Saturday, February 11, 2006
U.S. Loses in Iraq
It may just about be over. The towel is being readied to be thrown in, as the U.S. is so far behind on the scorecards and has no chance of delivering a knockout blow that for all intents and purposes it has lost its war in Iraq.
The latest sign that a virtual white flag is lurking next to the red, white, and blue is a new article entitled Intelligence, Policy, and the War in Iraq in the March-April issue of Foreign Affairs, written by Paul R. Pillar, the CIA’s top national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia from 2000 to 2005.
Pillar states "that official intelligence analysis was not relied on in making even the most significant national security decisions, that intelligence was misused publicly to justify decisions already made, that damaging ill will developed between policymakers and intelligence officers, and that the intelligence community's own work was politicized."
Where I come from we call that politicians lying to the public.
He also said that U.S. pre-war intelligence showed: "More likely, war and occupation would boost political Islam and increase sympathy for terrorists' objectives -- and Iraq would become a magnet for extremists from elsewhere in the Middle East."
In other words, they knew that the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq was likely to work against the objectives of what Bush called the “war on terror.”
The article is most significant because of where it appeared. Foreign Affairs is the discussion journal of the Council on Foreign Relations.
These are the big money guys, the top bankers and industrialists, and the politicians and professors who love them. Or, as Foreign Affairs puts it about the CFR, "Its 3,400 members include nearly all past and present Presidents, Secretaries of State, Defense and Treasury, other senior U.S. government officials, renowned scholars, and major leaders of business, media, human rights, and other non-governmental groups."
Or as they say in my old 'hood, the ruling class. And the publication of this article signals that most of these guys are mighty pissed off with Bush.
Bush’s choices are now this: get out of Iraq as cleanly and quickly as possible, or go down in the flames of a Nixon-like scandal fueled by the previously docile mainstream corporate-controlled media. Already storm clouds are gathering over his administration's ignoring of the threat of Hurricane Katrina and now the cover-up of its inaction during this tragedy in what its rubber-stamp media call "red states."
But he does not have much time to try to control the media and events as he thus far has been doing. What that battle will bring is uncertain and possibly dangerous, as are all unstable situations, but it is another fight in which he will be the big underdog.
The latest sign that a virtual white flag is lurking next to the red, white, and blue is a new article entitled Intelligence, Policy, and the War in Iraq in the March-April issue of Foreign Affairs, written by Paul R. Pillar, the CIA’s top national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia from 2000 to 2005.
Pillar states "that official intelligence analysis was not relied on in making even the most significant national security decisions, that intelligence was misused publicly to justify decisions already made, that damaging ill will developed between policymakers and intelligence officers, and that the intelligence community's own work was politicized."
Where I come from we call that politicians lying to the public.
He also said that U.S. pre-war intelligence showed: "More likely, war and occupation would boost political Islam and increase sympathy for terrorists' objectives -- and Iraq would become a magnet for extremists from elsewhere in the Middle East."
In other words, they knew that the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq was likely to work against the objectives of what Bush called the “war on terror.”
The article is most significant because of where it appeared. Foreign Affairs is the discussion journal of the Council on Foreign Relations.
These are the big money guys, the top bankers and industrialists, and the politicians and professors who love them. Or, as Foreign Affairs puts it about the CFR, "Its 3,400 members include nearly all past and present Presidents, Secretaries of State, Defense and Treasury, other senior U.S. government officials, renowned scholars, and major leaders of business, media, human rights, and other non-governmental groups."
Or as they say in my old 'hood, the ruling class. And the publication of this article signals that most of these guys are mighty pissed off with Bush.
Bush’s choices are now this: get out of Iraq as cleanly and quickly as possible, or go down in the flames of a Nixon-like scandal fueled by the previously docile mainstream corporate-controlled media. Already storm clouds are gathering over his administration's ignoring of the threat of Hurricane Katrina and now the cover-up of its inaction during this tragedy in what its rubber-stamp media call "red states."
But he does not have much time to try to control the media and events as he thus far has been doing. What that battle will bring is uncertain and possibly dangerous, as are all unstable situations, but it is another fight in which he will be the big underdog.
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