Of course papa bear of the Halliburton fame wants us to stay longer.  It means more $$$$$, doesn't it?  Of course baby bear, geroge want us to leave.  He has a lot playing on it for his base is now questioning his judgments.  Does this mean that the gop is now in denial or what!!??  bush is now a flamboyant no man in all terms of being.  He played his cards like he saw them and lost.  Cheney on the other hand is not quite ready to fold.  

Some day we will all look back to our history and wonder if we all had lost our ever lovin minds over this play of the most powerful.  I still say it is a team effort for the bush administration.  They will stick it out together..that is their mantra.  

Bush's legacy is that he is such a sucker for power, $$$ and tv time.  Look at his struggle with dick and that is why dick lays low for a time then when he does appear, it is power struggle for them both.  Always has been that way from the get go IMHO! That is why cheny approvd of h imself as VP...;o)

Thanks to Mr Rich. he has a lot on the ball.  He has forward observer abilities that need to be treasured.

Thanks Susan for all that you do for us here..hugs

Those desperate to keep the US forces in Iraq to protect their own skins are fighting back already. I will unadhamedly plug the diary I have just posted about an interview given by Allawi to the Observer.

Do I detect a split between Bush who is trying to find false excuses to pull out early and a camp based around Cheney which is trying to keep control of the country in US hands? Early pull-out and the probable re-examination of all of those untendered contracts would be very bad financial news for US companies including those not unconnected with the VPOTUS

I hope someone will correct me if I'm wrong or otherwise point me in the right direction if my own analysis is off the mark, but I have to say that after reading this LA Times piece, as well as numerous other pieces that have appeared in print that refer to troop withdrawls from Iraq, I have yet to see even one direct remark by any of the key players in the Bush regime that supports the notion advanced in these articles and opinion pieces that they have any intention of actually withdrawing any meaningful number of troops from Iraq at all during this coming year.

Not Cheney nor any of his minions, not Bush or his brain Rove or any of his White House mouthpieces, and not anyone directly speaking from the Pentagon. In fact, Cheney and his neocon pals continue to make statements specifically disparaging the idea of troop withdrawls by emphasizing that an "early withdrawl" will only serve the interests of the so-called terrorists. What these maniacs don't say is that whenever any withdrawl might happen would be too soon for them. They want the conflict to be a perpetual motion machine for the foreseeable future.)

In the LA Times piece linked to in the diary, Gary Schmitt, (chief neocon President of PNAC in addition to his AEI cred), quite deftly emphasizes the neocons official position on maintaining the war at peak capacity while masquerading as the voice of reason. He says, referring to the condition of the Iraqi Army;

"to get a force that is really effective requires a lot more experience than this army is likely to have for years."

Then he goes on to opine;

Schmitt says the administration's new signals are significant but believes that Bush has yet to resolve an internal debate between those aides who are pushing for a withdrawal to relieve domestic political pressure and others who fear that departure would cut short a successful undertaking that will create a large part of Bush's legacy.

Schmitt is telling us that there are no compelling reasons yet present to support the idea of troop withdrawls, at least none that trump the importance of ensuring the Bush legacy. And he is falsely characterizing the arguments in favor of withdrawl as ones based on alleviating political pressure, not thoughtful considerations based on the deaths of our soldiers or the disintegration of our military force structure, or, of course, the idea that it was a mistakefor us to invade in the first place. Schmitt makes it abundantly clear that the neocon position is continue driving the train down this samestupid track at the fastest possible speed, and ultimately I believe this is the path the Bush regime will maintain, maintain the war at the highest intensity possible despite the incredible damage it will do to our own country, never mind the rest of the world.

And for all the talk of consensus being reached in various government circles abnout the need to start ending this war before it destroys our own military or the budget or whatever else, all I can say is; When did the psychopaths running the Bush juggernaut ever give a shit about anyone's consensus?" Truth and reason and even public opinion now mean absolutely nothing to these lunatics.

Denial is our most dangerous adversary.

President Bush will give a major speech Wednesday at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md., in which aides say he is expected to herald the improved readiness of Iraqi troops, which he has identified as the key condition for pulling out U.S. forces...

Fucking politician.
Which is it? 1 brigade or 80 brigades ready like he claimed a couple of months ago?

His ass is on the ropes and he's getting ready to do the same exact thing that his underlings are villifying Murtha and the democrats for.

Green Grass and High Tides Forever

Some choice quotes from Rich's column for the Times Select deprived. Note that he links to the Rolling Stone article about John Rendon, hired to carry out the PR for this war. And Rendon has a lot of experience in selling wars to the American people. Quote from Rendon, . . . he boasted openly of the sweep and importance of his firm's efforts as a for-profit spy. "We've worked in ninety-one countries," he said. "Going all the way back to Panama, we've been involved in every war, with the exception of Somalia."

Now, Frank Rich:

Much more: each day brings slam-dunk evidence that the doomsday threats marshaled by the administration to sell the war weren't, in Cheney-speak, just dishonest and reprehensible but also corrupt and shameless. The more the president and vice president tell us that their mistakes were merely innocent byproducts of the same bad intelligence seen by everyone else in the world, the more we learn that this was not so. The web of half-truths and falsehoods used to sell the war did not happen by accident; it was woven by design and then foisted on the public by a P.R. operation built expressly for that purpose in the White House. The real point of the Bush-Cheney verbal fisticuffs this month, like the earlier campaign to take down Joseph Wilson, is less to smite Democrats than to cover up wrongdoing in the executive branch between 9/11 and shock and awe. . . .

The more we learn about the road to Iraq, the more we realize that it's a losing game to ask what lies the White House told along the way. A simpler question might be: What was not a lie? The situation recalls Mary McCarthy's explanation to Dick Cavett about why she thought Lillian Hellman was a dishonest writer: "Every word she writes is a lie, including 'and' and 'the.' " . . .

But the administration's deliberate efforts to suppress or ignore intelligence that contradicted its Iraq crusade are only part of the prewar story. There were other shadowy stations on the disinformation assembly line. Among them were the Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group, a two-man Pentagon operation specifically created to cherry-pick intelligence for Mr. Cheney's apocalyptic Iraqi scenarios, and the White House Iraq Group (WHIG), in which Karl Rove, Karen Hughes and the Cheney hands Lewis Libby and Mary Matalin, among others, plotted to mainline this propaganda into the veins of the press and public. These murky aspects of the narrative - like the role played by a private P.R. contractor, the Rendon Group, examined by James Bamford in the current Rolling Stone - have yet to be recounted in full. . . .

That's why it's Mr. Cheney's and the president's own words that are being thrown back now - not to rewrite history but to reveal it for the first time to an angry country that has learned the hard way that it can no longer afford to be without the truth.

[bf mine - and btw, Frank, note that you are sharing the same newsprint as Judy - who was inserting the needle into our arms and pressing the plunger when that propaganda was being mainlined . . .]

I just can't pimp the Rolling Stone article enough, imo. If you haven't already read it, please read and bookmark. Share with everyone you can.

To see what is in front of one's nose requires constant struggle. ~ George Orwell

pull out troops, reduce the number, hunker down in strategic locations for a few months just so they can say they pulled out 30-60,000 troops? They could claim the Dems are being too hasty, whereas the Repubs are being 'orderly' and so forth. Why won;t they try to have it both ways and more importantly, what should Dems say and do Now?

"Let your hopes, not your hurts, shape your future."