Quick. Someone brief Bush on reality

Bush said today: Bush said, "A year ago I did give the speech from the carrier saying we had achieved an important objective, accomplished a mission, which was the removal of Saddam Hussein.'' "And as a result, there are no longer torture chambers or rape rooms or mass graves in Iraq. Except that we DO have torture chambers and rape rooms and mass graves in US-controlled Iraq.

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Vietnam on Crack
by Billmon

At last week's Coalition for a Realistic Foreign Policy conference, I had a chance to talk briefly with John Mearsheimer, one of the realist camp's leading scholarly lights. He mentioned his amazement at how quickly the U.S. position in Iraq is falling apart -- especially when compared to the years, or even decades, required to convince all but the hardest of the hawkish hard core that the Vietnam War was well and truly lost. Or, to use the cliche: Iraq is Vietnam on speed. But, judging from today's New York Times-CBS poll, speed was just the gateway drug. It looks like the American public is already experimenting with even harder stuff: Nearly half say the war in Iraq was a mistake -- a finding similar to the public’s assessment of the Vietnam War as measured by the Gallup Poll in 1968. Which means that in just over a year, public attitudes towards Shrub's War have slid as far down the slippery slope as they did after four years of futile fighting in Vietnam (and more like eight years if you count Uncle Sam's pre-Gulf of Tonkin "advisory" role) -- even though the Iraq casualty count so far has been roughly (very roughly) 1/50th of the Vietnam butcher's bill as of the end of 1968.

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Marines Plan Handoff To Militia in Fallujah
Car Bomb Kills 8 Soldiers in Baghdad Suburb

U.S. Marines will withdraw from this violence-wracked city and hand over responsibility for pursuing insurgents to a new militia headed by former Iraqi army officers under a deal brokered by the top Marine general in Iraq, military officials here said Thursday. In Washington, senior Pentagon officials insisted a final agreement had not yet been reached, but Marine commanders here said they had received orders to prepare for a pullout that would begin Friday.

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  thanks to Whiskey Bar

Guest Commentary: Ray Close on 'The Real Meaning of Fallujah'

The proposed plan to turn over control of the Fallujah security situation to an Iraqi force under the command of four retired generals is much more significant than might at first be apparent. On the strategic level, with regard to overall American policy in Iraq, it represents a defeat for those who have contended all along that the insurgency is being carried on by a small group of thugs who do not enjoy widespread support within the Iraqi population at large. Today Donald Rumsfeld is explaining that he is merely acceding to the recommendations of local American military commanders that this compromise arrangement be substituted for the original plan for an all-out assault ---- weakly shifting from himself to them the responsibility for this sudden abandonment of both tough tactics and tough rhetoric. This represents a humiliating defeat for those who have argued that the United States had no choice but to "pacify" Fallujah, arrest the insurgents, confiscate their weapons, and reestablish the authority of the American military occupation forces. The new plan would accomplish none of those explicit and uncompromising assertions made repeatedly over the past few weeks by the president himself, by US military commanders in the field, and (please note) by politicians in the United States of BOTH PARTIES.

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Interview with a Mujahedeen, Observations from a Political Scientist

Another story Ahmed tells vehemently is that of when he was detained, along with his sister. While in Abu-Ghraib prison he says he watched his sister raped by soldiers, and after three months she was released, pregnant. “Why do we not hear about these atrocities in the media? They try to portray us as barbarians when we are defending our homes and our families against U.S. terrorism?” He continues his angry and firm tone, sitting on the edge of his chair while he says, “I will stop fighting when the last American soldier leaves Iraq.” He takes a deep breath and continues, “The Americans are the terrorists. Their military has killed millions of people all around the world. Is killing people like this accepted?”

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  thanks to Yolanda Flanagan

General Sees 'Staying the Course' In Iraq as Untenable

Maybe it's time, in other words, to listen to retired Gen. William E. Odom. It is delusional, asserts the Army veteran, college professor and longtime Washington hand, to believe that "staying the course" can achieve President Bush's goal of reordering the Middle East by building a friendly democracy in Iraq. For the sake of American security and economic power alike, he argues, the U.S. should remove its forces from that shattered country as rapidly as possible. "We have failed," Mr. Odom declares bluntly. "The issue is how high a price we're going to pay. ... Less, by getting out sooner, or more, by getting out later?"

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General Engagement
by Billmon

But even Zinni can't figure a way out of the rather hopeless contradiction of the American occupation of Iraq, as demonstrated in this interview with the San Diego Union Tribune: Q: So what they did militarily and politically in Iraq, none of what you recommended happened? Zinni: Well, I'll give you my hopeful formula to get out of this. But every day and every decision makes it worse. The first thing you do when you find yourself in a hole is stop digging. They seem to continue to dig. This 'stay the course' idea is wonderful except the course is leading us over Niagara Falls.

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CLOSE PROTECTION? THE SHADOWY WORLD OF PRIVATE MILITARY COMPANIES

They travel in armoured SUVs, ostentatiously carrying powerful weapons - assault rifles, sidearms, grenades - and they shoot and arrest people just as the soldiers do but minus the uniform and legal status. They're paid around $1,000 a day, considerably more than the regular soldiers or police officers which they used to be, work six weeks on and three off with paid flights home at the end of each tour. The advantage for the US is that their deaths and injuries don't show up on the figures for troop casualties. They are the bodyguards.

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  thanks to daily KOS

The war of the words
Terry Jones

Then there's the problem of what the Americans are going to call the Iraqis - especially the ones that they kill. You can call people who are defending their own homes from rockets and missiles launched from helicopters and tanks "fanatics and terrorists" only for so long. Eventually even newspaper readers will smell a rat. Similarly it's fiendishly difficult to get people to accept the label "rebels" for those Iraqis killed by American snipers when - as in Falluja - they turn out to be pregnant women, 13-year-old boys and old men standing by their front gates. It also sounds a bit lame to call ambulance drivers "fighters" - when they've been shot through the windscreen in the act of driving the wounded to hospital - and yet what other word can you use without making them sound like illegitimate targets? I hope you're beginning to see the problem. The key thing, I suppose, is to try to call US mercenaries "civilians" or "civilian contractors", while calling Iraqi civilians "fighters" or "insurgents".

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