It's getting better all the time

I'm no longer in that 18% who thinks Congress has enough good men in it to recommend that Yahweh not dispatch it to the same fate as Sodom and Gomorrah. They did their best to make this all about how wonderful our troops are - it's not. They tried to make it about those nasty lefties making it a personal attack on the General - it's isn't. They tried to make it all about the left wing minority - it isn't and they're not a minority who think this "report" is not objective. They tried to make it all about standing up to an enemy and thereby keeping the respect of our allies - it isn't; the enemy is the people of a country who never attacked us and never sponsored "state terrorism." Our allies and our detractors haven't had any respect for us since we allowed the Commander Guy to call himself the President. In short they made it all about what they have been doing and saying day after day to those who question, who doubt and who are aware of the disparity between the official story and the story told by everyone else.

Petraeus says they want us there. Others say 70% want us out. Petraeus says the police and army are improving, others say they are totally ineffective and massively corrupt, some selling the weapons we provide on the black market. Petraeus says we can't get weapons to them fast enough. Others report that we have no idea who we gave them to and that they are turning up in the hands of insurgents in Turkey.

I'm past caring. America will do the stupid thing - we always do and when the piper presents his invoice we will spend generations rewriting history to protect the idiots - we always do. And then we'll do it again, using fake lessons from this debacle to justify another one. We always do.

Waiting for Petraeus

Any minute now General Westmoreland Petraeus, lips still warm from kissing his boss' ass will give us his pep talk about Iraq. Is there any more reason to see at as more informative than the endless harangue about how much weight Don Shula lost on the Nutrasystem Diet or just how much of a sports car the latest land blimp is?

Ari Fleischer's Freedom's Watch has been hammering all morning on CNN about "they attacked US" and about how if we quit now, "it all will have been in vain."

Why bother to watch? We know what they're selling and if they were half as honest as the diet scammers, they would put up the same small print on the screen -- "Results not typical."

It's decisional

I'm not even going to bother with the dictionary. If Decisional is a word, it shouldn't be, but a Decisional meeting is what Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell called today's "surprise" get together at the Al Asad Air Base in Iraq's Anbar province; bringing together senior U.S. military leaders, top Iraqi political leadership, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and of course, the Decider in full Decisional mode.

"Nothing beats the opportunity to look David Petraeus in the eye and Ambassador Crocker and say, 'What's the situation? What do you think?'"

said an unnamed "senior official as quoted by ABC News today. I don't agree. I think we'd be better off, decisionally speaking, having the opinion of someone whose career doesn't depend on selling vain hopes and sanguine dreams to delusional deciders.

Whether or not there has been a significant and stable gain in overall security in Iraq of late, and whether the administration is simply sprucing up the stage set or building a full scale Potemkin Village, one can be forgiven a bit of skepticism -- and particularly one old enough to remember General Westmoreland's hauntingly similar vision of a "light at the end of the tunnel" 10 weeks before the Tet Offensive.

cross posted at The Reaction

Gonzo in the sky with diamonds

Look! Up in the sky - it's a bird - it's a plane - it's Alberto Gonzales! That's right, it's not enough to tap your phones and faxes and to read your e-mail and make lists of what you take out of the library or record video of you as you walk down the street; the Bush Administration wants to use super sophisticated, classified spy satellite technology to monitor what you're doing on your own property in your own home. Warrant? Probable cause? Don't make me laugh.

And meanwhile, back at the Surge. . . you know the surge Big Brother's media says is working so well because there was a momentary slowdown in suicide bombings? As many as 250 were killed today when 5 trucks blew up in a Kurdish area of Northern Iraq. Out of one side of his mouth, Major General Mixon tells us it's a typical al Qaeda trick to get us to turn against the war (has he noticed that we already have?) and out of the other side he calls it ethnic cleansing against the Kurds. Which is it? Do the Qaeda boys really give a damn about kurds as much as the Shiah or Sunni militias? Do insurgents and non-insurgents having nothing to do with Osama want us the hell out of the middle east? Does the continued slaughter of innocents mean we're winning or losing? Not hard questions to answer, General and none of the answers seem to lead to any of your twisted conclusions.

And now the death toll is at least 500

And CNN is still telling us it's ethnic cleansing but still has the fingerprints of al Qaeda. What it is is a continuing civil war with the fingerprints of George W. Bush. How's your surge progressing today George?

Groundhog day

To be fair, it hasn't been a full month since Douglas Lute was approved as "War Czar" but the nation seems to have forgotten him already. The Carpetbagger Report writes today that

About 200 lawmakers were invited to the Pentagon for a classified question-and-answer session on Thursday with [Ambassador Ryan] Crocker and Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq. The two men were to brief lawmakers via satellite from Baghdad.

Bush’s new war adviser, Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute, also was to be in the room. He wasn't. He didn't report on anything, give any analysis or projection or do anything one might consider Czarish, unless that includes relaxing in the Summer Palace somewhere.

It's almost as though Bush has had second thoughts and decided to let the matter drop, hoping we'd forget about it, or maybe Lute is being kept in the background in favor of General Petraeus, whom Bush likes to call "David." The Washington Post reported last Sunday that according to the President, "David" is his

"main man" -- a "smart, capable man who gives me his candid advice." And on Thursday, as the president sought to stave off a revolt among congressional Republicans, he said he wanted "to wait to see what David has to say. I trust David Petraeus, his judgment."

Bush, says The Post, has mentioned Petraeus at least 150 times this year in his speeches, interviews and news conferences, and there is speculation that he is being set up to be the fall guy in the Fall, when the Iraqi puppet government reconvenes and reality becomes harder to hide.

Meanwhile I'm having trouble finding anything about the Czar anywhere - anything at all. Could it be that he will re-emerge from his den as the shadow of Petraeus departs, to declare that there will be six more weeks of surge, or perhaps that Springtime for the president is just around the corner?

cross posted at The Reaction

Sales figures

Is the Surge getting harder to sell? It's hard to gauge the feelings of the troops who aren't being polled and whose blogs are censored, but there are indications. IraqSlogger relates that plain spoken and plainly anti-War Republican candidate Ron Paul seems to be raking in donations from military personnel. 50% of all the donations by the military are winding up in Paul's camp.

"One might think such criticism of the war and the Commander-in-Chief's leadership would make Paul a pariah to the military community, however, the latest figures indicate the antiwar Republican is receiving more donations from employees of the US military than any other Republican candidate."

Perhaps the people on the scene have more trouble maintaining their faith in Bush and his military brilliance than those safely removed from the carnage.

Meanwhile, as The Reaction points out, General Peter Pace continues to sing the jingle and the lyrics now tell us that it's working so well we should have some more. Great idea, but I'm not buying.

The perfect man

So we're going to have a "war Czar" in our country and I'm sure he'll be as effective as any drug Czar has been in winning the unwinnable with an unworkable plan. The cynic in me is delighted, of course, to hear that General Lute has criticized Bush's absurdly named "surge." One might question the mildness of the word "criticize" when directed at something akin to adding a squirt gun to fire hoses vainly trying to put out a wildfire, but then I can't expect much of anyone who would accept the crown of a Czar to do more than doubletalk his way around the contradiction.

So far, Czars haven't worked well at governing unruly countries whether you're talking about Russian history or the several Drug Czars the US has appointed to impede the will of the governed and I don't expect General Lute to be more than a figurehead. A figure whose head will be lopped off when things continue to go to hell. He isn't aided by having only three stars and needing to bully the 4 star types in the Pentagon into goose stepping to Bush's march music.

All in all, I think this bit of absurd theatrics is well summed up by Senator James Inhofe, (R) Oklahoma. who told the hearing today that he believed the new position was ‘unnecessary,’ but that Lute was the ‘ideal’ choice for the job. Lute should be very proud to be the perfect man for an unnecessary job.