Political Bloviation

Apparently not much:
Crooks and Liars » Sen Menedez to Amb. Crocker: Reconstruction billions have worsened everyday Iraqi life
Some of Menendez’s figures are downright infuriating. This is what $25 billion has gotten us:
43% of population lives in absolute poverty
prior to war 19% of children suffered malnutrition; today 28%
last year 75% elementary-aged kids went to school; now [...]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q9xFCBwuOJ8

Despite the Fighting in Basra, Bush Emphasizes Progress - washingtonpost.com
An honest editor might change that to:
Despite reality, Bush continues to lie.

The more violence there is the better it show we’re controlling the violence? Oh please, if you’re going to lie to us can’t you at least make it slightly believable?
AFP: Pentagon says new Iraq fighting arises from surge’s success
The Pentagon on Wednesday said an eruption of violence in southern Iraq, where US-backed government forces were [...]

I guess it wasn’t lives he cared about or his treasure that was sacrificed. After all, sacrifice is for the little people:
Five years on, Bush again talks of Iraq victory | U.S. | Reuters
President George W. Bush said on Wednesday he had no regrets about the unpopular war in Iraq despite the “high cost in [...]

Or perhaps he displays his senility:
UPDATED: McCain makes a major mistake about a very basic Iraq issue — two days in a row - AMERICAblog: A great nation deserves the truth
Pressed to elaborate, McCain said it was “common knowledge and has been reported in the media that al-Qaeda is going back into Iran and receiving [...]

McClatchy Washington Bureau | 03/10/2008 | Exhaustive review finds no link between Saddam and al Qaida
An exhaustive review of more than 600,000 Iraqi documents that were captured after the 2003 U.S. invasion has found no evidence that Saddam Hussein’s regime had any operational links with Osama bin Laden’s al Qaida terrorist network.The Pentagon-sponsored study, scheduled [...]

Re-Thinking The Terror War - The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan
File this one under “no shit?”
The great unanswered question of the last six and a half years is: why haven’t we been attacked again? There are logically two - not necessarily exclusive - possibilities: our defense has been getting much better; their offense was [...]

McClatchy Washington Bureau | 02/27/2008 | Nobel laureate estimates wars’ cost at more than $3 trillion
The questions are:

Are we better off for this huge cost in blood and treasure?
Did we buy better security?
What were the opportunity costs of going into Iraq?

I’d argue that we are less secure, and less able to respond to terrorist threats [...]

McClatchy Washington Bureau | 02/27/2008 | Iraqi leaders veto law Bush administration hailed as political breakthrough
This was the closest thing to political progress from the Iraqi national gvoernment the administration could find since the begining of the surge. Shot down in flames.

No, the surge is not a success. - By Michael Kinsley - Slate Magazine
Michael Kinsley lays out why, in Bush’s own terms, the surge is a failure. Simply put the stated purpose was to increase troop levels temporarily for the purpose of reducing violence enough to begin bringing troops home. We have yet to get [...]

Andrew Sullivan writes about a Charles Krauthammer op-ed in the Washington Post, that cites Anthony Cordesman’s latest report on Iraq. He riffs on McCain’s policy for Iraq and what it will take to win in the process:
The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan
If McCain is going to give us straight talk - one thing [...]

Lying about it must be congenital for republicans:
The Associated Press: McCain Seals GOP Nod As Romney Suspends
John McCain effectively sealed the Republican presidential nomination on Thursday as chief rival Mitt Romney suspended his faltering presidential campaign. “I must now stand aside, for our party and our country,” Romney prepared to tell conservatives.
“If I fight on [...]

Tim F. over at Balloon Juice, notes that things are not going so great in Afghanistan. Playing into this is the lack of flexibility in dealing with the deteriorating situation because of our never ending commitment in Iraq.

After his remark last week about staying in Iraq 100 years, McCain lays this one on us:
McCain Warns: “There Will Be Other Wars” - Politics on The Huffington Post
Sen. John McCain told a crowd of supporters on Sunday, “It’s a tough war we’re in. It’s not going to be over right away. There’s going [...]

Negotiating Our Future in Iraq | The American Prospect
Bush would like to negotiate a long term agreement with Iraq, including security and training assurances without going to the Senate for ratification of a formal treaty between the nations. Why would he want to do that (other than a long standing hatred of anything that smells [...]

Heckofajob Bushie:
U.S. war costs in Iraq up: report - Yahoo! News
“Funding for U.S. operations in Iraq and Afghanistan and other activities in the war on terrorism expanded significantly in 2007,” the Congressional Budget Office said in a report released on Wednesday.
War funding, which averaged about $93 billion a year from 2003 through 2005, rose to [...]

How long will I, my child and grandchildren be paying for the worst security and foreign policy error in American history. Bush doesn’t care as long has he can leave office and dump the mess on whoever wins the White House in November.  Whatever happened to the idea that Iraq would pay for itself? Disappeared [...]

Tim F. at Balloon Juice goes off on the significance of the Baghdad embassy debacle as reported in the Washington Post and general GOP mismanagement.
Balloon Juice
One would expect Republicans to take it worse than anybody that managers of the embassy project handed the project to a firm that never did embassy work before, mismanaged [...]

In two recent post Glenn nails it. The first What “winning” in Iraq looks like hits on what’s happened in Basra since the British abandoned it:
The article details that Shiite militias — which British troops “unintentionally” armed for years by failing to realize that the “security forces” had no allegiance to the central government [...]