PREEMPTED: Bush admin Iraq spin and Petraeus/WH report

[ProSense]

The Bush admin chickenhawks are up in arms about a report that gives his surge a failing grade. According to the AP, the Pentagon is also disputing parts of the report. Yet, in what Jon Soltz, of VoteVets.org, refers to as a complete meltdown by the military and Defense Department because of Bush's failed policy in Iraq, the commanders on the ground are bailing on Bush.

Nothing amount of facts can make Bush and his army of spin doctors acknowledge the reality on the ground. Take this report, Iraq body count running at double pace (emphasis added):

The findings include:

• Iraq is suffering about double the number of war-related deaths throughout the country compared with last year — an average daily toll of 33 in 2006, and 62 so far this year.

• Nearly 1,000 more people have been killed in violence across Iraq in the first eight months of this year than in all of 2006. So far this year, about 14,800 people have died in war-related attacks and sectarian murders. AP reporting accounted for 13,811 deaths in 2006. The United Nations and other sources placed the 2006 toll far higher.

• Baghdad has gone from representing 76 percent of all civilian and police war-related deaths in Iraq in January to 52 percent in July, bringing it back to the same spot it was roughly a year ago.

_According to the Iraqi Red Crescent Organization, the number of displaced Iraqis has more than doubled since the start of the year, from 447,337 on Jan. 1 to 1.14 million on July 31.

However, Brig. Gen. Richard Sherlock, deputy director for operational planning for the Pentagon's Joint Chiefs of Staff, said violence in Iraq "has continued to decline and is at the lowest level since June 2006."

He offered no statistics to back his claim, but in a briefing with reporters at the Pentagon on Friday he warned insurgents might try intensify attacks in Iraq to coincide with three milestones: the sixth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks in the U.S., the beginning of Ramadan and the report to Congress.

However? Here are some statistics (from icasualties.org's weekly casualties trends) Gen. Sherlock:

After Declining to 15.5, the Lowest Level Since the End of 2006, the Fatality Trend Line Has Risen above 18 for Two Weeks

A Proposed Benchmark for Evaluating Surge Success Based on the Fatality Trend Line (Blue in the Chart Below):

If the Fatality Trend Line Drops Below 10 for an Extended Period (At Least Ten Weeks; A Pattern Not Seen Since the 2003 Occupation), and

If it is Accompanied by a Parallel Reduction in Iraqi Deaths (to the early 2005 level of less than 100 Per Week, Down from 300-400 Now - See US vs Iraqi Fatalities tab),

Then the Surge will Have Achieved a Substantive Measure of Initial Success.

There are electricity and water shortages and the Trigress River is a graveyard. There is death, disease and displacement, compounded by chaos and rampant corruption. Obviously, Bush doesn't know who the hell he's sending the troops to Iraq to fight, and isn't even sure which decade he is in. Being AWOL does that to a person. It isn't clear to Bush that he cannot win the hearts and minds of people whose kids are being imprisoned and maimed.

To the those of you who follow Bush around like flies swarming to dung, get a clue: If the facts on the ground supported his claim that the surge is working, there would be no need for him to send an army of cronies to spew $15 million worth of propaganda. There is still time to regain your integrity. Consider the facts.

U.S. troop fatalities in August over the four plus years of Bush's war:

2003: 35
2004: 66, an 89% increase over previous year.
2005: 85, a 29% increase over previous year (21 soldiers killed in Anbar on the first (7) and third (14) days of the month).
2006: 65, a 24% decrease over previous year.
2007: 77, an 18% increase over previous year.

The number of fatalities for the first eight months of this year is up more than 58%, from 462 in 2006 to 732 in 2007. That's 58%!

The average number of Iraqis killed monthly in 2007 is up 500 from 2006, and is up by more than 140 over the previous eight months.

In May 2006, a Council on Foreign Relations article described the U.S. efforts to rebuild Iraq as a reconstruction abyss.

In April 2007, CNN reported:

In addition, 914 people -- including 224 U.S. citizens -- have died while working on the U.S.-funded projects, the report said.

The U.S. is spending $37 billion on Iraqi reconstruction.

The report said a major problem was the Iraqi government's lack of maintenance plans for the facilities after it has taken over control from the U.S.

For example, just 10 of the 17 electrical generators installed at a cost of almost $12 million at the Baghdad International Airport were operational. There was no plan for their maintenance, including keeping oil levels up, the report said.

Expensive generators were missing from the Camp Ur military base, having been hauled off to another post, the report said. Also at Camp Ur, three modular buildings constructed at a cost of $1.8 million were dismantled and removed with no explanation given.

Barracks renovated for enlisted soldiers were already in disrepair just a year after being handed over to the Iraqi Army, the inspector general said.

Even the officers and troops on the ground are complaining about waste.

Then there is this from Rolling Stone:

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the story of the Iraq War in a nutshell. In the history of balls, the world has never seen anything like the private contractors George W. Bush summoned to serve in Operation Iraqi Freedom. Collectively, they are the final, polished result of 231 years of natural selection in the crucible of American capitalism: a bureaucrat class capable of stealing the same dollar twice -- once from the taxpayer and once from a veteran in a wheelchair.

According to the most reliable ­estimates, we have doled out more than $500 billion for the war, as well as $44 billion for the Iraqi reconstruction effort. And what did America's contractors give us for that money? They built big steaming shit piles, set brand-new trucks on fire, drove back and forth across the desert for no reason at all and dumped bags of nails in ditches. For the most part, nobody at home cared, because war on some level is always a waste…

This post at Welcome to Pottersville blog sums up the entire immoral endeavor:

This story encompasses in a big greasy nutshell much of the callous avarice openly endorsed and even protected by the Bush administration which, when superimposed over the murderous, bloody quagmire of Iraq, makes that country look like a monstrous hybrid of the most nightmarish paintings by Hieronymus Bosch and the inflammatory greed-exposing cartoons of Thomas Nast.

And through it all, the media echoes the steady beat of Bush's propaganda:

2005
Jan.: Bush Urges Patience on Iraq as Election Nears
Jun.: Bush urges patience, long view on Iraq war
Aug.: Bush calls for patience on Iraq mission
Nov.: Bush Urges Patience With Iraq Training

2006
Mar.: Bush calls on Americans to show patience with Iraq
Jun.: After Iraq Visit, Bush Urges Patience
Aug.: Bush Urges Patience on Iraq, Speed in Lebanon
Oct.: Conceding Missteps, Bush Urges Patience on Iraq
Nov.: Bush Urges Patience on Winning Iraq War

2007
Mar: Bush Pleads for Patience in Iraq War
May: Bush Urges Patience on Iraq
Jun.: Bush urges patience on Iraq
Jul.: War In Year 5; Bush Requests Patience
Aug.: Bush pleads for more patience for Iraq war efforts


Time to kill the spin and end the war!

edited wrong word and delete "to"

[katty]

1. Same old song from WH, nothing new....move along

[Jacobin]

2. Simple. Do what bush always does. Lie, Cheat, Steal

bully the staff into changing the 'report card', accuse them of being unpatriotic, lie some more to the people....same old same old

[JeffR]

3. "Time to kill the spin and end the war!"

Agreed 1000%.

[Maestro]

4. Great research.

Bookmarked and kicked. :kick:

[rodeodance]

5. THANK YOU

[rodeodance]

6. and REC

[rodeodance]

7. k

[ProSense]

8. Cross posted at

Daily Kos

[tabasco]

9. Nice article. Well done!

It is heartening to see the military resist the criminal neocons.

[Hamlette]

10. This sounds SO much like Vietnam. The generals are running for cover.

Those of us who lived through that when 50% + Americans were opposed to Vietnam in 1968. Nixon ran as the peace candidate (!) in 1968 and in 1972 with a "secret plan" to win the war.

Makes me tired and sad. It is SO much more difficult to get out of a war than to get in. A lesson we seem to need to learn over and over.

The generals were roundly criticized after Vietnam for not speaking out publicly saying the war can't be win. Please, just don't let them reinvent history and say Vietnam could have been won.

My God.

[ProSense]

11. Plane carrying U.S. lawmakers in Iraq comes under attack.

Plane carrying U.S. lawmakers in Iraq comes under attack.

A military cargo plane carrying three senators — Mel Martinez (R-FL), Richard Shelby (R-AL), and James Inhofe (R-OK) — and a House member — Bud Cramer (D-IL) — was forced to take evasive maneuvers and dispatch flares to avoid ground fire after taking off from Baghdad on Thursday night. The AP reports:

The lawmakers said their plane, a C-130, was under fire from three rocket-propelled grenades over the course of several minutes as they left for Amman, Jordan.

”It was a scary moment,” said Sen. Mel Martinez, R-Fla., who said he had just taken off his body armor when he saw a bright flash outside the window. ”Our pilots were terrific. … They banked in one direction and then banked the other direction, and they set off the flares.” <…>

”We were jostled around pretty good,” said Cramer, who estimated the plane had ascended to about 6,000 feet. ”There were a few minutes there where I wondered: ‘Have we been hit? Are we OK?”’ <…>

”It was kind of dicey,” Shelby said. ”But it just shows you what our troops go through every day.”

U.S. Says Company Bribed Officers for Work in Iraq

By ERIC SCHMITT and JAMES GLANZ
Published: August 31, 2007

WASHINGTON, Aug. 30 — An American-owned company operating from Kuwait paid hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes to American contracting officers in efforts to win more than $11 million in contracts, the government says in court documents.

The Army last month suspended the company, Lee Dynamics International, from doing business with the government, and the case now appears to be at the center of a contracting fraud scandal that prompted Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates to dispatch the Pentagon inspector general to Iraq to investigate.

Court documents filed in the case say the Army took action because the company was suspected of paying hundreds of thousands in bribes to Army officers to secure contracts to build, operate and maintain warehouses in Iraq that stored weapons, uniforms, vehicles and other matériel for Iraqi forces in 2004 and 2005.

A lawyer for the company denied the accusations.

One of those officers, Maj. Gloria D. Davis, a contracting official working in Kuwait, shot and killed herself in Baghdad in December 2006. Government officials say the suicide occurred a day after she admitted to an Army investigator that she had accepted at least $225,000 in bribes from the company. The United States has begun proceedings to seize Major Davis’s assets, a move that is contested by her heirs.

more

[ProSense]

12. Kick! n/t

[sendero]

13. But there IS IMPROVEMENT..

.... things are better IN CERTAIN PLACES. If we only had 1,000,000 troops WE COULD STABILIZE IRAQ. We CANNOT AFFORD TO FAIL.

God I'm so sick of these idiotic, simpering, lying douchebag Republican shitbags.

WORD TO YOU FUCKING IDIOTS - you got us into this mess, why in FUCK'S NAME would I trust you to get us out.

[ProSense]

14. Juan Cole: Arguments over Night of the Living Dead in Iraq

Friday, August 31, 2007

Arguments over Night of the Living Dead in Iraq

<...>

I personally find the controversy about Iraq in Washington to be bizarre. Are they really arguing about whether the situation is improving? I mean, you have the Night of the Living Dead over there. People lack potable water, cholera has broken out even in the good areas, a third of people are hungry, a doubling of the internally displaced to at least 1.1 million, and a million pilgrims dispersed just this week by militia infighting in a supposedly safe all-Shiite area. The government has all but collapsed, with even the formerly cooperative sections of the Sunni Arab political class withdrawing in a snit (much less more Sunni Arabs being brought in from the cold). The parliament hasn't actually passed any legislation to speak of and often cannot get a quorum. Corruption is endemic. The weapons we give the Iraqi army are often sold off to the insurgency. Some of our development aid goes to them, too.

The average number of Iraqis killed in 2007 per day exceeds those killed in 2006. Independent counts by news organizations do not agree with Pentagon estimates about drops in civilian deaths over-all. Nation-wide attacks in June reached a daily all-time high of 177.5. True, violence in Baghdad has been wrestled back down to the levels of summer, 2006 (hint: it wasn't paradise), but violence levels are up in the rest of the country. If you compare each month in 2006 with each month in 2007 with regard to US military deaths, the 2007 picture is dreadful.

more

[ProSense]

15. Where is Petraeus' credibility?

Petraeus Attempts To Manipulate Australian Election With False Claims About Iraq

Remember when Petraeus backed Bush's crazy Iraq-Korea comparison:

Petraeus: Escalation Not Done By September, 50-Year Iraq Presence A ‘Realistic Assessment’

Today on Fox News Sunday, Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, agreed that lawmakers will be able to have a “reasonable and a realistic sense” of whether the escalation is “working or not working” by September. “I’ve said that all along. I started saying that back in January. I think we’ll have had by then our forces in the mix for a good several months.”

Later in the show, however, Petraeus admitted that he didn’t expect the “surge” to be done by September, the date set for Petraeus’ supposedly make-it or break-it report to Congress. Asked by host Chris Wallace whether he believed “the job would be done by the surge by September,” Petraeus responded, “I do not, no.” Watch it:

The Northern Ireland Model

The top U.S. commander in Iraq, Gen. David Petraeus, has characterized the counterinsurgency campaign in Iraq as a long slog and likened it to the decades-long struggle by British forces to quell Northern Ireland. “Northern Ireland, I think, taught you that very well. My counterparts in your forces really understand this kind of operation... It took a long time, decades,” he told the BBC. “I don’t know whether this will be decades, but the average counterinsurgency is somewhere around a nine or a ten-year endeavor.” In Northern Ireland, conflict has raged for years between Catholics and Protestants over whether to merge with Ireland or remain a part of the United Kingdom. Similarly, in Iraq Shiites, Sunni Arabs, and Kurds have competing views of what kind of future state Iraq should resemble (i.e. decentralized versus centralized, secular versus religious, pro-Arab versus pro-Iran). Yet some critics of Petraeus’ comments point out that the roots of the conflict in Northern Ireland stretch back centuries, not decades, a template that bodes for a long and bloody U.S. occupation in Iraq. “Here’s the problem of using the Northern Ireland analogy: For how long did a band of less than a thousand IRA militants keep peace at bay?” asks one blogger. “We’re not dealing with a few hundred insurgents in Iraq.”

more

What's Petraeus going to report in September? Kerry called it during the funding vote.

Edited linked to wrong article.

[ProSense]

16. Kick! n/t

[ProSense]

17. Iraqi civilian deaths up, Bush urges patience

Iraqi civilian deaths up, Bush urges patience

By Dean Yates Sat Sep 1, 10:02 AM ET

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Civilian deaths from violence in Iraq rose in August, with 1,773 people killed, government data showed on Saturday, just days before the U.S. Congress gets a slew of reports on President George W. Bush's war strategy.

The civilian death toll was up 7 percent from 1,653 people killed in July, according to figures from various ministries.

Nearly a quarter of the August total comprised 411 people killed in massive truck bombings against the minority Yazidi community in northern Iraq on August 14.

Without the Yazidi attack, the death toll would still be higher than the June number of 1,227, which had been the lowest monthly total since a U.S.-backed crackdown began in February.

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[ProSense]

18. Couric Admits Her Rosy Report From Iraq Is Based On ‘What The U.S. Military Wants Me To See’

Couric Admits Her Rosy Report From Iraq Is Based On ‘What The U.S. Military Wants Me To See’