skippy the bush kangaroo: we've already given up

Friday, September 07, 2007

we've already given up

with the dems beginning to cave, and with the multi-millionaire media creating sound bytes to make the dems who aren't caving sound like they are caving, we've already given up any hope that anybody will actually ask the real question about next week's iraq update from gen. petraeus. and that question is, how can you say it's all good when everyone else knows it's all bad?

jurassicpork puts it best:

here’s what will definitely happen when gen. david petraeus testifies before congress next week: he’ll assert that the surge has reduced violence in iraq — as long as you don’t count sunnis killed by sunnis, shiites killed by shiites, iraqis killed by car bombs and people shot in the front of the head.

here’s what i’m afraid will happen: democrats will look at gen. petraeus’s uniform and medals and fall into their usual cringe. they won’t ask hard questions out of fear that someone might accuse them of attacking the military. after the testimony, they’ll desperately try to get republicans to agree to a resolution that politely asks president bush to maybe, possibly, withdraw some troops, if he feels like it.

jurassicpork lays out the proof of the old canard that there are lies, then there are damn lies, then there are statistics:

first, no independent assessment has concluded that violence in iraq is down. on the contrary, estimates based on morgue, hospital and police records suggest that the daily number of civilian deaths is almost twice its average pace from last year. and a recent assessment by the nonpartisan government accountability office found no decline in the average number of daily attacks.

so how can the military be claiming otherwise? apparently, the pentagon has a double super secret formula that it uses to distinguish sectarian killings (bad) from other deaths (not important); according to press reports, all deaths from car bombs are excluded, and one intelligence analyst told the washington post that “if a bullet went through the back of the head, it’s sectarian. if it went through the front, it’s criminal.” so the number of dead is down, as long as you only count certain kinds of dead people.

oh, and by the way: baghdad is undergoing ethnic cleansing, with shiite militias driving sunnis out of much of the city. and guess what? when a sunni enclave is eliminated and the death toll in that district falls because there’s nobody left to kill, that counts as progress by the pentagon’s metric.

it's amazing to us that in spite of the fact that the majority of people in this country want an end to this war, this administration is already contemplating a new one next door.

we don't live in bizarro world. we live in bizarro century.

Labels: Iran, iraq war, middle east, war