Bush Speech:
Covering the Day After
Juan Cole:
..There are no Iraqi military units that can and will fight independently against the Sunni guerrillas, so all those statistics he quoted are meaningless.
..The people in Fallujah and Ramadi were not sitting around plotting terrorism three years ago. They had no plans to hit the United States. Terrorism isn't a fixed quantity. By unilaterally invading Iraq and then bollixing it up, Bush and Vines have created enormous amounts of terrorism, which they are now having trouble putting back in the bottle.
..Maybe 8 percent of the fighters in Iraq are foreign jihadis. Of the some 25,000 guerrillas, almost all are Iraqi Sunni Arabs who dislike foreign military occupation of their country...Moreover, many of those jihadis fighting in Iraq wouldn't even be jihadis if they weren't outraged by Bush's invasion and occupation of a Muslim country.
TomDispatch.com:
No administration in memory has been quicker to lie in its own interests and never stop doing so, no matter what.
Arianna Huffington on Bush using 9/11 so many times in his speech, and David Gergen calling it Bush's successful "trump card":
It turns out that when the media abdicate their responsibility to tell it like it is -- like they and we all know it is -- and call a deception a deception, our leaders will take advantage of that and, yes, continue to deceive.
Which brings us back to Bush. So 9/11, which he mentioned, by the way, five times in his speech, is his trump card?
Here’s Wikipedia on what a trump card is:In card games, trumps frequently figure in trick-taking games such as bridge, euchre, and spades. Trumps are cards (usually, all the cards of one particular suit) which rank above non-trump cards...But this is not a trick-taking game. It’s war -- and a matter of life and death. And if your trump card is a universally acknowledged lie, what does that say about the deck you’re playing with?
At Democracy Now:
Fmr. Pentagon Insider LT. COL. KAREN KWIATKOWSKI Blasts Bush's Iraq Speech and Repeated References to 9/11
I was actually curious as to who he was addressing this speech to. I mean, there were so many things in there that just don't match with reality, whether it's the American strategy, why we're in Iraq, which was supposedly why he gave this address, to explain to the American people why this is worth it, and yet he didn't speak about any of those reasons.
Journalist Patrick Cockburn Calls Iraq a "Bloody Mess" One Year After Handover of "Sovereignty"
..in a way, the atrocities committed by Zarqawi has made it much easier for the administration to pretend that no news is good news. In fact, no news out of Iraq means that something so horribly dangerous is going on that nobody can report it.
Mother of Soldier Killed in Iraq: "The Best Way To Honor My Son's Death Would Be To Bring The Troops Home"
Iraqi Blogger Criticizes Western Media For Excluding Iraqi Voices
Rahul Mahajan: "Bush Trots Out Bin Laden to Justify Anything He is Doing"
..in order to bring any kind of clarity to this situation, the United States has to withdraw. If it withdraws and part of the settlement is, in fact, that all Iraqi forces that will negotiate with each other, which includes the mainstream politicians now, it includes most of the resistance, it includes Muqtada al-Sadr, but it does not include Zarqawi and people like that. Then as the U.S. is withdrawing, and these other factions can easily come together and negotiate and agree to deal with the terrorism problem they have. In the absence of a withdrawal, however, just the reverse dynamic happens, and more and more of the resistance factions feel as if Zarqawi is on their side.