...I'm okay with being REALITY-based.




Thursday, July 24, 2003
      ( 3:36 PM )
 
Can You Fool Most of the People All of the Time?

Despite the White House's thus-far successful attempts to intimdate and harass people who bring to light its crimes and misdemeanors, its seeming forgetfulness of its insistence that the Geneva Convention be followed by releasing photos of the slain, charred bodies of enemy combatants, and its ongoing battle against the stain of the 16 words, the administration insists it is the NUMERO UNO supporter of the troops.

And yet, the Pentagon announced today new troop rotation plans. These plans involve rotating troops in and out of Iraq on a one year tour of duty. Sound familiar? That's because it is. In fact, the one year rotation plan was deemed so bad after Vietnam that military procedures were changed so as to avoid the inflated demoralization and sub-zero troop morale that the constant one-year rotations created. "We'll never do that again!" was basically what the Pentagon declared after Vietnam. But here we are, short on ideas and shorter on memory and today's announcement put the troops back into the one-year tour of duty again.

In addition to this wonderful news, we hear today from the Wolf's mouth that the White House may have made a few teensy-weensy planning errors with regard to how to handle the post-war occupation:

But in contrast to the planning for war, other
officials said, the Defense Department's
attention to the occupation was haphazard
and incomplete.

"There was a serious disconnect between the
forces necessary to win a war and occupy a
country," said a U.S. official who worked in the
initial postwar effort and is still in Baghdad.
"We fooled ourselves into thinking we would
have a liberation over an occupation.
Why did we do that?"

Contrary to popular BushCo claims, the deaths (murders) of the Hussein sons will not quell the "sporadic" opposition attacks by demoralizing the "few remaining Saddam supporters." The people attacking our troops are not Saddam Hussen supporters. They are nationalists. Most likely they were opposed to Saddam Hussein their whole lives. Only now they have their country back and they're not too anxious to hand it over again to another authoritarian force. I'm not justifying what they are doing, nothing in war can be justified or explained very easily, but what I am saying is that the administration's insistence that this resistance has to do with Baath party supporters or hold out Saddam lovers is once again a ploy to divert our attention from the fact that they did not plan for or prepare our troops for an ongoing guerilla war.

Oh, and by the way, who IS in charge?....

Despite Pentagon support for a provisional
government led by Chalabi, Bush rejected
that option. Instead, he took the State
Department's view that exiles and internal Iraqi
figures should be given an equal chance to
prove themselves in an Interim Iraqi Authority
to be created immediately after the war.

But Chalabi continued to work closely with Feith
and others at the Pentagon, staying in touch by
satellite telephone from Iran and northern Iraq.
Officials at the National Security Council and the
State Department were stunned to learn in early
April that U.S. military authorities had flown Chalabi
and 700 hurriedly assembled fighters into southern
Iraq. The vice president concurred in the decision
to airlift him.

Feith said it was strictly a decision made on military
grounds by U.S. Central Command, but his Pentagon
critics believe that he and Wolfowitz were trying to
boost Chalabi's political prospects.

Meanwhile, as Maru points out, whether or not Americans are noticing, the rest of the world has already discovered the truth about how our SCLM is brushing aside the confabulations (lies) of our government:

On CNN's media show Reliable Sources on
Sunday, Milbank told host Howard Kurtz:
"I think what people basically decided was this
is just the president being the president ...
He is under a great deal of pressure."

Now I must say that Milbank is probably the
toughest White House correspondent there is,
constantly churning out critical stories that go
against the pro-Bush tide. But when even he
says this is "just the president being the president''
or suggests that the man can't handle the pressure,
it's time to pull the covers over your head.

[...]

Dozens and dozens of pundits are behaving
like nothing is going on, as if, in the words of
the folks at http://www.tompaine.com, they
"aren't acknowledging the elephant in the living room.''

As for the few pro-Bush professional opinionators
who do write about it, they do so only to
diss the critics.
[...]

"The Niger uranium flap has achieved the
status of midsummer frenzy," concurs syndicated
columnist Charles Krauthammer, adding that
Bush's "blunder opens the way to the broad
implication that the president is a liar or a
dissimulator who took the country to war under
false pretenses."

Implication? Tell that to the families of the dead.

As http://www.fair.org reports, the "Bush uranium
lie'' is the "tip of the iceberg'' of confabulation.
Why aren't the media making more of the falsehoods?
How can Bush get away with saying that Saddam
would not allow the weapons inspections?

Funny thing is, according to the latest poll
from the Washington-based Pew Research
Center for People & the Press, more than half
of all Americans — 51 per cent — believe that
the U.S. media are liberal, while 70 per cent
want a "decidedly pro-American'' tilt to their news.

Looks like the media are delivering.

Talk about gassing your own people

Wake Up, America.

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