http://www.alternet.org/blogs/themix/#41569

Dear Vice President Cheney, please stop lying.
Posted by Evan Derkacz on September 13, 2006 at 7:53 AM.

In business, love and kindergarten it's understood that if you lie, you are a liar. Your credibility is shot on any number of matters both related and unrelated to the lie.

This somewhat intuitive structure breaks down when it comes to our top elected officials and the media. It's one of the larger reasons why people are very very pissed off and seeking changes.

Were Cheney not the VP and Tim Russert not able to guide the information transmitted to a large audience, exchanges like the one they had on Sunday's Meet the Press would merely be comical exercises in hand grenade humor. That is: pull the pin and wait for time to make a mockery of their "reasonable" discussion.

Unfortunately, people are dying. So Jane Harman, Ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, sent a letter to Cheney, asking him to please quit lying. But it was more polite.


Dear Mr. Vice President:

On Sunday's "Meet the Press," you stated "we don't know" whether September 11 hijacker Mohammed Atta ever met with an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague.

Just last Friday, the Senate Intelligence Committee released a report that cites multiple declassified intelligence assessments, some from as early as mid-2002, reporting evidence that the meeting did not occur. In addition, the 9/11 Commission concluded that "[t]he available evidence does not support the original Czech report" of a meeting between Mohammed Atta and an Iraqi officer.

There are also classified assessments on this topic from the Defense Intelligence Agency and the Central Intelligence Agency, dated 20 March 2006 and 27 April 2006, respectively.

The evidence is now public and the facts undisputed that the Prague meeting never happened. There was no provable link between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda prior to 9/11.

I urge you to correct your statement on "Meet the Press" and to be accurate in any future remarks.

Or: quit lying. But why the press buys anything Cheney says is beyond me. Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice....er... won't get fooled again.

In today's Washington Post Bill Kristol and Rich Lowry call for escalation in Iraq:

Supporters of the war, like us, have in the past differed over tactics. But at this urgent pass, there can be no doubt that we need to stop the downward slide in Iraq by securing Baghdad.

Translation: every single thing we've said about Iraq in the past has proven disastrously wrong, but since we've criticized a few details of the occupation, we think our credibility is intact. OK?


There is no mystery as to what can make the crucial difference in the battle of Baghdad: American troops. A few thousand U.S. troops have already been transferred to Baghdad from elsewhere in Iraq. Where more U.S. troops have been deployed, the situation has gotten better. Those neighborhoods intensively patrolled by Americans are safer and more secure.

In the beginning of August, three thousand troops were redeployed from elsewhere in Iraq to beef up the contingent already in Baghdad. The Pentagon claimed that their presence caused a drop in the city's daily tally of violent deaths.

Then, if you recall, we found out they were cooking the books:


Translation: every single thing we've said about Iraq in the past has proven disastrously wrong, but since we've criticized a few details of the occupation, we think our credibility is intact. OK?


There is no mystery as to what can make the crucial difference in the battle of Baghdad: American troops. A few thousand U.S. troops have already been transferred to Baghdad from elsewhere in Iraq. Where more U.S. troops have been deployed, the situation has gotten better. Those neighborhoods intensively patrolled by Americans are safer and more secure.

In the beginning of August, three thousand troops were redeployed from elsewhere in Iraq to beef up the contingent already in Baghdad. The Pentagon claimed that their presence caused a drop in the city's daily tally of violent deaths.

Then, if you recall, we found out they were cooking the books:


The U.S. military did not count people killed by bombs, mortars, rockets or other mass attacks -- including suicide bombings -- when it reported a dramatic drop in the number of murders around Baghdad last month, the U.S. command said Monday.


The decision to include only victims of drive-by shootings and those killed by torture and execution, usually at the hands of death squads, allowed U.S. officials to argue that a security crackdown that began in the capital on Aug. 7 had more than halved the city's murder rate.


But the types of slayings, including suicide bombings, that the U.S. excluded from the category of "murder" were not made explicit at the time…


The figures raise serious questions about the success of the security operation launched by the U.S.-led coalition.

Back to Kristol and Lowry:


The bottom line is this: More U.S. troops in Iraq would improve our chances of winning a decisive battle at a decisive moment. This means the ability to succeed in Iraq is, to some significant degree, within our control. The president should therefore order a substantial surge in overall troop levels in Iraq, with the additional forces focused on securing Baghdad.

This really gets to the nub of the issue. These guys still believe that "success" in Iraq is still possible, when by any reasonable definition of the term that boat sailed long ago. They harbor fantasies about a "decisive battle at a decisive moment" when in fact the occupation faces combatants in every direction -- Sadr's militia, Sunni insurgents, Badr death squads integrated into the nominal government -- it's delusional to think there's a chance of a decisive win over an enemy that can melt away into the crowds when the tanks roll up.

Lowry and Kristol persist in the belief -- born, no doubt, from the thick coating of American exceptionalism that surrounds their cerebral cortexes -- that we are still in control of events in Iraq. I accept the conventional wisdom that had the U.S. sent many, many more troops into Iraq in the first place they could have prevented much of the chaos and looting that followed (although I'm agnostic about the question of whether that would have prevented the insurgency from breaking out and the country sliding into civil war). But that was then and this is now.

In the end, we will leave Iraq without establishing a stable democracy and we will leave it in much worse shape than we found it -- the only question is when that will happen, and how many more casualties we'll take before it does. Sending more troops will only extend the occupation.

There is now no good argument for not sending more troops.

Ah, the song of the armchair warrior. How about this for an argument: "Troops" are also citizens (and sending more would almost certainly include reservists), who are flesh and blood and have families and sending them on long deployments devastates their lives -- even if they don't come home in a flag-draped coffin or missing a limb or with a severe brain injury.

That consideration doesn't even merit a passing sentence for Lowry and Kristol-- it doesn't rise to the level of a "good argument."

More to the point, 20 year-old, quick-on-the-trigger U.S. troops, 90 percent of whom believe they're in Iraq to get revenge against the country for it's involvement in 9/11, are an irritant in Iraq -- they simply fan the flames of the insurgency.


The administration often says that it doesn't want to foster Iraqi dependency. This is a legitimate concern, but it is a second-order and long-term one. Iraq is a young democracy and a weak state facing a vicious insurgency and sectarian violence. The Iraqis are going to be dependent on us for some time. We can worry about weaning Iraq from reliance on our forces after the security crisis in Baghdad has passed.

Iraq is not a democracy -- it has no legitimate government. The political project is lost, and sending more troops won't do anything to change that.

Consider the area where we have the highest concentration of troops, the Western Anbar province, where we got this bit of honest evaluation from Marine intelligence last week:


The chief of intelligence for the Marine Corps in Iraq recently filed an unusual secret report concluding that the prospects for securing that country's western Anbar province are dim and that there is almost nothing the U.S. military can do to improve the political and social situation there, said several military officers and intelligence officials familiar with its contents.[…]


One Army officer summarized it as arguing that in Anbar province, "We haven't been defeated militarily but we have been defeated politically -- and that's where wars are won and lost."

That's true of Anbar, true of Baghdad and true of Iraq as a whole. It's past time to end this debacle.

Joshua Holland is a staff writer at Alternet and a regular contributor to The Gadflyer.

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