alternative hippopotamus

“It seems that no matter what happens in Iraq, opponents of the war have one answer: retreat,” Bush said at a press conference this morning. “When things were going badly in Iraq a year ago, they called for withdrawal. Then we changed our strategy, launched the surge, and turned the situation around. . . .

“It’s interesting that many of the same people who once accused me of refusing to acknowledge setbacks in Iraq now are the ones who are refusing to acknowledge progress in Iraq.”

President Bush as quoted in White House Watch

If I were General Petraeus I wouldn’t work so hard. For example, I see this quote from the Washington Post:

[Petraeus] “is expected to report to Congress next month that there are some signs of progress in Iraq and that a precipitous U.S. withdrawal could be disastrous.”

Why bother with the heavy-duty Republican spin words like “precipitous”? Petraeus might as well submit a single page titled: “What I did on my summer offensive.” The body of the report could be something like: “I could quote some meaningless statistics. But does it really matter what I say?”

The answer to that obviously rhetorical question is an equally obvious “No.” It doesn’t matter. Every couple of months Bush is going to say, “Gimme $50 billion.” And, in the end he’ll get the money with no strings attached. Sometimes through a filibuster, sometimes through a veto. Sometimes out of resignation the Dems won’t even bother to try to kick the football that Lucy’s holding.

Just for fun I looked up synonyms to “precipitous”. Here’s what I found:

abrupt, breakneck, brief, frantic, harum-scarum, hasty, headlong, heedless, hurried, ill-advised, impatient, impetuous, impulsive, indiscreet, madcap, plunging, precipitant, precipitate, quick, rapid, rash, reckless, refractory, rushing, subitaneous, sudden, swift, unanticipated, uncontrolled, unexpected, unforeseen, violent, willful

Correct me if I’m wrong, but aren’t those words that describe the invasion, not the proposed withdrawal?

Washington Post:

BAGHDAD, Aug. 1 — Iraq’s largest Sunni political group partially withdrew from the Shiite-dominated government Wednesday, the latest indication of growing Sunni frustration with Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.

The announcement by the Iraqi Accordance Front came on an especially violent day in Baghdad, as three car bombs killed at least 75 people in the capital. Meanwhile, the U.S. military announced the deaths of four U.S. troops, bringing the total number of Americans killed in July to 78, the lowest monthly figure since November.

The Accordance Front announced that it would vacate five of its six seats in Maliki’s cabinet because of what Sunni leaders called the failure of the prime minister and other leading government officials to make progress on a list of demands the group issued last week.

“The government is continuing with its arrogance, refusing to change its stand and slamming shut the door to any meaningful reforms necessary to save Iraq,” said Rafaa al-Issawi, a senior member of the Accordance Front.

Michael Ware via Christopher Durang: (emphasis mine)

Well, Anderson, there is progress. And that’s indisputable. Sectarian violence is down in certain pockets. There are areas of great instability in this country. They’re at last finding some stability.

The point, though, is, at what price? What we’re seeing is — is, to a degree, some sleight of hand. What America needs to come clean about is that it’s achieving these successes by cutting deals primarily with its enemies. We have all heard the administration praise the work of the tribal sheiks in turning against al Qaeda. Well, this is just a euphemism for the Sunni insurgency. That’s who has turned against al Qaeda.

And why? Because they offered America terms in 2003 to do this. And it’s taken America four years of war to come round to the Sunnis’ terms. And, principally, that means cutting the Iraqi government out of the loop. By achieving these successes, America is building Sunni militias. Yes, they’re targeting al Qaeda, but these are also anti- government forces opposed to the very government that America created.

The suggestion that I’m making is that Sunni’s are withdrawing from the political process because deals are being cut to establish Sunni militias, a la Saddam Hussein.

Ooh, a blogging thingy on the Onion website. Maybe the middle-aged slackers who run washingtonpost.com will start paying attention, and do as the Onionists do:

Bush: Maybe U.S. Military ‘Just Not Very Good’

WASHINGTON, DC —"Maybe our men and women overseas just aren’t what they’re cracked up to be," said the President Bush of the thorough lack of quality in personnel.

The point of the article is, of course, that a critical component of the Bush world view is that Bush can’t be wrong. Bush gets his wisdom from his gut, and his gut gets it from an omniscient Judeo-Christian being, with a lesser emphasis on the Judeo part.

I also wanted to mention that the Onion now distributes itself for free on the streets of downtown DC is likely to have an effect on the nature of our political discourse. It showed up in the spring, roughly at the same time Politico showed up. The cause and effect of that timing is beyond the abilities of this hippopotamus to explain.

LA Times, lightly stolen from Froomkin:

“Bush is approaching this intensifying debate with what appears to be utter denial about his political situation. . . .

“Increasingly, the White House is demonstrating not only defiance but disdain in its dealings with Congress. . . .

“Bush has approached Congress with the attitude of a teacher determined to discipline unruly kindergarteners, not as the head of a co-equal branch of government.”

I wouldn’t be surprised if deep down Bushie believed that the parts about the co-equal branches of government was just something the authors of the Constitution put in to get it passed, and maybe partly to keep feelings from getting hurt. After all, the president is the only useful part of government, according to this view, and in a budget crunch we could always get rid of the other two. Maybe some of the Democrats don’t like the idea of Bush being the supreme decider-in-chief, and instead of calling him a king prefer to emphasize the notion of an Executive branch with power distributed across the entire branch, and not concentrated in a single invidual. But hey, if the scepter fits.

In my mind he’ll always be Lord Frat Bush.

Little LuLu points us to the straight poop on Iraq as told by the truth-tellers at FreeRepublic. This is a real he-man account. Not the candy-assed Frenchified version of events as told by the estrogen-drenched Iraq Study Group.

We have spread democracy in Iraq, much like the French spread brie on their toast and snails. Yes, Sir! We have plastered the f’ing toast with f’ing democracy, Sir! That must hurt Old Europeans like John Fwad Kerry (Citizens Report on Iraq, pp. 72-73):

In the Sixties and Seventies, the anti-American left worked with our communist enemies to bring about the political victory they were unable to win on the battlefield. For example, Democrat Sen. John Kerry, then a reserve Naval officer who had served in Vietnam and Cambodia, met with our communist enemies in Paris in 1970. The next year the testified in uniform before the Senate that we should accept the communists’ terms of surrender, while at the same hearing he vilified American soldiers as war criminals. Col. George ‘Bud’ Day, a prisoner of war being held by the North Vietnamese communists at the time ahs stated that Kerry’s actions lengthened the POW’s captivity by giving the communists hope for a then elusive victory.

Thus, it should be obvious to even the densest of the blame-America firsters, that their so-called “elected representatives” are hoping to undermine our soon-to-be imminent victory in Iraq (which we intend to rename “Valley of the Purple Fingers”), and are doing so just out of a fit of Bush Derangement Syndrome.

Over time I go back and forth between listening to my favorite media outlets via podcast, and reading the transcripts. There’s pluses and minuses to both, of course. In terms of information content per unit bandwidth it’s impossible to beat text. On the other hand, you certainly get a better sense of a conversation in audio.

I was thinking of this while watching the NewsHour interview of Bush. You can find both transcript and mp3 download here.

My impression was that Bush was jaw-droppingly out of touch with reality. You really need to see the video in this case. Watching the president smile while defending his Iraq policy is maddening. You get a pretty good sense listening to it, particularly the way he stutters when a direct question is asked. Still, just reading the transcript, it’s hard to keep your jaw from dropping on the floor.

Take this excerpt, for instance:

MR. LEHRER: But to be very direct about it, Mr. President, you had a few years here and you’ve been in charge. And you’ve made a lot of decisions; you’ve made a lot of judgments about things and they haven’t worked. And so now you’ve made a new one. So why should anybody expect the new ones to work when the prior ones did not?

PRESIDENT BUSH: Well, actually - I will sound defensive - but some of my decisions actually have worked, like getting rid of Saddam Hussein and helping the Iraqi government form a unity government that is based on a novel constitution for the Middle East. As a matter of fact, in 2005, I thought - I mean, in 2006, I thought I’d be in a position to remove troops from Iraq, in other words, hand over more of the authorities to the Iraqis so they could take the fight, and then this sectarian violence that you described broke out. And the question is, do we try to stop it? Do we help the Iraqis stop it? And a year ago, I felt pretty good about the situation; I felt like we were achieving our objective, which is a country that can govern, sustain, and defend itself. No question, 2006 was a lousy year for Iraq. And so the question I’m now faced with is do I react to that or do we just begin to leave, which is - some people - decent people on Capitol Hill think we ought to do. I made the decision, let’s succeed; let’s work for success not work for failure.

What is going through his mind at this point?

Update: ThinkProgress looks at another section of the same interview where Bush, being asked about why non-active-duty Americans have been asked to sacrifice nothing for the Iraq war, replies: “They sacrifice peace of mind when they see the terrible image of violence on TV every night.”

It’s this kind of misdirection that makes me wonder about Bush. In the context he’s taking the word “sacrifice” to mean that which has not been given willingly, and in many cases, here I’m thinking of those of us who opposed the Iraq invasion, over the most vocal objection.

To ask the American people to “sacrifice,” say in terms of public service of one form or another, would be to put the largely passive public into an active role. Who knows what may come of that? The people may become actively involved in their communities, in our society, and thus the power of the Bushies would become diminished. That forseeable outcome must be avoided at all costs.

Michelle Malkin asks: “What’s so funny about going to Iraq?”

Since you ask, it’s at least partly the incongruity of seeing someone who has labored to create their own reality, facing the inescapable reality: your party, and principally the man you worked to put in office, has created a debacle of the first order in Iraq. It’s also partly that by pushing a distraction (an AP story you feel is insufficiently sourced), you become part of the story.

To put it more concretely: I can imagine you there in Baghdad dressed in Arabic garb, trying to talk to ordinary Iraqi’s, trying to locate the man whose existence you doubt. His name? Something Hussein, I believe. Do you know a man named Hussein? An IED goes off, you can hear the sound of breaking glass, and people screaming. Suddenly, you understand the answer to that question you ask so often: How come the media doesn’t report more of the good things coming out of Iraq?

Clearly, it’s not funny like a comedy skit. You know, like the one Bush did about not being able to find the WMD’s. Or, the Dean scream video. Or, the Swift Boat Vets. That was all pure clean fun.

No, this is funnier more in a Be careful what you ask for you just might get it kind of way.

I keep both the London Times and BBC on my Palm T/X for my morning Metro ride. The day just isn’t right without that first jolt of international news. Yes, I know that Rupert Murdoch owns the Times of London, and its opinion pages lean neoconish, but its still a pretty good source. And, because of the timing of the news cycle, the London Times will be out in front of a story that the Washington Post will miss.

For instance, this story in the Times of London. It’s about the inquest into the death of Terry Lloyd, an unimbedded journalist who was shot and killed by US forces in 2003:

When the gunfire stopped he saw a green minibus appear. “It was difficult to see because of the black smoke in the area at the time. It would appear they helped people into the vehicle.”

Nicholas Walshe, an ITN journalist, who investigated the deaths for his company, said that the driver of the green minibus claimed he had picked up Mr Lloyd to take to him to hospital.

Mr Walshe said the “credible witness” claimed that his van was comandeered by Iraqi troops and had come under American fire as Mr Lloyd lay on two wooden slats.

He said: “This particular witness said Terry appeared shot in the shoulder and his arm was broken. He had been lying in the sand between two lanes of the road and walked to the car but was too weak to get in it without help.”

The BBC version goes a bit further:

The National Union of Journalists (NUJ) said Mr Lloyd’s killing was a “war crime” and this was echoed by Mr Lloyd’s widow, Lyn.

In a statement she said: “This was a very serious war crime, how else can firing on a vehicle in these circumstances be interpreted?

“This was not a friendly fire incident or a crossfire incident, it was a despicable, deliberate, vengeful act, particularly as it came many minutes after the initial exchange.

“US forces appear to have allowed their soldiers to behave like trigger happy cowboys in an area where civilians were moving around.”

The timing of the story is such that it missed today’s Washington Post and NYT. I see that Reuters picked it up this morning at the conclusion of the inquest, though that means it will be relegated to the Post’s Saturday edition. On the other hand, the coroner’s damning conclusion may be the most newsworthy aspect of the story (Reuters):

“He was fired on by American soldiers as a minibus carried wounded people away,” Coroner Andrew Walker said at the conclusion of the inquest, which U.S. soldiers declined to attend.

“I have no doubt it was an unlawful act of fire on the minibus,” Walker added.