5700 Carrots on a Stick

That’s about what I’d call Bush’s speech tonight.

What kills me is how Bush is completely blowing off the healthy skepticism he heard in Congress on the 10th and 11th regarding the efficacy of his “surge” and is assuming because Petraeus and Crocker announced that the surge is working, well, by golly, it must be working and we can continue apace.

This part is so fucking divorced from reality, it ought to be getting alimony and even child support from it:

Anbar Province is a good example of how our strategy is working. Last year, an intelligence report concluded that Anbar had been lost to Al Qaeda. Some cited this report as evidence that we had failed in Iraq and should cut our losses and pull out. Instead, we kept the pressure on the terrorists. The local people were suffering under the Taliban-like rule of Al Qaeda, and they were sick of it. So they asked us for help.

Didn’t the chucklehead who wrote this speech realize that this talking point was shot down days ago by Frank Rich and others? The Sunni sheiks running the 25 tribes in al Anbar began successfully fighting back against al Qaida back in September, five months before the escalation had even started. Those 4000 troops were sent in for little more than photo ops so Bush could claim credit.

So, sure they asked for help. And we withheld it until Bush saw they were making headway then he rushed in with other peoples’ kids and spouses and had his picture taken with one of the sheiks.

And funny thing about that…

Today, a city where Al Qaeda once planted its flag is beginning to return to normal. Anbar citizens who once feared beheading for talking to an American or Iraqi soldier now come forward to tell us where the terrorists are hiding.

Yeah, sheik Sattar Abu Reesha certainly wasn’t beheaded at his assassination hours before the speech (whose name Bush casually didn’t mention even though a week and a half ago they sure looked like bestest buddies to me). No doubt, Vice President Go Fuck Yourself would construe that, too, as “enormous progress.”

Here’s a newsflash:

One year ago, much of Baghdad was under siege. Schools were closed, markets were shuttered, and sectarian violence was spiraling out of control.

Hm. Well, better late than never, as they say, but still I wonder what took the administration so long to admit to this? We knew about all this, of course, but all we’ve been getting since March 19, 2003 is a ton and a half of sunshine pumped up our asses in Halliburton pipelines. I don’t recall the administration admitting schools being closed. All we were hearing was about the schools being built and “children going to school and playing safely in the streets,” as Bush said a year and a half ago in that other success story named Tal Afar.

Markets shuttered? Nonsense! Lindsey Graham buys rugs at rock-bottom prices every time he goes with his own bestest buddy McCain! And, as Bush said in that same speech in Cleveland, “You see markets opening…”

Sectarian violence? Oh, pshaw! In fact, the NY Times had reported just over a year ago,

“A day after a Pentagon report described spreading sectarian violence and increasingly complex security problems in Iraq, President Bush painted a rosier picture. "Our commanders and diplomats on the ground believe that Iraq has not descended into a civil war," Bush said Saturday in his weekly radio address. "They report that only a small number of Iraqis are engaged in sectarian violence, while the overwhelming majority want peace and a normal life in a unified country.”

So, could we have committed nearly 29,000 more troops in Iraq simply because of a few “bad apples?”

Of course, the Pentagon at the time was warning that the death squads could increase the chance of civil war but what do those armchair generals know, right?

So never let it be said that George Bush never speaks the truth. He gets around to it… eventually. When it suits him and the bad news is a bit too distant to hurt him, anymore…

And if George says that there’s enough progress in Iraq to warrant sending more troops home, then that’s good enough for… Uh oh. Looks like a White House report may queer those warm and fuzzy photo ops when that 8 or 9% of our troops come home for Christmas. Seems only one more benchmark has been met, which is in slowly overturning one of Paul Bremer’s grandest achievements, the one that should’ve earned him a size 56 EEE Timberland boot nestled squarely in his rectum: De-Baathification.

Yeah, seems reversing Paul Bremer’s Presidential Medal of Freedom-winning fuckups has actually become a benchmark in itself, which is in painfully re-admitting some of Saddam’s old cronies back into power since they may or may not have actually committed war crimes.

I’m not going to go into the rest of Bush’s speech because not only is it boilerplate but it’s tarnished boilerplate at that and, as any farm boy can tell you, recycled shit still smells like the same old shit no matter how long it’s been sitting in a compost heap.

But pay heed and make sure you remind your Democratic representatives of this sentence the next time Bush loiters his way into Congress with his hand out: “At the same time, they understand that their success will require U.S. political, economic and security engagement that extends beyond my Presidency.”

He added, “These Iraqi leaders have asked for an enduring relationship with America.” And who would that be, Talibani his Kurdish dick puppet? What about what the people want? Shouldn’t it be about what the people of free, democratic Iraq want instead of a couple of cardboard cutout officials?

Or does Bush (gasp) actually have a different definition of democracy than the rest of us?