This ain't Hell, but you can see it from here

Category: Media

  • Biden vs. McCain

    Joseph Biden takes issue with John McCain’s “The War You’re Not Reading About” piece in the Washington Post last Sunday and writes a rebuttal in the Washington Post;

    McCain wrote that the president’s strategy is beginning to show results but that most Americans don’t know it because the media cover the bad news, not the good news. Of course, reporting any news in Iraq is an extraordinary act of bravery, given the dangers journalists must navigate every day. But the fact is, virtually every “welcome development” McCain cited has been reported, including the purported anti-al-Qaeda alliance with Sunni sheikhs in Anbar, the establishment of joint U.S.-Iraqi security stations in Baghdad and the decision by Moqtada al-Sadr to go to ground — for now.

    The problem is that for every welcome development, there is an equally or even more unwelcome development that gives lie to the claim that we are making progress. For example:

    So Biden begins by sucking up to the brave journalists who are apparently in greater danger than our troops. Those brave journalists who call reporting explosions from their hotels in the Green Zone journalism. But, see, that’s how Biden makes his point that Iraq is dangerous. Of course it’s dangerous, numbnuts – that’s why its a war.

    Old Hair Plugs calls the President’s strategy a “failing strategy”. How’s that possible? It hasn’t even reached fruition, yet. If you want to call the old strategy a failure, go ahead, have at it. But how can you call the current strategy a failure when it hasn’t even happened yet?

    The administration hopes that the surge will buy time for Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s government to broker the sustainable political settlement our military views as essential to lasting stability in Iraq.

    But there is no trust within the government, no trust of the government by the people it purports to serve and no capacity on the part of the government to deliver security or services. There is little prospect that the government will build that trust and capacity anytime soon.

    In short, the most basic premise of the president’s approach — that Iraqis will rally behind a strong central government that looks out for their interests equitably — is fundamentally and fatally flawed.

    So we should just quit, Joey? Just stop? Oh, no. He has a plan;

    I cannot guarantee that my plan for Iraq (detailed at http://www.planforiraq.com) will work. But I can guarantee that the course we’re on — the course that a man I admire, John McCain, urges us to continue — is a road to nowhere.

    The same old Joe Biden partitioning of Iraq. Is there a reason that Iraqis haven’t arrived at that solution by themselves? Afterall, it’s their government, their constitution. Now if we imposed that plan on the Iraqis, that would be a puppet government, it would be an occupation.

    And we don’t need more of your doom and gloom stories from Iraq, Joe, we get them everyday from the Washington Post. In fact, we can hardly call your opinion news at all – it’s more of a “dog bites man” story. It’s not news that you and your buddies have a problem with this particular while a Republican administration is fighting it. And it’s not news that you think a strategy that hasn’t happened yet is failing.

  • Washington Post’s regret; Saddam is gone

    In an article today, the Washington Post’s Sudarsan Raghavan wistfully writes about one single Iraqi who regrets that Saddam is gone;

    Crowds of chanting Iraqis, some clutching stones and sandals, swarmed Firdaus Square to deliver blows to the statue. Then, with the help of an American tank and a winch, it toppled, creating one of the defining images of the U.S.-led invasion. Over one photo of Jubouri, a headline reads: “The Fall of Baghdad.”

    “It achieved nothing,” he said, after he had put away the magazines.

    Yup, three .html pages of one Iraqi’s opinion – Khadim al-Jubouri a motorcycle mechanic for Hussein and his sons wishes Hussein were back. That’s what passes for news these days – one guy is unhappy with the Iraqi government.

  • You can see Iraq from here

    The Washington Post’s Thomas Ricks correctly describes the two Iraq wars concurrently being fought;

    There are two Iraq wars being waged, according to military officers on the ground and defense experts: the one fought in the streets of Baghdad, and the war as it is perceived in Washington.

    Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, who took over as the top U.S. commander in Iraq in February, cited the disparity last week. “The Washington clock is moving more rapidly than the Baghdad clock,” he said in a television interview. “So we’re obviously trying to speed up the Baghdad clock a bit and to produce some progress on the ground that can, perhaps . . . put a little more time on the Washington clock.”

    One result of this disparity is the emergence of radically different views of the impact of the new strategy, which has been referred to as a “surge” because it sends more troops into Iraq but which is more noteworthy for moving U.S. troops off large, isolated bases and into smaller outposts across the capital.

    Initial reports indicate that his strategy is working well, in that al Qaida is being pushed into the smaller towns outside of Baghdad and exposing themselves to gunfire, as reported by the Washington Times (via AP);

    North of the capital, in the increasingly dangerous Diyala provincial capital of Baqouba, police reported 21 more bodies dumped in the streets, victims of the intense sectarian warfare. All were shot execution-style and many had been tortured. At least 62 bodies have been found in or near Baqouba since Tuesday.
        A total of 58 persons were killed or found dead across Iraq yesterday in the eighth week of the U.S.-Iraqi security crackdown on the capital and surrounding cities and towns.
        Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari, meanwhile, said government officials from Iraq’s neighbors, the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council and representatives of the Group of Eight industrialized nations would meet in Egypt early next month.

    With the release of the 15 British sailors and marines last week, we can get back to the business of killing malevolent influences in Iraq, even though Jalal Sharafi, a supposed Iranian diplomat claims that he wasn’t treated as well as the British by the CIA;

    At the time of his disappearance, Iran alleged Sharafi had been abducted by an Iraqi military unit commanded by American forces — a charge repeated by several Iraqi Shiite lawmakers. U.S. authorities denied any role in his disappearance.

    I guess the CIA is disguised as Iraqis these days.

    Speaking of Iran, nothing that the Iranian government does happens in a vacuum. I’m pretty sure that the Iranians kidnapped the British sailors and marines to disrupt their counter-smuggling operations for a few weeks. I expect more IED attacks with Iranian-manufactured shaped charges and perhaps some more sophisticated chlorine-gas dirty bombs to make an appearance in th next few weeks to make the “surge” appear ineffective and to electrify the Washington war on Iraq. I’m sure the Democrats will be eager to comply with the Iranians and ramp up the rhetoric when the time comes.

    AP reports that al Sadr bravely calls for his militiamen to fight the US invaders – but AP neglects to mention that Mookie al-Sadr is making this call to arms from the bar at the Tehran Holiday Inn Express;

    The powerful Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr ordered his militiamen on Sunday to redouble their battle to oust American forces and argued that Iraq’s army and police should join him in defeating “your archenemy.”

    Yeah, powerful. He’s not even in the country and he doesn’t realize that most of his militia has been disarmed and rounded up. I guess he’s doing his best impression of Ray Nagin calling for New Orleans’ residents to be brave from his room at the Baton Rouge Ramada. But it does mean that Iran has made resupplies available for the Shi’ite militias. al-Sadr wouldn’t be making this call if he didn’t already know they had the means to attack – it wouldn’t make him look as “powerful” to AP if they weren’t. 

    All this yapping on the news channels by retired US officers second-guessing the British hostages is just blather, as far as I’m concerned. Firstly, the US Code of Conduct leaves enough wiggle room for American prisoners of war to do just what the British did in their TV interviews. All this false bravado about resistance to an enemy is real easy coming from people who’ve never spent time in foreign incarceration with no light at the end of the tunnel. Having been in a similar situation in my younger days, I sympathize with them.

    Yeah, they probably should have resisted capture. I would have – not because I’m brave, but because I’d rather get shot to death than beheaded – which seems to be popular in that part of the world. But, I’m glad neither were in store for these British warriors. I’d sure like to see them resist temptation of commercializing their ordeal, though.

    According to the Wall Street Journal, the Iranians denied Maliki access to it’s airpace while he was flying to other Arab countries this weekend. Yet Ahmadinejad thinks he should be able to fly to New York whenever he wants. Real mature, fella.

    Of course the New York Times think the most important thing happening in Iraq right now (by putting this story on the front page) is the confusion in Iraq over whether they should leave statues of Hussein standing or not. That’s probably a prett good indication that the troops are doing a good job killing Islamists if all the New York Times can write about is stupid statues.

    But Iraq the Model has the real news on how well the “surge” is working.

  • Beating Dead Horses Week at WaPo

    Back on Tuesday, the Washington Post was having conniptions over the “16 words” in President Bush’s State of the Union speech of 2003 (please note it was four years ago) today it’s Hussein’s ties to al Qaida;

    Captured Iraqi documents and intelligence interrogations of Saddam Hussein and two former aides “all confirmed” that Hussein’s regime was not directly cooperating with al-Qaeda before the U.S. invasion of Iraq, according to a declassified Defense Department report released yesterday.

    The declassified version of the report, by acting Inspector General Thomas F. Gimble, also contains new details about the intelligence community’s prewar consensus that the Iraqi government and al-Qaeda figures had only limited contacts, and about its judgments that reports of deeper links were based on dubious or unconfirmed information. The report had been released in summary form in February.

    We already know that nothing we can say can convince anyone on the Left, those poor victims of Bush Derangement Syndrome, that war against Hussein was justified. In fact I’ve been involved in a month-long email argument with a old high school buddy who lives in Spain these days. He trots out all of the tired old “Bush lied…” lines and the “Where’s the WMDs…?” and poor old Saddam Hussein was just sitting there minding his own business when suddenly Bush sent our troops into Iraq with no provocation. Ho-hum.

    Nothing can convince the terrorist/dictator hugging Left that the war was justified. So why do we bother?

    I guess the fact that Abu Nidal lived in an apartment in downtown Baghdad for two decades isn’t an indication that Hussein supported terrorists. Or the fact that Hussein was writing checks to Palestinian suicide bomber’s families points fingers at Iraq as a rogue nation. And I guess Hussein’s forces attacking UN-sanctioned flights to enforce the no fly zones wasn’t proof that he had no intention to function as a rational actor in world politics.

    Remember why Operation Desert Fox started in 1998? Because twice in three years, Hussein had massed his troops on the Kuwaiti frontier and threatened his neighbor again. And twice in three years, Clinton had to deploy US troops to Kuwait to stand by and act as a speed bump to Hussein’s newest assault, should it come to pass. Yeah, OK, it never came to pass, but how much money were we spending every year to send a Brigade task force and it’s accompanying accoutrements to sit in the Kuwaiti desert?

    But that’s not enough for the Washington Post. They continue;

    The CIA had separately concluded that reports of Iraqi training on weapons of mass destruction were “episodic, sketchy, or not corroborated in other channels,” the inspector general’s report said. It quoted an August 2002 CIA report describing the relationship as more closely resembling “two organizations trying to feel out or exploit each other” rather than cooperating operationally.

    The CIA was not alone, the defense report emphasized. The Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) had concluded that year that “available reporting is not firm enough to demonstrate an ongoing relationship” between the Iraqi regime and al-Qaeda, it said.

    So you see, the reasons we go to war have to be rooted in evidentiary terms now. War is fought by lawyers apparently, not by using common sense and drawing straight lines from event to event and predicting the final outcome.

    Why would the Washington Post get their panties in wad? Because the Vice President went on the Rush Limbaugh show (over the heads of the traditional media – that sneak) and said, according to the Post;

    “This is al-Qaeda operating in Iraq,” Cheney told Limbaugh’s listeners about Zarqawi, who he said had “led the charge for Iraq.” Cheney cited the alleged history to illustrate his argument that withdrawing U.S. forces from Iraq would “play right into the hands of al-Qaeda.”

    So Chris Dodd and the Washington Post needed a comeback. So the Washington Post puts out a frontpage article telling the world how Bush lied (when and where he lied, I have no idea…Washington Post doesn’t go into that…but then their readers aren’t smart enough to get past the headline, anyway), and at the end of the story (their readers probably won’t get that far) they bury;

    Zarqawi, whom Cheney depicted yesterday as an agent of al-Qaeda in Iraq before the war, was not then an al-Qaeda member but was the leader of an unaffiliated terrorist group who occasionally associated with al-Qaeda adherents, according to several intelligence analysts. He publicly allied himself with al-Qaeda in early 2004, after the U.S. invasion.

    So Zarqawi was only occasionally associated with al Qaida. That makes him harmless, I suppose. Excellent job at muddying the waters with a non-story, R. Jeffrey Smith. 

    Curt at Flopping Aces has much more.

  • WaPo is still spazzin’ out over “the 16 words”

    In an article entitled How Bogus Letter became a Case for War by Peter Eisner, the Washington Post is still living in the past, still beating dead horses, still suffering from Bush Derangement Syndrome and I guess they can’t find anything else to complain about at Walter Reed;

    It was 3 a.m. in Italy on Jan. 29, 2003, when President Bush in Washington began reading his State of the Union address that included the now famous — later retracted — 16 words: “The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.”

    Like most Europeans, Elisabetta Burba, an investigative reporter for the Italian newsweekly Panorama, waited until the next day to read the newspaper accounts of Bush’s remarks. But when she came to the 16 words, she recalled, she got a sudden sinking feeling in her stomach. She wondered: How could the American president have mentioned a uranium sale from Africa?

    Maybe because the British intelligence community still stands by the information in the letter. The whole reason Ms. Burba thinks the letter is a forgery is because it mentions Niger sending 500 tons of uranium to Iraq every year. She claims it would take every truck in Niger to move that much uranium – and it may, I’m in no position to argue that with her.

    But Hussein, in 2000, when the letter was allegedly written, had every reason to believe that the sanctions against him would be lifted – afterall everyone thought that Gore was going to be our next President, and you know damn well he’d have lifted the sanctions with the help of Hussein’s cronies in the Oil for Food scandal, Russia and France.

    If the Washington Post thinks they can discount this whole story because some journalist “googled” the available truck tonnage in Niger, they really ought to think again. We found tons of mortar and artillery shells that Hussein had trucked from Jordan after the sanctions were imposed in 1990 buried in Kuwait. When the criminals of the world smell money, means are of little concern to them. I know it’s hard for the Washington Post and Peter Eisner to understand that.

    So let’s have Christopher Hitchens explain it to them;

    To summarize, then: In February 1999 one of Saddam Hussein’s chief nuclear goons paid a visit to Niger, but his identity was not noticed by Joseph Wilson, nor emphasized in his “report” to the CIA, nor mentioned at all in his later memoir. British intelligence picked up the news of the Zahawie visit from French and Italian sources and passed it on to Washington. Zahawie’s denials of any background or knowledge, in respect of nuclear matters, are plainly laughable based on his past record, and he is still taken seriously enough as an expert on such matters to be invited (as part of a Jordanian delegation) to Hans Blix’s commission on WMD. Two very senior and experienced diplomats in the field of WMDs and disarmament, both of them from countries by no means aligned with the Bush administration, have been kind enough to share with me their disquiet at his activities. What responsible American administration could possibly have viewed any of this with indifference?

    Exactly. What RESPONSIBLE administration could have ignored it? And just because the WaPo think that the “16 words” are the sole reason we went to Iraq doesn’t mean rational, thinking humans can’t mention a few more reasons.

  • Why Gonzalez?

    I was watching Fox News Sunday and Joe “are my hair plugs straight?” Biden while Chris Wallace asked him if his call for investigations into the firing of federal prosecutors are somewhat diluted by his refusal to investigate the firings of 93 investigators by the Clinton Administration as requested by then-Minority Leader Bob Dole. The first thing I remembered was last week’s rant by newly-admitted “Truther” Rosie O’Donnell when she announced that “just about every high level member of the Bush administration is under indictment from Rove to Gonzalez”.

    Well, we know that’s not true – not that it matters to Rosie or her View-ers.

    The only staff member who’s been indicted is Scooter Libby. There’s not even an investigation of any member of the Administration, except by the partisan committees in the House and Senate who are looking real hard to find something, anything they can find to fuel the idiots and morons of the O’Donnell fan club.

    You’ve got the Washington Post reporters Amy Goldstein and Dan Eggan with the “shocking” news today that this President has been giving prosecutor jobs to people he’s worked with and whom he knows shares his views;

    The people chosen as chief federal prosecutors on a temporary or permanent basis since early 2005 include 10 senior aides to Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, according to an analysis of government records. Several came from the White House or other government agencies. Some lacked experience as prosecutors or had no connection to the districts in which they were sent to work, the records and biographical information show.

    The new U.S. attorneys filled vacancies created through natural turnover in addition to the firings of eight prosecutors last year that have prompted a political uproar and congressional investigations.

    Apparently that’s considered news at the Washington Post – the fact that Presidents hire people they know and trust. I guess they’d be happier if he just rounded up the hobos in Lafayette Park to fill the vacated lawyer positions. Or even happier if they hired the various and sundry lawyers who hold political views diametrically opposed to the Administration.

    Then they go on to announce that is clearly a violation of no law, except the Law of No One Has Done This Before;

    No other administration in contemporary times has had such a clear pattern of filling chief prosecutors’ jobs with its own staff members, said experts on U.S. attorney’s offices. Those experts said the emphasis in appointments traditionally has been on local roots and deference to home-state senators, whose support has been crucial to win confirmation of the nominees.

    Of course they don’t name “experts” or bother to compare the hirings of other “administrations in contemporary times”. Eggan’s weakass explanations on this issue in emails to me hardly bare repeating with bandwidth for which I pay. His defense to me on nearly every issue related to this case includes the word “unprecedented”. So because there’s no precedent, it must be wrong. Wanna discuss the Travel Office firings? That was unprecedented, too. Apparently these investigations are unprecedented, too, if there was no investigation by Biden’s committee when Dole asked for them.

    The President shares partial blame for the Democrats’ targeting his staff by asking for Rumsfeld’s resignation  for no good reason. But the Left thinks they can cause disarray at the Bush White House by investigating every burp from his cabinet and declaring it was, instead, a fart. The Rumsfeld incident only made Democrats think he was being weak and now they’ve gone for the juglar on every issue that comes up in the Administration. Much like the terrorists are emboldened by the Congress’ weakness in dealing with them.

    The Left can’t find any real corruption, so with their willing accomplices in the press, they manufacture some corruption.

    I think it’d be more appropriate for the Bush Administration to start it’s own investigations of Sandy Berger, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, William Jefferson, John “Unindicted co-conspirator” Murtha apparently REALLY corrupt politicians, instead of people who hire qualified and connected prosecutors. That would be a domestic corollary to the Bush Doctrine of Pre-emption. 

    So in the meantime, the Defense Budget sits languishing and gathering dust somewhere on Capitol Hill while Congress takes off for their Spring Break and the Rosie O’Donnells and Dan Eggans do the Democrats’ heavylifting with repetitious, tedious and pedestrian blather.

  • AP’s weasel words

    Just started reading the news and came across the AP’s story about the President going to Walter Reed today. What a smoldering turd of an unattributed AP story at Yahoo and another at WaPo and the Examiner by Jennifer Loven;

    Bush on Friday was to tour the campus for the first time since reports surfaced of shabby conditions for veterans in outpatient housing.

    Yes, it probably will be the first time he’s visited since LAST MONTH when the Washington Post covered the front page of every issue with the story. The truth is; President Bush has rarely missed a month visiting Walter Reed or Bethesda Naval Hospital. Since my wife works there and I have to hear her complain about the parking problems there when the President comes, I guess I’d know, wouldn’t I? In fact, when she went in this morning, she took the subway because she knew parking would be a mess today.

    Walter Reed is considered one of the Army’s premier facilities for treating the wounded. The revelations of shoddy treatment for those wounded in war was an embarrassment to Bush, who routinely speaks of the need to support the troops.

    The story makes it sound as if the troops were complaining about their medical treatment – that’s not the case. I’ve never read ONE COMMENT about poor medical treatment. The problem was with OUTPATIENT HOUSING (nothing new for the Army). Get it straight, AP.

    This week, the House voted to create a coterie of case managers, advocates and counselors for injured troops. The bill also establishes a hotline for medical patients to report problems in their treatment.

    Um, if AP was doing their job, they’d point out that all of these services are already available at Walter Reed, without Congress having to vote. And again, AP makes it sound as if the problem was with medical treatment.

    Piss-poor reporting. But bloggers need editors to be accurate, right?

    UPDATE: AP changed the story at the Yahoo link I provided. Shame on me for no screen shot.

  • Axis of Weasels hard at work

    Democrats are trying to shift blame to the President for their vote to withdraw troops from Iraq. As I said yesterday, Harry Reid hopes that his willing accomplices in the press can make the case for him and turn the tables so that the President is to blame for Congress’ inability to pass funding for defense without loading it up with pork. And the Washington Post does their level best;

     Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) said it is Bush who would pay the price if a veto fight slowed down funding for the military, including billions of dollars for veterans’ health care and other benefits. “If the president vetoes this bill, it is an asterisk in history,” Reid said. “He sets the record of undermining the troops more than any president we’ve ever had.”

    So by vetoing a bill that undermines our troops, the President will be undermining our troops? I’d like to see a wire diagram of that process.

    To their credit, Republicans seem willing to stand up for the President for a change;

    Bush spent much of the closed-door meeting with House Republicans pressing an issue that many conservatives have already latched on to as a unifying force — the pork-barrel spending, unrelated to the war, in the bill. At one point, Bush asked House Minority Leader John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) if he could rally his troops to sustain a veto on the spending issue alone, even if Democrats stripped out language on troop withdrawals. When Boehner turned to his colleagues to ask if they would stay with Bush, they gave him a standing ovation.

    And to show how serious the Democrats are about funding the war;

    But Congress now leaves town for a recess, with the House not returning until April 16.

    In other words, they just want to run out the clock instead of playing the game.

    This is exactly how the Democrats pulled a fast one on the first President Bush in 1991 and trapped him into signing the tax hike despite his “no new taxes” pledge that cost him the 1992 election. With troops deployed in the field, they presented the President with a tax increase and pledged to not give the President authorization to use force against Hussein.

    Joseph Curl of the Washington Times reports that this Bush don’t play that;

    “We stand united in saying loud and clear that when we’ve got a troop in harm’s way, we expect that troop to be fully funded,” the president said, surrounded by Republicans on the White House North Portico.
        “And we got commanders making tough decisions on the ground, we expect there to be no strings on our commanders. We expect the Congress to be wise about how they spend the people’s money…”

    “Yesterday, I gave a speech, making it clear that I’ll veto a bill that restricts our commanders on the ground in Iraq, a bill that doesn’t fund our troops, a bill that’s got too much spending on it. I made that clear to the members,” he said.

    John Kerry, who clearly could give not a tiny rat’s ass for the troops chimed in;

    “Despite the reckless veto threats from President Bush, a majority of the Senate joined the House today in telling the administration that we need to set a deadline to bring home our troops from Iraq,” said Sen. John Kerry, Massachusetts Democrat. “A deadline is the best strategy for ending Iraq’s civil war because it forces Iraqis to stand up for Iraq. Guns alone cannot bring peace to Iraq.”

    It’s not the veto that’s reckless, you big sissy, it’s spending my taxpayer dollars to pay off various interests to make a pointless political point and sacrificing our national security for the sake of a few egos.

    Not to mentioning pissing off our troops even more you have already.