General Lies

| | Comments (0)

by shep

General Petraeus, just like his civilian rulers in the Bush Administration (I'm shocked), continues to tout progress from The Surge:

"The tribes and the sheiks decided to say no more to Al Qaeda. They were tired of the indiscriminate violence, tired of the Taliban-like ideology and the other practices," he said. "They are Sunni Arabs rising up against a largely Sunni Arab Al Qaeda in Iraq."

I'm not sure what our extra 30,000 troops spread across Iraq has to do with that but, meanwhile, there are good reasons why we should keep 130,000 American soldiers, indefinitely, in a hated occupation in Iraq where 70% of the population says that The Surge has made life more violent and dangerous:

"A rapid withdrawal would result in disintegration of the Iraqi security forces, rapid deterioration of local security initiatives. . . . Al Qaeda in Iraq regaining lost ground. . ."

Obviously, no one has any idea what will happen in Iraq, with or without an American troop withdrawal. So why would anyone state as fact that Al Qaeda, who’s “indiscriminate violence” and “Taliban-like ideology and the other practices," has already been rejected and attacked by much more secular Iraqi Sunnis and which didn’t even exist in Iraq until we invaded and occupied the country, will regain lost ground if we were to withdraw occupying troops?

Your answer can be found here:

"The reason to emphasize al-Qaeda, aides said, is simple. 'People know what that means,' said one senior official who spoke about internal strategy on the condition of anonymity. 'The average person doesn't understand why the Sunnis and Shia don't like each other. They don't know where the Kurds live. . . . And al-Qaeda is something they know. They're the enemy of the United States.'"

Just as Bush and Cheney lied when they said that ”there’s no doubt” that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, anyone telling the American public that they know what will happen if we begin to withdraw troops from Iraq is lying, plain and simple. To lay claim to knowledge of future events which don’t even make sense relative to your own characterizations of what’s happening at the moment can be taken for what it is: pure agenda-driven propaganda.

It’s a damned shame that Bush and the Republicans have so corrupted the relative non-partisanship and credibility of the US military but not really surprising. They’ve done the same with every single element of the US government from the Supreme Court to the Department of Justice when they thought it served their interests. There isn’t an honest bone among them and “fixing the facts around the policy” is all they know.

Leave a comment

Recent Comments

Archives

Two ways to browse:

OR