If anybody needed further proof that whatsisface is still flogging the same old bullshit, let him read “The Real Disaster,” which pretty much says what needs to be said about his speech on Iraq. It’s the lead editorial in this morning’s New York Times. (Then compare it with the Washington Post mush and the Los Angeles Times drivel.)
Meanwhile, the same old bullshit is being floated on new lies: “As part of a campaign to market the new strategy, [Prez Huha‘s] aides insisted that the plan [for more U.S. troops] was largely created by the government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki,” David Sanger reports. But, in fact, the Iraqi government “does not really want them,” according to another NYT report.
What should be highlighted in big bold print is Huha’s comments in a private meeting with Congressional leaders before making his speech. “I said to Maliki this has to work or you’re out,” Sanger quotes him as saying, according to two officials who were in the room. “Pressed on why he thought this strategy would succeed where previous efforts had failed, [Huha] shot back: ‘Because it has to.’”
Really.
The Wall Street Journal naturally supports the President With His Head Up His Ass. In its lead editorial, under the jingoish headline “Mission Baghdad,” it ignores reality and claims that “with the new strategy, new forces and new generals [Huha] is putting in place, we have a fighting chance to create a virtuous circle whereby better security leads to more anti-insurgent cooperation from the [Iraqi] public — which in turn leads to still better security.”
Everything just gets better and better.
Its secondary editorial, “A Cynical Opposition,” then tries to shift the focus: “The real question is whether the Democrats are prepared to act like a responsible opposition now that they control both houses of Congress, in contrast to the last four years of partisan minority sniping.” Ludicrous as that sounds, it’s not surprising. Last June The Journal drew this conclusion: “The U.S. has sacrificed too much already in Iraq to withdraw just when victory once again looks possible.” [Italics added.]
Which pretty much defines ludicrous.
Finally, it’s worth noting the historian Gareth Porter’s take on the perverse logic of Huha’s war and, most especially, the involvement of Henry Kissinger, whose “sudden emergence as a key figure” in the so-called new Iraq policy “deserves closer examination.”
Although he knows very little about how to deal with Sunnis and Shi’ites, Kissinger does know how to convey to the public the illusion of victory, even though the U.S. position in the war is actually weak and unstable. One of Kissinger’s accomplishments was to sell the news media on the Nixon administration’s propaganda line that the Christmas 1972 bombing of Hanoi had so unnerved the North Vietnamese that it had allowed president Richard Nixon and Kissinger to achieve a diplomatic victory over the communists in the Paris Agreement. That line was a gross distortion of what actually happened before and after the bombing.
And so, Porter writes further, Huha “may be equally interested in Kissinger’s experience in shifting the blame for defeat to the Democrats.”
That is exactly what he tried to do in spring 1975 when the South Vietnamese military regime fell apart under the pressure of the North Vietnamese offensive. Even though Kissinger had privately admitted at the time of the Paris Agreement that the regime of president Nguyen Van Thieu was unlikely to survive, he insisted that Nixon’s successor, president Gerald Ford, go through the motions of asking for an additional U.S. $722 million in military aid on April 11, less than three weeks before the final collapse.
Are we going through the motions again? It would seem so. Only now, in addition to the untold casualties and lost lives, Huha is talking billions — $6.7 billion, to be precise — on top of the billions already spent. If the Democrats don’t stick it to him, who will? The BananaRepublicans?
Postscript: That was not a rhetorical question. See this:
WASHINGTON, Jan. 12 — Republicans on the Senate Armed Services Committee came to the defense of [the President With His Head Up His Ass] on Friday, lending support to his decision to send more troops to Iraq and hoping to head off a Senate resolution criticizing the plan.
