whottt
08-20-2005, 07:24 PM
http://www.scottrandolph.net/category/current-events/
August 17, 2005
Cindy sealed the deal.
I actually felt myself become a republican today. It was around 10am, when I read the latest update of the Cindy Sheehan saga in CNN.com. I then shot over to read some blogs about it, and perused the comments in some of them, which was nothing but a long series of petty (albeit entertaining) partisan bickering.
Then it happend. The good little democrat in me tied the little noose around his neck and jumped off the stool. He just couldn’t take it anymore.
Take what? The whining. The constant whining by the extreme left about the reasons for war, the incompetence of this administration, and how we’ve all been lied to, and how we should pull out of Iraq immediately, because, *gulp* our soldiers were in danger.
Guess what folks….they signed up to join the Army, not the boy scouts. Anytime your orientation to a new job involves an automatic weapon, you should be smart enough to figure out there’s danger involved. I actually read some people’s comments about many of the soldiers over there being naive….they weren’t expecting to go to war, so, they should be allowed to go home. Wow.
Soldiers know, when they enlist, that it is entirely possible they will be shipped out and never come home. It’s part of the job. The fact that people still walk in to recruiters’ offices and sign that piece of paper make them heroes. To imply that they are simple kids who didn’t know what they were getting into, or even worse, that they died for no reason, or an immoral reason, does a horrible thing. It strips their sacrifice of the honor that it deserves. Even though those folks sitting out there in the Texas fields claim to honor and support the soldiers, they obviously have been blinded by their own selfishness as to the real way to support them.
Because, long story short, we can’t end this war now. That would send the message that those bastardly little terrorists have won. It doesn’t matter if the adminstration told us the desert sand was made of gold, and we are going over there to collect it in little buckets to bring home, the concrete fact that we are at war doesn’t change. We are there, and we have a job to finish. We’ve toppled a regime that was dangerous not only to its own people, but also to the rest of the world. Now, we are there fighting the same terrorists we are fighting in Afghanistan. We’ve given liberty to millions of people, and we’re trying to help create a government, in an area that is very volatile, that will be a bastion of freedom and hope for an entire race of people. I hate the fact that our boys are getting killed over there, and I wish it didn’t have to happen.
But, it is, there’s nothing we can do about it, except for doing everything we can to offer support and hope to the folks fighting over there. Arguing and whining about the reasons we’re there, and the need to come home not only kills morale, but it is a complete waste of time.
I just re-read the above post, and I apologize for the rambling….just needed to vent a little. Here’s a breakdown of the way I see things:
-right or wrong, we’re at war. no amount of yelling will fix that now.
-we have to finish the job. HAVE TO. it may take another 1800 soldiers, but it has to be done
-whether or not we’re there for the right reason, we’ve done something great for that country
I never was a big fan of Bush. But, one thing I do believe….he honestly wants to make this country, and this world a better place. Think about it…the war almost cost him the election. If we hadn’t invaded Iraq, he’d have won in a landslide.
I think it’s just my personality that lead me to this decision. I think the left is too concerned with everyone’s immediate rights and needs, and refuses to sacrifice a bit of comfort and happiness in the present, for something that will make life better for everyone in the future. You can take the environmental stance on that, and I’d have no argument…but I think there enough conservatives concerned with that to make it a moot point.
Mostly, I’m just really pissed off. We’re in a crappy situation, and it’s time for all of America to stand together, put on the big boy pants, and get through the next few years.
Good job lefties....another Democrat bites the dust. And don't say you haven't heard stories like this before.
boutons
08-20-2005, 07:45 PM
"The constant whining by the extreme left about"
It's not only the extreme left, or even the entire left of center. The majority of Americans have turned against the war, because
"the reasons for war"
.... were all BS, as was the urgency, as was the supposed lack of other options.
"the incompetence of this administration"
... who can argue FOR the admin's competence, esp in post-war planning?
"and how we’ve all been lied to"
.... never to be forgotten. Repeating that truth is not whining, it's part of the grass-roots drumbeat againt the Repugs.
"and how we should pull out of Iraq immediately"
... I think this is insane, but it's insane to stay, also, thanks to ALL of the above.
"our soldiers were in danger"
They signed up, never thinking they'd be ass-ripped by their own military-service-evading shrub-in-chief. It's not their fault, but tough shit.
This Scott Randolf hardly represents a major tendency American attitudes, but whott can carry on his delusions reigin in shrubWorld.. The tide has turned, the majority Americans are against this war, it's a total disaster on every count, but what's to done about it is totally unknown.
The below doesn't mean we will continue the insanity "4 more years" but the military is thinking along those terms.
========================
August 20, 2005
Army Planning for 4 More Years in Iraq
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 7:53 p.m. ET
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Army is planning for the possibility of keeping the current number of soldiers in Iraq -- well over 100,000 -- for four more years, the Army's top general said Saturday.
In an Associated Press interview, Gen. Peter Schoomaker said the Army is prepared for the ''worst case'' in terms of the required level of troops in Iraq. He said the number could be adjusted lower if called for by slowing the force rotation or by shortening tours for soldiers.
Schoomaker said commanders in Iraq and others who are in the chain of command will decide how many troops will be needed next year and beyond. His responsibility is to provide them, trained and equipped.
About 138,000 U.S. troops, including about 25,000 Marines, are now in Iraq.
''We are now into '07-'09 in our planning,'' Schoomaker said, having completed work on the set of combat and support units that will be rotated into Iraq over the coming year for 12-month tours of duty.
Schoomaker's comments come amid indications from Bush administration officials and commanders in Iraq that the size of the U.S. force may be scaled back next year if certain conditions are achieved.
Among those conditions: an Iraqi constitution must be drafted in coming days; it must be approved in a national referendum; and elections must be held for a new government under that charter.
Schoomaker, who spoke aboard an Army jet on the trip back to Washington from Kansas City, Mo., made no predictions about the pace of political progress in Iraq. But he said he was confident the Army could provide the current number of forces to fight the insurgency for many more years. The 2007-09 rotation he is planning would go beyond President Bush's term in office, which ends in January 2009.
Schoomaker was in Kansas City for a dinner Friday hosted by the Military Order of the World Wars, a veterans' organization.
''We're staying 18 months to two years ahead of ourselves'' in planning which active-duty and National Guard and Reserve units will be provided to meet the commanders' needs, Schoomaker said in the interview.
The main active-duty combat units that are scheduled to go to Iraq in the coming year are the 101st Airborne Division, based at Fort Campbell, Ky., and the 4th Infantry Division from Fort Hood, Texas. Both did one-year tours earlier in the war.
The Army has changed the way it arranges troop rotations.
Instead of sending a full complement of replacement forces each 12-month cycle, it is stretching out the rotation over two years.
The current rotation, for 2005-07, will overlap with the 2006-08 replacements. Beyond that, the Army is piecing together the plan for the 2007-09 switch, Schoomaker said.
With the recent deployments of National Guard brigades from Georgia and Pennsylvania, the National Guard has seven combat brigades in Iraq -- the most of the entire war -- plus thousands of support troops.
Along with the Army Reserve and Marine Reserve, they account for about 40 percent of the total U.S. forces in Iraq. Schoomaker said that will be scaled back next year to about 25 percent as newly expanded active-duty divisions such as the 101st Airborne enter the rotation.
August has been the deadliest month of the war for the National Guard and Reserve, with at least 42 fatalities thus far. Schoomaker disputed the suggestion by some that the Guard and Reserve units are not fully prepared for the hostile environment of Iraq.
''I'm very confident that there is no difference in the preparation'' of active-duty soldiers and the reservists, who normally train one weekend a month and two weeks each summer, unless they are mobilized. Once called to active duty, they go through the same training as active-duty units.
In internal surveys, some in the reserve forces have indicated to Army leaders that they think they are spending too much time in pre-deployment training, not too little, Schoomaker said.
''Consistently, what we've been (hearing) is, `We're better than you think we are, and we could do this faster,''' he said. ''I can promise you that we're not taking any risk in terms of what we're doing to prepare people.''
=========================================
Here's shrub's gift to the Iraq people, 2 years after his Mission Accomplished faux flyboy/Slam Dunk theatrics and lies. Iraq is badly broken, security, infrastructure, non government, no institiutions, and shrub doesn't have a fuckiing clue, never did, how to fix it.
===========
washingtonpost.com
Militias Wresting Control Across Iraq's North and South
Residents Tell of Growing Climate of Fear
Anthony Shadid and Steve Fainaru
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, August 20, 2005; 7:00 PM
BASRA, Iraq -- Shiite and Kurdish militias, often operating as part of Iraqi government security forces, have carried out a wave of abductions, assassinations and other acts of intimidation, consolidating their control over territory across northern and southern Iraq and deepening the country's divide along ethnic and sectarian lines, according to political leaders, families of the victims, human rights activists and Iraqi officials.
While Iraqi representatives wrangle over the drafting of a constitution in Baghdad, forces represented by the militias and the Shiite and Kurdish parties that control them are creating their own institutions of authority, unaccountable to elected governments, the activists and officials said. In Basra in the south, dominated by the Shiites, and Mosul in the north, ruled by the Kurds, as well as cities and villages around them, many residents say they are powerless before the growing sway of the militias, which instill a climate of fear that many see as redolent of the era of former president Saddam Hussein.
The parties and their armed wings are sometimes operating independently, and other times as part of Iraqi army and police units trained and equipped by the United States and Britain and controlled by the central government. Their growing authority has enabled them to seize territory, confront their perceived enemies and provide patronage to their followers. Their rise has come because of a power vacuum in Baghdad and their own success in the January elections.
Since the formation of a government this spring, Basra, Iraq's second-largest city, has witnessed dozens of assassinations, claiming members of the former ruling Baath Party, Sunni political leaders and officials of competing Shiite parties. Many have been carried out by uniformed men in police vehicles, according to political leaders and families of the victims, with some of the bullet-riddled bodies dumped at night in a trash-strewn parcel known as The Lot. The province's governor said in an interview that Shiite militias have penetrated the police force; an Iraqi official estimated that as many as 90 percent of officers were loyal to religious parties.
Across northern Iraq, Kurdish parties have employed a previously undisclosed network of at least five detention facilities to incarcerate hundreds of Sunni Arabs, Turkmens and other minorities abducted and secretly transferred from Mosul, Iraq's third-largest city, and from territories stretching to the Iranian border, according to political leaders and detainees' families. Nominally under the authority of the U.S.-backed Iraqi army, the militias have beaten up and threatened government officials and political leaders deemed to be working against Kurdish interests; one bloodied official was paraded through a town in a pickup truck, witnesses said.
"I don't see any difference between Saddam and the way the Kurds are running things here," said Nahrain Toma, who heads a human rights organization, Betnahrain, with offices in northern Iraq and has faced several death threats.
Toma said the tactics were eroding what remained of U.S. credibility as the militias operate under what many Iraqis view as the blessing of American and British forces. "Nobody wants anything to do with the Americans anymore," she said. "Why? Because they gave the power to the Kurds and to the Shiites. No one else has any rights."
"Here's the problem," said Majid Sari, an adviser in the Iraqi Defense Ministry in Basra, who travels with a security detail of 25 handpicked Iraqi soldiers. "They're taking money from the state, they're taking clothes from the state, they're taking vehicles from the state, but their loyalty is to the parties." Whoever disagrees, he said, "the next day you'll find them dead in the street."
British officials, whose authority runs through Basra and parts of southern Iraq, have called the killings "totally unacceptable."
"We are aware of allegations that men in police uniforms, whether they are genuine policemen or not, are carrying out serious crimes in Basra," said Karen McLuskie, a British spokeswoman. "We are raising our concerns with the Iraqi authorities at the highest level.
"The Badr Organization, one of the most powerful militias in southern Iraq and blamed for many of the assassinations, denied any role in the killings. The head of the group in Basra, Ghanim Mayahi, said his organization was only providing "support and assistance" to the police through lightly armed militiamen. "There is no law, there is no order, and the police are scared of the tribes. Badr is not afraid, and it can face those threats."
In the north, Kurdish officials acknowledged that terrorism suspects from across the region have been taken to several Kurdish-run detention facilities, but they said the practice was initiated by the Iraqi government with the blessing of the U.S. military. "It's a question of space; they have no place to put them and here it is safe," said Karim Sinjari, the minister of interior for the Kurdistan Regional Government and a senior official in the Kurdistan Democratic Party.
In June, however, U.S. officials denied any role and called for an end to the "extra-judicial detentions." A State Department memo at the time warned that abductions in the contested northern city of Kirkuk had "greatly exacerbated tensions along purely ethnic lines" and threatened U.S. standing.
In both northern and southern Iraq, the parties and their militias defend their tactics as a way of ensuring security in an increasingly lawless atmosphere. In part, they say, their power reflects their success in January's national and local elections, in which the Kurdistan Democratic Party and its counterpart, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, and the Shiite-led Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq and other Islamic parties won overwhelmingly in their respective regions.
But critics charge that they are wresting control over security forces to claim de facto territory and authority, effectively partitioning Iraq even as representatives in Baghdad struggle to negotiate a permanent constitution. "We have a feeling that our Islamic brothers want power, regardless of the law and regardless of the state," said Rahi Muhajir, who leads the Communist Party in Nasiriyah, 130 miles north of Basra. "They want authority and they want to stay permanently."
''Their Own Justice'
In the streets of Basra, a dreary, dun-hued port of 1.5 million people on the banks of the Shatt al Arab, the local police force of 13,600 has become as much an instrument of fear as security. Mohammed Musabah, the governor of Basra, acknowledged that the police were infiltrated by religious parties, the most powerful of which is the Supreme Council. His police chief, Hassan Sawadi, went further. He told a British newspaper, the Guardian, that he had lost control over three-quarters of his police force and that militiamen inside its ranks were using their posts to assassinate opponents. Soon after, Musabah said, the Interior Ministry ordered Sawadi not to speak again publicly
Since May, political leaders estimate that as many as 65 assassinations have occurred in Basra. Among them were a lieutenant colonel in the Defense Ministry, a Baath Party-era police officer, a merchant with ties to Hussein's government, two university professors and a municipal official who had tried to combat corruption. An American journalist was also recently killed, but the circumstances are unclear.
Musabah, whose own Islamic party, Fadhila, is believed to have growing influence inside the police force, said he has imposed new orders to try to track police vehicles involved in killings: Vehicles must bear numbers in large digits on the side, and tinted glass was banned. He tried to disband the two most notorious groups -- police intelligence and internal affairs -- although lower-ranking officers said they still operate as shadow forces at the direction of the Badr Organization, the Supreme Council's military arm.
Many residents of Basra say power remains in the hands of those with guns. They say the political parties -- the Supreme Council and the Fadhila party in particular -- realize that exerting power over the police is the surest way to secure influence and battle their rivals.
"The parties exercise their power through the security forces to impose their political views," said Jamal Khazaal, the leader of the Sunni-led Iraqi Islamic Party in Basra, who carries a pistol and travels with an armed escort. "The police chief can no longer control his own force. It's no longer a secret."
Ammar Muther, a 30-year-old member of Iraq's Border Police, had brought his father 110 miles south from the city of Amarah to Basra in December. A senior Baathist and a missile engineer in the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war, his father, Muther Abadi, had already escaped what he believed was an assassination attempt by Basra police who traveled to Amarah in two pickup trucks. Muther thought his father would be more secure with him in his home in Basra.
On a cold day that month, Muther recalled, he was downtown when his cell phone rang. It was his brother-in-law, his words urgent and clipped. "Come immediately to the house," Muther recalled him saying.
When Muther arrived, his father was gone. Six uniformed policemen in black masks had entered his house, his family told him. They put a gun to his wife's head and locked her, his mother and the children in the bedroom. The father tried to run, but police caught him. He clawed at the door as they dragged him away.
"The neighbors just watched," Muther said. "What could they do? It was the police.
"Muther searched for five hours for his abducted father in Basra's streets. As the sun began to set, he gave up and returned home. Minutes later, a friend rushed into his house, crying. He had heard that Muther's father had been killed.
That evening, the father's corpse was found in The Lot, amid rusted cans and water bottles. He had been shot five times -- twice in the chest, twice in the face and once in the temple.
"They carried out their own justice," Muther said, his eyes welling up.
A Maze of Prisons
Widespread abductions have instilled fear across northern Iraq and led families on a desperate search for relatives who disappear into a maze of prisons in Kurdistan, the semiautonomous region controlled by the two Kurdish parties. Reports of the missing stretch across an arc that spans the Syrian, Turkish and Iranian borders.
Hussein Saad Hussein, 60, said he began looking for his son Amar in December after the 33-year-old Mosul hotel worker was picked up in a joint U.S.-Iraqi raid, along with three other men, including Hussein's nephew and son-in-law. Hussein said he heard nothing for weeks until some released detainees told him that Amar had been spotted at a prison in the Kurdish-held city of Dahuk. He sent his daughter, Sukaina, to the prison, but "they denied he was there," Hussein said.
In March, the International Committee of the Red Cross, which monitors the prisons, forwarded letters from Hussein's nephew and son-in-law. The letters were dated March 15 and arrived from a detention facility not in Dahuk but in Irbil, a city dominated by the Kurdistan Democratic Party. "God knows and you know," wrote Hussein's nephew. Censors had deleted his next words.
"Note: I wrote this letter in the presence of Amar," the nephew wrote. "He is with me in the same room.
"Hussein sent Sukaina to Irbil to look for Amar. "She showed them the letters," Hussein said. "They said, 'No, we don't have those people here.'
"Weeks later, Hussein heard from released detainees that Amar and the others had been transferred to yet another prison in the resort city of Shaklawa, 20 miles northeast of Irbil. Sukeina found her brother there. "The conditions in Shaklawa are better than Irbil," Hussein said matter-of-factly. "He can extend his legs when he sleeps.
"The Kurds are holding detainees at prisons in Irbil, Sulaymaniyah, Dahuk, Akrah and Shaklawa, according to human rights activists, political leaders and released detainees.
The total number of detainees is unknown. In June, the U.S. military said it had logged 180 cases in Kirkuk alone; political leaders estimated there were more than 500. Wisam al Saadi, deputy director of the Islamic Organization for Human Rights, said 120 families from Mosul have lodged complaints seeking missing relatives in the last month. Nawazad Qadir, director of the Irbil branch of the Iraqi Red Crescent Society, said hundreds are being held in that city while still hundreds more are in the other prisons.
One former detainee, Abdul Raheem Faraj, 41, a Mosul human rights activist, said he was taken into custody Nov. 21 in a joint U.S.-Iraqi raid in downtown Mosul. Within hours, he said, the Americans told him he was innocent and planned to release him. An hour after that, he said, Kurdish militiamen blindfolded him, put him in the trunk of an Opel sedan and drove him to Dahuk. He said he spent six months, four days in custody, most of it with 15 other detainees in a windowless basement room at a facility operated by the Kurdish secret service, the Asayesh.
"My rights were violated. From whom am I supposed to get them back?" he said last week. "The Americans? The Americans are the ones who gave the Kurds the opportunity to do this."'
'They Have the Guns'
Across southern Iraq, the Supreme Council and other Islamic parties have consolidated their control in cities along the southern valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers through a mix of patronage and coercion, residents and political leaders say.
In Nasiriyah, the city council, dominated by Islamic parties brought to power in the January elections, decided to set up a new, 287-member police battalion. Each council member was allotted seven police jobs to appoint, said Muhajir, the communist leader, giving the most powerful Islamic parties the overwhelming share. "The formation of the force is to serve the parties," he said.
In southern cities, several political leaders said, other appointments to the security forces, civil defense, bureaucracy or state-owned companies require a recommendation from the party that can cost $100 to $1,000.
"The parties have become businessmen," said Khazaal, the Basra party leader.
The coercive side of the parties' power is the militias. In cities like Nasiriyah, the Supreme Council and forces loyal to the young cleric Moqtada Sadr still maintain armed forces that operate both within the police force and independently.
Sadr's Mahdi Army, seen as the most powerful force in the streets, sent what it calls a battalion of 240 men this month to search for car bombs in Suq al-Shuyukh, southeast of Nasiriyah. It manned the city's entrances, exits and intersections for 48 hours, said Ali Zaidi, the militia commander in Nasiriyah. "In every place, the Mahdi Army is there," he said.
The Supreme Council has moved aggressively to seize control of police forces in towns like Nasiriyah, Amarah and Diwaniyah, aided by the party's control of the Interior Ministry in Baghdad.
In February, 70 men belonging to its militia attacked the headquarters of the Nasiriyah police chief, Gen. Mohammed Hajami, in an effort to expel him. Dozens of machine-gun rounds and grenades carved holes in the building's facade. Although Hajami estimated that 70 percent of his men were loyal to Islamic parties and not him, he and a handful of loyalists fought them off.
Two months later, Hajami traveled to Italy for a training course. His security detail went on leave. While he was away, the Supreme Council's militia showed up again at his headquarters with four pickups and a police car, his aides recalled. The militiamen broke into Hajami's vacant office. This time, without firing a shot, the Supreme Council installed a new police chief.
"If they control the police, then they control the city. It's the only power at present," said Hajami's brother, Kadhim, a police officer. "Even if the government falls, they are going to stay because they have the guns.
"The Supreme Council's militia, formerly known as the Badr Brigades, has renamed itself the Badr Organization. Its leaders said they have turned themselves into a civilian organization, although they retain light arms. They maintain a clandestine style, incubated during two decades of exile in Iran. The militia's Basra headquarters are unmarked; its leaders refuse to give out phone numbers.
A Move to Dominate
The detentions in the Mosul area surged after the city's 7,000- man police force collapsed during an insurgent offensive in November, according to political leaders, human rights activists and families of the detainees.
Desperate to restore order, the U.S. military brought in the battle-hardened Kurdish militia, the pesh merga, under the auspices of the new Iraqi army. In addition to providing security, the militiamen have helped the Kurds take control of much of the Nineveh Plain, an arid flatland of dozens of towns and villages that includes Assyrian and Chaldean Christians, Turkmens and a little-known sect of Shiite Muslims called the Shabak.
On the sleeves of their Iraqi army uniforms, many Kurdish soldiers wear patches featuring the red, white and green national flag of Kurdistan, with its golden sun emblem. Along the highway toward Mosul, Iraqi army checkpoints openly fly the Kurdish flag.
Qaraqosh, a town of 25,000 people about 20 miles southeast of Mosul, demonstrates how the Kurds apply their expanding power in the north. Kurds, by all accounts, make up no more than 1 percent of the population. But Kurd political leaders have not concealed their intention to dominate: "Under the parliament and government of the Kurdistan region, the Assyrians, Chaldeans and Turkmens will enjoy their rights," reads a banner outside the Kurdistan Democratic Party headquarters.
Luqman Mohammed Rashid Wardak, a senior member of the party's local committee who has the Kurdish sun emblem tattooed on the back of his right hand, said he hoped Qaraqosh would be ceded to the Kurds after the area "becomes normalized." In the meantime, he said, "we are presenting our political ideas to the people." Wardak said the Kurdish Regional Government has already distributed $6,000 to poor families. "Because this area does not officially belong to the Kurdistan region," he said, the money "goes to the party and the party pays them." The party has set up a 700-man "protection force," paying the guards' $150 monthly salary.
But when largess doesn't work, the party uses force. On Dec. 5, local party officials ordered the director of a regional land office, Bahnam Habeeb, to disobey a central government order to distribute parcels of land to former Iraqi army officers and soldiers.
Habeeb, who refused to be interviewed, told the party that he could halt the distribution only if he received an order from "a higher authority" -- either the provincial government in Mosul or the central government in Baghdad.
Fifteen minutes later, five pick-up trucks filled with militiamen pulled up, according to witnesses. The fighters dragged the paunchy, 53-year-old Habeeb from his chair and beat him with their fists and rifle butts, the witnesses said. The soldiers placed him facedown in the bed of a pickup, pushed their boots into his back and legs and drove him around "to show everybody what they had done," said a witness who asked not to be identified out of fear of retribution.
"There is an absence of law," said a 40-year-old Transportation Ministry official who was detained for five days in Dahuk last month. The official said a Kurdish officer had accused him of "writing against the Kurds on the Internet."
" 'Freedom' and 'liberty' are only words in ink on a piece of paper," he said. "The law now, it's the big fish eats the small fish."
Fainaru reported from Qaraqosh.
spurster
08-20-2005, 11:14 PM
This seems appropriate in this thread.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/21/opinion/21rich.html
August 21, 2005
The Swift Boating of Cindy Sheehan
By FRANK RICH
CINDY SHEEHAN couldn't have picked a more apt date to begin the vigil that ambushed a president: Aug. 6 was the fourth anniversary of that fateful 2001 Crawford vacation day when George W. Bush responded to an intelligence briefing titled "Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States" by going fishing. On this Aug. 6 the president was no less determined to shrug off bad news. Though 14 marine reservists had been killed days earlier by a roadside bomb in Haditha, his national radio address that morning made no mention of Iraq. Once again Mr. Bush was in his bubble, ensuring that he wouldn't see Ms. Sheehan coming. So it goes with a president who hasn't foreseen any of the setbacks in the war he fabricated against an enemy who did not attack inside the United States in 2001.
When these setbacks happen in Iraq itself, the administration punts. But when they happen at home, there's a game plan. Once Ms. Sheehan could no longer be ignored, the Swift Boating began. Character assassination is the Karl Rove tactic of choice, eagerly mimicked by his media surrogates, whenever the White House is confronted by a critic who challenges it on matters of war. The Swift Boating is especially vicious if the critic has more battle scars than a president who connived to serve stateside and a vice president who had "other priorities" during Vietnam.
The most prominent smear victims have been Bush political opponents with heroic Vietnam résumés: John McCain, Max Cleland, John Kerry. But the list of past targets stretches from the former counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke to Specialist Thomas Wilson, the grunt who publicly challenged Donald Rumsfeld about inadequately armored vehicles last December. The assault on the whistle-blower Joseph Wilson - the diplomat described by the first President Bush as "courageous" and "a true American hero" for confronting Saddam to save American hostages in 1991 - was so toxic it may yet send its perpetrators to jail.
True to form, the attack on Cindy Sheehan surfaced early on Fox News, where she was immediately labeled a "crackpot" by Fred Barnes. The right-wing blogosphere quickly spread tales of her divorce, her angry Republican in-laws, her supposed political flip-flops, her incendiary sloganeering and her association with known ticket-stub-carrying attendees of "Fahrenheit 9/11." Rush Limbaugh went so far as to declare that Ms. Sheehan's "story is nothing more than forged documents - there's nothing about it that's real."
But this time the Swift Boating failed, utterly, and that failure is yet another revealing historical marker in this summer's collapse of political support for the Iraq war.
When the Bush mob attacks critics like Ms. Sheehan, its highest priority is to change the subject. If we talk about Richard Clarke's character, then we stop talking about the administration's pre-9/11 inattentiveness to terrorism. If Thomas Wilson is trashed as an insubordinate plant of the "liberal media," we forget the Pentagon's abysmal failure to give our troops adequate armor (a failure that persists today, eight months after he spoke up). If we focus on Joseph Wilson's wife, we lose the big picture of how the administration twisted intelligence to gin up the threat of Saddam's nonexistent W.M.D.'s.
The hope this time was that we'd change the subject to Cindy Sheehan's "wacko" rhetoric and the opportunistic left-wing groups that have attached themselves to her like barnacles. That way we would forget about her dead son. But if much of the 24/7 media has taken the bait, much of the public has not.
The backdrops against which Ms. Sheehan stands - both that of Mr. Bush's what-me-worry vacation and that of Iraq itself - are perfectly synergistic with her message of unequal sacrifice and fruitless carnage. Her point would endure even if the messenger were shot by a gun-waving Crawford hothead or she never returned to Texas from her ailing mother's bedside or the president folded the media circus by actually meeting with her.
The public knows that what matters this time is Casey Sheehan's story, not the mother who symbolizes it. Cindy Sheehan's bashers, you'll notice, almost never tell her son's story. They are afraid to go there because this young man's life and death encapsulate not just the noble intentions of those who went to fight this war but also the hubris, incompetence and recklessness of those who gave the marching orders.
Specialist Sheehan was both literally and figuratively an Eagle Scout: a church group leader and honor student whose desire to serve his country drove him to enlist before 9/11, in 2000. He died with six other soldiers on a rescue mission in Sadr City on April 4, 2004, at the age of 24, the week after four American security workers had been mutilated in Falluja and two weeks after he arrived in Iraq. This was almost a year after the president had declared the end of "major combat operations" from the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln.
According to the account of the battle by John F. Burns in The Times, the insurgents who slaughtered Specialist Sheehan and his cohort were militiamen loyal to Moktada al-Sadr, the anti-American Shiite cleric. The Americans probably didn't stand a chance. As Mr. Burns reported, members of "the new Iraqi-trained police and civil defense force" abandoned their posts at checkpoints and police stations "almost as soon as the militiamen appeared with their weapons, leaving the militiamen in unchallenged control."
Yet in the month before Casey Sheehan's death, Mr. Rumsfeld typically went out of his way to inflate the size and prowess of these Iraqi security forces, claiming in successive interviews that there were "over 200,000 Iraqis that have been trained and equipped" and that they were "out on the front line taking the brunt of the violence." We'll have to wait for historians to tell us whether this and all the other Rumsfeld propaganda came about because he was lied to by subordinates or lying to himself or lying to us or some combination thereof.
As The Times reported last month, even now, more than a year later, a declassified Pentagon assessment puts the total count of Iraqi troops and police officers at 171,500, with only "a small number" able to fight insurgents without American assistance. As for Moktada al-Sadr, he remains as much a player as ever in the new "democratic" Iraq. He controls one of the larger blocs in the National Assembly. His loyalists may have been responsible for last month's apparently vengeful murder of Steven Vincent, the American freelance journalist who wrote in The Times that Mr. Sadr's followers had infiltrated Basra's politics and police force.
Casey Sheehan's death in Iraq could not be more representative of the war's mismanagement and failure, but it is hardly singular. Another mother who has journeyed to Crawford, Celeste Zappala, wrote last Sunday in New York's Daily News of how her son, Sgt. Sherwood Baker, was also killed in April 2004 - in Baghdad, where he was providing security for the Iraq Survey Group, which was charged with looking for W.M.D.'s "well beyond the admission by David Kay that they didn't exist."
As Ms. Zappala noted with rage, her son's death came only a few weeks after Mr. Bush regaled the Radio and Television Correspondents' Association banquet in Washington with a scripted comedy routine featuring photos of him pretending to look for W.M.D.'s in the Oval Office. "We'd like to know if he still finds humor in the fabrications that justified the war that killed my son," Ms. Zappala wrote. (Perhaps so: surely it was a joke that one of the emissaries Mr. Bush sent to Cindy Sheehan in Crawford was Stephen Hadley, the national security adviser who took responsibility for allowing the 16 errant words about doomsday uranium into the president's prewar State of the Union speech.)
Mr. Bush's stand-up shtick for the Beltway press corps wasn't some aberration; it was part of the White House's political plan for keeping the home front cool. America was to yuk it up, party on and spend its tax cuts heedlessly while the sacrifice of an inadequately manned all-volunteer army in Iraq was kept out of most Americans' sight and minds. This is why the Pentagon issued a directive at the start of Operation Iraqi Freedom forbidding news coverage of "deceased military personnel returning to or departing from" air bases. It's why Mr. Bush, unlike Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter, has not attended funeral services for the military dead. It's why January's presidential inauguration, though nominally dedicated to the troops, was a gilded $40 million jamboree at which the word Iraq was banished from the Inaugural Address.
THIS summer in Crawford, the White House went to this playbook once too often. When Mr. Bush's motorcade left a grieving mother in the dust to speed on to a fund-raiser, that was one fat-cat party too far. The strategy of fighting a war without shared national sacrifice has at last backfired, just as the strategy of Swift Boating the war's critics has reached its Waterloo before Patrick Fitzgerald's grand jury in Washington. The 24/7 cable and Web attack dogs can keep on sliming Cindy Sheehan. The president can keep trying to ration the photos of flag-draped caskets. But this White House no longer has any more control over the insurgency at home than it does over the one in Iraq.
Nicholas D. Kristof and David Brooks are on vacation.
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