More Iraq "Fun"
- From: Tiglath <temp4@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 23 Jun 2007 22:32:17 -0700
By Frank Rich of the New York Time
My brackets.
BY this late date we should know the fix is in when the White House's
top factotums fan out on the Sunday morning talk shows singing the
same lyrics, often verbatim, from the same hymnal of spin. The pattern
was set way back on Sept. 8, 2002, when in simultaneous appearances
three cabinet members and the vice president warned darkly of Saddam's
aluminum tubes. "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom
cloud," said Condi Rice, in a scripted line. The hard sell of the war
in Iraq - the hyping of a (fictional) nuclear threat to America - had
officially begun.
America wasn't paying close enough attention then. We can't afford to
repeat that blunder now. Last weekend the latest custodians of the
fiasco, our new commander in Iraq, Gen. David Petraeus, and our new
ambassador to Baghdad, Ryan Crocker, took to the Sunday shows with two
messages we'd be wise to heed.
[Indeed, the "Custodians of the Fiasco" are raising the smoke screen
again.]
The first was a confirmation of recent White House hints that the long-
promised September pivot point for judging the success of the "surge"
was inoperative. That deadline had been asserted as recently as April
24 by President Bush, who told Charlie Rose that September was when
we'd have "a pretty good feel" whether his policy "made sense." On
Sunday General Petraeus and Mr. Crocker each downgraded September to
merely a "snapshot" of progress in Iraq. "Snapshot," of course, means
"Never mind!"
[Yep, and we have Mr. Hines on record saying we are winning the Global
War On Terror.]
When Mr. Bush announced his "new way forward" in January, he offered a
bouquet of promises, all unfulfilled today. "Let the Iraqis lead" was
the policy's first bullet point, but in the initial assault on
insurgents now playing out so lethally in Diyala Province, Iraqi
forces were kept out of the fighting altogether. They were added on
Thursday: 500 Iraqis, following 2,500 Americans. The notion that these
Shiite troops might "hold" this Sunni area once the Americans leave is
an opium dream. We're already back fighting in Maysan, a province
whose security was officially turned over to Iraqi authorities in
April.
In his January prime-time speech announcing the surge, Mr. Bush also
said that "America will hold the Iraqi government to the benchmarks it
has announced." More fiction. Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's own
political adviser, Sadiq al-Rikabi, says it would take "a miracle" to
pass the legislation America wants. Asked on Monday whether the Iraqi
Parliament would stay in Baghdad this summer rather than hightail it
to vacation, Tony Snow was stumped.
[We can't even control our puppet government -- the wads of American
cash they grabbed is burning a hole in their pockets -- it's R&R
time!]
Like Mr. Crocker and General Petraeus, Mr. Snow is on script for
trivializing September as judgment day for the surge, saying that by
then we'll only "have a little bit of metric" to measure success. This
administration has a peculiar metric system. On Thursday, Peter Pace,
the departing chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, called the spike
in American troop deaths last week the "wrong metric" for assessing
the surge's progress. No doubt other metrics in official reports this
month are worthless too, as far as the non-reality-based White House
is concerned. The civilian casualty rate is at an all-time high; the
April-May American death toll is a new two-month record; overall
violence in Iraq is up; only 146 out of 457 Baghdad neighborhoods are
secure; the number of internally displaced Iraqis has quadrupled since
January.
[It's an spectacle folks, America should march on Washington and rope
up these recalcitrant criminals.]
Last week Iraq rose to No. 2 in Foreign Policy magazine's Failed State
Index, barely nosing out Sudan. It might have made No. 1 if the Iraqi
health ministry had not stopped providing a count of civilian
casualties. Or if the Pentagon were not withholding statistics on the
increase of attacks on the Green Zone. Apparently the White House is
working overtime to ensure that the September "snapshot" of Iraq will
be an underexposed blur. David Carr of The Times discovered that the
severe Pentagon blackout on images of casualties now extends to
memorials for the fallen in Iraq, even when a unit invites press
coverage.
[The only lesson this administration has learned from Viet-Nam is that
they should not let us see the real face of war.]
Americans and Iraqis know the truth anyway. The question now is: What
will be the new new way forward? For the administration, the way
forward will include, as always, attacks on its critics' patriotism.
We got a particularly absurd taste of that this month when Harry Reid
was slammed for calling General Pace incompetent and accusing General
Petraeus of exaggerating progress on the ground.
[It's going to be more of the same, that's all they've got -- same
wine just more rancid.]
Come September 2007, Mr. Bush will offer his usual false choices. We
must either stay his disastrous course in eternal pursuit of "victory"
or retreat to the apocalypse of "precipitous withdrawal." But by the
latest of the president's ever-shifting definitions of victory, we've
already lost. "Victory will come," he says, when Iraq "is stable
enough to be able to be an ally in the war on terror and to govern
itself and defend itself." The surge, which he advertised as providing
"breathing space" for the Iraqi "unity" government to get its act
together, is tipping that government into collapse. As Vali Nasr,
author of "The Shia Revival," has said, the new American strategy of
arming Sunni tribes is tantamount to saying the Iraqi government is
irrelevant.
All the technology in Silicon Valley and Military-Industrial Valley
can't put Iraq together again. And towel-headed hoes are throwing for
a loop the biggest superpower our planet has seen. Bush can't crack a
nut with a sledgehammer.
For the Bush White House, the real definition of victory has become
"anything they can get away with without taking blame for defeat,"
said the retired Army Gen. William Odom, a national security official
in the Reagan and Carter administrations, when I spoke with him
recently. The plan is to run out the Washington clock between now and
Jan. 20, 2009, no matter the cost.
[Big job to shift blame on this one, like Rome trying to blame the
Lusitanians for killing Jesus.]
The threat that terrorists in civil-war-torn Iraq will follow us home
if we leave is as bogus as Saddam's mushroom clouds. The Qaeda that
actually attacked us on 9/11 still remains under the tacit protection
of our ally, Pakistan.
As General Odom says, the endgame will start "when a senior senator
from the president's party says no," much as William Fulbright did to
L.B.J. during Vietnam. That's why in Washington this fall, eyes will
turn once again to John Warner, the senior Republican with the clout
to give political cover to other members of his party who want to
leave Iraq before they're forced to evacuate Congress. In September,
it will be nearly a year since Mr. Warner said that Iraq was "drifting
sideways" and that action would have to be taken "if this level of
violence is not under control and this government able to function."
Mr. Warner has also signaled his regret that he was not more outspoken
during Vietnam. "We kept surging in those years," he told The
Washington Post in January, as the Iraq surge began. "It didn't work."
Surely he must recognize that his moment for speaking out about this
war is overdue. Without him, the Democrats don't have the votes to
force the president's hand. With him, it's a slam dunk. The best way
to honor the sixth anniversary of 9/11 will be to at last disarm a
president who continues to squander countless lives in the names of
those voiceless American dead.
[Spot on.]
.
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