You Call that Center?

The President tonight plans on telling the country that the his "Surge" 30,000 troops will be coming home next year but will still leave the same number of troops as before he announced the surge last January.

I can not comprehend this shit anymore. I just want to drop F bombs all over the place. This action is WAY out of touch with what the public wants.

Kids keep dying, Iraqi refugees are fleeing(2mil and rising), Hundreds of separate highly armed Militias control their own individual neighborhoods and could care less what is going on in some inconsequential "Green Zone."The propped up US Iraqi Govt has absolutely no control over them.

Osama is still alive and we keep going further into debt as a nation.

People against the war are continually smeared as unpatriotic, defeatists but pro war supporters are labeled as strong Americans who fight for freedom and want victory.

Against the War= Pussies, Losers, Un American
For the War= Tough, Winners, True Patriots

Being against this war is a pretty main stream idea and no matter how hard the WH spins this "Surge," all it really is more death and destruction for Iraqis/US soldiers. Losing more US life sure does not seem to bother House Minority Leader John Boehner. He was on CNN saying more US troop deaths are a small price to him. Of course, they are not HIS kids or HIS family members. Check out the video here.

Our political debate has sunk to new lows. We can not even admit our mistakes and try to move forward. The policy is a complete failure and has been since the day we disbanded the Iraqi Army. Do not ask Bush about the decision to create large numbers of unemployed, highly military trained insurgents with arms. He can not recall who made the decision. SHOCKER!

"The policy had been to keep the [Iraqi] army intact; didn't happen," Bush told Draper. Asked how he had reacted to Bremer's reversal, Bush replied, "Yeah, I can't remember. I'm sure I said, 'This is the policy, what happened?' "

The Pro War cheerleaders keep arguing things are not mistakes and that they need more time to prove everyone wrong. Where is the leadership in this country to finally say hey, after 4 1/2 years, 600 bill, 30,000 casulaties that we have no clue to what we are doing. Therefore, it is time to cut our losses and get international help out of this situation.

F BOMB times FBOMBS!

No one wants to abandon what our shitty leaders did to these poor people in the middle east because of our imperliastic hatred of their former dictator. We have to find real solutions for them and us. Political ones and not military.

The people in charge are so vested in to "winning" that they will not face reality.

FBOMBS!

My Man Froomkin sums up our political leaders ignoring the demands of the people up quite well in his column today.

You Call That the Center?
What's a middle-road approach to Iraq?

The White House would like you to believe the middle road is what President Bush will announce tonight from the Oval Office: The possible return to approximately pre-surge troop levels by sometime next summer.

A growing bipartisan movement on Capitol Hill would like you to believe the middle road is Congress agreeing on some modest, incremental, and in some cases non-binding limits on the president's policy.

But what's middle-road for the American public? A sizeable majority wants Bush to bring most of the 160,000 troops home from Iraq in about the same time frame that he is proposing to withdraw less than 30,000. According to the latest Washington Post/ABC News poll, for instance, 55 percent of Americans support "legislation that would set a deadline for withdrawing U.S. combat forces from Iraq by next spring."

On the antiwar extreme, some Americans want all U.S. troops of out Iraq right now; on the prowar extreme, some want those troops to stay indefinitely. But the consensus view is that Americans want out -- starting now, ending soon.

How, then, has the political debate in Washington become so skewed? Why is it so out of step with the will of the people?

One answer, of course, is that most Republican members of Congress are sticking with Bush. But a lot of the credit belongs to the White House, for a public-relations push that flooded the zone starting in early August.

The emphatic and persistent White House message about nominal military successes in Iraq, culminating with Gen. David Petraeus's congressional testimony this week, dominated the airwaves and shifted the inside-the-Beltway conventional wisdom about Iraq policy -- while not, interestingly enough, diminishing the public's desire to get the hell out one bit.

Froomkin Column
US deaths are a small price to Boehner
One Sided Political Debate
Who Disbanded the Iraqi Army? We Still Do No Know

The Lost Year

My man Dan Froomkin could not have summed it up any better in his column today.

A new national intelligence estimate concludes that President Bush's troop surge shows no signs of accomplishing its goal of encouraging political reconciliation in Iraq.

An influential Republican senator and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff now favor a troop withdrawal. (Sen. John Warner wants Bush to demonstrate that the commitment in Iraq is not open-ended; Marine Gen. Peter Pace argues that the military simply can't keep this up.)

These and other developments take us back in some ways to December 2006. It was then, in the wake of the November election and the report of the Iraq Study Group, that the debate in Washington finally appeared to be shifting away from how to achieve victory and toward how to cut our losses.

Instead, Bush ignored public sentiment, overruled his military commanders and opted for escalation.

And now it appears that the only thing the surge has bought him is time -- nine months or maybe a year, during which he was able to postpone the inevitable.

What has that year cost America -- and Iraq? For starters, a year in Iraq translates to over 1,000 more dead American soldiers; over $100 billion more in direct appropriations; over 15,000 more dead Iraqi civilians; and countless grievous wounds and shattered families both here and there.

In light of the costs, having bought a year of time may not seem like much of an accomplishment. But if Bush can drag things out another year or so, he can wash his hands of the whole mess and leave it for his successor to deal with.

Mac Gs World