It’s not breaking news that, in response to protests and plummeting polls, President Bush and company have launched a frenzied PR campaign to defend the war in Iraq. And it’s equally unsurprising that, to make the case, the president employs the soaring rhetoric of freedom and responsibility, or, as he did last week, praises the sacrifices of American families. But in comments yesterday at California’s North Island Naval Air Station, Bush rolled out a new rationale for why we should stay in Iraq:

If Zarqawi and bin Laden gain control of Iraq, they would create a new training ground for future terrorist attacks; they’d seize oil fields to fund their ambitions; they could recruit more terrorists by claiming an historic victory over the United States and our coalition.

In other words, Bush publicly acknowledged (for the first time, according to the Boston Globe) what many had already feared: he believes we need to stay the course, in part, maintain control of oil supplies in the country.

Points for honesty?

Yesterday’s NYT had a peculiar but fascinating story about the growth of reality television in Iraq. It turns out that while constitutional democracy is proving somewhat difficult to export, this signature facet of American Culture is thriving.

The Times piece focuses on a show called “Materials and Labor,” a home repair program run by the publisher of the respectable Azzaman newspaper, and inspired by the likes of “This Old House” and “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition.” In other words, it’s just like reality television in America! Well, except for that small Iraqi twist:

Since its start, the show has financed the repair of six homes. Two of those were destroyed by car bombs, two during the detonation of munitions by American soldiers, one by American armor and the sixth by an American airstrike.
“¦
["Materials and Labor" writer Majid] Samarraie said each episode, by showing the ravages of war and the callousness of politicians, serves as a critique of the Americans and the Iraqi government.

You know your occupation is going badly when it takes a reality television show to clean up the debris.

Like all analogies, the now clich© comparison between the war in Iraq and the war in Vietnam has its merits and limitations.

On two fronts, it seems to work.

First is the potential impact of declining domestic support for the war as casualties mount without end. President Bush’s astonishing 36 percent job approval rating – lower than Nixon’s at the height of Watergate – can be blamed in large part on the course of the war. Assuming that the military strategy carries on, when will we reach the political breaking point?

Second is the impact of the war on U.S. ground forces. My colleague Larry Korb likes to remind us that Gen. Maxwell Taylor, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff for President Lyndon Johnson, said that while we sent the Army to Vietnam to save Vietnam, we had to withdraw from Vietnam to save the Army. Iraq has had much the same effect, stretching the Army and Marines to their limits through repeated deployments and by unprecedented use of the Guard and Reserves. So much for President Bush’s promise to our armed forces in the 2000 campaign that “help is on the way.” Read more

Sen. Russ Feingold (D-WI) made headlines last week when he announced his support for the United States to set a detailed timetable for withdrawal of American troops from Iraq (a position the majority of Americans support). But this quote that Feingold related on Sunday’s Meet the Press has been virtually ignored:

Let me tell you the conversation I had in the Green Zone [with] one of the top generals in Iraq when I was there with Senator Clinton and Senator McCain. I said, “Off the record, your own view, would it help if we had a timeline to let the world know that we’re not staying here forever?” And this is what he said, verbatim. He said, “Nothing would take the wind out of the sails of the insurgents more than having a timeline in place.”

The media needs to follow up on Feingold’s statement and find out why this general’s advice is being dismissed.

White House spokesperson Trent Duffy was asked today about how President Bush felt about Cindy Sheehan and what plans he had for the American soldiers fighting in Iraq:

Q Does the President feel that over the last couple of days he’s made an effective and convincing case that Cindy Sheehan is misguided in her feelings about the war and what should happen to the troops?

Duffy responded by quoting the 9/11 Report, saying:

Well, first of all, the President has spoken continuously about the way he approaches this war, following September 11th, 2001. On September 14th, 2001, he stood at the National Cathedral and told all of America that this was going to be a very long and difficult war, and that there were going to be some very trying moments; but that because of what happened on 9/11, that we had to view the world in a different way.

The bipartisan 9/11 commission wrote all about this in chapter two. The name of that chapter is called, The Foundation of the New Terrorism. And the bipartisan commission members wrote about the U.S. reaction to terrorist acts overseas in the years leading up to 9/11. They reached a fundamental conclusion: When America takes a single step backwards in the face of terrorism overseas, it brings the terrorists 50 steps closer to our own shores.

That’s true: The second chapter of the 9/11 Commission Report is indeed named “The Foundation of the New Terrorism.” If the White House had read the actual chapter, however, they would have found the report actually shreds any White House attempts to equate Iraq with 9/11.

On page 66, for example, the report flatly states there was “no evidence” of any collaborative relationship between Saddam and 9/11 and no evidence that Iraq had anything to do with al Qaeda in “developing or carrying out any attacks against the United States.”

(For more on what the 9/11 report actually says, here’s an online, bookmarked copy.)

Note to White House: Before you quote reports to back up bogus justifications, it would be wise to actually read them.

President Bush and his followers have now launched a full-scale defense of his policy in Iraq and a full-on assault on his detractors. And yet their weapon of choice is spin, not strategy. Listening to the president speak about Iraq this week, one had the feeling that he must be living in a parallel universe. Is he unwilling to level with the American people about the cold reality that is Iraq today? Or is he unaware of the minefield he has walked the country into?

The truth hurts. More than 60 U.S. troops have died in Iraq since President Bush went on vacation. Iraq’s interim government has twice missed the deadline for presenting a constitution. The current draft of the constitution not only threatens to create an illiberal Shia theocracy that doesn’t respect the rights of women and religious minorities, but also risks intensifying the current undeclared sectarian civil war. And the president’s approval rating has dropped to an all-time low of 36 percent – lower than Richard Nixon’s approval rating at the height of Watergate. Cindy Sheehan is not the only American who thinks that things aren’t going so well in Iraq.

The White House’s solution to its problems? Sending the president to the friendly environs of Utah and Idaho and putting its spinmeister Dan Bartlett on television to simply insist that “we have the right strategy to prevail.”

As a former White House chief of staff, I can say that the most important duty of a senior advisor is not to say “yes, sir,” but to honestly present the facts and the options available to the country. If the president’s advisors can’t confront the truth or don’t have the courage to tell the president the truth, they shouldn’t have taken the job in the first place.

Instead of spending time plotting motorcade routes to avoid Cindy Sheehan protests, the president’s advisors should be spending their time laying out the situation on the ground and the impact the war is having on terrorist networks, regional stability, sectarian conflict within Iraq, our overstretched ground forces, and U.S. security.

The Center for American Progress has drafted a memo that outlines the facts and challenges in Iraq. This is the memo that the White House Iraq Group should – but probably won’t – send the president.

Read it here.

It hasn’t taken John Bolton long to undermine UN reform efforts. Just three weeks after his recess appointment, Bolton is reversing the work of U.S. negotiators and is seeking to “scrap much of a draft plan for comprehensive UN reform just weeks before it is to be adopted at a world summit.”

In a clear effort to throw a wrench in the gears of UN reform, Bolton wants to “launch line-by-line negotiations on the document, starting from scratch.” Another Bolton idea: “replace the current 38-page draft with a punchier three-page version.”

Line-by-line negotiations would be a disaster. American diplomats were deeply involved in the writing of the draft plan to begin with — reopening the debate on these issues would put the reform effort back at square one. Not to mention the effort to replace the draft with a three page document. How in the world do you reform the UN with a three page document?

The fact is you don’t. It seems that Bolton’s real motive is to turn the September world summit into a fiasco by either making sure that nothing is agreed to, or by making sure that what is agreed to is devoid of any significant reform.

Bolton was sent to the UN not to reform it, but to undermine it, and he’s already hard at work.

– Max Bergmann

Yesterday on CBS’s “Early Show,” senior presidential advisor Dan Bartlett took the “opportunity to clarify what President Bush is saying” about the war on terrorism:

BARTLETT: Not only after 9/11 do we have to go after Osama bin Laden and the people who perpetrated the act on 9/11, but also we had to change our policy in the Middle East.

The policies of stability in tolerating dictatorships got us 9/11 in the first place. The status quo has to change.

(CROSSTALK)

SMITH: So you’re talking about Saudi Arabia then?

BARTLETT: Absolutely.

I guess this means that, deep down, President Bush was secretly not tolerating Saudi King Abdullah when they held hands and strolled through the wild flowers together in Crawford.

68 U.S. troops have died in Iraq since President Bush went on the longest presidential vacation in 36 years on August 2nd.

The AP reported on August 2nd that at least 1,806 members of the U.S. military had died since the beginning of the Iraq war in March 2003. As of this morning, at least 1,874 members of the U.S. military have died.

President Bush believes it’s time to “get on with his life,” but U.S. soldiers continue to make the ultimate sacrifice on a daily basis.

Today in a speech before the Veterans of Foreign Wars in Salt Lake City, President Bush drew an analogy between the U.S. forces’ ongoing efforts in Iraq and a previous generation’s struggle in World War II:

From the beaches of Normandy to the snows of Korea, courageous Americans gave their lives so others could live in freedom. Since the morning of September the 11th, we have known that the war on terror would require great sacrifice, as well. [8/22/05]

Previously, Bush has called on the memories of the Revolutionary War, World War I, the Korean War, and even the Civil War to bolster support for the Iraq war effort.

Predictably, Bush has never compared the current conflict to Vietnam. But Senator Chuck Hagel, a decorated veteran of that conflict, suggests that’s the war from which we should be drawing lessons:

“We’re past that stage now because now we are locked into a bogged-down problem not unsimilar, dissimilar to where we were in Vietnam,” Hagel said. “The longer we stay, the more problems we’re going to have.

Read more

Recent reports show an serious uptick in attacks on U.S. forces in Afghanistan. This year is “already the deadliest for American soldiers” since the war was launched in 2001, with sixty-five American casualties in the first nine months. Taliban fighters have also killed “more than 800 Afghan officials, police, troops, aid workers and civilians since March,” and the violence is “likely to intensify” before September’s elections.

The reports clearly demonstrate that Afghanistan is not the open-and-shut “success story” that conservatives often describe. Just as important, they show that the CIA was correct when it predicted earlier this year that “Iraq may prove to be an even more effective training ground for Islamic extremists than Afghanistan was in Al Qaeda’s early days, because it is serving as a real-world laboratory for urban combat.”

Consider this portion of the New York Times report this morning:

More money is coming in, probably from Arab countries, and a unit of Qaeda fighters has returned to [Afghanistan] from Iraq to teach local fighters an unspecified “new tactic they learned in Iraq,” one security official said, explaining that he could not be identified because of the clandestine nature of his work.

Likewise, Knight-Ridder reported on 8/17/05:

Borrowing tactics from their counterparts in Iraq, [Taliban fighters] beheaded alleged informers and staged two suicide bombings, a form of terrorism rarely seen in Afghanistan.

In other words, President Bush’s defense strategy has not only turned ‘New Iraq’ into the old Afghanstan, but is also on its way to turning the ‘New Afghanistan’ into a second, violence-torn ‘New Iraq.’

“The advance of women’s rights and the advance of liberty are ultimately inseparable.”
– President Bush, 3/14/04

“President Bush has made the advance of women’s human rights a global policy priority. … We all have an obligation to speak for women who are denied their rights to learn, to vote or to live in freedom.”
– First Lady Laura Bush, 3/8/05

“The commitment of this administration to women’s rights in Iraq is unshakable.”
– Labor Secretary Elaine Chao, 3/9/04

“There can be no compromise on the principle that Iraqis can each have an equal role in the building of their country’s future without regard to their ethnic or religious background or gender.”
– U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad, 8/8/05

VERSUS

According to Kurdish and Sunni negotiators, the US ambassador, Zalmay Khalilzad, proposed that Islam be named “a primary source” and supported a wording which would give clerics authority in civil matters such as divorce, marriage and inheritance.

If approved, critics say that the proposals would erode women’s rights and other freedoms enshrined under existing laws. … Dozens of women gathered in central Baghdad yesterday to protest against what the organiser, Yanar Mohammad, feared would be a “fascist, nationalist and Islamist” constitution. “We are fighting to avoid becoming second class citizens,” she said.

Yesterday on Meet the Press, Sen. Trent Lott (R-MS) said that President Bush started lobbying for an invasion of Iraq long before significant diplomatic efforts began:

SEN. LOTT: Well, beginning in August that year and into the fall–in fact, beginning not too long after 9/11–as we had leadership meetings at breakfast with the president, he would go around the world and talk about what was going on, where the threats were, where the dangers were, and even in private discussions, it was clear to me that he thought Iraq was a destabilizing force, was a danger and a growing danger, and that we were going to have to deal with that problem.

DAVID GREGORY: He has described going to war in Iraq as the last resort that was a war of necessity. Are you suggesting here that, in fact, before much of the diplomacy had begun, that the president thought or believed in his mind that war was an inevitability?

[Snip]

SEN. LOTT: …I–but the short answer to your question–I think that he felt like we were going to have to deal with the problem before some of the diplomatic efforts occurred, and I don’t mean that critically. But it was my impression.

As David Gregory notes, this runs completely counter to how President Bush describes the decision to invade Iraq: Read more

This morning on ABC’s This Week, Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-NE) explains the problems with Bush’s policies in Iraq:

Stay the course is not a policy. Part of the problem that we have as Henry Kissinger pointed out here in the last few days in an op-ed in The Washington Post is we have no measurement for progress, for success.

And so I think by any standard when you analyze two and a half years in Iraq where we have put in over a third of a trillion dollars, where we have lost over 1,900

Americans, over 14,000 wounded. Electricity production down, oil production down.

Any measurement, any standard you apply to this, we’re not winning.

Hagel also explains why we need a fundamental shift in our policy:

The reason that I don’t think more troops is the answer now is we’re past that stage now because now we are locked into a bogged down problem, not unsimilar, dissimilar to where we were in Vietnam.

The longer we stay, the more problems we’re going to have, the more occupying force dynamics flow into this, the more influence of the outside people, as well as the inside people are going to hurt this country.

Looks like the wheels are coming off.

UPDATE: Crooks and Liars has the video.

Yesterday, Vice President Dick Cheney was on hand at the National Convention of the Military Order of the Purple Heart to talk about Iraq. The speech was full of the usual pabulum and dishonesty about the conflict, and there were even some bad jokes (“at ease, please,” he jestingly opens his remarks)””strange, coming from a serial draft-dodger.

But Cheney wasn’t there to talk up an imminent victory, or to discuss the last throes of the insurgency. He was there to claim that we have clarity: “Our mission in Iraq is clear,” Cheney tells the crowd. And again, in closing: “We will not relent in this effort, because we have the clearest possible understanding of what is at stake.”

Clarity?

Last Month, General George Casey, commander of the Multi-National Force in Iraq, told reporters that large-scale troop withdrawals could start as early as next spring. Then, just last Monday, we learned that a troop increase can be expected in the short term. Three days later, President Bush said no decision had yet been made on whether troop levels would increase or decrease. Just yesterday, we learn that 700 new troops will be dispatched to Iraq.

Ah, very clear. Everyone on the same page?

American Progress fellow Larry Korb recently published an op-ed that drew a response this past weekend from Pentagon spokesman Larry DiRita.

Korb had argued that the Bush administration’s repeated failure to heed the advice of top military commanders about troop levels in Iraq had not only undercut the mission, but severely weakened our military. “Gen. Maxwell Taylor, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff for President Lyndon Johnson, said that while we sent the Army to Vietnam to save Vietnam, we had to withdraw to save the Army,” Korb wrote. “This is where we are today.”

DiRita was incredulous:

Korb is looking for something that doesn’t exist: a difference in views between civilian leaders and military commanders regarding force levels in Iraq. The President, Secretary (Donald) Rumsfeld and military commanders have all consistently said “” and believed “” that the conflict against extremists in Iraq will ultimately have to be fought and won by Iraqis.

One doesn’t have to look far to discredit DiRita’s argument — examples of U.S. forces on the ground disagreeing with current troop levels are numerous. Read more

On March 13, 2002, President Bush warned Iraq the U.S. was prepared to go to war:

President Bush declared yesterday that “all options are on the table” — including nuclear weapons — to confront states that threaten to use weapons of mass destruction, as he issued his strongest warning to date that his administration plans to take on Iraq’s Saddam Hussein.

Friday, he dusted off the same warning, this time for Iran:

In a stern warning to Iran, President Bush said “all options are on the table” if the Iranians refuse to comply with international demands to halt their nuclear program, pointedly noting that he has already used force to protect U.S. security.

As they say, it’s deja vu, all over again.

This weekend, current U.S. Ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, will appear on numerous Sunday shows: NBC’s Meet the Press, ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos, Fox News Sunday, and CNN Late Edition.

In February 1989, Khalilzad penned an op-ed in the Washington Post explaining “How the Good Guys Won In Afghanistan.” His argument was simple: the Soviets underestimated the level of insurgent resistance they would face. Through persistence, the insurgency ultimately drove the Soviets out of Afghanistan.

Here’s what he wrote:

The key to the victory was that we came to believe — Afghans and Americans — that the Soviets could be stopped. Once we gained that confidence, everything else was possible. But it didn’t start out that way. When the Soviets invaded in 1979, they felt confident that they would prevail. And conventional wisdom in the West, too, assumed that Afghanistan could not withstand Soviet power.

The Soviets had expected a quick victory. When it eluded them, they changed tactics. Initially, they employed large formations in the countryside against the mujaheddin. The Afghans refused to fight a conventional war and instead adopted hit-and-run tactics — using to the maximum their familiarity with the local terrain.

When Mikhail Gorbachev assumed power in March 1985, he inherited an Afghanistan that had become a Soviet quagmire.

Increasingly after 1986, Gorbachev seemed to recognize that the Soviets did not have a war-winning strategy. The war was also becoming unpopular at home and even within the Soviet armed forces By the end of 1986, Gorbachev began to seek terms for a Soviet withdrawal. The war was a drain on the Soviet economy. ["How the Good Guys Won In Aghanistan," Zalmay Khalilzad, Washington Post, 2/12/89]

The question for Khalilzad: are there any lessons for our current struggle in Iraq that we can glean from the Soviet experience in Afghanistan?

Apparently President Bush isn’t the only one in the White House who just skims the headlines.

Monday:

Armed men entered Baghdad’s municipal building during a blinding dust storm on Monday, deposed the city’s mayor and installed a member of Iraq’s most powerful Shiite militia. …

“This is the new Iraq,” said [Alaa al-Tamimi, the deposed mayor], a secular engineer with no party affiliation. “They use force to achieve their goal.” …

The man the group installed, Hussein al-Tahaan, is a member of the Badr Organization, the armed militia of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq [the political party of Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari].

Wednesday:

Q: Trent, the mayor of Baghdad says he’s been deposed by armed gunmen and replaced by a member of a Shiite militia. Is the President aware of that? Is it a point of concern for the administration, in terms of how Baghdad is being run?

MR. DUFFY: I don’t have anything for you on that, Bill. I can check into it.

Vice President Dick Cheney recently traveled to Saudi Arabia to pay his respects to the late King Fahd and the newly crowned King Abdullah. Apparently, the administration has more respect for the Saudi dictatorship than U.S. law.

Last September, after years of foot dragging, the Bush administration designated Saudi Arabia a “country of particular concern” for “severe religious freedom violations” pursuant to International Religious Freedom Act of 1998 (IRFA). The designation was based “not only on the Saudi government’s violations of religious freedom within its own borders, but also based on reports of its propagation and export of an ideology of religious hate and intolerance throughout the world.”

Under the IRFA, the administration is required to “take action to oppose religious freedom violations” in Saudi Arabia within 90 days of making the designation. The administration can choose from among 15 actions, ranging from a condemnation to significant economic sanctions.

But, more than 5 months after the 90 day deadline expired, the Bush administration has done nothing.

Religious fundamentalism and intolerance motivates much of the world’s terrorism. Why won’t the Bush administration treat the problems in Saudi Arabia seriously?