If Rove really believes what he said — and we’ve had absolutely no indication from the GOP politburo that he didn’t — then it would appear the Cheney administration has concluded the war is already lost.
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June 24, 2005
WB: Situation Hopeless
Comments
Yep, hat’s why I posted the photoshopped stab in the back which was invented AFTER the Germans lost WW I. To launch such myth, as Rove did, is a declaration of defeat.
Holy shit!
Billmon just Novak’ed Rove!
If Rove is lost, how will we ever keep the media at their liberal task of harassing and breaking America’s conservatives?
Posted by: citizen | Jun 24 2005 21:26 utc | 2
Well done, Billmon. I’d give anything to see one of our good-guy mainstream liberal columnists write that.
Posted by: Phil from New York | Jun 24 2005 21:44 utc | 3
Well done, Billmon. I’d give anything to see one of our good-guy mainstream liberal columnists write that.
Posted by: Phil from New York | Jun 24 2005 21:44 utc | 4
I don’t know about “lost.” They don’t call him “turd-blossom” for nothing.
Nobody really believes here the administration won’t be able to turn this around? All they have to do is impress a majority of Americans (yet again) this War is a struggle for national survival. Just watch.
Posted by: slothrop | Jun 24 2005 22:15 utc | 5
I would have to give Billmon an A plus, plus, plus. Oh gezz, that looks like an Ebay rating. Oh well, great job Billmon.
If you added self discribed progressives what is the total? I know alot of people that don’t consider themselves a liberal that are clearly progressive.
I thought a saw a distinction between what is liberal and progressive the other day. Maybe at Kos.
It is my belief many people are progressive, but liberal has been turned into something many people shun and won’t identify with that word. I think Rove would have to arest at least half the country.
Am I barking up the wrong tree? I don’t believe so.
Posted by: jdp | Jun 24 2005 22:17 utc | 6
And what? Magic up 200,000 extra troops? From where? They need magic to win this war, not better fucking lies.
somewhat puzzling??
wellllll,maybe not all the dems , just the liberals, you know moveon. they just can’t figure out why all the dems who stood by them during there hr of need are getting so upset.
maybe we can go get some therapy and work it out.
Posted by: annie | Jun 24 2005 22:19 utc | 8
Bush today. Basically: no way in bloody hell he’s not going to “stay the course.” It’s not like he’s running for reelection.
Posted by: slothrop | Jun 24 2005 22:40 utc | 9
Yes, Colman, they don’t have the soldiers to do it. Yes, Slothrop, it’s not like Cheney to let this go, and he is certainly sounding as gruff and hallucinatory as ever.
Following on questions b real raised in an earlier thread, I too wonder how to explain the apparent mismatch of activities across the Administration. And perhaps A Swedish Kind has found the explanation: different players within the broad leadership have not all reached the same conclusion and are still each laying track towards their own objectives.
A similar scenario would be that the Administration does have its own internal timetable, setting a date when they will make a decision on which track to follow. Take a few months to see how the cards fall over the summer perhaps. Until then, they are developing all tracks, including a) withdraw/draw down, b) stay the course c) strike at the
next WOT objective Iran.
If recruiting numbers don’t rise (and they won’t), the options will be a draft or start drawdown within a year. And draft won’t come online fast enough, the character and abilities of the Army will change signifcantly, and it will take larger numbers of soldiers to maintain the status quo – even if the insurgency gets no stronger. But some may want to give the draft a try.
Rove probably doesn’t want to waste the political capital on a draft. Too hell with Iraq, nothing to be gained there, let’s see what we can salvage at the end. The volunteer Army doesn’t like a draft either; options change, planning has to be regamed, less reliable forces, etc.
Generals have a hard time giving up on a war once they are engaged; so they ask for more boots, more materiel, and clarify that they can run a holding pattern, but only politics can resolve the insurgency.
Rumsfeld has heard enough from them to know that the Army is faced with falling numbers and morale and cannot funtionally stay in Iraq much longer without recruiting, or a draft, or some deus ex machina event.
There are also individuals outside the Ruling cabal who are genuinely concerned about what catastrophes a U.S. pullout from an anarchical Iraq might precipitate, such as Juan Cole’s nightmare of spreading insurgent violence throughout the Middle East, that could destroy enough oil fields to plunge the world into another Great Depression. (6/23 Stirling Newberry..the Great Oil Price Shock of Gulf War IV)
And how should we understand the report, published on Aljazeera.net, from the former weapons inspector Scott Ritter? He describes a large new U.S. base being constructed in Azerbaijan; and contends that its purpose is to launch a land invasion of Iran. In fact, he says that the U.S. war against Iran is already taking its first small steps, including the CIA utilizing former Baathist- supported MEK.
It is hard to believe, with the twin avalanches of Afghanistan and Iraq threatening, that anyone in the Pentagon truly believes the U.S. could handle a major invasion of Iran any time soon. On the other hand, it seems clear that a very new U.S. base is going in next to Iran’s northern border.
Is this base simply for overseeing all our regional satellites and oil services? Someone in the blogosphere speculates that the U2 that crashed this week in UAE was actually doing surveillance over Iran, not Afghanistan. (Is is possible it drew a little anti-aircraft fire?) Is it safe to dismiss the possiblity of one more great leap for Cheney’s Raiders?
In any case, Bush’s remarks on a timetable are interesting in that he doesn’t actually say there is no timetable. His assertion, essentially, is that we should never announce a timetable. So what can we know?
Reading tea leaves again.
Posted by: small coke | Jun 25 2005 1:28 utc | 10
I fear this is still the wrong stance and assessment.
Rove is simply delivering what the Confederate Republicans have always wanted – to slander and blame their ignorant, Confederate, melodramatic, peeves on their countrymen, in the tradition of John Wilkes Booth quoting Latin like it made him something other than Confederate trash.
The modern Confederate Republicans had assimilated 9.11 to their twisted purposes by the 2002 campaigns – deliberately – and had completed the assimiliation to the exclusion of a real “war on terror” by the Confederate Republican National Convention in 2004.
This is what Confederates always do and always will do and the latest example is nothing new. Nothing else matters to them.
Responding on Rove’s terms – “liberals” – is a losing stance.
The issue is accountability for liars and cheats. All other stances are losers. But some like the game because they think “liberal” will win and then they will have government power to do what they want.
What is at stake is far more important than any liberal vs Confederate Republican Rove and his codepndents’spat. Tactically and strategicaly it is time to fight to forbid all liars and cheats from possessing government and international media power and break their backs. It is as much a winning hand as American had on 9.12. The question is whether anyone can be bothered to fight the fight when they won’t get own pet agenda advanced. Left to their own devices “liberals” will blow it so they can go on playing with Rove.
Posted by: razor | Jun 25 2005 2:57 utc | 11
I see that “the White House” has announced that it will not apologize for Rove’s remarks as Richard Durbin and the Demoplicans were so willing to do. And they’ve made it a point of “honor” not to do so: “Only people who tell untruths need apologize” is their smug stance, unspoken.
So far the MSM and “the people” have gone along with this ridiculous position.
The no-nonsense Democratic response, if there were still a Democratic Party, would be twofold : rational and emotional.
The rational response is to rundown the failure to apprehend Osama bin Laden, the fixation with invading Iraq and its results which are diametrically opposed to its stated goals, the slow motion destruction of the US military, and the conversion of the US of A into its very antithesis via the PATRIOT Act and Guantanamo. This regime has broken every single thing it’s touched since seizing power and a litany of illustrations should be sung unceasingly.
The emotional response is to point out that it is impossible to tell without a thorough investigation whether the present regime knowingly turned a blind eye when it counted most to what developed into the mass murderers of 9/11 in order to have a casus belli for its planned succession of wars in the Middle East.
Back that up by deposing Sibel Edmonds in secret and then dumping her testimony a la the Pentagon Papers.
As well, true emotion ought to be vented at the terrible losses suffered by the real victims of the neocons, the American men and women who have lost their lives and limbs slaking the neocons’ thirst by shedding their very life’s blood in the neocons’ wars.
The neocons’ preparation for war consisted of shipping these, their true victims, off to fight and die in Iraq under false pretenses in furtherance of their pipedreams of a Greater Middle East Co-Prosperity Sphere, while of course they stayed safe at home as war profiteers.
Caught now in the spotlight with their unbounded greed exposed they slander as traitors the very people they have sent to die in Iraq, for though the officer corps may be sympathetic to the regime’s unspoken goals, those who fight and die are ordinary Americans who stand to gain absolutely nothing even if these monstrous plans succeed, and day be day are coming to that hard, very hard realization.
Posted by: John Francis Lee | Jun 25 2005 3:12 utc | 12
small coke, it sounds a little goofy to put it this way, but Bush will only get out of anything or anywhere when it’s too expensive, and given his complete indifference to budgeting of any kind, I doubt that it will ever get too expensive–for him. For whom, then, will it ever get too expensive? How? When? To what good effect? The only hope in my life these days is Howard Dean, for whom this war has been outrageously too expensive for a good three years. He’s pretty good at toting up the costs, and holding the spenders accountable. Harry Reid doesn’t do so badly either. But both of these guys are improvising. They have to, because–and this is really strange–Bush doesn’t have any stakes in this game. Now that he’s won his second term, the whole wide world can go to hell and it doesn’t affect him at all. This, we must never forget, is a man who passed up his own daughter’s appendectomy to catch a golf-game in Florida.
Posted by: alabama | Jun 25 2005 3:20 utc | 13
Roves remarks only remind us that the parasite is winning. Human beings, evolved to be feckless consumers of grunted instructions on how to sharpen sticks and be cautious around red ants, invented powerful languages in which grand fables can be constructed, and then invented writing, printing presses, radios, televisions, films, and the internet to carry these lies. Since the world of lies is far easier to live in than the grim world God made for us, we spin further and further into fantasy, destroying each other and the planet in our walking dreams but feeding and feeding our parasitical imagined worlds. When the archeologists from Alpha Centurai finally inspect the ruins we’ve left behind, they will rummage though the books and recorded press conferences and support the troops decals, and Swift Boat Veterans and O.J. meets Michael Jackson docudramas in awe of the massive remains, as if an earthly scientist dug up a mummified tiny vole still entangled with a 20 foot tick.
Posted by: citizen k | Jun 25 2005 3:24 utc | 14
Right, citizen k, and the cockroaches will outlive the last human being by a good 300 million years. But who the hell cares about cockroaches or archaeologists? We come from a culture–call it Shakespeare’s–where the Roves and Bushes of the world leave a record of ignoble conduct that besmirches their names–the name “Rove,” the name “Bush”–to the end of time. Just look up the name “Hitler” in any phonebook, and how many entries will you find? So shall it be with “Rove” and with “Bush,” if we put our minds to the task (but only as a footnote, since we don’t intend to let them be “important”).
Posted by: alabama | Jun 25 2005 3:33 utc | 15
the Roves and Bushes of the world leave a record of ignoble conduct that besmirches their names–the name “Rove,” the name “Bush”–to the end of time.
Bush himself eloquently described the extent of his concern for his legacy, saying:
“Who cares about History? We’ll all be dead.”
Explains a lot.
Posted by: Night Owl | Jun 25 2005 4:03 utc | 16
Right, Night Owl, and the point to remember is this: we aren’t in the business of teaching Bush anything, because Bush is completely unteachable. The man is damaged goods. Ah, and lest we forget, “the father has eaten sour grapes, and his children’s teeth are set on edge” (or something to that scriptural effect). And here’s a recent story about a New York restaurant, where the Bush twins showed up for a meal, and the maitre d’ said that no tables were currently available. “When will a table be available?” “Not for the next four years”. Henceforth the name “Bush” is good for that sort of thing–nothing more.
Posted by: alabama | Jun 25 2005 4:13 utc | 17
It would only take a brigade of mortarmen and sharpshooters to guard the flight path into Baghdad, with the big C140’s gliding in, one
every hour, filled with more soldiers, civilian
contractors, food, water and building supplies.
Then flying treetop level at 200mph over the
bombed-out villages under suppressive cover,
to a great highwalled Green Zone Village, a
Disney World of unimagined extravagence and
unimaginable building expense, like nothing
ever seen before on earth since Tenochtitlan.
But the Berlin Airlift and the Israeli Wall
have proved beyond all equivocation that the
Rovian plan for Iraq will work quite nicely.
Let the Iraqi civil war rage like a prison
riot outside the walls, all is serene inside,
inside the triple-glazed bullet-proof glass,
all air-conditioned, bottled water and McDees,
the satellite TV, mini-bar, maid service,
hookers, anything you could find in Miami.
The only lynchpin is the dinero. Big Green.
Cut off the money, the whole thing folds like
a house of cards. Like an alley craps game.
The Senate voted 100-0 to extend $82,000M
just until October, and is already looking
at a $42,000M rider on top of that, and we
are sure to be there for another decade.
100-0. No abstentions.
It’s all about dinero. They got yours, and mine.
Don’t forget next Friday to file your 2Q1040!
Speak dinero to power!
Posted by: tante aime | Jun 25 2005 6:53 utc | 18
P.S.
They’re not just working this across the lines of the old Nazi pogrom demonize Jews and Gypsies as terrorists and back-stabbers trick, they’re also setting up Youth Camps and rounding up our kids names, addresses and phones, kidnapping them and dragooning them into the service of Der Fuehrer. They’re working rightist blog-o-sphere, working the video news feeds, and they’re working the domestic psyops, at the same time issuing $100M military base construction contracts, bing, bang, in Afghanistan and Azherbijhan and Uzbeckistan and Kurdistan, with the largest embassy-slash- satellite-spy-operation in the world right there in Iraq, in the Green Zone twilight zone, with Rumsfeld now in complete control over once-CIA assassins and disappearers, unlawful combatants and military spy satellites, without any civilian or legislative oversight or budgetary control.
Ask any military person, and they’ll tell you:
“Shut up, shut up, shut up! Go back to Iran!!”
We might as well be barking at the moon….
Posted by: tante aime | Jun 25 2005 7:12 utc | 19