Twenty Years of 100,000 Troops in Iraq in Long Shot Gamble

It's of little importance what administration frontman Gen. David Petraeus has to say next Monday about Iraq.
If he has something on his mind embarrassing to Bush, then he won't say it.

If he tells the truth about Iraq, he won't be around long, so the career-minded General certainly won't be telling the truth, the Bush truth anyway is being crafted by politicos at the White House.

One truth Petraeus won't acknowledge are the lies and lust for oil that have killed 100,000s.

Kevin Drum of The Political Animal points to Fred Kaplan's another substantial bit of truth that likely won't be told:

- The matter if 100,000 American troops in Iraq for 20 years -

BURIED LEDE ALERT....Fred Kaplan has a good piece in Slate today about the upcoming Petraeus report and what Congress needs to ask about it. But I was more taken by an astonishing statement at the end of the piece from Stephen Biddle, a member of Petraeus's advisory panel. Here's his comment about the current plan to restore stability to Iraq via a "bottom up" strategy of working with tribal leaders:

Biddle also said (again, expressing his personal view) that the strategy in Iraq would require the presence of roughly 100,000 American troops for 20 years — and that, even so, it would be a "long-shot gamble."

Here's Paul Krugman's take:

Here’s what will definitely happen when Gen. David Petraeus testifies before Congress next week: he’ll assert that the surge has reduced violence in Iraq — as long as you don’t count Sunnis killed by Sunnis, Shiites killed by Shiites, Iraqis killed by car bombs and people shot in the front of the head.

Oh, and not to bury my own lede, but just wondering how many troops could get PTSD disability benefits with the money spent on the slimy- PR-induced-Bush-says-"We're kicking ass"- surprise visit to Iraq last weekend. What a man that Bush is.

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Bush Knew Iraq Had No WMDs

Even the deluded, God-told-me-to-invade, swaggering idiot that is our president knew Saddam had no WMDs. I'm betting Bush will not admit this to the families of the soldiers killed in his miserable war.

Sidney Blumenthal has the exclusive story at Salon.

Bush knew Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction Salon exclusive:

Two former CIA officers say the president squelched top-secret intelligence, and a briefing by George Tenet, months before invading Iraq.

By Sidney Blumenthal

On Sept. 18, 2002, CIA director George Tenet briefed President Bush in the Oval Office on top-secret intelligence that Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction, according to two former senior CIA officers.

Bush dismissed as worthless this information from the Iraqi foreign minister, a member of Saddam's inner circle, although it turned out to be accurate in every detail. Tenet never brought it up again.

Nor was the intelligence included in the National Intelligence Estimate of October 2002, which stated categorically that Iraq possessed

WMD. No one in Congress was aware of the secret intelligence that Saddam had no WMD as the House of Representatives and the Senate voted, a week after the submission of the NIE, on the Authorization for Use of Military Force in Iraq. The information, moreover, was not circulated within the CIA among those agents involved in operations to prove whether Saddam had WMD.

On April 23, 2006, CBS's "60 Minutes" interviewed Tyler Drumheller, the former CIA chief of clandestine operations for Europe, who disclosed that the agency had received documentary intelligence from Naji Sabri, Saddam's foreign minister, that Saddam did not have WMD. "We continued to validate him the whole way through," said Drumheller. "The policy was set. The war in Iraq was coming, and they were looking for intelligence to fit into the policy, to justify the policy."
Now two former senior CIA officers have confirmed Drumheller's account to me and provided the background to the story of how the information that might have stopped the invasion of Iraq was twisted in order to justify it. They described what Tenet said to Bush about the lack of WMD, and how Bush responded, and noted that Tenet never shared Sabri's intelligence with then Secretary of State

Colin Powell.

According to the former officers, the intelligence was also never shared with the senior military planning the invasion, which required U.S. soldiers to receive medical shots against the ill effects of WMD and to wear protective uniforms in the desert.

Read the full report at Salon.

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