Bush's July Surprise for Iraq

[question everything]

Thursday, Jul. 12, 2007
Bush's July Surprise for Iraq
By Joe Klein
TIME

"I want to talk about the war we're in," the President of the United States said in Cleveland, and then he sighed, an exhausted ahhhhh. "I didn't want to be a war President," he continued, and the stage was set for George W. Bush to say something real as the Senate was beginning debate, yet again, on motions to start a withdrawal from Iraq. But George W. Bush has demonstrated only an intermittent relationship with reality about Iraq. He has trotted out the same old ironclad abstractions--"Our enemies will stop at nothing ..." and "Freedom is God's gift to man"--for four years. Recently, in his desperation, starting with his speech at the Naval War College on June 28, he has been telling an outright lie, and he repeated it now, awkwardly, in Cleveland: "The same people that attacked us on September the 11th is the crowd that is now bombing people, killing innocent men, women and children, many of whom are Muslims, trying to stop the advance of a system based upon liberty."

That is not true. The group doing the most spectacular bombings in Iraq was named al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia by its founder, Abu Mousab al-Zarqawi, now deceased, in an attempt to aggrandize his reputation in jihadi-world. It is a sliver group, representing no more than 5% of the Sunni insurgency. It shares a philosophy, but not much else, with the real al-Qaeda, which operates out of Pakistan. In fact, al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia has been criticized in the past by the operational director of the real al-Qaeda, Ayman al-Zawahiri, for its wanton carnage directed at Muslims. Bush's lie, which assumes a lack of knowledge on the part of the American people, was compounded by an outrageous bit of spin: "We just started ," the President said. General David Petraeus "got all the troops there a couple of weeks ago." In fact, Operation Fardh al-Qanoon, the military effort to secure Baghdad, has been going on since February.


(snip)

The President's tragic addiction to broad-brush propaganda prevented him from telling his Cleveland audience the one bit of good news emanating from Iraq in recent months--that the Iraqi version of al-Qaeda (AQI is the military acronym) is being rejected by its Sunni hosts across the country; that recent U.S. military operations have forced AQI from some of its most important sanctuaries, like the city of Baqubah; that many al-Qaeda operatives are on the run; that even horrific explosions, like the bomb that killed more than 150 in the obscure town of Amerli, north of Baqubah, are a perverse form of good news. A bomb that size was probably intended for downtown Baghdad but couldn't reach its destination because U.S. forces have blocked the routes south.

The reason Bush didn't tout this success is byzantine: If al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia is on the run, if we have "turned a corner" against al-Qaeda, as a senior Administration official told me, then an argument can be made that it is time to begin planning our departure. In fact, the departure is already being planned--in two places. There is the plan being devised by General Petraeus' staff in Iraq, which envisions a slow draw-down, paced by the Army's troop-rotation schedule; force levels would begin to ebb in March 2008 and reach pre-surge levels six months later. And there is more radical planning in the Pentagon, which would halve the current troop levels in a year. The growing friction between Petraeus and the Pentagon brass, with the generals desperate to save their Army before it breaks, will be a story to watch in the next few months.

(snip)

And so the President won't budge for now on Iraq. And the Democrats won't be able to summon the 67 votes necessary to pass a timetable for withdrawal. Even the old bull Republicans who have "abandoned" the President aren't prepared to vote with the Democrats just yet.

(snip)



* Find this article at:
* http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1642884,00.html

[opihimoimoi]

1. Common Sense and Logic tells us to reject Reality is DELUSIONAL

The Good Solutions outnumber the bad ones...and yet...the Madness continues unabated....

[PSPS]

2. The fact is that if we leave, the Iraqis themselves will quickly eliminate "AQI"

It's entirely possible that "AQI" is really our (or the UK's) own operation designed to maximize the chaos (as well as the flow of Iraqi oil money into bush's pockets.)