It used to be that the standard media scare phrase used to describe such fighters or groups was "with ties to al-Qaida", something that sounded nicely ominous, but was so vague that you could have just as easily said "with ties to Kevin Bacon" and not been much further off the mark. Apparently even that qualified phrase is not longer necessary for the volunteer army of Bush administration propagandists in the MSM. The ease with which people lie and deceive any more is truly frightening.

Scott Stoeffler

When the military itself starts mislabelling the enemy for propaganda purposes--an enemy in a guerrila war, whom we can't possibly defeat if we don't understand them--that is not just an instance of the tail wagging the dog. It's proof positive that we've given up on winning the war.

That's the good news, I guess: at some level they've realized the war can't be won. So now it's exactly like Vietnam. Getting poor kids killed so that rich men can "save face."

Glenn,

You know this is nothing new for the administration. They have been engaged in blurring these lines from the very beginning, and the press has failed to catch them on this ‘transcendence of rigor’, also from the very beginning. Thanks for pointing it out, but the public has likely been rendered pretty much punch drunk on this business. Either that, or they just don’t pay any attention any more, having accepted by now that it's all lies, and are stoically waiting for the chance to dismiss Bush et al in 2008. One can only hope.

War is such a sloppy undertaking.

It's not that our infantry and Marines are trying to participate in "wholesale slaughter" as one breathless Salonian wrote at Joan Welsh's blog. It's that for the most part, the Iraq war takes place in densely populated places. Ordinance doesn't stop killing and maiming once it passes the intended target. Most of our vehicle-mounted firepower goes right through cinder block and mud brick like a hot knife through butter. Civilian homes are the backstop in this shooting gallery.

An Iraqi family sitting down to dinner a kilometer away from a firefight could suddenly be visited by a burst of 20mm depleted uranium rounds coming right through their wall and splattering them all over the room.

Nobody wants to talk about these casualties. Not the Iraqi provisional government (such as it is) nor the American military. It's the by-product of war. Collateral Damage. But the temptation is almost irresistible not to count these deaths as enemy.

Nobody meant it to happen. But when a firefight starts, a massive amount of ordinance is expended in the direction of attack. Our soldiers are not monsters, but they are human. The first reaction to being shot at is to shoot back fast and with everything you've got.

Best solution: Bring our troops out of Iraq. Elect leaders who think of war as a failure of diplomacy and the very last resort of self-defense, rather than an oil-grab and a means for a very sad, fucked-up little boy to try to please his mommy and daddy and build a legacy for himself.

Now that we are killing more Al Qaeda (as witnessed by our own press releases), doesn't it stand to reason that there are more Al Qaeda in Iraq than there were before the war? Way to go Bushies. If you believe our press.

Retired Military Patriot:

Secretary of Defense Gates should also be asked to reply. He seems to be a man of integrity something very rare in the Bush administration. This would verify or nullify that assumption.

The idea that Gates has integrity is pure wishful thinking and propaganda.

I wrote an article about him at the time of his nomination, here:

http://www.randomlengthsnews.com/archive/gatesnov24.html

Over two decades before the Bush Administration first thought about politicizing intelligence to build a phony case for war against Iraq, Ronald Reagan’s CIA director, William Casey, played a trailblazing role in politicizing intelligence within the CIA, vastly inflating the threat posed by the Soviet Union, and blaming it for a wide range of terrorism it had nothing to do with. His right hand man was Robert Gates, President Bush’s appointee to succeed Donald Rumsfeld as Secretary of Defense.

But Gates did more than politicize intelligence. His involvement in the Iran-Contra affair, selling weapons to the terrorist-supporting Iranian government to illegally fund the terrorist Nicaraguan Contras—came close to getting him indicted. As the Independent Counsel, Lawrence Walsh (a life-long Republican), explained in his final report, “The issue was whether Independent Counsel could prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Gates was deliberately not telling the truth.” Just because he declined to indict did not mean he thought that Gates was innocent.

Furthermore, in his book, Firewall: the Iran/Contra Conspiracy and Cover-Up,” Walsh explained that Gates set up an internal CIA investigation that hindered his criminal investigation. “No longer would we be able to question CIA witnesses while they were fresh,” Walsh wrote. Instead, they had time to get their stories straight.

As for Iran-Contra itself, national security expert Ivan Evland, of the Independent Institute, recently wrote, “Contrary to the conventional wisdom, the Iran-Contra affair was worse for the Republic than the Watergate scandal.... the Reagan administration’s evasion of a congressional ban on assisting the Nicaraguan Contras (the Boland Amendment) was a knife in the heart of the greatest power the Congress has under the checks and balances of the Constitution—the power of the purse.”

....

“Here is a nation that went to war with politicized intelligence,” said former CIA Agent Mel Goodman—a senior Soviet analyst from 1966-1986 who clashed directly with Gates. And now to help clean up the mess, Bush is naming, “someone who was the most important practitioner of politicized intelligence in the history of the CIA,” Goodman stressed, adding, “As Yogi Berra would have said, ‘This is deja-vu all over again.’”

....

Another example Goodman cited was the alleged Papal assassination plot. Casey wanted a report blaming it on the Soviets. “It was Gates who picked the three people who wrote it. And he told them to write it in secret,” Goodman recounted. Yet, “He [Gates] had testified as late as 1983 that the Soviets had nothing to do with it.” Because of this willingness to do whatever he’s asked, Goodman calls Gates “a windsock,” without any core beliefs. For this reason, labels like “neocon,” or “realist” are both irrelevant and misleading, Goodman stressed.

My article went well beyond Gates himself to resurrect the history he was part of. But one thing should be clear: he was at the very heart of the Reagan-era corruption of intelligence. He's the last person one should expect to clean things up. As Goodman said, he's "a windsock" who changes direction with the prevailing wind. We saw how quickly he turned against the Iraq Study Group--which he had been part of--once he joined the Bush team. Folks expected him to persuade Bush to accept the ISG's advice. Those folks clearly had no idea who Gates was.

Don't make the same mistake.