care of Information Clearing House
Bush just playing us with 'troop withdrawal'
'Revelation' contradicts every other rationale offered in the last 500 days
SPECIAL COMMENT
By Keith Olbermann
Anchor, 'Countdown'
Updated: 6:20 p.m. PT Sept 4, 2007
And so he is back from his annual surprise gratuitous photo-op in Iraq, and what a sorry spectacle it was. But it was nothing compared to the spectacle of one unfiltered, unguarded, horrifying quotation in the new biography to which Mr. Bush has consented.
As he deceived the troops at Al-Asad Air Base yesterday with the tantalizing prospect that some of them might not have to risk being killed and might get to go home, Mr. Bush probably did not know that, with his own words, he had already proved that he had been lying, is lying and will be lying about Iraq.
He presumably did not know that there had already appeared those damning excerpts from Robert Draper's book “Dead Certain."
“I'm playing for October-November," Mr. Bush said to Draper. That, evidently, is the time during which, he thinks he can sell us the real plan, which is “to get us in a position where the presidential candidates will be comfortable about sustaining a presence."
Comfortable, that is, with saying about Iraq, again quoting the President, “stay... longer."
And there it is. We've caught you. Your goal is not to bring some troops home, maybe, if we let you have your way now. Your goal is not to set the stage for eventual withdrawal. You are, to use your own disrespectful, tone-deaf word, playing at getting the next Republican nominee to agree to jump into this bottomless pit with you, and take us with him, as we stay in Iraq for another year, and another, and another, and anon.
Everything you said about Iraq yesterday, and everything you will say, is a deception, for the purpose of this one cynical, unacceptable, brutal goal: perpetuating this war indefinitely.
War today, war tomorrow, war forever!
And also see commentary by John Kerry:
John Kerry The Escalation Didn't Work September 5, 2007 At Huffington Post
as he sums the situation up as:
Judgment time is here, and the only verdict is the same one we had in January, the same one we've had for a long time in Iraq: the Bush policy is a tragic failure. It's a policy that not only isn't working; it can't work. A political solution in Iraq cannot come about without a clear deadline on where our troops will be pulling out. Only Iraqis can end this civil war, and they aren't - and won't be - making any progress with an open-ended, massive presence by our military in their country.
The White House has tried, with some success, to focus everyone's attention in the media on the report they are writing, the report they used to call the Petraeus Report. But, at least judging from press reports, unfortunately, this report already seems to be controversial and solely focused on military measures. (No surprise - now, thanks in large measure to some good old fashioned muckraking out here in the blogosphere, we know that even the so-called Petraeus Report will be written not by the General, not by our Ambassador in Baghdad, but by the White House-- the White House which has again and again avoided the kind of plain, unadorned facts discussed in the GAO report.)
This White House ran out of credibility on Iraq a long long time ago. This is not the first time we've been told one thing only to learn another (Weapons of mass destruction? Greeted as liberators? Saddam's oil revenue to pay for the war and reconstruction?), so, predictably, instead of an honest appraisal of the escalation, this White House is again moving the goalposts and shifting criteria-- and they are doing it as the moment of accountability arrives. Their response to bad news has been and continues to be: simply change the story. What they can't change is the fact that time is not on our side. It's wrong to sacrifice over 100 American lives each month for a policy we know is not working.
And for further proof that all is not going as planned in Iraq here is another revealing story about Death Squads operating in Iraq:
Iraq: Government Death Squads Ravaging Baghdad
By Dahr Jamail and Ali Al-Fadhily
09/05/07 "IPS News" -- - Death squads from the Ministry of Interior posing as Iraqi police are killing more people than ever in the capital, emerging evidence shows.
The death toll is high - in all 1,536 bodies were brought to the Baghdad morgue in September. The health ministry announced last month that it will build two new morgues in Baghdad to take their capacity to 250 bodies a day.
Many fear a government hand in more killings to come. The U.S. military has revealed that the 8th Iraqi Police Unit was responsible for the Oct. 1 kidnapping of 26 Sunni food factory workers in the Amil quarter in southwest Baghdad. The bodies of ten of them were later found in Abu Chir neighbourhood in the capital.
Minister for the Interior Jawad al-Bolani announced he is suspending the police unit from official duties, and confining it to base until an investigation is completed.
But sections of the ministry appear responsible for the abductions and killing. Ministry of Interior vehicles were used for the kidnapping in this case, and most men conducting the raid wore Iraqi police uniforms, except for a few who wore black death squad 'uniforms', witnesses told IPS.
Take care,
GORD.
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