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He'll blame his own puppet govt. and exit, back stage, into a helicopter, flashing a peace sign.
... he and his accomplices are alone in spewing that self-serving fantasy.
dubya is stalling for time until 20 Jan 2009 when he escapes official responsbility for the piles of he and head have created.
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New US Intelligence Assessment Casts Doubts on Bush's Iraq Policy
By Jonathan S. Landay and Nancy A. Youssef
McClatchy Newspapers
Wednesday 11 July 2007
Washington - The Shiite Muslim-dominated government of Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki has made only "halting efforts" to end the power struggle fueling the war between Iraq's religious and ethnic communities, a new U.S. intelligence report said Wednesday.
( this isn't the left-wing press, WP, NYT, or anybody you right-wingers like to piss on. It's the US Intellgence Report)
Even if the bloodletting can be contained, Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish leaders will be "hard pressed" to reach lasting political reconciliation, the report stated.
The report, reflecting the consensus of all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies, cast new uncertainty about the chances of success for President Bush's plan to contain the war through the deployment of an additional 28,000 U.S. troops, mostly in and around Baghdad.
The conclusions also appeared to be bleaker than a White House assessment produced by the top U.S. officials in Baghdad, which found that Iraqi politicians have made satisfactory progress on some of the 18 benchmarks set by Congress in May.
The new intelligence findings were contained in a 23-page Global Security Assessment presented to the House Armed Services Committee by Thomas Fingar, the chairman of the National Intelligence Council, the intelligence community's top analytical body.
"The struggle among and within Iraqi communities over national iden y and the distribution of power has eclipsed attacks by Iraqis against (U.S.-led) Coalition Forces as the greatest impediment to Iraq's future as a peaceful, democratic and unified state," said the report by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
While there have been some "positive developments, communal violence and scant common ground between the Shias, Sunnis and Kurds continues to polarize politics," it said.
Bush, facing growing pressure to change policy from key Republican senators, many of whom face re-election next year, has blamed the worsening violence on al Qaida in Iraq, a Sunni terrorist group inspired by Osama bin Laden.
( but dubya won't touch AQ in the Paki FATAs)
But the new report repeats a January intelligence assessment that the conflict is a "self-sustaining sectarian struggle between Shia and Sunnis" for which al Qaida in Iraq attacks have served as "effective accelerants."
The report rendered judgment on two benchmarks: submission of a draft petroleum revenue-sharing law
( revenue sharing greatly benefits foregin (US/UK) oilcos compared with lease arrangement common everywhere else. The Iraqi oil industry and unions are dead set against revenue sharing. Revenue sharing agreements and access to Iraqi reserves are the only real, but hidden, unadmitted Repug/PNAC/AEI/neo- rationals for invading non-threatening Iraq )
.... to parliament which stalled immediately and the formation of an independent election commission as a first step toward local elections.
But the report said Maliki's "agenda is still only at its initial stages."
Other tests of progress set by Congress include legislation allowing the return of senior members of the former ruling Baath Party to government jobs, reforming the cons ution and disarming sectarian militias.
The benchmarks also call for deployment of three Iraqi army brigades in the U.S.-led Baghdad security operation, even-handed law enforcement by Shiite-dominated Iraqi security forces, an end to politicians' intervention in military operations and an increase in the number of Iraqi forces capable of operating independently.
The White House assessment, based on a report submitted earlier this week by Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, and Ryan Crocker, the U.S. ambassador to Baghdad, will be somewhat more upbeat, according to two military officials who read it.
It will say that the Maliki government has made satisfactory progress on about half the benchmarks, largely those requiring it to provide resources and forces to the Baghdad security operation.
The government, however, has performed unsatisfactorily on the other half, mostly those dealing with political measures, said the two officials, who declined to elaborate. They requested anonymity because the report is confidential.
"We can only say that it's mixed at this point," White House spokesman Tony Fratto said when asked to characterize the report's overall findings.
( with the mixture being overwhelmingly dominated by negatives,with a few insignificant positives)
Bush and top U.S. diplomatic and defense officials have repeatedly said that the war can be ended only through a political settlement.
A former senior military official who advises the Pentagon said there is mounting concern that hard-line Sunni and Shiite leaders, believing their side can prevail over the other in an all-out conflict, do not intend to implement the benchmarks so they can hasten a U.S. troop withdrawal.
"Both sides believe there is no point in having part of the pie if they can have the whole pie, and they are both convinced they can overwhelm their opponent," said the official, who requested anonymity to protect his relationship with the Pentagon.
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US Intelligence Chiefs Grim About Iraq's Future
Agence France-Presse
Wednesday 11 July 2007
Top US intelligence officials gave a bleak appraisal Wednesday of Iraq's chances of stemming political and religious strife and so helping the US administration to declare success in the nation.
Thomas Fingar, deputy director of national intelligence, told Congress that US President George W. Bush's "surge" of up to 30,000 more troops into Iraq had done little yet to stem the bloodshed.
He said that "even if violence is diminished, given the current winner-take-all at ude and sectarian animosities infecting the political scene, Iraqi leaders will be hard pressed to achieve sustained political reconciliation."
( and dubya and Petraeus have both said politics is the only solution, not military )
In prepared testimony to the House of Representatives armed services committee, Fingar said essential public services in Iraq remain "inadequate," oil output is below pre-war levels and electricity supply has fallen.
"With political reconciliation showing few appreciable gains, we have noted that Iraqis increasingly resort to violence," he said.
"The struggle among and within Iraqi communities over national iden y and the distribution of power has eclipsed attacks by Iraqis against the coalition forces as the greatest impediment to Iraq's future as a peaceful, democratic and unified state."
Fingar's remarks and similarly downbeat assessments from other senior intelligence officials to the House committee came with Bush under more pressure than ever to start bringing US troops home from Iraq.
A flurry of plans in the Democratic-led Congress, from across the political spectrum, range from an immediate troop exodus, to various blueprints for a withdrawal to start within four months and be completed by early next year.
Bidding to shore up its support among rebellious lawmakers, the Bush administration has focussed on the threat posed to Iraq and beyond of Al-Qaeda and its extremist sympathizers.
Fingar, however, said groups like Al-Qaeda in Iraq are not major players in themselves but "effective accelerants for the self-sustaining sectarian struggle between Shia and Sunnis."
Neighboring Iran is playing a nefarious role by providing "lethal support" to Shiite militants in Iraq, while Syria gives refuge to deposed Iraqi leaders and is unwilling "to stop the flow of foreign jihadists into Iraq," he added.
US allies such as Jordan and Saudi Arabia are meanwhile "increasingly apprehensive about Iraqi ethno-sectarian strife agitating their populations," and of the spread of radical Islamists, Iranian influence and refugees.
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CIA Said Instability Seemed 'Irreversible'
By Bob Woodward
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, July 12, 2007; A01
Early on the morning of Nov. 13, 2006, members of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group gathered around a dark wooden conference table in the windowless Roosevelt Room of the White House.
For more than an hour, they listened to President Bush give what one panel member called a "Churchillian" vision of "victory" in Iraq and defend the country's prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki. "A cons utional order is emerging," he said.
Later that morning, around the same conference table, CIA Director Michael V. Hayden painted a starkly different picture for members of the study group. Hayden said "the inability of the government to govern seems irreversible," adding that he could not "point to any milestone or checkpoint where we can turn this thing around," according to written records of his briefing and the recollections of six participants.
"The government is unable to govern," Hayden concluded. "We have spent a lot of energy and treasure creating a government that is balanced, and it cannot function."
Later in the interview, he qualified the statement somewhat: "A government that can govern, sustain and defend itself is not achievable," he said, "in the short term."
Hayden's bleak assessment, which came just a week after Republicans had lost control of Congress and Bush had dismissed Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, was a pivotal moment in the study group's intensive examination of the Iraq war, and it helped shape its conclusion in its final report that the situation in Iraq was "grave and deteriorating."
In the eight months since the interview, neither Hayden nor any other high-ranking administration official has publicly described the Iraqi government in the uniformly negative terms that the CIA director used in his closed-door briefing.
Among the 79 specific recommendations the Iraq Study Group made to Bush was withdrawing support for the Maliki government unless it showed "substantial progress" on security and national reconciliation. And it recommended changing the primary mission of U.S. forces from combat to training Iraqis so that combat units could be withdrawn by early 2008.
In effect, the report from the bipartisan group -- co-chaired by former secretary of state James A. Baker III, a Republican, and former congressman Lee H. Hamilton (D-Ind.) -- was an urgent message from the old Washington establishment to the Bush administration to change the direction of its Iraq policy. But Bush did not initially embrace any of the key recommendations, although bipartisan groups in the House and Senate have recently introduced legislation that would make them official U.S. policy.
Instead, the president in January announced that he was sending more troops to Iraq as part of a "surge," which he said would lead to the victory that had so far eluded U.S. forces.
Both Bush and Gen. David H. Petraeus, commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, have repeatedly said that there is no military solution to Iraq and that the sectarian strife and the insurgency can be resolved only by the Iraqi government.
Hayden's description of Iraq's dysfunctional government provides some insight into the intelligence community's analysis of Maliki and the situation on the ground. Five days before his testimony, national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley had written a memo to Bush raising doubts about Maliki's ability to curb violence in Iraq, but his assessment was not as bleak as Hayden's.
Bush's own optimistic statement to members of the study group did not reflect the viewpoint of his CIA director. But a statement from another administration official interviewed by the panel the same day -- Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice -- took it into account.
Asked by former Supreme Court justice Sandra Day O'Connor, a member of the study group, if she was aware of the CIA's grim evaluation of Iraq, Rice replied, "We are aware of the dark assessment," but quickly added: "It is not without hope."
A spokesman for the CIA, Mark Mansfield, disputed this account of Hayden's testimony to members of the study group. "That is not an accurate reflection of what Director Hayden said at that meeting, nor does it reflect his view, then or now," Mansfield said.
A senior intelligence official familiar with Hayden's session with the Iraq Study Group said that Hayden told the panel his assessment was "somber" and acknowledged that Hayden had used the term "irreversible." But the official insisted that Hayden instead said, "The current situation, with regard to governance in Iraq, was probably irreversible in the short term, because of the world views of many of the [Iraqi] government leaders, which were shaped by a sectarian filter and a government that was organized for its ethnic and religious balance rather than competence or capacity."
But another senior intelligence official confirmed the thrust and detail of Hayden's assessment, saying that the intelligence out of Iraq this month shows that the ability of the Maliki government to execute decisions and govern Iraq remains "awful."
Hayden, 62, a four-star Air Force general and career intelligence officer, has a reputation as a candid briefer. Since 2003, the CIA, which has more than 500 personnel in Iraq to assist in providing intelligence and analysis, has offered the most pessimistic view of any intelligence agency of both the Iraqi government's performance and the situation on the ground there.
Testifying publicly before the Senate Armed Services Committee two days after meeting with the study group, Hayden was more cautious in his conclusions. He said that there were serious problems in Iraq but that the government was "functioning."
Former defense secretary William J. Perry, one of the five Democrats on the Iraq Study Group, confirmed that Hayden told them the Iraqi government seemed beyond repair.
"That was what we'd been hearing everywhere," Perry said. "He just said it a little more clearly and more explicitly than other people."
O'Connor, a Republican, also confirmed Hayden's assessment. She said she did not agree with his conclusion that it was irreversible, but she said she was pessimistic.
"It is a dire situation," she said. "I don't think it has gotten any better. It just breaks your heart. . . . Iraqi people are dying, American soldiers are dying. So far it does not seem we have achieved any kind of security there."
Arriving at the White House on the morning of Nov. 13, members of the study group spent the day interviewing almost every key figure involved in Iraq policy. In addition to Hayden, Bush and Rice, they also questioned Rumsfeld; Gen. Peter Pace, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; Zalmay Khalilzad, then U.S. ambassador to Iraq; and, by videoconference from Baghdad, Gen. George W. Casey Jr., then the top U.S. commander in Iraq.
Bush was joined in the interview by Vice President Cheney, White House Chief of Staff Joshua B. Bolten and Hadley, but they did not speak. "We thought with that whole group there, we were going to get briefings, we were going to get discussions," said Perry. "Instead the president held forth on his views on how important the war was, and how it was tough."
In his meeting with members of the study group, Hayden described a situation in which the Iraqi government either would not or could not control the violence consuming the country and questioned whether it made sense to strengthen its security forces. He depicted the United States as facing mainly bad choices in the future.
"Our leaving Iraq would make the situation worse," Hayden said. "Our staying in Iraq may not make it better. Our current approach without modification will not make it better."
According to the written record and others in the room, Hayden at one point likened the situation in Iraq to a marathon. He said there comes a point in each race when the runner knows he can complete the challenge. But Hayden said he could see no such point in Iraq's future.
(dubya and head will drop out of the marathon 20 Jan 09 and dump the mess on the next administration, who they will blame for losing Iraq. )
"The levers of power are not connected to anything," he said, adding: "We have placed all of our energies in creating the center, and the center cannot accomplish anything."
Numerous U.S. generals already had told the study group that success in Iraq could not come without national reconciliation between the Sunnis and Shiites. Hayden agreed, saying: "The Iraqi iden y is muted. The Sunni or Shia iden y is foremost."
( this situation was foreseen by analysts before the invasion, but dubya invaded any, with no plans for the post-invasion period, excep to get make those oil revenue-sharing agreeements into the hands of US/UK oilcos ASAP)
But he clearly saw no end to sectarian killings. "Given the level of uncontrolled violence," Hayden said, "the most we can do is to contain its excesses and preserve the possibility of reconciliation in the future."
He compared the Iraq situation to the prolonged warfare in the Balkans. "In Bosnia, the parties fought themselves to exhaustion," Hayden said, suggesting that the same scenario could play out in Iraq. "They might just have to fight this out to exhaustion."
Hayden catalogued what he saw as the main sources of violence in this order: the insurgency, sectarian strife, criminality, general anarchy and, lastly, al-Qaeda. Though Hayden had listed al-Qaeda as the fifth most pressing threat in Iraq, Bush regularly lists al-Qaeda first.
Members of the study group said Hayden's stark assessment of the Iraqi government dovetailed with what they had heard in September during their visit to Iraq. There, they met with a senior CIA official who held an equally unenthusiastic view. "Maliki was nobody's pick," the CIA official had said, according to written notes from that meeting. "His name came up late. He has no real power base in the country or in parliament. We need not expect much from him."
Given the constant threats and persistent violence, the official had said, it was remarkable that Iraqi government employees showed up for work.
"We continue to be amazed that the Iraqis accept such high levels of violence," he told the study group. "Maliki thinks two car bombs a day, 100 dead a day, is okay. It's sustainable and his government is survivable."
But the government itself was responsible for some of that violence, the CIA official said. "The Ministry of Interior is uniformed death squads, overseers of jails and torture facilities," he said. "Their funds are constantly misappropriated."
In his testimony, Hayden said that the United States had fundamental disagreements with Maliki's Shiite-dominated government on some of the most basic issues facing Iraq.
"We and the Iraqi government do not agree on who the enemy is," Hayden said, according to the written record. "For all the senior leaders of the Iraqi government, Baathists are the source of evil. There is a Baathist behind every bush."
Several participants in the interview described Hayden as dismayed by the startling level of violence in the country but skeptical of the ability of Iraqi forces -- either the military or the police -- to do anything about it.
"It's a legitimate question whether strengthening the Iraqi security forces helps or hurts when they are viewed as a predatory element," he said. "Strengthening Iraqi security forces is not unalloyed good. Without qualification, this judgment applies to the police."
In one bit of qualified good news, he said that the training of the Iraqi army had produced better results than that of the police. "The army is uneven," he said, adding: "Uneven, in this case, is good."
Hayden's frustration with Maliki provides a context to the administration's continuing efforts to pressure the Iraqi leader into finding a political settlement between Sunni and Shiite factions in Iraq. During one week last month, three senior administration officials visited Baghdad to try to speed up the political process.
In her testimony Nov. 13, Rice recounted her discussions with Maliki in which she bluntly told him the importance of making progress on national unity and reconciliation. Rice said she had told the prime minister, "Pretty soon, you'll all be swinging from lampposts if you don't hang together."
Brady Dennis and Evelyn Duffy contributed to this report.
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you're doing a heckuva job, dubya
He'll blame his own puppet govt. and exit, back stage, into a helicopter, flashing a peace sign.
incompetent is not a word I throw round lightly, but if the shoe fits...
But, you wear it nicely.
You better get in the game, Yoni. I'm thinking you only have until Jan. 2009 to file that lawsuit against Bush for the carpet burns on your kneecaps.
July 12, 2007
News Analysis
Defending an Iraq Strategy in a Race Against Time
By DAVID E. SANGER and THOM SHANKER
WASHINGTON, July 11 — Once again, President Bush tried today to buy more time for his strategy in Iraq, refusing to say when conditions there might allow him to begin the troop drawdown that he insists is his ultimate goal.
For now, at least, Mr. Bush has rejected the advice of those who have urged him to hint at a timeline for withdrawal, concluding that to follow that course would only have emboldened Republican rebels and others in Congress to go even further in trying to reshape his strategy.
But even some of his aides acknowledge that the surge of American forces that Mr. Bush defended so ardently today is already on borrowed time. By September, when a fuller report on political and security progress in Iraq is due, the chances that Congress will intervene to accelerate a troop withdrawal are expected to increase sharply.
While Mr. Bush gave only the briefest hint of it today, senior commanders in Baghdad and at the Pentagon and political and national security officials in the White House are already deeply involved in planning a “post-surge” mission for the American military.
That narrower mission would focus the American approach on training Iraqi forces, assuring Iraq’s territorial integrity, deterring Iran and preventing Iraq from becoming a terrorist haven. To a significant extent, it would pull American troops off the streets and out of harm’s way.
It is a strategy that Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates — with an occasional assist from Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice — appears to have been trying to get Mr. Bush to embrace sooner rather than later. But from the White House to the Pentagon to the military headquarters in Baghdad, there is no appe e to publicly offer a preview of the thinking for any eventual troop reductions and narrowing of the mission, even if those reductions are inevitable. And they appear inevitable: Come April, top military officials say, Mr. Bush will either have to pull one brigade a month out of Iraq, or again extend the tours of soldiers on the ground — in the middle of a presidential election.
Administration officials say that if Mr. Bush talked now about pulling back forces at the end of this year or next spring, he would only provide new ammunition for those Democrats and a growing number of Republicans who are pushing for legislation to set timelines for the withdrawal of some of the 150,000 American forces.
The argument inside the White House last week, one official said, was over “how much leg to show” of that strategy. Karl Rove, the president’s top political adviser, was among those arguing for showing very little, and judging by Mr. Bush’s performance in his first news conference in a newly renovated White House press room, Mr. Rove won the day.
With that advice in mind, Mr. Bush described the follow-on mission in Iraq only in the broadest of terms. Perhaps one reason is that it bears tremendous resemblance to the narrow mission recommended by the bipartisan Iraq Study Group in December and rejected as premature by Mr. Bush in his January announcement of a significant troop increase. Mr. Bush said again today that he had decided to give the government of Nuri Kamal al-Maliki a chance “to open space for Iraq political leaders to advance the difficult process of national reconciliation” of Shiites and Sunnis.
Mr. Bush’s problem is that the Iraqis have so far shown little to no progress, as the National Intelligence Council told Congress on Wednesday. Few in the White House are betting that the situation will look much different in September. And that will raise anew the hardest questions facing the administration: What has the surge bought? And at what cost?
Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company
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The Shiites and Sunnis are having their civil war, and will have to fight it to exhaustion, like some many other civil wars.
This week's scaremongering that the US leaving Iraq will draw in adjacent countries is just like the IndoChina Domino Theory in the 1960s. That didn't happen and leaders in countries adjacent to Iraq don't want to stablize their own power by going into Iraq. And the Iraqi Shiites and Sunis are so pre-occupied fighting themselves to death that they don't have the military comand structure and logistics to invade nearly countries.
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