It’s not that I expect that our guys on the ground to be perfect. It’s that I expect that government won’t go after whistle blowers or try to destroy the legitimacy of organizations that try to tell the truth. War is ugly, nasty business that should be avoided because of “collateral damage”. That’s why the public needs to see things like this.

They took out a Reuters photographer, his driver, some pedestrians, a van (with two children on board) driven by some poor schmuck who tried to rescue one of the wounded. To sort of layer some additional horror on top of it the US military tried to insist that they were insurgents even though no weapons were found and no shots are fired from the ground. If you had some foreign cowboy types circling your neighborhood killing your neighbors on a whim, how would you feel about them?

I’m not so concerned that the military punishes these soldiers for what they’ve done; it’s obvious they were doing exactly what the military expected of them. You and I can sit in the faraway safety of our living rooms and clearly see that other than the two journalists, no one else was carrying anything – no weapons, no RPGs, nothing. The men in the street weren’t hiding or acting suspicious, they were a bunch of mates just strolling down the street, relaxed and chatting to each other. The guy behind the building is looking up at the circling helicopter, but there are no shots being fired from the ground. None.

To give as much benefit of the doubt as I humanly can, there was hostile activity going on in the area, and it is possible the guys in the helicopter may not have been lying; they may have seen what they expected to see, what they wanted to see – AK47s and RPGs that didn't exist – asked for and got permission from distant superiors who had no way to judge the threat other than from what they were told by the helicopter crew. Then they killed everyone in sight. Did it by the book.

It's just that the book is rotten.

That is the true horror – our military is becoming no better than Blackwater. Kill anyone you want, no problem, we’ll cover it up and make excuses. Including shipping two small children we’ve shot to an inadequately staffed local hospital where they’ll most likely conveniently die, rather than to a US Army hospital where they have a better chance of survival… and telling their side of the story to an American media.

via Death, Lies and Videotape | Crooks and Liars.

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 30%
prior to war 50% lacked access to clean water; now 70%
only 50 of 142 primary health care centes are open to publicAmbassador Crocker’s response is exactly what you would expect:

“Security conditions made it difficult to bring projects to closure in a timely fashion.”

What a tangled web we weave.

Heckuva job Bushie.

An honest editor might change that to:

Despite reality, Bush continues to lie.

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 battling Shiite militias, was a “by-product of the success of the surge.”

Pentagon press secretary Geoff Morrell said it showed that the Iraqi government and security forces were now confident enough to take the initiative against Shiite extremists in the southern port of Basra.

“Citizens down there have been living in a city of chaos and corruption for some time and they and the prime minister clearly have had enough of it,” he said at a Pentagon press conference.

More on the deteriorating situation in Southern Iraq here from Juan Cole.

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 lives and treasure” and declared that the United States was on track for victory.

And exactly what would Iraq look like in this iteration of his standard victory speech? It’s changed enough times that I’ve lost track.

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 training and are coming back into Iraq from Iran, that’s well known. And it’s unfortunate.” A few moments later, Sen. Joseph Lieberman, standing just behind McCain, stepped forward and whispered in the presidential candidate’s ear. McCain then said: “I’m sorry, the Iranians are training extremists, not al-Qaeda.”

He just shot himself in the foot, twice. There’s another example with audio from the Hugh Hewitt radio show. Are we gonna leave him in charge of the really big guns? Seriously, this kind of mistake shows a profound misunderstanding of the situation of the kind with the mistakes that got us in Iraq in the first place. So, was he that monumentally ignorant or have his 71 years caught up with him? Either way it’s not what I want to see from someone who wants to make the decisions in the Oval Office. He did serious damage to the central theme of his candidacy: that John McCain is the voice of knowledge and experience on national security issues. Not so much…

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 for release later this week, did confirm that Saddam’s regime provided some support to other terrorist groups, particularly in the Middle East, U.S. officials told McClatchy. However, his security services were directed primarily against Iraqi exiles, Shiite Muslims, Kurds and others he considered enemies of his regime.

Greater Wignuttia is all over this story with thier usual panche:

Gateway Pundit fabulously mistates the whole thing, 

UNBELIEVABLE!

Just when you thought that the mainstream media had hit rock bottom…
McClatchy Newspapers reported today that there is no Al-Qaeda in Iraq…”

No where does it say that there is no Al-Qeada in Iraq, but you can’t let that get in the way of a good spittle flecked rant.

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 over-rated. I suspect that technology, good police work, and plenty of heroic stories that neither you nor I know about have made a difference. But seven years is a long time. And Bush is not exactly Mr Competence, is he?Have we misread the world – and over-estimated the threat – even more profoundly than we realize? That is the question.

A small band of cave dwelling bomb throwers was never an existential threat to the US. On the other hand, the reaction to terrorism by the Bush administration most definitely is a threat to the principles this nation has always stood for.

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 elsewhere and missed the opportunity to capture those who were behind 9-11. Also our policies and tactics in the war have greatly assisted the cause of Jihad by imprisoning people without due process and torturing captives. It serves to prove them right about us to the world and assists in fund raising and recruitment efforts.

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.

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 back to the 130,000 level prior to the surge and further draw downs have been paused. There are still about 150,000 military personnel in country now and political progress has been minimal at best. Yes victory is ours and we can’t withdraw because we’re winning. Yes let’s remain in Iraq forever, it’s done such wonderful things for both nations.

The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan
If McCain is going to give us straight talk – one thing the Bush administration has been completely unable to do – and believes that Iraq should remain a permanently integrated part of a new, expanding American protectorate in the Middle East, then he needs to say so. He needs to be honest about what his goal of turning Iraq into a stable, non-despotic, unified country, permanently occupied by US troops, requires. It will require trillions of dollars, a bare minimum of another decade of occupation, over 100,000 troops (probably more) committed indefinitely, and no lee-way to tackle any major security threats anywhere else on the planet including Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran, without a draft. Oh, and then there’s a need to maintain US public support for the Sisyphean task of nation-building a place where there is no nation, in a place a long way away, where our reward for such an effort will be fathomless contempt and hatred.

McCain says we all want to leave Iraq. But some obviously don’t. It is increasingly clear that the point of the surge and the occupation is to stay in Iraq for ever. Do we want that? Is it in the West’s interest? Maybe, after all these years, we can have some minimal honesty in this debate.

Doesn’t that all sound like a wonderful investment of American blood and treasure for minimum of the next decade?

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 in my campaign, all the way to the convention, I would forestall the launch of a national campaign and make it more likely that Senator Clinton or Obama would win. And in this time of war, I simply cannot let my campaign, be a part of aiding a surrender to terror,” Romney will say at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington.

Really the irony here is that the only remaining candidate to really state that they would immediately get all troops out of Iraq was Republican Ron Paul. Obama and Clinton both see a long term need for an America troop presence in Iraq for counter-terrorism operations, force protection and training Iraqi forces. To say otherwise is a flat out lie. It’s ugly, mendacious and plays to fears the GOP does their best to nurture. In other words the normal run of the mill Republican rhetoric.

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 to be other wars.” Offering more of his increasingly bleak “straight talk,” he repeated the claim: “I’m sorry to tell you, there’s going to be other wars. We will never surrender but there will be other wars.”

Run those two gems back to back a couple of times with a little voice over noting that this is what the GOP stands for and you have a gem of a campaign ad for whoever wins the democratic nomination. Thanks John!

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 like oversight)? Because treaty ratification would require a 2/3 majority vote in the Senate and is therefore unlikely to pass in the face of massive public opposition to a long term presence in Iraq. Why should the dupes paying for the mess have any say at all?

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 $120 billion in 2006 and $171 billion in 2007 and President George W. Bush has asked for $193 billion in 2008, the nonpartisan office wrote.

“It keeps going up, up and away,” Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad said of the money spent in Iraq since U.S. troops invaded in 2003.

“We’re seeing the war costs continue to spiral upward. It is the additional troops plus additional costs per troop plus the over-reliance on private contractors, which also explodes the costs,” said Conrad, a North Dakota Democrat who opposed the war.

And, to make it more fun, there have been tax increase or spending offsets to pay for the blood spilled. It’s been added to the national debt where it will contribute to the interest payment. Generations to come will no doubt love paying to hide the appearance of defeat in an ill-conceived, poorly planned cluster fuck that’s left us less able to respond to terrorist threats, shown limits of American military power and pissed of huge swaths of the globe.

Bush budget won’t fully fund Iraq war – David Rogers – Politico.com
The White House confirmed Wednesday that its new budget next month will not request a full year’s funding for the war in Iraq, leaving the next president and Congress to confront major cost questions soon after taking office in 2009.

The decision reverses the administration’s stance of just a year ago, when President Bush’s budget made a point of spelling out in advance what he thought the costs would be for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan for 2008. By comparison, the new budget, to be unveiled Feb. 4, requests only incremental “bridge” funding into 2009 and won’t sustain the military through the full length of the fiscal year, which ends Sept. 30, 2009.

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 the proceedings and then buried evidence of major safety issues. They won’t, of course. A central theme of modern Republicanism is that appearing to do something is more important than doing it well. The mentality isn’t limited to the embassy, of course. It pervades contracting throughout Iraq. When Stuart Bowen, the Inpector General responsible for Iraq, uncovered evidence that America’s contracting money was largely disappearing down a fraud hole the White House reponded by trying to sack him. If any right-wing voices complained about that I don’t remember hearing about it.

Take abstinence only education. Studies have variously showed that it either doesn’t work or causes more underage sex than doing nothing, yet ordering teens to cross their legs until marriage remains a central point of the White House’s education agenda. The disparity between goals and results has gotten so stark that some states have given up federal funds so that they can implement sex ed programs that work. Hurricane FEMA. Setting aside programs that are meant to contradict their official purpose, which include mine safety, climate science and environmental protection, more often than not programs which Republicans want to work still collapse from miserable implementation.

Sure, as a guy who shares almost none of their agenda I won’t be supporting modern Republicanism any time soon. The billion dollar question is why anybody would.

Sadly the answer is too many gullible people who prefer to believe their leaders would not, could not mislead them on such a grand scale would still believe them.