September Reorts on Iraq

[bestsynd]

(Best Syndication) A report presented to Congress on Tuesday indicates that violence is still high and there is very little political reconciliation. The report was an estimate of the progress made by both the US military and the Iraqi government to provide security and reconciliation.

The Government Accounting Office (GAO) report was prepared to assess the 18 benchmarks contained in the U.S. Troop Readiness, Veterans' Care, Katrina Recovery, and Iraq Accountability Appropriations Act of 2007. The GAO said “The Iraqi government met 3, partially met 4, and did not meet 11 of its 18 benchmarks.” The Iraqi government has not enacted legislation on de-Ba'athification, oil revenue sharing, provincial elections, amnesty, and militia disarmament.

More on The GAO report to Congress

Complete GAO report

[Nictoe]

[bestsynd]

General Petraeus Letter To Troops In Iraq – Less Violence And Surge Has Worked



(Best Syndication) In a letter to the troops, General Petraeus said the surge is working and giving coalition forces much needed “momentum”. The letter, in advance of the general’s September 10th and 11th report to Congress, is being called a “straight forward look at the situation in Iraq” by the Department of Defense (DOD).

Petraeus said that there are now three groups of enemies fighting US forces in Iraq. Although al Qaeda, Iranian-supported militias and home-grown extremists continue to attack US targets, they are carried out at a reduced level compared to previous months. “Up front, my sense is that we have achieved tactical momentum and wrested the initiative from our enemies in a number of areas in Iraq,” the general wrote.

See the actual letter and the rest of the article

[bestsynd]

Ted Kennedy

(Best Syndication) Although many media outlets are reporting that General David Petraeus will present to Congress the “Petraeus Report” this week, the actual report will be prepared by the Whitehouse. General Petraeus and US Ambassador to Iraq, Ryan Crocker, will be testifying in Congress this week and it is expected that they will warn against major changes in the war strategy.

The President is expected to recommend a “stay the course” approach to the Iraq War. There will probably be a mixed bag assessment of the situation, with a positive report from Anbar province and a negative report on political reconciliation. Many Senators and Representatives complain that the US is spinning its wheels in Iraq without Iraqi political action on wealth sharing and de-Baathification.

Will The Report Change Anyone's Mind?

[Nictoe]

FRANK RICH: As the Iraqis Stand Down, We’ll Stand Up

September 08, 2007

IT will be all 9/11 all the time this week, as the White House yet again synchronizes its drumbeating for the Iraq war with the anniversary of an attack that had nothing to do with Iraq. Ignore that fog and focus instead on another date whose anniversary passed yesterday without notice: Sept. 8, 2002. What happened on that Sunday five years ago is the Rosetta Stone for the administration's latest scam.


That was the morning when the Bush White House officially rolled out its fraudulent case for the war. The four horsemen of the apocalypse — Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powell and Rice — were dispatched en masse to the Washington talk shows, where they eagerly pointed to a front-page New York Times article amplifying subsequently debunked administration claims that Saddam had sought to buy aluminum tubes meant for nuclear weapons. "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud," said Condoleezza Rice on CNN, introducing a sales pitch concocted by a White House speechwriter.

What followed was an epic propaganda onslaught of distorted intelligence, fake news, credulous and erroneous reporting by bona fide journalists, presidential playacting and Congressional fecklessness. Much of it had been plotted that summer of 2002 by the then-secret White House Iraq Group (WHIG), a small task force of administration brass charged with the Iraq con job.

Today the spirit of WHIG lives. In the stay-the-surge propaganda offensive that crests with this week's Congressional testimony of Gen. David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker, history is repeating itself in almost every particular. Even the specter of imminent "nuclear holocaust" has been rebooted in President Bush's arsenal of rhetorical scare tactics.


The new WHIG is a 24/7 Pentagon information "war room" conceived in the last throes of the Rumsfeld regime and run by a former ABC News producer. White House "facts" about the surge's triumph are turning up unsubstantiated in newspapers and on TV. Instead of being bombarded with dire cherry-picked intelligence about W.M.D., this time we're being serenaded with feel-good cherry-picked statistics offering hope. Once again the fix is in. Mr. Bush's pretense that he has been waiting for the Petraeus-Crocker report before setting his policy is as bogus as his U.N. charade before the war. And once again a narrowly Democratic Senate lacks the votes to stop him.

As always with this White House, telegenic artificial realities are paramount. Exhibit A, of course, was last weekend's precisely timed "surprise" presidential junket: Mr. Bush took the measure of success "on the ground here in Anbar" (as he put it) without ever leaving a heavily fortified American base.

A more elaborate example of administration Disneyland can be found in those bubbly Baghdad markets visited by John McCain and other dignitaries whenever the cameras roll. Last week The Washington Post discovered that at least one of them, the Dora market, is a Potemkin village, open only a few hours a day and produced by $2,500 grants (a k a bribes) bestowed on the shopkeepers. "This is General Petraeus's baby," Staff Sgt. Josh Campbell told The Post. "Personally, I think it's a false impression." Another U.S. officer said that even shops that "sell dust" or merely "intend to sell goods" are included in the Pentagon's count of the market's reopened businesses.


One Baghdad visitor left unimpressed was Representative Jan Schakowsky, a Democrat from Chicago, who dined with her delegation in Mr. Crocker's Green Zone residence last month while General Petraeus delivered his spiel. "He's spending an awful lot of time wining and dining members of Congress," she told me last week. Though the menu included that native specialty lobster tortellini, the real bill of fare, Ms. Schakowsky said, was a rigid set of talking points: "Anbar," "bottom up," "decrease in violence" and "success."

In this new White House narrative, victory has been downsized to a successful antiterrorist alliance between Sunni tribal leaders and the American military in Anbar, a single province containing less than 5 percent of Iraq's population. In truth, the surge had little to do with this development, which was already being trumpeted by Mr. Bush in his January prime-time speech announcing the surge.

Even if you believe that it's a good idea to bond with former Saddamists who may have American blood on their hands, the chances of this "bottom up" model replicating itself are slim. Anbar's population is almost exclusively Sunni. Much of the rest of Iraq is consumed by the Sunni-Shiite and Shiite-Shiite civil wars that are M.I.A. in White House talking points.

The "decrease in violence" fable is even more insidious. Though both General Petraeus and a White House fact sheet have recently boasted of a 75 percent decline in sectarian attacks, this number turns out to be as cooked as those tallies of Saddam's weapons sites once peddled by WHIG. As The Washington Post reported on Thursday, it excludes Shiite-on-Shiite and Sunni-on-Sunni violence. The Government Accountability Office, which rejected that fuzzy math, found overall violence unchanged using the methodology practiced by the C.I.A. and the Defense Intelligence Agency.

No doubt General Petraeus, like Dick Cheney before him, will say that his own data is "pretty well confirmed" by classified intelligence that can't be divulged without endangering national security. Meanwhile, the White House will ruthlessly undermine any reality-based information that contradicts its propaganda, much as it dismissed the accurate W.M.D. findings of the United Nations weapon experts Hans Blix and Mohammed ElBaradei before the war. General Petraeus intervened to soften last month's harsh National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq. Last week the administration and its ideological surrogates were tireless in trashing the nonpartisan G.A.O. report card that found the Iraqi government flunking most of its benchmarks.


Those benchmarks, the war's dead- enders now say, are obsolete anyway. But what about the president's own benchmarks? Remember "as the Iraqis stand up, we'll stand down"? General Petraeus was once in charge of the Iraqi Army's training and proclaimed it "on track and increasing in capacity" three years ago. On Thursday, an independent commission convened by the Republican John Warner and populated by retired military officers and police chiefs reported that Iraqi forces can take charge no sooner than 12 to 18 months from now, and that the corrupt Iraqi police force has to be rebuilt from scratch. Let us not forget, either, Mr. Bush's former top-down benchmarks for measuring success: "an Iraq that can govern itself, sustain itself and defend itself." On that scorecard, he's batting 0 for 3.

What's surprising is not that this White House makes stuff up, but that even after all the journalistic embarrassments in the run-up to the war its fictions can still infiltrate the real news. After Michael O'Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack, two Brookings Institution scholars, wrote a New York Times Op-Ed article in July spreading glad tidings of falling civilian fatality rates, they were widely damned for trying to pass themselves off as tough war critics (both had supported the war and the surge) and for not mentioning that their fact-finding visit to Iraq was largely dictated by a Department of Defense itinerary.

But this has not impeded them from posing as quasi-journalistic independent observers elsewhere ever since, whether on CNN, CBS, Fox or in these pages, identifying themselves as experts rather than Pentagon junketeers. Unlike Armstrong Williams, the talking head and columnist who clandestinely received big government bucks to "regularly comment" on No Child Left Behind, they received no cash. But why pay for what you can get free? Two weeks ago Mr. O'Hanlon popped up on The Washington Post op-ed page, again pushing rosy Iraq scenarios, including an upbeat prognosis for economic reconstruction, even though the G.A.O. found that little of the $10 billion earmarked for reconstruction is likely to be spent.


Anchoring the "CBS Evening News" from Iraq last week, Katie Couric seemed to be drinking the same Kool-Aid (or eating the same lobster tortellini) as Mr. O'Hanlon. As "a snapshot of what's going right," she cited Falluja, a bombed-out city with 80 percent unemployment, and she repeatedly spoke of American victories against "Al Qaeda." Channeling the president's bait-and-switch, she never differentiated between that local group he calls "Al Qaeda in Iraq" and the Qaeda that attacked America on 9/11. Al Qaeda in Iraq, which didn't even exist on 9/11, may represent as little as 2 to 5 percent of the Sunni insurgency, according to a new investigation in The Washington Monthly by Andrew Tilghman, a former Iraq correspondent for Stars and Stripes.

Next to such "real" news from CBS, the "fake" news at the network's corporate sibling Comedy Central was, not for the first time, more trustworthy. Rob Riggle, a "Daily Show" correspondent who also serves in the Marine Reserve, invited American troops in Iraq to speak candidly about the Iraqi Parliament's vacation.

When the line separating spin from reality is so effectively blurred, the White House's propaganda mission has once more been accomplished. No wonder President Bush is cocky again. Stopping in Sydney for the economic summit after last weekend's photo op in Iraq, he reportedly told Australia's deputy prime minister that "we're kicking ass." This war has now gone on so long that perhaps he has forgotten the price our troops paid the last time he taunted our adversaries to bring it on, some four years and 3,500 American military fatalities ago.
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"I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny, and I say secession now, secession tomorrow, secession forever."

[aliaslezarddagain]

[paultevis]

[aliaslezarddagain]

It makes sense if you painted yourself intoa corner and want to be elected in 08, but it isn't gonna work.

They are screwed, they just have to hope Bush is screwed worse.

Oh, hold on, Bush isn't running!
_________________
"Trying to determine what is going on in the world by reading newspapers is like trying to tell the time by watching the second hand of a clock." Ben Hecht (1894-1964)

[Biscuit]

Bush IS screwed!!......but regardless, none of it is going to work....even if it does, it wont work for very long.
The whole thing is a failure, and the Bush Admin is PARTIALLY responsible for it.

[theLIBERTARIAN]

Basically this article says that Petraeus said that he does not know how or when the war will end. There is no real plan to win, other than stay the course.

http://www.sacbee.com/111/story/374091.html

WASHINGTON -- They sat behind burgundy-covered witness tables for more than 16 hours of testimony and answered hundreds of questions about the Iraq war, some of them pointed, some of them softballs.

But there was one question Army Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. military commander in Iraq, and Ryan Crocker, the U.S. ambassador in Baghdad, couldn't, or wouldn't, answer.

It was the question Petraeus himself posed rhetorically back in 2003 when he led the Army's 101st Airborne Division into Iraq: "Tell me how this ends."

Much to the frustration of the senators -- mostly Democrats, but including a few Republicans -- who grilled them Tuesday, neither the general nor the diplomat outlined a strategy for putting Iraq back together or a timetable for bringing U.S. troops home.

Four and a half years after the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq -- and four years after some Pentagon officials thought American troops would be home in triumph -- two days of breathlessly anticipated testimony by Petraeus and Crocker appear to have produced another stalemate in Washington.

Democrats in Congress don't have enough votes to force a withdrawal from Iraq. The Bush administration can offer only the hope of slow progress in Iraq and an eventual, but undefined, U.S. withdrawal.

In response to a question from Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., Petraeus predicted that 100,000 American troops would still be in Iraq a year from now.

"Two years from now, in the summer of 2009, we're still going to have 80,000 troops on the ground in Iraq," predicted one State Department official, who requested anonymity in order to speak frankly. "We knew that pretty much already. Now it's done."

But lawmakers complained that neither Petraeus nor Crocker could explain how the Iraq war fits into Bush's war on terror or how it's protecting Americans.

One of the most jaw-dropping moments in the hours of back-and-forth came when retiring Sen. John Warner, R-Va., asked Petraeus whether his proposal for Iraq -- including a reduction of U.S. troops to pre-surge levels of 130,000 -- would make the United States safer.
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[Guitarras Reyes]

I'm glad the SURGE is OVER and at least 30 thousand troops are coming HOME!!! GOD BLESS AMERICA!!!
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www.myspace.com/suejacobsband
Hecho en E.U.A. COMING SOON!

[Guitarras Reyes]

Obama is on the way!!
_________________
www.myspace.com/suejacobsband
Hecho en E.U.A. COMING SOON!

[aliaslezarddagain]

[theLIBERTARIAN]

[bestsynd]

(Best Syndication) Although the President has said that troop reduction timelines would help the enemy, General Petraeus told Congress that he had a timeline from bringing troops home. Petraeus testified that we could start bringing some troops home as early as this month. He expects number of troops in Iraq to be reduced to pre-surge levels by the Summer of 2008.

It is uncertain whether this announcement of a troop reduction timeline will help the “enemy”. The Administration is claiming success in the Iraq war because they are able to bring troop levels down to 130,000. This is the same number of troops as December 2006....

...Army officials have testified that it would be difficult to continue the surge past the spring and summer of 2008 because rotation issues. ...

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