What To Believe About Iraq

We know we can’t trust government people and information. So many lies have been told it is impossible to even consider. So, who do we turn to to find out the real story, and how do we know that IS the real story? These are very good questions.

I usually check to see if I can verify the information I get from other sources. Oh, not the ones who do reprints, and there are plenty of those, but like stories about the same issue. And then I try to use the best one of those for my article. It isn’t the best method, but since I’m not in Iraq it is all I have.

General Petraeus is one of those guys in the bush administration who will say what he’s told to say. In this instance, he’s been told to say the surge is working and the Iraqi troops just need more time. But is that the truth? No, it isn’t. Far from being the truth, it is just more fodder for getting our Young men and Women killed. What do they matter so long as bush has his war? This administration should have been impeached years ago. It is simply another sign of how corrupt Washington has become!

Can you imagine looking back on your life and knowing that the world sees you as a liar? Can you imagine having your reputation destroyed because you stood with a despot? I’d hate to be General Petraeus at the end of his days. He will have much to regret, not the least of which will be all the lives he threw away.

From AlterNet I bring you this story about Iraq:

Don’t Betray Us, General: Admit That Iraq Keeps Getting Worse, And That The Surge Failed

By Tom Engelhardt, TheNation.com. Posted April 8, 2008.

Gen. David Petraeus ought to level with the American public about the dire state of affairs in Iraq in his testimony to Congress this week.

They came, they saw, they deserted.

That, in short form, is the story of the recent Iraqi government “offensive” in Basra (and Baghdad). It took a few days, but the headlines on stories out of Iraq (“Can Iraq’s Soldiers Fight?”) now tell a grim tale and the information in them is worse yet. Stephen Farrell and James Glanz of the New York Times estimate that at least 1,000 Iraqi soldiers and policemen, or more than 4% of the force sent into Basra, “abandoned their posts” during the fighting, including “dozens of officers” and “at least two senior field commanders.”

Other pieces offer even more devastating numbers. For instance, Sudarsan Raghavan and Ernesto Londoo of the Washington Post suggest that 30% of government troops had “abandoned the fight before a cease-fire was reached.” Tina Susman of the Los Angeles Times offers 50% as an estimate for police desertions in the midst of battle in Baghdad’s vast Sadr City slum, a stronghold of cleric Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army militia.

In other words, after years of intensive training by American advisors and an investment of $22 billion dollars, US military spokesmen are once again left trying to put the best face on a strategic disaster (from which they were rescued thanks to negotiations between Muqtada al-Sadr and advisors to Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, brokered in Iran by General Qassem Suleimani, a man on the U.S. Treasury Department’s terrorist watch list). Think irony. “From what we understand,” goes the lame American explanation, “the bulk of these [deserters] were from fairly fresh troops who had only just gotten out of basic training and were probably pushed into the fight too soon.”

This week, with surge commander General David Petraeus back from Baghdad’s ever redder, ever more dangerous “Green Zone,” here are a few realities to keep in mind as he testifies before Congress:

1. The situation in Iraq is getting worse: Don’t believe anyone who says otherwise. The surge-ified, “less violent” Iraq the general has presided over so confidently is, in fact, a chaotic, violent tinderbox of city states, proliferating militias armed to the teeth, competing regions armed to the teeth, and competing religious factions armed to the teeth. Worse yet, under Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker, the U.S. has been the great proliferator. It has armed and funded close to 100,000 Sunnis organized into militias reportedly intent on someday destroying “the Iranians” (i.e. the Maliki government). It has also supported Shiite militias (aka the Iraqi army). In Basra, it took sides in a churning Shiite civil war. As Nir Rosen summed matters up in a typically brilliant piece in the Nation, Baghdad today is but a set of “fiefdoms run by warlords and militiamen,” a pattern the rest of the country emulates. “The Bush administration,” he adds, “and the U.S. military have stopped talking of Iraq as a grand project of nation-building, and the U.S. media have dutifully done the same.” Meanwhile, in the little noticed north, an Arab/Kurdish civil war over the oil-rich city of Kirkuk, and possibly Mosul as well, is brewing. This, reports Pepe Escobar of Asia Times, could be explosive. Think nightmare.

You will most definitely have to read the rest of the article from their website. I found their information compelling. Too bad our government thinks it has to be right when in reality it is looking worse than foolish. bush’s reputation and that of his administration precedes him around the globe. I’m glad that I don’t have his reputation.

I also noted the incongruities in the article such as the broker of the peace deal is on our terrorist watch list and from Iran. And yet the bush administration is still pushing the war agenda there too. This administration need to all go through a psych screening to see if they are even mentally stable enough to hold office. It is my belief that they are not capable of rational thought. It is the only logical explanation for the disinformation we are receiving and the Real ID, hidden prison camps inside the USA, Blackwater, etc.

And the bad news just keeps getting worse even though the bush administration says otherwise. By now I wonder if anyone believes that bastard. I also wonder if anyone in his administration has the guts to tell him just how unpopular he is? Grrrrrrrrrrrrr I know a spoiled little rich boy who needs a good spanking. A nice public one!

Next to traitor in the dictionary should be the name george walker bush. And next to that should be the name of dick cheney. Two worthless pieces of humanity who have dragged this nation into a war we cannot win, under policies that are worthless, with a congress undeserving of being called that. I’m not going to ask what can be worse because I don’t think we’ve seen it yet.

~ by justmytruth on April 8, 2008.