Some much-anticipated testimony to Congress on the Iraq troop surge could come on the sixth anniversary of the terrorist attacks, according to the Hill newspaper. Is it coincidence that Gen. David Petraeus (in photo) and U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker would answer lawmakers’ questions in open session on Sept. 11? The symbolism would serve the Bush administration’s argument that Iraq is now the primary front in the war on terrorism. But White House spokesman Gordon Johndroe said the timing was dictated by Congress’ tight schedule.
Posted by Rhonda Holman
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21 Comments
Yeah. Congress’ tight schedule. Right.
This Administration is as opportunistic as it is dishonest.
So the Bush administration will write a report about how the escalation is going. Gee, I wonder what it will say.
If some cannot see the blantant disrespect for the intellect of the American people, I have some land I want to sell you.
Oh ye people of little faith. :)
180*
It is unconscienable exploitation of the 9/11 victims, for the benefit of the unconscious bushies.I bet that little timing tidbit was Rove’s parting gift to the Chump-In-Chief!
I’m sure he will tell us that he can see the light at the end of the tunnel as the dead-enders are in their last throes. Maybe he will also tell us how well Iraqiization is coming along with all those well-trained cadres of ARI troops ‘almost’ ready to take over!
The encouraging news is that we’re starting to work with the Sunnies to fight the Shiites, the bad news is we’re being attacked by both factions.You can bet the speech writers will be burning the mid-night oil to have the report ready by drop dead day, Sept. 11!
A little something for you, Ben, on how Iraqification is coming along…
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/23/world/middleeast/23electricity.html?ex=1345521600&en=ec2685fb33d35d33&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss
Very true VT. Deja Vu all over again!
Thing is Phantom, the Shiites control the government we helped install. Meanwhile our Saudi allies continue to support alQuada in Iraq.
As much as I don’t like Iran and Syria they are a hell of a lot less bad than our alQuada-supporting ally Saudi Arabia. The least bad outcome of all this might just be a Syria-Iran dominated Iraq.
Way to go George! MISSION ACCOMPLISHED!
An Editorial from Arab News.
Bush Knows Iraq War Is UnwinnableMatthew Yglesias, The GuardianToday (Aug. 22), it seems, was “Asian Wars Analogy Day” in the Bush administration, as the US president uncorked a whole series of odd historical analogies in defense of his Iraq policy. “In the aftermath of Japan’s surrender,” he reminded an audience of the Veterans of Foreign Wars in Missouri, “many thought it naive to help the Japanese transform themselves into a democracy. Then, as now, the argued that some people were not fit for freedom.”
In fact, it seems rather doubtful that any substantial body of opinion actually did argue this about Japan.
Perhaps some people argued that it was more important to the United States that Japan be a reliable ally against the Soviet Union than that it be a democracy. Which, of course, is precisely what American policy was. As former Tokyo CIA station chief Horace Feldman is quoted in Tim Weiner’s new book Legacy of Ashes, “We ran Japan during the occupation, and we ran it a different way in these years after the occupation,” ensuring the Liberal Democratic Party a basic monopoly of political power in exchange for deference to American security policy in Asia. Despite this meddling, Japan did emerge from the postwar occupation with the basic scheme of a liberal democracy in place, which was all to the good. Elsewhere in Asia, however, things didn’t work out so well, and countries like Taiwan, South Korea, and the Philippines were subjected to America-friendly military dictatorships that only became democratic decades later as a result of popular protest.
One points this out not to condemn America’s Asia policy of the 1940s and 1950s, but merely to observe that democracy-promotion wasn’t especially high on the agenda. This serves, in turn, as a reminder that the United States hardly invaded Japan (or Germany or Italy for that matter) in order to build democracies. Rather, Japan launched a sneak attack on American soil, Germany invaded Poland, both were hell-bent on world domination, and the Allies prosecuted World War II as a fundamentally defensive measure. The contrast with Iraq could not be more stark.
Nor, indeed, could the contrast between homogenous, resource-poor Japan and heterogeneous, oil-rich Iraq be much greater. Indeed, though leading war advocate Paul Wolfowitz demonstrated gross ignorance of Iraq when he testified before Congress that the country had no history of ethnic strife, he was showing a keen awareness of the fact that a history of ethnic strife would make the country an unpromising proving ground for gunpoint democratization.
All this, however, was but the appetizer for a shocking embrace of a historically illiterate account of the Vietnam War. “One unmistakable legacy of Vietnam is that the price of America’s withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent citizens,” Bush said, “whose agonies would add to our vocabulary new terms like ‘boat people,’ ‘re-education camps’ and ‘killing fields.’”
While it is of course true that people died in South Vietnam following American withdrawal, millions died during the United States’ years of military involvement as well, a great many killed by the American military at enormous expense and with no end in sight. The killing fields of Pol Pot’s Cambodia, meanwhile, were, if anything, more a consequence of America’s destabilization of the region than of America’s departure. Unenlightening as Bush’s analogies may be, they do serve as an interesting sign of the times. For years, war-supporters derided any efforts to draw parallels between Iraq and Vietnam as unwarranted, now they’re eager to draw them. The reason, most likely, is that while the hawks lost the war in Vietnam and eventually even lost the debate over the war, they believe themselves to have eventually won the larger political battle as Ronald Reagan embraced Bush-style revisionist accounts of the war in Southeast Asia as part of his march to the White House in 1980.
For months now, many conservatives have been fundamentally positioning themselves for the postwar era, readying the arguments that will blame the failure of the venture in Iraq on its opponents rather than its architects.
That Bush himself has chosen to join them is, perhaps, on some level the clearest reflection of the reality that the president knows perfectly well that the war is unwinnable, and blame shifting now the best hope for saving his historical legacy.http://www.arabnews.com/?page=7§ion=0&article=100364&d=24&m=8&y=2007&pix=opinion.jpg&category=Opinion
Looks like Warner can’t wait!Republican urges Iraq troop cut as Maliki faulted By Randall Mikkelsen50 minutes ago
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – In a double setback for U.S. President George W. Bush, an intelligence report cast doubt on Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki’s leadership and an influential senator in Bush’s Republican Party urged him on Thursday to begin a troop pullout.
ADVERTISEMENTVirginia Sen. John Warner said Maliki had “let our troops down” by failing to take steps toward political reconciliation that would help stabilize Iraq. He said Bush should announce next month an initial withdrawal of U.S. troops as a way to spur the Iraqi government into action.
“We simply cannot, as a nation, stand and put our troops at continuous risk of loss of life and limb without beginning to take some decisive action which will get everybody’s attention,” Warner told reporters following a visit to Iraq.
U.S. political leaders have assailed Maliki’s ability to govern Iraq. The unpopular war has featured prominently in the campaign for the November 2008 presidential election, with Democrats and some Republicans urging a U.S. troop withdrawal.
Warner, a senior Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee who has pushed Bush to change his Iraq policy, suggested a withdrawal of “say 5,000″ troops who could be home by Christmas. About 160,000 U.S. troops are now in Iraq.
Bush should announce the step on September 15 in conjunction with a progress report on Iraq requested by Congress, Warner said. The evaluation by the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Ryan Crocker, and the top U.S. commander there, Gen. David Petraeus, is widely seen as the potential trigger for a change in U.S. policy in Iraq.
Bush just this week launched a new plea for patience and the White House responded to Warner’s call by saying it still wanted to wait for the September assessment.
MORE PRECARIOUS
Warner spoke shortly after U.S. intelligence agencies cast doubt on Maliki’s ability to heal sectarian divides, one of the benchmarks the United States uses to measure progress in Iraq.
Declassified findings of the National Intelligence Estimate said there had been “measurable but uneven improvements” in Iraqi security since January, under a U.S. troop increase ordered by Bush this year.
It said, however, that “levels of insurgent and sectarian violence will remain high” and “the Iraqi government will become more precarious over the next 6-12 months.”
The intelligence estimate forecast increased criticism from within the Shi’ite Muslim majority’s main coalition, as well as from Sunni Muslim and Kurdish parties.
“Broadly accepted political compromises required for sustained security, long-term political progress and economic development are unlikely to emerge unless there is a fundamental shift in the factors driving Iraqi political and security developments,” the report said.
Warner said the United States needed “to show that we mean business” when it says its commitment to Iraq is not open-ended.
He said he would not go as far as Democratic Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan, who called for Maliki to be replaced.
Warner’s call and the report came a day after Bush sought to correct impressions his support for Maliki was wavering. Bush had hailed Maliki as “the right guy for Iraq” when the two stood side by side last November in Jordan, but doubts within the Bush administration have been growing.
Bush on Tuesday voiced frustrations with the Iraqi leadership but on Wednesday called Maliki “a good man with a difficult job.”
Maliki bristled at the criticism, saying no one outside Iraq had a right to set timetables for progress.
The intelligence estimate said a change in the mission of U.S. troops from fighting insurgents, as some war critics in Congress have advocated, would erode recent security gains.
Senior U.S. intelligence officials told reporters in Washington there was hope reconciliation beginning to take place at the local level in Iraq could lead to broader national unity, but it was too early to know.
George W. Bush has used the 9/11 tragedy for his own political poll numbers rising but yet I cannot forget the day Bush stated that he does not even think about Bin Laden anymore.
How can our president not even think about the self-admitted mastermind behind 9/11? This is a slap in every 9/11 victim’s face and in the faces of their families and loved ones.
This goes to the dept of ‘character’ of Bush and, of course, Bush promised to restore honesty and integrity to the White House and we see how well that worked out.
Those saying Iraqies were not ready or more to the point, don’t want democracy were spot on! Too bad they didn’t get a fair hearing before the lunatic invaded. Countless lives (especially American) wouldn’t have been lost in the pursuit of bush’s grand illusion. The post above by ED shows just how ignorant bush is about history.
Bush certainly did a 180 on his relentless pursuit of those behind 9/11. If the report is on 9/11 the dems. ought to play bush bull shitting America on the mega phone at the wtc site, followed with the clip where he made the don’t think about bin laden statement!
War analogy strikes nerve in Vietnam
By BEN STOCKING, Associated Press Writer 44 minutes ago
HANOI, Vietnam – President Bush touched a nerve among Vietnamese when he invoked the Vietnam War in a speech warning that death and chaos will envelop Iraq if U.S. troops leave too quickly.
People in Vietnam, where opposition to the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq is strong, said Thursday that Bush drew the wrong conclusions from the long, bloody Southeast Asian conflict.
“Doesn’t he realize that if the U.S. had stayed in Vietnam longer, they would have killed more people?” said Vu Huy Trieu of Hanoi, a veteran of the communist forces that fought American troops in Vietnam. “Nobody regrets that the Vietnam War wasn’t prolonged except Bush.”
He said U.S. troops could never have prevailed here. “Does he think the U.S. could have won if they had stayed longer? No way,” Trieu said.
Vietnam’s official government spokesman offered a more measured response when asked at a regular media briefing to comment on Bush’s speech to American veterans Wednesday.
“With regard to the American war in Vietnam, everyone knows that we fought to defend our country and that this was a righteous war of the Vietnamese people,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Le Dung said. “And we all know that the war caused tremendous suffering and losses to the Vietnamese people.”
Dung said Vietnam hopes that the Iraq conflict will be resolved “very soon, in an orderly way, and that the Iraqi people will do their best to rebuild their country.”
Although Vietnam opposed the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, Dung stressed that ties between Hanoi and Washington have been growing closer since the former foes normalized relations in 1995, two decades after the war’s end.
In his remarks to U.S. veterans, Bush said a hasty retreat from Iraq would lead to terrible violence.
“One unmistakable legacy of Vietnam is that the price of America’s withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent citizens whose agonies would add to our vocabulary new terms like ‘boat people,’ ‘re-education camps’ and ‘killing fields,’” Bush said.
Many people in Vietnam said Bush’s comparison was ill-considered.
The only way to restore order in Iraq is for the United States to leave, said Trinh Xuan Thang, a university student.
“Bush sent troops to invade Iraq and created all the problems there,” Thang said.
If the U.S. withdrew, he said, the violence might escalate in the short term but the situation would eventually stabilize.
“Let the Iraqis determine their fate by themselves,” Thang said. “They don’t need American troops there.”
Ton Nu Thi Ninh, former chairwoman of the National Assembly’s committee on foreign affairs, said Bush was unwise to stir up sensitive memories of the Vietnam War.
“The price we, the Vietnamese people on both sides, paid during the war was due to the fact that the Americans went into Vietnam in the first place,” Ninh said.
“The price we, the Iraqi people on both sides, paid during the war was due to the fact that the Americans went into Iraq in the first place,”
will we ever learn!
Another take on the bush comparison.
Historians Question Bush’s Reading of Lessons of Vietnam War for Iraq
The New York TimesBy THOM SHANKERNews Analysis
WASHINGTON, Aug. 22 — The American withdrawal from Vietnam is widely remembered as an ignominious end to a misguided war — but one with few negative repercussions for the United States and its allies.
Now, in urging Americans to stay the course in Iraq, President Bush is challenging that historical memory.
In reminding Americans that the pullout in 1975 was followed by years of bloody upheaval in Southeast Asia, Mr. Bush argued in a speech on Wednesday that Vietnam’s lessons provide a reason for persevering in Iraq, rather than for leaving any time soon. Mr. Bush in essence accused his war critics of amnesia over the exodus of Vietnamese “boat people” refugees and the mass killings in Cambodia that upended the lives of millions of people.
President Bush is right on the factual record, according to historians. But many of them also quarreled with his drawing analogies from the causes of that turmoil to predict what might happen in Iraq should the United States withdraw.
“It is undoubtedly true that America’s failure in Vietnam led to catastrophic consequences in the region, especially in Cambodia,” said David C. Hendrickson, a specialist on the history of American foreign policy at Colorado College in Colorado Springs.
“But there are a couple of further points that need weighing,” he added. “One is that the Khmer Rouge would never have come to power in the absence of the war in Vietnam — this dark force arose out of the circumstances of the war, was in a deep sense created by the war. The same thing has happened in the Middle East today. Foreign occupation of Iraq has created far more terrorists than it has deterred.”
The record of death and dislocation after the American withdrawal from Vietnam ranks high among the tragedies of the last century, with an estimated 1.7 million Cambodians, about one-fifth of the population, dying under the rule of Pol Pot, and an estimated 1.5 million Vietnamese and other Indochinese becoming refugees. Estimates of the number of Vietnamese who were sent to prison camps after the war have ranged widely, from 50,000 to more than 400,000, and some accounts have said that tens of thousands perished, a figure that Mr. Bush cited in his speech, to the Veterans of Foreign Wars. Mr. Bush did not offer a judgment on what, if anything, might have brought victory in Vietnam or whether the war itself was a mistake. Instead, he sought to underscore the dangers of a hasty withdrawal from Iraq.
But the American drawdown from Vietnam was hardly abrupt, and it lasted much longer than many people remember. The withdrawal actually began in 1968, after the Tet offensive, which was a military defeat for the Communist guerrillas and their North Vietnamese sponsors. But it also illustrated the vulnerability of the United States and its South Vietnamese allies.
Although American commanders asked for several hundred thousand reinforcements after Tet, President Johnson turned them down. President Nixon began a process of “Vietnamization” in which responsibility for security was gradually handed to local military and police forces — similar to Mr. Bush’s long-term strategy for Iraq today.
[EDIT:They leave out of their account that if we had continued to supply Air Power and aid, the South could have won. But the Dem Congress refused to do so.]
American air power was used to help sustain South Vietnam’s struggling government, but by the time of the famous photograph of Americans being lifted off a roof in Saigon in 1975, few American combat forces were left in Vietnam. “It was not a precipitous withdrawal, it was a very deliberate disengagement,” said Andrew J. Bacevich, a platoon leader in Vietnam who is now a professor of international relations at Boston University.
Vietnam today is a unified and stable nation whose Communist government poses little threat to its neighbors and is developing healthy ties with the United States. Mr. Bush visited Vietnam last November; a return visit to the White House this summer by Nguyen Minh Triet was the first visit by a Vietnamese head of state since the war.
“The Vietnam comparison should invite us to think harder about how to minimize the consequences of our military failure,” Mr. Bacevich added. “If one is really concerned about the Iraqi people, and the fate that may be awaiting them as this war winds down, then we ought to get serious about opening our doors, and to welcoming to the United States those Iraqis who have supported us and have put themselves and their families in danger.”
To that end, some members of Congress and human rights groups have urged the Bush administration to drop the limits on Iraqi refugees admitted to the United States.
[EDIT: Sure. Let millions of angry Muslim Iraqis into the country. No questions asked.]
Mr. Bush also sought to inspire renewed support for his Iraq strategy by recalling the years of national sacrifice during World War II, and the commitment required to rebuild two of history’s most aggressive and lawless adversaries, Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, into reliable and responsible allies.
But historians note that Germany and Japan were homogenous nation-states with clear national identities and no internal feuding among factions or sects, in stark contrast to Iraq today.
The comparison of Iraq to Germany and Japan “is fanciful,” said Steven Simon, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. He noted that the American and allied militaries had eliminated the governments of Japan and Germany, and any lingering opposition, and assembled occupation forces that were, proportionally, more than three times as large as the current American presence of more than 160,000 troops in Iraq.
“That’s the kind of troop level you need to control the situation,” Mr. Simon said. “The occupation of Germany and Japan lasted for years — and not a single American solider was killed by insurgents.”
Senior American military officers speaking privately also say that the essential elements that brought victory in World War II — a total commitment by the American people and the government, and a staggering economic commitment to rebuild defeated adversaries — do not exist for the Iraq war. The wars in Korea and Vietnam also involved considerable national sacrifice, including tax increases and conscription.
Perhaps the American people would support the Iraq war if it was truly a necessary war. But as many see it, it is Bush’s war for control of the oil.
We need strong leadership in our president and Congress to get ourselves off the dependency of foreign oil. US needs to develop alternativen energy sources so we can tell the Middle East assholes to shove their oil barrels up their collective asses!
But with two oil men in the White House, that is not about to happen. Rather than to provide real leadership, Bush, the decider, invades Iraq and tries to promote it as some sort of war on terror and bringing democracy to Iraq.
And how does the Iraqi government return the favor – they go on vacation for 2 months during the worst fighting. Is this really why American soldiers are being sacrificed?
The bigger question is not when the Iraq war will end but when will Bush and Cheney poke their big stick in Iran’s eye one too many times and start that holy war? Then the shit will really hit the fan.
maidmarion,
Indeed. Iran is what the Neocon jerkoffs have wanted all along. “Anyone can go to Baghdad. Real men go to Iran” and all that.
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,671919,00.html
We all know perfectly well what Petraeus is going to say when he gives his report. And we all know perfectly well that American troops will stay right where they are until George Bush has left office. Does anybody think George Bush gives a shit about what John Warner has to say?
Odds-on that Cheney personally shoots him.
This talk about Iran has CF2K a little spooked. So here’s a bit of prophecy from the guy who saw where we were headed all the way back in November of 2000: Dr. Hunter S. Thompson.
“Prepare for the WeirdnessBy Hunter S. ThompsonPage 2 columnistESPN.comNov. 20, 2000
“Something is happening here,But you don’t know what it is,Do you, Mr. Jones?”– Bob Dylan
No sir, not a chance. Mr. Jones does not even pretend to know what’s happening in America right now, and neither does anyone else.
We have seen Weird Times in this country before, but the year 2000 is beginning to look super weird. This time, there really is nobody flying the plane. … We are living in dangerously weird times now. Smart people just shrug and admit they’re dazed and confused.
The only ones left with any confidence at all are the New Dumb. It is the beginning of the end of our world as we knew it. Doom is the operative ethic.
The Autumn months are never a calm time in America. Back to Work, Back to School, Back to Football Practice, etc. … Autumn is a very Traditional period, a time of strong Rituals and the celebrating of strange annual holidays like Halloween and Satanism and the fateful Harvest Moon, which can have ominous implications for some people.
Autumn is always a time of Fear and Greed and Hoarding for the winter coming on. Debt collectors are active on old people and fleece the weak and helpless. They want to lay in enough cash to weather the known horrors of January and February. There is always a rash of kidnapping and abductions of school children in the football months. Pre-teens of both sexes are traditionally seized and grabbed off the streets by gangs of organized Perverts.
Most of these things are obviously Wrong and Evil and Ugly — but at least they are Traditional. They will happen. Your driveway will ice up, your furnace will blow up and you will be rammed in traffic by an uninsured driver in a stolen car.
But what the hell. That’s why we have Insurance, eh? And the Inevitability of these nightmares is what makes them so reassuring. Life will go on, for good or ill. The structure might be a little Crooked, but the foundations are still Strong and Unshakable.
Ho, ho. Think again, buster. Look around you. There is an eerie sense of Panic in the air, a silent Fear and Uncertainty that comes with once-reliable faiths and truths and solid Institutions that are no longer safe to believe in. … There is a Presidential Election, right on schedule, but somehow there is no President. A new Congress is elected, like always, but somehow there is no real Congress at all — not as we knew it, anyway, and whatever passes for Congress will be as helpless and weak as Whoever has to pass for the “New President.”
If this were the world of sports, it would be like playing a Super Bowl that goes into 19 scoreless Overtimes and never actually Ends. … or four L.A. Lakers stars being murdered in different places on the same day. Guaranteed Fear and Loathing. Abandon all hope. Prepare for the Weirdness. Get familiar with Cannibalism.”
http://www.tomcoyner.com/prepare_for_the_weirdness.htm