Facts Belie Petraeus’ Case, Say Humanitarian Groups
PROVIDENCE - Observers of the situation in Iraq lashed out at the Bush administration Thursday ahead of the president’s prime time address to the nation.
They contend that General David Petraeus gave a misleading report to Congress this week when he said “significant progress” was being made in Iraq, including a sharp drop in the number of attacks on American forces and a lessening of sectarian violence.
“What people came away with from the report is that the situation is better for people living in Iraq and that’s just not true,” said Yifat Susskind of the women’s rights organization MADRE. “That’s refuted both by the fact that statistics don’t bear it out and in the experiences of the regular Iraqis we speak to on a daily basis.”
A joint ABC/BBC poll released this week shows 70 percent of Iraqis believe security has deteriorated since the Bush administration increased the number of troops in Iraq this Spring. Some 60 percent believe attacks on U.S. forces are justified, a number that includes 93 percent of Sunnis.
According to the poll, only 29 percent of Iraqis now think the situation will get better, compared to 64 percent who shared that optimism before the so-called “surge” of troops began.
“One of the most cynical things General Petraeus did was celebrate the fact that there’s a decline in sectarian violence,” Susskind said. “But that drop reflects the success of ethnic cleansing rather than anything the U.S. military has done. The reality is that there are places where killing is down because there’s nobody left to kill.”
According to the group Refugees International, nearly 5 million Iraqis have been forced from their homes since the fall of Saddam Hussein. More than 2 million people are now displaced inside the country, the group says, and an additional 2.5 million have fled to neighboring countries.
The numbers continue to grow with as many as 100,000 per month newly displaced within the country and another 40,000 to 60,000 fleeing to Syria.
The Bush administration has allowed only a few thousand Iraqis to enter the United States.
In addition, two retired Generals — Lt. General Robert Gard (U.S. Army, Retired), who now works at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation in Washington, and Brigadier General John Johns (U.S. Army, Retired), a board member at the non-profit Council for a Livable World — released a statement arguing the continued American occupation of Iraq is destroying the U.S. military.
“Continued engagement in Iraq’s civil war distracts the United States from our more urgent missions in Afghanistan and enhanced homeland security, stretches the U.S. military to the breaking point, inflicts psychological scars on returning veterans and breaks up their families, causes mounting American casualties, increases the drain on the U.S. treasury, and erodes our stature in the world,” the Generals wrote in a statement.
Gard, who served in combat during both the Korean and Vietnam wars, said Petraeus’ report and Bush’s speech tonight remind him of 1967, when then-Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara told President Lyndon Johnson that he thought the Vietnam war was lost.
“Lyndon Johnson privately agreed, but no president wants to lose a war,” Gard told OneWorld. “So we surged. In 1968, we had lost 24,000 young men. Five years later we had lost 58,000 and nothing was accomplished.”
“Now we’re going down the same path,” he said. “We didn’t alter the outcome by that surge and now you’ve got Bush in office and he isn’t going to be changed unless he’s forced to do so.”
© 2007 OneWorld.net
Oceania has always been at war. The MSM’s Ministry of Truth says so. Big Brother is keeping us safe by spying on us . . .
“The reality is that there are places where killing is down because there’s nobody left to kill.”
Fuzzy math, W-style.
“It is the nature of the scoundrel to decieve by lying.
~~Cicero~~
Lying becomes a cowardly, deplorable habit, until when the liar may speak the truth, few believe it.
~~Kem Patrick~~
Too bad their pants aren’t on fire
Petraeus has no idea what the real body counts are, let alone who killed whom why, except in a small fraction of the killings. Reconcile the Lancet estimate (2/3M dead as of 1 year ago) with the much lower other reports, and a quantitative understanding of what is going on could emerge. The US military won’t do this, of course, because they really don’t care about the dead, only about exposure of their crimes.
All generals and admirals are liars, just some more so than others.
Everybody in government or business knows you get ahead by saying what your superiors want to hear. The general mindset is that only fools speak or even care about the truth. If you open your mouth the party line had better come out.
And then we wonder why liars and idiots wind up in power.
I keep repeating chunks of Gwynne Dyer’s *The Mess They Made*, as if I were Dyer’s publicity agent. Yet his words seem like such an appropriate response to so many of the articles that appear on this site. Perhaps I’m preaching to the choir, but here goes again:
“…defeat and humiliation in Iraq mean that soon there will no longer be the will in the United States to go on with the task of maintaining the status quo, and because the forces unleashed by the destruction of Iraq are going to overwhelm the status quo. Everything is now up for grabs: regimes, ethnic pecking orders within states, even the 1918 borders themselves might change. Five years from now there could be an Islamic Republic of Arabia, an independent Kurdistan, almost anything you care to imagine.
“So what should the rest of the world do about this? Nothing. Just stand back and let it happen. Outsiders to the region have no solutions left to peddle any more (nor any credibility even if they did have solutions), and they no longer have the power or the will to impose their ideas. For the first time in a century, the region is going to choose its future for itself — and it may, of course, make a dreadful mess of it. Even then outsiders should not intervene, because foreign intervention generally makes things worse — but also because it’s none of their business.”
The Muslim world is on to us, folks. As Naomi Klein intimates, Arabs and Persians are now shock-resistant. And that’s why Ahmadinijad is saying: “Bring it on!” He knows it’ll cost Persian lives (what does he care?), but he also knows that Iran and the rest of the Middle East will nevertheless score a victory over white Western hegemony.
We have many honorable military leaders who have told the truth. Bush has retired them. Fallon is still speaking up (Petraeus’s boss) but for how long?
At the time it was announced that General Petraeus would become the new commander the news was that unlike all the other generals that were negligent in promoting the war, we would now be served and he would undoubtedly end the conflict. Here it is many months later and although with the addition of thousands there has been some headway there doesn’t seem to be that much progress. Believe his report will reflect the same tone as the perpetrator of the war and we will continue to lose lives, with not much hope and the expenditure of billions. Abe Bucksner (buckykc@aol.com) Overland Park, Kansas
Admiral Fallon said it : “Sycophant” Petraeus is a very bad liar (by that I mean he’s not good at lying). “I wrote the speech myself.” Yeah, riiight.
Admittedly, I did not (couldn’t bear to) watch it — only excerpts. Did anyone question the methodology of counting sectarian violence? Sunni on Sunni violence — doesn’t count. Shia on Shia violence — doesn’t count. Bullet in the front of the head — doesn’t count. Bullet to back of head — counts. And (I think) only certain instances of car bomb casualties qualify. Bizarre? yes. Accurate? yeah, riiight.
gde, one admiral who isn’t a liar is William Fallon. And a good admiral doesn’t like to run his fleet up on rocks. “We don’t have time for reconciliations,” he told Washington Post columnist David Ignatius on an airplane returning from Iraq, and for publication, Ignatius said on the 9/14 Diane Rehm show.
That’s what is lacking everywhere– Admiral Fallon’s urgency about getting out. When Quaggenbush compares his future Iraq with South Korea or West Germany, a place with American sheeples quartered there, he misunderstands the volatile nature of Iraq’s historical antipathy to colonial occupiers once again.
(How can he ALWAYS be so stupid? The man is
psychologically uneducable.)
As we hear incessant horror stories about what absolutely must happen if we abruptly pull out, we hardly ever hear a single one about what happens when we stay.
If we stay in Iraq we’ll actually find weapons of mass destruction. People will
manufacture or import them or “bring them on” HERE because of our continuing, unwanted presence THERE. We might even see a mushroom
cloud, thus fulfilling the dream of Condoleezza, Dick and l’enfant terrible himself.
Quaggenbush and Petraeus, with their huge
egos, apparently think they can make Iraq
as docile as South Korea. The fact is, the
place and the places around it (i.e., the world) are changing every second and for the
worse, with everybody hating us more and more.
Remember the Kyoto agreement? I’m not saying
Quaggenbush’s attitude toward it caused 9/11, but it sure didn’t help.
Do the sheeple get it? Of course not! We’re
headed straight for World War III unless we as
the most prominent nation on earth get the hell out of Iraq, bringing every last American with us!
We better hope Fallon stays healthy - I have a sneeking suspicion as CINCCENT - head of forces arrayed around the Middle East, he is all that is holding back the bombing of Iran.
People talk about Iraq as if the people are strange and can’t be understood. If we were to bomb Toronto or Quebec for hours and days, invade Canada, arrest thousands of men, kick down doors, run tanks over people’s cars, put up checkpoints all over the country and shoot people who didn’t stop fast enough…What do you think the Canadians would do? Shoot back? Bomb us? Don’t you think they would hate us and want us out of their country? People are people and no one wants foreign soldiers in their country. I wouldn’t even want to live next to an American army base. Young men away from home are obnoxious and dangerous.
I noted the body language of the general and his side kick idiot while they were answering question from Congress. They were both lying through their teeth.
If you will notice the general’s left hand in the photo above. The fingers are all spread and in a very tense manner, pointed slightly upward and stiff, as he prepares to deny or reject a comment from someone. That is a sign of insecurity, for he well knows he is wrong about someting and is prepared to object, __ with a another lie.
Bush’s surge engine Petraeus was reportedly dismissed by Admiral William Fallon, chief of Central Command, as an “ass kissing little chicken shit”.
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/II14Ak02.html
Bush’s surge engine Petraeus was reportedly dismissed by Admiral William Fallon, chief of Central Command, as an “ass kissing little chicken shit”.
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/II14Ak02.html
That a President who has proven he could care less about Christian Americans living in the US in the wake of Katrina would seek instead to spend a trillion dollars or more on the quality of life of Muslims in a desert is a flight of hallucination.
The lack of humanity of this President is further demonstrated by his relegating the death and destruction he has wrought as but a comma in the book of history.
At this point, it should be obvious that it’s by any and all necessary means for this brutal pseudo-Texan. I’m absolutely certain that Petraeus knows how to spell “Shinseki.”
The truly frightening part of this hideous diorama is that the Democrats, who are carefully maintaining the status quo even at the risk of infuriating their base, are also running out the clock to the end of Bush’s term, as surely as Bush is doing it. Again, by any and all means necessary, they seek to wrest and consolidate power.
Were they sacrificing our blood and treasure in the short term to benefit anyone but their corporate masters in the long term, this might be considered just a misguided strategy borne of genuine motives. But we know that no candidate within reach of the Presidency is advocating anything but an indefinite occupation. And we’ve seen the relationships cultivated with corporate donors who make sure we have the best government money can buy, irrespective of party.
We are hemmoraging blood, treasure, and global goodwill NOW. We are decidedly less safe than before this debacle started. This is a triage situation, and waiting until an election over a year hence is not acceptable. Further, it is tantamount to holding a gun to the head of the electorate. And we’re starting to resent it.
Do you hear us, Nancy, Harry, Rahm, Hillary, Mark, and the rest of you corporate DLC sons-of-bitches?
Sixty seven votes my ass, Joe Biden: GET US OUT OF IRAQ - NOW.
bottle says “get the hell out of Iraq, bringing every last American with us!” I would like to disagree. We should bring all the troops home and leave Blackwater there and let the Iraq people take care of them!
Crocker and Petraeus were not sworn in to tell the truth nothing but the truth which is what is done in respectable Congressional hearings all the time when their is real issues discussed which certainly was the case here.
They were giving a cheerleading speech just like Bush.
It was a dog and pony show complete with photo opportunity for Sheik Abu Reisha who died for nothing and was sold down the river by the keys tone military idiots too interested in celebrity to protect the real US ally for the moment, that sheik.
Did those surge people even protect that house of his? I doubt it. Not any more than they protected the Golden Dome. No they are out there doing active combat!@@#$%^&* while luring a Sheik to shake the hand of Bush who is hated in Ramadi and Fallusiah for destroying lives and houses.
These two were NOT sworn in to tell the truth nothing but the truth which is what is done in respectable Congressional hearings all the time and is routine.
Petreaus told george Senator that yes his son who is training in Fort Benning would be serving in Iraq.
Either Petraeus is lying and just wants the locals to sign up at the recruiting station or he is too stupid to know that having Petraeus’s son serving in Iraq makes about as much sense as Prince Charles showing up- we know he boasted about going over there but was convinced otherwise by smarter people to please stay away from others who would be targeted if they were anywhere near high value folks like Prince Charles or Petraeus’son. Did anybody think around corners what would happen if either of them were kidnapped?
Petraeus obviously did not plan well to use the surge to protect the front door of Sheik Abu Reisha who was killed walking out of his door in Ramadi only on the day that Petraeus was testifying that Ramadi was safe.
Where are our troops when you need them? and why are they in Ramadi making the place unsafe for the Sheik in his own neighborhood after photo op of Bush and him are plastered all over the Arab newspapers. That was a HUGE setback for Petraeus in Anbar to kill that sheik. It happened because he Petraeus should never have gone over there to help that Sheik fight AlQaida- that sheik was doing a lot better without our help. Who needs friends like us who give the kiss of death with a photo op and don’t even know better.
Just shows that smaller military footprint would be an improvement.
You people in the reality based universe just don’t get it. Apparently 30% of the people will believe any lie if it is repeated enough. Bu$h the inferior lives on that 30%.
These guys will not admit that they are lies, they will just say that there is a difference of opinion. It is all a matter of perception. That has been the Republican rationalization for a long time. It is all just a matter of how you look at it, not an outright lie or deception.
BTW-
Bush is a former cocaine addict and an alcoholic who is now drunk on power as a substitute. What will happen when that addiction to power stops being fed in 2009?
You guessed it…