Jan. 8, 2007
How To Further The Neocon Mess In Iraq
Nation: Those Who Sold War On False Pretenses Want Escalation
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Play CBS Video Video Report: Bush Wants More Troops Sources tell CBS News that President Bush will call for a surge of additional troops in his revised plan for the war in Iraq. The new Congress is already raising red flags. Bill Plante reports.
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(CBS/AP)
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Interactive Iraq: A Turning Point? New Congress, change at the Pentagon, study group report; what does the future hold?
Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol walked into the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) yesterday with a big grin on his face, as if to say "they're listening to me again!"
Wolfowitz, Feith, Rumsfeld, Bolton and other architects of the war in Iraq may be gone, but the neoconservatives' stature inside the Bush Administration has hardly diminished. The same people that sold us the war, often under false pretenses, are now leading proponents of escalating the conflict by sending tens of thousands of additional troops.
An event at AEI yesteday brought together the intellectual progenitors of escalation: military historian Fred Kagan, retired General Jack Keane and Senators John McCain and Joe Lieberman. The focus was not on how to clean up the neocons mess, but on how to deepen it.
"The surge must be substantial and it must be sustained," McCain told a packed room. That means keeping an additional 20,000 to 35,000 troops in Iraq for 18 to 24 months. Under such a plan, 160,000 plus troops could be deployed well past 2008 at an untold cost.
Over 300 protestors convened by MoveOn.org gathered outside AEI to protest such a scenario. "John McCain, John McCain, escalation is insane!" they chanted. Around the same time, Democratic leaders Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid sent a letter to President Bush expressing their opposition to any troop increase.
"After nearly four years of combat, tens of thousands of US casualties, and over $300 billion dollars, it is time to bring the war to a close," they wrote to Bush. "We, therefore, strongly encourage you to reject any plans that call for our getting our troops any deeper into Iraq."
But Lieberman, the self-described "Independent Democrat," was having none of that. "The battlefield is in Baghdad and Al-Anbar, not in Washington," Lieberman said. "We need to support the President as he goes forward."
Who needs to support the President? Only 12 percent of Americans want to escalate the war. Most now want the US to get out. Nothing they've heard from the neocons since the beginning of the war has turned out to be right.
"I believed the initial invasion was going to be easy," McCain admitted today, echoing statements he made before the war. "Most of us did. I believed we were going to be welcomed as liberators. We were."
Little wonder why McCain and his fellow neocons can't bear the thought of ending the war they helped start.
Reprinted with permission from The Nation.
 | If you like this article, check out www.thenation.com for more investigative reports, timely editorials and incisive columns |
Best-selling author Mitch Albom on his first nonfiction work since "Tuesdays with Morrie."
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See all 38 CommentsHe has absolutely no credibility who deliberately scared the American people yet still is paraded on the morally bankrupt, Bush "right or wrong" FoxNews channel.
That tells us a lot about the moral state of our nation, esp. letting FoxNews get away with it, much less the President.
Thank you for that and his treatment by the right-wing media its not surprising.
Surely if Iraq had been a "cakewalk" as the Project for the New Israeli (Arrrhmmm, I meant American) Century (PNAC) you would have seen the "democracy through a barrel of the gun" folks preying on Iran and Syria already.
As one respectable Republican (who is not an Israeli apologist NEOCON like Wall Street Journal or FoxNews) said: "The only lesson we learn from history is that we do not learn from history."
Wrong. This idea that the Salman Pak facility was a terrorist training camp, was spread by Chalabi's INC before the war in order to get us into Iraq. And like most things pushed by the INC, this has turned out not to be true.
The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, the CIA, and the DIA have all concluded that these INC reports of Al Qaeda training at Salman Pak were not credible. The DIA told the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in 2006, "fabricators and unestablished sources who reported hearsay or thirdhand information created a large volume of human intelligence reporting."
But, like most myths in in the empty cheeto bag infested basements of Wingnutistan, this one just won't die. It continues to be repeated endlessly as "proof" no matter how many times one points out that it doesn't prove ANYTHING.
Anything other than gullibility on the part of its boosters.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-v2f-WC4cjo
Lieberman is a Jew and obviously hates Muslims (at least in public so as to pander to his Jewish constituents)..
...or going hunting with Cheney.
FYI - the Bible also states that Christianity is the only true religion. There is nothing unique about a dogma manual that claims it is the only true path to heaven.
Never heard of "Onward Christian Soldiers"?
NO WMD found Clintons way worked.
Its called Diplomacy. Something George Bush cant spell say or understand.
I guess you enjoy having 750 billion spent, 3000 americans killed 100,000+ iraqis dead on a nation no one in this country gives a *** about on made up intellignece. .
Can seem to bring yourself to the reality that Bush has been wrong on all accounts on Iraq.
He rushed to war. He kicked the inspectors out and told them Im bombing. I got Haliburton contrats to
make.
Clinton signature did not make him do it.
You must be an idiot if you cant see this is all on BUSH
You can blame clinton if it helps you sleep better at night but this one is all on the cons.
And your just an idiot who refuses to see the reality.
Bush is one of the biggest cowards I have ever seen.
A person willing to send your kids to fight when Bush and Cheney used every connect within their fathers powers not to go to Vietnam.
They havent been right about one thing in Iraq.
If we leave they may just make up.
I dont beleive that but I would beleive that befoer I beleive anything Bush or Cheney have to say.
Also, Can you please cease your obsession with the number of US troops killed in Iraq? The number of troops killed is certainly tragic but that number pales with the auto deaths in the US in one week. Give us a break from your Liberal hand-wringing.
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See all 38 Comments