My favorite line from the movie "Four Weddings and a Funeral" is, "Oh, I think we both know that's a lie." When discussing Bush's latest public proclamation with someone, I'm prone to call up that quote more often than not.Well, in his latest desperate spin on the progress of Iraqi forces to take charge of the campaign against insurgents, Bush assured Naval cadets of just that this past Wednesday. Except we seem to have gotten a conflicting slant on Bush's glowing report of Iraqi troops command and control of a recent operation in Tal Afar.
We've seen the disdain our government holds for independent, unembedded journalists. In fact, all kinds of awful things can and have befallen those reporters who choose to seek truth without our military suggesting where to look.
But the latest refutation of Bush's reality take regarding Iraqi competence in battle comes from a Time Magazine reporter, Michael Ware, who was in the battle of Tal Afar, embedded with U.S. Troops. In Ware's words...
I was in that battle from the very beginning to the very end. I was with Iraqi units right there on the front line as they were battling with al Qaeda. They were not leading. They were being led by the U.S. green beret special forces with them. Green berets who were following an American plan of attack who were advancing with these Iraqi units as and when they were told to do so by the American battle planners. The Iraqis led nothing.
Of course, lying by the Bush administration is not that noteworthy. That is, if you disregard the more than 2,100 dead American troops, many more wounded and disabled and all those Iraqi civilians murdered and maimed in the world's newest emerging Stone Age nation because of Bush lies.
Bush gives us mixed messages. From one side of his mouth we are told we must "stay the course" until the mission is accomplished and victory achieved, while the other side seems to be preparing us for a troop draw down due to emerging competence of Iraqi military. Both appear to be lies.
It's nothing new. Bush and Cheney lied us into the war. They'll lie us out of Iraq. In between we can rest assured the only additional cost will be more lives and the billions of dollars buying this continual carnage.
1 comment:
Lies are an integral part of any war. In Vietnam, where I served as Advisory Team Leader, I found that my enemy casualty reports were multiplied by 10 at each of my higher levels of command My six enemy casualty reports became 60 at District, and 600 at Province level.
One of our mercenaries, who had been Special Forces, told me of leading a mission to assess the damage of our B-52 strikes into the "Iron Triangle". He found only two or three rear guard soldiers, no enemy casualties at all, and that is what he duly reported. Next morning, when he picked up the "Stars and Stripes" back at Saigon, the headline read: "B-52 raid annihilates VC Regiment, 358 enemy KIA".
When he confronted his contact, a major at MACV about that, the response was: "These raids are enormously expensive, and we have to justify them somehow". These false casualty figures are now a part of our history, and many gullible Americans actually believe them.
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