Blogging with Bush

[cal04]

In trying to win support for his escalation in Iraq, President Bush was reduced to quoting two bloggers in Baghdad -- who turned out to be brothers he had met here-- and their postings were more than three weeks old. Has it come to this?


This is how far he, and his argument for continuing the slaughter in Iraq, have fallen: President Bush today was reduced to quoting two anonymous bloggers from Baghdad.

He cited them as evidence that his surge/escalation is working. One problem: their posts were written weeks ago, and re-published in the Wall Street Journal on March 7.

So the bloggers weren't even talking about current conditions in Baghdad. That left it to Rajiv Chandrasekaran, former Baghdad bureau chief of The Washington Post -- and author of the heralded 2006 book "Imperial Life in the Emerald City" -- who appeared on MSNBC's "Countdown" tonight to debunk this idea of a newly-safe Baghdad. "I talk to Iraqis all the time," he said.




By Greg Mitchell
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/columns/pressingissues_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003564636

[frogcycle]

1. claims such as these were debunked last week in Newsweek

http://checkpointbaghdad.talk.newsweek.com/default.asp?item=539953

Posted March 24, 2007 12:50:49 PM
The Missing Returnees

By Rod Nordland

Baghdad, March 24, 2007. The Baghdad Security Plan is going so well that Iraqis displaced by sectarian violence are flocking back to their homes in Baghdad, so a number of officials are telling us. The only problem with that: it's probably not true. General David Petraeus, in an interview with the BBC on March 18, said hundreds and even up to a thousand Iraqis had already returned, although he warned the plan is still in its early stages--a hopeful sign. On March 20, a Pentagon official, Major General Michael Barbero, gave a briefing in Washington during which that statistic morphed into hundreds of Iraqi families, which at a conservative multiplier of six to a family, bumps that number well above a thousand people. Meanwhile, Brig. General Qassim Atta al-Moussawi, the Iraqi spokesman for the Baghdad Security Plan, confidently asserted that 2,000 families had returned.

Good luck finding them all. Tufan Abdu-Wahab, head of the Baghdad section in the Ministry of Migration and Displaced People, said in an interview that only a handful of Iraqi families had returned, and most of those were Shias returning to Shia districts, rather than to formerly mixed communities. Officials have a pretty good handle on this, he said, because the government is offering a bounty of 250,000 dinars (about $192) to each family that returns to its home, and they also pay a small benefit to families who are displaced, so people both fleeing and returning have a big incentive to register. So as of the end of February, 35,000 families--210,000 people approximately--had registered as displaced, he said. Of those, Abdu-Wahab says that only about 1 percent have come back--which would be 350 families in the first month of the security plan--but many of those have only returned to check on their belongings and leave again. Meanwhile, families continue to flee at the rate of 25 a day
-snip -


"If the present situation goes on it will become west Baghad, Sunni, east Baghdad, Shia, like Beirut and its Green Line," said Abdu-Wahab. It will take a lot more than rosy pronunciamentos to make sure the Tigris doesn't end up as Baghdad's own Green Line.

[maddezmom]

2. how much is the WH paying these 2 average Joes?