A Knight in Dragonland

George W. Bush now embraces the concept of a “general time horizon” for troop withdrawal from Iraq.
{SNORT}
Isn’t that the same thing as a timetable? Doesn’t timetable = treason & surrender according to White House propaganda?

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Scott Horton provides us with examples of the “aggressive interrogation techniques” condoned and authorized by the Bush administration. An excellent but disturbing piece about the woman behind the camera at Abu Ghraib in The New Yorker provided many of the details. Here’s a summary:
Enforced nudity. This technique is adopted for purposes of degrading [...]

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Let’s review recent news from Iraq …
The U.S. military suffers its 4000th death.
In the long run, the war costs American taxpayers as much as $3,000,000,000,000 … that’s three trillion dollars, folks.
The “Surge” has turned into a perpetual deployment.
And now the Shi’a cease fire unravels.
Even Petraeus admits that the Iraqi politicians have not used the lull [...]

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Andrew Sullivan has been on a roll lately. Here’s a great analysis of McCain’s Iraq strategy from the Daily Disher.
If McCain is going to give us straight talk – one thing the Bush administration has been completely unable to do – and believes that Iraq should remain a permanently integrated part of a [...]

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From an editorial on Iraq in the New York Times today …
It remains unclear what the Republicans will consider sufficient success to warrant bringing the troops home.  Beyond tough-sounding talk about refusing to surrender, no Republican has ever defined victory in Iraq or given the slightest idea of how to achieve it.
Heh.  Ain’t that the [...]

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The drop in violence has been considerable and is a fantastic achievement by the U.S. but it’s worth reminding ourselves that this “victory” still means 600 civilian deaths a month. That’s roughly two 9/11s a month, when adjusting for population size – but more terrifying because more random. It reduces violence to the levels of [...]

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Deaths of prominent figures often come in threes. When both James Brown and Gerald Ford died within days of each other, I wondered who the third would be.
Well, now I know. I do not wish another good person dead, but I do regret that the above two could not have better company in [...]

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There are some very interesting remarks in this article in the New York Times about mounting tensions in the Horn of Africa. Ethiopian troops are preparing to confront the Islamist forces that have taken control of much of the southern portion of Somalia. The only internationally recognized government in Somalia sits besieged by [...]

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Woe is Richard Perle. Now he’s backtracking from the comments quoted in Vanity Fair and reverts to adoring George Bush. From the National Review Online:
I believe the president is now doing what he can to help the Iraqis get to the point where we can honorably leave. We are on the right path. [...]

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Wow … the hits just keep on coming for President Bush and his team. I almost feel sorry for them … but I don’t. They brought this down on themselves with their supreme incompetence.
First the editors of the Military Times papers call for Rumsfeld’s resignation. Now the neo-con pundits who were the [...]

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The ridiculous overreaction to Senator Kerry’s comments – a botched joke at the President’s expense for which Kerry has apologized repeatedly – indicates that the current administration is beyond dysfunctional. The President says it was never stay the course, and then Keith Olbermann shows a compilation of 29 different times Bush used the phrase [...]

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My views on the War on Terror and the War in Iraq have been attacked quite virulently both here and in other places. Well, here’s some validation of what I’ve been saying from an officer in the 101st Airborne Division returning from Iraq after serving in Baghdad and Samarra.
Money quote:
The future of Samarra, and Iraq [...]

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There is an article in the New York Times regarding the National Intelligence Assessment on the state of global terrorism. The emphasis present throughout this post is my own.

The intelligence estimate, completed in April, is the first formal appraisal of global terrorism by United States intelligence agencies since the Iraq war began, and [...]

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