Gen. Reid Charts New Direction
A year ago, Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi and other high-profile Democrats were telling President Bush to listen to his generals, implying that President Bush wasn’t doing that. Now that Gen. Petraeus has delivered a report that is at odds with their agenda, ‘Gen.’ Reid has decided that that isn’t the right thing to do. Here’s what he said:
In his first comments about the Democrats’ strategy for changing the course in Iraq since President Bush’s address Thursday, Reid said the only troops left in Iraq by Spring should be for counter-terrorism efforts and to protect American resources.
“Our new amendment we will offer next week will not include training Iraqis,” Reid told the Reno Gazette-Journal. “We have spent billions of dollars training Iraqis.” and they should be trained up pretty good now.”
In other words, Sen. Reid is telling Americans that they should listen to Democrats, not Gen. Petraeus. It’s clear that Gen. Petraeus sees a different mission for our troops in Iraq than does armchair Gen. Reid. I don’t think that Harry Reid actually is for this policy. I’m convinced that he’s pushing this policy because that’s what the puppeteers at MoveOn.org are telling him is his agenda.
The more I think of it, the more I realize that calling MoveOn.org a bunch of puppeteers isn’t right. It’s more accurate to call them ventriloquists; whatever they say, Reid, Pelosi and Murtha repeat.
If you think about it, Reid’s policy initiative is a disaster. Why wouldn’t we be willing to train Iraqi forces? There isn’t any doubt that without further training, Iraq won’t be able to defend itself. If Iraq isn’t able to defend itself, it won’t take long before Iran, Hezbollah and other terrorist groups start a regionwide conflict.
Here’s some worthwhile exchanges he had with Reno Gazette-Journal reporter Anjeanette Damon:
Q: You disagree with the assessment President Bush and Gen. Petraeus put forth this week. How do you think the course should be changed?A: All you have to do is look at what they said. Nothing has changed since the surge started. Today, now we learn that 1 million Iraqis have been killed since the war started. A million. That’s pretty hard to comprehend: 3,800 Americans, 30,000 wounded. More than 2,000 double amputees.
The president, of course boasts about how well things are going.
Notice how Reid didn’t answer her question about how the “course should be changed”? He didn’t get to that until after he made some outlandish, inaccurate statements about President Bush and the war in Iraq. The notion that there’s been a million Iraqis killed since the start of the war is absurd. Here’s what the Iraqi Health Minister said a year ago:
In November 2006 Iraq’s Health Minister Ali al-Shemari said that since the March 2003 U.S.-led invasion between 100,000 and 150,000 people have been killed.
Either Sen. Reid wants us to believe that 850,000 to 900,000 Iraqis have died this year or that the Iraqi Health Minister is way off with his figures. Based on Sen. Reid’s history, I wouldn’t buy into that if my life depended on it.
Q: How should the course be changed?A: We should do what my amendment said we should do: start redeploying troops immediately and have all the American troops out of Iraq by the first of April, except those who are involved in counter-terrorism.
The original amendment said protecting our assets and it also said training Iraqis. Our new amendment we will offer next week will not include training Iraqis. We have spent billions of dollars training Iraqis and they should be trained up pretty good now.
There’s a circular quality to Reid’s statements. He’s repeatedly said that we need a change in course, that Iraqis aren’t stepping up and doing their fair share of the fighting. Now he’s saying that the Iraqi troops are proficient. After all, if they’re “trained up pretty good”, they’ve got to be proficient, right?
I don’t think that Harry Reid realizes how big of a credibility problem he has. If he did, he wouldn’t be making such outlandish statements.
Technorati Tags: Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, Iraq War, President Bush, David Petraeus
Cross-posted at LetFreedomRingBlog
September 17th, 2007 at 10:15 am
[...] Cross-posted at California Conservative Categories: Military, Iraq, President Bush, Pelosi, Foreign Policy, Harry Reid, John Murtha, Defeatocrats | [...]
September 17th, 2007 at 12:56 pm
Reid is an absolute moron. Wasn’t it one of the Dem’s mantras that stated our troops have to sign up because of poverty, poor living standards, no jobs? And wasn’t the Dem’s (one in particular, Biden), who said we are losing our best and our brightest? Well which is it Reid, Biden, Pelosi and especially you Big John Murtha?
September 17th, 2007 at 4:09 pm
Dingy Harry & Pelosi & all the others (a.k.a., MoveOn.org) won’t offer a plan because they have no plan. Plain and simple.
They also won’t stop screaming like the stuck pigs they are because (at least so far) the country is not a socialist state yet, and that just grinds in their guts no end.
And when all is said and done, they’d better hope we are the winners IN SPITE OF THE DONKEYS ’cause they aren’t gonna be happy living in a caliphate. Guaranteed.
(Can you picture Nancy’s daughter, or Chelsea, in a burka?)
September 17th, 2007 at 9:25 pm
Part of the problem is that the Bush cabal doesn’t count things they don’t like. For instance, who really knows how many Iraqis have been killed, because early-on, Rummy told the commanding officers literally not to count the Iraqi dead. So, the best we can come up with is an educated guess:
Part of the problem is that the Iraqi Health Minister seems to be a crackpot, has some interesting math skills, and let’s not forget he’s Sunni. Who knows what his motivation is to say about the number of dead. He could simply not be counting any Shiite. We already know he isn’t counting deaths caused by Shiite-on-Shiite and Sunni-on-Sunni. Oh yeah, and not counting deaths from car bombings, either.
And he doesn’t count the even greater number of bodies that don’t make it to the morgue, but are instead gathered by volunteers and buried in mass graves, numbering into the tens of thousands.
Of course, if you want to take the word of an Iraqi, over our good ally Britain…
Harry Reid’s analysis, however, was spot-on. Bush has not listened to his generals until he found General Be… err, I mean, Petraeus, who’d happily toe the line, being an “ass kissing chickenshit” according to his boss, Admiral Fallon.
Petraeus is clearly biased. After testifying for two days, he went on Fox Noise to spout off for another 16 uninterupted minutes (and our humble host Brit Hume couldn’t think of a single question to ask! Now that’s journalism.
Petraeus’ testimony seemed to be “we’re winning, we’re winning!” The facts say something else. It is basic military theory that the definition of winning is when the number of your enemies decreases; AQI is increasing in numbers, a fact Petraeus conveniently omitted from his testimony.
The bottom line is that it is no coincidence that every report, except for Petraeus’, indicates we are digging a deeper and deeper hole in Iraq, and we must change course or the hole will get so deep, we can’t get out of it… or it consumes us whole.
September 17th, 2007 at 10:09 pm
So what y’all are telling us is that 1 in every 27 men, women and children have been killed in Iraq. That number should seem just a tad high for even you, Rocky. Unless, of course, you are the one with blinders (or a blindfold) on, not us.
Heck, at that rate all the Iraqis will be dead by the turn of the century, assuming the rate doesn’t increase or decrease.
It’s so easy to pick a number, any number, and if one says it with enough authority it has to be correct! It was said with authority by an unbiased source. And we all know both the moonbat socialists and British press are as unbiased as it comes. Or as unbiased as, say, the Iraqi Health Minister. Or better yet, as unbiased in their opinions as, say, Ahmadinijad, that peace-loving fount of love next door.
September 17th, 2007 at 11:06 pm
“1 in every 27 men, women and children have been killed in Iraq.”
-Tragically, yes.
“all the Iraqis will be dead”
-Well, that is a legitimate fear. Not a likely outcome, as Iran, Syria, Turkey and let’s not forget our great allies (who, as a token of their esteem for us, supplied 15 of 19 9/11 hijackers) Saudi Arabia, will not stand by idly while we f**k up the Middle East.
But even I, a lowly liberal, can see the difference between a scientific survey conducted in the past couple of months, and the SWAG of the Iraqi Health Minister. Does anybody know who this guy is? What his qualifications are? We have our answers spelled out before us, in ORB’s case. And if that isn’t substantial enough for you, we can always rely on the peer-reviewed Lancet which concluded that the number of Iraqi dead must be at least 750,000.
Or, we can continue our path of fighting Ahmadinijad’s war for him, clearing his path towards that caliphate you’re warning us about.
September 18th, 2007 at 12:44 pm
Rocky, there is one way (and the only one I can see) that the figure approaches 1 million, and that’s if you start counting the bodies discovered AFTER Saddham was deposed, the bodies his henchmen killed because they didn’t toe Saddham’s loyalty line. That would account for hundreds of thousands of dead, but that’s failed to be mentioned in your “surveys”. And if you do count those bodies, let’s make it clear that those were victims BEFORE the war started, not after.
Also, it never ceases to amaze me how libs fear Christians so much, yet pooh-pooh the idea of a world-wide caliphate (simply another name for one-world government but with twisted-religious overtones.) Could it be that libs fear personal responsibility more than slavery?
September 18th, 2007 at 2:55 pm
Extreme libs don’t fear Christians, they hate them for “imposing their values”. But its politically correct to allow Islamic values no matter how extreme to be imposed all over the place, because they are a minority, and must, by definition, be respected and coddled.
Just another example of their insanity.
September 18th, 2007 at 9:16 pm
MoveOn.org, the Campaign for America’s Future and DailyKos.com should all be classified as terrorist groups. They, just like the Radical Islamists, believe that anyone having a belief or an oppinion differing from theirs is to be attacked and destroyed. The Islamics do physical slaughter. These groups and organizations seek to slaughter people’s reputations, business’ and livelihoods to get their way.
We are fighting a war to stop terrorism.
Don’t you think a stop should be put to this form of terrorism, too?
September 18th, 2007 at 10:45 pm
Liberals don’t pooh-pooh religion at all, whether Christian or Islamic. However, our liberal forefathers foresaw the need to separate church and state in our constitutional republic, and it is that wall that only — seemingly — liberals want to protect. It scared the bejesus out of me when I read “55% believe erroneously that the Constitution establishes a Christian nation.”
Do you want a religion (other than your own, of course) imposed on you and your family?
If you answered “yes” to that question, I know where some great desert property has recently decreased in value and can be had for next to nothing. Because it is, literally, next to nothing but a bombed-out hole.
I don’t know where TA got the idea that liberals are out to somehow show deference to Muslims, but not Christians. Apparently he doesn’t watch Fox Noise or read any number of rightwingnut blogs, which drone on endlessly about the “war on Christians” and the “war on Christmas.” This tactic, used to confuse the masses and drum up religious fervor, is both heinous and insidious. By mis-casting liberals as the opponents of religion, even as nuanced as done in this thread, the point is completely lost. Liberals don’t want you to not be able to have a nativity display; its that there is the proper place for such display, namely, the church. It just doesn’t belong in the public-owned town square.
Let me put this in a way I hope will make more sense. Remember when you were young and your mother told you not to say anything if you couldn’t say something nice? She didn’t say “talk louder and get everyone to talk at the same time, too, if you can’t say something nice.”
The irony of the war on terror is that it is a war over religion. Al-Qaida didn’t attack us because they hate our freedom, they attacked us because we have troops on what they consider their holy ground, even more ironic because we were there keeping tabs on Saddam, whom they didn’t like, either (but they hate us more). If we’d get out of Iraq, it possibly might cool things down with these terrorists for a while, and while I’m not naïve enough to think that would have any permanency, it would buy us time to fight the war on terror the only way possible, intelligence gathering and aggressive law enforcement. Or, are we going to ignore England’s successful victory over their terrorist foe, the IRA? They’ve fought terrorism for a lot longer than we have; can’t we learn something from the way that they conduct this war on terrorism?
Is this concept just too foreign to grasp?
Speaking of grasping strange ideas about the war on terrorism, I’d like to know what Billie proposes be done to stop these “terrorist groups” like MoveOn, or is Billie simply suggesting that anyone having a belief different than Billie’s should be stopped? The circular logic makes my head hurt.
September 19th, 2007 at 12:47 am
Moveon is in for more disappointent unless it gives the Dems some wiggle room.
Of course, Harry Ried isn’t afraid to send up a resolution demanding a date certain for withdrawal from Iraq, because he knows Mitch McConnell and enough moderate Dems. will kill it. But meanwhile the loons keep the pressure on demanding nothing less. Ironically enough pushing against McConnel hard enough to keep the Dems in a box.
Even Joe Biden tried to tell them in one of the debates this summer that getting out of Iraq was not gong to be like folding up the tables and loading the truck. But thats good enough for them, no they have to scream and rage and call Patreus a triator and make general assholes out of themselves. If they aren’t careful they could end up killing the dems the way the yippies did in Chicago in 68.
September 19th, 2007 at 7:10 am
Couple of points, Rocky. First is that the Constitution prohibits the Federal government from establishing a religion, but it also specifically states that the right to practice religion shall not be infringed upon, period. I’ll get the exact text, if you wish.
Doesn’t take a genius to figure out that there’s a difference between the state forcing a particular religion on its citizens and the citizens practicing their own.
Second, it’s convenient to say the muslims are simply protecting what they consider holy ground. Even kinda makes sense. Until you consider that they think any territory they’ve ever controlled is holy ground, including a significant part of Europe. And that their purpose in life is to make all ground holy (the entire earth) at any cost (including war) and to protect it from the infidels.
That makes me real nervous. It also devalues the claim of “holy ground”, at least in my poor country-boy mind.