Tag: Iraq

Clinton: Bush Must End War before He Leaves Office

Jon Ponder

Campaigning in Iowa over the weekend, Sen. Hillary Clinton issued a demand that Pres. Bush bring troops home from Iraq before he leaves office:

Clinton’s proposal provides an answer to the Republican talking-points challenge that Democrats don’t have a plan for getting out of Iraq. You want plan? Here’s a plan: You broke it, you fix it.

“This was his decision to go to war with an ill-conceived plan and an incompetently executed strategy,” the Democratic senator from New York said her in initial presidential campaign swing through Iowa.

“We expect him to extricate our country from this before he leaves office” in January 2009, the former first lady said.

This is smart because it pushes the responsibility for the war back onto the president, who has been trying to toss his hot potato to Democrats since they took control of Congress in November.

The proposal also provides an answer to the Republican talking-points challenge that Democrats don’t have a plan for getting out of Iraq. You want plan? Here’s a plan: You broke it, you fix it.

The senator’s challenge also reflects polling that shows that most Americans (52 percent in the most recent ABC/WaPo) want U.S. troops to leave Iraq, whether or not civil order is restored.

What Sen. Clinton’s proposal does not do is prevent U.S. forces from needlessly dying or being injured for two years while Bush dithers.

Bush Just Keeps Saying the Same Thing: “Trust Me”

Trish

“Some are condemning the plan before it even has a chance to work.”

I don’t know about you but comments like that by Bush and his henchmen Cheney, Limbaugh, and Lieberman are really getting on my nerves. Not to mention this chestnut:

President Bush…said Friday “I’m the decision-maker” about sending more troops to the war.

He still expects us to give his latest idiocy the benefit of the doubt, a chance to work. Try it out, see how it goes. What the hey?

Bush still doesn’t get it. Even after his “thumpin’,” even after congressional Republicans hulked up and started acting like people again by voting their conscience instead of their party, and even after 70 percent of the American people said they disagree with him, he still takes umbrage when his ridiculous conclusions are questioned.

Well wake up, decider, we aren’t taking your word anymore.

White House veterans and analysts say the signs suggest a bunker mentality for a White House frustrated over its efforts to govern and pursue a broader agenda when the administration seems to face criticism of the Iraq War at every turn…

White House insiders, speaking on condition of anonymity, say an intense sense of war fatigue has set in.

Some cite a sense of regret and self-recrimination among White House officials who have evolved from a sense of being unjustly persecuted to a sense that the administration itself made critical mistakes in the conduct of the war that have contributed to the media and public lament.

I would say that from Day One this president has asked us to trust him while presenting nothing but evidence that we should do the exact opposite. I would say that, except he hasn’t asked us to trust him, he’s simply ridiculed and bullied and threatened those who don’t. He’s demanded blind faith while demonstrating incompetence and duplicity and the poorest judgement of the 21st century.

And he still expects us to give his latest idiocy the benefit of the doubt, a chance to work. Try it out, see how it goes. What the hey? After all, what’s really at stake? Only 21,500 men and women with families and loved ones and jobs and futures. Come on, America, just roll those dice. W is. And the only thing bothering him about it all is having to answer to you for it.

Protests on Saturday in DC, LA

Jon Ponder

Los Angeles Times:

The Los Angeles protest is to begin at noon outside the California Democratic Party’s Los Angeles office at 888 S. Figueroa St., with participants marching past City Hall to the federal building at 300 N. Los Angeles St.

Emboldened by the Democratic takeover of Congress and shrinking public support for the Iraq war, antiwar groups are planning what they hope will be a massive protest Saturday on the National Mall.

Similar events are planned in dozens of cities around the country, with some of the largest expected in Los Angeles and San Francisco. Organizers said they aim to put pressure on both the White House and Congress to end the war.

“The message will be ‘Mr. President, bring our troops home,’ ” said Rep. Lynn Woolsey (D-Petaluma), one of several politicians, activists and actors scheduled to speak in Washington.

The Rev. Jesse Jackson, founder and president of the Rainbow/Push Coalition, one of the rally sponsors, is also scheduled to appear on the mall, organizers said. Others on the lineup are Rep. Dennis J. Kucinich of Ohio, a longshot candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, and actors Jane Fonda, Danny Glover, Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins.

“We’re predicting this will be one of the largest demonstrations since the war began,” said Leslie Cagan, national coordinator for United for Peace and Justice, the umbrella group organizing the Washington protest…

In Los Angeles, about 100 groups are planning to gather downtown. Organizers expect tens of thousands of marchers, including many bused in from Orange, Riverside and San Bernardino counties.

Rallies are also planned in San Francisco, San Diego, Mount Shasta and Palm Springs.

The Los Angeles protest is to begin at noon outside the California Democratic Party’s Los Angeles office at 888 S. Figueroa St., with participants marching past City Hall to the federal building at 300 N. Los Angeles St.

Speakers will include Cindy Sheehan, who lost her son in Iraq and became a symbol of the antiwar movement after camping out in protest near President Bush’s Texas ranch, and Ron Kovic, the antiwar activist and Vietnam veteran who wrote “Born on the Fourth of July.”

About 300 soldiers from California have been killed in Iraq, more than from any other state.

Pelosi Says Bush Did Not Consult Her on War Escalation

Jon Ponder

George W. Bush is not the only American aristocrat in office today. But Ted Kennedy, Jay Rockefeller and others see themselves as public servants. On the other hand, Bush sees himself as a king, with all the royal entitlements thereto ascribed:

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said yesterday that President George W. Bush did not consult her before announcing his new strategy for the war in Iraq — a sign that, despite the cozy rhetoric, the relationship between Washington’s two powerhouses has already had its share of friction.

In an interview, Pelosi also said she was puzzled by what she considered the president’s minimalist explanation for his confidence in the new surge of 21,500 U.S. troops that he has presented as the crux of a new “way forward” for U.S. forces in Iraq.

“He’s tried this two times — it’s failed twice,” the California Democrat said. “I asked him at the White House, ‘Mr. President, why do you think this time it’s going to work?’ And he said, ‘Because I told them it had to.’ ”

Asked if the president had elaborated, she added that he simply said, ” ‘I told them that they had to.’ That was the end of it. That’s the way it is.”

Call to Arms for Young Conservatives: Bush Needs You! (Last Chance)

Jon Ponder

Now Is the Time for All Young Republicans to Come to the Aid of Their Dear Leader

Sign up! Sign up! Be part of the surge. Pres. Bush needs young Republicans to volunteer for service in Iraq. He especially needs the sons and daughters of members of his administration, his appointees and of Republican members of Congress to help him fight “the enemy” in Iraq.

Last night, in his State of the Union speech, Dear Leader sent out a call to arms:

Tonight I ask the Congress to authorize an increase in the size of our active Army and Marine Corps by 92,000 in the next five years. (Applause.) A second task we can take on together is to design and establish a volunteer Civilian Reserve Corps. Such a corps would function much like our military reserve. It would ease the burden on the Armed Forces by allowing us to hire civilians with critical skills to serve on missions abroad when America needs them. It would give people across America who do not wear the uniform a chance to serve in the defining struggle of our time.

It’s time for all GOP Dead-enders and One-Hundred-Percenters — the 30 percent of Americans who support this president and his war — to get their kids off their duffs, into uniform and onto streets of Baghdad.

Come on, boys and girls! Show us liberals that he is right and we are wrong.

To arms! To arms! To arms and Iraq!

SOTU: Jim Webb for President

Jon Ponder

There couldn’t have been a starker contrast between Pres. Bush’s pre-packaged pablum in the State of the Union speech last night and the Democratic response from Sen. Jim Webb of Virginia. In particular, what he said about Iraq was devastating to Bush’s tissue of lies and homilies:

This is my father, when he was a young Air Force captain, flying cargo planes during the Berlin Airlift. He sent us the picture from Germany, as we waited for him, back here at home. When I was a small boy, I used to take the picture to bed with me every night.

[This] country has patiently endured a mismanaged war for nearly four years. Many, including myself, warned even before the war began that it was unnecessary, that it would take our energy and attention away from the larger war against terrorism, and that invading and occupying Iraq would leave us strategically vulnerable in the most violent and turbulent corner of the world.

I want to share with all of you a picture that I have carried with me for more than 50 years. This is my father, when he was a young Air Force captain, flying cargo planes during the Berlin Airlift. He sent us the picture from Germany, as we waited for him, back here at home. When I was a small boy, I used to take the picture to bed with me every night, because for more than three years my father was deployed, unable to live with us full-time, serving overseas or in bases where there was no family housing. I still keep it, to remind me of the sacrifices that my mother and others had to make, over and over again, as my father gladly served our country. I was proud to follow in his footsteps, serving as a Marine in Vietnam. My brother did as well, serving as a Marine helicopter pilot. My son has joined the tradition, now serving as an infantry Marine in Iraq.

Like so many other Americans, today and throughout our history, we serve and have served, not for political reasons, but because we love our country. On the political issues – those matters of war and peace, and in some cases of life and death – we trusted the judgment of our national leaders. We hoped that they would be right, that they would measure with accuracy the value of our lives against the enormity of the national interest that might call upon us to go into harm’s way.

We owed them our loyalty, as Americans, and we gave it. But they owed us – sound judgment, clear thinking, concern for our welfare, a guarantee that the threat to our country was equal to the price we might be called upon to pay in defending it.

The President took us into this war recklessly. He disregarded warnings from the national security adviser during the first Gulf War, the chief of staff of the army, two former commanding generals of the Central Command, whose jurisdiction includes Iraq, the director of operations on the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and many, many others with great integrity and long experience in national security affairs. We are now, as a nation, held hostage to the predictable – and predicted – disarray that has followed.

The war’s costs to our nation have been staggering: Financially. The damage to our reputation around the world. The lost opportunities to defeat the forces of international terrorism. And especially the precious blood of our citizens who have stepped forward to serve.

The majority of the nation no longer supports the way this war is being fought; nor does the majority of our military. We need a new direction. Not one step back from the war against international terrorism. Not a precipitous withdrawal that ignores the possibility of further chaos. But an immediate shift toward strong regionally-based diplomacy, a policy that takes our soldiers off the streets of Iraq’s cities, and a formula that will in short order allow our combat forces to leave Iraq.

Muslim Clerics Urge Sunnis, Shiites to Unite in the Fight Against Foreign Aggression

Buck Banks

Invasion persuasion: It’s happened — the mullahs have figured out the only way to get us out of Iraq is to get the Shiites and Sunnis to stop torturing and killing each other and to join together to torture and kill Americans. One wonders why it took them three years to figure that out.

It came down at a kind of cleric’s convention in Qatar last weekend:

We have an obligation to fight foreign occupation of Muslim countries and we should be united against foreign aggression.

A prominent Sunni Muslim cleric on Monday called on warring Sunnis and Shi’ites in Iraq to stop sectarian violence and fight U.S.-led “foreign occupiers”.

“It is a taboo for Muslims to kill each other,” said Sheikh Youssef al-Qaradawi, an Egyptian cleric living in Qatar.

The call to unite against “foreign occupiers” came after a three-day religious forum in Qatar grouping more than 200 Sunni and Shi’ite scholars from more than 40 countries.

“We have an obligation to fight foreign occupation of Muslim countries and we should be united against foreign aggression,” Qaradawi added.
[…]

The Urge to Surge Versus the Action-Reaction Scenarios

Buck Banks

Vietnam all over again: Congress Daily’s Charles C. Wilson was a Vietnam war correspondent in 1968 and he was embedded with the Marines in Iraq in 2003. His take on the potential response is chilling — what if the surge in troops turns the Sunni and Shia militias against the American invaders? It’s a worse-case scenario that is in the back of the minds of many whenever we hear the Commander-In-Chief start talking troop “augmentation.”

Note how easy it would be for suicidal Sunni or Shia mortar crews to fire shells into the Green Zone or into a slow moving American truck convoy out of Kuwait, perhaps inflicting heavy American casualties and making headlines around the world, just as the Tet offensive did in 1968.

What will Congress do in the likely event that the warring forces in Iraq respond to President’s Bush’s troop surge and anti-militia attacks by shifting their fire away from each other and onto Americans in their midst, inflicting heavy casualties in an Arab-world version of the Vietnam War’s Tet offensive?

“You are the first person to ask me that question,” Senate Foreign Relations Chairman Joseph Biden, D-Del., told me, acknowledging that he has been worrying about that possibility while pondering possible unintended consequences of Bush’s decision to send an additional 21,500 American troops to Iraq with orders to take on the armed militias, including the Mahdi Army controlled by Shia cleric Moktada al-Sadr.

If Sadr’s militia, or any other one in Iraq, inflicts heavy casualties on American soldiers or civilians, “this place will go nuts,” Biden said, referring to Congress. In such a case, he predicted lawmakers would demand “complete withdrawal” of U.S. troops from Iraq.

Up to now, the Shiites and Sunnis have been more interested in killing each other by the score rather than Americans by the score. But hit-and-run wars such as Vietnam and Iraq have an action-reaction dynamic because, at bottom, they are a struggle for men’s minds, not territory. So militia leaders like Sadr would feel compelled to strike back in a telegenic way to stepped-up American attacks against them.

I saw this action-reaction phenomenon play out as a combat correspondent covering a slice of the country-wide Tet offensive in South Vietnam in 1968. Thirty-five years later, as a reporter embedded with the Marines during the 2003 invasion of Iraq, I wondered why the same phenomenon did not take hold.

Looking back, the reason was that tribal leaders and their militias were waiting to see how long the invading American forces would stay in Iraq and what they would do there. Now they know, from Bush himself, that he intends to raise the stakes.
[…]

Is St. McCain Depressed?

Jon Ponder

Sen. John McCain’s performance on “Meet the Press” yesterday was decidely lackluster. The current GOP 2008 frontrunner and former maverick’s snap and crackle seemed to be replaced with a sodden doughiness. Perhaps it was the topic of the Iraq civil war and the “McCain surge,” which has been dragging Pres. Bush’s numbers lower since it was announced a few weeks ago.

The senator also made a wildly inaccurate reference to polling data ahead of the first Gulf War, which was caught by C&L. Sen. McCain said:

Only 15 percent of Americans supported the first Gulf War at the beginning.

But the actual data, from January 18, 1991 was the opposite:

The initial reaction by the American public to President Bush’s decision to go to war with Iraq is positive, according the Gallup Poll.

Seventy-nine percent of those interviewed on Wednesday night said they approved “of the U.S. decision today to go to war with Iraq in order to drive the Iraqis out of Kuwait,” while 15 percent disapproved, and 6 percent had no opinion.

We all make mistakes. But why so glum, Senator? Perhaps you’ve seen polling about how the war would affect your chances in 2008 if it is still raging? Or maybe you know some (new) dark truth about the current administration that is about to be revealed.

No Protection for Surge Troops — or the Ones Already There

Trish

The problem with having a commander in chief whose only personal consideration in fighting a war was how to get out it is becoming clearer. Bush keeps sending troops off to fight in his private war of aggression without armor or protection.

Most of the 21,500 troops President Bush has ordered to Iraq as reinforcements will not have access to specialized blast-resistant armored vehicles

…the Pentagon’s effort to protect its troops against roadside bombs is in disarray, with soldiers and Marines having to swap access to scarce armored vehicles and the military unsure whether it has the money or industrial capacity to produce the safe vehicles it says the troops need.

On Jan. 10, The [Baltimore] Sun reported that most of the 21,500 troops President Bush has ordered to Iraq as reinforcements will not have access to specialized blast-resistant armored vehicles because they are in such short supply.

…In congressional testimony and interviews last week, senior Army and Marine Corps officers acknowledged that they are struggling just to meet the needs of service members already in Iraq. Even if the Pentagon can find millions of dollars not currently budgeted, and even if it can find factories to produce the armored vehicles, most U.S. troops in Iraq will not have access to the best equipment available, as President Bush has often promised.

The Army acknowledged last week, for example, that it is still 22 percent short of the armored Humvees it needs in Iraq despite heated criticism in 2004 and 2005 over the lack of armored vehicles. Army officials said it will be another eight months before that gap can be filled.

Maybe part of the problem is the current leadership’s decision to use big-ass, tough-looking Humvees. Didn’t wars used to get won without those?

To augment its fleet of armored Humvees, the military is intent on buying thousands of new armored vehicles whose V-shaped hulls deflect blasts from beneath upwards and outwards, unlike the flat-bottomed Humvees that absorb the blasts. These Mine-Protected Vehicles, or MPVs, designed and manufactured for years by South Africa and other countries, have a proven record of surviving powerful blasts.

Based on requests from commanders in Iraq, the U.S. military needs 6,465 MPVs, according to Lt. Gen. Stephen M. Speakes, the Army’s top supply officer. Under the current program, the first portion of those vehicles wouldn’t be delivered to Iraq until March 2008 or later, even if the services can find the funding.

Let’s hope most of the troops will be elsewhere (and I don’t mean Iran, North Korea, or Afghanistan) by March, 2008.

None of these facts will keep Bush from continuing to lie like a rug. Let’s all pledge to drink a shot during tomorrow night’s State of the Union address every time he mentions how dedicated he is to providing the best protection for our troops in the field.