit of a struggle to think of anything to put into a letter that's worth reading. Worse, this place just consumes you. I work 18-20-hour days, every day. The quest to draw a clear picture of what the insurgents are up to never ends. Problems and frictions crop up faster than solutions. Every challenge demands a response. It's like this every day. Before I know it, I can't see straight, because it's 0400 and I've been at work for 20 hours straight, somehow missing dinner again in the process. And once again I haven't written to anyone. It starts all over again four hours later. It's not really like Ground Hog Day, it's more like a level from Dante's Inferno.
Rather than attempting to sum up the last seven months, I figured I'd just hit the record-setting highlights of 2006 in Iraq. These are among the events and experiences I'll remember best.
Worst Case of Deja Vu — I thought I was familiar with the feeling of deja vu until I arrived back here in Fallujah in February. The moment I stepped off of the helicopter, just as dawn broke, and saw the camp just as I had left it ten months before — that was deja vu. Kind of unnerving. It was as if I had never left. Same work area, same busted desk, same chair, same computer, same room, same creaky rack, same... everything. Same everything for the next year. It was like entering a parallel universe. Home wasn't 10,000 miles away, it was a different lifetime.
Most Surreal Moment — Watching Marines arrive at my detention facility and unload a truck load of flex-cuffed midgets. 26 to be exact. We had put the word out earlier in the day to the Marines in Fallujah that we were looking for Bad Guy X, who was described as a midget. Little did I know that Fallujah was home to a small community of midgets, who banded together for support since they were considered as social outcasts. The Marines were anxious to get back to the midget colony to bring in the rest of the midget suspects, but I called off the search, figuring Bad Guy X was long gone on his short legs after seeing his companions rounded up by the giant infidels.
Most Profound Man in Iraq — an unidentified farmer in a fairly remote area who, after being asked by Reconnaissance Marines if he had seen any foreign fighters in the area replied "Yes, you."
Worst City in al-Anbar Province — Ramadi, hands down. The provincial capital of 400,000 people. Lots and lots of insurgents killed in there since we arrived in February. Every day is a nasty gun battle. They blast us with giant bombs in the road, snipers, mortars and small arms. We blast them with tanks, attack helicopters, artillery, our snipers (much better than theirs), and every weapon that an infantryman can carry. Every day. Incredibly, I rarely see Ramadi in the news. We have as many attacks out here in the west as Baghdad. Yet, Baghdad has 7 million people, we have just 1.2 million. Per capita, al-Anbar province is the most violent place in Iraq by several orders of magnitude. I suppose it was no accident that the Marines were assigned this area in 2003.
Bravest Guy in al-Anbar Province — Any Explosive Ordnance Disposal Technician (EOD Tech). How'd you like a job that required you to defuse bombs in a hole in the middle of the road that very likely are booby-trapped or connected by wire to a bad guy who's just waiting for you to get close to the bomb before he clicks the detonator? Every day. Sanitation workers in New York City get paid more than these guys. Talk about courage and commitment.
Second Bravest Guy in al-Anbar Province — It's a 20,000-way tie among all these Marines and Soldiers who venture out on the highways and through the towns of al-Anbar every day, not knowing if it will be their last — and for a couple of them, it will be.
Worst E-Mail Message — "The Walking Blood Bank is Activated. We need blood type A+ stat." I always head down to the surgical unit as soon as I get these messages, but I never give blood — there's always about 80 Marines in line, night or day.
Biggest Surprise — Iraqi Police. All local guys. I never figured that we'd get a police force established in the cities in al-Anbar. I estimated that insurgents would kill the first few, scaring off the rest. Well, insurgents did kill the first few, but the cops kept on coming. The insurgents continue to target the police, killing them in their homes and on the streets, but the cops won't give up. Absolutely incredible tenacity. The insurgents know that the police are far better at finding them than we are — and they are finding them. Now, if we could just get them out of the habit of beating prisoners to a pulp...
I have read a whole lot of war letters. Some of my favorites are from soldiers of WWII. They had a sense of purpose, and despite the same kind of language, 50 some years removed... This one strikes me... There is something magnificent about this Marine's writing. I wish I owned a newspaper, I would give him a job the moment he stepped off the plane when he gets home. It is something everyone who supports this war, especially those who support it from the safety of their Den, needs to read. I loved this line:
Biggest Outrage — Practically anything said by talking heads on TV about the war in Iraq, not that I get to watch much TV. Their thoughts are consistently both grossly simplistic and politically slanted. Biggest Offender: Bill O'Reilly.
He could just as easilly be talking about half the dimwits in the conservasphere...
And iraq deteriorates into civil war... One must ask themselves, "how will we be judged by history for the invasion?"
Could we have somehow forced Saddam out in time? Could continuing diplomatic pressure and the threat of destruction have pushed him out in a year... two years?
Would we have been able to spare the Iraqi people the chaos and fear they now live in? The Conservatives like to make hay about how horrible it was under Saddam, and no one will argue that his regime was not a murderous one, one of many including Dafur, North Korea and other known hot spots or tyranny. But I must wonder, for the average Iraqi, how much more frightening is life in Iraq today. A life where leaving your house could result in sudden and violent death or kidnapping, at a ridiculously higher percentage of probability than the Saddam days....
In the old days if you were an enemy of Saddam, you lived in fear.... Today, you need only be a resident of Iraq... If that's bringing freedom and democracy, I am sure most Iraqi's would have sooner passed!
There was an almost forgettable exchange earlier this month in the Iraqi National Assembly, itself on the fringe of relevance in today's disintegrating Iraq. Lawmakers debated whether legislation should be submitted to a committee to determine if it was compatible with Islam. Ideas were put forth, as well as criticism. Why not a committee to determine whether legislation endorses democratic principles? one asked. In stepped Mahmoud Mashadani, the assembly's speaker, to settle the dispute.
"Any law or decision that goes against Islam, we'll put it under the kundara!" he thundered.
"God is greatest!" lawmakers shouted back, in a rare moment of agreement between Sunni and Shiite Muslims.
Kundara means shoe, and the bit of bluster by Mashadani said a lot about Baghdad today.
It had been almost a year since I was in the Iraqi capital, where I worked as a reporter in the days of Saddam Hussein, the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, and the occupation, guerrilla war and religious resurgence that followed. On my return, it was difficult to grasp how atomized and violent the 1,250-year-old city has become. Even on the worst days, I had always found Baghdad's most redeeming quality to be its resilience, a tenacious refusal among people I met over three years to surrender to the chaos unleashed when the Americans arrived. That resilience is gone, overwhelmed by civil war, anarchy or whatever term could possibly fit. Baghdad now is convulsed by hatred, paralyzed by suspicion; fear has forced many to leave. Carnage its rhythm and despair its mantra, the capital, it seems, no longer embraces life.
"A city of ghosts," a friend told me, her tone almost funereal.
The commotion in the streets -- goods spilling across sidewalks, traffic snarled under a searing sun -- once prompted the uninitiated to conclude that Baghdad was reviving. Of course, they were seeing the city through a windshield, the often angry voices on the streets inaudible. Today, with traffic dwindling, stores shuttered and streets empty by nightfall, that conceit no longer holds.
Even the propaganda, once ubiquitous and often incongruous, is gone. One piece I recalled from two years ago: a map of Iraq divided into three colored bands. In white, it read, "Progress." In red, "Iraq." In white again, "Prosperity." The promises are now more modest: "However strong the wind," reads a new poster of a woman clutching her child, "it will pass." More indicative of the mood, perhaps, was one of the old banners still hanging. Faded and draped over a building scarred with craters from the invasion, it was an ad for the U.S.-funded Iraqi network, al-Iraqiya. In Arabic, its slogan reads, "Prepare your eyes for more."
That they either don't understand that their press conferences and statements are videotaped, or that they think the American public is stupid enough to continue to believe their lies....
"Violence in Iraq will continue to get worse until the November elections. The terrorists are very media savvy and are determined to influence our elections. They may succeed thanks in part to all the help they get. I don't know whether or not this latest news from Reuters is a part of that plan, but in all likelihood it is related to their overall strategy. I only pray this soldier does not suffer the same fate as those previously kidnapped and used for terrorist propaganda."
Uh Huh.... The violence in Iraq that has been escalating for years, is now all about influencing our election. Where the hell do these people come from? Righ after the election things are going to be peachy keen right?
Editor's note: Kevin Tillman joined the Army with his brother Pat in 2002, and they served together in Iraq and Afghanistan. Pat was killed in Afghanistan on April 22, 2004. Kevin, who was discharged in 2005, has written a powerful, must-read document.
It is Pat's birthday on November 6, and elections are the day after. It gets me thinking about a conversation I had with Pat before we joined the military. He spoke about the risks with signing the papers. How once we committed, we were at the mercy of the American leadership and the American people. How we could be thrown in a direction not of our volition. How fighting as a soldier would leave us without a voice ... until we get out.
Much has happened since we handed over our voice:
Somehow we were sent to invade a nation because it was a direct threat to the American people, or to the world, or harbored terrorists, or was involved in the September 11 attacks, or received weapons-grade uranium from Niger, or had mobile weapons labs, or WMD, or had a need to be liberated, or we needed to establish a democracy, or stop an insurgency, or stop a civil war we created that can't be called a civil war even though it is. Something like that.
Somehow our elected leaders were subverting international law and humanity by setting up secret prisons around the world, secretly kidnapping people, secretly holding them indefinitely, secretly not charging them with anything, secretly torturing them. Somehow that overt policy of torture became the fault of a few "bad apples" in the military.
Somehow back at home, support for the soldiers meant having a five-year-old kindergartener scribble a picture with crayons and send it overseas, or slapping stickers on cars, or lobbying Congress for an extra pad in a helmet. It's interesting that a soldier on his third or fourth tour should care about a drawing from a five-year-old; or a faded sticker on a car as his friends die around him; or an extra pad in a helmet, as if it will protect him when an IED throws his vehicle 50 feet into the air as his body comes apart and his skin melts to the seat.
Somehow the more soldiers that die, the more legitimate the illegal invasion becomes.
Somehow American leadership, whose only credit is lying to its people and illegally invading a nation, has been allowed to steal the courage, virtue and honor of its soldiers on the ground.
Somehow those afraid to fight an illegal invasion decades ago are allowed to send soldiers to die for an illegal invasion they started.
Somehow faking character, virtue and strength is tolerated.
Somehow profiting from tragedy and horror is tolerated.
Somehow the death of tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of people is tolerated.
Somehow subversion of the Bill of Rights and The Constitution is tolerated.
Somehow suspension of Habeas Corpus is supposed to keep this country safe.
Somehow torture is tolerated.
Somehow lying is tolerated.
Somehow reason is being discarded for faith, dogma, and nonsense.
Somehow American leadership managed to create a more dangerous world.
Somehow a narrative is more important than reality.
And I can promise you, the conservatives who drapped Pat in the flag and made him a hero of the conservative movement are NOT going to pick up on this story. Pat Tillman was a Hero, just like all the other soldiers who signed up for this dangerous mission, believing they were doing so to protect our country. It is a shame that they were decieved, and even more of a shame that the American people have become such cowards that they are willing to follow sheepishly an administration that has laid waste to our American ideals about Freedom, Liberty and "doing the right thing!"
A year and a half later, and the "Last Throes of the Insurgency," continue...
The Bush administration has misled the American people about the level of violence in Iraq, where there is an attack by insurgent forces every 15 minutes, Bob Woodward, the investigative journalist, said yesterday.
In a new book, State of Denial, Woodward argues that the White House disregarded warnings from advisers in the autumn of 2003 that it needed thousands more troops to put down the insurgency. He says the administration continues to deny the gravity of the situation in Iraq because of Mr Bush's conviction that it was right to go to war.
"It's getting to the point now where there are 800-900 attacks a week. That's more than a hundred a day. That is four an hour attacking our forces," Woodward told CBS television in an interview to be aired tomorrow night.
The Pentagon's latest quarterly report on Iraq, presented to Congress and posted on the defence department website on September 1, shows the number of attacks rising to 792 a week in August. However, that figure includes attacks on Iraqi civilians, infrastructure and Iraqi police as well as US and coalition troops. Iraqi civilians suffered the majority of casualties.
Woodward argues the administration routinely glosses over such news from the ground, as well as intelligence predicting further deterioration in Iraq, because they collide with Mr Bush's convictions.
The White House failed to act on a memo from Robert Blackwill, then the senior Iraqi adviser on the National Security Council, calling for 40,000 additional troops in Iraq, he writes. It is equally resistant to intelligence forecasts of worsening violence in the year ahead.
The National Intelligence Estimate, parts of which were released this week by Mr Bush, predicted rising violence in Iraq as the conflict there becomes a "cause célèbre" for the global jihad.
"The truth is that the assessment by intelligence experts is that next year, 2007, is going to get worse and, in public, you have the president and you have the Pentagon [saying], 'Oh, no, things are going to get better'," Woodward told CBS.
The vice-president, Dick Cheney, remained similarly unswayed by mounting evidence that Saddam Hussein never had weapons of mass destruction, phoning weapons inspectors at 3am to advise on possible locations of chemical warfare sites.
Such criticism is unlikely to dent Mr Bush's confidence in his decision to go to war. In a speech in Washington yesterday, he criticised those who say the war exposed Americans to greater risk of an attack by al-Qaida. "This argument buys into the enemy's propaganda that the terrorists attack us because we're provoking them," he said.
But as he tried again to rally Americans, the commander of US forces in the volatile Anbar province was predicting that the insurgency would not end until US forces were gone. "The insurgency's days will eventually come to an end. And they will come to an end at the hands of the Iraqis, who, by definition, will always be perceived as more legitimate than an external force like our own," said Colonel Sean MacFarland.
Does the administration have any credibility at all left, outside of the lunatic fringe Far Right cheerleading squad?
Oct. 2, 2006 issue - You don't have to drive very far from Kabul these days to find the Taliban. In Ghazni province's Andar district, just over a two-hour trip from the capital on the main southern highway, a thin young man, dressed in brown and wearing a white prayer cap, stands by the roadside waiting for two NEWSWEEK correspondents. It is midday on the central Afghan plains, far from the jihadist-infested mountains to the east and west. Without speaking, the sentinel guides his visitors along a sandy horse trail toward a mud-brick village within sight of the highway. As they get closer a young Taliban fighter carrying a walkie-talkie and an AK-47 rifle pops out from behind a tree. He is manning an improvised explosive device, he explains, in case Afghan or U.S. troops try to enter the village.
In a parched clearing a few hundred yards on, more than 100 Taliban fighters ranging in age from teenagers to a grandfatherly 55-year-old have assembled to meet their provincial commander, Muhammad Sabir. An imposing man with a long, bushy beard, wearing a brown and green turban and a beige shawl over his shoulders, Sabir inspects his troops, all of them armed with AKs and rocket-propelled grenade launchers. He claims to have some 900 fighters, and says the military and psychological tide is turning in their favor. "One year ago we couldn't have had such a meeting at midnight," says Sabir, who is in his mid-40s and looks forward to living out his life as an anti-American jihadist. "Now we gather in broad daylight. The people know we are returning to power."
Not long after NEWSWEEK's visit, U.S. and Afghan National Army forces launched a major attack to dislodge the Taliban from Ghazni and four neighboring provinces. But when NEWSWEEK returned in mid-September, Sabir's fighters were back, performing their afternoon prayers. It is an all too familiar story. Ridge by ridge and valley by valley, the religious zealots who harbored Osama bin Laden before 9/11—and who suffered devastating losses in the U.S. invasion that began five years ago next week—are surging back into the country's center. In the countryside over the past year Taliban guerrillas have filled a power vacuum that had been created by the relatively light NATO and U.S. military footprint of some 40,000 soldiers, and by the weakness of Afghan President Hamid Karzai's administration.
In Ghazni and in six provinces to the south, and in other hot spots to the east, Karzai's government barely exists outside district towns. Hard-core Taliban forces have filled the void by infiltrating from the relatively lawless tribal areas of Pakistan where they had fled at the end of 2001. Once back inside Afghanistan these committed jihadist commanders and fighters, aided by key sympathizers who had remained behind, have raised hundreds, if not thousands, of new, local recruits, many for pay. They feed on the people's disillusion with the lack of economic progress, equity and stability that Karzai's government, NATO, Washington and the international community had promised.
The Generals have been saying it for a while, but of course my friends on the Right (Watch the comments on this one), will say that this is nothing but democratic propaganda!
Retired military officers on Monday bluntly accused Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld of bungling the war in Iraq, saying U.S. troops were sent to fight without the best equipment and that critical facts were hidden from the public.
"I believe that Secretary Rumsfeld and others in the administration did not tell the American people the truth for fear of losing support for the war in Iraq," retired Maj. Gen. John R. S. Batiste told a forum conducted by Senate Democrats.
A second military leader, retired Maj. Gen. Paul Eaton, assessed Rumsfeld as "incompetent strategically, operationally and tactically."
"Mr. Rumsfeld and his immediate team must be replaced or we will see two more years of extraordinarily bad decision-making," Eaton added at the forum, held six weeks before the Nov. 7 midterm elections, in which the war is a central issue.
Sen. John Cornyn (news, bio, voting record), R-Texas, a member of the Armed Services Committee, dismissed the Democratic-sponsored event as "an election-year smoke screen aimed at obscuring the Democrats' dismal record on national security."
"Today's stunt may rile up the liberal base, but it won't kill a single terrorist or prevent a single attack," Sen. Mitch McConnell (news, bio, voting record), R-Ky., said in a statement. He called Rumsfeld an "excellent secretary of defense."
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter, speaking Monday at the National Press Club, said election-season politics may be what's standing in the way of finding a solution to the insurgency in Iraq.
"My instinct is, once the election is over, there will be a lot more hard thinking about what to do about Iraq and a lot more candid observations about it," said Specter, R-Pa.
The conflict, now in its fourth year, has claimed the lives of more than 2,600 American troops and cost more than $300 billion.
Sen. Byron Dorgan (news, bio, voting record), D-N.D., the committee chairman, told reporters last week that he hoped the hearing would shed light on the planning and conduct of the war. He said majority Republicans had failed to conduct hearings on the issue, adding, "if they won't ... we will."
Since he spoke, a government-produced National Intelligence Estimate became public that concluded the war has helped create a new generation of Islamic radicalism and that the overall terrorist threat has grown since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
Along with several members of the Senate Democratic leadership, one Republican, Rep. Walter Jones (news, bio, voting record) of North Carolina, participated. "The American people have a right to know any time that we make a decision to send Americans to die for this country," said Jones, a conservative whose district includes Camp Lejeune Marine base.
It is unusual for retired military officers to criticize the Pentagon while military operations are under way, particularly at a public event likely to draw widespread media attention.
And Senate Republicans circulated a statement by four retired generals that said, "(W)e do not believe that it is appropriate for active duty, or retired, senior military officers to publicly criticize U.S. civilian leadership during war." The group included two three-star generals, John Crosby and Thomas McInerny, and a pair of two-star generals, Burton Moore and Paul Vallely.
But Batiste, Eaton and retired Col. Paul X. Hammes were unsparing in remarks that suggested deep anger at the way the military had been treated. All three served in Iraq, and Batiste also was senior military assistant to then-Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz.
Batiste, who commanded the Army's 1st Infantry Division in Iraq, also blamed Congress for failing to ask "the tough questions."
He said Rumsfeld at one point threatened to fire the next person who mentioned the need for a postwar plan in Iraq.
Batiste said if full consideration had been given to the requirements for war, it's likely the U.S. would have kept its focus on Afghanistan, "not fueled Islamic fundamentalism across the globe, and not created more enemies than there were insurgents."
Just as they attempted to dismiss the National Intelligence reports as nothing more than political propaganda. Of course we know that Republican and Conservative Bloggers, are far more qualified to address intelligence information than the experts who get paid to do so.
A Pentagon report last month found that as many one in five U.S. service members “are being preyed on by loan centers set up near military bases” that can charge interest of 400 percent or more. Increasingly, soldiers have debt levels so high they are barred from serving overseas; others suffer from “bankruptcies, divorces and ruined careers.” (More facts HERE.)
The Pentagon has joined consumer, military, and veterans groups in backing a bipartisan amendment from Sens. Jim Talent (R-MO) and Bill Nelson (D-FL) that places a cap of 36 percent on high interest rates for short-term payday loans to military members.
But one conservative congressman, Rep. Geoff Davis (R-KY), is trying to gut the amendment. Davis has proposed his own language — praised by the payday lending industry — that sets no real limits on predatory lenders. One of Davis’s aides admitted last week that he consulted on the legislation with “CNG Financial of Mason, Ohio, one of his top campaign donors and owner of national payday lender Check ‘n Go.”
Rising sectarian bloodshed has pushed violence in Iraq to its highest level in more than two years, and preventing civil war is now the most urgent mission of the growing contingent of 140,000 U.S. troops in the country, according to a new Pentagon report released yesterday.
Executions, kidnappings and other sectarian attacks targeting Iraqi civilians have soared over the past three months, contributing to a 51 percent rise in casualties among the population and Iraqi security forces, the report said. More than 3,000 Iraqis are killed or wounded each month, and by July, 2,000 of the casualties were the result of sectarian incidents, it showed.
Donald Rumsfeld is probably the best Secretary of Defense of my lifetime. I am constantly amazed at what he's accomplished, and how well he keeps his head while doing it, and being subjected to some of the most unfair criticism I've ever seen thrown at a public official.
I sleep better every night knowing this guy's still in charge. I really do.
By the way, violent deaths are down dramatically in Baghdad, and Iraqis continue to take on more and more of their own security duties. And of course, our own forces continue taking fewer casualties all the time...
But what about all the schools and hospitals that have opened?
It must be harder and harder for Neocons to blow smoke up our ass on Iraq...
Death squads and terrorists have ramped up attacks on civilians in Iraq, killing more than 1,600 people in cold-blooded "execution-style" slayings in July alone, a Pentagon report said Friday.
Increasing violence is affecting "all other measures of stability, reconstruction and transition," according to the report, which examined the situation in June, July and August.
I have been thinking a lot about the war lately...
Well, actually longer than lately...
To be honest, it has been on my mind a lot.
I wonder sometimes how the biggest supporters of the war can stomach what has happened to Iraq? I have noticed there has been a decided downturn to the rah rah comments about how, "much better," things are for the average Iraqi.
I have also noticed that the Conservatives have quieted down with the rhetoric about how many Iraqis died under the Hussien regime, as the civilian death toll continues to mount in Iraq. Iraq is a disaster.
There is no other way to put it, and painting it as anything but is at best disingenuous, and at worst dishonest. The saber rattling about Iran in recent weeks, is cause for further concern, as we are stretched far too thin already, and yet the most vocal advocates of the war and of attacking Iran, are the least likely to make anything more than a symbolic contribution to it's success.
I wont go with the yellow elephant meme today, as it arouses to much righteous indignation from the right and frankly clouds the argument.
I have never supported this war, but I have said as a matter of principle that we can not leave Iraq in a state of Civil War... A state which despite semantic arguments, by most accounts exist today. Today, I question my own logic as it would seem that without major change in policy, and probably personnel... That this war will continue to grind on, and Iraqis will continue to suffer.
I don't have any real answers... I am neither an expert in warfare, nor foreign policy. The only thing I can say for sure is that rhetoric will not solve the massive problems facing Iraq, or win the war. Maybe some of those geniuses on the Right, who are so sure of victory, SHOULD sign up...
For a moment there, I was almost encouraged. George W. Bush, the most resolutely incurious and inflexible of presidents, was reported last week to have been surprised at seeing Iraqi citizens -- who ought to be grateful beneficiaries of the American occupation, I mean "liberation" -- demonstrating in support of Hezbollah and against Israel.
Surprise would be a start, since it would mean the Decider was admitting novel facts to his settled base of knowledge and reacting to them. Alas, it seems the door to the presidential mind is still locked tight. "I don't remember being surprised," he said at his news conference yesterday. "I'm not sure what they mean by that."
I'm guessing "they" might mean that when you try to impose your simplistic, black-and-white template on a kaleidoscopic world, and you end up setting the Middle East on fire, either you're surprised or you're not paying attention. But that's just me.
As for George Bush, what on earth is on his mind?
Even conservatives have begun openly assessing the president's intellect, especially its impermeability to new information. Cable television pundit Joe Scarborough, a former Republican congressman, devoted a segment of his MSNBC show to "George Bush's mental weakness," with a legend at the bottom of the screen that impertinently asked: "IS BUSH AN 'IDIOT'?"
It's tempting to go there, but I'm not sure we'd get very far. While we have the president on the couch, I'm more interested in trying to understand his emotional response -- or lack of response -- to the chaos he has spawned.
According to the Iraqi government, 3,438 civilians were killed in July, making it the bloodiest month since the invasion. The president was asked yesterday whether the failure of the U.S.-backed "unity" government to stem the orgy of sectarian carnage disappoints him, and he said that no, it didn't. How, I wonder, is that possible? Does he believe it would be a sign of weakness to admit that the flowering of democracy in Iraq isn't going exactly as planned? Does he believe saying everything's just fine will make it so? Is he in denial? Or do 3,438 deaths really just roll off his back after he's had his workout and a nice bike ride?
I find it hard to be sarcastic in the face of the ongoing carnage in Iraq. But I do find it making me more and more angry. How is it that intelligent people on the Right, in all their "rah rah," support for Bush, did not see this coming. We on the left have been accused of Bush hatred for pointing out what has been obvious long before Bush occupied the White House. The man has very limited mental capacity. This war, and the resulting pandemonium in the Middle East, was foreseen by many. Those who were against the war, even experienced intelligence and military experts, were all painted as "Bush Haters." The fact that chaos is brewing in the Middle East, and that the entire region is less stable than before the war, is conveniently glossed over in the scare mongering over terrorism. We live in a far more dangerous world than before Bush took office. The big question is, is he capable of keeping us safe?
Others Blogging: The Mahablog, David Corn, uggabugga and Blue Crab Boulevard
I wonder when the books are closed, what the final tab will be, for Bush's vanity war against Saddam?
BAGHDAD, Iraq, July 29 - The State Department agency in charge of $1.4 billion in reconstruction money in Iraq used an accounting shell game to hide ballooning cost overruns on its projects there and knowingly withheld information on schedule delays from Congress, a federal audit released late Friday has found.
The agency hid construction overruns by listing them as overhead or administrative costs, according to the audit, written by the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, an independent office that reports to Congress, the Pentagon and the State Department.
Called the United States Agency for International Development, or A.I.D., the agency administers foreign aid projects around the world. It has been working in Iraq on reconstruction since shortly after the 2003 invasion.
The report by the inspector general’s office does not give a full accounting of all projects financed by the agency’s $1.4 billion budget, but cites several examples.
The findings appeared in an audit of a children’s hospital in Basra, but they referred to the wider reconstruction activities of the development agency in Iraq. American and Iraqi officials reported this week that the State Department planned to drop Bechtel, its contractor on that project, as signs of budget and scheduling problems began to surface.
The United States Embassy in Baghdad referred questions to the State Department in Washington, which declined to comment immediately.
In March 2005, A.I.D. asked the Iraq Reconstruction and Management Office at the United States Embassy in Baghdad for permission to downsize some projects to ease widespread financing problems. In its request, it said that it had to “to absorb greatly increased construction costs” at the Basra hospital, and that it would make a modest shift of priorities and reduce “contractor overhead” on the project.
The embassy office approved the request. But the audit found that the agency interpreted the document as permission to change reporting of costs across its program.
Referring to the embassy office’s approval, the inspector general wrote, “The memorandum was not intended to give U.S.A.I.D. blanket permission to change the reporting of all indirect costs.”
The hospital’s construction budget was $50 million. By April of this year, Bechtel had told the aid agency that because of escalating costs for security and other problems, the project would actually cost $98 million to complete. But in an official report to Congress that month, the agency “was reporting the hospital project cost as $50 million,” the inspector general wrote in his report.
The rest was reclassified as overhead, or “indirect costs.” According to a contracting officer at the agency who was cited in the report, the agency “did not report these costs so it could stay within the $50 million authorization.”
“We find the entire agreement unclear,” the inspector general wrote of the U.S.A.I.D. request approved by the embassy. “The document states that hospital project cost increases would be offset by reducing contractor overhead allocated to the project, but project reports for the period show no effort to reduce overhead.”
The report said it suspected that other unreported costs on the hospital could drive the tab even higher. In another case cited in the report, a power station project in Musayyib, the direct construction cost cited by the development agency was $6.6 million, while the overhead cost was $27.6 million.
Keep in mind this report does not even talk about the millions that have gone "missing," since the war started. No wonder Bush was a failure as a CEO.
Iraq's top Shiite cleric urged his followers Thursday to refrain from reprisal violence against Sunnis, his strongest call yet for an end to increasing sectarian bloodshed. The statement by Grand Ayatollah Ali Al-Sistani came as U.S. military officials reported a 40 percent increase in the daily average of attacks in the Baghdad area.
U.S. spokesman Maj. Gen. William Caldwell said there has been an average of 34 attacks a day against U.S. and Iraqi forces in the capital over the past five days. The daily average for the period June 14 until July 13 was 24 a day, he said.
"We have not witnessed the reduction in violence one would have hoped for in a perfect world," U.S. spokesman Maj. Gen. William Caldwell said at a news briefing Thursday. "The only way we're going to be successful in Baghdad is to get the weapons off the streets."
Caldwell said militias and death squads have responded to Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's call for a crackdown by intensifying attacks to derail Iraq's new unity government.
Looks like Chenney's Memo on last throes....did not get to the folks on the ground in Iraq. Either that or.... Hand to Mouth in Shock!
"They don't give a rats ass."
From Think Progress:
Today at joint press conference with Russian president Vladimir Putin, President Bush said he hoped that Russia would model its government on the kind of democracy the United States is helping build in Iraq. Putin replied, "We certainly would not want to have the same kind of democracy as they have in Iraq. I will tell it quite honestly," drawing laughter from the assembled press. Bush interjected, "just wait."
Shouldn't be long now, right GW? I mean, the insurgency in Iraq is in it's Last Throes... Right?
In Iraq, lives differ in value -- and so do deaths. In this disparity lies an important reason why the United States has botched this war.
Last November in Haditha , a squad of Marines, outraged at the loss of a comrade, is said to have run amok, avenging his death by killing two dozen innocent bystanders. And in March, U.S. soldiers in Mahmudiyah allegedly raped a young Iraqi woman and killed her along with three of her relatives -- an apparently premeditated crime for which one former U.S. soldier has been charged . These incidents are among at least five recent cases of Iraqi civilian deaths that have triggered investigations of U.S. military personnel. If the allegations prove true, Haditha and Mahmudiyah will deservedly take their place alongside Sand Creek, Samar and My Lai in the unhappy catalogue of atrocities committed by American troops.
"You have to understand the Arab mind," one company commander told the New York Times, displaying all the self-assurance of Douglas MacArthur discoursing on Orientals in 1945. "The only thing they understand is force -- force, pride and saving face." Far from representing the views of a few underlings, such notions penetrated into the upper echelons of the American command. In their book "Cobra II," Michael R. Gordon and Gen. Bernard E. Trainor offer this ugly comment from a senior officer: "The only thing these sand niggers understand is force and I'm about to introduce them to it."
But recall a more recent incident, in Samarra . On May 30, U.S. soldiers manning a checkpoint there opened fire on a speeding vehicle that either did not see or failed to heed their command to stop. Two women in the vehicle were shot dead. One of them, Nahiba Husayif Jassim, 35, was pregnant. The baby was also killed. The driver, Jassim's brother, had been rushing her to a hospital to give birth. No one tried to cover up the incident: U.S. military representatives issued expressions of regret.
In all likelihood, we will be learning more about Haditha and Mahmudiyah for months to come, whereas the Samarra story has already been filed away and largely forgotten. And that's the problem.
The killing at the Samarra checkpoint was not an atrocity; most likely it was an accident, a mistake. Yet plenty of evidence suggests that in Iraq such mistakes have occurred routinely, with moral and political consequences that have been too long ignored. Indeed, conscious motivation is beside the point: Any action resulting in Iraqi civilian deaths, however inadvertent, undermines the Bush administration's narrative of liberation, and swells the ranks of those resisting the U.S. presence.
Read the whole thing. It goes a long way towards putting into context some of the problems with alleged abuses of civilians in Iraq. Now I am going to reserve judgement on the active cases going on in Iraq, the Haditha incident and the alleged rape and murder, are open cases... The AG Prison scandal is not.
The apparent attitude of commanders on the ground towards the people of Iraq could go a long way towards explaining why such incidents have occured. This is pretty uncomfortable stuff we are talking about. The image of Americans as Liberators, and the whole Rah Rah, we are here to save the Iraqi people from tyranny thing, is going to ring pretty damned hollow if the latest accussations prove true...
WASHINGTON, June 24 - The top American commander in Iraq has drafted a plan that projects sharp reductions in the United States military presence there by the end of 2007, with the first cuts coming this September, American officials say.
And the US Congressional elections are WHEN? You know the absolute contempt that these people have for the intelligence of the American people is nothing less than incredible....
NEW YORK - The Washington Post has obtained a cable, marked "sensitive," that it says show that just before President Bush left on a surprise trip last Monday to the Green Zone in Baghdad for an upbeat assessment of the situation there, "the U.S. Embassy in Iraq painted a starkly different portrait of increasing danger and hardship faced by its Iraqi employees."
This cable outlines, the Post reported Sunday, "the daily-worsening conditions for those who live outside the heavily guarded international zone: harassment, threats and the employees' constant fears that their neighbors will discover they work for the U.S. government."
It's actually far worse than that, as the details published below indicate, which include references to abductions, threats to women's rights, and "ethnic cleansing."
A PDF copy of the cable shows that it was sent to the SecState in Washington, D.C. from "AMEmbassy Baghdad" on June 6. The typed name at the very bottom is Khalilzad -- the name of the U.S. Ambassador, though it is not known if this means he wrote the memo or merely approved it.
The subject of the memo is: "Snapshots from the Office -- Public Affairs Staff Show Strains of Social Discord."
As a footnote in one of the 23 sections, the embassy relates, "An Arab newspaper editor told us he is preparing an extensive survey of ethnic cleansing, which he said is taking place in almost every Iraqi province, as political parties and their militiast are seemingly engaged in tit-for-tat reprisals all over Iraq."
Among the other troubling reports:
-- "Personal safety depends on good relations with the 'neighborhood' governments, who barricade streets and ward off outsiders. The central government, our staff says, is not relevant; even local mukhtars have been displaced or coopted by militias. People no longer trust most neighbors."
-- One embassy employee had a brother-in-law kidnapped. Another received a death threat, and then fled the country with her family.
-- Iraqi staff at the embassy, beginning in March and picking up in May, report "pervasive" harassment from Islamist and/or militia groups. Cuts in power and rising fuel prices "have diminished the quality of life." Conditions vary but even upscale neighborhoods "have visibly deteriorated" and one of them is now described as a "ghost town."
-- Two of the three female Iraqis in the public affairs office reported stepped-up harassment since mid-May... "some groups are pushing women to cover even their face, a step not taken in Iran even at its most conservative." One of the women is now wearing a full abaya after receiving direct threats.
-- It has also become "dangerous" for men to wear shorts in public and "they no longer allow their children to play outside in shorts." People who wear jeans in public have also come under attack.
-- Embassy employees are held in such low esteem their work must remain a secret and they live with constant fear that their cover will be blown. Of nine staffers, only four have told their families where they work. They all plan for their possible abductions.
No one takes home their cell phones as this gives them away. One employee said criticism of the U.S. had grown so severe that most of her family believes the U.S. "is punishing populations as Saddam did."
***
Of course it is high treason to report how bad things suck in Baghdad, especially in light of the administration's, "optimism."
I have stated numerous times that I believe it would be immoral to pull our forces out of Iraq and leave them in a state of Civil War. But for once, I would like to have a discussion with the Right, where they did not call me a traitor and troop hater, for suggesting the obvious. Iraq is screwed.... And if the above reports are right, it is not going to get better any time soon... In my opinion one of two things are going to happen.
1. Americans will eventually grow so tired of this, that they will insist we pull out, regardless of the stability or lack thereof in Iraq.
2. We will have a MAJOR presence in Iraq for MANY years to come.
Neither option is very appealing...
And rather than being blunted by the killing of Zarqawi, Insurgent bands in Iraq seem to be emboldened
No, it does not look good...
Away from all the hate and political posturing... To thank these young men and women for their sacrifice, and to pray for them and their families.
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - The number of U.S. military deaths in Iraq has reached 2,500, the Pentagon said on Thursday, and the military warned it expected the new leader of al Qaeda in Iraq to continue the bloody tactics of his slain predecessor.
Tens of thousands of Iraqis have also been killed since the U.S.-led invasion more than three years ago to overthrow Saddam Hussein, igniting an insurgency by his once-dominant Sunni Arab minority that is showing little sign of easing.
Seems a witness has come forward making that claim:
U.S. officials have altered their account of the death of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, saying he was alive and partly conscious after bombs destroyed his hideout, and an Iraqi man raised fresh questions about the events surrounding the end of Iraq's most-wanted militant.
The man, who lived near the scene of the bombing, told AP Television News on Friday that he saw U.S. soldiers beating an injured man resembling al-Zarqawi until blood flowed from the victim's nose.
When asked about the man's allegations, military spokesman Maj. Gen. William Caldwell said he would check. In Washington, Pentagon spokesman Jeffrey Gordon said Saturday he was unaware of the claim.
"We frequently receive allegations which prove to be unsubstantiated," Gordon said.
The Iraqi, identified only as Mohammed, said residents put a bearded man in an ambulance before U.S. forces arrived. He said the man was found lying next to an irrigation canal.
"He was still alive. We put him in the ambulance, but when the Americans arrived they took him out of the ambulance, they beat him on his stomach and wrapped his head with his dishdasha, then they stomped on his stomach and his chest until he died and blood came out of his nose," Mohammed said, without saying how he knew the man was dead.
A dishdasha is a traditional Arab robe.
A similar account in The Washington Post identified him as Ahmed Mohammed.
No other witnesses have come forward to corroborate the account of a man resembling al-Zarqawi being beaten. U.S. officials have only said al-Zarqawi mumbled and tried to roll off a stretcher before dying.
Could have happened... Am I going to cry about it. No... The man was a BRUTAL sadist and murderer. Whatever happened, he got what he deserved. But I doubt this claim. I am pretty sure if the bastard was still alive when they found him, our troops would not have done what is alleged, if for nothing else, because of his value as an intelligence assett.
Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, whose bloody campaign of beheadings and suicide bombings made him the most-wanted terrorist in Iraq, was killed when U.S. warplanes dropped 500-pound bombs on his isolated safe house, officials said Thursday. His death was a long-sought victory in the war in Iraq.
The targeted airstrike Wednesday evening was the culmination of a two-week-long hunt for al-Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaida in Iraq. Tips from senior militants led U.S. forces to follow al-Zarqawi's spiritual adviser to the safe house, 30 miles outside Baghdad, for a meeting with the terror leader. The adviser, Sheik Abdul Rahman, was among seven aides also killed.
Fingerprints, tattoos and scars helped U.S. troops identify al-Zarqawi's body, White House spokesman Tony Snow said. The U.S. military released a picture of al-Zarqawi's face after the airstrike, with his eyes closed and spots of blood behind him, an image reminiscent of photos of Saddam Hussein's slain sons from the early days of the war.
"Al-Zarqawi was eliminated," Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki said.
President Bush, who learned of the deadly airstrike Wednesday afternoon, hailed the killing as "a severe blow to al-Qaida and it is a significant victory in the war on terror."
But he cautioned: "We have tough days ahead of us in Iraq that will require the continuing patience of the American people."
Around the time news reports announced al-Zarqawi's death, two bombs hit a market and a police patrol in Baghdad, killing at least 19 people and wounding more than 40. Police differed on whether the bombs struck shortly before or after the 10:30 a.m. news. Later, a parked car bomb exploded in north Baghdad, killing six people and wounding 15.
Al-Qaida in Iraq vowed to continue its "holy war," according to a statement posted on a Web site.
"We want to give you the joyous news of the martyrdom of the mujahed sheik Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
"The death of our leaders is life for us. It will only increase our persistence in continuing holy war so that the word of God will be supreme."
My first thought... "Good riddance for bad rubbish."
My next thought... "It aint over."
From the same piece:
Al-Qaida in Iraq vowed to continue its "holy war," according to a statement posted on a Web site.
"We want to give you the joyous news of the martyrdom of the mujahed sheik Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
"The death of our leaders is life for us. It will only increase our persistence in continuing holy war so that the word of God will be supreme."
There is a certainty that Zarqawi's death will not result in the crumbling of the terror networks in Iraq... However, there are many things to be excited about.
This murderous thug got his just deserts. For that, I am immeasurably happy. One of the benefits I am sure we will see from this success is an uptick in troop morale, which has to have been suffering as a result of the Haditha incident and various setbacks in Iraq. Likewise, I am sure the Iraqi people are breathing a sigh of relief at the news. See Malkin's blog for a roundup of some of the Iraqi blogger reactions, and some great photos and videos.
The news of Zarqawi's death will likely result in an increased sense of resolve for all those responsible for returning stability to the country, and may even result in the accelerated capture or death of others involved, as intelligence is gathered from the wreckage of Zarqawis safe house... We can at least hope.
Shortly after the strikes, 17 more raids were conducted on other suspected hideouts for Zarqawi associates in Baghdad. They produced a "treasure trove" of information, according to the Americans.
As expected, there are tons of others blogging on the news:
And they call us moonbats?
Why does everything have to be a conspiracy?
Lieutentant Ehren Watada has said he will refuse to go to Iraq when his Stryker Brigade is deployed.
"This is more than just one man refusing to deploy. It's a coordinated effort by the anti-war left to undermine our troops, our war effort, and President Bush, and Lt. Watada is its pawn. Take a look at this website. It's the public relations effort that will make sure Lt. Watada gets as much press coverage as possible"
Okay, first off... I think the Army Officer is WRONG. He signed up for the Army. He understood when he joined and accepted his commission that he would be required to go where they send him. Apparently he attempted to resign his commission, but was refused by the Army. Regardless of how many organizations are standing behind him, this is not some Lefty conspiracy, and Kim no one undermines Bush as well as Bush...
The apparent cold-blooded killing last November of 24 Iraqi civilians by United States marines at Haditha will be hard to dispose of with another Washington damage control operation. The Iraqi government has made clear that it will not sit still for one, and neither should the American people. This affair cannot simply be dismissed as the spontaneous cruelty of a few bad men.
This is the nightmare that everyone worried about when the Iraq invasion took place. Critics of the war predicted that American troops would become an occupying force, unable to distinguish between innocent civilians and murderous insurgents, propelled down the same path that led the British to disaster in Northern Ireland and American troops to grief in Vietnam. The Bush administration understood the dangers too, but dismissed them out of its deep, unwarranted confidence that friendly Iraqis would quickly be able to take control of their own government and impose order on their own people.
Now that we have reached the one place we most wanted to avoid, it will not do to focus blame narrowly on the Marine unit suspected of carrying out these killings and ignore the administration officials, from President Bush on down, who made the chances of this sort of disaster so much greater by deliberately blurring the rules governing the conduct of American soldiers in the field. The inquiry also needs to critically examine the behavior of top commanders responsible for ensuring lawful and professional conduct and of midlevel officers who apparently covered up the Haditha incident for months until journalists' inquiries forced a more honest review.
So far, nothing in President Bush's repeated statements on the issue offers any real assurance that the White House and the Pentagon will not once again try to protect the most senior military and political ranks from proper accountability. This is the pattern that this administration has repeatedly followed in the past — in the torture scandal at Abu Ghraib, in the beating deaths of prisoners at Bagram air base in Afghanistan and in the serial abuses of justice and constitutional principle at Guantánamo Bay.
These damage control operations have done a great job of shielding the reputations of top military commanders and high-ranking Pentagon officials. But it has been at the expense of things that are far more precious: America's international reputation and the honor of the United States military. The overwhelming majority of American troops in Iraq are dedicated military professionals, doing their best to behave correctly under extraordinarily difficult circumstances. Their good name requires a serious inquiry, not another deflection of blame to the lowest-ranking troops on the scene.
They can't have it be an isolated incident, they can't allow for the possibility that it's limited to a few bad apples and some midlevel commanders because then the blame falls squarely on the guilty parties themselves. Which leaves the Times and its constituents double-bound: not only does it force them to acknowledge that American soldiers (volunteers, no less) do in fact have moral agency and therefore are partly responsible for the war the left hates so much, but it offers them no way to exploit the incident for political purposes. How can they call for a pullout if the plague of renegade soldiers going berserk from exhaustion isn't a plague? How can they blame Bush or Rumsfeld for creating a "climate of impunity" (in the Nation's words) if there's no climate of impunity? The actions of the other 99.9% of U.S. forces in Iraq should count as evidence on that point, no?
My ignorance of military culture prevents me from answering the following myself so I'll throw it open to milbloggers and our readers in the armed forces. Have you "gotten the message" that you should feel free to shoot Iraqi infants in the head if it pleases you to do so? Has the torture at Abu Ghraib created a "climate of impunity" in your mind that leads you to believe gunning down Arab civilians in cold blood is appropriate, and will result in no adverse consequences to yourself? Let me know in the comments or by e-mail and I'll print the responses, because I have a crazy hunch this "green light" argument is so much bullshit manufactured by Bush-haters as cover for their agenda.
Now I just have a couple of things to say about all this. Let's wait until the investigation is over, before we decide who is to blame.... But signs are pointing towards a cover-up. Bush loves to wear the Commander in Chief hat. For someone who avoided the dangers of Vietnam, playing GI Joe must be fun. I can wear military jackets, drop gloriously onto the deck of American Aircraft Carriers and make speeches to those who walk the walk.. But I can't take responsibility when things go bad.... What happened to "The Buck Stops Here?" Right Wingers like to make hay about the guilty being punished in the Abu Ghraib case, but no officers were charged in that case. None to my knowledge have been charged in any of the other cases. It has been enlisted men and women, who granted, carried out the attrocities, but for a President who suppossedly demands accountablity, it seems strange that no one in the upper chain of command has been charged. Sure there have been some shuffling of command structures, but no one has seriously been held accountable above the pay grade of Sargeant.
So my question to Allahpundit and others is, "WHY NOT." What kind of hypocrisy drives Right Wing thinking, that it's fine to bask in glory.... what little there has been, for the senior administrators of this war. But when it comes to accountability for these events, the leaders should get a pass.... This is something those on the Right need to seriously think about.
I have never read anything more brutal in my life... My God, if the investigation proves these accussations true, these men deserve death, and just as important, our Military leaders need to understand what caused our young men to break like this...
Then one of the Marines took charge and began shouting, said Fahmi, who was watching from his roof. Fahmi said he saw the Marine direct other Marines into the house closest to the blast, about 50 yards away.
It was the home of 76-year-old Abdul Hamid Hassan Ali. Although he had used a wheelchair since diabetes forced a leg amputation years ago, Ali was always one of the first on his block to go out every morning, scattering scraps for his chickens and hosing the dust of the arid western town from his driveway, neighbors said.
In the house with Ali and his 66-year-old wife, Khamisa Tuma Ali, were three of the middle-aged male members of their family, at least one daughter-in-law and four children -- 4-year-old Abdullah, 8-year-old Iman, 5-year-old Abdul Rahman and 2-month-old Asia.
Marines entered shooting, witnesses recalled. Most of the shots -- in Ali's house and two others -- were fired at such close range that they went through the bodies of the family members and plowed into walls or the floor, physicians at Haditha's hospital said.
A daughter-in-law, identified as Hibbah, escaped with Asia, survivors and neighbors said. Iman and Abdul Rahman were shot but survived. Four-year-old Abdullah, Ali and the rest died.
Ali took nine rounds in the chest and abdomen, leaving his intestines spilling out of the exit wounds in his back, according to his death certificate.
The Marines moved to the house next door, Fahmi said.
Inside were 43-year-old Khafif, 41-year-old Aeda Yasin Ahmed, an 8-year-old son, five young daughters and a 1-year-old girl staying with the family, according to death certificates and neighbors.
The Marines shot them at close range and hurled grenades into the kitchen and bathroom, survivors and neighbors said later. Khafif's pleas could be heard across the neighborhood. Four of the girls died screaming.
Only 13-year-old Safa Younis lived -- saved, she said, by her mother's blood spilling onto her, making her look dead when she fell, limp, in a faint.
Townspeople led a Washington Post reporter this week to the girl they identified as Safa. Wearing a ponytail and tracksuit, the girl said her mother died trying to gather the girls. The girl burst into tears after a few words. The older couple caring for her apologized and asked the reporter to leave.
I have read the numerous reports of the psychological strain on troops repeadedly deployed to Iraq. I have often wondered how I would react to that stress, and how our troops are able to deal with it every day. This case is going to have some serious impact, including political impact. Reports like the one quoted above will likely outrage and disgust the American people. There is no doubt that it will also inflame our enemies and help them to justify internally, "bringing it back to our civilian population." It's a mess, and one that is not going to go away for a while. And well it shouldn't. If innocents, especially women and children were killed in this fashion, the ramifications will be 100 times worse than Abu Gharib.
I meant to post about this last week when Murtha was making the rounds but I got caught up in other things. Yeah, it's awful and par for the course that he'd pronounce the Marines guilty before the investigation is complete; and yeah, no one's surprised that he'd exploit the incident to promote a pullout. But it rubbed me the wrong way to watch righty bloggers go ballistic on Murtha while dismissing the underlying allegations with a perfunctory "these are serious charges." I'm not accusing anyone of not caring, mind you; this is Hot Air, not the Daily Dish. I’m just saying that it's bad form to kill the messenger when serious malfeasance might be afoot. Not unlike how lefties reacted to the Swift Vets, to take a more benign example.
This story is not about Murtha, nor his detractors. (Personally, I never mentioned Murtha's comments on this.) The Haditha story is a tragedy for the victims and their families. It is another tragedy for the people of Iraq, as the blowback from this story will play into the terrorists' hands. It is a tragedy for the armed forces of the United States, who will be tarred by the actions of a few. It is a tragedy for the people of the United States, as it will help inflame global terrorists; our own security is weaker today due to this story.
Conservative bloggers who supported the war in Iraq should face this story head on, and report it vigorously. I also recommend we lay off the whole "who said what about whom in relation to their earlier comments about ..., etc.." This is too tragic and important to devolve into an ever-widening pissing contest over Murtha's word, Malkin's words, TBogg's words, etc..
Others have noted that over 500 were killed at My Lai, compared to 24 at Haditha. The global media's extreme sensitivity to casualties of American wars and to atrocities committed by American soldiers is a reality. Sure, World War Two dwarfed Vietnam on any scale. And yes, the violence in Vietnam dwarfed the events in Iraq (not just My Lai relative to Haditha). But, in the environment of 2006, Haditha will loom as large in the global media, if not in literal body count.
This is not about whether we are for or against the war. It is about a crime, perpetrated in our name. I don't even want to think about the international implications, but there will be many. I am personaly very saddened by all this. Sad for the victims, sad for the families and loved ones of the Marines involved, sad for our international image, and sad for the retribution that is sure to come.
I will not participate in a political pissing contest about all this. This was not American Policy, this was a few perhaps stressed to their limits soldiers, going over to the dark side. While some will use this a football to pass blame. The blame lies squarely on the shoulders of those who pulled the trigger AND those who commanded them. I too hope Conservative bloggers who have supported the war will take the lead on this, but I don't expect it (At least not from people like Malkin). We will see... I have not seen much today, but it's not like I have been looking for it.
The best course for responding to this is to demonstrate American Justice. These men need to be tried, and if found guilty, executed. Plain and simple. I know many Marines, too of my best friends are Marines, and I know they more than anyone right now, are angry for their beloved Corps, and what these rogues have done to it's name.
The commandant of the Marine Corps flew to Iraq to address his troops yesterday, and members of the Senate Armed Services Committee were briefed on allegations that Marines had purposely killed as many as two dozen Iraqi civilians in November.
The two developments were indications of the growing seriousness of two investigations into the incident in Haditha that has led to charges from a congressman that Marines killed civilians "in cold blood."
"When these investigations come out, there's going to be a firestorm," said retired Brig. Gen. David M. Brahms, formerly a top lawyer for the Marine Corps. "It will be worse than Abu Ghraib - nobody was killed at Abu Ghraib."
(emphasis mine)
And that is the gist of it... Abu Gharib ripped the country apart, and sent ripples of anti americanism around the globe. That innocent civilians were killed, allegedly in cold blood is horrifying, that children were murdered as well... well, you have the picture. The blogsphere seems to be waking up to the story, as more and more blogs weigh in. Not surprisingly, some political positioning (subtle as it may be in some cases), is begining to show.
Ironically, some on the Right seem to be using this case as a way of downplaying the horrors of Abu Gharib. I am not going to touch that one... Like I said in the begining, this is not about politics. It's about evil. It's about a crime, and it's about American honor and prestige in the world. I live in a country that has a long time love affair with the United States, and yet even here the American image is damaged goods. This story, if proven 100% true, will do nothing to improve that image.
PRESIDENT BUSH: Sounds like kind of a familiar refrain here - saying "bring it on," kind of tough talk, you know, that sent the wrong signal to people. I learned some lessons about expressing myself maybe in a little more sophisticated manner - you know, "wanted dead or alive," that kind of talk. I think in certain parts of the world it was misinterpreted, and so I learned from that. And I think the biggest mistake that's happened so far, at least from our country’s involvement in Iraq is Abu Ghraib. We've been paying for that for a long period of time. And it's - unlike Iraq, however, under Saddam, the people who committed those acts were brought to justice. They've been given a fair trial and tried and convicted.
That a little humility is seeping into the President?
Nah... Poll numbers in the toilet will do that to ya! And it would take him the rest of his presidency to accept all of his mistakes.
video is proven a fake, and it certainlyappears that it is.... It discredits more than helps the anti-war movement. There appears to be more than enough attrocity stories about Iraq, that there is no need to INVENT them. I will be interested in seeing how this one sorts out.
HARTFORD, Connecticut (AP) -- U.S. military troops with severe psychological problems have been sent to Iraq or kept in combat, even when superiors have been aware of signs of mental illness, a newspaper reported in its Sunday editions.
The Hartford Courant, citing records obtained under the federal Freedom of Information Act and more than 100 interviews of families and military personnel, reported numerous cases in which the military failed to follow its own regulations in screening, treating and evacuating mentally unfit troops from Iraq.
In 1997, Congress ordered the military to assess the mental health of all deploying troops. The newspaper, citing Pentagon statistics, said fewer than 1 in 300 service members were referred to a mental health professional before shipping out for Iraq as of October 2005.
Twenty-two U.S. troops committed suicide in Iraq last year. That number accounts for nearly one in five of all noncombat deaths and was the highest suicide rate since the war started, the newspaper said.
The paper reported that some service members who committed suicide in 2004 or 2005 were kept on duty despite clear signs of mental distress, sometimes after being prescribed antidepressants with little or no mental health counseling or monitoring. Those findings conflict with regulations adopted last year by the Army that caution against the use of antidepressants for "extended deployments."
Although Defense Department standards for enlistment disqualify recruits who suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, the military also is redeploying service members to Iraq who fit that criteria, the newspaper said.
"I can't imagine something more irresponsible than putting a soldier suffering from stress on (antidepressants), when you know these drugs can cause people to become suicidal and homicidal," said Vera Sharav, president of the Alliance for Human Research Protection, a New York-based advocacy group. "You're creating chemically activated time bombs."
I don't know how you justify this... But I am sure some of the TRUE Lovers of our Troops, will find a way. Or they will simply ignore it, as they do most things that don't fit their fantasy.
MR. STEPHANOPOULOS: Finally, weapons of mass destruction. Key goal of the military campaign is finding those weapons of mass destruction. None have been found yet. There was a raid on the Answar Al-Islam Camp up in the north last night. A lot of people expected to find ricin there. None was found. How big of a problem is that? And is it curious to you that given how much control U.S. and coalition forces now have in the country, they haven't found any weapons of mass destruction?
SEC. RUMSFELD: Not at all. If you think -- let me take that, both pieces -- the area in the south and the west and the north that coalition forces control is substantial. It happens not to be the area where weapons of mass destruction were dispersed. We know where they are. They're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat.
In the age of the "internets," it's aweful hard to lie. Even when you have people who don't want to HEAR the Truth.
Check out the video, it's worth it to watch Rummy Squirm...
With the expected passage this spring of the largest emergency spending bill in history, annual war expenditures in Iraq will have nearly doubled since the U.S. invasion, as the military confronts the rapidly escalating cost of repairing, rebuilding and replacing equipment chewed up by three years of combat. The cost of the war in U.S. fatalities has declined this year, but the cost in treasure continues to rise, from $48 billion in 2003 to $59 billion in 2004 to $81 billion in 2005 to an anticipated $94 billion in 2006, according to the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.
The U.S. government is now spending nearly $10 billion a month in Iraq and Afghanistan, up from $8.2 billion a year ago, a new Congressional Research Service report found. Annual war costs in Iraq are easily outpacing the $61 billion a year that the United States spent in Vietnam between 1964 and 1972, in today's dollars.
Wonder when that Oil revenue money that was suppossed to pay for this war is going to kick in?
One has to wonder why Powell did not have the stones to say this while in office.
Just back from Baghdad and eager to discuss promising developments, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice found herself knocked off message Sunday, forced to defend prewar planning and troop levels against an unlikely critic — Colin Powell, her predecessor at the State Department.
For the Bush administration, it was a rare instance of in-house dissenter going public.
On Rice's mind was the political breakthrough that had brought her and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld to Iraq last week and cleared the way for formation of a national unity government.
Yet Powell sideswiped her by revisiting the question of whether the U.S. had a large enough force to oust Saddam Hussein and then secure the peace.
He said he advised Bush before the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003 to send more troops to Iraq, but that the administration did not follow his recommendation.
Rice, Bush's national security adviser during the run-up to the war, neither confirmed nor denied Powell's assertion. But she spent a good part of her appearances on three Sunday talk shows reaching into the past to defend the White House, which is trying to highlight the positive to a public increasingly skeptical in this election year of the president's conduct of the war and concerned about the large U.S. military presence.
"I don't remember specifically what Secretary Powell may be referring to, but I'm quite certain that there were lots of discussions about how best to fulfill the mission that we went into Iraq," Rice said.
It's actually funny watching these people on the defensive...
Dean has an interesting Blurb about Bin Laden's latest propaganda tape.
I notice that Osama Bin Laden has a new tape out. Frustrating that we haven't captured the vermin yet. But amusingly, Tigerhawk notes that a couple of years ago Bin Laden was promising to defeat America in Iraq. And he, uh, doesn't have much to say about that now.
Maybe he feels he doesn't need to. Since the war has cost the U.S. hundreds of billions, over 1000 American Dead, 10's of thousands of Iraqi lives, Bush ALL of his so called "political capital," created another Afghanistan type environment in Iraq, and given the United States a black eye around the world. Sounds to me like he accomplished his goal, perhaps not how he imagined, but who knows. Bin Laden is an old guerilla warrior, in that type of war, clear cut military victory is rarely the goal.
The man on the phone with the 14-year-old Iraqi girl called himself Sa'ad. He was calling long distance from Dubai and telling her wonderful things about the place. He was also about to buy her. Safah, the teenager, was well aware of the impending transaction. In the weeks after she was kidnapped and imprisoned in a dark house in Baghdad's middle-class Karada district, Safah heard her captors haggling with Sa'ad over her price. It was finally settled at $10,000. Staring at a floor strewn with empty whiskey bottles, the orphan listened as Sa'ad described the life awaiting her: a beautiful home, expensive clothes, parties with pop stars. Why, she'd be joining two other very happy teenage Iraqi girls living with Sa'ad in his harem. Safah knew that she was running out of time. A fake passport with her photo and assumed name had already been forged for her. But even if she escaped, she had no family who would take her in. She was even likely to end up in prison. What was she to do? Safah is part of a seldom-discussed aspect of the epidemic of kidnappings in Iraq: sex trafficking. No one knows how many young women have been kidnapped and sold since the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003. The Organization for Women's Freedom in Iraq, based in Baghdad, estimates from anecdotal evidence that more than 2,000 Iraqi women have gone missing in that period. A Western official in Baghdad who monitors the status of women in Iraq thinks that figure may be inflated but admits that sex trafficking, virtually nonexistent under Saddam, has become a serious issue. The collapse of law and order and the absence of a stable government have allowed criminal gangs, alongside terrorists, to run amuck. Meanwhile, some aid workers say, bureaucrats in the ministries have either paralyzed with red tape or frozen the assets of charities that might have provided refuge for these girls. As a result, sex trafficking has been allowed to fester unchecked.
(CBS) A CIA official who had a top role during the run-up to the Iraqi war charges the White House with ignoring intelligence that said there were no weapons of mass destruction or an active nuclear program in Iraq.
The former highest ranking CIA officer in Europe, Tyler Drumheller, also says that while the intelligence community did give the White House some bad intelligence, it also gave the White House good intelligence,which the administration chose to ignore.
Drumheller talks to 60 Minutes correspondent Ed Bradley in his first television interview this Sunday, April 23 at 7 p.m. ET/PT.
Drumheller, who retired last year, says the White House ignored crucial information from a high and credible source. The source was Iraq's foreign minister, Naji Sabri, with whom U.S. spies had made a deal.
When CIA Director George Tenet delivered this news to the president, the vice president and other high ranking officials, they were excited,but not for long.
"[The source] told us that there were no active weapons of mass destruction programs," says Drumheller. "The [White House] group that was dealing with preparation for the Iraq war came back and said they were no longer interested. And we said 'Well, what about the intel?' And they said 'Well, this isn't about intel anymore. This is about regime change.' "
They didn't want any additional data from Sabri because, says Drumheller: "The policy was set. The war in Iraq was coming and they were looking for intelligence to fit into the policy."
You can smell it coming from a distance. Powerline, Wizbang, Captain's Quarters, Goldstein, they are all sharpening their sabres in preparation for the massive retaliation. Hell they are probably convening a virtual War Room even as we speak. The opportunity to confront 60 minutes again must be giving these guys a collective hard on! The research work that must be going into the counter strike plans... The rhetoric, I can only imagine. I want to propose a drinking game... One shot for every time you read on a Rightie Blog, "there is nothing new here." As if the fact that this stuff is common knowledge among some of us... Somehow makes it less significant.
For the Conservative Blog spin machine to spin up. Just amazing, a bunch of guys with no command background, and not enough balls to go fight in the war that they so voraciously cheerlead, attack the REAL warriors, because they dont agree with their convienant little delussion. It's coming apart baby.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President George W. Bush on Friday said Donald Rumsfeld has "my full support," after a number of retired generals criticized the defense secretary's handling of the Iraq war.
"Secretary Rumsfeld's energetic and steady leadership is exactly what is needed at this critical period. He has my full support and deepest appreciation," Bush said in a statement.
So a bunch of retired Generals, many of them having served in Iraq, come out and demand his firing, and Bush stands up for his man.
Meantime, Right Wing fanatics bloggers continue their slide into the "bunker syndrom," of "defend at any cost."
But the American People seem to be waking up. The biggest shame to all this is that so many people had to die BEFORE we woke up. My prediction, Rumsfeld will resign... Iraq is IN the throes of a horrible civil war, and denying it much longer will only look silly, both on the part of the politicians and the Right Wing Blogsphere. I don't for a moment doubt that Bush will try to bomb Iran. What I doubt is if he will be able to, short of PROVING conclussively that Iran has Nukes. And I don't see China or Russia allowing another open ended Security Council resolution to pass, giving Bush a "gray" light to attack. The world is about to get a LOT more complicated. The only open question is, will our elected representatives, especially the one's from Bush's own party have the balls to stand up against this insanity. With Bush's approval rating tanking, they may have an opening to do just that...
On May 29, 2003, 50 days after the fall of Baghdad, President Bush proclaimed a fresh victory for his administration in Iraq: Two small trailers captured by U.S. and Kurdish troops had turned out to be long-sought mobile "biological laboratories." He declared, "We have found the weapons of mass destruction."
The claim, repeated by top administration officials for months afterward, was hailed at the time as a vindication of the decision to go to war. But even as Bush spoke, U.S. intelligence officials possessed powerful evidence that it was not true.
A secret fact-finding mission to Iraq -- not made public until now -- had already concluded that the trailers had nothing to do with biological weapons. Leaders of the Pentagon-sponsored mission transmitted their unanimous findings to Washington in a field report on May 27, 2003, two days before the president's statement.
The three-page field report and a 122-page final report three weeks later were stamped "secret" and shelved. Meanwhile, for nearly a year, administration and intelligence officials continued to publicly assert that the trailers were weapons factories.
The authors of the reports were nine U.S. and British civilian experts, scientists and engineers with extensive experience in all the technical fields involved in making bioweapons, who were dispatched to Baghdad by the Defense Intelligence Agency for an analysis of the trailers. Their actions and findings were described to a Washington Post reporter in interviews with six government officials and weapons experts who participated in the mission or had direct knowledge of it.
And have you noticed that the Right Wingers have quietly retired the meme about, "recently released declassified documents proving WMD." Look if these people want to keep on deluding themselves, and lying to their readers, that is their perogative, but the truth is, its over, Bush and his administration are a cesspool of lies and manipulation and a disgrace to the offices they hold.
The lies, the manipulation, the dirty politics... It's all coming home to roost. There will be denials, and spinning and as reported yesterday on a number of blogs, Cheney will likely fall on his sword.
"On Monday, former Secretary of State Colin Powell told me that he and his department's top experts never believed that Iraq posed an imminent nuclear threat, but that the president followed the misleading advice of Vice President Dick Cheney and the CIA in making the claim.
Probably part of the contingency from the begining.
But there is enough shame to go around.... I have said from day one, that in the age of 24/7 Cable news and Blogs, a lie can not go unexposed forever, and it would appear that despite two years of failed efforts by Progressive Blogs to expose the incredible corruption of this administration, that the truth is finaly starting to seem in with the American People... Thank God.
a.) Incredibly Naive.
b.) Immoral Liars who will do anything to support thier beliefs and justify them.
or
c.) Just unwilling to accept the fact that they were WRONG.
or perhaps, ALL OF THE ABOVE.
Gandelman says it best in his post on the subject:
In reality, though, the issue here isn't just about intelligence being wrong. It gets back to the issue that has dogged this administration repeatedly — credibility.
Bush's speeches on weapons of mass destruction (as anyone can see by watching old videos of them) were quite explicit in stating their existence. Bush did NOT deliver speeches with any "hedge words." He stated his case as a certain fact.
The questions become (a) if Bush was aware that there had been serious questions before his speeches over the biolabs being a real threat and (b) if he was, why his speeches didn't at least mention that more investigation of them was going to be underway due to some questions raised about the degree of threat.
This will be one more issue where Democrats will shout "aha!" and loyal Republicans will immediately into defense lawyer/go-on-the-offensive mode. But the real significance is that this is one more news story in one more news cycle hitting home the message to many Americans that this administration at worst has a credibility problem and its words cannot be trusted or at best is competency challenged. Some will wonder: if this was out there why didn't the President at least temper his comments? And some may conclude: because it wouldn't have helped his agenda to mention it.
And he is of course right, the Rightwing Blogsphere is doing a much better job at parsing words than Bush did, completely ignoring, as Bush did, anything that does not justify their point.
"By conservative counts, nearly 200 civilian men have been executed in the past two weeks and dumped on Baghdad's streets. Many have been hogtied. Some have had acid splashed on their faces. Others have been found without toes, fingers, eyes." Gettleman, who had been away from Iraq for more than a year, wrote that something fundamental had changed: The violence had "turned inward" into sectarian warfare...
But there are lots of new schools and hospitals and shit.. And the insurgency is in it's last throes, I know because Dick "Shotgun Chenney," said so, over a year ago... And besides, it's getting better every day. Uh huh...
RAMSTEIN AIR BASE, Germany (AP) - Former hostage Jill Carroll strongly disavowed statements she had made during captivity in Iraq and shortly after her release, saying Saturday she had been repeatedly threatened.
In a video, recorded before she was freed and posted by her captors on an Islamist Web site, Carroll spoke out against the U.S. military presence. But Carroll said the recording was made under threat. Her editor has said three men were pointing guns at her at the time.
"During my last night in captivity, my captors forced me to participate in a propaganda video. They told me I would be released if I cooperated. I was living in a threatening environment, under their control, and wanted to go home alive. So I agreed," she said in a statement read by her editor in Boston.
"Things that I was forced to say while captive are now being taken by some as an accurate reflection of my personal views. They are not."
I got to give it to Wizbang for not piling on, and for actually putting THE FACTS up tonight for all the Right Wingers to read.
It's also becoming increasingly disturbing to witness the almost mindless rage of many on the right, who have this knee-jerk, vicious reaction to anyone, even a hostage, for god's sake, who doesn't constantly mouth a programmed screed of platitudes about "the terrorists!" and swear undying loyalty to George W. Bush. What is it that they want from Jill Carroll? If she's not in the cult, then she really wasn't abducted? She's "one of them?" Commenters and even bloggers on some of these sites are actually saying this stuff... and none has produced a scintilla of evidence, despite Ms. Carroll's long record of published journalism, that proves she somehow "hates America."
Realtiy check. Ms. Carroll has been through hell. And she, along with 86 other journalists still held captive in Iraq, have exhibited more bravery by going into the war zone to get vital information to the public, than the armchair Jack Bauers tapping away at their keyboards could ever pretend to. I'd like to see Debbie Schlussel do something braver than tease her hair before she criticizes what Jill Carroll did to survive, and how she's coping now.
Read the whole thing. The most interesting thing to me, as is pointed out in the above post.... "The same clowns who attack people like Carroll, and rant and rave about support for the war and the old red white and blue, are totall fucking cowards who don't have the balls to do what Carroll did, and who's support for the war is long on LIP and short on action. You want to support the war, there IS a recruiting office near you. You want to blow rose essence up everyone's ass about how great things are going in Iraq. Earn some credibility, GO to Iraq and report first hand, otherwise shut the hell up.
According to this report, Jill Carroll was under pressure from the group that kidnapped her while taping the interview
"Jill Carroll's kidnappers reportedly warned her before her release that she might be killed if she cooperated with the Americans or went to the Green Zone, saying it was infiltrated by insurgents."
"Bergenheim said Friday that Carroll's parents, who spoke to her about the video, told him it was "conducted under duress. When you're making a video and having to recite certain things with three men with machine guns standing over you, you're probably going to say exactly what you're told to say," Bergenheim added."
I hope that clears up a few things for the likes of "Little Green Footballs" who attacked her immediately upon her release. Here's some comments that are approved by Charles Johnson about Jill:
"I've been watching this traitor bitch fawn all over her captors this morning. "Nice furniture, safe, nice clothes, they NEVER threatened me". I'm very glad you were so comforatble while working to undermine our efforts in Iraq. Now, wipe that muslim DNA from your face and confess to pre-planning this?"
"She's probably coming home with a suitcase full of cash (her kickback) and a dose of the clap."
Whatever... These people are beyond being idiots. Cut the woman some slack. If anyone should be accussed of being a Bukkake recipient, it is these morons from the Right, who have taken so many facials from Karl Rove and the Bush Administration, that they should be elegible for the Porn Actors pension fund.
What would you say to your captors after months as a prisoner? You'd tell them exactly what they want to hear. Remember, the only video we have of Jill Carroll are two segments taped while she was still a prisoner--under a considerable amount of duress. The second video we have is one taped in the offices of The Islamic Party of Iraq--the political front for the same terrorists who had victimized her!
No one has logged more post on terrorism in Iraq than Rusty, and he seems to be one of the decent people who are taking politics out of this and considering the victim. Right on Rusty!
And I am sure a ton of others. Today has been another one of my busy "work" days, so I have not had much of a chance to read or comment on other blog posts. As usual, Rusty seems to have the most comprehensive coverage, along with The Moderate Voice. I dont have much to add to the story. I am glad to see the young woman was not hurt or killed. I am sure that she will be fine and make millions on the book that we KNOW is coming from all this.
Other than that, I am just happy to see that more of the Hostages are making it out alive today. There was a time where a week did not pass, without a grissly beheading video floating around the net.
You know, I just have a question. I mean, the coverage -- they don't like the coverage, maybe, because we were sold a different ending to this story three years ago. We were told we'd be embraced as conquering heroes, flower petals strewn in the soldiers' paths, unity government would be formed, everything would be rosy. This, three years after the fact, the troops would be home. Well, it's not turning out that way. And if somebody came into New York City and blew up St. Patrick's Cathedral and in the resulting days they were finding 50 and 60 dead bodies on the streets in New York, do you suppose the news media would cover it? You're damn right they would. This is nonsense: "It's the media's fault the news isn't good in Iraq." The news isn't good in Iraq. There's violence in Iraq. People are found dead every day in the streets of Baghdad. This didn't turn out the way the politicians told us it would. And it's our fault? I beg to differ...
Our troops must be really "feeling the love," about now...
And the outrageous ABUSE "support," of our troops continues...
Besides bringing antibiotics and painkillers, military personnel nationwide are heading back to Iraq with a cache of antidepressant and anti-anxiety medications.
The psychotropic drugs are a bow to a little-discussed truth fraught with implications: Mentally ill service mem-bers are being returned to combat.
The redeployments are legal, and the service members are often eager to go. But veterans groups, lawmakers and mental-health professionals fear that the practice lacks adequate civilian oversight. They also worry that such redeployments are becoming more frequent as multiple combat tours become the norm and traumatized service members are retained out of loyalty or wartime pressures to maintain troop numbers.
Sen. Barbara Boxer hopes to address the controversy through the Department of Defense Task Force on Mental Health, which is expected to start work next month. The California Democrat wrote the legislation that created the panel. She wants the task force to examine deployment policies and the quality and availability of mental-health care for the military.
"We've also heard reports that doctors are being encouraged not to identify mental-health illness in our troops. I am asking for a lot of answers," Boxer said during a March 8 telephone interview. "If people are suffering from mental-health problems, they should not be sent on the battlefield."
Stress reduces a person's chances of functioning well in combat, said Frank M. Ochberg, a psychiatrist for 40 years and a founding member of the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies.
"Stress reduces a person's chances of functioning well in combat..."
Duh... Yeah....
Let's cut the crap shall we? I mean it is obvious at this point that the well has run dry. It is time for every damned Conservative of age, and who is healthy... and has supported this war, to sign up, and let these poor guys who have reached the end of their rope, come home. Whatta ya say guys?
I think it would be immoral to leave Iraq in it's present state... That does not mean I support the war, and I never will, no matter how many alleged documents "conveniently," appear to support pre-war claims of terrorist ties, as Bush's numbers continue to slide. In fact I find it incredible that the people who still ride with this bullshit actually believe it, or think we should. Let's just look at this... Either the documents are real, which further proves the incompetence of this administration in having the smoking guy for three years and never revealing it to the world, or the documents are fakes and a lame attempt to boost poll numbers that are sinking into oblivion, by belatedly 're-justifying the war. Either way, anyone with an ounce of intelligence should be at minimum questioning them... But then the only time the Right questions anything, is when it makes them look bad.
There has been a lot of talk about Iraq becoming our generation's Vietnam. The war supporters rant and rave and quote statistics to prove this isn't so. On the face of it, you could probably say they are right... statistically... But watch this trailer from Full Metal Jacket, and catch the parallels.
See, what we all need to do is.... "Get with the Program..."
After all, inside every "Raghead," is an American trying to get out. Right?
For those folks who are always trying to convince us of how great things are in Iraq... You know who you are...
BAGHDAD, March 8 - Gunmen wearing what appeared to be the uniforms of Iraqi Interior Ministry commandos stormed a private security company in the capital Wednesday afternoon and kidnapped as many as 50 employees, a ministry official said. In an atmosphere of spiraling lawlessness, other violence killed at least 47 people across the country between Tuesday and Wednesday nights.
In the deadliest incident, the bodies of 18 men, all bound at the wrists and blindfolded, were found piled in an abandoned minibus late Tuesday by a U.S. military patrol in Mansour, a mixed neighborhood of Shiite and Sunni Arabs in western Baghdad, the U.S. military said in a statement Wednesday.
Baghdad police said that 15 of the victims, including the driver, had been strangled and that three had been shot in the back of the head.
The killings and mass kidnapping were new illustrations of deteriorating security in many parts of Iraq, particularly the capital. Multiple slayings, often of people from the same family or religious sect discovered bound and gagged, have become commonplace.
Sunni Arab politicians and religious leaders allege that death squads from Iraq's Shiite-led Interior Ministry -- which reportedly has absorbed many members of private Shiite militias who have conflicting loyalties -- are often behind the killings. The government denies the charge.
Last month, Maj. Gen. Joseph Peterson said American troops in January had arrested a group of 22 Interior Ministry police commandos on the verge of executing a detained Sunni man. "We have found one of the death squads," Peterson said in an interview with the Chicago Tribune, which first reported the incident. "We continue to believe that there's more of these out there."
A bomb planted under a car exploded Wednesday in Baghdad as a convoy from the Interior Ministry was passing, killing two ministry commandos who were securing the route and injuring three bodyguards assigned to Interior Minister Bayan Jabr, according to Col. Hadi al-Timimi of the Baghdad police. He said Jabr, one of the top Shiite officials in the government, was not riding in the convoy.
Gunmen in western Baghdad attacked the home of an Interior Ministry adviser, Maj. Gen. Moussa Salman, killing two of his bodyguards, the Reuters news agency reported.
The violence has escalated since the bombing of a revered Shiite mosque in Samarra, north of Baghdad, two weeks ago and has taken on increasingly sectarian tones. More than 1,000 people have been killed since the bombing, many in Shiite-Sunni violence that political and military analysts fear could push the country into civil war.
The violence has fueled political chaos as well. Sunni Arab and Kurdish politicians are refusing to back the Shiites' nominee for prime minister, Ibrahim al-Jafari, saying he has failed to improve the country's security in the year he has served as transitional prime minister. Iraq's new parliament has not met since it was elected in December, and leaders are threatening to delay its scheduled first session on Sunday because of arguments over who should lead the government.
Right now the Bushies have got to feel like the coach of a Football Team that started off a game winning, and found themselves getting shellacked by halftime... You know, that..."Let's just go home," feeling...
I have asked the question before, and I will ask it again. How many Iraqis need to be beheaded, garroted, shot, blow up and yes... tortured, before we are ready to say things are just as bad as under Saddam? What's the magic number guys?
I have a sneaking suspicion that Dictatorships are starting to look mighty damned tranquil to these people about now...
It is becoming increasingly apparent even to loyal Bush followers that our occupation in Iraq has turned into a full-blown, irreversible disaster. Conservative hero William Buckley, writing in the pages of National Review yesterday, emphatically proclaimed American defeat in that war.
I don't know how apparent it is...
Most of the Conservatives and War supporters I read seem to be more interested in pushing the "fantasy of an improving Iraq," if only the MSM would just report about all those damned schools that are being built...
Talk about suspension of disbelief...
I read Buckley's piece by the way... He was very flowery and philisophical in his language, leaving room for debate about what exactly he means... Very well, he wont be called a traitor... Yet.
It's a legitimate question and one that needs asking.
BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- A top Shiite political figure has joined the top Shiite cleric in Iraq in urging unity and self-restraint among citizens, an effort to calm sectarian hostilities before they degenerate into a full-blown civil war.
Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim, the head of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), Friday called the bombing of the Al-Askariya "Golden Mosque" in Samarra a strike against all Iraqis.
The attack on Wednesday triggered Shiite reprisals across Iraq, including the killings of Sunni Arabs, attacks on their mosques and institutions, and mass protests.
Al-Hakim blamed the Golden Mosque bombing not on Iraqi Sunnis, but "takfiris," or extremists, who don't represent Islam, and he cited people such as Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the head of al Qaeda in Iraq.
And, he said, Iraqis must unite to fight them. (Watch a country struggling to stay together -- 2:38)
Al-Hakim's remarks, issued in a statement read on Iraqi TV, echoed those by the Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, who asked Shiite "believers to peacefully express their sorrow and peacefully denounce and condemn this act."
Now some on the right are claiming that those of us on the Left, want Civil War in Iraq. Just to make Bush look bad. There might be some who are that jaded. But in reality, Civil War in Iraq is bad for ALL Americans. Civil War will just further destabilize a region that seems to be reeling from one crises to another.
I hope that cooler heads prevail and that the leaders of the Sunni and Shia came come together. But imagine the outrage of Catholics if someone blew up The Cathedral of Notre Dame... One thing that needs to happen is that we all need to gain a better understanding of how Muslims revere their traditions and Holy sites, perhaps by putting ourselves in their shoes.
I cant see myself using the act of terror that destroyed the Mosque as a hammer against Bush, but logic dictates that we look at the broader picture of security in Iraq, and realize that it is FUBAR. This fact can justify a wide range of arguments against the war. At what point do we look at the balance sheet and say, "we have caused more harm to this country and it's people, than good." I don't know the answer to that question. What I do know is that it is a question that needs asking....
The attack on the Shrine of the Two Imams in Samarra yesterday was certainly an atrocity and many in the media and the blogosphere see it as a sign that Iraq is already in a state of civil war or headed that way.
Despite all the, "blow rose petals up your arse," talk from Conservatives and War Supporters like my friend Dean, Iraq has been in a state of civil war almost from the minute the smoke cleared on, "Mission Accomplished."
This attack will almost certainly contribute to the instability and religious warfare going on there... I don't need to read other blogs, to realize this.
In a despicable act, terrorists in Iraq have blown up a holy Shia site in the city of Samarra, the Golden Mosque (photo and facts Via CNN).
The Grand Ayatollah Al-Sistani has called for 7 days of mourning by Shias, and for peaceful protests around the country--with strong emphasis on the peaceful.
After a horrific and gruesome attack on Shia pilgrims just a few months ago, this is yet another blow at the oppressed Shia majority in Iraq - who, it is increasingly obvious, should be viewed very much like the black majority in South Africa under Apartheid. The Sunni minority has long lorded it over, oppressed, and despised the Shia majority as well as the Kurds. They are but 20% of the population but they have for generations wielded 90% of the power. Now that they have to share it, some of them are turning toward murder and mayhem and terror in response.
It must be pretty overwhelming for most Americans to comprehend how two sects of the same religion can so hate each other as to destroy the sacred sites of their own brothers. The story got me to thinking... I know, dangerous thing heh? Well, I went in search of information about the orgins of the two branches of Islam. This article may be helpful in understanding the differences.
Add to this historical issue, tribalism and politics and you can understand why the war in Iraq has created a boiling pot, bordering on Civil War.
You know, if you look at -- if you, really, if you look at these pictures, I mean, I don't know if it's just me, but it looks just like anything you'd see Madonna, or Britney Spears do on stage. Maybe I'm -- yeah. And get an NEA grant for something like this. I mean, this is something that you can see on stage at Lincoln Center from an NEA grant, maybe on Sex in the City -- the movie. I mean, I don't -- it's just me.
I violated protocol and excerpted too much of it, but it is so good I could not decide where to break. Go read the entire post. And find out what a REAL soldier thinks about what happed at Abu Ghraib.
Stephen Gordon - Just like the rest of the country, the rhetoric on this site is intensifying as a result of the new Abu Ghraib photos. Salon just published an even newer batch of them. Beware, there is a lot of blood and nudity in the latest of the torture photos.
The people responsible will be or have been punished. That's the difference between the old and new Iraq. In the old, those responsible for the much wider torture going on were not held accountable - they were actually government sanctioned.
Wrong answer, dude. Only the lower level heads have rolled - but not the senior ones most responsible for this.
Vietnam veteran Julian (when not fighting with Pauli and Artus) defended Trevor with:
Glad to see you are still around. Most of these jack asses don't know you are in Irag and are in the army. You are the real eyewitness to history.
Guess what? I've spent over a decade in the Army, and find the actions at Abu Ghraib absolutely deplorable. I've been the eyewitness to history that Julian described; I was stationed in Germany when the wall fell. I am still proud of my minor role in tearing it down, too. While I can expect a ration of shit from people like Artus and Pauli, they should know that I got out for two reasons: doubts about the first Iraqi War followed by Clinton's absolute disrespect and misuse of the military.
Should America ever be truly threatened by some other country, I'll be in the front of the line to defend her. I'm neither a pacifist nor a member of the left - no matter what the WSJ says about myactions. I volunteered to help defend my country - not to offend other countries. We've clearly lost sight of the concept of a defensive military since WWII. It may be notable that we haven't actually had a constitutionally declared war since then, either.
Julian seems to think that bravery (and the right to hold an opinion about things military) should be reserved for those who have served. OK, dude - I've done my time, and then some, and then some more. Perhaps he and others like him will at least listen to me.
This war is bullshit. We attacked the wrong frigging people. Saddam Hussein did not kill 3,000 people on 9/11. There are no WMDs. Saddam Hussein is in jail now - negating yet another reason stated for going to war. We have no reason to be in Iraq right now. None at all.
Our rape and torture of POWs and detainees is deplorable. It serves no purpose. When I was in the Army, had any of my buddies been engaged in such activities, every last one of us would have done what we could to stop it. Not only would most of the troops reported it, commanders would have started serious investigations immediately. At a lower level, they probably would have "blanket-partied" anyone involved. I wouldn’t even rule out the possibility that someone might have fragged an NCO or junior officer involved, too.
Salon: Why we're publishing the new Abu Ghraib photos. Abu Ghraib cannot be allowed to fade away like some half-forgotten domestic political controversy, which may have prompted newsmagazine covers at the time, but now seems as irrelevant as the 2002 elections. Abu Ghraib is not an issue of partisan sound bites or refighting the decision to invade Iraq. Grotesque violations of every value that America proclaims occurred within the walls of that prison. These abuses were carried out by soldiers who wore our flag on their uniforms and apparently believed that Americans here at home would approve of their conduct. Rather than hiding what they did out of shame, they commemorated their sadism with a visual record.
Salon's publication, on the heels of the Australian broadcasting company's scoop, is a commentary, in part, on the peculiar abandonment of this story by American Big Media journalists, some of whom broke it several years ago. These pictures were important then and remain so.
The Salon piece is a powerful one, BECAUSE of the points is makes about the core of this issue. The people who have really made this a partisan issue are the Limbaughs and Malkin's of the world... The Appologist for sadism and torture. Those who made light of these accussations... The pictures that Salon has published, are not Frat Boy Hijinks. They are more like illustrations of the memoirs of the Marquis de Sade. And the Salon ones were the tame ones. If you REALLY want to see what went on in Abu Ghraib, you need to look at the ones published the other day. What happened there... What happened with the British Soldiers beating Iraqi teens, will forever mar the suppossedly noble purposes of this war. And if you think things are going to get better, you obviously are not paying attention to the news.
What is most disturbing is that we suppossedly went into Iraq to stop these things from happening. And when you look at these pictures, and I beseech you to do so... I dont think anyone with a rational mind can deny the horrors that went on in Iraq. This is a national shame, and yet not one senior officer has been punished for this. Bush likes to wear the Tag of Commander in Chief. Let him have it, but as C-in-C, he is responsible for what happened in that Torture Chamber. Today's publication of the photos presents an opportunity and a challenge for the man... Will he live up to it?
We now know, from the mouth of Scooter Libby and the pen of Murray Waas, that Vice President Cheney and other top White House officials authorized the leaking of classified information in order to defend the Bush Administration's fabricated case for war in Iraq.
But what really went on before the war, before all those desperate leaks? How did the Bush Administration fabricate a case for war?
In an important piece in Foreign Affairs, Paul R. Pillar argues that "the Bush administration disregarded the [intelligence] community's expertise, politicized the intelligence process, and selected unrepresentative raw intelligence to make its public case".
In other words: "The Bush administration deviated from the professional standard not only in using policy to drive intelligence, but also in aggressively using intelligence to win public support for its decision to go to war. This meant selectively adducing data -- 'cherry-picking' -- rather than using the intelligence community's own analytic judgments. In fact, key portions of the administration's case explicitly rejected those judgments."
The question remains, will this issue be pursued by the mainstream press to the point that it gets broad exposure?
It is obvious that conservatives and Republicans are not interested in discussing this. The debate on why we went to war has changed as a matter of convenience for them. First it was WMD's then it was remove a dictator, as if we have the right to remove governments because we dont agree with them... The whole issue of lying to go to war has been broadly pooh poohed by the Right. I do not expect this to change with this news...
Think Progress: Bush Made Up His Mind On Iraq Two Months Before Invasion.
"A memo of a two-hour meeting between the two leaders at the White House on January 31 2003 - nearly two months before the invasion - reveals that Mr Bush made it clear the US intended to invade whether or not there was a second resolution and even if UN inspectors found no evidence of a banned Iraqi weapons programme...read on
First off, I am begining to believe it highly unlikely that these guys would have allowed detailed notes to be taken at such a meeting. Secondly, who cares anymore. These memos and allegations have not made one dent in the case that Bush lied about the war, at least not with those who count the most, the undecided voters and non-aligned.
So what happens, another accussation is made, the Right and Administration supporters pooh pooh the whole thing, and we look like a bunch of conspiracy freaks.
I say show me the memo when it is verifiable, clear and definative that the administration lied. This is the kind of thing that back in the glory days of 60 Minutes, would have cleaned these clowns out of office. Now the U.S. Media is scared to touch them, even to further investigate. And as much as our beloved blogs can inflame the masses of the faithful, the real impact is NIL.
Remember the whole controversy last month over whether the American government - one way or the other - was eavesdropping on CNN star foreign reporter Christiane Amanpour?
The National Security Administration denied it. But if they weren't listening then, they'll probably start now! Matt Drudge has this breathless report on the top of his notorious Web page:
CNN's top war correspondent Christiane Amanpour now says the Iraq war has been a disaster and has created a "black hole."
Amanpour made the comments Monday evening on the all-news network.
"The Iraq war has been a disaster. It's a spiraling security disaster," Amanpour explains to Larry King. "It just gets worse and worse."
Of course she is a quasi-arab, liberal yada yada... Might as well sent her to Al Jazeera. Right Boys?
All jokes aside, Amapour showed a lot of brass in making that statement, Michelle Malkin and the like will be sharpening sabers over this one, and claiming how WONDERFUL things are in Iraq. The question I always wonder about is how many of these yodells would consider things wonderful, if they knew that just going to the market could get their asses blown to hell?
The Anbar tribes' campaign to rid the province of Zarqawi's terror organization, al-Qaeda in Iraq is in its 2nd day and so far, 270 Arab and foreign intruders have been arrested.
Usama Jad'aan, the leader of Karabila tribes in Qaim told al-Hayat that "the operation will continue to eliminate terror elements according to a quality plan" and added "270 Arab and foreign intruders have been arrested, in addition to some Iraqis who were providing them shelter".
To bad the Afghan's didn't do this a long time ago. If they had, maybe there would not have been a 9/11.
How many innocent Iraqis have died during the same period? How many policemen? How many others...
I don't know what you call it, but winning, no...
And saying so just makes it harder for Americans to realize that this is going to be a long war and that really winning it will require us to continue to sacrifice.
WASHINGTON, Jan. 17 - A high-level intelligence assessment by the Bush administration concluded in early 2002 that the sale of uranium from Niger to Iraq was "unlikely" because of a host of economic, diplomatic and logistical obstacles, according to a secret memo that was recently declassified by the State Department.
Among other problems that made such a sale improbable, the assessment by the State Department's intelligence analysts concluded, was that it would have required Niger to send "25 hard-to-conceal 10-ton tractor-trailers" filled with uranium across 1,000 miles and at least one international border.
The analysts' doubts were registered nearly a year before President Bush, in what became known as the infamous "16 words" in his 2003 State of the Union address, said that Saddam Hussein had sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.
The White House later acknowledged that the charge, which played a part in the decision to invade Iraq in the belief that Baghdad was reconstituting its nuclear program, relied on faulty intelligence and should not have been included in the speech. Two months ago, Italian intelligence officials concluded that a set of documents at the center of the supposed Iraq-Niger link had been forged by an occasional Italian spy.
A handful of news reports, along with the Robb-Silberman report last year on intelligence failures in Iraq, have previously made reference to the early doubts expressed by the State Department's bureau of intelligence and research in 2002 concerning the reliability of the Iraq-Niger uranium link.
But the intelligence assessment itself - including the analysts' full arguments in raising wide-ranging doubts about the credence of the uranium claim - was only recently declassified as part of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit brought by Judicial Watch, a conservative legal group that has sought access to government documents on terrorism and intelligence matters. The group, which received a copy of the 2002 memo among several hundred pages of other documents, provided a copy of the memo to The New York Times.
The White House declined to discuss details of the declassified memo, saying the Niger question had already been explored at length since the president's State of the Union address.
I guess they would decline to discuss it... I mean what were they going to say, "Damn! Busted again! Hope nobody reads this!"
I dont expect to see many conservative bloggers rushing to apologize to Joe Wilson or his wife either... I have gotten to the point where I just have to laugh at the ridiculous nature of some of the other side's arguments when it comes to Bush. I mean either they are incredibly stupid, naive, or just don't give a rats ass as long as their boy stays on top. This rancid meat has been stinking for so long that it's not even apetizing to maggots any more... And yet they keep excusing and denying... Makes you wonder... Makes you think, that sometimes all the talk about the traitorous Left, is just a reflection of their own guilt in being unable to acknowledge that they were sold a bill of goods, and in making the buy, they sold out their conservative ideas and the country as a whole...
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Paul Bremer, who led the U.S. civilian occupation authority in Iraq after the 2003 invasion, has admitted the United States did not anticipate the insurgency in the country, NBC Television said on Friday.
Bremer, interviewed by the network in connection with release of his book on Iraq, recounted the decision to disband the Iraqi army quickly after arriving in Baghdad, a move many experts consider a major miscalculation.
When asked who was to blame for the subsequent Iraqi rebellion, in which thousands of Iraqis and Americans have died, Bremer said "we really didn't see the insurgency coming," the network said in a news release.
The network, which did not publish a transcript of the interview, added that Bremer's comments suggested "the focus of the war effort was in the wrong place."
Interesting in what way, Dave? The reactions of the left and right blogosphere, or the effect Saddam's claims have on his trial?
For my part, I'm really looking forward to reading diatribes on:
(L) Since there was Abu Ghraib, this is entirely believable - no, almost certainly true...
and
(R) This is utter bullshit, and doesn't even bear looking into.
In the real world, of course, it certainly warrants a visit from a Doctor and a review of the access logs for Saddam's quarters - with a hefty dose of salt (it's Saddam, after all). Whether or not any of the high traffic blogs on the left or right take that tack remains to be seen.
My Answer:
Interesting in it's political implications. I don't believe that Saddam was tortured. But... he has put the message out there, seeding doubt in the minds of those who believe that the American invasion was illegal (Especially the Muslim World and some Europeans). He is experiencing his greatest fantasy right now, the whole prayer bit, the Anti American Diatribes, the torture accussations, the questioning of the reasons for war. I would say at this moment that Saddam is getting just what he wanted, a stage... A world stage, to promote his case against the American invasion.
I am watching CNN International right now, live coverage of the Saddam trial. Saddam is claiming that he was beaten by American jailers. "Yes I was beaten, and the marks are all over my body." Now this is going to be very interesting....
Bush gave a major speech tonight on Iraq. While I did not catch it live, I was able to read the transcript here.
Did it break new ground... Not really, except the President once again accepted responsibility for sending American Troops into Iraq, and not finding WMD's. This is pretty groundbreaking in and of itself for a President who just a year ago was still holding on to the WMD argument.
Like David at the Moderate Voice, I give the speech a B. I find myself agreeing with a lot of what Bush said tonight, including completing the job. As I have said many times, leaving an unstable Iraq would be a far worse decision than going to War in the first place.
I believe, unlike many of my bretheren on the Left, that the Elections were a major step in the right direction, and I am willing to give our troops on the ground and their commanders the time that they need to finish their mission.
I believe many mistakes have been made in executing this war, the first being going to war in the first place, but I am willing to acknowledge that if a stable, peaceful and democratic Iraq results from the war, then it may have been worth it.
Time will tell. At the moment, this Administration faces a steep uphill climb in earning my trust and respect, something I was willing to give them in the days following 9/11, but which they have thrown away with dirty trick after dirty trick. Nevertheless, I am pleased to see the President at least trying to provide some real leadership and vision on Iraq, even if it fails perfection.
Dean writes of one Iraqi's grattitude to Americans for making yesterday's elections possible. He closes with this statement:
"What's saddest of all to me is that congressional Democrats could have taken a big share of the credit for this. But instead they embraced that jackass Howard Dean and the "Bush lied!" and "Bush's war" crowd."
My point is a simple one. There is no reason in my mind that one can be proud of the Iraqi people for taking this monumental step, and proud of the sacrafice of our troops in helping them to get to this point, and at the same time question the policy and means in which we got into this war.
The question is not the ultimate success which has been achieved, but the right of the American people to know the truth about why we are sending our sons and daughters off to war. This is a fundamental issue which some on the Right seem to consistently ignore.
I am not Anti War. When America or our allies are threatened, I support 100% our right and obligation to defend ourselves. If Weapons of Mass Destruction had been found in Iraq, I would be 100% in support of the War. They were not, and sufficient questions have arrissen to make many Americans suspicious as to whether our Government knew this. My oppossition to the war lies in the principle that the American people have the right to know WHY we are going to war. If the reasons given for doing so are invalid, regardless of the ultimate results, our government needs to be held accountable for both the cost in blood and the cost in taxpayers money.
A congressional report made public yesterday concluded that President Bush and his inner circle had access to more intelligence and reviewed more sensitive material than what was shared with Congress when it gave Bush the authority to wage war against Iraq.
Democrats said the 14-page report contradicts Bush's contention that lawmakers saw all the evidence before U.S. troops invaded in March 2003, stating that the president and a small number of advisers "have access to a far greater volume of intelligence and to more sensitive intelligence information."
More troubling questions about what our lawmakers knew in approving the war. Now some on the Right will pooh pooh this as nothing new, irrelevant or worse... Some on the Left will see it as proof that, "Bush Lied." I am saying niether at this point. What I am saying is, "Don't we have the right to know?"
It is a simple proposition, I dont see why more on the Right, DONT GET IT?
It isn't all about sour grapes Jeff. I caught some coverage on CNN (International Edition) today about the Election. It seems all possitive to me. Even the hardliners in Iraq seem to be giving the elections a chance. If you are/were expecting me to try to find a copper lining in that golden cloud, you are mistaken. I was against the war. I am still against the war, I will be against the war... None of that changes the fact that I am extremely proud of the heroism of the average Iraqi in going to vote today and in trying to put their country back together. So I wish them well, and most of all I wish them a speedy recovery of their Sovereignty, and a return of our troops to their homes.
How long will Republicans continue to block information about pre-war intelligence?
I don't think much longer. This thing has been stinking for a LONG time, and most Americans have chosen to ignore the stench, but recent dissatisfaction with the war has forced Republicans to change the spin from "a justified war," to "We need to finish what we started." The second part I agree with, but the Truth about why we went to war in Iraq and why over 2,000 Americans are dead, needs to be exposed.
There is a lot of discussion going on about Congressman Murtha's recent comments about getting out of Iraq. Some of the response from the Right has been called "sliming," that may be the case in many cases, but the debate is legitimate. In my opinion we simply can't leave Iraq at this point, but that does not mean we should not examine why we are there in the first place.
The Keystone Kops Of Iraq... Or how we blew another one....
LA Times: U.S. Military Covertly Pays to Run Stories in Iraqi Press. As part of an information offensive in Iraq, the U.S. military is secretly paying Iraqi newspapers to publish stories written by American troops in an effort to burnish the image of the U.S. mission in Iraq. The articles, written by U.S. military "information operations" troops, are translated into Arabic and placed in Baghdad newspapers with the help of a defense contractor, according to U.S. military officials and documents obtained by the Los Angeles Times.
As Gillmor says, the Keystone Cops masquerading as PsyOps Troops have now ensured that the Average Iraqi wont believe anything they read in their own papers... Where do we get these idiotic ideas?
David A. says it's our fault, it's up to us to fix it.
Two questions come to mind:
1) Is that fair? and
2) Okay, if it's fair, what do we do now?
One of his commenters took offense to my comment that Iraq is a more dangerous place today.... Something which seems pretty common sense based on the news reports, but to back up my point I did some googling....
Saddam: between 500,000 and 1,000,000 Iraqis killed (includes Kurds)
U.S. Occupation: about 100,000 killed directly or indirectly (includes Kurds)
What this means is that if the U.S. invasion has lead to an average of about 70,000 deaths per year -- based on the survey that finds Iraqi death rate increased by 100,000 over the first 18 months of the occupation -- then it is likely that Iraqis are dying at a higher rate under the U.S. occupation than they were under Saddam's regime.
If we take the estimates that between 500,000 and 1,000,000 Iraqis died during Saddam's rule (1979 - 2003), it yields an annual death rate of between 25,000 to 50,000 per year under Saddam.
Based on the figure of 100,000 Iraqi deaths from the invasion, it could be said that the new annual death rate under U.S. "rule" (or lack of) is somewhere around 66,000 Iraqis per year.
It does not take a Rocket Scientist to understand that Iraq under Saddam was a dangerous place for many Iraqis. If you somehow ended up on the wrong side of the debate with Saddam or his regime, you died, it was that simple. But what percentage of Iraqis lived in that kind of fear? Today, going to the Market, sending your children to school, simply wandering outside, can lead to unexpected death. The reality of the situation in Iraq, regardless of one's position on the war, is that the country is in turmoil. And it appears that it is not just the Jihadist that the average Iraqi has to worry about.... So the blow sunshine up our collective assess set, can go on with their fantasies about Iraq the Model, we are a long way from any model other than one of Chaos!
I am sure that this is just an isolated incident, just like Abu Gharib, right????
A "trophy" video appearing to show security guards in Baghdad randomly shooting Iraqi civilians has sparked two investigations after it was posted on the internet, the Sunday Telegraph can reveal.
The video has sparked concern that private security companies, which are not subject to any form of regulation either in Britain or in Iraq, could be responsible for the deaths of hundreds of innocent Iraqis.
The Iraq argument is in full swing right now. There are the "It was right, no matter why it was started," crowd, the "Bring our troops home now," crowd, and the "We should have never been there in the first place," but we need to finish the job crowd...
I read this piece on Dean's Blog today, and while I don't agree with the blanket assessment, I do happen to believe that we can not leave Iraq without establishing stability (whatever that means in the crazy world we now live in).
The truth is that I don't believe the majority of those who are against the war, "want us to fail." No doubt there are some whose hatred for Bush is so intense that they might feel that way, but I am compelled to believe that the majority of Americans who are against the war, simply want to see an end to it. Many don't care at this point what the eventual outcome is for the Iraqi people, they simply want to see Americans stop dying. I can't allow myself to feel that way. My own sense of justice compels me to believe that we created a far more dangerous Iraq for the average Iraqi, than the one they lived in under Saddam. We have to fix that, and I can not support another Saigon Syndrome, where we simply walk away...
While I DO Think we need to understand why we got into a war in Iraq in the first place... The American People and our veterans deserve no less... It IS time we discussed how we get out, and more importantly, how we leave a better place than we found.
Despite all the denial, the truth is coming out... bit by bit. Not that the truth has not been there all along. The apologist for the war, and the out and out propagandist, have done a good job of distorting the facts and creating an amazing array of confusing spin that would discourage even the most ardent seeker of truth to walk away scratching their head. This Slate Article does a good job of breaking it down, read the whole thing, then think about the nearly 20,000 dead and wounded Americans and tens of thousands of dead and wounded Iraqis!
Here's what we do know already, without a congressional inquiry: Members of the Bush Administration were dishonest with the public and with Congress about prewar intelligence. We've known this for some time—see, for example, the comprehensive and damning story Barton Gellman and Walter Pincus wrote in the Washington Post in August 2003 ("Depiction of Threat Outgrew Supporting Evidence"). Over the past two years, several incidents of executive-branch dishonesty in the run-up to the war have turned into subscandals of their own: the aluminum tubes that Iraq used for missiles and not gas centrifuges, the yellowcake uranium that Saddam didn't try to buy from Niger, the mobile biological warfare laboratories that turned out to be hydrogen generators for balloons, the al-Qaida chemical warfare training that was based on a false confession, the meeting with Mohamed Atta that didn't happen in Prague.
If you examine these and other pillars of the administration's case for invading Iraq, a clear pattern emerges. Bush officials first put clear pressure on the intelligence community to support their assumptions that Saddam was developing WMD and cooperating with al-Qaida. Nonetheless, significant contrary evidence emerged. Bush hawks then overlooked, suppressed, or willfully ignored whatever cut against their views. In public, they depicted unsettled questions as dead certainties. Then, when they were caught out and proven wrong, they resisted the obvious and refused to correct the record. Finally, when their positions became utterly untenable, they claimed that they were misinformed or not told. Call this behavior what you will, but you can't describe it as either "honest" or "truthful."
Many of the White House's most serious misrepresentations involve the case that Saddam was trying to build nuclear weapons, which he had in fact stopped trying to do in 1991. "We now know that Saddam has resumed his efforts to acquire nuclear weapons," Cheney said in August 2002, in one of his conclusive comments on the subject. This position was echoed by Bush and Rice, who both conjured the specter of a mushroom cloud, as well as by Rumsfeld and Colin Powell, who went into more detail about aluminum tubes and uranium. If you were on the inside and read even the now notorious National Intelligence Estimate of 2002, you at least knew that such statements were at the very least overdrawn. Analysts at the departments of Energy and State weren't buying the aluminum tubes and yellowcake theory that formed the basis of the nuclear case.
Or consider another component of that case that has gotten less attention, the description of fresh "activity" at Saddam's known nuclear sites. A draft paper produced by Andrew Card's White House working group on Iraq, and cited in the 2003 Post article, was characteristically distorted. The document inaccurately attributed to U.N. arms inspectors the claim that satellite photographs showed signs of reconstruction and acceleration of Iraq's nuclear program. It went on to quote something chief U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix told Time: "You can see hundreds of new roofs in these photos." But the White House paper left out the second half of Blix's quote: "[B]ut you don't know what's under them." In February 2003, American inspectors visited those sites as part of U.N. teams and saw that nuclear bombs weren't being made at them. But Bush officials acted as if such counterevidence didn't exist.
Those who continue to support the war and the reasons for being in Iraq will continue to do so, and will continue their attempts to rewrite history, "It was never about WMD's." But the American people are catching on. Read TCF's post which shows how polling trends are indicating that the American people are now convinced that they were lied to about the war. Those of us who have known for a long time about the lies and have screamed about it at the top of our lungs, are finaly getting some MSM support and while it is a bit late, it will define Bush's presidency as the corrupt and vile thing that it was.
Iraqi leaders at a reconciliation conference reached out to the Sunni Arab community by calling for a timetable for the withdrawal of U.S.-led forces and saying the country's opposition had a "legitimate right" of resistance.
A day after the communique was finalized by Iraqi Shiite, Kurdish and Sunni leaders, Washington reiterated Tuesday that the United States would stay only as long as it takes to stabilize Iraq.
The communique condemned terrorism but was a clear acknowledgment of the Sunni position that insurgents should not be labeled as terrorists if they don't target innocent civilians
or institutions that provide for the welfare of Iraqis.
WASHINGTON, Nov. 5 - A top member of Al Qaeda in American custody was identified as a likely fabricator months before the Bush administration began to use his statements as the foundation for its claims that Iraq trained Al Qaeda members to use biological and chemical weapons, according to newly declassified portions of a Defense Intelligence Agency document.
Looks like the administration has some 'splainin to do.
So the moment has arrived after days of speculation and drum beating on both sides of the political spectrum. Based on the amount of spin the last couple of days, I am sure this is going to get major media play. 2,000th American Dead in Iraq! But when it all comes down to it, that will simply be simplifying an issue that most Americans simply don't want to deal with... The question of whether invading Iraq was worth even ONE American life?
BAGHDAD, Iraq -- The U.S. military has announced the death of an American soldier who was wounded in Iraq.
That brings the U.S. death toll to 2,000.
The toll compiled by The Associated Press reached 2,000 with the death of an Army sergeant who was wounded by a roadside bomb north of Baghdad. He died last weekend in Texas.
Staff Sgt. George Alexander of Killeen, Texas, was wounded last week in Samarra, north of Baghdad. He was based at Fort Benning in Georgia.
Earlier Tuesday, President George W. Bush warned the nation to brace for an even higher casualty count, saying there's more work ahead in Iraq before the job is done.
But the first U.S. service member to die in the Iraq war is just as important as the 2,000th. A U.S. military spokesman said that is why the military does not consider the death of the 2,000th American in Iraq a milestone.
And the chief spokesman for the American-led coalition force is asking reporters not to treat it as a milestone, either.
The military earlier Tuesday announced the deaths of two Marines killed last week in Baghdad. Their deaths raised to 1,999 the number of members of the U.S. military killed since the Iraq war started in March of 2003. This latest death makes the toll hit 2,000.
But in an e-mail, military spokesman Steve Boylan spoke of what he calls the "daily milestones" in the war against terrorism, which he said are rarely covered. Those include the struggles faced by families of soldiers serving for a year or more. and the Iraqis who've fought along with U.S. forces, making themselves daily targets for militant attacks.
As for the 2,000 death, Boylan calls that an "artificial mark on the wall."
I have mixed emotions about the numbers game. I would tend to agree that the first soldier killed is just as important as the 2,000th. I would also tend to agree that it is but one statistic among many sad statistics of this war. Discounting the thousands of Iraqi's dead, or the victims of terrorist atrocities in Iraq since the war started is a slap in the face of those sacrifices.
Nor is it possible to look at the state of the war in Iraq today and to imagine 2,000 being anywhere near the finaly death tally for American troops. We are a society obsessed with numbers and no doubt when the number of U.S. killed surpasses that of those who died on 9/11, there will be other comparisons.
I had a long, (too long) conversation with a conservative friend of mine today about the war, and I realized during that discussion how fruitless it is to even have a discussion on the subject.
Those who believe this war was just, will continue to do so no matter what. Those who think we should bring our troops home regardless of the eventual outcome in Iraq, will likewise continue to feel that way. Those like me....
I feel that the war was wrong, possibly illegal and almost certainly based on lies, but believe we need to, "fix what we broke," and will more than likely continue to believe that way.
None of it matters to the dead... And none of it will bring them back...
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The U.S. Army is investigating reports that troops took photographs of dead Iraqis and traded them to a pornographic Web site in return for access to that site, Army sources said Wednesday.
Army spokesman Paul Boyce told CNN that a preliminary investigation had found "no evidence of a felony crime," but both he and Col. Joseph Curtin said the Web postings, if verified, could constitute a violation of the Uniform Code of Military Justice provisions on good conduct.
"There is no criminal investigation into the matter of photos of deceased bodies in Iraq being posted on the worldwide Web anonymously," Boyce said. "Army criminal investigators examined this recently as a preliminary inquiry but found there is no specific evidence of a felony crime."
Curtin acknowledged an ongoing investigation, however, saying it was focusing on "allegations that soldiers may have exchanged personally taken photographs of dead Iraqis in exchange for pornographic access."
Chris Wilson, owner of the site, told CNN that he had given members of the military serving in Iraq and Afghanistan access to the site for free -- if they provided him with a photograph proving they were serving there.
If these allegations prove to be true, it is another sad example of how U.S. Military conduct standards have deteriorated in the last half century. If we were shocked by Abu Ghraib, then these latest allegations are all the more shocking and evidence of moral decline and a lack of discipline on the part of some of our American Troops. We have come a long way since the hallowed days of "America's Greatest Generation," and we are NOT a better place for it.
This represents a decline in military discipline as well, one that will never be fixed as long as we focus on punishing individual soldiers instead of focusing on the command structure that ignores such behavior and in some cases even advocates it.
Update: Boyd points out below that I painted with too broad a brush in this post, so I made a change above. But I do dissagree with Boyd on one point. This is a command issue, and a disciplinary one. Now perhaps more is being done behind the scenes to address these types of issues than we know about, but certainly there is enough evidence of abuse accross the spectrum of the "war on terrorism," to be justified in assumming that something is seriously wrong.
Former US president Bill Clinton sharply criticised George W. Bush for the Iraq War and the handling of Hurricane Katrina, and voiced alarm at the swelling US budget deficit.
Breaking with tradition under which US presidents mute criticisms of their successors, Clinton said the Bush administration had decided to invade Iraq "virtually alone and before UN inspections were completed, with no real urgency, no evidence that there were weapons of mass destruction."
The Iraq war diverted US attention from the war on terrorism "and undermined the support that we might have had," Bush said in an interview with an ABC's "This Week" programme.
Clinton said there had been a "heroic but so far unsuccessful" effort to put together an constitution that would be universally supported in Iraq.
The US strategy of trying to develop the Iraqi military and police so that they can cope without US support "I think is the best strategy. The problem is we may not have, in the short run, enough troops to do that," said Clinton.
On Hurricane Katrina, Clinton faulted the authorities' failure to evacuate New Orleans ahead of the storm's strike on August 29.
People with cars were able to heed the evacuation order, but many of those who were poor, disabled or elderly were left behind.
"If we really wanted to do it right, we would have had lots of buses lined up to take them out," Clinton.
He agreed that some responsibility for this lay with the local and state authorities, but pointed the finger, without naming him, at the former director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).
And if you have ANY doubts about how poorly the war in Iraq has been executed, you need look no further than this week's Time Magazine.
Yeah it's a worse disaster than than we knew. And is beginning to look like the... shall we say it... Quagmire, that supporters are so afraid of.
In the meantime, hundreds continue to die weekly, British soldiers are torched in their tank, and it appears that the, "Last Throes," are going to last a long, long time.
As for the Hurricane Katrina thing.... I am a Gang Banger.
Update: John Kerry joins in and hammers the administration. If he had shown this kind of spirit on the campaign trail, he might be President.
Bush is well known for his soaring rhetoric, especially when it comes to Iraq. It is a conflict born out or rhetoric, and indeed sustained by it. But the rhetoric has begun to ring hollow with a majority of the American public, and statements comparing Bush's War on Terror with the greatest conflict of the last century is well.... Ridiculous!
Accept for a moment the argument that Iraq is but one theater in a global war on terrorism. Overlook that, to the degree this is true, it's because Bush's invasion of Iraq and his many miscalculations afterward helped make it so. Even so, it would be an enormous leap to claim that the war in Iraq or the broader war on terror is the political, strategic, or moral equivalent of World War II.
Al-Qaida or its sundry offshoots could crash many more airplanes, wreck many more buildings, and bomb many more subways and the magnitude of their power, and the urgency of their threat, would still fall far short of that posed by Nazi Germany. The panzers of the Wehrmacht rolled across the plains of Europe, toppling governments with ease, imposing totalitarian regimes, and killing millions in their wake. This was a war of civilization on a level that today's war however you might define it doesn't begin to approach.
But let's say that the two wars World War II and Iraq (or the broader war on terrorism) are comparable, that their stakes are even remotely as high. Then why is President Bush fighting this war so tentatively?
From December 1941 to August 1945 the attack on Pearl Harbor until the declaration of Allied victory the United States manufactured 88,430 tanks and 274,941 combat aircraft. Yet in the two years after the invasion of Iraq, much less the four years since the attack on the World Trade Center, the Bush administration has not built enough armor platings to protect our soldiers' jeeps from roadside bombs.
To fund World War II, the United States drastically expanded and raised taxes. (At the start of the war, just 4 million Americans had to pay income tax; by its end, 43 million did.) Beyond that, 85 million Americans—half the population at the time—answered the call to buy War Bonds, $185 billion worth. Food was rationed, scrap metal was donated, the entire country was on a war footing. By contrast, President Bush has asked the citizenry for no sacrifice, no campaigns of national purpose, to fight or fund the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan. In fact, he has proudly cut taxes, heaving the hundreds of billions of dollars in war costs on top of the already swelling national debt.
If this war's stakes are comparable to World War II's, the entire nation should be enlisted in its cause not necessarily to fight in it, but at least to pay for it. And if President Bush is not willing to call for some sort of national sacrifice, he cannot expect anyone to believe the stakes are really high.
Bush has not asked the American public to sacrifice for the war in Iraq. If he had, I doubt it would have taken this long for the American Public to become fed up with it. This disorganized, disjointed conflict, in which our young men and women are sent to die in a meatgrinder of RPG's and Roadside Bombs, has been a disaster from it's inception.
And despite claims to the contrary, the shortage in available Guard Units due to the war, has no doubt had an impact on the ability to rapidly respond the victims of Katrina. Would anyone argue that we are one disaster away from a tragedy of ungodly proportions. This administration is an undeclared National Disaster. We put a drunken Frat Boy in the highest office in the land, fronted and propped up by an old boy network and a political hack in Karl Rove, and NOW... NOW with thousands dead in Iraq, New Orleans wiped off the map,fiscal problems that would make The Lemon Drop Kid blush, political scandals ranging from Gay Hookers in the Press Room to Outing CIA agents for revenge, only NOW do we start looking at the five year train wreck and international embarrassment that this administration is...
It is beyond belief to me, that an entire Nation, a nation with the backbone of heroes, could be so cowed by 9/11, that we allowed this man to waltz back into the White House on an Agenda of "Fear All the Time." That Bush is President for three more years, means that the opportunities to continue to squander this nations assets, destroy our international esteem, and generally continue to FUBAR everything in sight, is a reality that we all must face, and all must take responsibility for. My ONLY hope is that in the Mid Term elections, The American people wake up and realize that the only way to apply some sanity to an America on the brink, is to throw those out, Republican and Democrat, who have collaborated with this government. Then there is a long path to getting our house back in order, and I am afraid it will be a few more years yet, before we can start the real cleaning...
In the mean time, The President continues his "vacation," while 10's of thousands of Americans in Louisiana and Alabama wonder how they are going to live now that they have no job or place to live....
That headline heralds the latest bit of drivel to spill from the keyboard of Rob, "Say Anything," Port, (I think he takes his name way too literally.)
The post goes on to excerpt a bunch of polls that:
a.) Document the obvious... (I don't think anyone on the Left believes leaving Iraq will end Terrorism. HELLO, 9/11 happened BEFORE Iraq, and had NOTHING to do with Iraq.)
b.) That only about 39% of Americans believe we should immediately pull out of Iraq. (Ahem... Americans are inherently decent people, we FUBARED Iraq, we can't leave it FUBARED.)
c.) That 3% more Americans have an unfavorable opinion of Cindy Sheehan, than have a favorable one. (Is Cindy running for office and someone forgot to tell me?)
Now, I have read the post about six times now, and other than a LAME attempt to convince the already convinced (Wizbang Readers), that Americans somehow support the war and hate Cindy Sheehan, I frankly don't get it...
With nearly 60% of Americans seeing Iraq as a mistake, and 56% of Americans expressing disapproval of the President's job performance, it does not come as a surprise that Bush is doing the rah rah routine over Iraq.
Likewise it is no surprise that the Conservaphere continues to try and spin positives out of what obviously has become a disaster. The war has become a boat anchor around the President's neck, and it is only getting worse. Rather than face reality and admit that the policy is a failure, the Right Wingers are so upset that they are attacking each other... And these are people who are always talking about "hate."
It has become obvious over the last week that Cindy is having an impact. The Spin, and spin of the spin continues on the Right, trying to discredit her. Roughnecks show up in Crawford in an attempt to intimidate her, and yet her message only grows more compelling as day after day, the "Last Throes," in Iraq seem to grow longer.
Time to do a reality check guys. Cindy is not going away. Iraq is not going to suddenly get better, and the truth about what led to the war is finding resonance with more and more Americans. Time to wake up and smell the coffee.
I am not real big on conspiracy theories, and my BS meter is about as fine tuned as they come. But the stuff in the above report, and this one, are enough to scare the bejeezus out of me.
We have some very interesting people running our country right now, and I have suspected for some time that Bush isn't really the one doing the running... What they are doing is not exactly new. I have pointed out in recent posts that the resentment for US foreign policy and meddling is high in some parts of Latin America, and with just cause. What is going on right now is nothing but a return to and re-emphasis on American Imperialism. What is different is that these guys are arrogant about it, while in the past we always went about it on the QT.
Islamic terrorist have walked into the cave of a sleeping bear, woke him up and pissed him off, and given him an excuse to slap the living shit out of them, while at the same time taking their honey and anyone else's honey that they covet. In the interim, these people have made living in our country infinitely more dangerous. Everyone wants to take down the bear. In the process they have also made it a more uncomfortable place for every American who steps off the shores of the U.S.. Those who have come to and will come to hate America will not distinguish between it's leaders and it's citizens, when it comes to exacting revenge.
It has been said before but merits saying again. After 9/11, America had the sympathy and support of most of the world. That we sought justice in Afghanistan was seen as an indisputable right. On that day and for sometime afterward, Almost everyone was an American. But the people behind the Neocon Agenda sought to capitalize on that tragedy to push their agenda. The war in Iraq was a turning point for us as a state and an empire. It was the moment when we went from benevolent to BULLY, and it persists...
That these plans existed previous to 9/11 are not up for debate. Some on the conservative side would argue on the relative merits or degrees of "wrong," in these plans. Most of us, at least those among us NOT drinking the Kool Aid would argue that whatever the merits, we were lied to, and that in and of itself makes them suspicious.
The Commissar has the entire document in English. I know that the biggest concern people have expressed regard women's rights. To be honest, it is difficult to tell how Women's rights will shape up under this constitution. Article 2 is the article that raises the most concern, and yet hope:
Article (2):
1st - Islam is the official religion of the state and is a basic source of legislation:
(a) No law can be passed that contradicts the undisputed rules of Islam.
(b) No law can be passed that contradicts the principles of democracy.
(c) No law can be passed that contradicts the rights and basic freedoms outlined in this constitution.
2nd - This constitution guarantees the Islamic identity of the majority of the Iraqi people and the full religious rights for all individuals and the freedom of creed and religious practices.
The constitution covers extensively the issue of human rights, and implies that Iraq will adhere to international standards in this area.
CINDY SHEEHAN couldn't have picked a more apt date to begin the vigil that ambushed a president: Aug. 6 was the fourth anniversary of that fateful 2001 Crawford vacation day when George W. Bush responded to an intelligence briefing titled "Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States" by going fishing. On this Aug. 6 the president was no less determined to shrug off bad news. Though 14 marine reservists had been killed days earlier by a roadside bomb in Haditha, his national radio address that morning made no mention of Iraq. Once again Mr. Bush was in his bubble, ensuring that he wouldn't see Ms. Sheehan coming. So it goes with a president who hasn't foreseen any of the setbacks in the war he fabricated against an enemy who did not attack inside the United States in 2001.
When these setbacks happen in Iraq itself, the administration punts. But when they happen at home, there's a game plan. Once Ms. Sheehan could no longer be ignored, the Swift Boating began. Character assassination is the Karl Rove tactic of choice, eagerly mimicked by his media surrogates, whenever the White House is confronted by a critic who challenges it on matters of war. The Swift Boating is especially vicious if the critic has more battle scars than a president who connived to serve stateside and a vice president who had "other priorities" during Vietnam.
The most prominent smear victims have been Bush political opponents with heroic Vietnam resumes: John McCain, Max Cleland, John Kerry. But the list of past targets stretches from the former counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke to Specialist Thomas Wilson, the grunt who publicly challenged Donald Rumsfeld about inadequately armored vehicles last December. The assault on the whistle-blower Joseph Wilson - the diplomat described by the first President Bush as "courageous" and "a true American hero" for confronting Saddam to save American hostages in 1991 - was so toxic it may yet send its perpetrators to jail.
True to form, the attack on Cindy Sheehan surfaced early on Fox News, where she was immediately labeled a "crackpot" by Fred Barnes. The right-wing blogosphere quickly spread tales of her divorce, her angry Republican in-laws, her supposed political flip-flops, her incendiary sloganeering and her association with known ticket-stub-carrying attendees of "Fahrenheit 9/11." Rush Limbaugh went so far as to declare that Ms. Sheehan's "story is nothing more than forged documents, there's nothing about it that's real."
But this time the Swift Boating failed, utterly, and that failure is yet another revealing historical marker in this summer's collapse of political support for the Iraq war.
As usual Rich pulls no punches...
Read it all. It demonstrates an all to clear pattern of abuse on the part of this Administration, abuse of power, abuse of the truth, abuse of the trust of the American Public. It also demonstrates further the sense of invulnerability that this administration feels. And rightfully so. They have successfully used the same tactic again and again and again...
But as Rich says:
When the Bush mob attacks critics like Ms. Sheehan, its highest priority is to change the subject. If we talk about Richard Clarke's character, then we stop talking about the administration's pre-9/11 inattentiveness to terrorism. If Thomas Wilson is trashed as an insubordinate plant of the "liberal media," we forget the Pentagon's abysmal failure to give our troops adequate armor (a failure that persists today, eight months after he spoke up). If we focus on Joseph Wilson's wife, we lose the big picture of how the administration twisted intelligence to gin up the threat of Saddam's nonexistent W.M.D.'s.
The hope this time was that we'd change the subject to Cindy Sheehan's "wacko" rhetoric and the opportunistic left-wing groups that have attached themselves to her like barnacles. That way we would forget about her dead son. But if much of the 24/7 media has taken the bait, much of the public has not.
this time the vast majority of the American Public is NOT buying it. The very principle of repeating something often enough until it becomes truth, has backfired. The American Public has been hearing about Administration lies and manipulation for years now, and the idea is finaly starting to sink in...
The majority of Americans feel compassion for Cindy Sheehan. While her protractors are vocal, the majority see her as a Mother grieving over the loss of a son, who is entitled to her moment with the President. His fundraising, vacationing and grandstanding with Lance Armstrong have come across as callous and heartless, at the very moment when he needs to be explaining some things not only to Sheehan, but to the whole nation. Bush ran the first time as a Straight Talk candidate. Those of us who watched the campaign from the Left, never bought this in the first place, but a lot of people did. His failure to provide Americans with a straight answer on the debacle in Iraq has eroded American confidence in him, and his administration. It does not help his case when his Generals are saying one thing, His SecDef another and Vice President something entirely different altogether.
Recent poll numbers more than anything, demonstrate a lack of confidence on the part of the American Public in ANYTHING having to do with Iraq, and rightfully so...
The attacks on Sheehan have only made the matter worse. I predict that Bush will eventually meet with Sheehan, calls to do so from within his own party have made this a nearly forgone conclusion. The delays at this point are more than likely based on Karl Rove trying to determine the best way to spin a lose/lose situation for Bush.
Welcome to Daou Report readers. Please feel free to comment on the post that the Daou Report linked to, as well as anything else you find interesting on ISOU.
And if you want to read two more interesting viewpoints on the effects of the war in Iraq on Bush's legacy. Professor Bainbridge and Kevin Drum have two excellent pieces on the subject. It is heartening to see Conservatives like Bainbridge waking up to the reality of this folly.
I found these two comments, particularly compelling:
The trouble with Bush's justification for the war is that it
uses American troops as fly paper. Send US troops over to Iraq, where
they'll attract all the terrorists, who otherwise would have come here,
and whom we'll then kill. This theory has proven fallacious. The first
problem is that the American people are unwilling to let their soldiers
be used as fly paper. If Iraq has proven anything, it has confirmed for
me the validity of the Powell Doctrine.
and
The second problem is that the fly paper strategy
seems to be radicalizing our foes even more. For every fly that gets
caught, it seems as though 10 more spring up. This should hardly come
as a surprise to anybody who has watched Israel pursue military
solutions to its terrorist problems, after all. Does anybody really
think Israel's military actions have left Hezbollah or Hamas with fewer
foot soldiers? To the contrary, the London bombing suggests to me that
it is only a matter of time before the jihadists strike in the US
again, even though our troops remain hung out as fly paper in the
Augean Stables of Iraq. {Update: The news
that Scotland Yard foiled a gas attack on the House of Commons, for
which the Yard deserves mega-kudos, doesn't change my mind. As the
climax of Tom Clancy's novel Debt of Honor suggests (and I still wonder of that inspired 9/11), the terrorists only need to win once. Conversely, the latest news
about that rocket attack on a US Navy ship in Jordan seems to confirm
my concerns: "The Abdullah Azzam Brigades -- an al-Qaida-linked group
that claimed responsibility for the bombings which killed at least 64
people at Sharm el-Sheik in July and 34 people at two other Egyptian
resorts last October -- said in an Internet statement that its fighters
had fired the Katyushas, bolstering concerns that Islamic extremists
had opened a new front in the region." Indeed, the NYT reports
that: "The possible involvement of Iraqis and the military-style attack
have raised fears that militants linked to Iraq's insurgency may be
operating on Jordanian soil."}
I have to admit, I often wonder what some Conservatives out there are smoking, that they can't see the obvious. I am convinced that they do see it. If 2000 was a heady experience for Conservatives who had suffered through eight years of Bill Clinton, despite aggressive attempts to get rid of him at any cost, then 2004, after surviving numerous mini scandals and debunking Rathergate, must have been the greatest of highs.
That Republicans managed to take healthy majorities in both Houses, and seemed to dominate the U.S. political agenda, must have given Conservatives a sense of invulnerability. But the cracks have been showing in the armor for some time now, and it has taken "Rovian," measures to keep the fact of the Emperors Nakedness from the American Public. It must be painful in the extreme to see those cracks appearing, and know that not only did they make a monumental mistake, but that all they worked so hard for is based on a foundation of lies, deception and corruption.
Admittedly, the Downing Street Memos, in and of themselves might have been compelling to those who already suspected the truth, but they were not "smoking gun," enough to convince the majority of the faithful. This is especially true of those who invested so heavily in what they felt was a new Conservative Revolution. They have been rewarded by stark failures on the part of the Administration to propel that Revolution forward, and have instead seen it get bogged down in a morass of ineptitude. For a time, they were able to defend against this ineptitude by making the issue "Liberal Hate of Bush," rather than accepting the realities of consistent and repeated failure by the Administration to accomplish much of anything, except successfully defending itself against charge after charge. Now, with more and more Conservatives beginning to acknowledge the obvious, the spin begins to ring hollow, even for those who once believed it.
I honestly don't see anything "inappropriate" about it. Cindy accuses the President of "lying" about several of the reasons for war in Iraq, so maybe these television stations are worried about giving air time to somebody calling the President a liar when its clear to most of us with common sense that he didn't lie about Iraq. But that's just a guess.
Were it up to me, I'd have let the ad run. Most Americans don't agree with the idea that the President "lied" about the WMD's and know that Saddam had plenty of ties to al Qaeda, though not to the 9/11 attacks specifically. This is why Americans re-elected the President in the face of these accusations of lying. Putting Cindy Sheehan up to repeat these accusations again is only going to do more harm to her causes than it would to the cause of the President.
Rob's argument is deeply flawed... First off, recent polls indicate that as many as 51% of Americans feel the American Public was deceived about Iraq. With some polls nearing 60%. So the argument that "Most Americans believe that the President did not lie is intellectually and morally dishonest.
The Left has often made this spin easier, by failing to stay on message, and by failing to present a clear alternative. The Left has also been guilty of wimping out at key times. Those who have shown strength, have been attacked as members of the "Loony Left." Rove has been able to successfully exploit this time and time again by pointing out the inconsistency of the Left's message, while hammering away on the Administration's, even in those cases where it was obvious that the Administration message was a nefarious one. Rove and his Conservative Disciples have been Masters of hammering away on a message until it BECOMES truth, even when it is clear to any thinking person that the message lacks logic.
9/11 was a catharsis for America. Karl Rove and the Administration have shamelessly taken advantage of this to smear Liberals, out a CIA agent in an act of revenge, and execute a disastrous and unjustified war. This administration's legacy will be based on Post 9/11. With information coming to light almost daily on how badly they bungled the so called "War on Terror," and with little else to point to as accomplishments, Bush's legacy will likely suffer. More significantly, he may join Nixon as a President corrupted by his own sense of infallibility.
Last week, I heard repeated for the nth time the charge that the war on terror is a failure. Why did we invade Iraq, and more importantly, why is Osama Bin Laden still out there somewhere? Where is he? And how can we say we're winning the war if he's still unaccounted for?
I can see that argument. There's a part of me (the liberal, emotional, vindictive, touchy-feely part of me) even sympathizes with it. I want to see his ugly, bearded head on one of the spikes on the White House fence. But my intellect dismisses it as a non-issue.
Osama Bin Laden is not THE enemy. He is not who we declared war against. He is not the be-all and end-all of our foes, and even if he were to surrender today, that would not put an end to the struggle.
Jay Tea Wizbang
Eh, are these the same people who supported and continue to champion a war based on, "Saddam Hussein is a bad, bad man... and needed to be removed from power?" Well, I don't know, maybe I am missing something, but I see the dude who ordered the murder of thousands of Americans as being a pretty bad chap too, and "rendering him irrelevant," while convienant for those who want to deflect from the embarrassment that we have not captured him, does not make it so..." Neither do I see us, "thoroughly stomping," anyone. If we have, then the terrorist that Osama continues to at least provide inspiration for, must be roaches, 'cause for every one we "stomp," ten more seem to appear. Jay Tea was once someone I respected, as at least inserting logic into his arguments, now he is nothing more than a well written apologist for a failed policy and a disgraced administration, one that does not quite know it has been disgraced.... YET...
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - U.S. diplomats have conceded ground to Islamists on the role of religion in Iraq, negotiators said on Saturday as they raced to meet a 48-hour deadline to draft a constitution under intense U.S. pressure.
So what exactly was it we were fighting for in Iraq?
Bringing Freedom to Iraq? It will be interesting to see how Women's rights are respected under the new constitution. It will also be interesting to see how the Administration spins this. Conservatives continuously scream loud about not cutting and running, and it is one of the few areas I agree with them about Iraq. But this is just cutting and running under a another name folks. The administration will do ANYTHING to get out of Iraq at this point, including selling out the Iraqi people to the very terrorist who have been cutting off their heads and blowing up their markets for the last two years.
In the Meantime...
The NEW Iraq promises to be a model of stability, with none of the torture, abductions, cruelty and injustices of the Saddam Regime.... Yeah Right!
BASRA, Iraq -- Shiite and Kurdish militias, often operating as part of Iraqi government security forces, have carried out a wave of abductions, assassinations and other acts of intimidation, consolidating their control over territory across northern and southern Iraq and deepening the country's divide along ethnic and sectarian lines, according to political leaders, families of the victims, human rights activists and Iraqi officials.
While Iraqi representatives wrangle over the drafting of a constitution in Baghdad, forces represented by the militias and the Shiite and Kurdish parties that control them are creating their own institutions of authority, unaccountable to elected governments, the activists and officials said. In Basra in the south, dominated by the Shiites, and Mosul in the north, ruled by the Kurds, as well as cities and villages around them, many residents say they are powerless before the growing sway of the militias, which instill a climate of fear that many see as redolent of the era of former president Saddam Hussein.
Further TRUTH comes to light on the road to Iraq and War!
It is going to be interesting as HELL to see how the right spins this, the latest barrage of evidence to support the idea that the American Public and possibly even Colin Powell were bullshitted into believing war in Iraq was justified.
Powell's speech, delivered on
February 5, 2003, made the case for the war by presenting U.S.
intelligence that purported to prove that Saddam Hussein had weapons of
mass destruction. Wilkerson says the information in Powell's
presentation initially came from a document he described as "sort of a
Chinese menu" that was provided by the White House.
"(Powell)
came through the door ... and he had in his hands a sheaf of papers,
and he said, 'This is what I've got to present at the United Nations
according to the White House, and you need to look at it,'" Wilkerson
says in the program. "It was anything but an intelligence document. It
was, as some people characterized it later, sort of a Chinese menu from
which you could pick and choose."
Wilkerson and Powell spent four
days and nights in a CIA conference room with then-Director George
Tenet and other top officials trying to ensure the accuracy of the
presentation, Wilkerson says.
"There was no way the Secretary of
State was going to read off a script about serious matters of
intelligence that could lead to war when the script was basically
un-sourced," Wilkerson says.
In one dramatic accusation in his
speech, Powell showed slides alleging that Saddam had bioweapons labs
mounted on trucks that would be almost impossible to find.
"In
fact, Secretary Powell was not told that one of the sources he was
given as a source of this information had indeed been flagged by the
Defense Intelligence Agency as a liar, a fabricator," says David Kay,
who served as the CIA's chief weapons inspector in Iraq after the fall
of Saddam. That source, an Iraqi defector who had never been debriefed
by the CIA, was known within the intelligence community as "Curveball."
After
searching Iraq for several months across the summer of 2003, Kay began
e-mailing Tenet to tell him the WMD evidence was falling apart. At one
point, Wilkerson says, Tenet called Powell to tell him the claims about
mobile bioweapons labs were apparently not true.
"George actually
did call the Secretary, and said, 'I'm really sorry to have to tell
you. We don't believe there were any mobile labs for making biological
weapons,'" Wilkerson says in the documentary. "This was the third or
fourth telephone call. And I think it's fair to say the Secretary and
Mr. Tenet, at that point, ceased being close. I mean, you can be
sincere and you can be honest and you can believe what you're telling
the Secretary. But three or four times on substantive issues like that?
It's difficult to maintain any warm feelings."
The whole thing just reeks, stinks to high heaven, and it is beyond the pale to me that anyone can continue to justify this war. I believe very seriously, that the only way some Right Wingers will acknowledge that this war was based on unadulterated lies and deceptions, is if Bush wakes up one day and just says, "Sorry folks, the guy tried to kill my Daddy. It's a Texas thing, I had to get some payback. And we all know that Saddam was a loony so who cares why we went to war. We did, and in the end, the ends justify the means." And even if he did, I still think some people on the right would try to spin it.
You go to war when you have to. You weigh the dangers and you make a decision based on the imminent threat to the United States. It is clear to all but a rabid Bush Supporter at this point, that no such threat existed, and that the administration not only knew it, but sought to invent one.
O'DONNELL: "And, finally, the president has made the case that winning the war in Iraq is central to winning the war on terror and making sure that Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda cannot take harm the United States. Is that true, if we win there, will that help?"
SCHEUER: "No, ma'am. The war in Iraq has broken the back of our counterterrorism effort. I'm not an expert on the threat posed by Saddam Hussein, but the invasion of Iraq has made sure this war will last decades ahead and it has transferred bin Laden and al Qaeda from being man and an organization into being a philosophy and a movement. We've really made sure that the war against us is going to be a long and very bloody one. Iraq was an absolutely disastrous decision."
Read the whole thing, and watch the video. Of course our Brothers on the Right will just say that this is Left Wing Propaganda, Treason and Harmful to the moral of our troops.
Well let me tell you something. It just might be, because my moral is harmed every time I see another body count from Iraq. My moral is harmed every time I hear about the number of dead Iraqis. My moral is harmed every time I hear about another incidence of terrorism in Iraq. Hell my moral is harmed by knowing that Iraq has become not only a rallying point for global terrorism, but also a training ground that is 100 times more effective than Afghanistan. You see in Afghanistan, the terrorist did not get a chance to practice on the best of our technology and people. In Afghanistan they did not get a laboratory on U.S. Tactics. In Afghanistan they simply LOST...
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is."
--Governor George W. Bush (R-TX)
Amen...
Want more proof of liberal's hatred guiding their thoughts? Try and figure out how this article relates to the "lies" that OIF is based on. Personally, I'm baffled.
But he is right about one thing. Hatred pretty much describes my feelings about stupidity and political blindness. The post I made yesterday referred to a number of points. One (And I will keep this short to keep Chris' attention), is that as previously stated, the Iraq war was planned and pre-determined well before any effort was made to "justify," the war. Two, despite the fact that 9/11 happened on Bush's watch, and there appears to be significant evidence that it could have been stopped, had anyone in the administration been paying attention to the threat, Conservatives continue to blame it on Clinton, Liberals, anyone but the people most responsible for it...
I have ratcheted back my blogging lately, mainly because it is just ridiculous dealing with this crap. Disagree, hate me for being a Liberal, whatever. The chickens are coming home to roost, and history will be the judge as to who is right or wrong. Most blogs are preaching to their choirs, so I am sure Chris' audience is buying his spiel. But the Truth is out there.... I am confident that it will all come to light.
Oh, and as an asside, either Liberals are the only ones taking polls these days, or a significant numbers of Conservatives have stopped drinking the Kool Aid.
State Department experts warned CENTCOM before Iraq war about lack of plans forpost-war Iraq security
Planning for post-Saddam regime change began as early as October 2001
Washington, D.C., August 17, 2005:
Newly declassified State Department documents show that government experts warned the U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) in early 2003 about "serious planning gaps for post-conflict public security and humanitarian assistance," well before Operation Iraqi Freedom began.
In a February 7, 2003, memo to Under Secretary of State Paula Dobriansky, three senior Department officials noted CENTCOM's "focus on its primary military objectives and its reluctance to take on 'policing' roles," but warned that "a failure to address short-term public security and humanitarian assistance concerns could result in serious human rights abuses which would undermine an otherwise successful military campaign, and our reputation internationally." The memo adds "We have raised these issues with top CENTCOM officials."
By contrast, a December 2003 report to Congress, also released by the State Department, offers a relatively rosy picture of the security situation, saying U.S. forces are "increasingly successful in preventing planned hostile attacks; and in capturing former regime loyalists, would-be terrorists and planners; and seizing weapons caches." The document acknowledges that "Challenges remain."
Since then, 1,393 U.S. military fatalities have been recorded in Iraq, including two on the day the report went to Congress.
The new documents, released this month to the National Security Archive under the Freedom of Information Act, also provide more evidence on when the Bush administration began planning for regime change in Iraq -- as early as October 2001.
Meanwhile, in Iraq.....
BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- Iraqi police arrested four people in connection with a string of car bombings Wednesday morning that killed at least 43 people and wounded 88 in central Baghdad, the Transportation Ministry said.
The blasts came as transitional governmental officials worked to complete a new constitution, which lawmakers hope will help produce stability in the volatile country.
The attacks began about 7:45 a.m. (11:45 p.m. ET), when a car bomb exploded outside of the al-Nahda bus terminal, police said. A second car bomb exploded about 10 minutes later.
Casualties were rushed to the al-Kindi Hospital, where a third explosion was reported a short time later.
Video from the scene showed the smoldering wreckage of a vehicle near two buses, but black smoke obscured much of the view. Iraqi police said 22 vehicles were damaged.
While some conservative bloggers blow sunshine up our ass... which is in and of itself amazing, considering that their own heads are up their asses. You see to them, it's all about Cindy Sheehan, the outrage of it all. Too bad they dont feel the same outrage about the bullshit that lead to Cindy being in Texas huh?
Wait NO, it was Clinton's fault!!! Everything was Clinton's fault. 9/11 was Clinton's fault... Let's just ignore the fact that it happened on Bush's watch, and that evidence has now been presented that 9/11 could have been stopped.
Read Frank Rich's column from the NY Times. It's a classic. Somehow the man manages to cover all the bases on the war in Iraq, including Cindy Sheehan's protest movement.
My favorite excerpt:
Nothing that happens on the ground in Iraq can turn around the fate of this war in America: not a shotgun constitution rushed to meet an arbitrary deadline, not another Iraqi election, not higher terrorist body counts, not another battle for Falluja (where insurgents may again regroup, The Los Angeles Times reported last week). A citizenry that was asked to accept tax cuts, not sacrifice, at the war's inception is hardly in the mood to start sacrificing now. There will be neither the volunteers nor the money required to field the wholesale additional American troops that might bolster the security situation in Iraq.
WHAT lies ahead now in Iraq instead is not victory, which Mr. Bush has never clearly defined anyway, but an exit (or triage) strategy that may echo Johnson's March 1968 plan for retreat from Vietnam: some kind of negotiations (in this case, with Sunni elements of the insurgency), followed by more inflated claims about the readiness of the local troops-in-training, whom we'll then throw to the wolves. Such an outcome may lead to even greater disaster, but this administration long ago squandered the credibility needed to make the difficult case that more human and financial resources might prevent Iraq from continuing its descent into civil war and its devolution into jihad central.
Thus the president's claim on Thursday that "no decision has been made yet" about withdrawing troops from Iraq can be taken exactly as seriously as the vice president's preceding fantasy that the insurgency is in its "last throes." The country has already made the decision for Mr. Bush. We're outta there. Now comes the hard task of identifying the leaders who can pick up the pieces of the fiasco that has made us more vulnerable, not less, to the terrorists who struck us four years ago next month.
I was not aware that one of Bush's "loyalist, Senator George Allen of Virginia, instructed the president to meet with Cindy Sheehan, the mother camping out in Crawford, as "a matter of courtesy and decency." Or, to translate his Washingtonese, as a matter of politics. Only someone as adrift from reality as Mr. Bush would need to be told that a vacationing president can't win a standoff with a grief-stricken parent commandeering TV cameras and the blogosphere 24/7."
It will be interesting to see if he takes this advice. Cindy pulled a brilliant strategic move today by inviting Bush to, "Pray with her," on Friday. For this President, who claims a lock on spirituality, that one may be even more difficult to pass up. I still have serious reservations about the Sheehan Strategy at the moment, but I have to admit I am impressed with some of the moves..
I don't even want to talk politics today. Frankly, no amount of rationality is going to change any minds, read Deans comments on a recent post. Sad as it is, Dean and some of my other friends on the Right are living in another reality. I don't have the time, energy or even the desire to try and change these people's minds anymore.
I read this, on the antichimp today, and it (ALL OF IT), says it all for me.
Great report from Cindy Sheehan this morning, from outside the Bush royal compound in Crawford, Texas. She's been speaking with the media like crazy, pointing out the obvious cowardice of the chickenhawk inside the "ranch." Meanwhile, brave American Bill O'Reilly is telling both of his viewers that Cindy is protesting in Crawford because she has been bought out by "The Arab Anti-Discrimination League" and other lies. Bill, how much of a man does it take to smear the reputation of the mother of a dead soldier?
"I don't want anything to do with him," he explains. "My belief is that his ego is getting people killed and mutilated for no reason -- just his ego and his reputation. If we really wanted to, we could pull out of Iraq. Maybe not completely but enough that we wouldn't be losing people -- at least not at this rate. So I think he himself is responsible for quite a few American deaths."
Dean says he is not buying that the administration lied. Well a more important question is, IS HE BUYING IT THAT THEY ARE LYING, not past tense, but present. Either they are lying, or the group we have running the country and this fucked up excuse for a war are the biggest group of morons in history. And they are getting support and comfort from everyone who acts as an appologist for them...
We have destroyed a country, turned it into a raging battleground of insurgent groups, and in the meantime. Al Quaeda slips back into Afghanistan... Rememer Afghanistan??? Where they proceed to kill Navy SEALS, and take their gear and ID as souvenirs...
What planet are Right Wingers living on when they even come close to believing we are making progress in the so called War on Terror?
"Sleeping in a grave-size space, defined by two walls touching both my head my and feet, and surrounded with human bodies touching me from both sides, in a way that hardly leaves any chance to move at all during the long… long night, in a 12 square meters room stuffed with 35 people trying to sleep, and to hold themselves together in order not to fight..."
So begins this post, another horror story from Post Saddam Iraq, a place where such horrors are supposed to be a thing of the past.
Hat tip The Naked Truth, one of my favorite new discoveries.
"How many times have we seen the right whip out the canard "Well so and so dem supported the war". How many times have we seen a news talk show host ask that very question of the democratic talking head and watch as the talking head sputtered and mumbled and danced clumsily away. Seems to me like a defensible response would be the simple truth: I also initially supported the war. Why? Because I trusted that the freakin President of the United States that's why! I gave the President the very support he asked for, and which he misused to the tune of hundreds of billion of dollars and a stack of dead and maimed kids." Darksyde
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Americans' approval of President Bush's handling of Iraq is at its lowest level yet, according to an AP-Ipsos poll that also suggests fewer than half now think he is honest.
A solid majority still see Bush as a strong and likable leader, though the poll indicates the president's confidence is seen as arrogance by a growing number.
Approval of Bush's handling of Iraq, which had been hovering in the low- to mid-40s most of the year, dipped to 38 percent. Midwesterners and young women and men with a high school education or less were most likely to disapprove of Bush on his handling of Iraq in the past six months.
American troops have suffered heavy casualties in Iraq this month. On Wednesday, 14 Marines were killed in the Euphrates River valley in the worst roadside bombing targeting Americans since the war began in March 2003.
On Monday, seven Marines were killed, six of whom died in a gun battle near Haditha in western Iraq.
Even Bay Buchanan, who spoke today on CNN's Inside Politics, was critical of Bush's all talk, no action stance. The 38% approval rating on Iraq is symptomatic of Americans faltering confidence in the President's strategy, or lack thereof.
It's nice to see that the people are finaly waking up, unfortunate over 1,800 Americans had to die to wake them...
The Left. Hopeless. Shameful. History will record that the U.S.
could have saved tremendous loss of life and treasure had we liberated
Iraqi with more troops and a proper "after-victory" plan. But the
chronicles will also show that America could have saved time, money
and--most especially, lives--had the Left contributed its valuable
resources to the liberation effort as well. Imagine if feminists, labor
leaders, environmentalists, civil rights activists, artists and the
media had joined in the struggle instead of sitting on the
sidelines--or worse, assisting the fascists? Imagine if the clarion cry
of freedom and democracy had arisen from a unified progressive front
consisting of conservatives and liberals? Just as we've learned how
much succor the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong took from the anti-war
protesters of the 1960s, we will someday learn how the parochial,
small-minded, narrow-souled opposition to the establishment of
democracy in Iraq stiffen the fascist backbone of the "insurgency." But
of course, the Michael Moores, Robert Fisks, George Galloways, Ted
Kennedys and innumerable Hollywood celebrities and academics of this
world will not care--they will always find reporters, voters, fans and
tenure committees willing to dull the sting of conscience.
Dean goes on to agree with the quote. Well, perhaps I am showing my ignorance, but I have no idea who Steve Vincent was. I will take some time tomorrow to read his blog. But I want to offer a strong opposing point of view.
I don't think Leftist have done ENOUGH in opposing the war. Yes you read that right, and if you have read ISOU before, you are probably not surprised.
Many of us opposed this war BEFORE the Downing Street Memos. We had different reasons. Mine is sitting in a cave in Afghanistan or Pakistan right now. I felt, and still feel that we should have focused our ire and our energies on punishing those responsible for 9/11, and bringing ALL of the perpetrators to justice.
No, we allowed ourselves to be deceived, and to be swept up in the "War on Terror," which has become a disjointed quagmire. Iraq is a mess, more of a mess than it was under it's former dictator, and even the CIA says it has become a breeding ground for 21st Century Terrorism. All the jingoism in the world does not change the fact that there was no plan and is no plan, at least no consistent one.
Iraq has become a meat grinder for our troops and the Iraqi people, and it will probably have to get to the point where it is proven that there have been more killed during the occupation, than during the Hussein Regime, before anyone on the Right is willing to admit it.
I am not a moonbat, and stupid/dramatic protest do not make an impact on middle America. What we needed was for our elected representatives to stand up, show some spine and demand accountability in the decision to go into Iraq. What we needed and still need is for Progressives to speak out logically, sanely and without rhetoric on the true impact of this war, on the American People, The American Economy and the Iraqi people.
That we did not contribute to a war that we did not believe in is not the sad thing, that we did not contribute to stopping it, and have not suitably contributed to exposing it for what it is, is...
Obviously no one told the terrorist and insurgents in Iraq that they were in the "Last Throes" of their fight.
BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- A roadside bomb blast killed 14 Marines and a civilian interpreter Wednesday as they rode in a vehicle near Haditha, Iraq, U.S. military officials said.
The military said the bomb struck the amphibious assault vehicle about 1 mile (about 2 kilometers) south of Haditha, a city along the Euphrates River about 135 miles (217 kilometers) northwest of Baghdad. The military said one Marine was wounded.
The 14 Marines belonged to the same Ohio-based battalion as six Marines who were killed in the region on Monday, according to The Associated Press.
The six sniper team members were killed in a firefight near Haditha. A suicide car bomb killed a seventh Marine Monday in nearby Hit.
In the past 10 days, 43 U.S. troops have been killed in Iraq. That brings the number of U.S. troops killed in the war to 1,820, according to U.S. military reports.
Douglas Feith, One of the Iraq War Planners is on Wolf Blitzer right now. The man is absolutely tongue tied right now, avoiding the question of "If he knew then what he knows know about the success of the war, would he still advocate the original plan." It is incredible watching these guys stumble all over themselves...
It has never been about people's right to support the war, or their qualifications to discuss it. I don't know why someone as smart as Stephen, thinks,
"Goldstein demolishes the "Chickenhawk" rhetoric."
since his argument just rewarms and serves up the same gruel that pro-war bloggers have been serving up, every since The General started the Yellow Elephant meme.
My personal criticism is directed at all the YOUNG Republicans, and the Karl Rove's of the world who talk the talk, but don't walk the walk. If one thinks the war is such a noble cause, why not show your support by volunteering to contribute to it's success.
This does not mean that one is not entitled to their opinion, or that there opinion is somehow invalidated because they refuse to serve. What it does demonstrate however is an unwillingness to back up their rhetoric, with action.
For those who have a real passion about the "rightness," of the conflict, they come of as a bit hypocritical when they are not willing to fight it themselves, provided they have no physical reason that they can not.
Rhetoric is rhetoric, and while I agree that it can get a bit ridiculous at times discussing this issue, I believe the assumption that those most strongly advocating something, should be willing to sacrifice themselves for the cause they advocate... Is not an unreasonable position.
During the 2004 Election Campaign most Democrats and Republicans agreed on the fairness of Fact Check dot Org. Lets see what they had to say about the President's Speech from Monday Night:
Summary
Standing before a crowd of uniformed soldiers, President Bush addressed the nation on June 27 to reaffirm America's commitment to the global war on terrorism. But throughout the speech Bush continually stated his opinions and conclusions as though they were facts, and he offered little specific evidence to support his assertions.
Here we provide some additional context, both facts that support Bush's case that "we have made significant progress" in Iraq, as well as some of the negative evidence he omitted.
Analysis
Bush's prime-time speech at Fort Bragg, NC coincided with the one-year anniversary of the handover of soverignty to Iraqi authorities. It was designed to lay out America's role in Iraq amid sinking public support for the war and calls by some lawmakers to withdraw troops.
The Bloodshed
Bush acknowledged the high level of violence in Iraq as he sought to reassure the public.
Bush: The work in Iraq is difficult and dangerous. Like most Americans, I see the images of violence and bloodshed. Every picture is horrifying and the suffering is real. Amid all this violence, I know Americans ask the question: Is the sacrifice worth it?
What Bush did not mention is that by most measures the violence is getting worse. Both April and May were record months in Iraq for car bombings, for example, with more than 135 of them being set off each month. And the bombings are getting more deadly. May was a record month for deaths from bombings, with 381 persons killed in "multiple casualty" bombings that took two or more lives, according to figures collected by the Brookings Institution in its "Iraq Index." The Brookings index is compiled from a variety of sources including official government statistics, where those are available, and other public sources such as news accounts and statements of Iraqi government officials.
The number of Iraqi police and military who have been killed is also rising, reaching 296 so far in June, nearly triple the 109 recorded in January and 103 in Febrary, according to a tally of public information by the website Iraq Coalition Casualty Count, a private group that documents each fatality from public statements and news reports. Estimates of the total number of Iraqi civilians killed each month as a result of "acts of war" have been rising as well, according to the Brookings index.
The trend is also evident in year-to-year figures. In the past twelve months, there have been 25% more U.S. troop fatalities and nearly double the average number of insurgent attacks per day as there were in the preceeding 12 months.
Reconstruction Progress
In talking about Iraqi reconstruction, Bush highlighted the positive and omitted the negative:
Bush: We continued our efforts to help them rebuild their country. . . . Our progress has been uneven but progress is being made. We are improving roads and schools and health clinics and working to improve basic services like sanitation, electricity and water. And together with our allies, we will help the new Iraqi government deliver a better life for its citizens.
Indeed, the State Department's most recent Iraq Weekly Status Report shows progress is uneven. Education is a positive; official figures show 3,056 schools have been rehabilitated and millions of "student kits" have been distributed to primary and secondary schools. School enrollments are increasing. And there are also 145 new primary healthcare centers currently under construction. The official figures show 78 water treatment projects underway, nearly half of them completed, and water utility operators are regularly trained in two-week courses.
On the negative side, however, State Department figures show overall electricity production is barely above pre-war levels. Iraqis still have power only 12 hours daily on average.
Iraqis are almost universally unhappy about that. Fully 96 percent of urban Iraqis said they were dissatisfied when asked about "the availability of electricity in your neighborhood." That poll was conducted in February for the U.S. military, and results are reported in Brookings' "Iraq Index." The same poll also showed that 20 percent of Iraqi city-dwellers still report being without water to their homes.
Conclusions or Facts?
The President repeatedly stated his upbeat conclusions as though they were facts. For example, he said of "the terrorists:"
Bush: They failed to break our coalition and force a mass withdrawal by our allies. They failed to incite an Iraqi civil war.
In fact, there have been withdrawals by allies. Spain pulled out its 1,300 soldiers in April, and Honduras brought home its 370 troops at the same time. The Philippines withdrew its 51 troops last summer to save the life of a Filipino hostage held captive for eight months in Iraq. Ukraine has already begun a phased pullout of its 1,650-person contingent, which the Defense Ministry intends to complete by the end of the year. Both the Netherlands and Italy have announced plans to withdraw their troops, and the Bulgarian parliament recently granted approval to bring home its 450 soldiers. Poland, supplying the third-largest contingent in the coalition after Italy's departure, has backed off a plan for full withdrawal of troops due to the success of Iraqi elections and talks with Condoleezza Rice, but the Polish Press Agency announced in June that the next troop rotation will have 200 fewer soldiers.
Bush is of course entitled to argue that these withdrawals don't constitute a "mass" withdrawal, but an argument isn't equivalent to a fact.
The same goes for Bush's statement there's no "civil war" going on. In fact, some believe that what's commonly called the "insurgency" already is a "civil war" or something very close to it. For example, in an April 30 piece, the Times of London quotes Colonel Salem Zajay, a police commander in Southern Baghdad, as saying, "The war is not between the Iraqis and the Americans. It is between the Shia and the Sunni." Again, Bush is entitled to state his opinion to the contrary, but stating a thing doesn't make it so.
Terrorism
Similarly, Bush equated Iraqi insurgents with terrorists who would attack the US if they could.
Bush: There is only one course of action against them: to defeat them abroad before they attack us at home. . . . Our mission in Iraq is clear. We are hunting down the terrorists .
Despite a few public claims to the contrary, however, no solid evidence has surfaced linking Iraq to attacks on the United States, and Bush offered none in his speech. The 9/11 Commission issued a staff report more than a year ago saying "so far we have no credible evidence that Iraq and al Qaeda cooperated on attacks against the United States." It said Osama bin Laden made a request in 1994 to establish training camps in Iraq, but "but Iraq apparently never responded." That was before bin Laden was ejected from Sudan and moved his operation to Afghanistan.
Bush laid stress on the "foreign" or non-Iraqi elements in the insurgency as evidence that fighting in Iraq might prevent future attacks on the US:
Bush: I know Americans ask the question: Is the sacrifice worth it? It is worth it, and it is vital to the future security of our country. And tonight I will explain the reasons why.
Some of the violence you see in Iraq is being carried out by ruthless killers who are converging on Iraq to fight the advance of peace and freedom. Our military reports that we have killed or captured hundreds of foreign fighters in Iraq who have come from Saudi Arabia, Syria, Iran, Egypt, Sudan, Yemen, Libya and other nations.
But Bush didn't mention that the large majority of insurgents are Iraqis, not foreigners. The overall strength of the insurgency has been estimated at about 16,000 persons. The number of foreign fighters in Iraq is only about 1,000, according to estimates reported by the Brookings Institution. The exact number is of course impossible to know. However, over the course of one week during the major battle for Fallujah in November of 2004, a Marine official said that only about 2% of those detained were foreigners. To be sure, Brookings notes that "U.S. military believe foreign fighters are responsible for the majority of suicide bombings in Iraq," with perhaps as many as 70 percent of bombers coming from Saudi Arabia alone. It is anyone's guess how many of those Saudi suicide bombers might have attempted attacks on US soil, but a look at the map shows that a Saudi jihadist can drive across the border to Baghdad much more easily than getting nearly halfway around the world to to the US.
Osama bin Laden
Bush quoted a recent tape-recorded message by bin Laden as evidence that the Iraq conflict is "a central front in the war on terror":
Bush: Hear the words of Osama bin Laden: "This Third World War is raging" in Iraq..."The whole world is watching this war." He says it will end in "victory and glory or misery and humiliation."
However, Bush passed over the fact that the relationship between bin Laden and the Iraqi insurgents - to the extent one existed at all before - grew much closer after the US invaded Iraq. Insurgent leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi did not announce his formal allegiance with bin Laden until October, 2004. It was only then that Zarqawi changed the name of his group from "Unification and Holy War Group" to "al Qaeda in Iraq."
In summary, we found nothing false in what Bush said, only that his facts were few and selective.
--by Brooks Jackson & Jennifer L. Ernst
Researched by Matthew Barge, Kevin Collins & Jordan Grossman
"President Bush's 8 p.m. update on the war in Iraq averaged just 19.13 million total viewers on the big four broadcast networks, ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox, according to Nielsen overnights.... That's down 41 percent from the 32.75 million who watched Bush on the Big Four during a primetime press conference in April, though that speech took place on the first night of May sweeps, when television viewership overall was higher."
And thought it worth repeating. Sorry for running the whole thing Rob, but it moved me. Please trackback to Rob's piece and give this post some love. I for one am sick of People like Michelle Malking accussing us on the Left of hating our troops.
Support the Troops!
Let the men and women of the United States Armed Forces know you care, that you support them, and that regardless of how you feel about the war you are behind them.
Our Soldiers, Sailors, Marines, and Airmen need to know that America is behind them. No matter what happens in terms of policy and politics here at home, never forget what was done to the troops in Vietnam, who came home from a horrible war only to be the focus of the anger and anti-war sentiments of their own countrymen.
The troops don't make the decisions for war...they carry them out.
And they are the real heroes of America.
Heroes like the late Sgt. 1st Class Paul R. Smith, posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor for his heroism in Iraq.
Heroes like Sgt. Leigh Ann Hester, the first woman since WWII to receive the Silver Star, our third highest award for heroism.
Heroes like Hospital Corpsman 3rd Class John D. House, USN, who was killed in a helicopter crash with his detachment of 30 Marines from Kaneohe Bay, Hawaii, in January. Petty Officer House left behind a son he never met, born while he was in Iraq.
And for all the others who serve with honor in the harsh conditions of war.
The Washington Post released a poll today, before the President's speech, on American support for the war in Iraq.
The WaPo's article highlights certain results: "Survey Finds Most Support Staying in Iraq / Public Skeptical About Gains Against Insurgents"
In looking at the raw data in the pdf file, I see a remarkably stable level of support for the war, since late 2003.
Since October, 2003, a solid 58% have favored keeping forces in Iraq, with continued casualties made explicit
He goes on to make an observation at the end...
Between the WaPo poll and upon reflection of the Left's proclivity for "shouting themselves in the foot," I feel better about American support for the war than I have in a long time. And I saw Bush's speech, and I didn't think it did much one way or the other. The stable good sense of the American people and the idiocy of the moonbats are Bush's greatest assets.
I would add one thing to what he had to say. "The naivete of the Wingnuts." This needs to be factored in...
In my opinion the support for finishing the war is a given. Americans sense of fairplay will not allow for us to leave that country a bombed out mess. But from my perspective that is not the story. The real story is not if we will finish what we started. I believe we will. The real story for me is will Americans continue to believe our reasons for being there in the first place. And that... Is the story that is gaining legs... Despite the attempts to change the subject.
Well, actually longer than lately...
-- It has also become "dangerous" for men to wear shorts in public and "they no longer allow their children to play outside in shorts." People who wear jeans in public have also come under attack.
I had a long, (too long) conversation with a conservative friend of mine today about the war, and I realized during that discussion how fruitless it is to even have a discussion on the subject. 
