Who Pays the Price?

clay Bennett

The Crosses of Lafayette - Christmas Eve 2007

Click to enlarge

973 US Troops Killed in Iraq in Last 12 Months

The Iraq Study Group was published one year ago today.

Although the final report was not released until December 6, 2006, media reports ahead of that date described some possible recommendations by the panel. Among them were the beginning of a phased withdrawal of US combat forces from Iraq and direct US dialogue with Syria and Iran over Iraq and the Middle East. The Iraq Study Group also found that the Pentagon has underreported significantly the extent of the violence in Iraq and that officials have obtained little information regarding the source of these attacks. The group further described the situation in Afghanistan as so disastrous that they may need to divert troops from Iraq in order to help stabilize the country. After these reports began surfacing, co-chair James Baker warned that the group should not be expected to produce a "magic bullet" to resolve the Iraqi conflict.

According to the Iraq Coalition Casualty Count, 973 US Troops were killed in Iraq from December 6, 2006 through December 5, 2007.

Tip o' the hat to Atrios.

Pattern Recognition: Representing Failure as Success

Mike Lukovich

Currently, I am reading "Legacy of Ashes" by Tim Weiner. Well, I am not really reading it. Instead, I am listening to it on my iPod having downloaded it from Audible.com. I just listened to the following observation:

"The ability to represent failure as success was becoming a CIA tradition."

I know from Chalmers Johnson's review of the book that it occurs on page 58.

The Bush administration has the same tradition. The war in Iraq is an obvious failure that the Bush administration keeps representing as a success. And the mainstream media is still happy to report or least repeat the Bush administration representation. Other countries knew even before the occupation that failure was in the offing. Now the entire world - or at least, the entire world outside of the Beltway, is certain of that failure.

Likewise, the intelligence hyped by the administration about WMD leading up to the invasion and occupation of Iraq was a complete failure but represented as a success. And now we know that intelligence about Iran's development of WMD is also a failure as was the policy of saber rattling toward Iran. So the pattern would be that Bush will now represent that failure as a success. And, sure enough he is. And we also know that the mainstream media will report, I mean repeat, that representation.