Now the article of the same name, at
http://www.slate.com/id/2172687/nav/fix/
states "Maliki fires back while Bush warns against withdrawal. The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and Washington Post all lead with Iraq.
The LAT goes high with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki firing back at his American critics. While on a trip to Syria, Maliki warned that Iraq "can find friends elsewhere" and said U.S. politicians have no business imposing deadlines on the Iraqi government. The WP and NYT both lead with President Bush's speech at the Veterans of Foreign Wars national convention, where he made the case for a continued commitment to Iraq and put the situation in a historical context by linking it to previous conflicts, most notably the Vietnam War. He also stepped back from previous criticism of Maliki by saying the prime minister is a "good man with a difficult job."
How can the US military feel comfortable with big bro 43 alternately attacking Maliki with faint praise and condemning him, while Maliki tells W to sod off? It is just propaganda, but it gets harder to tell who the intended audience for W's psychotic ravings is.
This new report, along with the recent criticism of Maliki, seems to be part of an effort by the White House to reduce expectations before the much-awaited progress report in September. "We are entering a period of passing the blame," an expert tells the LAT."
So W is warning us that his plan is failing in order that he'll reassure that only he is a strong enough leader to protect us against the real and imagined boogeymen who dwell in his GWOT.
The article "The misleading Vietnam analogy" at
click here
states "Bush needs to look no further for killing fields and refugees than modern-day Iraq, even without a withdrawal.
With rhetoric that would stir any patriot but logic that should persuade few, President Bush on Wednesday waded into the historical quagmire of the Vietnam War. Then, as now, Bush said, "people argued the real problem was America's presence and that if we would just withdraw, the killing would end." He then listed the tragedies that followed the U.S. withdrawal from Southeast Asia -- the Khmer Rouge slaughter in Cambodia, the harsh communist rule in Vietnam. "The price of America's withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent citizens whose agonies would add to our vocabulary new terms like 'boat people,' 're-education camps' and 'killing fields.' " Likewise, he argued, innocents will pay if a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq empowers Al Qaeda.
The president's Vietnam-Iraq analogy begins with a large kernel of truth, but goes astray. First, no serious Iraq expert believes U.S. withdrawal would end the killing. The debate today centers on whether the civil war that has been only partly suppressed by the surge of 30,000 U.S. troops will inevitably rage until the Sunnis and Shiites reach a rough equilibrium on the battlefield.
It's true that millions of Iraqi civilians have already paid a terrible price and may suffer even more as fighting may well worsen after a U.S. withdrawal -- whenever that occurs. But it seems equally clear that the civil war cannot be suppressed indefinitely unless the U.S. plans to occupy the country for decades."
Maybe someone should clue W in to the fact that the latest guy W has hitched his wagon to, Petraeus, is clearly planning on reducing the surge by early next year. John Warner, GOP insider, has said that W should make it clear immediately after Petraeus' report that the US troops will be on their way home.
I was a teenager during the 60s. I knew that Nixon's scare tactic of Communists at our street corners was insane. "The real lesson of Vietnam is that its civil war was a nationalist struggle that toppled no communist "dominoes" across Asia. Bush's rhetoric implying an Al Qaeda "domino effect" in the Middle East has the same false ring."
The article "Report finds Iraqi government precarious" at http://www.charlotte.com/news/ap_news/v-print/story/247698.html
states "The Iraqi government will become more precarious over the next six to 12 months and its security forces have not improved enough to operate without outside help, U.S. spy agencies conclude in a new assessment of the country's political and military fortunes.
Despite some uneven improvements, the analysts concluded that the level of overall violence is high, Iraq's sectarian groups remain unreconciled, and al-Qaida in Iraq is still able to conduct highly visible attacks....
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said the report confirms what most Americans already know: "Our troops are mired in an Iraqi civil war and the president's escalation strategy has failed to produce the political results he promised to our troops and the American people."
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