It’s a horrible mess. I guess many people know it’s a mess, but to see it spelled out in detail is pretty depressing.
It is beyond me how anyone can vote for Bush for a second term knowing all this.
It’s like going to a surgeon and he does a horrible job and leaves you a total mess, and then, when you want a follow-up surgery you go to the same surgeon, instead of going to a new one “because better the devil you know”. Come on!
And the idiotic thing is that people want to vote for Bush precisely because they think he will do a better job than Kerry on terrorism. How much worse than Iraq can anyone do? Didn’t Bush screw up as President and Commander in Chief? Why give the guy who screwed up any more chances?
Whatsamatta you? Never heard of “on the job” training? This stuff is hard! Really!
What you gotta do is, think of this first term as a “Mulligan”, the President gets a “do-over”. Now that he’s getting the hang of it, he’ll do really swell job!
Are you telling us that what she is saying is new to you? An awful lot of us have known this a long time and predicted much of it two years ago. I don’t know about the other wiseasses in this thread but I’m getting pretty burnt out on bad news from Iraq. The situation is screwed up and I can’t even get it up to make a sick joke about it. To quote Ed Grimley, “We’re as doomed as doomed can be.”
In general, I knew it was a mess, and I knew some details, but she provided some details that I didn’t know. For example, I knew that reconstruction wasn’t progressing well, but, she says
Also, about the Iraqi police and National Guard, she says
So, added to what I already knew, this letter makes the situation look even more grim than I had imagined.
There’s only one Iraq Mulligan per family, so Big George used that. However, Little George could still have one for Iran, N. Korea or Dade County, Florida.
No, you aren’t. I learned a few things too from that e-mail. A lot of people on this board probably do know about such things, though I think it’s a safe bet that voters like my mother, who get their news from NBC/CBS/ABC commercial TV and/or their local newspaper, don’t know. The question is, how do we get this information out there? Clearly the internet is not going to be enough.
Especially when the WSJ has decided that their editorial policy will be to silence their in-house voices who don’t agree with their rah-rah cheerleading for Bush, even in news stories, apparently.
“Fassihi would not write about Iraq for the paper until after the election”, indeed. Og forbid someone on the ground should actually print the truth…
We in the USA, will finally abandon INTERVENTIONISM! Think about it, we should mind our own business! For the past 90 years, we have been so earger to get involved in every fight in the world…where has it gotten us? Lets see:
-Spanish -American War: got us embroiled in Asiatic Affairs, plus we added an intractable problem for ourselves (ownershipof Puerto Rico, protectorate over Cuba)
-WWI: we intervened and saved Allies from defeat. result: embittered Germany goes on to start WWII!
-WWII: we wind up building up former enemies (Germany, Japan)into commercial rivals for ourselves!
-KOREA: lost 36,000 lives, now, 50 years later, we still have an army of occupation in S. Korea For which the korean people hate us)
-VIETNAM: lost >55,000 lives, spent >200$ billion, achieved nothing
-GULF War I: propped up corrupt Kuwait regime, embittered mostof arab world
-ISRAEL:unconditional support for Isareali policy makes enemies in Arab world
-GULF War II: spent >85 billion $, amde enemies of all of remaining Arab world.
Quite a record of succes!
I’d like to understand more about why the WSJ made this decision. According to the PRWatch site that the OP linked to, the reason is presumably that “unauthorized publication of her private correspondence somehow called into question the fairness of her journalism” although a journalism professor expressed surprise on this.
In the past, I have found the WSJ news to be quite good with no obvious bias that I could detect (and they have even broken some negative stories about this administration) even though the editorial page is slightly to the right of Attila the Hun. It actually made for some amusing reading since the news section sometimes seems to directly contradict what they are saying on the editorial page. But, I have always had a respect that the WSJ has managed to maintain this wall between their editorial page and their news reporting.
The point, for me, on this one is that they’re suspending her from Iraq reporting until “after the election”. If her objectivity is questionable now because of the unauthorized publication of her private correspondence, why will it be acceptable after the election? Unless the editorial board itself has decided that things are edgy enough for a Bush win already without their own news division screwing things up for him?