Bush/Cheney would never have appointed a general to lead the surge unless they knew beforehand that they would get the report the wanted. Many people don't realize that they had initially offered the job to general James L. Jones, right after he retired from his post as NATO supreme commander, but he turned them down because he wouldn't guarantee them a favorable report and because he was vehemently against the torture policy of the Bush regime.

As far a the 08 elections-they will probably allow the elections to take place, but should a democrat win, they would challenge the outcome using all the various federal court that are now stacked with right wing ideologues and they will make sure that a Republican ends up in the white house.

When a gang of robbers breaks into a bank and makes a mess of it, do they say to the police:'if we leave now, the bank will disintegrate, so we have the stay the course, finance our stay' ?

The only reply to the moronic elephant-dung and the sh***r is:you broke in,stupidly and against the law, you made a mess of it, if you stay you'll just make an even greater mess, get the hell out and face the music.

One of the most important cornerstones of any tyranny is propaganda. In order to make propaganda believable, the tyrants must use agents who aren't perceived as the tyrant's agents by the population. The Pollack-O'Hanlon trip to Iraq was just that-a propaganda scam, using willing propaganda tools/agents masquerading as "scholars". The regime knew all along that the corporate media and gullible public would never challenge this scam. You can never underestimate the intelligence of the American public and the corruption and laziness of the corporate media.

Americans are largely so ignorant and confused about the world that anyone presenting themself as "expert" and "scholar" is put on a pedestal. Does either O'Hanlon or Pollak speak Arabic, let alone the Iraqi dialect? No, they don't. I speak Arabic and am extremely well read on Mesopotamian history, from antiquity to present day, yet I would never dream of describing myself as an expert who is qualified to recommend going to war. I could go to Iraq and actually converse with real Iraqis and find out what is really going on thee on daily basis, unlike those two propaganda tools, yet I still wouldn't pretend to claim that I know what's going on. The only people who really know are regular Iraqis, not in the Green Zone, but in real Iraq. I have to hear of even one genuine Iraqi who believes things are getting better. Only in the ignorant USA, two totally discredited propaganda tools would be hailed by the lazy and corrupt MSM as scholars and experts.

I keep thinking of Albert Speer, the 3rd Reich's architect, whenever the name of these 2 propagandists comes up. After getting out of prison, Speer would claim that he was a scholar and intellectual who was actually not really part of the Nazi apparatus and never felt comfortable around that gang of criminal psychopaths. Imagine if Speer were alive today and given a 1400 word opinion piece in a major German newspaper. Imagine that he writes to an audience that never heard of him, describing himself as a scholar and opponent of that regime. He claims that the Third Reich had been a success and that Germans should give them a second chance, although he "admits" that didn't always agree with their ideology. He "forgets" to mention that he had actually been an indispensable member of that murderous apparatus and one of its most effective enablers. Because of his image as a scholar and intellectual, millions of uninformed and gullible germans take him seriously. In reality, during the Third Reich rule, Albert Speer had given that gang of genocidal murderers a measure of credibility among some naive Germans:'If Speer is supporting them, they couldn't be all that bad". I wonder if at least Pollack, who is Jewish, realizes the macabre irony of his willingness to be a propaganda tool for this felonious regime.

I know it's been said before, but the only way to study Iraq right now is from outside that hell hole. Those who go into Iraq right now without being embedded with the US military have a very small chance of staying alive. Being embedded with the US military means being subjected to a dog&pony show, nothing but pure and tightly controlled propaganda. It would like going on the Disneyland Pirates of the Caribbeans trip and saying you've been around pirates. Pollak&O'Hanlon could be so stupid so as to not realize that they have been nothing but propaganda tools and that they have no idea what's really going on in Iraq. You always have to follow the money trail. The person who actually provides their paycheck is Mr. Saban, an Israeli-American multi-millioner neocon who is on record as being a staunch advocate of a long term, even permanent US occupation of Iraq in order to help Israel's interests and security. Looking at their shameless propaganda tour in that context, things become pretty clear and obvious.

Pollak and O'Hanlon can be excused of dishonesty in their idiotic report from Iraq only on the grounds that before deceiving others they have taken great pains to deceive themselves.

This nation has deteriorated to the point where millions of people, just like a poster on this thread, accept the right of an American president to gamble the lives of thousands of US troops, and hundreds of thousands of "foreigners" away. Why don't we just have a medieval style monarch and launch crusades? After all, they were the ultimate gamble, just like this completely unnecessary and illegal invasion.