Add Democrat Joe Biden and Republican John McCain to the growing list of people blasting Rep. John Boehner (R-OH) for saying that America has paid a “small price” in Iraq.
There was so much crap in the president’s speech last night that analyzing requires a fairly aggressive form of crap triage to distinguish the merely bogus from the bogus and hilarious or the bogus and unconscionable. So let me focus in again on the president’s reference to the “the 36 nations who have troops on the ground in Iraq.”
One way the president comes up with this number is to rope in something called the NATO Training Mission-Iraq (NTM-1).
As Spencer Ackerman notes here, most of the countries involved in this initiative have agreed to let Iraqis come to their countries for training, not the other way around. So for instance, according to a recent Congressional Research Service report, Spain “plans to train groups of 25 Iraqis in mine clearance at a center outside Madrid.”
And who has boots on the ground in country? One example from the president’s list of 36 is Iceland which has sent a single public information officer to serve in the NATO mission in Baghdad. More robustly, Italy has 8 officers on the NTM-I mission in Baghdad, Portugal is considering sending “up to 10.”
Let’s start by stipulating that the arguments for our Iraq policy have been a pretty big crock for a really long time. We want to calm the place down so they can have democracy. As long as we can also get all the terrorists there so we can fight them in one place of our choosing. Or we need to fight in Iraq because the real threat is Iran. Etc. etc. etc.
We know all the rationales. I’ve even made something of a career of chronicling them. But as we saw in President Bush’s speech last night things have gotten to a point where the White House spinmeisters hardly seem even to have their heart in it anymore. And the president just seems to be living in some sort of alternative universe populated by the failed gods of his narcissism and vainglory.
As the president lays out in the second paragraph of his speech, there are first our allies the Iraqis who are battling the extremists who want to take away their freedom and democracy. And we cannot abandon them in this fight. Indeed they are asking us to build an “enduring relationship” (i.e., long-term presence of American troops) with them.
This seems not to take into account that a sizable majority of Iraqis believe it is acceptable to kill our troops in the country. And there is virtual unanimity within the Iraqi population against any permanent American troop presence in the country — with the exception of the Iraqi Kurds who now enjoy de facto independence under our protection.
The only reasonable argument that I can see for our continued occupation of Iraq (though on balance I find it unpersuasive and disagree with it) is that we have screwed things up so badly and made the place such a powder keg that we need to stay there to try to undo or at least ameliorate what a disaster we’ve created — to paraphrase Woody Allen’s famous line from Annie Hall to get Iraq safely back from horror to mere misery.
But with respect to the president’s cartoonish babble, like I said, whatever. I know this reads like an expression of cynicism or disengagement. But while the president’s chatter, with its brainlessness and brazenness, drives many to distraction, I think this is the only appropriate response. Anyone watching what’s happening can see that what the president is talking about bears no relation to what’s actually happening in Iraq — a fact well confirmed by the fact that polls show no change in the public’s take on what’s happening in response to the president’s speech. Primitive animals will sometimes keep chattering or twitching their muscles even after their heads have been cut off. And that’s probably the best analogy today to the president’s continuing enunciation of his policies.
The president’s continuing power as commander-in-chief, behind a wall of 1/3+ support in the Congress, is key. His arguments aren’t. They have simply predeceased his presidency.
Charlie Savage wraps up his stint this week over at TPMCafe. His last post is on the subversion of American democracy. Our thanks to Charlie for sitting down at the Table for One.
It just about epitomizes the President’s speech last night. One of the purported 36 coalition nations is Iceland, whose “contingent” to Iraq consists of a single soldier in Baghdad whose primary responsibility is as a media representative. To NATO’s disappointment, Iceland is pulling that one soldier as of October 1. You can’t make this stuff up.
We still haven’t managed to figure out how the President’s math gets him to 36 nations in the coalition. But whatever the number, it will be minus one when a single Icelander heads home in a couple of weeks.
Late Update: TPM Reader EF points out that Iceland doesn’t even have a formally constituted military, which the CIA World Fact Book confirms. The lone Icelander is a member of the Icelandic Crisis Response Unit. Calling him a soldier may be overstating matters.
Oh my, not looking good for the Tubester, Sen. Ted Stevens (R-AK).
Under cross-examination, VECO CEO Bill Allen is now admitting that included in the $400,000 in bribes he’s admitted to giving legislators was labor for the home renovation of Stevens’ home.
That would seem to put the onus pretty heavily on Stevens. The briber turning evidence on the bribee is usually real bad news for the guy who took the bribes.
The White House has provided us with the list of 36 nations the President was referring to last night in his speech when he said, “We thank the 36 nations who have troops on the ground in Iraq and the many others who are helping that young democracy. ”
The key phrase there is “troops on the ground.”
If you take a look at the list we were provided, by a National Security Council official, the first heading is “Countries with troops on ground in Iraq.” Only 26 countries appear in that category. The remaining 10 countries are assigned to either United Nations Assistance Mission in Iraq or to NATO Training NTM-I.
So by the President’s own accounting, the math is wrong. As Spencer Ackerman points out, there are other problems with the numbers. Canada is listed, for example, among the 36, but it pulled out its one and only person in Iraq months ago. The numbers, in short, are a sham.
Now, whether it’s 36 countries or 106, shouldn’t distract from the larger shams, such as the implication that there remains international support for the U.S. mission in Iraq or the suggestion that anyone other than the U.S. is doing virtually all of the heavy lifting there.
But after the famous 16 words on Niger in his State of the Union speech, after 4 1/2 years of duck and cover on Iraq, after all of the lies, deceptions, and falsehoods, it plumbs news depths of dishonesty to include such a bogus number as “36 nations” in a speech that begins with the following lines: “In the life of all free nations, there come moments that decide the direction of a country and reveal the character of its people. We are now at such a moment.”
The President once again revealed his character. Were that it was of the same quality as that of the people he leads.
The fallout over Minority Leader John Boehner’s “small price” comment about the Iraq War continues. Two House Democratic leaders have raised their objections to the comment, and CNN has picked up the story, or more precisely, returned to it. Boehner’s remarks were made earlier in the week in a CNN interview with Wolf Blitzer but gained attention after being flagged by TPM’s Greg Sargent.