Letters to the Editor
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Al Qaida Inc
Heh. I find the image of a few soon-to-be-exterminated al Qaida Sunnis in a postwar Iraq trying to run the national oil industry to be particularly comical.
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Who knew?
You're surprised that that slug Kitty Bond is a liar? Nothing these inept (yet powerful) clowns do surprises me anymore.
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Kit Bond
Reading this report makes one wonder whether Senator Bonds IQ is higher than 50. Seems to be typical for the
repugnican right.
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the "right man" to lead us is now arming the insurgents....
Bond:
The strategy we had before was not the right strategy," he told reporters at midweek. "We should have had a counterinsurgency strategy." and then:
While I agree that we had the wrong plan for three years, we now have the right one, and the right man to lead it.
Does Bond even realize that Petraeus, now the “right man” to lead us is not engaging in a counterinsurgency strategy against the Sunni insurgents, but rather is now arming the insurgents to fight “Al Qaeda”?
When asked on Fox News: "How do you know, or do you worry, that they are going to end up using those weapons to either attack US forces or to fight their civil war against the Shiites?"
Petraeus replied, "Those are legitimate concerns."
So now the right counterinsurgent strategy is to arm the insurgents.
Blowback anyone? I think we should ask the French about this. Their track record on these issues is much better than ours.
http://rawstory.com/news/2007/Gen._Petraeus_concerned_about_U.S._arming_0617.html
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No
Greenwald fails to realize that it is possible for one to back one strategy for as long as it seems to be working, and then drop that strategy and try another when it ceases to work. In this case, Bush's strategy worked like a charm until we encountered the disaster of November 7, 2006. After 11/7 hit, President Bush took immediate, decisive action, and cashiered Rumsfeld, reorganized the military leadership, and enabled The Generals to develop the new Surge Strategy. Bond might have thought that the old strategy was working, but he had a pre-11/7 mentality. Bond now realizes that, in our post-11/7 world, it is essential for us to come up with a sexy name for essentially the same strategy and use it as a rallying point so that we never have another 11/7.
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Wonder how many military funerals Senator Bond has attended.
Exactly how many of his constituents have been killed because of this? How many times has he dared to show his face to their families and tried to justify those deaths?
I also wonder how he lives with himself talking about this as if it were nothing but a board game. I wonder the same about the entire Republican Caucus sometimes.
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Leaving ones brain at the door
I read these comments of Kit Bond and others of his ilk and just have to wonder how it is they can leave all semblance of common sense, intellectually honest and rational thought behind and simply parrot what the GOP/Administration wants them to.
Don't they have any self-respect for truth?
It simply boggles my mind ...
(where's LWM when one needs a URL to explain)
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No Contradiction: It Was The Wrong Plan But It Was Successful and It Was Working
You see, the earlier plan was the wrong plan even though it was successful and working, just not successfully and workingly enough.
The new plan, which just seems like the old plan with some more people, is the right plan and is working and is successful, but we don't yet know if it will be sucessful and working enough.
So the new plan which is the right plan and which is successful and working may soon itself too become the wrong plan, which although correct and successful and working needs to be replaced by the right plan, which will be successful and working even more.
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re: El Cid
Thanks for so eloquently summarizing the complete insanity of this administration's plan over the past four years of dealing with Iraq and the GWOT!
Now, if you'll excuse me I need to go clean my keyboard ...
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They will continue to get away with it
The press should have spent the last few years hammering away at ludicrous hypocrisy like this - but no. I assure you that this incident will remain unreported, unremarked on by all but the likes of Glenn.
I regard the collapse of the mainstream press in recent years as a major reason why the Republican thugs have been allowed to radically remake our government.
I wish I had an answer. The Dems, in general, are too cowardly and sated with corporate money to do anything effective to help. It is entirely possible that we will never recover from this.
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Since you asked...
(where's LWM when one needs a URL to explain)
--Anonymous
Stan Goff had a rather brief (but shrill) explanation of COIN over at HuffPo and he's had some personal experience in the field:
Bagwan Petraeus
Posted July 19, 2007 | 09:39 PM (EST)
Counter-insurgency doctrine consists of retrospective corrections for past failures to create fresh failures.
Counter-insurgency is a 25-cent, sometimes-hyphenated euphemism for attempted military solutions to populations who refuse to be quietly dominated by invading foreigners. The problem is it doesn't work... or perhaps that's the upside.
Military success is not determined by tactical outcomes, but by political ones. The war in Iraq was lost when the troops crossed the line of departure in March 2003...
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/stan-goff/bagwan-petraeus_b_57022.html
My memory was jogged by Kit Bond's comment and had me wondering about those Anthrax attacks again:
I would like to flip the question on my colleagues and ask: How much time do we have? Every minute we wait, Saddam Hussein's efforts to acquire weapons of mass destruction and to share them continue. Every minute we wait, the surviving al-Qaida terrorists plot their next attack. We fear it may be a weapon of mass destruction, particularly chemical and biological attack. . . .
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War Supporters like Kit Bond
How can these people show up at family gatherings with their children and grand children, knowing that they will be leaving a nation to them that has lost credibility world wide ('cept, for Albania). Will these War Supporters please please please! drive the kids and gtrandkids down to the Army Recruiter and get them signed up so they can stop sitting on the sidelines and actually participate in the "Global War on Terrorism." Character building and a strong defense are part of the what SUPPORT means.