We in the blogosphere have fought long and hard to make the obvious failure of our Iraq policies known -- now it appears that all you have to do is turn on the tv and read the paper to hear our own words coming back to us.
Chuck Hagel on "This Week" From Crooks and Liars.
"It is unfortunate that we are in civil war. We are losing each day as an average 50 to 60 people throughout the country, if not more," Allawi told the BBC. "If this is not civil war, then God knows what civil war is."
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Hagel: I think the former Prime Minister is correct. I think we've had a low grade civil war going on in Iraq for the last six months maybe the last year-our own generals have told me that privately George, so that's a fact.
From the Los Angeles Times.
THREE YEARS AGO TODAY, Iraqis were "shocked and awed" by the power of the U.S. military. Today, Americans are shocked and awed by its limits. If the "cakewalks" of the 1980s and 1990s -- Grenada, the Gulf War, Kosovo -- restored America's belief in its omnipotence, so badly shaken in Vietnam, the occupation of Iraq has been a humbling letdown.
With a mere 38% of the public still thinking that the war is going well, and more than 2,300 U.S. troops dead, it's become fashionable for the war's initial supporters to have second thoughts. We opposed the decision to go to war. But we will resist the temptation to be fashionable and will take this opportunity to at least concede that the Bush administration's actions were rooted in a strain of American idealism most often identified with Woodrow Wilson. The decision to topple Saddam Hussein's regime was a Wilsonian attempt to preserve the notion of collective security; even more idealistically, it was an attempt to create an oasis of American-style democracy and prosperity that would alter the complexion of the entire region.
So much for the vision. The reality has been -- to use a term from another unpopular war -- a quagmire. Bush's messianic idealism was never justified, and in any event the administration's flawed execution would have undermined his purpose. The list of gaffes is by now distressingly familiar: the flawed intelligence on weapons of mass destruction, the lack of sufficient troops, the tainted contracting process and so on.
Crooks and Liars has more...
John Murtha on Meet the Press:Murtha appeared on MTP today and got the full body treatment from Timmy. Russert wailed away at John (who wouldn't like to see that same treatment with Condi or Cheney?) and threw everything and the kitchen sink at him, but Murtha was relentless in his feelings about the Iraq war. He admitted that he made a mistake with his vote and then slapped down Ken Melman. He also addressed the criticisms from the wingnuts about the media and their coverage of the war.
Murtha: You can't win this with rhetoric. What the Republican chairman has no impact on me or anybody else as far as I'm concerned. This should not be political. When I go by the graveyard over there at Arlington, it doesn't say Democrat or Republican, it says American.
Russert: Some in the administration say the media is distorting the good news that's coming out of Iraq.
REP. MURTHA: Well, they said the same thing about Vietnam. They said the same thing over and over and over about Vietnam. They said, "We're winning the war in Vietnam." That-you could go back and get quotes from Vietnam, and you'd see the same kind of, of, of reports, "The media's the one that's distorting; everything's going fine in Vietnam." Well, everything's not going fine in Iraq...
Read the full transcript
George Will repeating Murtha - This is not Working".
Will announced today on THIS WEEK, that Iraq is not working. He repeats what John Murtha has been saying in this small sound byte.
Firedoglake's Reddhedd on Washington Journal
Christy Hardin Smith (aka) Reddhedd from FireDogLake, was on the Washington Journal today with Paul Mirengoff from Powerline-discussing a variety of topics including Scooter Libby and Iraq.
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Ultimately the problem has not been with the idea of spreading liberty and freedom. That is indeed a noble goal, the problem has been with the execution of reaching that goal. If you were to imagine that instead of invading a sovereign nation under false pretenses we had decided to trash our neighbors car with the excuse that we we're looking for drugs, and when we didn't find them proclaimed that "well, you needed to excersize more anyway... so what we did was a noble cause" - we'd be committed.
If we then proceeded to promise to fix the car, but instead installed the wrong parts, overpaid for the parts by thousands upon thousands of dollars - and after three years the car still didn't work properly. You could pretty much expect that the car owner would want to run us down with it.
That is exactly where we are now - three years after "Shock and Awe".
The solution to this problem, which almost no-one is bringing up is really to look to the past. In our not very distant history we successfully dealt with a similar three-way ethic/religious/sectarian civil war of extreme violence.
That War was in Bosnia.
As bad as the Reich-win often claims Saddam was -- Milosevic was far worse. Bringing him down and creating a peaceful democrat state in the former Yugoslavia required a genuine coalition of equal forces from Russian, Europe and the U.S. capable of keeping the peace and a diplomatic strategy based on good faith negotiations backed with a pin-point accurate bombing campaign. It could be done again, but not by this President and this Secretary of Defense at this time.
It's long past time we reached out (as John Kerry has often suggested) to NATO, the UN and even the neighboring Arab States who are similarly threatened by al Qaeda and the violence of the insurgents to help give our tired forces some relief and the Iraqi Military time to stand up.
What we need is new blood, willing to take us in a new reality-based direction.
Unfortunately, it's three more years until the next election - so either we wait until Year 6 or we remove this President ( by electing a Democratic Majority to Congres) in the meantime. The choice is ours.
I vote for the latter - time's up George. Shape up or ship out.
Vyan
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