It must be election season again: we’ve captured yet another ‘Al-Qaeda number two’.
Optimistic 2005 myDD article: Media Finally Sees Through Bush’s ‘Number 2 Man’ Myth
Optimistic Feb. 2006 Onion article: Eighty Percent Of Al-Qaeda No. 2s Now Dead.
Slightly padded Sept. 2006 List of Captured or Killed al Qaeda in Iraq #2’s (actually has 3’s and 4’s in there…).
…if we’re setting up a lawless state … is kill all the lawyers.
Iraqi police Wednesday discovered the bullet-riddled body of Khamees al-Ubaidi, a lead defense attorney for former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.
His body was found in a Shia neighborhood near the Sadr City section of Baghdad, police said.
An hour earlier, a group of men dressed as Iraqi police stormed al-Ubaidi’s home and asked him to come to the Ministry of Interior of questioning, according to Najib al-Nouemi, a fellow defense counsel for Hussein.
Things are getting better in Iraq every day. That nice Mr. Cheney says so, and he wouldn’t lie to me.
The Sun-Sentinel is a quality newspaper a bit north of here. It has a justly deserved reputation as being pretty conservative editorially, and even in some of its political coverage. (A long-time state political reporter just got reassigned for being too overtly Republican, showing both that there’s a tilt, and that the place has some standards.)
So it’s interesting that the Sun-Sentinel editorial page, which I gather has been a big cheerleader for the Iraq war, is now not only vehemently against the Iraq war, but trying to suggest it was always against it. That’s right: the war is now so unpopular that former backers are obfuscating their prior support.
Incidentally, the paper’s April 7 editorial is real strong stuff. Here’s how it starts:
Three years, 19 days. And counting.
More than 2,300 Americans killed. More than 16,000 wounded, many of them maimed for life. And then there are the tens of thousands of Iraqi victims.
Almost $400 billion spent so far, followed by another $330 million every day.
These are the tangible costs of the Iraq war. There are other costs that are harder to measure precisely, but they are many and they are mounting. It can be strongly argued that they are largely the fault of a president who is stubborn, intractable, dogmatic, exclusionary and intellectually dishonest, and who appears reluctant to operate outside his inner circle.
Democrats (and Republicans) take note.
Gen. William E. Odom (ret.), ex NSA Chief, looks at Iraq through the prism of Vietnam and what he sees is not pretty:
Will Phase Three in Iraq end with helicopters flying out of the “green zone”� in Baghdad? It all sounds so familiar.
The difference lies in the consequences. Vietnam did not have the devastating effects on U.S. power that Iraq is already having. On this point, those who deny the Vietnam-Iraq analogy are probably right. They are wrong, however, in believing that “staying the course”� will have any result other than making the damage to U.S. power far greater than changing course and withdrawing sooner in as orderly a fashion as possible.
But even in its differences, Vietnam can be instructive about Iraq. Once the U.S. position in Vietnam collapsed, Washington was free to reverse the negative trends it faced in NATO and U.S.-Soviet military balance, in the world economy, in its international image, and in other areas. Only by getting out of Iraq can the United States possibly gain sufficient international support to design a new strategy for limiting the burgeoning growth of anti-Western forces it has unleashed in the Middle East and Southwest Asia.
History repeats itself, this time as tragedy.
I rarely link to Daily Kos (and some other huge traffic sites) on the theory that the whole world reads it anyway. But I can’t resist this post, Voices Carry, which seems to me not only to sound an obvious and necessary warning, but also to provide the sort of pithy solution which makes the perfect political frame:
As Glenn Greenwald and others have recognized, the newest note in the chorus of whining GOP harpies frantically evading accountability, is that the critics of the Bush strategemary somehow lost, or are losing, the war in Iraq.
[Link] Those who insisted on this war, who started it, who prosecuted it, who controlled every single facet of its operation – they have no blame at all for the failure of this war. Nope. They were right all along about everything. It all would have worked had war critics just kept their mouths shut. The ones who are to blame are the ones who never believed in this war, who control no aspect of the government, who were unable to influence even a single aspect of the war, who were shunned, mocked and ridiculed, and who have been out of power since the war began. They are the ones to blame. They caused this war to fail.
Expect this, plan on it. Anyone who thinks that it’s not coming, that the sinking GOP wouldn’t have the nerve to try, is possibly as delusional as the 34 percent who still think George Bush is doing a heckuva job. In fact, Kevin Drum notes that at least one right-wing cheerleader with a megaphone is already laying the groundwork with a trial balloon to blame the media; a stone’s throw away from going after critics of the White House’s Iraq War.
There’s a lot of ways someone can respond to this tactic, after they stop laughing hysterically of course, as it really is quite desperate. But voices do carry, so a response is in order. The best response for anything is usually the simplest, the most direct, the most truthful. In this case the simple truth is that The Republicans are Losing the War.
Karl Rove would be jealous were it not for the fact that this one is true.
The administration is fond of throwing statistics about how there are 100 or so Iraqi brigades in the new refored Iraqi army. Subtext: the US can pull out soon, leave things to the Iraqis. Progress.
In fact, however, not at all:
The only Iraqi battalion capable of fighting without U.S. support has been downgraded to a level requiring them to fight with American troops backing them up, the Pentagon said Friday.
It reminds me of a Vietnam war cartoon which unfortunately I’ve been unable to find online: as I recall it, Herblock’s everyman is pointing to traintracks that lead to a dark tunnel into the mountain and saying, “No there isn’t: There’s a tunnel at the end of the tunnel”. (I couldn’t find that one, but I did find this classic Herblock cartoon, which is similar.)
Jotwell Blenderlaw
