I started noticing this about a month ago and have sent several letters to the usual media suspects. No response, of course. Needs a bigger gun than li'l ol' me. How about a Salon exposé?

ok so you namecall and hide behind anonymous

that's about par for the course here.

-- RealName

Does that comment mean that RealName really is your real name?

including that we didn't have the man power and did not intend to actually hold the areas (outside Baghdad) we were clearing -- for instance -- as well as continued assessment of the Iraqi forces' likely performance as doubtful to dismal.

Actually, there have been other statements apparently telegraphing our intentions -- whether a ruse or not, I can't say -- but declaring we're gonna have Fallujah cleared by August, when that push has not yet begun ... well ...

Ordiano (sorry for spelling) -- I love your interpretation ... that (at least) this suggests that "the enemy" (tm) is within Iraq's borders.

Every time our various "leaders" get all het up with insisting that, say, Iran, Syria, Lebanon and Turkey tighten up their borders to, essentially, help us out, my eyes glaze over -- yeah, like they're all gonna mobilize massive forces to help us, when a substantial amount of traffic is just citizens conducting business as usual and Iraqis trying to get the hell out of Iraq by land. We should really try making the same demand on Mexico and see how far it gets us... oh, yeah, we tried that a few years ago ... they laughed.

WorldNetDaily is a right wing for profit 'news service' run by a Joseph Farah of Oregon begun with seed money from Richard Mellon Scaife, of the Arkansas Project ill-fame. The Clinton videotape story wasn't on the web site when I scrolled through the most recent 50 items of dreck. They place ads for penny stocks 'turn $300 into $218,000 in three months!'and quack medicine 'four drops can turn tap water into a fountain of health!'in the same column as wire service copy and credulous accounts from Sen. Inhofe of Senators Clinton and Boxer plotting to drive Rush Limbaugh off the air.

But Shooter was holding out on us! WND also reveals the nefarious plots of President Bush to flood the country with Mexicans and create a North American Union of Canada, the US and Mexico...books available for purchase, from WorldNetDaily!

Even unintentional comedians like Shooter need a joke writer. I'll bet he pays for their 'insider' newsletter, with better medicine and stock offers, perhaps.

Not even Shooter believes Shooter... on second thought, RealName might believe Shooter.

Simply chilling. Very 1984-like, with "We've always been at war with Eurasia," just like "We've always been at war with al-Qaeda in Iraq." And the fact that there has been no acknowledgement of the subtle shift from "insurgents" and "sectarian fighters" to "Qaeda" is reminiscient of the abrupt and seamless shift from Eurasia to Eastasia in the novel 1984. It's sad that this is happening in our media. Thank God we have the Internet to bring attention to this very disturbing development.

What they, the government, are trying to do with the help of our 'liberal' media is get the American people to think that if we quit Iraq we quit al-qaida. We're even supplying the weapons to our enemies to help us fight al-qaida whom will promise never to be used against us.

We complain that Iran is helping the Iraqis while we do the same thing but when it actually comes to who helps al-qaida one needs look no further than the western border of Pakistan.

Come September we will be told if we leave Iraq we will leave it to al-qaida and not to the fractious Iraqi Sunni's and Shia's who are trying to gain some foothold to call their own once America leaves.

Don't get fooled again...

To respond to your much earlier response, no, I was not endorsing guerrilla warfare; for someone who seems to claim extensive knowledge of counter insurgency and suppression, I thought you would recognize that sometimes guerrilla and terrorist attacks are purposefully not made against military targets, but against civilian targets, for psychological and political reasons. Did you miss this when you sneered that the body count by insurgents was 100-to-1 civilians vs. military, so they couldn't hit our guys; or did your need to make a cheap point overcome your ability to recognize the truth?

Second, I found this quote from you to be particularly telling on another point:

I went to the 1980 Olympic games despite the US State departments personal face time interview to convince me not to go. I found a few things. One, Russian people were generally nice but economically miserable. And two, your 'successes' were imploding and even 11 years before the collapse of the 3CP it was obvious to the people who lived there it was only a matter of time, that they themselves would experience the end of the regime. The fact that the 3CP and its allies desperately pursued a program of proxy wars in Africa and west Asia from 1979 on which all ended in nothing only underlines the patent silliness of anyone's position that it was a 'success'.

Based on this, it is obvious that St. Ronnie did not cause the fall of the Soviets; they were already failing during Carter's admin, and knew it. I need to remember to pull this up the next time someone claims that he won the Cold War.

Previous comments reminded me of 'The Power of Nightmares', a 3 part series from the BBC examining the rise of both Neoconservatives and Al Qaeda. I highly recommend it, and it is available online - I found it just now using google (the url was massive and I confess I don't know how to use tinyurl, otherwise I would include it here).

As other commentators have pointed out, the constant invocation of Al Qaeda is intended for both foreign and domestic consumption. Domestically it lends weight to the case for continuing to occupy Iraq because America supposedly has its enemies in its sights. In Iraq it serves to unite Iraqis against an external threat - or at least it would were they not exposed daily to the outright falsity of the claim.

In the long run, I believe this propaganda will backfire horribly. Al Qaeda will be able to claim victory over America in Iraq (conveniently ignoring, as does the administration's rhetoric, the largely nationalistic nature of the resistance). The short sighted goal of propping up support here at home will result in a huge propaganda victory for the Al Qaeda brand.