Sen. Joseph Lieberman (I-CT) made an unannounced trip to Iraq today, telling reporters, “what I see here today is progress, significant progress.” Hours later, he was confronted by U.S. soldiers with a very different message: “We don’t feel like we’re making any progress.”

McClatchy reports tonight on Spc. David Williams, who collected questions for Lieberman from 30 other troops.

At the top of his note card was the question he got from nearly every one of his fellow soldiers:

“When are we going to get out of here?”

The rest was a laundry list. When would they have upgraded Humvees that could withstand the armor-penetrating weapons that U.S. officials claim are from Iran? When could they have body armor that was better in hot weather?

Williams missed six months of his girlfriend’s pregnancy when he was given six days’ notice to return to Iraq for his second tour. He also missed his baby boy’s birth. Three weeks ago, he went home and saw his first child.

“He looks just like me,” he said. “I didn’t want to come back. . . . We’re waiting to get blown up.” [...]

Next to him, Spc. Will Hedin, 21, of Chester, Conn., thought about what he was going to say.

“We’re not making any progress,” Hedin said, as he recalled a comrade who was shot by a sniper last week. “It just seems like we drive around and wait to get shot at. … It’s just more troops, more targets.”

In the past two months, the unit has lost two men. In May alone, at least 120 U.S. troops died in Iraq, the bloodiest month in 2007 and the highest number since the battles of Fallujah in 2004.

Spc. Kevin Krasco, 20, of Medford, Mass., and Spc. Kevin Adams, 20, of Moosup, Conn., chimed in with their dismay before turning the conversation to baseball.

“It’s like everything else in this war,” Adams said, referring to Baghdad. “It hasn’t changed.”

Later, Lieberman walked in to see the soldiers “wearing a pair of sunglasses newly purchased from an Iraqi market that the military had taken him to in southeast Baghdad.” In response to their questions about leaving Iraq, Lieberman said it would be a “victory for al-Qaida and a victory for Iran.”

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Yesterday, President Bush announced a new set of economic sanctions on the Sudanese government, pledging to help the victims of the genocide. “I promise this to the people of Darfur. The United States will not avert our eyes from a crisis that challenges the conscience of the world,” he said.

But Bush conviently “averted” his eyes from the role of oil in the Darfur crisis. “The sanctions will do little to stem Sudan’s oil exports, which are the main source of the country’s wealth, analysts said.”

Those companies excluded from the sanctions include China National Petroleum Corp and Gum Arabic Co., one of the world’s largest exporters of an ingredient used in soft drinks and makeup. In creating these loopholes, Bush effectively exonerated the Chinese government, which is investing heavily in Sudan’s oil industry and selling weapons to its army.

Yesterday, U.S. ambassador to Sudan Andrew Natsios offered this explanation for the toothless sanctions:

The purpose of these sanctions is not sanctions. [Their] purpose is to send a message to the Sudanese government to start behaving differently when they deal with their own people.

Watch it:

In the briefing, Natsios claimed sanctions on large oil firms would be “extreme” and even “militant.”

John Prendergast has more at the Enough Project.

The right wing is seething over the widely-circulated video showing Rachel Smith, the U.S. representative in the Miss Universe competition, being booed by an audience in Mexico after she fell during the evening gown competition. A sample of the outrage:

Michelle Malkin: “Yeah, we’re the nativists. Next, they’ll tell us the mob at the Miss Universe pageant was simply ‘doing the booing Americans won’t do.’ Will President Bush speak out against the treatment Miss USA received in Mexico?”

Sweetness & Light: “Let’s face it. Many Mexicans simply seem to hate the US. And yet they insist on coming here in droves. Why is that?”

Freedom Folks: “Neighbors? Unfortunately, and these are the lawn mower borrowing and never returning mooch neighbors that everybody hates to live next to.”

Here’s the video:

It’s a shame that Smith was booed, but we think she’ll manage to overcome this international scandal without (as Malkin suggests) President Bush “speaking out” in her defense. Instead, Bush should take a look at counterproductive U.S. policies that are breeding resentment in Mexico and around the globe. From the latest BBC/PIPA/WorldPublicOpinion poll from January 2007:

Mexican views of the US have remained consistently negative in recent years, with a slight majority (53%) seeing the US as a mostly negative influence in the world. Only 12 percent believe that the US is having a mainly positive influence.

The issue of US handling of the Iraq war earns the highest level of disapproval (80%), followed by a large majority (70%) that disapproves of the treatment of detainees at Guantanamo and other prisons. Two-thirds (67%) disapprove of the US on the issue of global warming… Four in five (80%) in Mexico view the US military presence in the Middle East as a destabilizing force.

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Over the weekend, Fox News pundit Fred Barnes claimed that in September, Gen. David Petraeus will report “great progress and say [Baghdad] is heavily pacified.” That optimistic assessment is not shared, however, by one of Petraeus’ key advisers.

On CBS Evening News last night, Stephen Biddle, an early proponent of the escalation, argued that Bush’s strategy in Iraq is “likelier to fail than succeed at this point.” Biddle assessed that there is “maybe a one in ten” chance the escalation will succeed. “Maybe it’s a one in five longshot, if we play our cards right,” he said. Watch it:

Biddle is right to be cautious about the escalation’s success. Despite a brief lull at the beginning of the surge, sectarian murders in Iraq are on the rise again. Car bombings, chlorine bombs, and the use of children as bombers have all also increased. On Tuesday, May became not only the deadliest month for U.S. troops in 2007, but also the third deadliest month in the entire war.

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Transcript: Read more

On May 30, 2005, Vice President Cheney declared that the insurgency in Iraq was in its “last throes” and predicted “the level of activity that we see today from a military standpoint, I think, will clearly decline.”

Virtually every administration national security official publicly defended his statement. Then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld claimed that “last throes” could be “violent,” and told critics of Cheney’s phrase to “look it up in the dictionary.” Cheney insisted 10 months after his statement that it was “basically accurate” and “reflected reality.” One year later, he again stood by his words.

All the while, violence in Iraq has continued unabated. Since Cheney’s statement two years ago, 1,799 U.S. soldiers have been killed in Iraq, roughly half of all U.S. fatalities. At least 12,378 U.S. soldiers have been wounded.

Watch a compilation of Cheney and the reaction to his remarks (you’ll have to adjust the volume, the video quality is mixed):

Seventeen months later, in October 2006, Cheney finally acknowledged, “I would have expected that the political process we set in motion…would have resulted in a lower level of violence than we’re seeing today. It hasn’t happened yet. I can’t say that we’re over the hump in terms of violence, no.”

But new versions of “last throes” continue to emerge. On May 10, 2007, President Bush said, “The level of sectarian violence is an important indicator of whether or not the strategy that we have implemented is working. Since our operation began, the number of sectarian murders has dropped substantially.” Two weeks later, new figures showed that sectarian murders in the first three weeks of May had already surpassed numbers from January, before the escalation policy was launched.

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