Yes, Keith Olbermann was right to take umbrage at Bush Two's claim to have sacrificed his golf outings in sympathy with all of the people he's ordered to be killed in Iraq.

However, it still strikes me as a mistake to assume that the man who claims to take his directions straight from God is actually competent to be responsible for the mayhem of the last seven years.  I mean, one reason there's a new candidate on the scene spouting the same lines is because there's a whole army of minions supporting the notion that the United States government has just two functions: to reward the compliant and punish the recalcitrant.

Somebody tells Bush Two what to say and he says it.  It's the same relationship Bill o'Reilly has with his teleprompter.

Theme Park Planned for Washington, Not Baghdad

(reposted from richieville.com)

Richieville News Service– WASHINGTON, D.C.

The Pentagon confirmed today that it had indeed commissioned plans for a $5 billion Iraqi- themed resort but said the site of the proposed development was Washington, D.C., not Baghdad.  

"We said we were going to rebuild Iraq, and that's what we're going to do," said Maj. General George Stanley, commander of the Army Corp of Engineers' theme park division. "We're just not going to rebuild it in Iraq."

For months now, supporters of the war in Iraq have trumpeted America’s apparent success in Iraq’s Anbar Province as a model for counterinsurgency operations.  With major fighting in Fallujah, Ramadi, and Qaim in the past, what had once been the most violent region of Iraq had--by the fall of 2007--become one of the most peaceful areas of the country.

It stayed that way until recently.  When a yet-to-be-named U.S. soldier was killed while on patrol in Anbar on Tuesday, he became the ninth American to die there in the past three and a half weeks.  This is neither random nor insignificant.

This is how the Pentagon envisions the Green Zone of Baghdad after a $5 billion tourist and development scheme.

A plan by US military planners for the "Tigris Woods Golf and Country Club" in the Green Zone in Baghdad, Iraq. Picture: U.S. Army/AP

There's nothing like playing a relaxing 18 holes of golf for U.S. generals and big oil executives after a tough day in oil-rich, occupied Iraq. Or as The Guardian describes it in Luxury hotels and golf: welcome to the Green Zone:

Picture... a tree-lined plaza in Baghdad's International Village, flanked by fashion boutiques, swanky cafes, and shiny glass office towers. Nearby a golf course nestles agreeably, where a chip over the water to the final green is but a prelude to cocktails in the club house and a soothing massage in a luxury hotel... Then, as twilight falls, a pre-prandial stroll, perhaps, amid the cool of the Tigris Riverfront Park, where the peace is broken only by the soulful cries of egrets fishing.

Unbelievable.

In the rush to cover current events, we often forget to go back and really mock the so-called "experts" who’ve said some of the dumber things about the war in Iraq recently.  So I want to take a few minutes this morning to do just that.  Doing so will better enable us to heap scorn on them when they attempt to say similar stupid shit in the future.

But first off, let’s consider the current situation in Iraq:

51 Americans died in Iraq this past month, making April 2008 the deadliest for U.S. troops since last summer--the bloodiest of the war.  This represents a more than 30 percent increase in combat fatalities over March (during the Basra fighting).  However, more telling than that, is the fact that American deaths in Iraq are up 122 percent since December.  

This diary is in response to CNN's National Disgrace.

I cannot tell you how distressed it makes me to hear complaints about deaths going unreported that exclude the majority of those killed in this war, innocent Iraqis. below the fold leads you to links about deaths that have been occurring over the last few hours, the last couple days.

Today, according to VOI (Voices of Iraq, as mainstream iraq news as you are going to find in Iraq)....

Iraq Primary Heats Up
Candidates Seek to Destroy Each Other's Credibility, Each Other
 
Richieville News Service - BAGHDAD (reposted from www.richieville.com)

The Iraq primary election campaign, which had seemed to moderate in recent weeks, has returned to its previous level of rancor, with rival candidates and their supporters throwing accusations at each other along with mortar fire and armor-piercing bullets. Both sides blamed the other for the increasingly negative tone of the contest, which will decide the winner of provincial elections to be held in the Fall.

[Llewellyn] Werner, chairman of C3, a Los Angeles-based holding company for private equity firms, is pouring millions of dollars into developing the Baghdad Zoo and Entertainment Experience, a massive American-style amusement park that will feature a skateboard park, rides, a concert theatre and a museum. It is being designed by the firm that developed Disneyland. "The people need this kind of positive influence. It’s going to have a huge psychological impact," Mr Werner said.

(more after the fold.)

Al Qaeda
Iraq
Al Qaeda in Iraq
Iran
Al Qaeda in Iraq

After months of delay and enormous cost overruns, on Friday Ryan Crocker, US ambassador to Iraq announced that the new US embassy in Baghdad was complete.  This is troubling on two fronts, first, because of what it indicates about our future presence in Iraq.  Second, $736 million is a tremendous amount of money that could have had a serious impact had it been redirected either toward infrastructure spending in Iraq or here at home.

link to photo

link to photo 2

link to photo 3

link to photo 4

When not in court, I usually keep one of the two cable news stations on in the background of the office, just to keep the little finger on the pulse of this place.

Today, General B Petraeus managed to tie up cable news with a marathon performance so substance free, so spin-fully delectable, so adverse fact free that several beverage companies were seen lurking about, trying to capture his ability to remove the slightest hint of caloric impact on the recipient.

Sure, there were some good times, Senators Dodd, Biden, Obama, and even a republican or two. But for the most part, all we learned (with all news to the contrary being diced, sliced, saute'd and broiled into nothingness) was that THE SURGE IS A SUCCESS.

Yep, you can stop reading here. Just to repeat the Big Message, THE SURGE IS A SUCKCESS.

In their testimony before Congress today, General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker began painting a picture of American progress in Iraq.  But even as the United States faces a diminishing threat from Al Qaeda thanks in part to former Sunni insurgents the U.S. has largely co-opted, American forces find themselves increasingly engaged in an intra-sectarian Shiite conflict in which Iran is seemingly backing all sides.  And with General Petraeus calling for an indefinite pause in the drawdown of U.S. troops after July, President Bush's so-called "return on success" has apparently once again been postponed.

Here, then, are five questions for Petraeus and Crocker:

John McCain sees the "real" Baghdad...

In the swirling violence that has now spread across the southern half of Iraq, Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army gang of thugs is now using American-issued Iraqi Army humvees.

I wonder if they'll ever get it.  This political analysis by Michael Cooper and Larry Rohter in tomorrow's NY Times is about the effect of the increasing violence in Iraq on the presidential campaign.  http://www.nytimes.com/...

While I might not agree with their political analysis, it's their basic assumptions about the Iraq war that almost sent part of me (the part containing intelligence) exploding through the roof of our house. Here's the sentence that blew the top of my head off:

The reporters said that the heavy fighting in Basra (they seem to conveniently forget the stuff going on in Baghdad and elsewhere) has

raised anew a host of politically charged questions about whether the current strategy is succeeding, how capable the Iraqis are of defending themselves and what the potential impact would be of any American troop withdrawals.

George W. Bush is suffering from another severe case of premature Iraq elation.  That's the inescapable diagnosis after a week which featured sunny statements from the President even as Baghdad and Basra descended into chaos.

While many of us may have had a bit of schadenfreude over Hillary’s getting caught "misspeaking" about her Tuzla, Bosnia junket in an effort to pad her foreign relations dossier by embellishing it with sniper bullets whizzing overhead, we’d do well to recall McCain’s current anniversaries marking a couple of his own major misspeaking moments beginning a year ago today when he tried to convince the American people that Baghdad’s largest open-air shopping district was "like a normal outdoor market in Indiana in the summertime."

And he would be telling the Gospel truth ... as long as normal outdoor summertime markets in Indiana come fully stocked with more than 100 rifle-ready soldiers in armored Humvees (that’s an entire company), three Blackhawk helicopters and two Apache gunships hovering overhead – and let’s not forget bulletproof vests for all those Hoosier customers

Largely as a result of portions (described in some sources as "splinter groups") of the Mahdi Army engaging in illegal smuggling activities in Basra (which increased, accompanied by higher levels of violence when the UK pulled out), the US and Iraqi armies have launched what is, in essence, a militarized police action against the Shia militia.

[In sourcing this diary I'm using new first-hand reporting from the New York Times and Christian Science Monitor.]