Iraq & The Month of Lowered Expectations
Well, those wild and crazy folks who are stage managing the Mess in Mesopotamia from the White House may be stoopid, but they sure aren’t dumb, which is why April should be remembered as The Month of Lowered Expectations.
First, the Bush administration signaled that it doesn’t expect the Iraqi government to accomplish anything substantive any time soon (as opposed to not having done so in the past) because President Nouri Al-Maliki doesn’t have the clout to meet U.S.-imposed benchmarks.
Translation: Al-Maliki is more interested in execrable actions like purging senior police officers who go after Shiite death squads than working to unite Iraqis, let alone kissing Bush’s butt since the American gravy train shows no sign of pulling up stakes and leaving town.
Second, the oft-uttered term outcomes has been assigned to the war’s ever growing semantic dustbin, joining such golden oldies as victory and democracy, and sooner or later, benchmarks, too. Replacing outcomes are outputs, which are defined in administration Orwell-speak as favorable activity of any kind.
Translation: Electricity is now available in some Baghdad nabes for five hours a day instead of four.
Third, training up the Iraqi Army is no longer a priority, which is a full-blown retreat from the president’s oft-declared notion that the Americans can only stand down when the Iraqs stand up.
Translation: U.S. troops are stretched so thin that they can no longer be spared for anything but surging. Besides which, the Iraqi Army will never be capable of standing up, so why bother?
Fourth, the Iraqi government is no longer providing civilian casualty figures, while U.S. authorities are no longer counting car bombing victims.
Translation: No news is good news. And the best way to claim that there has been a drop in sectarian violence since the surge began is to eliminate a major category of victims from the body count.
Fifth, it was revealed that the rebuilding of Iraq is literally coming apart. Inspectors have found that in a sampling of eight big projects that the U.S. had declared successes, seven were no longer operating as designed because of plumbing and electrical failures, lack of proper maintenance, apparent looting and expensive equipment that has laid idle.
Translation: Even the good news in Iraq usually masks bad news. But how about that Halliburton share price?
Sixth, the White House is continuing its thus far fruitless search for a “war czar.” In theory, this official would prod administration bigs into carrying out White House orders.
Translation: Bush has totally sucked as commander in chief. Stephen Hadley has totally sucked as national security advisor. Since Donny Rumsfeld is no longer available, they need someone to take the blame. Help!!!
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11 Responses to “Iraq & The Month of Lowered Expectations”
Shaun – Things are going so man-Coulter swimmingly that Riverbend and her family are leaving Iraq. The surge is even better than Operation Together Forward. Maybe Sadr will stage a coup when the Iraqis Paliment takeds their two mounth vacation. Back to a serious note, Riverbend has been there from the start, I wonder if her family will take their generator to continue blogging in Syria or where ever they go.
Speaking of Riverbend, I put up a post at my own blog today that puts her blogging into a much needed perspective.
There is no ability to cleanly link from TMV comments at the moment and the URL will override the sidebars, so just go to my blog and scroll down beyond the Month of Lowered Expectations post.
Did you mean “Robert Hadley” or “Stephen Hadley” in your last paragraph?
Please delete my comment after reading …
Shaun- The kicker came for me when they built a Palestine-style wall in Baghdad, so that the government could achieve reconciliation and strive towards national unity. The Iraq government’s role in all of this has been the plan’s fatal flaw all along. How long will the administration keep up the farce of great progress this time? In January, Rice went on record as saying that the US would give the government 90 days to try to meet its benchmarks, as its last chance. I guess she doesn’t own a calendar.
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Meanwhile, As was reported on this site yesterday, while American troops’ tours are being extended and their families greatly inconvenienced, the Iraqi Parliament is planning a well-deserved 2 month holiday in June, I guess they need a rest from all of that quibbling. We also recently learned that under Maliki’s orders the Iraqi army has continued to purge leaders that have tried to stand up to the Shiite militias. (kinda reminds me of the US atty scandal over here,lol) I’m sure the loyalists were promoted. Maybe they are more like us than we initially realized.
Robert:
it is indeed Stephen. Fixed. Thank you.
Kritter:
It’s worse than that.
The sound you hear is the Democrats capitulating. Bush will veto their spending bill. The Democrats will then give him and General Petraeus political cover by introducing a bill that will put the onus on the Al Maliki government to meet (totally unrealistic) benchmarks. Bush will have succeeded in buying another six months (his declaration that Petraeus will report back on “progress” in the fall).
The six-month mark will come and there will be no progress of consequence to report and Bush will again say that more time is needed . . .
And how many more people will have died.
Shaun-The problem goes back to the Republican base which blindly buys into the victory-defeat rhetoric put out by the right. These folks adamantly believe we cannot leave before the ‘job is done’, well you know the litany.The Dems will have to give in because they can’t muster the votes to override. The 20% who still support this war are in the Republican base. I believe they have given it their best effort despite being labelled as traitors by their own countrymen.
They need to turn off Rush, Sean and Bill’o and take a hard look at Bush’s dismal record of credibility on news about the war. Also, why don’t they stop going on about their meaningless “victory” and realize that the US military does not have it in their power to deliver one- even the war-God Petraeus has spoken thus. It is telling that the WH is running out of candidates to proposition for the plum post of war czar, lol.
Shaun -
To link a long URL –
So, to do a real one: Spiderman 3 Review
Shaun -
Ok, lets try again.
First you put
Then with no quotes The Name of The Post
Then
Well, what now. Every attempt to show the syntax is failing, becuase it is parsing and interpreting the tag.
SO, do this. Google ‘HTML tags”. Select the first entry (http://www.web-source.net/html_codes_chart.htm). Scroll down to the second tag, its name is ‘anchor’. That shows how to use it.
And ALL the tags shown on that page work in the comments section.
Go wild!
AustinRoth:
Thank you for the help, but I’m gonna wait until TMV has made the big move and comment tags are a bit easier to use.