Monday 25th of November 2024
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on creeping surges & phoney withdrawals .....

on creeping surges & phoney withdrawals .....

 

‘When it comes to surging in Iraq, it's "encouraging" out there. So the President tells us ("Yet even at this early hour, there are some encouraging signs..."); so Lt. Gen. David Petraeus, the surge commander in Baghdad, tells us ("[It's] too early to discern significant trends, [but] there have been a few encouraging signs...").

No, they're not talking about what Juan Cole calls the "new spate of massive and deadly bombings [that] has spread insecurity and further compromised the Iraqi government... right in downtown Baghdad, within spitting distance of the Green Zone, where the U.S. and the Iraqi government planned out the new security arrangements"; they're referring to some weapons caches found, some under-strength Iraqi units deployed to the capital, a possible small drop in deaths from sectarian violence.

Still, if surge success isn't exactly looming on the horizon, it's clear enough what is: Call it "surge creep." In a way, surge creep has been the story of the Iraq War since the beginning.’

The Numbers In Iraq Keep Creeping Up

meanwhile …..

‘From the very start, the debate over Iraq has been obscured by a miasma of bogus statistics and facts: issues no one really wanted to deal publicly with - not the White House; certainly not the Republican-led Congress.

Congress is now supposedly discussing the eventual withdrawal of all American troops from Iraq. Even the Bush administration, though it refuses to set any deadline, seems to be promising a total pullout.

But who are they kidding? First of all, even those Iraqi units s already up and running rely on the U.S. for much of their logistics and certainly almost all of their air support. Self-sufficiency is years away.

Secondly - and very much related: If U.S. troops are really to withdraw completely from Iraq what’s the point of America’s having built four huge “super bases” in that country - each one housing tens of thousands of US soldiers?

Total Withdrawal? What About The Superbases

Justice soup alla Gonzales

From the New York Times

‘Mistakes’ Made on Prosecutors, Gonzales Says

By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG and JEFF ZELENY
Published: March 14, 2007

WASHINGTON, March 13 — Under criticism from lawmakers of both parties for the dismissals of federal prosecutors, Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales insisted Tuesday that he would not resign, but said, “I acknowledge that mistakes were made here.”

The mea culpa came as Congressional Democrats, who are investigating whether the White House was meddling in Justice Department affairs for political reasons, demanded that President Bush and his chief political adviser, Karl Rove, explain their roles in the dismissals.

With Mr. Bush traveling in Mexico, the White House insisted that the president’s role had been minimal and laid the blame primarily on Harriet E. Miers, who was White House counsel when the prosecutors lost their jobs and who stepped down in January.

“The White House did not play a role in the list of the seven U.S. attorneys,” said Dan Bartlett, Mr. Bush’s counselor, referring to a roster of those who were dismissed.

Mr. Bartlett said it was “highly unlikely” that Mr. Rove would testify publicly to Congress about any involvement he might have had. “But that doesn’t mean we won’t find other ways to try to share that information,” he said.

With Democrats vowing to get to the bottom of who ordered the dismissals and why, the White House scrambled to explain the matter by releasing a stream of e-mail messages detailing how Ms. Miers had corresponded with D. Kyle Sampson, the top aide to Mr. Gonzales who drafted the list of those to be dismissed. [Page A18.]

Mr. Sampson resigned Monday.

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Gus: obviously someone somewhere has tried to fiddle the justice system in the US to suit a republican stream... Whether "Gonzales" was involved or not, his department was... It shows he is either incompetent for running it or devious should he had given instructions to interfere with the prosecutors.