Obama’s decision to withdraw from Iraq proves I was RIGHT! President Obama highlighted U.S. accomplishments in Iraq: doing away with Saddam Hussein’s regime, helping establish a sovereign government, dealing al-Qaeda in Iraq “a serious blow,” and lifting Iraq out of “tyranny and terror.” His plan for ending the war is designed to preserve the value of these accomplishments. Rightly, his emphasis is on securing U.S. success, not cutting losses. His speech effectively repudiated the extreme antiwar rhetoric of recent years. There was no mention of Iraq as a disaster, a fraud or even a blunder. He presumably still thinks the … Continue reading Doug Feith Just Can’t Help Himself

SFGate.com reports on the lack of training time and equipment for troops is hurting readiness… Soldiers of the 1st Brigade, 3rd Infantry Division had so little time between deployments to Iraq they had to cram more than a year’s worth of training into four months. Some had only a few days to learn how to fire their new rifles before they deployed to Iraq — for the third time — last month. They had no access to the heavily armored vehicles they will be using in Iraq, so they trained on a handful of old military trucks instead. And some … Continue reading SFGate.com: Corners cut in rush to add troops

Why don’t you love us? MR. LEHRER: The president has also said that he made some mistakes in the last eight years. Did you make any? VICE PRES. CHENEY: Well, make mistakes – I can think of places where I underestimated things. For example, talking about Iraq, the extent of which the Iraqi population had been beaten down by Saddam Hussein was greater than I anticipated. That is, we thought that the Iraqis would be able to bounce back fairly quickly once Saddam was gone or the new government established and step up and take major responsibilities for governing Iraq, … Continue reading Cheney: Why So Serious, Iraqis?

Beautiful downtownBasra! BASRA, Iraq — This southern port city has been, in effect, on its own since September, when British forces here moved to the outskirts, yielding authority to local leaders. British and American officials say Basra’s experiment in self-rule could serve as a model for Iraq’s future, but if so — many locals and outside advisers say — that future remains dark. What makes the situation in Basra — Iraq’s second largest city and commercial hub — so alarming, they say, is that it is a test of Iraqi rule under relatively optimal conditions: Basra has the nation’s best … Continue reading Success!

Had to: GAFFNEY: May I state my position rather than you stating it? May I do that?My position is that it’s regrettable that any Americans died. It is regrettable that they had to die, but I believe they did have to die. It’s a little too easy and cheap to ask what precisely Gaffney has lost because of this war, not only because I don’t believe you have to have friends in a war to give a fuck about whether that war was a mistake, but also because I don’t think there’s any personal stake that could convince me Gaffney … Continue reading Had To

Column: Asked by Congress in 2003, before the invasion of Iraq, how many troops it would take to win the war that President George W. Bush was planning to wage there, Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric Shinseki replied, “I would say that what’s been mobilized to this point – something on the order of several hundred thousand soldiers are probably, you know, a figure that would be required. We’re talking about posthostilities control over a piece of geography that’s fairly significant, with the kinds of ethnic tensions that could lead to other problems. And so it takes a significant … Continue reading Proved Fucking Right

“How would you like to SUCK MY BALLS?” Seriously, is there another interpretation of Obama’s appointing the guy whose reaction to the war in Iraq was“The … hell?” A. Continue reading Obama To Bush

From Boston Globe: WASHINGTON — Recent graduates of the US Military Academy at West Point are choosing to leave active duty at the highest rate in more than three decades, a sign to many military specialists that repeated tours in Iraq are prematurely driving out some of the Army’s top young officers. According to statistics compiled by West Point, of the 903 Army officers commissioned upon graduation in 2001, nearly 46 percent left the service last year — 35 percent at the conclusion of their five years of required service, and another 11 percent over the next six months. And … Continue reading West Point grads leaving service at highest rate in over 3 decades

Maybe McCain can give one of his houses to homeless veterans. Also, can I just say? Well done, Democrats. Well done, Obama campaign. Well done, bloggers everywhere. THIS is what I’m talking about when I say you don’t skate backwards. More shitstorms like this one, please, from now until November. A. Continue reading The Contrast That Counts

Not that this is new, but HONESTLY: He seems to think the Iraqis are sad and mad because we liberated them instead of letting them liberate themselves. It’s nice that Tommy Friedman likes this happy rhetoric of liberation, though it’s a bit different from the days when he was saying we invaded Iraq so our soldiers could go door to door telling Iraqis to Suck. On. This. I don’t know how much our soldiers actually did this, but in any case Little Tommy Friedman can’t get himself to understand that maybe Iraqis are sad and mad because we invaded and … Continue reading They’re Not Like Us

Scout, who likes to raise my blood pressure as early as possible in the day, sends this over to the Doug Feith Desk here at First Draft World HQ. And I pass it along to you all.Be polite. Not because he deserves it, but because you do. For what it’s worth, here are mine: Why did your book not address the scandal overLarry Franklin’s resignation and subsequent guilty plea? Did you not feel it was important to explain why your office harbored a traitor? If you truly felt that the Bush administration was taking the wrong tack by proposing a … Continue reading Doug Feith Takes Your Questions

Oy. BAGHDAD, Iraq — One U.S. soldier was killed and five others were wounded today in a bizarre shooting incident near the town of Salman Pak, south of Baghdad, according to U.S. and Iraqi authorities. Iraqi authorities said a member of the town council, which is part of the U.S.-allied Iraqi government, carried out the shootings, An Iraqi police captain, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the incident, said local council member Raed Hmood Ajil opened fire on the U.S. troops for unknown reasons and was killed at the scene by American forces. The account could … Continue reading Cheney’s Idea of Flowers and Candy

Look. I drove home yesterday from a picnic in a rainstorm, listening to the radio simulcast of the60 Minutes program on this. Very instructive in some ways (seriously, of course nobody speaking Arabic would monitor this thing, actual knowledge of anything that could prove useful is a drawback in this administration), very annoying in others, in that everybody involved just seemed shocked as hell that an American propaganda channel was viewed by its audience as … an American propaganda channel. How dare those Arab rubes not swallow the freedom we so generously feed them? How dare they be aware of … Continue reading There’s A Stunner

Hitchens wonders why: As I write this on the first day of June, about a book that was published in the first week of April, the books pages of the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and the Boston Globe have not seen fit to give Feith a review. I don’t know, Chris, maybe because he is at best a complete ignoramus and at worst a complete fucking liar? Yeah, that’s right, I’m uncivil. Civility wasn’t doing me any good and my blood pressure kept going up, so fuck it. From the day he arrived in … Continue reading Hitchens & Feith: Like A Law Firm That Gets Sued A Lot

Heckuva job, Chimpy. ST. LOUIS (AP) – The father of the first female soldier from Missouri to die in Iraq wants Congress to force the Army to reopen its investigation into her death. John Johnson, father of LaVena Johnson, said yesterday that he met in April with Rep. Ike Skelton, D-Mo., chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, as well as others. [snip] Army Pfc. LaVena Johnson was found dead July 19, 2005, in a small contractor’s tent in Balad, Iraq, after only eight weeks in the country. Army investigators and coroners ruled she had shot herself in the mouth … Continue reading Damn

Oy. FALLUJAH, Iraq — At the western entrance to the Iraqi city of Fallujah Tuesday, Muamar Anad handed his residence badge to the U.S. Marines guarding the city. They checked to be sure that he was a city resident, and when they were done, Anad said, a Marine slipped a coin out of his pocket and put it in his hand. Out of fear, he accepted it, Anad said. When he was inside the city, the college student said, he looked at one side of the coin. “Where will you spend eternity?” it asked. He flipped it over, and on … Continue reading Crusade

Chimpy has no friends left. Japan’s defense minister has said US President George W. Bush was wrong to invade Iraq and warned that Tokyo could not automatically renew its air force mission to the war-torn country. [snip] The rebuke from one of Washington’s closest foreign allies came hours after an embattled Bush used his annual State of the Union address to plead for public support to send more troops to Iraq. “Mr. Bush went ahead in a situation as if there were nuclear weapons, but I think that decision was wrong,” Defense Minister Fumio Kyuma said Wednesday of the 2003 … Continue reading Wrongo

Dougie on how the preznit ate his war: Before the war, administration officials said that success would mean an Iraq that no longer threatened important U.S. interests – that did not support terrorism, aspire to WMD, threaten its neighbors, or conduct mass murder. But from the fall of 2003 on, the president defined success as stable democracy in Iraq. This was a public affairs decision that has had enormous strategic consequences for American support for the war. The new formula fails to connect the Iraq war directly to U.S. interests. It causes many Americans to question why we should be … Continue reading It Starts To Look Needy, Man

“Errors are not lies,” says Feith, and that’s the last sentence before he starts stammering. http://www.thedailyshow.com/sitewide/video_player/view/default/swf.jhtml I like Stewart’s comparison of errors vs. lies to manslaughter vs. homicide. Either way, somebody’s dead at the end, so somebody else should GO TO JAIL. http://www.thedailyshow.com/sitewide/video_player/view/default/swf.jhtml Thanks to jjj. A. Continue reading ‘What Was So Honest About It?’

First of all, the tags on his book are priceless: dumbest f_cking guy on the planet (34) idiot (16) wingnut welfare (15) treason (12) high crimes (11) hubris (8) corruption (7) fiasco (7) immoral (7) benedict arnold (4) ignorance (4) Me: So how strong a drink should I watch Feith on 60 Minutes with? Mr. A: Not very strong. Me: Quoi? Mr. A: If you want to throw things, you’ll need to be able to aim. Story produced by L. Franklin Devine and Michael Rosenbaum. It would have killed you both to have dirty hippies on this show talking about … Continue reading Debunking Douglas Feith: 60 Minutes Liveblogging

Philippe Sands, author of the Vanity Fair piece on the torture memo, talks about Doug Feith’s role in it: AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about Douglas Feith, who he was, his significance, your extended interview with him in Washington? PHILIPPE SANDS: I can talk to him. He—it’s one of the great things about America—my own country is not so open—but you can just get in touch with people, call them up, email them, find their spouses and partners, and say, “Can I come and talk to you?” And Mr. Feith said yes. And I’m very grateful to him for that. … Continue reading ‘A Combination of Ideology and Incompetence’

I’ll be on the radiohere tonight at 6 p.m. CST, to talk about Feith’s book and Special Plans, and in preparation for that, I poured a generous dose of whiskey into my coffee and listened toFeith on Hannity’s show, a bit generously hosted by Spocko’s Brain. Feith essentially said — during the occasional break in Hannity’s usual schtick of “liberals don’t know the history of the world, I DO!!!!” — that Bush screwed up and trusted the CIA when it came to WMD. It was a repeat of a claim he made on CNN here: He also went into a … Continue reading Feith Tonight

What the fuck doesthis mean? A senior administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the administration had abandoned the benchmarks [Congress set for Iraq] as a strict standard of progress because establishing a secure Iraq would also depend on factors other than political and military progress. [snip] Asked for elaboration, the senior administration official said, “It’s a very hard concept to explain publicly because it doesn’t feature a sort of setting of the dial. It features what we call a running assessment.” Continue reading Goblety Gook

Link: The key to being really, really, really bad at your job, apparently, is to be so brazenly bad about it that people are too astonished to call you on it. The above sentence is the first entry in a long list of things I learned about life from watching the Bush administration. I’d call it “Everything I Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten,” but I understand that title’s taken. Watching former Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith on “60 Minutes” Sunday night and reading his new book, I’m struck more than ever by the truth of it. … Continue reading Column: Just Say You’re Sorry, Doug

America wants out.Gallup: Which do you think is better for the US: to keep a significant number of troops in Iraq until the situation there gets better, even if that takes many years, or to set a timetable for removing troops from Iraq and to stick to that timetable regardless of what is going on in Iraq? All AmericansSet a timetable for withdrawl: 60%Keep troops in Iraq until the situation gets better: 35% DemocratsSet a timetable for withdrawl: 81%Keep troops in Iraq until the situation gets better: 15% IndependentsSet a timetable for withdrawl: 61%Keep troops in Iraq until the situation … Continue reading Remember This During Gen. Betrayus’ Testimony

From the glorious Culture of Truth: Kroft: you’re an idiot – what are you doing now? Feith: teaching at Georgetown Feith: if Bush had listened to me and put Chalabi in charge things would have been fine Kroft: General Franks says you’re the dumbest mother fucker on the planet Feith: ah – but not Venus or Mars, right Kroft: people seem to hate you Feith: they are just pissed because i faked intelligence to trick america in to war Kroft: oh so just whining A. Continue reading More Doug Feith

Huh-Oh. Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki blasted the U.S. State Department for renewing its contract with the Blackwater security firm, saying the company has yet to answer for what he called a “massacre” last year. The Iraqi government was not consulted on the State Department decision, he said. “No judicial action has been taken and no compensation has been made,” al-Maliki said Sunday. “Therefore, this extension requires the approval of the Iraqi government, and the government would want to resolve the outstanding issues with this company.” [snip] … al-Maliki said Sunday that the renewal of Blackwater’s contract isn’t final “because … Continue reading Puppet Trouble