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HILLARY RIGHTFULLY BLASTS RUMSFELD / IT'S TIME TO LEAVE
The secretary has lost credibility with the Congress and with the people ... It's time for Rumsfeld to step down and be replaced by someone who can develop an effective strategy and communicate it effectively to the American people and to the world: Hillary Rodham Clinton
With Lieberman about ready to crash and burn in Connecticut ~ Hillary Clinton is beginning to realize that the Democratic progressive revolution is for real and it's time to return to her base before she also tanks in 2008.
She took a giant step in that direction with her methodical and rightful scathing review of Rumsfeld's performance as Defense Secretary in yesterdays Senate hearings before a visibly shaken Rumsfeld ~ who suffered the humiliation of being dressed down in front of his two top generals.
Obviously we are on the wrong course in Iraq and I leave it to the center for American Progress to fill in the sordid details ~ including an apparently delusional Donald Rumsfeld.
We have reached the point in Iraq where we are being openly scorned and laughed at by an increasingly empowered insurgency ~ along with a bewildered world community.
It's time to leave.
Allen L Roland
Staying On The Wrong Course
by Judd Legum, Faiz Shakir, Nico Pitney
Amanda Terkel and Payson Schwin / American Progress Report / August 4, 2006
Yesterday, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld testified about Iraq before the Senate Armed Services Committee, his first public testimony about the war in six months. One thing became abundantly clear: conditions in Iraq have gone from bad to worse. Four months ago, Gen. John Abizaid, the commander of American forces in the Middle East, told a Senate committee, "Iraq remains a long way from civil war." Yesterday, Abizaid, who testified with Rumsfeld, said that the "the sectarian violence is probably is as bad as I’ve seen it" and, unless rampant violence in Baghdad is "stopped," a civil war could be imminent. Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who also accompanied Rumsfeld, added, "I believe we do have the possibility of that devolving to a civil war." Rumsfeld, for his part, pretended he had always allowed for the possibility that -- more than three years after the initial invasion -- there would be rampant sectarian violence and more than 130,000 U.S. troops still in Iraq. Rumsfeld told Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY), "I have never painted a rosy picture. I have been very measured in my words, and " you’d have a dickens of a time trying to find instances where I have been excessively optimistic." Actually, prior to the invasion, Rumsfeld publicly said he "doubt[ed]" the conflict would last "six months." More than 40 months later, we are still bogged down in Iraq and still "staying the course" with a failed strategy.
WHY BUSH WON'T ACKNOWLEDGE THE CIVIL WAR IN IRAQ: "It is now obvious that we are not midwifing democracy in Iraq. We are baby-sitting a civil war," writes New York Times columnist Tom Friedman. "'[S]taying the course' is pointless, and it’s time to start thinking about Plan B — how we might disengage with the least damage possible."
Friedman, who has been a supporter of Bush's Iraq effort, said it is time for the administration to hold a peace conference and announce its intention to leave. "[W]e can’t throw more good lives after good lives," he argued. Friedman's analysis comes on the heels of a leaked British memo, drafted by William Patey, Britain's ambassador to Baghdad, that warned of an emerging civil war. In the memo, Patey wrote to Prime Minister Tony Blair, "The prospect of a low-intensity civil war and a de facto division of Iraq is probably more likely at this stage than a successful and substantial transition to a stable democracy."
Acknowledging the civil war in Iraq would force Bush's hand in changing the course of the war. The administration has indicated that it will not take sides if Iraq enters into a civil war. Another complication for Bush is that Sen. John Warner (R-VA), chairman of the Armed Forces Committee, indicated yesterday that Congress may need to vote on a new Iraq resolution if the civil war grows.
DELUSIONAL RUMSFELD: Last weekend, Newsweek editor Fareed Zakaria warned that Rumsfeld "seems literally in a parallel universe and slightly deranged. If you listen to what he said last week about Iraq, he's living in a different world, not a different country." Yesterday's hearing provided fresh examples of Rumsfeld's delusions. “If we left Iraq prematurely,” he said, “the enemy would tell us to leave Afghanistan and then withdraw from the Middle East. And if we left the Middle East, they’d order us and all those who don’t share their militant ideology to leave what they call the occupied Muslim lands from Spain to the Philippines.”
Echoing the faulty domino theory applied to the Vietnam war, Rumsfeld said America would ultimately be forced “to make a stand nearer home.” The New York Times writes Americans want "some assurance that the administration has a firm grasp on reality and has sensible, achievable goals that could lead to an end to the American involvement in Iraq with as little long-term damage as possible. Instead, Mr. Rumsfeld offered the same old exhortation to stay the course, without the slightest hint of what the course is, other than the rather obvious point that the Iraqis have to learn to run their own country."
USA Today also charred the defense secretary, saying, "Americans deserve a strategy based on the reality of a changing situation, not political rhetoric that costs lives and prolongs an illusion."
Sen. Clinton yesterday called on Rumsfeld to resign, echoing a call previously made by a host of military generals. "The secretary has lost credibility with the Congress and with the people," she said. "It's time for him to step down and be replaced by someone who can develop an effective strategy and communicate it effectively to the American people and to the world."
MEANWHILE, THE BLOODSHED IN IRAQ CONTINUES: Providing fresh images of the anarchic civil war that is playing out in Iraq, "insurgent fighters have killed at least 23 Iraqis, most of them police officers, in a wave of bombings across the country" today. In a one incident, "a suicide car bomber ploughed into a police post protecting a football match in northern Iraq, killing three officers and seven civilians." Yesterday, "a motorcycle bomb in Baghdad killed 12 people. At least 18 other people were killed or found dead across the country. The dead included nine bodies discovered floating in the Tigris River."
The intensifying Lebanon-Israel conflict appears to providing a political impetus for the Iraqi civil war. "More than 100,000 white-clad Shiites marched through Baghdad in a noisy rally in support of Lebanon's Hezbollah militia." Moqtada al-Sadr, who commands the powerful Mehdi Army militia that has engaged heavily in the sectarian strife, appears to be gaining greater popular support. And the U.S. seems to have few options to contain him. One senior coalition official said, "We have to careful that we don't demonize Jaish al-Mehdi [the Mehdi Army], because look at the polls -- Moqtada Sadr himself is an enormously popular figure. Why? Because he is thumbing his nose at the coalition."
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