There seems to be a tremendous disconnect between the die-hard war supporters and reality.
On the one hand, you have Lindsey Graham drinking deep from the Raspberry Red and stepping up to the mike to declare that things in
It’s hard to tell, the way objectives shift and goalposts get moved, but I seem to recall that the purpose of the escalation was to secure
Just a brief perusal of the major news outlets would indicate that Graham is either delusional at best, or flat-out lying at worst. I’m going with the lying until proof is submitted to the contrary.
One British soldier was also killed in the south.
The fresh violence follows a lull in
The violence came as the
The worst carnage unfolded in the Shiite Turkoman village of Amarly, 50 miles south of Kirkuk, when a suicide bomber rammed a truck laden with explosives into the central market, which is near a police station, officials said. The attack killed at least 115 people and wounded at least 210, according to district and hospital officials, adding that they expected the death toll to rise.
And finally, from the New York Times:
In the worst blast, a truck loaded with explosives demolished dozens of fragile clay-built houses and shops on Saturday in Amerli, a village of poor Shiite Turkmen about 15 miles south of Tuz Khurmato. The Iraqi police said the blast killed 1o5 people and wounded 210 more.
The American military also reported Saturday the deaths of nine soldiers and marines on Thursday and Friday, eight of them during combat or from roadside bomb attacks.
Witnesses in Amerli described a horrific scene of people running while on fire, and others shrieking for rescuers to pull them free from beneath scores of buildings that were turned into rubble by the blast.
Perhaps Lindsey will do us all a favor and next time he visits Iraq and conduct one of his patented pep-rallies outside the Green Zone, in the middle of Baghdad – without two Apache gunships, three Blackhawks, an entire company of U.S. soldiers surrounding him – and enough body armor to pass himself off as a body double for RoboCop.
If he did that, I might, for a couple of minutes, stop bitching about the stupidity of these dog-and-pony-shows when potentates visit the “troops in the field” to “get the real story” – oh please! You can take my first-hand account on this – any “troop in the field” who might be inclined to say something the potentates don’t want to hear, doesn’t get anywhere near the potentates. These trips are a waste of taxpayer money, and for what just one of these junkets costs, at least ten teachers could be trained for placement in inner city schools, and a couple of doctors for inner-city hospitals, too.
And I can tell you something else first-hand…when the word comes down from on high that a dignitary is coming, the cursing is voluble and eye-rolling is blatant...even from the commanders making the announcement, in a lot of cases. I can only imagine the reaction of troops in a war zone.
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