Or maybe not so strange.
In the midst of surge week and in advance of the President’s speech tonight, the Pentagon has released tapes of the combatant status review tribunal of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.
And Fox News is running hard with them.
In touting the powers of the new FISA law, the intelligence chief falsely told Congress that it was instrumental in a terrorism investigation in Germany that led to multiple arrests.
Fran Reiter was Giuliani’s campaign manager in 1997, but says Rudy has “backed away from” his former “progressive views.”
With the death in Anbar today of a member of the Sunni leadership who was among the key figures in the recent rapprochement with U.S. troops there, it bears returning to the issue of what constitutes the Sunni insurgency. Gen. Petraeus downplayed the non-al-Qaeda Sunni insurgency in his testimony this week, but al Qaeda in Iraq is a tiny proportion of the overall Sunni insurgency.
The new AP poll shows little movement on the key questions involving Iraq and President Bush.
So Abu Risha, our new ally in al Anbar, was helping us turn the tide on al Qaeda. But now al Qaeda has killed him in an explosion near his home in Ramadi. So they’re fighting back. And it’s a major setback in the progress we’ve made in the province.
That at least is the narrative you’ll read in most of the US press.
But is any of it true? As Spencer Ackerman reports here, a lot of people who know a lot about the region and the people involved say that AQI (“al Qaida in Iraq”) remains a miniscule part of the Sunni insurgency. Perhaps a disproportionately lethal part of it, but so small as to make any equation of the Sunni insurgency and ‘al Qaeda’ deeply misleading. Indeed, many experts express doubt that al Qaeda is even responsible for Abu Risha’s death. At least as likely, says Marc Lynch, it was “one of the nationalist insurgency groups, the ones which current American rhetoric pretends don’t exist.”
I did an interview yesterday with Juan Cole — which we’re going to try to bring you soon on TPMtv — and his take was broadly similar to Lynch’s. There really is something changing in al Anbar. Attacks are down substantially. But the ‘turning against al Qaeda’ storyline is at best deeply misleading. More accurate would be to say that we’re getting a bit more savvy about using patronage/bribery to recruit a tribal clientage willing to act as our proxies in the region. And in itself that’s probably a very shrewd move. Cole makes the point that a lot of these tribes tried to do business with us years ago, only to get sent packing after a quick pat-down and weapons search. And it is worth keeping in mind that some of what we’re calling ‘tribes’ here are more aptly termed gangs.
For me, the fog of war is compounded by my relative ignorance of the players involved and the thousands of miles between me and Iraq. But I know enough to be deeply skeptical when the news of the day conforms so tightly to the expectations of policies and storylines we know to be based on misdirection, lies and questionable ideology.
So maybe this small extremist group, AQI, really did kill Abu Risha.. But there’s enough evidence out there to suggest that everything we’re hearing really is through the looking glass, a highly distorted version of events designed to keep us locked in our ratcheting vise of policy catastrophe.
Tonight at 9 p.m. ET President Bush will address the nation in response to this week’s congressional testimony by Gen. Petraeus and Amb. Crocker and triumphantly announce the withdrawal of some 30,000 U.S. troops from Iraq by next summer. Call it a cold hunch, but we have a feeling he will link the drawdown directly to “progress on the ground,” or “facts on the ground,” possibly “signs of success on the ground.” Something to do with the ground. But what’s the real story behind the troop withdrawal?
In today’s episode of TPMtv we attempt to preemptively inoculate you against the President’s spin by showing you the administration getting its story straight in real time, with a little help from Press Secretary Tony Snow, who delivered a magisterial performance in his final televised press briefing …
With the help of Brian Beutler, Spencer Ackerman crunches the economic numbers on Iraq presented this week by Amb. Ryan Crocker. Funny, they don’t quite add up.
One of the more remarkable things about the enormous effort put into this week full of Petraeus hearings, White House spin and assorted PR from all sides is how little movement any of it has generated in public opinion. I am mindful of making that conclusion a bit prematurely, before the week is over and before the President’s speech tonight. So we’ll just have to wait and see the final results. But I had the sense last week as we were gearing up for this Washington spectacle that for most Americans, who made up their minds on Iraq quite some time ago, the events of this week would be of little consequence.
American public opinion on Iraq and the Bush policies on Iraq has been locked in place for an unusually long period of time, especially considering how strongly negative the polling is. I am not a polling expert and statistics are not my strong suit but my intuitive sense is that after public opinion turns strongly negative you would tend to see a softening of that opinion over time. I believe the term of art in statistics is reversion to the mean. The folksy truism is people don’t stay mad for long.
In this case, people are not so much mad as they are very dissatisfied, and consistently so. There have been some small dips and bumps in the polling data over the last many months, but they have for the most part been negligible. Just today, AP polling begun during the Petraeus hearings showed little movement in opinion on Iraq and the president. CNN shows the President today still mired at 36% approval. One poll out did show considerable movement, but I not sure it can be said to undermine the point I’m making here. The NBC/Wall Street Journal poll shows an 8 point jump in the President’s approval rating–to a whopping 30%. That poll’s respondents went from enraged to merely pissed off.
The day’s most remarkable poll may be from Fox News, which asked whether respondents thought the Petraeus report was truthful and objective or slanted toward Bush Administration policies. More people thought it was slanted (40%) than that it was truthful (35%). The distinguished general’s reputation notwithstanding, people we’re not buying what he had to say.
Given the immovable numbers, it’s all the more apparent that the target audience this week has not been voters but congressional Republicans. They are the key to President Bush being able to continue a terribly unpopular war until he leaves office. So long as they stand by him, he can maintain his grip on Iraq policy in the face of longstanding and deep public dissatisfaction.
Late Update: To clarify, the NBC/Wall Street Journal poll number above is Bush’s job approval on Iraq.