3,003 ... and counting

[dweller]

The charade is exposed: The Iraq war was all about oil, after all. And the sorrow continues.

BY HAL CROWTHER

November 2006 was a month that historians will study in minute detail, day by day and headline by headline, when they attempt to reconstruct the iron chain of misery the United States has been forging for itself since September 2001—though some will maintain that November 2000, with its still-disputed presidential election, was the actual beginning of our decline and fall. If these are historians of a distant future and the nation has survived, even regained some of the power and prestige it squandered in this most humiliating of all its military misadventures, their conclusions will be of great but essentially academic interest. If the colossus of the 20th century has self-destructed and vanished from the playing field of history, their chronicles may take on the tragic grandeur of Homer, Herodotus and Gibbon. But the truest thing about the lessons of history is that they are never learned.

Either way, this November just behind us was the first month since 2001 when a careful observer could glimpse any excuse for optimism. And not so much for the midterm elections of Nov. 7, when President Bush lost his enabling majorities in Congress, but for the month's last day—historic Nov. 30—when the congenitally self-assured Mr. Bush stood before us buck naked, stripped of his last pretenses and his last hope that he could salvage much of anything from the smoldering ruins of "Operation Iraqi Freedom." The hateful smirk remained, but with a rueful little twist to it, and the swagger was gone. Gone with the president's majorities was Rumsfeld, his warlord and role model, whose martial body language had sustained the White House in its last comforting spasms of make-believe. (But who had issued, on the eve of the election and his own forced resignation, a classified memo conceding that he and Bush had failed in Iraq.) Gone, too—shattered by the oft-maligned Howard Dean—was the sinister prestige of the presidential hand-holder and vote-counter, the cutthroat Karl Rove, whose universal prescriptions for misdirection, intimidation, subterfuge and denial had always served to keep the truth at bay.

On Nov. 29, the bipartisan Iraq Study Group, co-chaired by the Bush family fixer James Baker, revealed that its final report would recommend a phased pullout of combat troops from Iraq; most major media authorized their reporters to use the long-verboten "civil war" to describe intramural jihad between Sunnis and Shiites; Senate Democrats called for a special envoy to address the stupefying carnage in Baghdad; and a White House memo disparaging and undermining Iraq's Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, coincided with the resignation from Maliki's government of 36 officials loyal to Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, a crucial bloc that withdrew cursing President Bush as "the world's biggest evil." An elaborately orchestrated summit dinner for Bush and Maliki in Amman, Jordan, was canceled at the eleventh hour. On the morning of Nov. 30, there was no rational creature on this tortured planet who could soberly doubt that the jig was up for Incurious George.

In Baghdad, the daily massacre occurred on schedule. Though he crawled up from the wreckage in Amman and flew off to Latvia with a final muted battle cry, "I'm not going to pull our troops off the battlefield before our mission is complete," no one paid the slightest attention. Back in Washington, "mission" was being redefined hourly, in a rapidly diminishing spiral. Then came Nov. 30 and the breakfast farewell, most likely the last meeting in this life for Bush and Maliki. There they stood, each fiercely embarrassed by the other and committed to mutual repudiation, loathing lurking just beneath their diplomatic manners. The exhausted puppeteer and his soon-to-be-discarded puppet. What's sadder than the end of the puppet show, with the audience long gone and the sets and costumes folded away, and every poor trick of the trade exposed to view?


http://www.indyweek.com/gyrobase/Content?oid=oid%3A42122

dp

[partylessinOhio]

1. I wrote these numbers down last evening during Lou Dobbs:

3006 Dead
22,565 Wounded

All in Iraq

Impeachment is mandated.
Stop the escalation of the BushWarOfLies.
Bring our troops home.