Tag: Iraq

“W. says he can’t set a deadline to bring the troops home. But he started the war on an artificial deadline; he declared a ‘Mission Accomplished’ end to major hostilities on an artificial deadline; he was inflexible on deadlines for handing over Iraqi sovereignty and holding elections. And he tried to force the Iraqis to produce a constitution on his deadline when the squabbling politicians of the ethnic and religious factions hadn’t even reached consensus on little things like ‘Do we want one country?’

— Maureen Dowd

Karl Rove need no longer pore over polls to find out which way the wind is blowing in public opinion about the war in Iraq. He need only take a gander at the rats deserting the sinking ship. Case in point, Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Bestiality) – a primo GOoper tool if there ever was one – has been caught jumping overboard so fast it has made his own head spin.

Santorum is facing opposition in his bid for re-election next year from Democratic state treasurer Robert Casey Jr. When Casey criticized Santorum for not asking tougher questions about President Bush’s reasons for taking the country to war, a very surprising thing happened.

Instead of bloviating the latest talking points about the war fed to him by his betters, Santorum capitulated – and in capitulating, he lied:

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If that headline creates cognitive dissonance in your brain pan, Norman Solomon’s article in the International Labor Communications Association’s on-line journal may give you some perspective.

Solomon points out that, while there appears to be increasing hand-wringing and breast-beating from a growing antiwar movement, it’s actually an “anti-lose” message that is the subtext. Much of the messaging in the media is focused on getting the hell out of Baghdad because we’re not winning or can’t win, and so can’t justify the ongoing loss of life or expense. That gives Bush an invitation to escalation, says Solomon.

A big ongoing factor is that George W. Bush and his top aides seem to believe in red-white-and-blue violence with a fervor akin to religiosity. For them, the Pentagon’s capacity to destroy is some kind of sacrament. And even if more troops aren’t readily available for duty in Iraq, huge supplies of aircraft and missiles are available to step up the killing from the air.

Back in the USA, while the growth of antiwar sentiment is apparent, much of the criticism — especially what’s spotlighted in news media — is based on distress that American casualties are continuing without any semblance of victory. In effect, many commentators see the problem as a grievous failure to kill enough of the bad guys in Iraq and sufficiently intimidate the rest.

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“The real defeatists are those in power and their silent supporters in the opposition party who are reduced to repeating ‘Stay the course’ even when the course, whatever it now is, is light years away from the one originally undertaken. The truth is we’re way off course.”

– Former Sen. Gary Hart

Greg Mitchell, an editor at Editor & Publisher, has taken a lot of heat for his expressed views on the Iraq War and his use of the V(ietnam)-word to describe the conflict. He now says we have reached the “tipping point” for Iraq, equivalent to Vietnam’s tipping point — the Tet Offensive.

Mitchell makes some excellent points, especially that the very newspapers who were trumpeting the now-discredited WMD rationale that propelled the U.S. into the war should be among the first to call for withdrawal. He also notes that if a couple of the biggies break the ice, many more will follow.

As the dog days of August wind down, the editorial pages of American newspapers face a moment of truth on the Iraq war. Over the next few weeks, with vacationers heading home, the president’s popularity sinking, hearings planned in Congress, and major protests set, the case for a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq — sooner rather than later, as Al Neuharth has repeatedly put it — will finally become a center of public and political debate.

Or, as Republican Senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska (who once favored the war) said on Sunday, “We should start figuring out how we get out of there. I think our involvement there has destabilized the Middle East. And the longer we stay there, I think the further destabilization will occur.”

It’s time for newspapers, many of which helped get us into this war, to consider using their editorial pages as platforms to help get us out of it. So far, few have done much more than wring their hands, or simply criticize the conduct of the war, or the lack of body armor. Not many months ago, in fact, some papers, including The New York Times, were calling for more U.S. troops for Iraq.

Now it’s literally do-or-die time.
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More damnable lies from a White House flying monkey speaking for President Bush:

Meeting briefly with reporters Monday aboard Air Force One, Trent Duffy, a White House spokesman subbing for Scott McClellan, said that President Bush believes that those who want the U.S. to begin to change course in Iraq do not want America to win the overall “war on terror”… Speaking to reporters, Duffy said that Bush “can understand that people don’t share his view that we must win the war on terror…”

History teaches us that violence never resolves terrorism. No terrorist group (or its equivalent) in recorded history has ever been put down by force. We can retaliate when we are attacked by terrorists, and we can try to root them out before they hit us, but if we use force as our only tool in this struggle, the violence against us will only escalate.

Violence did not resolve the IRA’s terror campaign against the British. New prosperity in Ireland, generated largely by technology (borne of improved educational resources) was largely responsible for the quelling of hostilities.

And look at Israel. Their democratically elected, religion-based government is locked in continuously escalating violence with the Palestinians that has been going on for 50 years and could go on for centuries to come.

President Bush needs all Americans to be afraid. He uses our fear as a lever to control us. This technique is many things – evil, for one – but what it is not is leadership.

Jim Lobe, writing for the Inter Press News Service, offers some trenchant analysis of the current state of the anti-war movement, the Bush administration’s mishandling of the Iraq war and the growing groundswell of sentiment against the war.

Has the U.S. public lost so much confidence in the George W. Bush administration’s handling of the Iraq war that its current strategy — to the extent one actually exists — is unsustainable?

With Pres. Bush himself besieged by anti-war protesters on his seemingly endless and ill-timed vacation at his Texas ranch, that appears to be The Big Question, just two weeks before the resumption of official business back in Washington.

Both Republican lawmakers, who face mid-term elections in 15 months from now, and the military itself, which, as a result of the Vietnam debacle, has taken as an article of faith that the loss of civilian support must be avoided at all costs, appear increasingly restive and unhappy with the course of events.

“There are more and more voices within the party and military who are beginning to acknowledge that the situation in Iraq is not only not improving, but is actually getting worse,” said Jim Cason of the Friends Committee on National Legislation (FCNL), a lobby group that opposed the war.

“The administration is under more and more pressure from within — especially from the Pentagon and influential Republicans on Capitol Hill — and it clearly hasn’t figured out what to do about it.”
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“Stay the course is not a policy…. And so I think by any standard when you analyze two and a half years in Iraq where we have put in over a third of a trillion dollars, where we have lost over 1,900 Americans, over 14,000 wounded, electricity production down, oil production down… any measurement, any standard you apply to this, we’re not winning…. The longer we stay, the more problems we’re going to have.”

– Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Nebraska)

“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.

“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.”

— Frank Rich in the New York Times