Maybe it’s the fact that Bush is safely re-elected, maybe it’s his flagging poll numbers, maybe it’s the cumulative effect of spousal abuse syndrome…but the relationship between the administration and the press has turned decidedly nasty lately.
Today’s Washington Post comes very close to calling them a pack of liars.
President
Bush’s portrayal of a wilting insurgency in Iraq at a time of escalating violence and insecurity throughout the country
is reviving the debate over the administration’s Iraq strategy and the accuracy of its upbeat claims.
While Bush and Vice President Cheney offer optimistic assessments of the situation…Privately, some administration officials have concluded the violence will not subside through this year.
The disconnect between Rose Garden optimism and Baghdad pessimism, according to government officials and independent analysts, stems not only from Bush’s focus on tentative signs of long-term progress but also from the shrinking range of policy options available to him if he is wrong. Having set out on a course of trying to stand up a new constitutional, elected government with the security firepower to defend itself, Bush finds himself locked into a strategy that, even if it proves successful, foreshadows many more deadly months to come first, analysts said.
But it is not just the Post that is calling them liars. Some Republicans are insinuating the same thing.
:::flip:::
Rep. Curt Weldon (R-Pa.), who joined Biden for part of the trip, said Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and others are misleading Americans about the number of functional Iraqi troops and warned the president to pay more attention to shutting off Syrian and Iranian assistance to the insurgency. “We don’t want to raise the expectations of the American people prematurely,” he said.
Weldon uses ‘misleading’. Rep. Chabot uses ‘(in)accurate'”
“I am pleased that in less than a year’s time, there’s a democratically elected government in Iraq, there are thousands of Iraq soldiers trained and better equipped to fight for their own country [and] that our strategy is very clear,”
Bush said during a Rose Garden news conference Tuesday. Overall, he said,
“I’m pleased with the progress.” Cheney offered an even more hopeful assessment during a CNN interview aired the night before, saying the insurgency was in its “last throes.”
Several Republicans questioned that evaluation. “I cannot say with any confidence that that is accurate,” said Rep. Steve Chabot (R-Ohio), a member of the House International Relations Committee. “I think it’s impossible to know how close we are to the insurgency being overcome.”
McCain refers to the lack of ‘frank talk'”
“We are just paying a heavy price for mistakes made before,” said Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.)…McCain said Bush needs to carefully balance his reassuring statements to a troubled nation with frank talk about the arduous and unpredictable future. “It’s a long, hard struggle and very gradually maybe we are making progress,” McCain said. “There are tough times ahead.”
The Post sums up:
It is not unusual for a president to put the most positive spin possible on U.S. policy, especially during a time of armed conflict when public support is crucial. But the administration’s assertions about Iraq have been a source of controversy since the earliest days of the operation, from the insistence that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction to Cheney’s claim of links between Iraq and al Qaeda to the rosy forecasts about how welcome U.S. troops would be.
‘Source of controversy’ is a nice way of saying ‘willfully and cynically wrong’. But at least the press and (some) Republicans are no longer afraid to point this out. We are driving over a cliff. Someone in the GOP caucus and the corporate media needs to point that out. Especially when you consider the following:
“It’s dangerous when U.S. officials start to believe their own propaganda,” said David L. Phillips, a former State Department consultant who worked on Iraq planning but quit in frustration in 2003 and has written a book called “Losing Iraq: Inside the Postwar Reconstruction Fiasco.” “I have no doubt that they genuinely think that Iraq is a smashing success and a milestone in their forward freedom strategy. But if you ask Iraqis, they have a different opinion.”
No doubt.
I don’t think there is any “international assistance” to be had at this point. Who in their right mind would agree to step into this mess? Which only leaves “more troops.” According to Reid.
How about just get the hell out of there?
Yes, horrible things will happen when (not if) we pull out. But horrible things will happen in Iraq when we pull out whether we do it tomorrow or two years from now or ten years from now.
Spent part of my afternoon reading this story over at TPM Cafe. I don’t agree with the original post, but do with many of the comments, such as this one and this one.
I posted this on a comment before, but I think it bears repeating. This is from the PNAC’s website, Letter to Congress on Increasing U.S. Ground Forces
January 28, 2005
Dear Senator Frist, Senator Reid, Speaker Hastert, and Representative Pelosi:
I find it very depressing that the person who has emerged as the main spokesman for the Democratic party (Reid) is saying the same thing as the PNAC, for Christ’s sake – “more troops.”
It is still a difficult call. The greatest obstacle to formulating an alternative exit strategy is the fact that BushCo seems incapable of making any changes in strategy, concessions, etc.
Pulling out now would assure a Saigonesque disaster. Can we succeed in training and equipping a police and security force that can prevent an implosion with an extra two years?
Nothing in the Bush track record gives me confidence. But it is hard to say with total confidence that we will make our problems better by saying ‘to hell with it’.
We also have to assess what the fallout of that would be in Iraq and elsewhere. It’s complicated.
I think our biggest problem is our lack of credibility, and our inability to get any help, and our unwillingness to make any concessions to get any help.
At this point, the Shi’a will not be denied power, the Kurds will not give up on their semi-autonomy…so if we leave there will be a very nasty war and Iran and Turkey will likely have some serious differences about what kind of Iraq they want to see. So will the Sunni Arab nations.
We have our balls in a vice.
Or as Juan Cole says, Sometimes You are Just Screwed.
Juan Cole, I think, knows more about what is going on in Iraq than anyone in America, and he lays out the problems of a US withdrawal very clearly. However, I still don’t think our continued presence there is the answer – and not just because BushCo is handling the situation so abysmally.
It’s not a matter of saying “Oh the hell with it.” America has brought enormous suffering and destruction to Iraq. We have an obligation to the Iraqi people because of the harm we have caused. But we must ask ourselves, what good can we possibly do that can be done with American troops?
At this point, I don’t think any American leader can salvage the situation – Iraq is just screwed, and American troops in the country can do nothing but make the tragedy worse.
Pulling out would cause a “Saigonesque disaster”? Of course it would. But what could anyone – not just the current morons in power – do to make the outcome any different? Iraq will have a civil war. The only question is when. As horrible as it will be, I fail to see how it will be any better if we continue an American military presence for years.
Vietnam went through a horrible time after we left – but we did not make it less bad by staying for nine years, with a US troop strength that rose to half a million in the last years of that war. And it was a much smaller and weaker country.
As CDR Adama said in the thread I linked to in the comment above:
OK, maybe 4-5 million US troops could defeat the Iraqi insurrection (I’m not sure even that would do it). Would Iraq really be better off after that? Better off than if we get the US troops out – whose very presence has become gasoline on the fire that is now Iraq?
I say we should leave ASAP, go down on our knees and beg their forgiveness daily until the last day of the life of the last Iraqi parent who lost a child in this illegal, immoral, stupid, stupid war. And be prepared to spend many billions of American dollars rebuilding the country.
We need “reality-based,” very smart people to get to work – not on figuring out a way to keep our troops there until everything is all right, or even sort of OK, in Iraq, when we can then “declare victory” and go home. But rather, to figure out how to direct all of that money that we surely owe them, if there is any justice to be had, in a way that actually helps Iraq. Which is NOT going to be easy.
And yes, the problems involve not just Iraq, but the entire Middle East – which is why this war is so much worse than Vietnam. But I don’t think keeping US troops in Iraq is going to solve those problems, either. More troops is not the answer. That’s what Johnson, McNamara, et al kept assuring us was the answer last time around. It wasn’t the answer. The situation just got worse and worse. No matter how many troops we sent, the Vietnamese simply would not give up. It was their country, their home. Their resolve and determination always trumped ours. The same will be true in Iraq.
my compliments on an excellent post. Well informed, well reasoned, and well articulated.
And you might very well be right.
I have a gut feeling about what is going on in Iraq, and my gut tells me that both the left and the right have got it wrong. The right is clueless.
But the left seems to think that the Iraqi resistance is nationalist, that most of the killing is merely an attempt to kick out the Americans, and that a lot of this violence is justifiable from a nationalistic perspective.
It’s hard to gauge because we are subjected to so much disinformation- on all sides.
But it appears that the there is a lot of vendetta killing going on, a lot of clerics being gunned down, a lot of violence that has little to do with Americans. It also appears that the majority, possibly the vast majority, of the suicide bombers are foreigners. They may be operating on a kind of pan-Arab pride philosophy, but their beef is not an Iraqi nationalist beef.
There is also a lot of Iraqi Sunni resistance to Americans which seems to take the form of roadside bombs, mortar attacks, some car bombs, and kidnapping and harrassment of reconstruction efforts.
There are also actions taken against the government and the police officers that seem to be Sunni motivated.
Somehow the left seems to jumble all of these different acts of violence under an umbrella of legitimate resistance to occupation. That’s a mistake. These distinctions need to be made.
When we talk about a 10:1 ratio of troops to insurgents, we need to understand who the real insurgents are. We also need to be mindful that the country is heavily Shi’a. And any government that has any representative quality is going to reflect that fact. A huge amount of the violence is against Shi’a domination, and would exist even in the absence of American troops. The fact that the Shi’a government has some puppet qualities should not distract us from this fact.
In Vietnam we sided with a small Catholic population against a much larger Buddhist population. In this case, we are siding with the majority population against a much smaller religious minority. That is a big difference.
And it cuts both ways. We can leave and the Shi’a will probably prevail. But they might not prevail without becoming as beholden to Iran as Lebanon became to Syria. All of this has the potential to spin out of control with Turkey and Jordan and Syria all getting into the act. Trade and energy production could be severely disrupted. It could cause huge job losses across the globe.
I don’t have answers. But I do know that pulling out of Iraq will not necessarily lesson the problems we have created. Staying may not help either. So, without disagreeing with you, I just am saying, I am not sure what to do.
army that has occupied the nation and runs marauding around murdering, maiming and hauling Iraqi citizens off to torture camps.
Removing that entity will remove the greatest source of slaughter.
Are there factions in Iraq? Sure. Will they all agree once they have succeeded in removing the foreign invader? Probably not.
Will the US still have domestic problems? You betcha!
But just as it would not help solve US domestic problems for a couple of hundred thousand Iraqis to occupy the US and proceed to bomb Chicago, Iraq’s internal conflicts are not likely to be helped by US attentions.
Iraq has been around for quite a bit longer than the US, and at this point, if the American people are interested in preserving their own nation’s sovereignty, for those who believe it has such now, that would be an excellent focus for US activities, and would save many lives, including those of many Americans.
about Mesopotamia being around longer than the USA. But the USA has been around longer than Iraq.
Our brutal civil war is in our past, and Iraq’s is in the future. The question really is whether the Shi’a dominated government can negotiate out terms to bring the various groups into a cohesive entity, without having to resort to all out war. And can they do that now, or will it help to have some time to gather strength in training and equipment?
I know you feel strongly that America’s presence is only contributing to the chaos. But at this point American forces also place a limit on the chaos.
My point is that I don’t know what is best, and I am skeptical of anyone who is too certain that they know.
that the US’s real civil war is in its past. I don’t think California was even a state back then. 🙂
I have acknowledged before that regarding colonialism, there is an unbridgeable gap, and I do not seek to convert anybody.
However it would be less than honest for me to pretend that the rest of the world shares the colonialist faith any more than Hindus share a belief in the Immaculate Conception.
I am as certain that it would be best for the US to cease aggression, disarm, and repatriate their gunmen as I am certain that it would not be best for Iraq, or Iran, or Russia to invade and occupy the US.
In the best of circumstances, occupations have some tradeoffs that can be vexing to even the most fervent colonialists.
Being a part of the exciting last gasp of colonialism comes with an even steeper price.
Actually, California was a state by the time the Civil War started(remember the Compromise of 1850 in that battered old American History textbook?).
And IMHO the Civil War isn’t over yet.
The middle few decades of that century were such a blur for me. I was so busy elsewhere I just couldn’t keep up. 😉
continues to be fought, day-in, day-out. The slave-holders turned Racist turned Segregationist turned States Rightist turned Born-Again turned anti-Union, anti-Tax; Red State Hater is still out there. Churning up a froth of fundamentalist friction.
The civil war in the Fertile Crescent has been ongoing for over six thousand years. An occupying army of 10 million would only keep the warring factions subdued as long as the occupation lasted.
Iraq as an entity is a fiction. Much like greater Serbia was a fiction. The fighting stops when there is a Suni state, Kurdish state, Iranian expanded state and a independent Shia state… As it has been at different times over the last six thousand years plus…
Occupation is a no-win gambit. No-win for anyone. Over the past six thousand years, the occupations have always been undermined, subverted and eliminated; one way or another. The last one was the British who took over from the Turks who took over from the Arabs (around Bagdad)…
At any rate,
what keeps being repeated over and over is how BushMart has screwed up, isn’t listening, isn’t paying attention, didn’t have the post invasion plan for winning the peace etc., etc…
What people don’t understand is that George Bush doesn’t care.
He doesn’t care if his actions are right or wrong.
He decided he was going to invade Iraq. We’re invading Iraq. If George says we’re winning, as far as he is concerned, we’re winning. All he wants to be able to do is mouth the Karl Rove message to the core Red State Hate supporters.
The BushMart message is always directed at and for the core supporter.
Nobody else.
George does not care what you think or what I think or even what Jimmy Guckert, Howie, Brooksie, Cokie, Daddy or anyone else thinks.
You do what he tells you to do.
A war?
The Economy?
Robbing Social Security?
Placing rabid fanatics, losers, malcontents, incompetents on court benches or at the head of government departments or world organizations…
He doesn’t care. That’s what he wants. Sometimes it’s just for a laugh. Sometimes it’s because somone pissed him off… If things go broken, that’s someone elses problem…
as it has always been for George.
is the “Disaster Capitalism” described by Naomi Kline.
the Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization, headed by
former US Ambassador to Ukraine Carlos Pascual. Its mandate is to
draw up elaborate “post-conflict” plans for up to twenty-five
countries that are not, as of yet, in conflict. According to
Pascual, it will also be able to coordinate three full-scale
reconstruction operations in different countries “at the same time,”
each lasting “five to seven years.”
[…]
“We used to have vulgar colonialism,” says Shalmali Guttal, a Bangalore-based researcher with Focus on the Global South. “Now we have sophisticated colonialism, and they call it ‘reconstruction.'”
LINK
Since when is “optimism” used to convey “consistent blatant lying?”
Bush Bets on Baghdad
[…]
Link
Once the war was a fact, I subscribed to Powell’s reference to the Pottery Barn rule. I long held that belief, but it’s been fading to zero over the last year. The reconstruction efforts are largely a failure – both from lack of interest/capacity/competence and from the horrendous security situation in large parts of the country. The half-baked efforts in training police and military forces. It is not getting better and there will have to be an eventual show-down between the groups situated within a fictional Iraq. They will have to figure it out on their own terms – any foreign intervention can only be at the unanimous request of these groups.
Might as well pull out (won’t happen, though).
.
Bolton’s 10 Story Remark off UN Building & more Bush-Cheney Gang rant on UN Officials …
IRAQ II: State of Invasion Planning
May 6, 2002 — Besides publicly lashing out against inspections, on April 20th the administration successfully led a bid to remove José Bustani, the Brazilian director-general of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons.
Bustani’s principal “crime,” from the Bush administration’s skewed perspective, appears to be that he was in the process of negotiating a new inspection regime for suspected Iraqi chemical weapons sites. An undertaking which could have undercut U.S. efforts to portray an invasion as the only way to eliminate the threat of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) being developed in Iraq.
May 6, 2002 — In mid-April, the Washington Post reported that Wolfowitz had asked the CIA to investigate the key UN inspections official, Hans Blix, Swedish head of U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission, the replacement for UNSCOM. Wolfowitz told the CIA to examine Blix’s performance as chief of the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency, which inspected Iraq’s declared nuclear power plants from 1981 to 1997.
The CIA reported to Wolfowitz in January that Blix’s inspections were “fully within the parameters he could operate.” The Washington Post further noted that a former official at the State Department who knew of the CIA report said Wolfowitz, “hit the ceiling” presumably since it did not accomplish the mission of discrediting Blix and consequently the new UN weapons inspection program.
[Source: World Policy Institute May 6, 2002]
Oui – Liberté – Egalité – Fraternité
This is off topic as heck but today is the 1-year anniversary of the death of Saint Ronald Reagan.
Just so ya’s know…
Pax
but there seems to be a split in the MSM, some are reporting negatives, and just in the past few days, you see more of the positives, such as finding so called weapons of mass destruction possibilities, large weapons cash, etc, etc, making their initial claims more sound.
I think the BushCo is trying to do damage control, to regain it’s momentum in light of the upcoming 06 senate and house seats.
BushCo speaks with forked tongue, and it’s head is that of Medusa, many, many tongues ; )
Al Medina is quoting a Sunni sheik in Fallujah.
This would be Zarq’s 3rd death in as many years.
He does this on purpose. It is really a problem here in the safe house. Whenever it’s his turn to clean the cat box, he announces another death and locks himself in his room and won’t let anybody else play with the X box. We are going to go eat all his pistaschio ice cream and wash his shorts with that red towel that bleeds.
The relationship with the media has finally begun to reach balance. The message of this administration became clear shortly after the election, starting with Powell’s replacement. A PNAC/Neo-con sweep at the top, with Bolton/Rove/Hughes rounding out the takeover. Everyone now has the same emblem on their uniforms: a cross over a cannon. At least one bridge too far.
= = = = = =
But if you ask Iraqis, they have a different opinion.
A different opinion and their own government. As usual we debate the pros and cons of “should I stay or should I go” and talk about the 25 million people of that “country” only as an afterthought. Near-total U.S.-centric viewpoint projected globally.
That’s the only similarity I see between Iraq & Vietnam. But this is not Southeast Asia, and it ain’t your daddy’s cold war anymore. The people of Iraq – an artifically created country – will ultimately determine their own fate. But somehow that part gets left out of the conversation.
I find myself agreeing with Duct insofar as the focus must be on the people who, in addition to having an “alien invader” on their soil, must decide the fate of their great-grandchildren.
They have been tasked with creating a country out of whole cloth from maps drawn by Ottomans and British oilmen, and have been given less than two years to reach the goal. They have survived 30 years of Baathist rule, a decimating war with Iran, an internal war against both Shia and Kurd, Gulf War 1, ten years of U.N.-imposed sanctions and no-fly zones, and the current war and occupation.
If we’re truly looking for answers, we need to ask the people that live there. We owe them at least that much. Had we done so in the past, there are a number of countries and thousands of people who may have been alive today.
is on this WaPo story too. Snippet:
The importance of this Washington Post article cannot be overstated, though it will probably large overlooked. First, we do have some signs that the Democrats have recognized that they need to stop running from this issue. I’m not confident that they’ll be willing to do so in the necessary way – admit they were wrong to support the war, wrong to trust this administration to do it right even given what they believed at the time, and sorry for their mistake – but maybe I’ll be surprised.
The most important thing about this article is that we have a Republican essentially saying that Bush is full of shit. …
but have you noticed that when violence in Iraq increases the Bush Admin. says, “We’re winning! The insurgents are getting desperate.” And when the violence in Iraq decreases they say, “We’re winning! The insurgents are in their last throes.”?
As far as they’re concerned Iraq is a Win/Win situation. There is no use trying to make a case against them. There will never be reason enough to convince them otherwise.
Consequently, we can not expect them to propose a schedule for withdrawl since our troops need to be there when we’re “winning,” regardless of the conditions.
Bush’s February remarks, “Our strategy is clear. We’re going to help the Iraqis defend themselves. . .We’ll help them stand up a high-quality security force. And when that mission is complete, and Iraq is democratic and free and able to defend herself, our troops will come home with the honor they have earned.”
This is carte blanche for staying in Iraq forever. The menu of enemies is nearly endless: al-Qaeda; Sunni followers of Saddam; Shia followers of insurgent Mosul cleric, Abdullah Janabi; foreign (Syrian, Saudi, Yemeni) terrorists; devotees of the much-resurrected al-Zarqawi; Islamist pot-stirrers from Iran; opportunistic common and organized criminals. . .
The problem the Democrats have is pinning the Bush Administration down to a quantitative definition of “win,” much like trying to pin Clinton down on the definition of “is.”
From where I sit (with my stuffy head balanced precariously on the end of my neck) to me, the only way out of Iraq resides in the hands of the American people. As with Vietnam, only after the public’s dissatisfaction with the morass, quagmire, quicksand pit that is Iraq, reaches defining proportions on the street in terms of protests, demonstrations, and effigy burnings of Bush, Rumsfeld, Rove, and Wolfowitz will this country remove.
Until then, expect our troops to remain and continue dying. After all, the projected troop loss at the beginning of this war for the “war” itself was 3,000. We’re only a little over half way there. At this rate, we should be in Iraq at least until 2008.