Baker’s Latest Assignment

[Bottomfeeder 244]

March 20, 2006

The cracks and fissures are finally beginning to appear in Fortress Bush. The AP is reporting that Congress quietly appointed an "Iraq Study Group" headed by James A. Baker to "assess the Bush administration’s policies in Iraq and political and economic developments in the troubled country". In other words, Baker has been picked to tell Bush that the war is over; we lost.

The group was voted into being with little fanfare to spare the White House any unnecessary embarrassment, but the message is clear; the adults are finally stepping in. The war has been so appallingly mismanaged that jittery American elites are forcing themselves back into the policy-making apparatus.

http://www.uruknet.de/?s1=1&p=21741&s2=21

[AURaptor 1,126]

Simply becaue Congress has called for a study means that we've lost ? That's the most absurd thing I've ever heard on this board. We clearly won the war, and are winning the post war. What crop dusted laced dope are you smoking?

[Bottomfeeder 244]

Winning the battle is not necessarily strategically/politically winning the war. Post war Iraq is a mess for future presidents to clean up, while Cheney and the monkey-boy roll in the dough.

[Tigermike 3,050]

Winning the battle is not necessarily strategically/politically winning the war. Post war Iraq is a mess for future presidents to clean up, while Cheney and the monkey-boy roll in the dough.

227231[/snapback]

There it is, "politically winning the war".

I said over a year ago that the strategy of the left was to keep harping and haranguing in order to demoralize and destroy the will of the American citizens. The only way the US could loose this war was if the citizens and politicians lost their collective nerve and will to fight. This war can only be lost here in the United States. Not in Iraq or Afghanistan. Only in the US.

[Bottomfeeder 244]

Libertarians, such as myself, are anti-war, anti-state and pro-market. Bush didn't even know that Iraq had different religious factions within the country before he ordered the invasion. It is simple ignorance on behalf of a monkeyboy who graduated from Yale. And, what this tells me is he didn't study at all. Smart guy that Bush, OTFLMAO!

Oborne: I traveled to Boston to meet a former U.S. diplomat who had been a leading authority on Iraq for over a decade. A chance remark made just two months before the war, hinted at how the complexities of Iraq had bewildered Americans at the highest levels.

Peter Galbraith - former U.S. diplomat: January 2003 the President invited three members of the Iraqi opposition to join him to watch the Super Bowl. In the course of the conversation the Iraqis realized that the President was not aware that there was a difference between Sunni and Shiite Muslims. He looked at them and said, "You mean...they're not, you know, there, there's this difference. What is it about?"

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/12/8/215257/257

Excerpt from Al Franken's recent book 'The Truth" pp. 241-242:

Bush's failure to look reality full in the face extended to even the most basic facts about the country he had chosen to invade. There is one anecdote in particular that I keep coming back to. David Phillips, a former State Department official, tells the story in his book, 'Losing Iraq: Inside the Postwar Reconstruction Fiasco'. Phillips was in charge of the Democratic Principles Working Group of the Future of Iraq Project, where he convened a variety of Iraqi exiles to envision how Iraq would be governed after the fall of Saddam. The most prominent exile in the group was Brandeis professor Kanan Makiya, one of Ahmed Chalabi's chief deputies. Makiya was the man who had famously told Bush that Americans would be greeted in Iraq with sweets and flowers. In late January 2003, less than eight weeks before the war began, Phillips wrote:

Kanan was invited to watch the Super Bowl at the White House; he told me later that he had to explain to the President of the United States the differences between Arab Shi'a, Arab Sunnis, and Kurds.

I talked to David Phillips over breakfast and asked what Makiya had meant by this. Did he mean that Bush didn't understand the fine points of their cultural and religious differences? No.

PHILLIPS: What Makiya told me was that he didn't know there was a difference. That among Iraqis there were Arab Shia, Arab Sunni, and Kurds.

ME: He didn't know that there existed those three groups?

PHILLIPS: That's right. This is pretty basic. You're going to go to war in a country, you should know who lives there.

http://www.tpmcafe.com/story/2005/12/27/15230/331

[AURaptor 1,126]

I don't believe a word of it. That Bush didn't know of the Sunnis , Kurds and Shias. He worked in the WH for a time w/ his dad, for pete's sake. Just more lies and distortions to ridicule Bush.