The Vietnamization of U.S. involvement in Iraq’s religious civil war is now complete:

The U.S. military did not count people killed by bombs, mortars, rockets or other mass attacks when it reported a dramatic drop in the number of murders in the Baghdad area last month, the U.S. command said Monday.

The decision to include only victims of drive-by shootings and those killed by torture and execution, usually at the hands of death squads, allowed U.S. officials to argue that a security crackdown that began in the capital August 7 had more than halved the city’s murder rate.

But the types of slayings, including suicide bombings, that the U.S. excluded from the category of “murder” were not made explicit at the time. That led to confusion after Iraqi Health Ministry figures showed that 1,536 people died violently in and around Baghdad in August, nearly the same number as in July.

The figures raise serious questions about the success of the security operation launched by the U.S.-led coalition. When they released the murder rate figures, U.S. officials and their Iraqi counterparts were eager to show progress in restoring security in Baghdad at a time when Iraq appeared on the verge of civil war.

Nothing, not even a bipartisan finding by the U.S. Senate, will ever convince about 40 percent of Americans that there was no connection between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda — or especially that there was no connection between Hussein and 9/11. Nonetheless, it is so:

Saddam Hussein rejected overtures from al-Qaida and believed Islamic extremists were a threat to his regime, a reverse portrait of an Iraq allied with Osama bin Laden painted by the Bush White House, a Senate panel has found.

The administration’s version was based in part on intelligence that White House officials knew was flawed, according to Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee, citing newly declassified documents released by the panel.

The report, released Friday, discloses for the first time an October 2005 CIA assessment that prior to the war Saddam’s government “did not have a relationship, harbor or turn a blind eye toward” al-Qaida operative Abu Musab al-Zarqawi or his associates.

President Bush’s misadventure in Iraq has been a tragic waste of blood and treasure. Another tragedy is that so many Americans can be so easily fooled by such an obvious huckster.

Crooks & Liars has the video.

Earlier this week, Sec. of Defense Donald Rumsfeld drew a stark comparison between the two-thirds of Americans who question the Bush Administration’s motives and competence in its operations inside the Iraq Civil War to Nazi appeasers 70 years ago.

On Countdown yesterday, Keith Olbermann gave voice to the voiceless with this answer to Mr. Rumsfeld’s outrageous charges:

OLBERMANN: The man who sees absolutes where all other men see nuances and shades of meaning is either a profit or a quack. Donald H. Rumsfeld is not a profit. We end the COUNTDOWN where we began, our No. 1 story with a special comment on Mr. Rumsfeld‘s remarkable speech to the American Legion yesterday. It demands the deep analysis and the sober contemplation of every American, for it did not merely serve to impugn the morality or intelligence, indeed the loyalty of the majority of Americans who impose the transient occupants of the highest offices in the land.

Worst still, it credits those same transient occupants, our employees, with a total omniscience, a total omniscience which neither commonsense nor this administration‘s track record, at home or abroad, suggest they deserve it. Descent and disagreement with government is the life‘s blood of human freedom and not merely because it the first roadblock against the kind of tyranny the men Mr. Rumsfeld likes to think of his troops still fight this very evening in Iraq. It is also essential, because just every once in a while, it is right and the power to which it speaks is wrong.

In a small irony however, Mr. Rumsfeld speech writer was adroit in invoking the memory of the appeasement of the Nazis for in their time, there was another government faced with true peril with a growing evil, powerful, and remorseless. That government, like Mr. Rumsfeld‘s, had a monopoly on all the facts. It too had the secret information, it alone had the true picture of the threat. It too, dismissed and insulted its critics in terms like Mr. Rumsfeld‘s. Questioning their intellect and their morality.

That government was England‘s in the 1930. It knew Hitler posed in true threat to Europe, let alone to England. It knew Germany was not re-arming in violation of all treaties and accords. It knew that the hard evidence it had received, which contradicted its own policies, its own conclusions, its own omniscient, needed to be dismissed.

The English government of Neville Chamberlain (ph) already knew the truth. Most relevant of all, it knew that its staunchest critics need to be marginalized and isolated, in fact it portrayed the foremost of them as a blood-thirsty warmonger who was, if not truly senile, at best morally or intellectually confused. That critics name was Winston Churchill.

Sadly we have no Winston Churchill‘s evidence among this evening, we have only Donald Rumsfeld‘s demonizing disagreement, the way Neville Chamberlain demonized Winston Churchill. History and 163 million pounds of (INAUDIBLE) bombs over England have taught us that all Mr. Chamberlain had was his certainty and his own confusion, a confusion that suggested that the office cannot only make the man, but that the office can make the facts.

Thus did Mr. Rumsfeld make an apt historical analogy accepting the fact he has the battery plugged in backwards. His government absolute and exclusive in his knowledge is not the version of please one that stood up to the Nazis it is the modern version of the government of Neville Chamberlain.

But back to today‘s omniscient ones, that about what Mr. Rumsfeld is confused is simply this, this is a democracy, still, sometimes just barely and as such, all voices count, not just his. Had he or his president perhaps proven any of their prior claims of omniscience, about Osama bin Laden‘s plans five years ago, about Saddam Hussein‘s weapons four year, ago, about Hurricane Katrina‘s impact one year ago, we all might be able to swallow hard and except their omniscience as a bearable, even useful recipe of fact plus ego.

But to date, this government has proved little besides its own arrogance and its own hubris. Mr. Rumsfeld is also personally confused, morally or intellectually, about his standing in this matter. From Iraq to Katrina, to flu vaccine shortages to the entire fog of fear which continues to envelopes our nation, he, Mr. Bush, Mr. Cheney and their cronies have inadvertently or intentionally profited and benefited, both personally and politically.

And yet he can stand up in public and question the morality and the intellect of those of us who dare ask just the receipt for the emperor new clothes.

In what country was Mr. Rumsfeld raised? As a child at whose heroism did he read? On what side of the battle for freedom did he dream one day to fight? With what country has he confused the United States of America?

The confusion, we as its citizens must now address, is stark and forbidding. But variations of it have faced our forefathers when men like Nixon and McCarthy and Curtis Lemay have darkened our skies and obscured our flag.

Note, with hope in your heart, that those earlier Americans always found their way to the light and we can too. The confusion is about whether this secretary of defense and this administration are in fact now accomplishing what they claim the terrorists seek, the destruction of our freedoms, the very ones for which the same veterans Mr. Rumsfeld addressed yesterday in Salt Lake City so valiantly fought.

And about Mr. Rumsfeld‘s other main assertion of that this country faces a new type of fascism as he was correct to remind us that a government that knew everything could get everything wrong. So too was he right when he said that. Though probably not in the way he thought he meant. This country faces a new type of fascism, indeed.

Although I presumption use his sign off each night in feeble tribute, I have no utterly no claims to the words of the exemplary journalist, Edward R. Murrow. But never in the trial of 1,000 years of writing could I come close to matching how he phrased a warning to an earlier generation of us, at a time when other polarities thought they and they alone knew everything and branded those who disagreed confused or immoral.

Thus for give me for reading Murrow in full.

“We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty” he said in 1954, “We must remember always that accusation is not proof and that conviction depends upon evidence and due process of law. We will not walk in fear one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are not disended from fearful men, not from men who fear to write, to speak, to associate and to defend causes that were, for the moment, unpopular. And so, goodnight and good luck.”

Lies, damned lies and — more lies: From the folks that took the War on Terror to Iraq, here are some utterances that range from the inane to the profane to the insane:

1) “My answer is bring ’em on.” — President George W. Bush, challenging militants attacking U.S. forces in Iraq, July 2, 2003

2) “I think they’re in the last throes, if you will, of the insurgency.” — Vice President Dick Cheney, on the Iraq insurgency, June 20, 2005

3) “As you know, you go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time.” — Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, responding to a U.S. soldier serving in Iraq who asked him why troops had to dig through scrap metal to armor vehicles, Dec. 8, 2004

4) “My belief is we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators.” – Vice President Dick Cheney, “Meet the Press,” March 16, 2003

5) “F**k Saddam, we’re taking him out.” – President Bush to three U.S. senators in March 2002, a full year before the Iraq invasion

6) “Ladies and gentlemen, these are not assertions. These are facts, corroborated by many sources, some of them sources of the intelligence services of other countries.” – Secretary of State Colin Powell, testifying about Iraq’s chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons capabilities before the United Nations Security Council, Feb. 5, 2003

7) “Freedom’s untidy, and free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things.” – Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on looting in Iraq after the U.S. invasion, adding “stuff happens,” April 11, 2003

8) “Major combat operations in Iraq have ended. In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed.” – President Bush, standing under a “Mission Accomplished” banner on the USS Lincoln aircraft carrier, May 2, 2003

9) “It’s hard to conceive that it would take more forces to provide stability in post-Saddam Iraq than it would take to conduct the war itself and to secure the surrender of Saddam’s security forces and his army. Hard to imagine.” – Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, testifying before the House Budget Committee prior to the Iraq war, Feb. 27, 2003

10) “From a marketing point of view, you don’t roll out new products in August.” — White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card, on why the Bush administration waited until after Labor Day to try to sell the American people on war against Iraq, “New York Times” interview, Sept. 7, 2002

Pres. Bush on Monday:

[THE PRESIDENT:] The terrorists attacked us and killed 3,000 of our citizens before we started the freedom agenda in the Middle East.

Q What did Iraq have to do with that?

THE PRESIDENT: What did Iraq have to do with what?

Q The attack on the World Trade Center?

THE PRESIDENT: Nothing, except for it’s part of — and nobody has ever suggested in this administration that Saddam Hussein ordered the attack. Iraq was a — the lesson of September the 11th is, take threats before they fully materialize, Ken. Nobody has ever suggested that the attacks of September the 11th were ordered by Iraq.

Here is a partial record of a few of the president’s statements linking al Qaeda to Iraq:

October 28-November 10, 2002:

Bush’s comments about Saddam Hussein, each from a different speech:

“This is a person who has had contacts with al Qaeda.”
“He’s got connections with al Qaeda.”
“This is a guy who has had connections with these shadowy terrorist networks.”
“We know he’s got ties with al Qaeda.”
“We know that he’s had connections with al Qaeda.”
“He’s had connections with shadowy terrorist networks like al Qaeda.”
“We know that he has had contacts with terrorist networks like al Qaeda.”
“This is a man who has had contacts with al Qaeda.”
“This is a man who has had al Qaeda connections.”
“He’s had contacts with al Qaeda.”
“This is a man who has got connections with al Qaeda.”

And this, from June 18, 2004:

President Bush yesterday defended his assertions that there was a relationship between Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda, putting him at odds with this week’s finding of the bipartisan Sept. 11 commission. “The reason I keep insisting that there was a relationship between Iraq and Saddam and al Qaeda [is] because there was a relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda.”

Because terrorists can’t read maps.

In the run up to war in Iraq, the Bush Administration offered us a tangled web of spin: Iraq possessed WMD, Saddam was building a nuclear bomb, the oil revenues in Iraq would pay for the war, we would cakewalk into Baghdad as liberators.

At his news conference yesterday, Pres. Bush unveiled the latest lie — this one intended to convince the public that the U.S. must stay in Iraq, despite the cost in blood and treasure.

This latest uber-spin is a doozy: If we leave Iraq now, the president says, the terrorists will follow us home. Like most spin from the Bush White House, it sounds reasonable on the surface. The problem, of course, is that it isn’t factual.

The bloodshed in Iraq today is not being perpetrated by “terrorists.” Almost all the violence comes from Iraqi Sunnis trying to kill Iraqi Shi’ites. By definition, it is a civil war. Attacks by non-Iraqi terrorist groups like al Qaeda are all but nil.

Here is the president in full peroration yesterday, floating the new lie:

Now, if you say, are you going to change your strategic objective, it means you’re leaving before the mission is complete. And we’re not going to leave before the mission is complete. I agree with General Abizaid: We leave before the mission is done, the terrorists will follow us here.

And:

And there’s a fundamental difference between many of the Democrats and my party, and that is, they want to leave before the job is completed in Iraq. And again, I repeat, these are decent people. They’re just as American as I am. I just happen to strongly disagree with them. And it’s very important for the American people to understand the consequences of leaving Iraq before the job is done.

This is a global war on terror. I repeat what our major general said — or leading general said in the region. He said, “If we withdraw before the job is done, the enemy will follow us here.” I strongly agree with that. And if you believe that the job of the federal government is to secure this country, it’s really important for you to understand that success in Iraq is part of securing the country.

To recap: If we redeploy out of Iraq, their civil war will follow us home, with Sunnis exploding car bombs to kill Shi’ites on the streets of Fon du Lac and Boise.