"I think we are winning. Okay? I think we're definitely winning. I think we've been winning for some time." - Gen. Richard Myers, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, on the Iraq War 04/26/05
"I just wonder if they will ever tell us the truth." - Harold Casey, Louisville, KY, October 2004.
If we had a real press corps in the United States, instead of the corporate gelding variety we actually have, this kind of story wouldn't be any revelation to most readers, because this was already looking like the picture a year ago to people who were taking the time to follow the news closely: Iraq's Dark Day of Reckoning by Fareed Zakaria Newsweek 10/16/06 issue (accessed 10/10/06). He writes:
More waiting is unlikely to turn things around, nor will more troops. I understand the impulse of those who want to send in more forces to secure the country. I urged just such a policy from the first week of the occupation. But today we are where we are. Over the past three years the violence has spread and is now franchised down to neighborhoods with local gangs in control. In many areas, local militias are not even controlled by their supposed political masters in Baghdad. In this kind of decentralized street fighting, 10,000 or 20,000 more troops in Baghdad will not have more than a temporary effect. Nor will new American policies help. The reason that the Democrats seem to lack good, concrete suggestions on Iraq is that the Bush administration has actually been pursuing more-sensible policies for more than a year now, trying vainly to reverse many of its errors. But what might well have worked in 2003 is too little, too late in 2006.
Iraq is now in a civil war. Thirty thousand Iraqis have died there in the past three years, more than in many other conflicts widely recognized as civil wars. The number of internal refugees, mostly Sunni victims of ethnic cleansing, has exploded over the past few months, and now exceeds a quarter of a million people. (The Iraqi government says 240,000, but this doesn't include Iraqis who have fled abroad or who may not have registered their move with the government.) The number of attacks on Shiite mosques increases every week: there have been 69 such attacks since February, compared with 80 in the previous two and a half years. And the war is being fought on gruesome new fronts. CBS News's Lara Logan has filed astonishing reports on the Health Ministry, which is run by supporters of radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. According to Logan, hospitals in Baghdad and Karbala are systematically killing Sunni patients and then dumping their bodies in mass graves.
Muqtada al-Sadr, more influential in Iraq than Dick Cheney or Rummy
He even says something that was clear to a lot of people, maybe even most people in America, quite some time ago:
President Bush says that if America leaves Iraq now, the violence will get worse, and terrorists could take control. He's right. But that will be true whenever we leave. "Staying the course" only delays that day of reckoning. (my emphasis)
Actually, that is something that is, to put it mildly, hard to predict, even for the few actual experts on Iraq that we have. Because the presence of American troops as occupiers is clearly a major exacerbating factor in Iraq. It's at least possible - not likely from what we've seen lately, but at least thinkable - that things could get better if the US troops were pulled out.
Now that Bush family fixer James Baker is promoting his secret plan to get the US out of Iraq, pundits will be piling on board to position themselves as some kind of withdrawal advocates.
"Wars are easy to get into, but hard as hell to get out of." - George McGovern and Jim McGovern 06/06/05
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