Magpie

Friday, September 7, 2007

Step right up folks! See the amazing disappearing benchmarks!

Although our Dear Leader doesn't recall the benchmarks that he himself set up for judging the success of the surge in Iraq, Salon's Tim Grieve remembers them quite well indeed.

This magpie wants to think that the Democrats in Congress will remember Dubya's benchmarks—and how very few of them have been met—when they pass judgment on the surge later this month. I'm not holding my breath, though.

Labels: Dubya, Iraq, Memory failure, Surge

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:12 AM | Get permalink

Thursday, August 23, 2007

I think the press is finally noticing ...

... that Dubya is pulling reasons for staying in Iraq out of his butt.

Dubya's speech to the VFW yesterday (see this earlier post) seems to have finally pushed a number of US reporters over the edge. Good examples are this video clip featuring MSNBC's David Shuster [WMV file, thanks to Crooks and Liars], and this commentary by Joseph Galloway, McClatchy's senior military correspondent:

This week we saw two President Bushes in action. In a news conference in Canada, he acknowledged that while security has improved somewhat thanks to the surge, the Iraqis have made little progress toward meeting the benchmarks. Two days later, speaking at the National VFW convention in Kansas City, the president spoke at length about the need to stay the course in Iraq indefinitely.

He pleaded for the patience he said is needed to win in Iraq, and surprisingly put forward the example of the Vietnam War and our withdrawal from there after 10 years and 58,249 dead American troops as a reason why we must stick to our guns in Iraq.

He trotted out his administration's now shopworn fear tactics, arguing that persisting in this senseless war will prevent a massacre of millions in Iraq and attacks on us at home by a reinvigorated al Qaida.

The more things change in this administration, the more they stay the same. [Emphasis added]

In fairness, though, I should point out that McClatchy (and its previous incarnation as Knight Ridder) has been almost the only mainstream US news organization that's been critical of Dubya's Iraq adventure right from the start.

Via McClatchy Washington Bureau.

Labels: 'War on Terrorism', Big fat idiots, Dubya, Iraq, Surge

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:01 AM | Get permalink

Wednesday, August 22, 2007

Iraqi insurgents = Al-Qaeda = Khmer Rouge.

To most people, the logical leaps needed to make that equation would be impossible, but nothing is too difficult for our Dear Leader.

In a speech given to members of the Veterans of Foreign Wars earlier today in Kansas City, Dubya unloaded some of the most preposterous misunderstandings (and outright lies) about the world's history since the Second World War that this magpie has had the misfortune to hear. For example, the prez said that the US was responsible for the decolonization of Asia and after 1945. (It wasn't.) He likened the 'war on terror' to the war against Japan and the Korean war. (As a historian, I can't think of any significant similarities.) And he attributed the murderous rule of the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia to the fact that the US withdrew its troops from Southeast Asia at the end of the Vietnam War. (In fact, the success of the Khmer Rouge was due to a CIA-sponsored coup that replaced a neutralist government with one more sympathetic to US war aims in Vietnam. The Khmer Rouge wouldn't have had a chance without a US-backed enemy to fight against.)

However, all that pseudo-history pales when compared to Dubya's main contention: If the US withdraws from Iraq, Al-Qaeda will not only wreak destruction on the Iraqi people like that suffered by Cambodians in the Khmer Rouge years, but Osama bin Laden will bring a similar reign of terror here to the US.

Bin Laden has declared that "the war [in Iraq] is for you [the US] or us to win. If we win it, it means your disgrace and defeat forever." Iraq is one of several fronts in the war on terror -- but it's the central front -- it's the central front for the enemy that attacked us and wants to attack us again. And it's the central front for the United States and to withdraw without getting the job done would be devastating.

If we were to abandon the Iraqi people, the terrorists would be emboldened, and use their victory to gain new recruits. As we saw on September the 11th, a terrorist safe haven on the other side of the world can bring death and destruction to the streets of our own cities. Unlike in Vietnam, if we withdraw before the job is done, this enemy will follow us home. And that is why, for the security of the United States of America, we must defeat them overseas so we do not face them in the United States of America.

This, of course, completely ignores the facts that 1) there was no al-Qaeda threat in Iraq prior to the US-led invasion; 2) Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11; and 3) the US occupation of Iraq is what has turned that country into a terrorist magnet and training ground. But hey, facts never get in Dubya's way when he's trying to support some stupid policy that he's already committed himself to.

If you have a strong stomach, I strongly suggest reading Dubya's whole speech. I'm sure the GOP is already sending out talking points based on what he said, so you might as well get a good handle on the arguments for the occupation that the 30-percenters will be tossing at you between now and when the administration has to make its Iraq progress report to Congress next month.

Labels: 'War on Terrorism', al-Qaeda, Dubya, Ignorance, Occupation, Surge

| | Posted by Magpie at 10:05 AM | Get permalink

Wednesday, August 15, 2007

Of course the surge in Iraq is working.

As Dubya and his minions started reminding us five months ago, we needed to give the administration until September to start showing results of the so-called surge in Iraq. Then General David Petraeus would be issuing a report on whether things were going as planned.

Since the planned report was first announced, there's been a lot of skepticism about its value, and about whether it would just be a rubber stamp for Dubya's continuing Iraq adventure. Well, now we know.

Despite Bush's repeated statements that the report will reflect evaluations by Petraeus and Ryan Crocker, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, administration officials said it would actually be written by the White House, with inputs from officials throughout the government.

And though Petraeus and Crocker will present their recommendations on Capitol Hill, legislation passed by Congress leaves it to the president to decide how to interpret the report's data.

Wanna lay any bets as to whether the September report says that everything is going as planned in Iraq?

I guess you have to admire the administration's lack of tact and trust. I mean, your average corrupt government would be satisfied to let a general know what conclusions he should come to and then let him write the report himself. In Dubya's regime, however, even the most loyal minions can't be trusted to do the job right, so the White House has to write its own lies.

Via LA Times.

Labels: Insurgency, Iraq, Pentagon, Stupidity, Surge, White House

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:10 PM | Get permalink

Thursday, August 9, 2007

The US occupation of Iraq just keeps on giving.

In this case, that gift is the millions of refugees who've fled Iraq for neighboring countries. About 1.4 million of those refugees have landed in Syria, and they now make up 8 percent of that country's population. The presence of the refugees is 'pushing Syria to the edge,' according to a report by freelance journalist Hugh Naylor.

"The situation is starting to scare a lot of people," said Samir Taqqi, a political analyst at the Orient Center for Studies, a Damascus think tank.

Public services are deteriorating. State-run hospitals, inundated by tens of thousands of Iraqis seeking free medical care, are short on staff and medical supplies. Unable to afford serving cafeteria food, many are asking patients to bring their own.

At public schools across Damascus, the capital, overwhelmed teachers are forced to work double shifts to accommodate Iraqis pushing class sizes to as high as 70 students. Meanwhile, rolling power blackouts blanket the city for up to five hours a day because the country's electrical grid can't meet increasing energy demands during one of the warmest summers on record. Blackouts in some suburbs reportedly last up to 12 hours.

"The Syrian economy doesn't have the resources to sustain current subsidies for food and energy," said Taqqi.

One way to understand the magnitude of Syria's refugee crisis is to try to imagine what things in the US would be like if, over the course of 4 years, more than 28 million Mexican refugees poured into the country as the result of a civil war. Both the sheer magnitude of the immigration and the presence of a large, unstable country next door would wreak havoc on the US economy and political institutions. While I doubt that Dubya's administration had any idea of the refugee problem that would result from the US-led invasion of Iraq, this magpie is certain that Syria's refugee-related troubles aren't causing anyone in the White House to shed even crocodile tears.

As Naylor's report points out, however, Syria is not the only country dealing with a huge influx of Iraqi refugees. Jordan is hosting 700,000 Iraqis — in other words, more than 1 in 10 residents of Jordan have fled Iraq. This situation is no doubt reminding Jordanian officials (and probably the Syrian government as well) of an earlier influx of Palestinian refugees that resulted in armed battles between government forces and armed Palestinian militants in the early 1970s.

Addition: I didn't quite complete my thought there at the end. The reason I brought up the experience of the Jordanians in dealing with a large Palestinian refugee population was to draw an analogy between the regional results of the Israel/Palestine conflict and the current occupation of Iraq. In the latter confict, action — or lack of action — by the US created and perpetuated a state of affairs (lack of a viable Palestinian state) that has kept the region in an uproar for the last 40 years or so. And which, arguably, led to the 9/11 attacks. My suspicion is that the refugee crisis in Syria and Jordan may be one of the first signs that the Iraq occupation is causing similar regional problems — and that no one in the White House gives a sh*t.

Via SF Chronicle.

Labels: Iraq, Occupation, Refugees, Surge, Syria

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:30 AM | Get permalink

Tuesday, April 3, 2007

Dubya can't count.

For some reason, the prez seems to think that 57 is a bigger number than 119.

At his press conference this morning, Dubya berated the Democratic Congress for taking 57 days (so far) to pass his supplemental funding request for the Iraq occupation.

In a time of war, it's irresponsible for the Democrat leadership -- Democratic leadership in Congress to delay for months on end while our troops in combat are waiting for the funds. The bottom line is this: Congress's failure to fund our troops on the front lines will mean that some of our military families could wait longer for their loved ones to return from the front lines. And others could see their loved ones headed back to the war sooner than they need to. That is unacceptable to me, and I believe it is unacceptable to the American people.

Members of Congress say they support the troops. Now they need to show that support in deed, as well as in word. Members of Congress are entitled to their views and should express them. Yet debating these differences should not come at the expense of funding our troops.

Congress's most basic responsibility is to give our troops the equipment and training they need to fight our enemies and protect our nation. They're now failing in that responsibility, and if they do not change course in the coming weeks, the price of that failure will be paid by our troops and their loved ones.

Congress is failing. They're irresponsible. They're endangering the troops. Pretty strong words, eh?

Given that language, I have to wonder why Dubya didn't give the same tongue-lashing to the Republican Congress when it waited 86 days to pass the supplemental bill for the occupation in 2005. Or when it waited 119 days to pass the bill just last year. Wasn't that irresponsible? Didn't the delay put the troops' lives in danger? Nope, the 119-day delay was 'a fiscally responsible way to provide much-needed funds for the War on Terror.'

Today's comments by the prez are just another desperate attempt to make it look like the Democrats are responsible for the continuing failures of the administration's Iraq adventure, and not the series of bad decisions made by Dubya, his advisors, and the Republican-controlled Congress. And they're yet another example of the contempt in which our Dear Leader regards the intelligence of people like you and me.

Labels: Congress, Dubya, Iraq, Press Conference, Supplemental, Surge

| | Posted by Magpie at 9:45 AM | Get permalink

Thursday, March 29, 2007

It's business as usual in Washington while people keep dying in Iraq.

And journalist Matt Tabibi is even less impressed with how Democrats are dealing with the Iraq occupation than I am. Writing in Rolling Stone, Tabibi suggests that Democratic congressional leaders have come up with a strategy that gives the appearance of confronting Dubya over Iraq, but doesn't involve taking any of the political risks that would be associated with actually doing something to stop the carnage.

In my visits to Washington in the past few months I've heard different stories from Democratic congressional aides about what the party's intentions are. Some say they think the leadership is just going to stall and pass a bunch of non-binding, symbolic, Kumbayah horseshit to help propel whoever the Democratic candidate is into the White House two years from now. Others claim with a straight face that all of these non-binding resolutions are only a start, that the strategy is to really end the war via a death-by-a-thousand-cuts type of legislative grind, with the leadership sending to the floor bill after bill after bill designed to eat away at either war policy or war funding. They claim that all of these votes are exercises in coalition-building, necessary steps to gathering the support needed to pass real biting measures later on.

But I'll believe that when I see it. Right now, it all looks too convenient....

You'll know that something real is going on in Washington when either a) the Democrats force the "antiwar conservatives" to actually cast a vote on whether or not to cut off spending for the war, or b) a dozen or so more Republicans cross the picket line to set up a possible override of a Bush veto. Until and unless one of those unlikely moments arrives, it sure looks like what we've got is one of those rare "good for both teams" baseball trades, an arranged standoff in which everybody gets to suck a little of that hot nourishing blood in the ballooning antiwar poll numbers.

My sense of this whole ballet from the start has been that with each passing season, as the antiwar rhetoric increases both among the public and in Washington, we'll see a corresponding increase in both financial and personnel commitment in the Iraq theater. The logic here is irresistible; Bush will not preside over what he perceives to be a surrender, and the Democrats will not cast a vote "against the troops" in an election season. So what we'll get is a lot of what we just saw -- non-binding antiwar votes hitched to troop increases and/or "short-term" funding boosts. It's worth noting that the same political logic that led the Bush White House to fund the war as an emergency long after it ceased to be an unexpected expenditure will now appeal to the Democrats, and for the same reason; so long as the money is in an "emergency" bill, they will be able to pretend, before voters, that the commitment is temporary.

Via AlterNet.

Labels: Congress, Iraq, Nancy Pelosi, Surge

| | Posted by Magpie at 8:42 AM | Get permalink

Wednesday, March 28, 2007

So what did they Senate and House actually pass?

Everyone has been arguing about whether the Congress is really trying to put some kind of end to the Iraq occupation, or whether (like this magpie has suggested) the withdrawal measures that both houses passed are toothless bills that will have no effect on Dubya's warmongering. Despite all the verbal pyrotechnics, it hasn't been easy to find out the exact text of the two measures.

Over at Balkinization, Marty Lederman has corrected this problem. You can read the relevant parts of the House and Senate bills here. Make up your own mind.

Labels: Congress, Dubya, Iraq, Surge

| | Posted by Magpie at 8:31 AM | Get permalink

Tuesday, March 27, 2007

What needs to be done about Iraq.

It's sure not this.

Thanks to Mikhaela for a cartoon that so nicely boils down a complicated subject into a single panel.

Labels: Dubya, Iraq, Nancy Pelosi, Surge

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:30 PM | Get permalink

Monday, March 26, 2007

I told you so.

Last week, the House of Representatives passed a bill that lets the prez keep his Iraq adventure going virtually unfettered until September 2008 — an act that left this magpie so pissed off that I couldn't blog about it. I'm glad to report that not everyone who opposed that 'compromise' bill has been rendered so mute. Over at TalkLeft, Big Tent Democrat has an excellent post explaining why passage of a weak anti-war bill was a really bad idea, despite all the talk from the bill's supporters that the House's action was a good first step toward ending the war.

Hint: The Senate wouldn't want to tie the hands of the military, would they?

Labels: Iraq, Politics, Surge

| | Posted by Magpie at 10:11 AM | Get permalink

Friday, February 2, 2007

What he said.

Democratic senator Russ Feingold on what Congress should be doing about Dubya's 'surge' in Iraq:

Congress is gearing up for a big Iraq debate next week. The Senate will take up the John Warner-Carl Levin resolution, which some are portraying as an important, symbolic rebuke of the president's Iraq policy. Symbols can be powerful, but only if they have substance behind them. Read the fine print of the resolution itself, and you will find that it is not a rebuke at all. In parts, it reads like a reauthorization of the war, rejecting troop redeployment and specifically authorizing "vigorous operations" in part of Iraq. This resolution isn't a symbolic rebuke of the president; instead it symbolizes a Congress that is too timid to challenge the president's failed Iraq policy.

Under the guise of constructive criticism, this resolution signs off on the president's policy of maintaining military operations in Iraq indefinitely. While a resolution like this might have been all you could expect from a Republican Congress, it hardly seems like the product of a Congress under new Democratic leadership.

After voters registered their opposition to the war last November, the new Congress was supposed to offer dramatic change. Instead, less than a month into this Congress, some members in both parties have rallied around a resolution that endorses the catastrophic status quo in Iraq....

Instead of allowing the president's failed policy to continue, Congress can and should use its power of the purse to end our involvement in the Iraq war, safely redeploying the troops while ensuring that important counterterrorism missions are still carried out.

We should be coming up with a strategy for post-occupation Iraq and the region that is squarely within the context of the global fight against al-Qaida. That means replacing a massive, unsustainable and unlimited military mission with a long-term strategy for mitigating the mess left behind by this war. With such a strategy, we can redirect substantially more resources and attention to the fight against al-Qaida and other international terrorist organizations.

While bipartisanship is a worthy goal, and symbols have their value, this resolution sacrifices far too much in the name of symbolism and compromise. As long as this president goes unchecked by Congress, our troops will remain needlessly at risk, and our national security will be compromised. This resolution fails to check the president, or to change his disastrous Iraq policy. It essentially authorizes the failed strategy that the American people rejected in November. For the sake of our troops, and for our national security, Congress should take real, binding steps to challenge the president's policy and bring our troops out of Iraq.

You can read the rest of Feingold's comments here. And if you want to keep the Senate from rubber-stamping Dubya's plan to send yet more troops to Iraq, call or write your senators and tell them to support Feingold's Iraq Redeployment Act of 2007 instead of the Warner-Levin Resolution.

Via Salon. [Paid sub or ad view req'd.]

Labels: Iraq, Iraq Redeployment Act, Russ Feingold, Surge

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:47 PM | Get permalink