Newsweek reports, "The White House was surprised when even pro-war senators, including Sam Brownback (R-KS) and Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), came out against" Bush's plan for escalation in Iraq. U.S. News adds Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has "lined up as many as a dozen Republicans for a resolution opposing what he branded 'escalation.'"

With opposition in Congress growing, Bush said this weekend that he believes he has the authority to ignore the will of Congress and send more troops to Iraq. A USA Today/Gallup Poll released this week found "more than 6 of 10 people back the idea of a non-binding congressional resolution expressing opposition to Bush's plan to commit an additional 21,500 U.S. troops to Iraq."

A former senior Bush aide who is still close to the White House says that if the situation in Iraq continues to slide, "a delegation of [conservative] senators could one day show up in the Oval Office to tell Bush that the party is no longer with him and the war must end - much like Sen. William Fulbright's forcefully urging Lyndon Johnson to bring the Vietnam War to a close."

But the great deciderer still really likes making decisions. In his interview with 60 minutes, President Bush said "decision" twenty-four times in nine minutes. The chart here "shows how often he said the word during each of the interview's nine minutes, including two times when he practically shouted it."

Meanwhile, BuzzFlash reported a total power outage throughout Baghdad during George Bush's war speech last week, preventing Iraqis from having the chance to watch (electricity usually only lasts a few hours each day anyway). Reports today indicate that the capital city of 6 million people is also suffering from another serious problem: a collapsed sewage system.

The constant car bombings occasionally make the news, but neither of these crises have been covered by the mainstream western media. However, they are just as serious and deadly. As a result of sewage water sitting idly in city streets, "all residents are threatened with gastroenteritis, typhoid fever, cholera, diarrhea and hepatitis," according to a health official.

With tap water unsafe to drink, Iraqis are forced to purchase bottled water with what are usually meager incomes. Those unable to afford this luxury are forced to drink the sewage water.

The sewage and electrical problems highlight the failure in the Bush Administration's handling of the occupation of Iraq. More than $350 billion has spent on the war, but quality of life in Iraq is worse in many ways than under Saddam's regime and security has continued to decrease in recent months.

One Baghdad official blamed the utilities problems on insurgent attacks, which have killed about 600 city workers in the past nine months alone. Given the deteriorating conditions in Iraq, it is little wonder why a majority of Iraqis want us to leave them alone and stop "helping" them, and even less wonder why a majority of Americans want the Bush Administration to stop blowing so much money (and so many lives) on a problem it has proved so unable to fix.

Bombers rock Baghdad university
   
Most of those killed were female students on their way home

At least 70 people have been killed and scores injured in a double bombing at a university in Baghdad, sources say.

A car bomb blew up outside Mustansiriyah University, and a suicide bomber targeted students as they fled.

Elsewhere in the Iraqi capital, at least 25 people died in car bombings and shootings.

The attacks came as the UN said more than 34,400 Iraqis had died in 2006 in violence across the country.

It also said more than 36,000 civilians were hurt during the year.

The UN's figures were almost three times the Iraqi government's estimate.

The latest attacks come less than a week after US President George W Bush ordered more than 20,000 additional US troops to Iraq.

Most of them are heading for Baghdad in what is expected to be a new security drive by US and Iraqi forces to rid the city of daily sectarian attacks.

In other violence:

* Twenty-five unidentified bodies are found in Baghdad

* Four US soldiers died in a blast in Nineveh province on Monday, the US military said...

And the decidering bumbling US president is still an idiot, getting idioter by the minute, with a pinhead understanding of the world: "I'm a pinhead, therefore the world is for pinheads..." 

 

Get onto Jim Lehrer's interview President Bush Defends New Iraq Strategy.

Just caught the tail of it on SBS, but the commentary by David Brooks and Mark Shields is pretty sharp.

... I thought, Jim, his answer on the sacrifice question I thought was just absolutely less than defective. I mean, this is a man who is ahistorical. Abraham Lincoln, William McKinley, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, every president who has presided over a war -- and the president describes this as a nation at war, this is the battle, the ideological battle of the century that we're engaged in. It's an all-out global effort.

And every one of them saw the need to call upon their nation, two Republicans, two Democrats, for collective and individual sacrifice, that war does demand equality of sacrifice. And that just eludes him. He just becomes a tax-cutter again. He reduces the whole argument to that. ...

And -

... The other thing that just amazed me was that he said we have to stop al-Qaida from getting a foothold in Iraq. That was in the resolution to go to war in the first place, that al-Qaida did have a foothold in Iraq. So, I mean, here we are, five years later.

 

From Robert Scheer: Chuck Hagel for President!:

... In any case, Hagel refused to bite on Lieberman’s apocalyptic vision, which somehow manages to skip the hard truth that Iraq has collapsed because of our involvement, not despite it.

“[T]he fact is, the Iraqi people will determine the fate of Iraq,” Hagel responded, in what amounts to a radical opinion in paternalistic, arrogant Washington. “The people of the Middle East will determine their fate. We continue to interject ourselves in a situation that we never have understood, we’ve never comprehended [and] we now have to devise a way to find some political consensus with our allies [and] the regional powers, including Iran and Syria.

“To say that we are going to feed more young men and women into that grinder, put them in the middle of a tribal, sectarian civil war, is not going to fix the problem,” he added.

Words of wisdom that set the standard for anyone running for president.

 

And a word of warning to Ms Gillard, from Boxer’s Actual Comments to Rice:

“Who pays the price? I’m not going to pay a personal price. My kids are too old and my grandchild is too young. You’re not going to pay a particular price, as I understand it, with an immediate family. So who pays the price? The American military and their families. And I just want to bring us back to that fact.”

 

 

‘The evidence is building up that President Bush plans to add war on Iran to his triumphs in Iraq and Afghanistan - and there is every sign, to judge by his extraordinary warmongering speech in Plymouth on Friday, that Tony Blair would be keen to join him if he were still in a position to commit British forces to the field.

"There's a strong sense in the upper echelons of the White House that Iran is going to surface relatively quickly as a major issue - in the country and the world - in a very acute way," said NBC TV's Tim Russert after meeting the president. This is borne out by the fact that Bush has sent forces to the Gulf that are irrelevant to fighting the Iraqi insurgents. These include Patriot anti-missile missiles, an aircraft carrier, and cruise-missile-firing ships.’

Next Target Tehran

ABC radio broadcast an interview with Scott Ritter.

Ritter has a new book suggesting Iran is not the huge threat that Condi and Dick assure us it is.

Ritter was about the only one warning of the dangers of IEDs if the US went into Iraq. He reckons Ahmadinejad is relatively powerless and the ruling mullahs are fairly moderate.

Not the kind of thing we'd hear from Fox. I trust Paul Barry will be summoned to the manager's office.

 

Gus: Buy an Iraq War now! Excellent terms, low balloning interest for your kids to pay when they grow up (if they ever grow up!)... No deposit for you (except for a few somebody else's lives — don't look at the boring stats, got to put this small reference, for trading regulation)... No repayments ever, not even after you're kicked out of office! And if you ring now, we'll throw in a set of steak knives for FREE! Buy now! See your war grow into something monumental should you take the extra troops option.

Special deal: Ongoing war on terror! This war can provide you and your family with an ongoing source of fear and redneckery for ever after! Ring now! Use someone else's CREDIT card and we will throw in a bagful of devoted religious ratbaggery righteous right for FREE!

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From The Christian Science Monitor...

How US is deferring war costs

As war spending on Iraq and Afghanistan nears the levels for Vietnam and Korea, concern is rising over the 'borrow now, pay later' approach.

By Ron Scherer | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
NEW YORK - To pay for World War II, Americans bought savings bonds and put extra notches in their belts. President Harry Truman raised taxes and cut nonmilitary spending to pay for the Korean conflict. During Vietnam, the US raised taxes but still watched deficits soar.

But to pay for the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the US has used its credit card, counting on the Chinese and other foreign buyers of its debt to pay the bills.

...