Olbermann: “Iraq, President Bush, and ‘sacrifice’”
By SusanUnPC on January 2, 2007 at 1:37 PM in Current Affairs
By SusanUnPC: I just received the daily newsletter for MSNBC’s Countdown with Keith Olbermann live at 8PM ET tonight. [UPDATE: The text and video are up at MSNBC.] “We’re back, Keith’s back, anchoring from Washington, and he has a Special Comment about the war in Iraq, President Bush, and ‘sacrifice’.” And it promises to be a humdinger:
Here’s the top news story that Keith’s newsletter discusses:
US President George W Bush intends to reveal a new Iraq strategy within days, the BBC has learned. The speech will reveal a plan to send more US troops to Iraq to focus on ways of bringing greater security, rather than training Iraqi forces. The move comes with figures from Iraqi ministries suggesting that deaths among civilians are at record highs.
The BBC was told by a senior administration source that the speech setting out changes in Mr. Bush’s Iraq policy is likely to come in the middle of next week. Its central theme will be sacrifice. The speech, the BBC has been told, involves increasing troop numbers. The exact mission of the extra troops in Iraq is still under discussion, according to officials, but it is likely to focus on providing security rather than training Iraqi forces.
Keith’s source: BBC
UPDATE: Add to Keith’s revelations and observations tonight, this Reuters Alternet analytical piece today:
ANALYSIS-Iraqis see U.S. push against Sadr’s Mehdi Army
By Mariam Karouny
BAGHDAD, Jan 1 (Reuters) – U.S.-led forces are likely to launch a limited New Year offensive against Shi’ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mehdi Army militia, blamed for sectarian death squad killings, senior Iraqi officials say.
The Pentagon, in a report last month, described Mehdi Army militias as the biggest threat to Iraq’s security and diplomats say Washington is impatient to confront them.
Several officials in the Shi’ite political parties that dominate Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki’s unity government also say they are losing patience with Sadr’s supporters and predict more raids like last week’s joint U.S.-Iraqi operation in which a senior Sadr aide was killed.
“There will be limited and targeted operations against members of the Mehdi Army,” a senior Shi’ite official told Reuters. “The ground is full of surprises but we think around Jan. 5 there will be some operations. I can say no more.”
British forces in the southern oil province of Basra have also been conducting major raids against groups they describe as “rogue Mehdi Army”, some entrenched in Iraqi police units.
Last week, British troops blew up the headquarters of Basra’s Major Crimes Unit and said they freed tortured prisoners.
“The Americans want a war with the Mehdi Army,” said a Western diplomat in Baghdad, who is not American or British.
“They want to get rid of the militia and it seems they will succeed in getting one.”
MALIKI BOLSTERED
[...]
But Maliki’s fragile authority among his fellow Shi’ite’s has been bolstered by Saturday’s hanging of Saddam Hussein, whose Sunni-led administration oppressed the Shi’ite majority. …
Among other topics, Keith will also discuss:
BAGHDAD, Iraq – Hundreds of Sunni Arabs gathered to show their anger and grief for Saddam Hussein on Tuesday as the Iraqi government promised an investigation into illicitly filmed footage of Shiite officials taunting him on the gallows. The sectarian passions that have pushed Iraq toward civil war could be further inflamed by the video of the execution, apparently shot on a mobile phone, showing people chanting the name of Shiite cleric and militia leader Muqtada al-Sadr.
Source: MSNBC
UPDATE #2: I got this Rick Jacobs post from Howie in Seattle today, and it’s so pertinent, I can’t help but add it. Especially as a dedicated Howard Dean supporter, I remember how Dean was viciously attacked and ridiculed for his remarks — and how DAMN RIGHT HE WAS. Dean’s supporters KNEW it then, just as so many more know it now:
Howard Dean in December 2003: The US is No Safer with Saddam in Captivity than Before. And Now?
Just over three years ago, then Democratic front-runner Howard Dean made a major foreign policy address here in Los Angeles designed to show the “establishment” that he understood the world and could successfully lead our nation. Having listened to his advisers, consulted many leading politicians and foreign policy experts, Governor Dean inserted one last sentence by hand into his carefully crafted speech.
Just days after Saddam Hussein was found hiding in a hole in the ground in December 2003, Dean said in that speech, “The United States is no safer today, after capturing Saddam Hussein, than we were before he was captured.”
[...]
Dean’s candidacy catapulted to near coronation by an otherwise disdainful media corps precisely because he alone of any major candidate opposed the war from the outset. He gained unflinching grassroots support that translated into historic amounts of money, nearly all from small donors, because he literally spoke truth to power. While on the one hand he questioned the essence of our government’s social contract with its citizens by its persistent unwillingness to provide access to good healthcare for all of our people, on the other hand he questioned the president’s essential competence by underscoring the lunacy in positing that just imprisoning a deposed dictator would ipso facto make America safer. Dean’s rivals for the nomination, including the one who ultimately received it, joined Joe Lieberman in decrying the former Vermont Governor’s naïveté for calling bullshit to the president’s continued wanderings in the labyrinth of Iraq’s growing civil war.
Most regrettably, this weekend’s confluence of Saddam’s execution with passing the 3,000 mark in the number of American soldiers dead in Iraq proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that Dean was right three years ago. At the time Dean made his much-criticized remark, about 500 American’s had died in Iraq. Five times that many have died since. And this does not include hundreds of dead American contractors, and tens of thousands of dead Iraqis. …
by Ronald Scott
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