Victory R US_Ed Naha

[Guest guest]

Ed Naha: 'Our victories are killing us'

Friday, September 01,2006

Topic: War & Terrorism

 

 

Ed Naha

 

I love it when a Republican plan comes together...even

when there's no plan and it's not really coming

together. Even by BushCo. standards, this last week

has been a pip.

 

Add up these headlines; " Dozens killed in Iraq; 8 U.S.

troops die, " " Shi'ite militia, Iraqi troops in fierce

clashes, " " Shiite Militia Clashes With Iraqi Troops, "

" Bomb in Baghdad market district kills 24, "

" Insurgents kill 77 in Iraq as bloodshed mounts, "

" Iraq army seen fit in 18 months, bombs kill 50, "

" Iraq strikes peace deal with militia as 155 killed, "

and " Violence in Iraq Kills 60 As Market, Recruits Hit

- U.S. Troops and Shiite Militia Fight in Eastern

Baghdad. " Toss in the fact that 62 American troops

died in August (up from 43 in July), bringing the

total to 2,639, add in 10,000 Iraqis killed in the

last four months and what have you got? PROGRESS!

 

Yes, from Iraq to Afghanistan (where the Taliban is on

the rise, killing dozens in car bombings) to Pakistan

(where two " American spies " were beheaded this week)

to New Orleans, Bush's successes are to die for.

 

On the Iraq front? " We have reduced the amount of

violence, " military spokesman Maj. Gen. William B.

Caldwell told reporters in Baghdad. " We are actually

seeing progress out there. "

 

 

 

" Whether it is shops opening, banks opening,

neighborhood trash being removed, women and children

moving about in their neighborhoods ... Iraqi security

forces are making progress, " he said.

 

Head Iraqi honcho Nouri al-Maliki declared, on CNN,

" We're not in a civil war. Iraq will never be in a

civil war. The violence is in decrease and our

security ability is increasing. " He said that through

an interpreter who, apparently, couldn't translate:

" I'm pissing down my leg. "

 

Ummm. Okay. So, when Iraqi soldiers took on Shiite

militia troops in Diwaniya, last week, with 23 Iraqi

troops killed, some executed after they ran out of

ammo, you had Shiite killing Shiite and the only way

out of it was a " truce. " That's not a civil war? And

it's considered a victory when only 1,000 Iraqis die a

month instead of 3,000? Ayup.

 

Major General William Caldwell presented statistics

showing a 16 percent drop in the daily average of

attacks in Baghdad since Aug. 7, at 21 compared to 25

in the preceding two months.

 

" There are positive things occurring and people are

seeing it, " Caldwell said. " This is not something

that's going to happen overnight. But all the signs

are very positive. "

 

Wow! 21 attacks a day after pouring thousands of U.S.

troops into Baghdad as part of, I'm not kidding about

this, " Operation Together Forward. "

 

I'm pretty sure Bush named that one, personally.

" Operation One Step Forward, Nine Steps Back " and

" Whoopsie! Total Clusterfuck " had already been taken.

 

Our tremendous success in Iraq has led to two things:

America has decided to hire a publicist and is now

fighting World War II ( " The Big One " ) again.

 

U.S. military leaders in Baghdad have put out for bid

for a two-year, $20 million public relations contract

that calls for extensive monitoring of U.S. and Middle

Eastern media in an effort to promote more positive

coverage of news from Iraq. You, know, morning coffee

and scrambled eggs stories like: " Only seventy people

were blown up this morning, instead of a hundred. And

most of them were ugly and old and deserved to die,

anyway. "

 

Plus, there's all the great Republican minds like

Santorum, Bush and Rumsfeld seeing themselves as re-

fighting World War II, just like Ronnie Reagan did (on

the screen, as opposed to in real life).

 

You know Republicans are scrambling when they tune in

to " TV Land " and start taking notes while watching

re-runs of " Combat. "

 

This week, the Smirk-in-Chief had the nads to get up

before veterans and announce: " Victory in Iraq will be

difficult and it will require more sacrifice. The

fighting there can be as fierce as it was at Omaha

Beach or Guadalcanal. " (NOTE: Let's see if he can

point to either site on his spiffy National Guard

map.) He also compared his war on terriers to fighting

Nazis, Fascists and Commies.

 

Bush morons, er, morans, were falling out of the

woodwork this week to jump on the anti-terrorist

bandwagon. Republican Senator Conrad Burns of Montana

declared that terrorists " drive taxi cabs in the

daytime and kill at night. "

 

Okay. The geezer's 71 but managed to actually give us

a reason to take public transport.

 

Pennsylvania's Rick ( " Meet my fetus " ) Santorum, dove

into the " Islamo-fascists = " Tora, Tora, Tora " mode as

well, stating, while buffing his head: " Were the

Japanese imperialists with their mind-set and their

ideology the same as the Nazis? Obviously not. Were

they the same as the fascists in Italy? Obviously not.

But they were still a common enemy, " the Republican

told about 250 people at a Pennsylvania Press Club

luncheon consisting of horseshit on white bread.

 

" We're at war with Islamic fascism, " said Santorum,

the No. 3 Senate Republican. " Afghanistan and Iraq and

southern Lebanon and every country around the world is

a front. "

 

Next up? Watch out mid-West! It's the friggin'

Apaches! Damn those Redskins to Hell!

 

Cheney, this past week, was Cheney, eating raw red

meat and spewing crap at Offutt Air Force Base in

Nebraska, num-numming such sage thoughts as: " In our

own country, we take democratic values seriously -- so

we always have a vigorous debate on the issues. That's

part of the greatness of America; we wouldn't have it

any other way. But there is a difference between

healthy debate and self-defeating pessimism. We have

only two options in Iraq -- victory or defeat. And I

want you to know, as members of the United States

military, that the American people do not support a

policy of retreat or defeat. We want to complete the

mission. We want to get it done right. And we want to

return with honor. " (NOTE: To this five-deferment

cowardly dickweed liar, this is known as " Speech to

Idiots 13-a. " )

 

But it was Donald Rumsfeld who personified the

Repuglican's " retro-psycho " take on whatever the Hell

war we're fighting, when he lost the last marble in

his head before the American Legion Convention in

Utah, and spewed out enough crap to make all the crops

in drought-stricken Texas grow anew. Referring to the

end of World War I, he rasped:

 

" Over the next decades, a sentiment took root that

contended that if only the growing threats that had

begun to emerge in Europe and Asia could be

accommodated, then the carnage and the destruction of

then-recent memory of World War I could be avoided.

 

" It was a time when a certain amount of cynicism and

moral confusion set in among Western democracies. When

those who warned about a coming crisis, the rise of

fascism and Nazism, they were ridiculed or ignored.

Indeed, in the decades before World War II, a great

many argued that the fascist threat was exaggerated or

that it was someone else's problem. Some nations tried

to negotiate a separate peace, even as the enemy made

its deadly ambitions crystal clear. It was, as Winston

Churchill observed, a bit like feeding a crocodile,

hoping it would eat you last.

 

" There was a strange innocence about the world.

Someone recently recalled one U.S. senator's reaction

in September of 1939 upon hearing that Hitler had

invaded Poland to start World War II. He exclaimed:

'Lord, if only I had talked to Hitler, all of this

might have been avoided!'

 

" I recount that history because once again we face

similar challenges in efforts to confront the rising

threat of a new type of fascism. Today -- another

enemy, a different kind of enemy -- has made clear its

intentions with attacks in places like New York and

Washington, D.C., Bali, London, Madrid, Moscow and so

many other places. But some seem not to have learned

history's lessons. "

 

He also rambled: " It's a strange time: When a database

search of America's leading newspapers turns up

literally 10 times as many mentions of one of the

soldiers who has been punished for misconduct -- 10

times more -- than the mentions of Sergeant First

Class Paul Ray Smith, the first recipient of the Medal

of Honor in the Global War on Terror... And it's a

time when Amnesty International refers to the military

facility at Guantanamo Bay -- which holds terrorists

who have vowed to kill Americans and which is arguably

the best run and most scrutinized detention facility

in the history of warfare - 'the gulag of our times.'

It's inexcusable. "

 

He stopped before yelling " Remember the Maine! " and

" Injuns! Get the wagons in a circle! "

 

ONE member of the press actually noticed Rumsfeld's

oratorical diarrhea. Keith Olbermann of " Countdown. "

HE took note. HE responded as, in the old days, DOZENS

of hard-nosed reporters would have. Here's his

complete response.

 

OLBERMANN: " The man who sees absolutes where all other

men see nuances and shades of meaning is either a

prophet or a quack. Donald H. Rumsfeld is not a

prophet. We end the COUNTDOWN where we began, our No.

1 story with a special comment on Mr. Rumsfeld's

remarkable speech to the American Legion yesterday. It

demands the deep analysis and the sober contemplation

of every American, for it did not merely serve to

impugn the morality or intelligence, indeed the

loyalty of the majority of Americans who oppose the

transient occupants of the highest offices in the

land.

 

" Worst still, it credits those same transient

occupants, our employees, with a total omniscience, a

total omniscience which neither common sense nor this

administration's track record, at home or abroad,

suggest they deserve. Dissent and disagreement with

government is the life's blood of human freedom and

not merely because it's the first roadblock against

the kind of tyranny the men Mr. Rumsfeld likes to

think of his troops still fight this very evening in

Iraq. It is also essential, because just every once in

a while, it is right and the power to which it speaks

is wrong.

 

" In a small irony, however, Mr. Rumsfeld speech writer

was adroit in invoking the memory of the appeasement

of the Nazis for, in their time, there was another

government faced with true peril, with a growing evil,

powerful, and remorseless. That government, like Mr.

Rumsfeld's, had a monopoly on all the facts. It, too,

had the secret information. It, alone, had the true

picture of the threat. It. too, dismissed and insulted

its critics in terms like Mr. Rumsfeld's questioning

their intellect and their morality.

 

" That government was England's in the 1930s. It knew

Hitler posed a true threat to Europe, let alone to

England. It knew Germany was not re-arming in

violation of all treaties and accords. It knew that

the hard evidence it had received, which contradicted

its own policies, its own conclusions, its own

omniscience, needed to be dismissed.

 

" The English government of Neville Chamberlain already

knew the truth. Most relevant of all, it knew that its

staunchest critics needed to be marginalized and

isolated. In fact, it portrayed the foremost of them

as a blood-thirsty warmonger who was, if not truly

senile, at best morally or intellectually confused.

That critic's name was Winston Churchill.

 

" Sadly we have no Winston Churchills in evidence among

us this evening. We have only Donald Rumsfelds

demonizing disagreement, the way Neville Chamberlain

demonized Winston Churchill. History and 163 million

pounds of blitzkrieg bombs over England have taught us

that all Mr. Chamberlain had was his certainty and his

own confusion, a confusion that suggested that the

office cannot only make the man, but that the office

can make the facts.

 

" Thus did Mr. Rumsfeld make an apt historical analogy

excepting the fact he has the battery plugged in

backwards. His government - absolute and exclusive in

his knowledge is not the version of one that stood up

to the Nazis - it is the modern version of the

government of Neville Chamberlain.

 

" But back to today's omniscient one. What Mr. Rumsfeld

is confused about is simply this: this is a democracy

still - sometimes just barely - and as such, all

voices count, not just his. Had he or his president

perhaps proven any of their prior claims of

omniscience, about Osama bin Laden's plans five years

ago, about Saddam Hussein's weapons four year, ago,

about Hurricane Katrina's impact one year ago, we all

might be able to swallow hard and except their

omniscience as a bearable, even useful recipe of fact

plus ego.

 

" But to date, this government has proved little

besides its own arrogance and its own hubris. Mr.

Rumsfeld is also personally confused, morally or

intellectually, about his standing in this matter.

From Iraq to Katrina, to flu vaccine shortages to the

entire fog of fear which continues to envelope our

nation, he, Mr. Bush, Mr. Cheney and their cronies

have inadvertently or intentionally profited and

benefited, both personally and politically.

 

" And yet he can stand up in public and question the

morality and the intellect of those of us who dare ask

for just the receipt for the emperor's new clothes.

 

" In what country was Mr. Rumsfeld raised? As a child,

of whose heroism did he read? On what side of the

battle for freedom did he dream one day to fight? With

what country has he confused the United States of

America?

 

" The confusion, we as its citizens must now address,

is stark and forbidding. But variations of it have

faced our forefathers when men like Nixon and McCarthy

and Curtis Lemay have darkened our skies and obscured

our flag.

 

" Note, with hope in your heart, that those earlier

Americans always found their way to the light and we

can, too. The confusion is about whether this

Secretary of Defense and this administration are in

fact now accomplishing what they claim the terrorists

seek, the destruction of our freedoms, the very ones

for which the same veterans Mr. Rumsfeld addressed

yesterday in Salt Lake City so valiantly fought.

 

" And, about Mr. Rumsfeld's other main assertion that

this country faces a new type of fascism, he was

correct to remind us that a government that knew

everything could get everything wrong. So, too, was he

right when he said that, though probably not in the

way he thought he meant. This country faces a new type

of fascism, indeed.

 

" Although I presumptuously use his sign off each night

in feeble tribute, I have utterly no claims to the

words of the exemplary journalist, Edward R. Murrow.

But, never ... could I come close to matching how he

phrased a warning to an earlier generation of us, at a

time when others thought they and they alone knew

everything and branded those who disagreed confused or

immoral.

 

" Thus forgive me for reading Murrow in full.

 

" 'We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty' " he

said in 1954, " 'We must remember always that

accusation is not proof and that conviction depends

upon evidence and due process of law. We will not walk

in fear one of another. We will not be driven by fear

into an age of unreason. If we dig deep in our history

and our doctrine, and we remember that we are not

descended from fearful men, not from men who fear to

write, to speak, to associate and to defend causes

that were, for the moment, unpopular. And so,

goodnight and good luck.' "

 

To the Republicans still fighting World War II? Have a

time, bunkies. Check out " Hogan's Heroes " for a few

gag lines. Maybe you can save a seat in Congress this

fall.

 

Or at least host an old John Wayne flick on American

Movie Classics.

 

To Keith Olbermann? Goodnight and good luck. You are

one of the very few out there fighting the good fight.

 

Stay well and stay sane.

 

We need you.

 

America needs many more of you.

 

Holy cow! Injuns at twelve o' clock high! Fire-arrows!

 

Somebody wake up Rummy!

 

Get the wagons in a circle!

 

Source:

http://mkanejeeves.com/?p=232