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Post by phil on Sept 3, 2006 9:09:43 GMT -5
Surely you don't think Junior is the boss ... ??
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Post by phil on Sept 3, 2006 9:10:37 GMT -5
No civil war in Iraq, insists Bush - but Pentagon differs
While 68 Iraqis have died in two days, the President talks up military success with an eye on the mid-term elections. Meanwhile, defence chiefs are ever more fearful of another Vietnam
Paul Harris in New York
Sunday September 3, 2006
The Observer
President Bush yesterday denied that Iraq was plunging into civil war, just a day after the Pentagon painted a bloody picture of a nation caught in a spiral of increasing violence.
His statement appears to widen the gap between the political message coming from a White House concerned about upcoming mid-term elections and a military establishment fearful of getting caught in another Vietnam.
In his weekly radio address to the nation, Bush lashed out at critics of the war and portrayed the conflict in Iraq as an integral part of the war on terror. He said the country was not sliding into civil war.
'Our commanders and diplomats on the ground believe that Iraq has not descended into a civil war. They report that only a small number of Iraqis are engaged in sectarian violence,' he said.
That may be true, but the tone of Bush's speech was deeply at odds with a Pentagon report released late on Friday, which showed Iraqi casualties had soared by more than 50 per cent in recent months. The Pentagon often releases bad news late in the week in order to minimise press coverage and the study certainly made for grim reading.
'Death squads and terrorists are locked in mutually reinforcing cycles of sectarian strife,' it noted. The report added that civil war was a possibility in Iraq, which seemed to jar with the message from the White House and top Republican politicians. Bush insisted that the war in Iraq would be won by American and Iraqi armed forces. 'The security of the civilised world depends on victory in the war on terror, and that depends on victory in Iraq, so America will not leave until victory is achieved,' he said. He did warn, however, that the struggle would be hard and unlikely to end soon. 'The path to victory will be uphill and uneven, and it will require more patience and sacrifice from our nation,' he said.
Bush has faced increasing criticism in America for his 'stay the course' policy on Iraq. Many polls show a majority of Americans now believe the war was a mistake: even some Republican politicians are breaking ranks and calling for a change in strategy. But in response to the growing unease, Bush and other senior figures, such as Vice-President Dick Cheney and Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, have launched a PR offensive aimed at convincing Americans the Iraq war is vital for their own safety.
Yesterday Bush also hit back at those who argue for a pullout, or at least a timetable for withdrawal. 'Many of these people are sincere and patriotic, but they could not be more wrong,' he said.
That last remark angered Democrats who accused the President of using the war in Iraq as a way of labelling his opponents as weak in the November elections. 'Our President continues to resort to name-calling and fear-mongering in an attempt to distract from his failure to keep America safe. But sadly Americans have seen this page of the Republican playbook before,' said Democrat Congressman Bennie Thompson.
Bush's radio address was a re-hash of a speech he delivered in Salt Lake City last week. It is likely to be repeated at three other events that Bush has scheduled to make over the next few days as America prepares for the fifth anniversary of 9/11. It also follows on an attempt to evoke the Second World War struggle against fascism as a parallel for the struggle against Islamic terrorism.
Republican strategists, including Bush's political guru Karl Rove, believe that focusing on national security will allow them to claw back support in November, because voters tend to favour the Republicans on defence. However, recent polls have shown that support cracking and Democrats have become noticeably more strident in their criticism of the war, in the belief that public opinion is now firmly against it.
Meanwhile, events in Iraq continued to slide into chaos. Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki was yesterday holding talks with Iraq's most influential cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, on the worsening security situation. Sistani had recently warned that 'other powers' could take over the country if the government could not impose law and order.
The meeting came after two days of bloodshed in Baghdad in which 64 people were killed and 286 wounded. Most of the victims appeared to be Shias, with blame for the violence focused on Sunni death squads.
Yesterday the bodies of 15 pilgrims from Pakistan and India were found. In other incidents, a car bomb killed three in Baghdad, another killed three civilians and wounded 14 in the town of Mahaweel, and the bodies of three decapitated women were found in Baquba. An attack on Iraqi police in Baquba killed three policemen.
At the same time, a long-awaited ceremony officially to hand over operational control of the Iraqi army to the Iraqi defence ministry was postponed. The delay was due to 'miscommunication' between the Iraqis and the US-led foreign forces in the country. However, the Iraqi government did take over control of Abu Ghraib prison, site of a prisoner abuse scandal by the US troops who had once been based there.
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Post by phil on Sept 3, 2006 9:16:55 GMT -5
To leave Iraq would be as disastrous as to remain
Peter Beaumont
Sunday September 3, 2006
The Observer
There is an idea in mathematics. It describes a series of numbers that is endlessly halved, endlessly approaching but never reaching zero. It is an engine endlessly grinding to a halt but never stopping. That is a perfect model for the endlessly redefined semantics of where Iraq is heading - always moving towards the conditions of civil war but never quite arriving.
Over the past few months a succession of US generals has warned that the country is approaching the conditions of a civil war. Last week, a Congressionally approved Pentagon report suggested that the conditions for civil war had not only been achieved but that they were spreading outside Baghdad. But still, they insist, it is not in actuality a civil war.
Even as the civilian death toll climbs with each new appalling atrocity, it is a realisation kept deliberately at arm's length. And not only by the generals and politicians in Washington. There are those too on the anti-war left who similarly want to finesse the figures. Their selective view - factually correct but ignoring the wider picture - argues that because the majority of the attacks are still aimed against the multinational forces, it must be a war of liberation, and when the occupiers leave, then the violence will end.
It is all pretty academic to people like my friend W, who called me from his Baghdad home earlier this summer. A Sunni who lives in an insurgent neighbourhood in the city's suburbs, he had called to describe an attack by Shia gunmen who had crossed into his district in a mass attack. Trapped in his house he described gunmen on the roofs and the loudspeakers on the mosques directing the battle.
It is all pretty academic, too, to those dying daily in the conflict - to the 64 killed on Friday, or the 14 pilgrims whose bodies were discovered yesterday, ambushed on their way to a Shia shrine.
But to accept that there is a spreading civil war is to acknowledge the nightmare scenario: that the invasion of Iraq has unleashed forces beyond control that threaten the whole region, and that to leave would be as disastrous as to remain - the most poisonous of paradoxes.
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Post by phil on Sept 6, 2006 10:18:45 GMT -5
Bush legacy and U.S. reputation tied to Iraq war in fallout of Sept. 11
11:28:12 EDT Sep 4, 2006
Canadian Press: BETH GORHAM
WASHINGTON (CP) - It's mind-boggling. But it won't entirely go away.
Five years after al-Qaida terrorists toppled the twin towers of the World Trade Center and hit the Pentagon, a substantial minority of Americans still think Saddam Hussein was behind the attacks on the United States.
It's a testament to how effective President George W. Bush was in rallying support for the invasion of Iraq, even though it turned out that country had nothing to do with the horrors of Sept. 11, 2001.
Public opinion experts also blame the tenacity of the myth on sheer ignorance about the Middle East, less than rigorous media coverage and Democrats who accepted Republican doctrine without scrutiny.
For a time, it seemed treasonous to challenge a war-time president. All that helped to create a climate of acceptance - at first.
But now, more than three years into Iraq, die-hard war supporters are declining in numbers. Surveys peg them at about a third of Americans, people who are likely to think Iraq was involved with Sept. 11.
The rest have watched U.S. soldiers die and the war's financial costs soar, while they pay too much for gas and fear the American economy is tanking. And many say they don't feel safer even though they're paying such a steep price.
They've seen an outpouring of global sympathy turn to widespread mistrust of Bush.
And the president's domestic approval ratings remain so low that many fellow Republicans who want to get re-elected in the mid-term congressional elections this fall are keeping their distance from him.
Civil rights have been challenged by secret wiretaps in the name of catching terrorists. And terrible stories of torture and abuse in the war on terror have shocked the world.
Some think it could take a generation for the United States to regain its international reputation.
"Other countries have figured out how to respond to the terrorists without completely losing their minds," said political analyst Charles Cushman at George Washington University.
"As a nation, we went a little insane for a while."
After the Sept. 11 attacks, Bush appeared at Ground Zero and vowed revenge through a bullhorn. He was seen as a strong leader, a ballsy commander who finally had the guts to confront a dangerous enemy.
Any president would have moved to clear out the Taliban in Afghanistan and end the sanctuary for Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida terrorists, analysts say. But that's where it likely would have stopped.
The road to Baghdad was never as clear.
Critics view Bush's decision to go to war in Iraq in March 2003 as a breathtakingly blithe disregard for international norms mostly followed since the end of the Second World War. To them, Bush had become a dangerous, isolationist cowboy.
Despite the president's portrayal of the war as an unwelcome conflict foisted on Americans, many analysts say it never would have happened if not for Bush.
"It took a remarkably unusual president to invade Iraq," said Stephen Biddle, a senior fellow for defence policy at the Council on Foreign Relations.
He points out that Bill Clinton's policy was also to get rid of Saddam but no one expected the Democrat with a strong internationalist bent to actually do it.
"Iraq clearly has to be seen as a war of choice," said presidential scholar Stephen Hess. "He really did turn on a dime after 9-11. He determined his agenda. Where he went is uniquely where George. W. Bush decided to go."
Bush was struggling politically before Sept. 11. He was an unpopular leader with no defining issue. Many thought he'd stolen the 2000 election from Democrat Al Gore.
That changed almost overnight with 9-11.
Despite a rocky start, Bush soared to new heights.
"We were at this amazing high point where the entire world, even Arab states, were leaning toward us," Cushman said. "We had the moral high ground."
"But the minute the rhetoric shifted to Iraq, the air started to seep out of the balloon. By the time Bush gave the go-ahead, the whole world turned its back on us."
By invading in March 2003, Bush confirmed for many countries fears that had been brewing since the Cold War ended in 1991: that the United States would seek hegemony and ignore accepted rules of international behaviour, said Will Dobson, managing editor of Foreign Policy magazine.
For a time, Bush was incredibly successful at convincing most Americans that the world had fundamentally changed on Sept. 11, and unprecedented military action was needed.
Biddle said Bush took a reasonable calculated risk going into Iraq. "We couldn't rule out the possibility that Saddam Hussein could get hold of weapons of mass destruction."
But it turned out Saddam didn't have any.
There's no denying the spectacularly faulty intelligence on Iraqi weapons and all the misleading references connecting Sept. 11 to Iraq.
Bush gave a brusque response when asked recently what Iraq had to do with 9-11.
"Nothing," he said. "Nobody's ever suggested that the attacks of Sept. 11 were ordered by Iraq."
But shortly after Sept. 11, U.S. officials started implying repeatedly that Iraq helped the Saudi hijackers.
Vice-President Dick Cheney declared in late 2001 that it was "pretty well confirmed" Iraq had contacts with them.
Bush himself continually juxtaposed Iraq and al-Qaida, although he refrained from saying directly that Iraq was responsible. Privately, he was exhorting former counter-terrorism czar Richard Clarke to find "any shred" of evidence against Saddam, despite being told there was none.
Even now, in a three-week blitz to rally voters in the mid-term election campaign, Bush continues to hail the Iraq war as central to his war on terror. It's "the decisive ideological struggle of the 21st century," he said.
The mid-term elections will be won or lost on national security and Iraq. Republicans face the prospect of losing control of Congress largely because the war is going so badly for Americans.
More than 3,000 Americans and 60,000 Iraqis have died in the conflict.
Author Thomas Ricks, in a recent book called Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq, calls the Pentagon blueprint "perhaps the worst war plan in American history."
Cushman said that when he first read descriptions of the invasion of Iraq as the biggest strategic blunder ever, he thought it was overblown.
"Now I don't," he said. "We're prosecuting the wrong war and we're doing it incredibly badly. You cannot help but see that it has gone absolutely disastrously."
Said Dobson: "The real tragedy is that it didn't need to go this badly ... It's been an incredible sequence of missteps and errors."
Dobson argues that U.S. foreign policy since 9-11 has made the world a far more dangerous place and unnecessarily antagonized people who already resented the imbalance between the United States and everyone else.
And in a recent survey of 100 top U.S. foreign policy experts, including Democrats and Republicans, most said the United States is not winning the war on terror.
"The reason is that it's clear to nearly all that Bush and his team have had a totally unrealistic view of what they can accomplish with military force and threats of force," said Leslie Gelb, president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations.
Yet analysts disagree on how Bush will be judged in the long term. A lot can happen in the last two years of his presidency.
Cushman is adamant that "20 years from now there will still be ill feeling around the world because of Iraq. We could have 10 President Gandhis in a row and they wouldn't repair all the damage."
Dobson's not so sure.
"I am, maybe naively, more optimistic than that. The United States both repels and attracts. It's the U.S. government policy they don't like. The good news for the U.S. is policy can change."
In the end, Biddle said, if Iraq becomes stable Bush may just come off as a prescient gambler.
"People, in retrospect, tend to treat uncertainties as inevitabilities. They'll be declaring him a genius."
© The Canadian Press, 2006
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Post by Galactus on Sept 6, 2006 10:21:55 GMT -5
The only thing that makes that barable is knowing that it's all Clinton's fault.
ABC Docudrama Sparks 9/11 Spat
By Jeff Stein, CQ Staff
The docudrama that ABC will air next week commemorating the fifth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks seems likely to revive some long-running disputes over whether the Clinton or Bush administration has more to answer for in neglecting indications of a pending al Qaeda attack on the United States.
“The Path to 9/11,” a five-hour, two-part depiction of events prior to the attacks, is to air Sept. 10 and 11. And early reviews among veterans of the Clinton White House are decidedly negative: They argue that the show downplays the Bush White House’s culpability while inventing some scenes out of whole cloth to dramatize the supposed negligence of Clinton officials.
That complaint came to the fore at a National Press Club screening of the show late last month, when Richard Ben-Veniste — one of the 10 members of the independent Sept. 11 commission, whose final report producer Marc Platt credits with supplying much of the mini-series’ detail and narrative structure — rose to denounce the veracity of a key scene involving Clinton national security adviser Samuel R. Berger.
Berger, portrayed as a pasty-faced time-server by Kevin Dunn (Col. Hicks in “Godzilla”) freezes in dithering apprehension when a manly and virtuous CIA agent played by Donnie Wahlberg radios in from the wilds of Afghanistan to say that he and his noble band of local tribesmen have Osama bin Laden within sight and begs for the green light to terminate him with extreme prejudice. In the film, the line goes dead before Berger offers any reply.
The moment is clearly intended to encapsulate the notion of American inattentiveness to the terror threat in the 1990s — a point driven home when the camera pans back to show Berger surrounded by a supporting cast of fellow Clinton administration nervous Nellies, including Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright and Defense Secretary William S. Cohen.
So when the post-screening question-and-answer session began, Ben-Veniste stood to say that the Berger-bashing scene didn’t square with the research he and the other commissioners conducted. “There was no incident like that in the film that we came across. I am disturbed by that aspect of it,” Ben-Veniste, a loyal Democrat, told the panel, which included both the producer and the commission’s GOP chairman, former Gov. Thomas H. Kean of New Jersey.
Berger, reached by phone after the screening, seconded Ben-Veniste’s criticism. “It’s a total fabrication,” he said tersely. “It did not happen.”
That is not likely to prevent the film from being embraced far and wide among Bush supporters. Even before its airdate, the show is being hailed as a breakthrough in the conservative blogosphere. One blogger marveled in an interview with scriptwriter Cyrus Nowrasteh that “one unbelievable sequence shows how . . . Sandy Berger . . . actually hung up the phone on the CIA agent on the ground.”
Neither Berger nor Ben-Veniste was consulted on the film. Kean, however, is an official adviser; he says the incident was a fictionalized composite. It was “representative of a series of events compacted into one,” he replied to Ben-Veniste at the time. In a phone interview a few days later, he added, “It’s reasonably accurate.” And he offered a prediction that the show will “get just as many howls from Republicans.”
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Post by phil on Sept 6, 2006 10:52:26 GMT -5
5 years after 9/11 ...
- The World is more dangerous now than it was then ...
- Irak has become a real terrorist school but instead
of just learning there, they do the training for real ...
- Small terrorist grougs, inspired by El-Qaeda,
strikes many parts of the world ...
- The CIA is still trying to recruit analysts who speak arabic ...
- Between september 12, 2001 and december 31 of last year,
18900 people have died in terrorist attacks but only 8 died in the US
- Budgets for national defense and homeland security
have increased by 39 % ...
- Junior finaly admitted that Saddam Hussein was never involved
in the 9/11 attack ...
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Post by kmc on Sept 6, 2006 11:14:06 GMT -5
George W. Bush is the clear result of years of anti-intellectual bias in this country. This is what happens when you elect someone you connect with versus someone who isolates by being too brainy. What's so ridiculous with wanting your President to be a better person than you are?
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Post by Kensterberg on Sept 6, 2006 11:18:02 GMT -5
George W. Bush is the clear result of years of anti-intellectual bias in this country. This is what happens when you elect someone you connect with versus someone who isolates by being too brainy. What's so ridiculous with wanting your President to be a better person than you are? AMEN! I (for one) want to have a President who I look at and go "that guy is a hell of a lot smarter and better informed than I am." POTD? Just maybe ... |
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Post by chrisfan on Sept 6, 2006 11:23:16 GMT -5
George W. Bush is the clear result of years of anti-intellectual bias in this country. This is what happens when you elect someone you connect with versus someone who isolates by being too brainy. What's so ridiculous with wanting your President to be a better person than you are? Why separate George W Bush from the pack here? I quite frankly can't think of a president in recent history who has not put "connecting with the people" ahead of intellect. |
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Post by phil on Sept 6, 2006 11:25:42 GMT -5
You could settled for a "guy who is AT LEAST as smart and as informed" as you are ...  |
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Post by rockysigman on Sept 6, 2006 11:31:11 GMT -5
George W. Bush is the clear result of years of anti-intellectual bias in this country. This is what happens when you elect someone you connect with versus someone who isolates by being too brainy. What's so ridiculous with wanting your President to be a better person than you are? Why separate George W Bush from the pack here? I quite frankly can't think of a president in recent history who has not put "connecting with the people" ahead of intellect. I don't think Kenny's point was so much that Bush values connecting with people ahead of actual skill in matters of public policy. I think his point was that the voters put way too much emphasis on it, and that Bush's skills and intellect are inadaquate for the job. Clinton certainly worked hard to connect with people, but he was also remarkably informed and knowledgeable about the issues. It wasn't an either/or thing. The President of the United States needs to be smart, and people should be inspired by, not threatened by, a President who is smarter than they are. |
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Post by Kensterberg on Sept 6, 2006 11:31:35 GMT -5
George W. Bush is the clear result of years of anti-intellectual bias in this country. This is what happens when you elect someone you connect with versus someone who isolates by being too brainy. What's so ridiculous with wanting your President to be a better person than you are? Why separate George W Bush from the pack here? I quite frankly can't think of a president in recent history who has not put "connecting with the people" ahead of intellect. William Jefferson Clinton. Yeah, he could connect with almost any audience, but the man is also brilliant (Rhodes Scholar, etc.). Even Bush Senior was an extremely bright and well read guy. |
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Post by chrisfan on Sept 6, 2006 11:37:28 GMT -5
It's all a matter of how you measure intellect.
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Post by strat-0 on Sept 6, 2006 11:39:25 GMT -5
Bush has a very ekelectic reading list.
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Post by rockysigman on Sept 6, 2006 11:44:21 GMT -5
It does matter how you measure intellect, I suppose. For the record, I meant it in the way that everyone, everywhere has always meant it, as opposed to people who can't stand to admit that Bush isn't smart define it. Those are really the only two ways though.
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