Running out the clock?

Our junior Senator here in Rhode Island, Sheldon Whitehouse, had these good words on the Senate floor during July 18 debate:

The President says Iraq is part of a vast “global war on terror” and that remaining mired in a conflict there is critical to our national security. But the war in Iraq has made us less, not more, secure. The way to reverse this trend is to redeploy our troops out of Iraq.

After our country has expended over $450 billion and lost more than 3,600 American lives, according to the unclassified key judgments of the National Intelligence Estimate released yesterday, al-Qaida and other Islamist terrorist groups remain undiminished in their intent to attack the United States and continue to adapt and improve their capabilities.

While the Bush administration wallows in Iraq, al-Qaida has protected sanctuary along the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, again according to the unclassified key judgments of the NIE.

National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell told the Senate Armed Services Committee that he believes a successful attack by al-Qaida would most likely be planned and come out of the group's locations in Pakistan, not Iraq. Al-Qaida, the perpetrators of the September 11 terrorist attacks on the United States, remains a significant threat to our country and our national security, and 4 years of war in Iraq has not changed that fact.

Strangely enough, while most of the country has agreed with this assesment for some time, the MSM has only just begun to accurately represent this as a consensus opinion, in the context of reporting the upcoming GAO report, NIE reports and the like.

So how is Cheney/Bush trying to spin all this? Well, it's hard to know exactly what the new justification for staying the course might be. The administration will surely try to discredit the expert opinions of those in the miltary and elsewhere who are now convinced that the "surge" has not worked. Yet they seem to be drifting off message. For example, in January of this year Bush made his case for a temporary surge in U.S. forces, lasting about one Friedman unit:

A successful strategy for Iraq goes beyond military operations. Ordinary Iraqi citizens must see that military operations are accompanied by visible improvements in their neighborhoods and communities. So America will hold the Iraqi government to the benchmarks it has announced….
The question is whether our new strategy will bring us closer to success. I believe that it will….
victory in Iraq will bring something new in the Arab world -- a functioning democracy that polices its territory, upholds the rule of law, respects fundamental human liberties, and answers to its people. A democratic Iraq will not be perfect.
If we increase our support at this crucial moment, and help the Iraqis break the current cycle of violence, we can hasten the day our troops begin coming home.

So, according to President Bush in January, mere progress in military operations, even the temporary sweeping away of hostile forces from a particular province, or city, is not an end in itself. The "new strategy" can only be judged a success with major political improvements-- the benefits of which are obvious to "ordinary Iraqi citizens."

The Cheney/Bush propaganda machine is of course trying to paint a picture of progress made towards these benchmarks, slower than hoped, but good enough that we might get there after the next Friedman unit. However, despite expensive and slick marketing, the Bushies seem to be falling back to nearly abandoning any serious claim to having achieved success, even on the modest scale advanced by Bush in January.

Listen to the words of White House spokesman Tony Snow at yesterday's briefing: “The real question that people have is: What’s going on in Iraq? Are we making progress? Militarily, is the surge having an impact?” The answer is yes. There’s no question about it.” Maybe these crooks and liars realize that they can no longer obliterate the truth. Now they are reduced to pretending that momentary military advances were all they wanted in the first place.

Now is the time for an anti-war surge here at home. We cannot let yet another Friedman unit go by, with our troops still spinning their wheels in the quagmire of sectarian violence, rampant gangsterism, and civil war.