Hey only 19 dead so far this month (4 days old)!!! Let's get this party started!!!

Update: now 22 US soliders have died in the last 4 days. God bless them. Unfortunately their Commander in Chief is delusional, refuses to change direction, and is taking dictation from Henry Kissinger, so our prayers and votes will be about all we can do for them right now.

Stay the course. Dead or alive. Last throes. Come and get 'em. Mission accomplished....

Yep, its been a ghastly start to the month over there, but fear not, things are going well, and the insurgents are in the last throes!!!!

OH COME ON!!! All you Defeatocrats, commies and blame-America-firsters: Victory is on the march in Iraq and if you can't see it, then *YOU* are the ones in a state of denial!! Three and a half years after mission accomplished and you still can't admit that Baghdad is a secure, shining example of superior war planning and execution. Losers! Condi's plane circled over Baghdad for an hour the other day just to prove to the Islamofascists that they couldn't shoot her down. That kevlar vest she wore the whole time in Iraq, just like the stiletto boots she wore in Germany: brilliant fashion statement! And the electricity's going out during her meetings in Baghdad -- just her way of identifying with the little people. So buck up, comrades! Join the party of goodness, light and victory or else go back to Russia. America's party, the GOP: Bringing victory to Iraq since 2003!

Beginning to look and sound like Woodward is completely on the mark with his bleak assessment of Iraq.....

I like how conveniently Sen. Warner says that bold action would be taken in three months. Well, by then, we'll have a Democratic congress. So that bold action will be taken and Warner will likely be there to rant and rave against it. Yes, our Imperious President is seeing things through rose-colored glasses and everything will be fine over there.

Sad but true. Unfortunately those aren't roses the Iraqi's are throwing at the troops.

Aquaman, your reply made me laugh out loud!

BTW, Frontline's upcoming episode focuses on Al Qaeda in America. But I thought we were fighting over there and surrendering our rights over here so that we would be safe over....

FYI:

(1) this money was appropriated last year and carried over into the new fiscal year; and
(2) it was inserted with the agreement of both parties and approved by unamimous consent.

Still seems pretty stupid regardless of who approved it or when. No victory last year, no victory this year. Surely the money could have been better spent, perhaps even on better armour or weapons for the troops.

Agreed!!

Now, now! That would require some logical and analytical skills that the Republicans are almost incapable of doing at this point in time. It's most unfortunate for our troops and essentially for us, the American people.

I am beginning to think that I should blame my debt on my fear of terrorism and add it to the list of expenditures for the government to pay for....

I mean will all of the red, orange and yellow alert swirls going on, how could I not spend money for fear that if I didn't, the terrorists would hack my account and use it for themselves?

Thisjust can't sit well with the American people. By the estimate given of up to $138 BILLION more needed for 2008, if you estimate this up till 2010, thats maybe around another $420 Billion, give or take, but whats a few Hundred billion more, right????? With that money spent on Iraq we could completely overhaul Social Security, Medicare, and probably have enough money left over to find some insurance coverage for the 40 million+ Americans without health care!!!

Bush dismisses report of 655,000 Iraqi deaths. An American general says he hasn't seen numbers higher than 50,000. But given that U.S. deaths are 2,753, you would think that Iraqi deaths would be a significantly high number. 50,000... 655,000.... they can count the U.S. deaths to the last person, yet Iraqi deaths... who knows how many are dead? After a while, they cease to be people and just become numbers.

Well in the first 10 days of October they found over 700 dead Iraqis in Baghdad alone!!

An LA Tiimes Op-Ed chimes in on Dubyah insulting our intellegence about Iraq. Read on...

HockeyTom, you're right. Remember how Bush used to claim it was "the people's money"? Why don't the media ask him if he still holds to that or if the real meaning of the statement was that "people's money" was "the rich contractors and corrupt Republican and Iraqi politicians' money"? I'd surely like to know....

Fiscal conservatism within the Republican party no longer exists. They threw that baby out with the bath water of accepting lies to go to war with Iraq. Knowing this and the utter rejection of gays lately, it still baffles me that the Log Cabin'ers are still associating with the GOP. It's as mysterious to me as the Bermuda Triangle.

And then there is this. The dominoes are all falling.....

Calendar Boys

Freedom is not free. Real marines appear in this beefcake calendar to raise funds to help injured military personnel and their families pay for medical care etc. I guess I always assumed that the government picked up all of the tab but guess not. Seems like a patriotic and sexy buy for 2007!

We all know that freedom is not free. If I remember correctly it costs a Buck 'o Five.

I'm feeling free to buy this calendar for the B/f. Only $14.99? The B/f has earned this, especially since he was a Navy boy and told me how he used to stare at a few of those good-looking Marines.

More good news from Iraq: British coroner says British journalist 'unlawfully killed' by U.S. forces, although a Pentagon investigation claims 'US forces followed the applicable rules of engagement.' AP article.

I am about half way through "State of Denial" Its now come out that as far back as early 2003 Shrub was told and warned that things were not going well in Iraq, and that the tide was turning in the country. Their biggest fear was losing the support of the American people, because if they did that, the war was lost.....well, guess what? The name of his book pretty much sums it all up.

AP article: Bush keeps revising war justification

How many Iraqis died during the same period? Or is it PC heresy to ask such a question still?

Of those Iraqis, how many were enemy comabatants of the USA and its allies, innocent bystanders, victims of ethnic civil war or excess deaths due to the deteriorating condition of Iraq's infrastructure since we invaded?

Will we have to wait another two years for the next statistical estimate to come out? When will the number equal that of the Holocaust? When will the number of US military deaths in Iraq exceed the number of people who died in the 9/11 terrorist attack which even George W. Bush admits was not caused by anyone who had anything remotely to do with Iraq?

And most important of all, when will we start to consider "excess deaths" due to an unprovoked war a criminal offense?

These are more than rhetorical questions.

They are simply questions that we as voters have not been forced to confront because anyone who wants accurate answers to them will not likely be elected. At some point we will hold responsibility for these facts.

In the book " State of Denial" I am up to the election in 2004, and specifically in the month of Oct. 04. A Mr. Bob Blackwill who was a Deputy Security Council Advisor, has come to the alarming conclusion that Bush had no strategy for the far escalating violence that was well underway in Iraq even then. Again, this from a man who taught strategy at a prominent east coast university. NO STRATEGY! So I don't see how the Repugs. can stand on two feet and proclaim the Dems. are offering no strategy. Oh, the hypocrisy!

I think I'll have to pick up a copy of that book, hockeyTom. Yes, our Imperious President and his ilk clearly had no strategy on how to deal with insurgency and the civil war because they were expecting roses to be thrown, champagne to flow, and the oil to be free and clear for the taking. Obviously, that didn't happen and he had a rude awakening. Worst president in the history of this glorious republic? You betcha!

UCLA. I would consider it a must read for anyone that cares about what is going on both in Iraq, and in the Oval Office. The revelations to me, have been stunning, especially that so many high level people in and around Shrub, both as members of the Pentagon and Security Councils,as well as Advisors , knew exactly what was going on in Iraq ( how bad things were) years ago, and still to this day, and couldn't do a damn thing about it.

October has been the bloodiest month for US soldiers in years, and the carnage continues.....what a mess.

Of course, it's a disaster. I read that his own father had said that the main reason for him not continuing on into Iraq after the Gulf War was because he knew American troops would get bogged down in something like a civil war after toppling Saddam. If you can't trust your own father when it comes to international policy, then who can you trust?

The situation unfortunately is even worse than many of us realize. If you look at the last two days of Reuters' and AP's reports, they're describing scenes of carnage that mirror the kinds of horrors that were common during partisan battles in Central Europe or Japanese-occupied Manchuria and southeast Asia during World War II. The slaughter of Sunnis by Shiites in Balad by Shiite militiamen, is only one example of the nightmare going on over there.



Now, here are the wire services' accounts of just the last day:

Reuters


AP


Gulf Daily News


When are we Americans going to wake up and say we've had enough of participating in this horrific situation? Why are our troops over there, stuck in the midst of this terrible charnel house of centuries-old hate and retribution? And if the partition of Iraq goes through and the Shiites create a pro-Iranian south and the Sunnis an Islamic Republic as some of the most radical elements among them called for, won't we have created the EXACT OPPOSITE of what Bush has claimed is his most recent excuse for going over there?

While I agree that Iraq is a horror show and that the US should never have invaded I can't figure out how the US can honorably leave any time soon. If you do pull out you will be leaving a nation in a much worse state than it was in before the invasion and you will be responsible for it. It is doubtful that Iraq as a unified nation would last long before being balkanized between warring factions and it will remain the ultimate breeding ground for terrorists (which it wasn't before the invasion) which will threaten its neighbours and the worlds oil supply. Resolving this problem ulitimately is not a Republican issue nor a Democratic issue, it is an American issue. Its a case of you started it and now you will have to find a way to finish it. If America cuts and runs it will lose what ever influence and trust remains with its allies in the Gulf.

Withdrawing and redeploying troops is not "cutting and running," and it's very insulting for you to parrot these Republican talking points. Millions of Americans did NOT want to send troops to Iraq, and many who did now admit that they were duped by the administration's shifting, untrue discourse on the necessity of attacking that country. A majority of Americans are pessimistic about the current state of affairs there, and a majority also want a change of policy. The commission headed by James Baker actually is considering the option of withdrawal and redeployment, which at the very least will remove the US from a civil war. America did not create this situation, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and the neocons, incompetents all of them, did. They used our military for their own purposes. And the result is a burgeoning disaster.

On top of which, soldiers from YOUR country are now fighting and losing their lives in Afghanistan, a country whose military and political situations very well could have been resolved had we had a competent figure as our commander in chief or secretary of defense. Are you happy with this? Don't you think it would have been a better plan to shore up Afghanistan, take out Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri and Mullah Omar, and make sure that the Taliban would not be resurgent in that country?

I am not an expert on Iraq, but I said before the mess began there that it would turn out badly. Why couldn't the majority of people who supported Bush see this? My God, his own FATHER realized this, and he wasn't the sharpest knife in the drawer. Why were so many people so easily hoodwinked? Ronald Reagan withdrew American troops from Lebanon when that country's civil war ended up leading to American soldiers' deaths, but he wasn't "cutting and running," he was doing the militarily correct and prudent thing, so removing our troops now would not be a bad plan.

Here's what would happen, I think: the Shiites will slaughter the Sunnis in predominantly Shiite areas expeditiously, as they're already doing. The Sunnis will slaughter Shiites in Anbar and western Iraq, as they're already doing. The Kurds will set up their own state, and Turkey will have to enter the war, but then Turkish troops are already making incursions across the border. Cities with mixed populations will explode with carnage and then be partitioned, as is already happening. If you don't think ethnic cleansing and outright murder is occurring over there, then please read that Reuters report. Iran's influence and power will grow, but it's already been strong for THREE years. Syria and Saudi Arabia will have more incentive to deal with the Sunnis' problems, and may help stabilize their region, though it will be Islamic fundamentalist, like the Shiites' militia-controlled areas of southern and eastern Iraq. But this is already happening WITH AMERICAN TROOPS there, and we basically have no support from anyone except Great Britain, which is talking about pulling out, so why shouldn't the American military say, there is only so much we can do, and be realistic about the situation as it is? Canada sure in the hell isn't sending any troops, is it? Fantasies simply aren't going to make the horrors that are occurring there disappear, and who's suffering the worst as a result: the Iraqi people, who're poorer, are being slaughtered at rates exceeding anything under Saddam, and are witnessing their present and future dissolving before their very eyes.

swiminbuff, this IS an Americna problem now. It would not have been exclusively our problem, had our idiot-in-chief been listening to the people of America. Now that it is our problem, we are dealing with it by voting in a Democrat Congress to counterbalance the extremist Christian course our Imperious President has set us on. Therefore, we are now taking back control of our country.

As for the points FT has made, they are some of the most valid that I have seen for our case to re-deploy our troops from Iraq to the hot spot of Afghanistan. Yes, Afghanistan again. We need them there to capture Osama and to eliminate the resurgence of the Taliban. All of this is redundant because our Imperious President failed to complete the mission in Afghanistan, to eliminate the Taliban completely and to capture Osama.

Thus, on both fronts of battle, W is losing the war on terrorism. That is a failure in judgment and discretion that the American people cannot and should not tolerate.

Swiminbuff, let me be clear, I'm not attacking you in any way. The phrase "cut and run," the rhetorical handiwork of none other than Karl Rove, is constantly being bandied about down here, as you know, by people who have ZERO plan and live in a world of fantasy about the terrible situation in Iraq.

According to today's news, US military spokesman Major General William Caldwell IV is now clearly stating that the "crackdown" in Baghdad, yet another attempt to pacify that country and present a positive face on the situation, has not succeeded. In fact, attacks are UP since the three weeks preceding Ramadan, and up even over last year. Tony Snow spun this today as not being a "failure," but if a highly touted and sold strategy doesn't work, how do you describe it?

There were a spate of other bombings across the country, including in Mosul and another city, more than 40 people were killed and more than 100 injured, and in the south, which we're constantly being told is peaceful, Iraqi police were battling Shiite militiamen. As of yesterday, 72 US troops had been killed in just October, while far more had been wounded, and God knows how many Iraqis have been killed or severely wounded just this month.

Really, the situation is untenable. We can't keep on this course. Woodward revealed that Bush has been taking advice from Henry Kissinger, of all people, the monster who prolonged the Vietnam war by nearly 4 years, rather than by other Republicans, clustered around his father, who might have given him better guidance. Is he going to hold on so that he can either hand the debacle off to a Democrat, who'll be saddled, along with the Democratic Party, with blame for the failed policy, or to McCain or some other Republican, who'll have to engage in furious spin upon taking office to deal with the necessary changes that have GOT TO BE MADE NOW?

In his book, and in his talks on the talking head tv shows Woodward said he believes that Shrub will need to put his differences aside with the Democrats and bring them into talks about alternative plans/strategies. It sounds like he may, be thinking about this, as right now, James Baker and high level Democrat ( forget his name) are now involved in some committee, non partisan, whose goal is to come up with some alternatives, soon, because clearly whats going on there is not working, no matter how rosy Shrub or his cabinet members say it is. This is a start.

Lee Hamilton. Lee Hamilton is the Dem helping James Baker.

Perhaps I was unclear in my original post. The basic question is how does the US and its allies manage a withdrawal from the Iraq mess without leaving the people of Iraq much much worse off than they were pre-invasion? I wasn't slamming the US or its people. No one disagrees that the war is wrong or that the situation is not a total mess, but there is I think some duty / responsibility owed to the Iraqi people to get them out of a situation that was not of their making. Any ideas on how to accomplish this.

As for Afghanistan I do think it is totally different than Iraq, there was in my mind just this war. The problem here is I think efforts,and attention from the media, got diluted with the Iraqi invasion and now we have a return of the Taliban in a big way. Attacks on allied forces, including the Canucks, are on te rise and it seems as if almost every week we see on tv the return of dead soldiers to Canada.

AP article on Toronto Star website: Baghdad in chaos: U.S.

Speaking of Iraq, the US taxpayers' money and the "fiscally responsible" Republicans, has anyone else seen the following report?

Yahoo! News: Corrupt arms deals cost US taxpayers, Iraqis $800 million; $2.2 billion feared stolen since fall of Saddam"

So where is the GOP fiscal conservatives' outrage? I just don't get it! This is the US taxpayers' hard-earned dollars! In THREE YEARS the thieves have stolen $2.2 billion, and that's just in relation to fake arms dealing; there's also the stolen oil money, the stolen reconstruction money, the.... Why the hell have we been paying to keep Iraqi crooks living in high style in Paris and Monte Carlo and Gstaad? And the poverty level in Iraq has shot up to some of the worst levels in 100 years? Why isn't the damned pope speaking out about this? It goes beyond criminal.

Then there's this heartbreaking video by a British journalist, Sean Smith. It shows how the Iraqi police and soldiers are literally turning on the Americans, firing rounds and throwing grenades into the joint compound the Americans have established for the Iraqis' protection. These are the people who're supposed to "stand up," and they're working with the insurgents! The US soldiers are basically admitting this thing is lost; something tells me the nuts in the White House could care less.

Fan, this subject was the first they talked about on "60 Minutes" last night. Pathetic. Whats another $800 million dollars I am sure the neo-cons are thinking.....

The latest spending numbers. This should outrage everybody.

A quote from the article:



Mindboggling.

...meanwhile the leak of another classified document today which shows what WE have known all along, the situation in Iraq is even closer to chaos than at any other time, and what does Shrub have to say about it? Dick and Ronny, youre doing a heckuva job! Amazing.......

... and Bush says he wants Heckuva Job Rummy to stay on till 2009.

And the hits just keep on coming...

Rep. John Boehner, House Majority (for the time being) Leader has now passed the buck on the Iraq debacle in his defense of Secy. Rumsfeld. He has shifted responsibility for this mess from Rummy to the troops!

"Let's not blame what's happening in Iraq on Rumsfeld. The fact is, the generals on the ground are in charge, and he works closely with them and the president."

This story is disgusting.

ABC News: Army Recruiters Lying to Enlistees

Pretty unbelieveable and sad in my opinion.

Hey, let's not forget the poor American soldier who was kidnapped, but who's been abandoned because the Iraqi prime minister had to do the bidding of a terrorist, Moqtada al-Sadr! Has anyone in the administration explained this particular betrayal of the American troops yet?