The number of roadside bombs planted in Iraq rose in July to the highest monthly total of the war, offering more evidence that the anti-American insurgency has continued to strengthen despite the killing of the terrorist leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
Along with a sharp increase in sectarian attacks, the number of daily strikes against American and Iraqi security forces has doubled since January. The deadliest means of attack, roadside bombs, made up much of that increase. In July, of 2,625 explosive devices, 1,666 exploded and 959 were discovered before they went off. In January, 1,454 bombs exploded or were found.
The bomb statistics — compiled by American military authorities in Baghdad and made available at the request of The New York Times — are part of a growing body of data and intelligence analysis about the violence in Iraq that has produced somber public assessments from military commanders, administration officials and lawmakers on Capitol Hill.
“The insurgency has gotten worse by almost all measures, with insurgent attacks at historically high levels,” said a senior Defense Department official who agreed to discuss the issue only on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak for attribution. “The insurgency has more public support and is demonstrably more capable in numbers of people active and in its ability to direct violence than at any point in time.”
A separate, classified report by the Defense Intelligence Agency, dated Aug. 3, details worsening security conditions inside the country and describes how Iraq risks sliding toward civil war, according to several officials who have read the document or who have received a briefing on its contents.
George W. Bush has MADE Iraq a central front and recruiting ground for terrorists where it wasn't one before. As long as the U.S. is in Iraq, American and Iraqi defense forces are going to be targeted. There's no guarantee that, starved of fuel, the insurgency will stop once we leave. But there is no doubt that it will never, ever stop as long as we are there.
And George Bush still lives in his bubble.
Dan Froomkin:
The White House made a big to-do about President Bush's meeting Monday with four outside experts on Iraq. Spokesman Tony Snow held the meeting up as proof that the president is interested in -- and consistently exposed to -- different points of view, and even dissent.
But the only thing that meeting demonstrated is that true dissent is still not welcome at the White House, unless you define dissenters as anyone who doesn't agree with the president on absolutely everything.
By all independent accounts, none of the academics who were granted an audience with the president Monday criticized his fundamental approach to Iraq. At most, they suggested minor course corrections.
And none of them told him what he evidently refuses to hear: That it's not working.
I've written a fair amount about the Bush Bubble over the past nearly three years. And it seems to me that, with a tiny handful of exceptions, the bubble is still fully operational.
When it comes to Iraq in particular, Bush has no interest in engaging in genuine dialogue with people who disagree with him -- even though polls suggest those people now represent a large majority of the American public.
He has no interest in actually arguing the merits of his approach, or substantively defending against the increasingly focused critique by congressional Democrats.
Rather, he describes his approach in platitudes, and uses inflated rhetoric to mock the made-up arguments of imaginary opponents. He counts on the skillful use of imagery and human backdrops to deliver his very simple core message -- "I am protecting you" -- without actually making his case.
He hides behind the presidency.
George W. Bush has always been a small, mean man, a spoiled child of privilege who has never in his life been held to account for any of his actions. From drunken brawls to squandering the money of his father's friends, people have been protecting this sociopath from the day he was born. Aside from people like Karl Rove, with his immediate and homoerotic attraction to the man's occasional surface charm, reports have always filtered out of Texas and Washington, including during his father's presidency, of the kind of man this guy was.
And then they gave this small, mean man the keys to the entire nation. And just as he's ruined every business he's ever touched, he has now ruined a once-great country. Most Americans don't know it yet, but the America we live in is but a hollow shell of the country of which George W. Bush took charge on January 20, 2001. It isn't a smoking ruin yet, though Mr. Bush is doing everything he can to turn it into one. But what it took 224 years to build, this guy has destroyed in less than six years.
When George W. Bush was drilling dry holes in Texas and squandering his fathers' friends' money, no one was killed, and those who lost money still achieved the access to his father that was the REAL point of setting up Junior in business. But the consequences to putting a guy like this in charge of the lives of the American people on our shores, and more importantly, American soldiers anywhere in the world, are very real. Those consequences are planeloads of caskets as another generation of American young people comes back home in a box. Those consequences are another generation of baby brides, widowed before they are a quarter-century old, kicked off of military bases with babies to raise alone. Those consequences are thousands of American families racked with the grief of losing a child that no one should ever have to endure. And those consequences are a frightened population looking desperately to a sociopath with no soul as their only source of protection -- a shell of a man who couldn't give a shit about anyone's safety, except to the extent that it makes him feel like something other than the small, mean, worthless, dry drunk meat puppet he knows in his deepest heart he is, and would have to confront, were it not for the Bubble.
Aucun commentaire:
Enregistrer un commentaire