W's team has lied about Iraq for too long, as illustrated by the facts contained in the Iraq NIEs. The Democratic Party is exercising its responsibility to provide checks and balances against the executive branch. The GOP is also showing signs of fight W! It is not a matter of if W's insane Iraq surge will be stopped, but when.

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You'd like to think they would say something to the effect that "Enough is enough. You're wasting the lives of our military's boys and girls, our resources and destroying the moral high ground the US formerly possessed. Your insane GWOT has to focus on Afghanistan and solving the problems of cultures which produce extremist jihadists. After a phased deployment, you must exit Iraq, even though your illegal war there has been a boon for terrorists." What they will really say though is "Leave Iraq now W. We are using too much of our time defending your lies about it. If you get out now maybe we can force the Democratic Senators to focus on moving forward instead of looking back, but even that can't be considered a sure as we still have the Phase 2 of the pre-war Intelligence Investigation to deal with. If you had only let us come out with a bland nothing of a report before the election, we wouldn't have a Democratic Party controlled committee to investigate your stupid cherry-picking and manipulation. We'll surely lose in 2008 if you don't start a phased withdrawal from Iraq immediately and admitting to your lies this minute!" The article "For GOP, Discord In Dissent On Iraq" of January 31, 2007 at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/01/30/AR2007013000456.html states "Senator Specter, the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, pushed back against Bush's claim he is the "decision maker," saying the White House needs to accept Congress's role in shaping war policy. "I would suggest respectfully to the president that he is not the sole decider," Specter said during a hearing on Congress's war powers. "The decider is a shared and joint responsibility." W isn't going to give in on his big activity as a war-time president, "Operation Iraqi Freedom" without a fight. Now with the Democratic Party in charge of all committees, and therefore doing its job of checking and balancing W's run-away policy disasters in the executive branch, W's illegal activities are being monitored. The Democratic Party can fight W alone, but back in Nixon's day it was a group of high-ranking GOP functionaries who forced Nixon to surrender. The Democratic Party can count on GOP Senators such as Specter, Hagel and even Warner to help in the fight to restore a fully functioning Democracy to the US, but only so far as to not hurt the GOP. A Democracy needs a free flow of information. The citizens therefore can't be consistently brainwashed by the executive branch, and sadly that is what is happening even now, years after the US became aware that the reasons for the Iraq War were false. The latest National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq in the article "Report: Corruption, extremism imperil Iraq stability" at http://www.cnn.com/2007/POLITICS/02/02/iraq.estimate.ap/index.html is summarized as: ? The NIE states the U.S. could lose its tenuous grip on Iraq ? Iraqi-on-Iraqi violence is the top threat to U.S. goals in the war-ridden nation ? Declassified summary to be released after Congress receives classified version We're going to learn the details in dribs and drabs after W's propaganda unit varnishes the facts to suit its purposes. The article "Bleak Iraq Report Is Sent to Congress -- Threats to Government Are Detailed" at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/02/02/AR2007020200685.html states "The entire 90-page, classified NIE, titled "Prospects for Iraq's Stability: A Challenging Road Ahead," was delivered to Congress yesterday morning after most members had left for the weekend." Why release when the Congress couldn't comment? That is a tactic that W's vile group always uses. Maybe by Morning things will improve or people will forget! The fact is that W's surge will accomplish nothing as we can't get the Iraqis to make the required political concessions required to reduce the violence as "Without mentioning Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, a Shiite, by name, the estimate noted that "the absence of unifying leaders among the Arab Sunni or Shia with the capacity to speak for or exert control over their confessional groups limits prospects for reconciliation.... On the other hand, the NIE concluded, "a number of identifiable internal security and political triggering events . . . have the potential to convulse severely Iraq's security environment" and could "spark an abrupt increase in communal and insurgent violence and shift Iraq's trajectory from gradual decline to rapid deterioration." Those events include sustained mass sectarian killing, the assassination of major political and religious leaders, and a complete Sunni defection from the government. Any one of the three, the estimate said, could result in "chaos leading to partition . . . emergence of a Shia strongman . . . [or] anarchic fragmentation of power." Just this week a Shiite lunatic group which according to "Healing Iraq" at http://healingiraq.blogspot.com/ "was coordinating with Ba'athists and Al-Qaeda and receiving logistic and monetary backing from Saudi Arabia tried to assassinate the revered Shia clerics including al-Sistani. The details remain murky and the government has not disclosed how it discovered that the group was plotting to attack pilgrims or to kill senior Shi'ite clerics in Najaf. But it's interesting to hear the telling detail that local police officers said they did not move against the group at first because they thought they were the Mahdi Army. The Sadrist account: Nahrain Net, a Sadrist website, quotes anonymous sources from the Hawza and security officials in Najaf that an armed group named "Jund Al-Samaa'" (the Army of Heaven, the Soldiers of Heaven, the Soldiers of the Skies) were amassing in palm groves at Zarga, north of Kufa, and that they were plotting to take supreme Shi'ite clerics in Najaf, including Sistani, Ishaq Al-Fayyadh, Ya'qubi, Mohammed Al-Hakim, and Muqtada Al-Sadr, as hostages in order to use as a bargain to control the shrine of Imam Ali in Najaf." What would have happened if they succeeded?According to the latest NIE the likely result would be "chaos leading to partition . . . emergence of a Shia strongman . . . [or] anarchic fragmentation of power." Secretary of Defense Gates is quoted in the DoD News Briefing with Secretary Gates and Gen. Pace from Pentagon at http://www.defenselink.mil/Transcripts/Transcript.aspx?TranscriptID=3879 as saying "What I have said in my testimony is that I think that the words "civil war" oversimplify a very complex situation in Iraq. I believe that there are essentially four wars going on in Iraq. One is Shi'a on Shi'a, principally in the south; the second is sectarian conflict, principally in Baghdad, but not solely; third is the insurgency; and fourth is al Qaeda, and al Qaeda is attacking, at times, all of those targets." The article "Iraq, and Analysis, Revisited -- Intelligence Community Took New Approach After 2002 Errors" at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/02/02/AR2007020201596.html has the mandatory unidentified "senior intelligence official who agreed to discuss some aspects of both reports said that while the 2004 estimate now seems prescient, analysts failed to predict "the rapid degree of intensification of sectarian mobilization and consciousness, and the speed in which that happened. I don't think we were that insightful." The development of the NIE had to be improved and "The result, they said, is that the new estimate -- which describes an Iraq engulfed by numerous bloody wars -- is strikingly similar to a still-classified assessment written in late 2004 and widely distributed among President Bush's top advisers. That assessment predicted that over a period of 12 to 18 months, there would be "at best, tenuous stability, at worst a slide into civil war" in Iraq, said Paul R. Pillar, a Middle East scholar and veteran intelligence officer who was one of the report's principal authors... Based on the accuracy of the previous political estimates, Pillar said, it is very possible that the worst-case scenarios set out in yesterday's assessment could occur in the next year and a half." W's team has been lying to us and concealing information that reveals their lies and which we have a right to know. The GOP elders are preparing to get the failed flop in line before he blows the next election. The article "GOP Elders Take That Long Walk to the White House" at http://www.crisispapers.org/essays7w/elders.htm describes how W will be confronted by the GOP politicians who rode his coattails to victories the last 6 years. It won't be pretty, but neither has the devastation that the fool has wrought.

Authors Bio:
Winston Smith is an ex-Social Worker. I worked in child welfare, and in medical settings and in homeless settings. In the later our facility was geared as a permanent address for people to apply for welfare. Once they received that we could send them to facilities in which their welfare paid the bill and provided enough for a meager existence. We also referred people to vocational rehabilitation services. Many of the people who came to us were people who were clearly emotionally ill, but Reagan's slashing of the services for these people caused them to become homeless. One woman I dealt with-St. Jane, believed she was in direct communication with God, urinated freely without using the facilities and she had 47 bags of trash which were prized possessions. She got welfare and was sent to a facility were she could survive. The rule was that our facility could be used 1 time only as we had too many people who thought that the services that we provided we would lift them from the dire straights that they were in. Well, we provided our services for St. Jane around Thanksgiving. On Christmas Eve she was back with her 47 bags of trash and wanted to stay at our facility. I informed my superior of this situation, but we declined to provide services for St. Jane. She slept in front of our facility in a snowstorm. The local rag took the picture and excoriated us for what we did. The local welfare department asked her where she would like to live. St. Jane said Chicago because she liked the wind. She knew on one there. She and her 47 bags of trash of were carted onto a train for the windy city and never of again. The local welfare department was glad to get shed of her. Social welfare in the mid-1980's was geared to blame the victim. Ill people were sent home from hospitals were no one was going to help them because social welfare budgets were slashed by Reagan. Bush 41's â"thousand points of lightâ" was just another way to shaft the weakest in our society. Bush 43's faith based initiative was just another attempt to reduce social welfare services. Reagan's â"Just say Noâ" was the pinnacle of hypocrisy. No services for those who desperately needed them under the guise of tough love.

Obviously I became burnt out by too much indifference regarding our weak and weary. I couldn't look at desperate people and could not get myself to say that what I could offer them wouldn't really help themâ"?it would only get them out of my office to be another person's problem, until the local welfare department carted them away.

I had little interest in politics until the illegal Iraq War started. Growing up in the 1960's caused me to understand that the GOP used war to attract right-wing extremists to vote for them. When â"Tricky Dick'sâ" secret plan to end the Vietnam War unfolded into elongating our presence there for 8 years I knew that I would never believe a GOP war-monger again. I dislike Obama's plan to escalate our presence in Afghanistan and see it as a craven attempt to placate the GOP. Maybe he'll reduce the GOP's attacks against him, but it will at the expense of alienating his base.