Complete withdrawal is the only Iraq plan we can accept from a Democratic candidate. Luckily it looks like Obama is on the right side of this.

As the AP puts it “President Bush will tell the nation this week he plans to reduce the American troop presence in Iraq by as many as 30,000 by next summer, but will condition those and further cuts on continued progress…”

Excuse me if I don’t believe that. The AP got a “scoop” from another anonymous admin PR flack that we might reduce troop numbers if “progress” continues. What progress? The progress they invented? The progress that is just enough to keep us in Iraq, but not enough for us to leave? Again, why are we still there? The Iraqis wants us to leave. 2/3 of americans want us to leave. And we aren’t even making any progress. At what point will this White House get tired of lying to us? When will the media stop reprinting this crap?

As the AP puts it “President Bush will tell the nation this week he plans to reduce the American troop presence in Iraq by as many as 30,000 by next summer, but will condition those and further cuts on continued progress…”

Excuse me if I don’t believe that. The AP got a “scoop” from another anonymous admin PR flack that we might reduce troop numbers if “progress” continues. What progress? The progress they invented? The progress that is just enough to keep us in Iraq, but not enough for us to leave? Again, why are we still there? The Iraqis wants us to leave. 2/3 of americans want us to leave. And we aren’t even making any progress. At what point will this White House get tired of lying to us? When will the media stop reprinting this crap?

Today the great General Petreus told us that (surprise) the surge is working. But it isn’t working so well we can leave, it is working just well enough that we have to stay for the indefinite future.

Hooray for democracy! As yglesias notes, however, its hard to call it a success if 60% of Iraqis support attacks on Americans. That’s right, its not that they want us to leave or think the surge was a bad idea. They support the idea of killing American service people. Clearly, we are making progress with those hearts and minds.

Oh and better still, 70 percent of Iraqis think the surge has made their lives worse. Oh well, at least the great General thinks this has been a huge success.

Every once and a while I sit and wonder to myself: why the hell are we still in Iraq? As we eagerly await the Petreus White House Report Testimony on the status of the troop surge it is becoming clear that this Iraq thing has been a complete failure on every level. They can’t move the goal posts any further to declare it a success. There were no WMDs, we haven’t brought democracy, we haven’t been able to create a national police force that works, we haven’t been able to train a security force.

Are we really just “staying the course” because of the pig-headedness of Bush and Cheney? Because that is so insane.

Yeah seriously, the fact that anyone thinks nuclear weapons are a good idea in any circumstance is disturbing.

I just watched the president speaking about what the Fox News chyron called “the war on terror”, aka the war in Iraq. Fox assured me that “some” are critical of the Iraq policy, but that Bush just gave a strong response. I love how Fox doesn’t just show the speech, they explain why the speech was strong and right. If the speech was unclear, they fix up the argument.

Anyway, the new argument is that “new intelligence” reveals that Al Qaida in Iraq reports to Bin Laden, which is why we have to fight them in Iraq. Another twist on the classic “using the troops as bait” argument, which seems to play with somebody. But I just think its amazing the White House thinks we are so stupid as to accept the new argument for staying in Iraq is that being in Iraq is attracting terrorists there.

It’s good for business!

The Dow closed at a record high for the fourth straight session today. Kudos to the rich! Meanwhile, in poor-people-land, Dozens Massacred in Diyala, 80 Dead in Kirkuk Bombings. As Patrick Cockburn writes, “just another day in Iraq.”

Listen if you have time. A real look at what Iraq is like for US soldiers and marines. Interesting for me was that the army seems proud of transitioning from the “abusive” model of policing to the “insanely condescending” technique. Also bizarre is the ideological insistence that in Iraq there are “bad guys” causing all the violence and “everyday Iraqis” are the victims. So we are training the Iraqis to defend themselves, giving them weapons to protect against the “bad guys” without stopping to consider the possibility that it is “everyday Iraqis” who are killing us and each other.

The Times Editorial board tells it like it is.