Conservatives afraid of a 48-year old mother

I said recently that the Rovians attack what they fear most. And when your greatest fear is the mother of a combat soldier who wants to ask the president why her son had to die in Iraq, you know you've got some serious PR problems.

As usual, Billmon goes to the heart fof the matter (after a few compalints about he weather that we Texans consider relatively mild for August. Hey, we haven't had a 105 degree day for a long time.)

The real core of the conservative's problem is that Iraq is an utter failure in every respect. Here is Joseph Galloway (the coauthor of "We Were Soldiers; and Young" and the Knight-Ridder military columnist) today describing the situation.

George Casey, the ground commander in Iraq, says we will begin drawing down American forces in Iraq as soon as the dawn of New Year 2006.

Surely it is no coincidence that 2006 will bring us midterm elections for a new Congress, while the polls show the American people beginning to turn against President Bush's war and his management of same. Only 38 percent of those surveyed in an AP-IPSOS poll now say they support the way that the president is managing the war.

So we have a president who continues at every opportunity to say that he -- and we -- will "stay the course" in Iraq, while his political advisers look at the polling numbers and break out in a cold sweat. What to do?

Send out the general to suggest that the draw-down is imminent, even as the Pentagon is announcing that between now and the end of the year we will actually increase the number of American troops on the ground in Iraq to secure the ratification of Iraq's new constitution and election of its new parliament.

Some divisions nearing the end of their latest 12 months in hell will find they are being extended for another month or two or three. Some divisions preparing to rotate back into Iraq for the second or even third time may find their departures moved up correspondingly. The overlap is the buildup.

It amounts to a stealth increase of forces in Iraq, done on the cheap, while simultaneously sending a signal to American voters that a reduction in U.S. forces -- especially all those National Guard and Reserve troops who have borne a heavy and deadly burden in this war and whose families back home are voters -- is just around the corner.

It's enough to make a cynic of Mother Teresa.

The old saw has it that truth is the first casualty of war. In this war, the truth was murdered in cold blood well before the war ever began, and it continues to die the death of a thousand cuts every day.

The president says we are going to stay in Iraq until the mission is actually accomplished, as opposed to the photo-op "mission accomplished" charade staged on that aircraft carrier flight deck when the real war was only just beginning, in May 2003.

Everyone concedes that only the Iraqi people and government can win this war. It isn't ours to win, but it has always been ours to lose.

It can be fairly stated that many of America's 1,800 dead and 14,000 wounded suffered because they were riding in unarmored or lightly armored vehicles that are totally inappropriate to the nature of the war and enemy we are fighting.

This while the heaviest and deadliest divisions in the world's best Army were being ordered to leave most of their best equipment -- the M1A2 Abrams tanks and Bradley Fighting Vehicles -- parked at their home bases in orderly ranks.

This while the highly trained crews of those vehicles were ordered to dismount and become infantry to patrol the most dangerous streets and roads in the world in unarmored Humvees.

We are spending $5 billion a month on this war (much of it siphoned away and sucked up by private contractors), but somehow we can't send our soldiers and Marines to war with the best equipment in the world -- the equipment we already own and know how to use to great effect.

Don't tell me we are going to stay the course. We are on the wrong course, and it only leads deeper into the quicksand.

Tell me how we are going to change course. Tell me how we are going to do everything we can, spend whatever it takes, to give our sons and daughters what they need to fight and survive and prevail even in a war that makes no sense.

Tell me we can at least do that. Tell me that you made some serious mistakes, Mr. President and Mr. Vice President and Mr. Secretary of Defense, and that you are willing to do everything to correct those mistakes.

Tell me this is not Wonderland, Alice.

That is why the conservatives are afraid of a 48-year old mother from Vacaville, CA. She has put a face on the incompetence, lies and greed that have driven the war in Iraq.

If there was ever a case to be made for invading Iraq, this administration did not make it. Instead the lied about some fictious nukes and terrorists under Saddam's supposed control. Then they fucked up the invasion and the occupation, unless you have Haliburton stock, in which case they have provided unprecedented levels of graft and literally saved the company which was about to be destroyed by Asbestos law-suits it took on becuase of Dick Cheney's acquisition of the company liable for those lawsuits.

What we have is a President who failed in every business venture he was ever responsible for and a Vice President who made similare disastrous judgments in business, who were then promoted to managing a major war in the middle east.

And everyone is surprised that Bush/Cheney/Rove have screwed up in Iraq too?