Bush Administration Ineptitude Scarier than Scandals
Bob Herbert of the New York Times in an editorial 24 Oct said that the Bush administration may be under possible indictments but cannot be prosecuted for their biggest offense - "its colossal and profoundly tragic incompetence."
Herbert then quotes Larry Wilkerson, former chief of staff to then Sec. of State Colin Powell in an address last week to a public policy institute.
""We have courted disaster in Iraq, in North Korea, in Iran," said Mr. Wilkerson. "Generally, with regard to domestic crises like Katrina, Rita ... we haven't done very well on anything like that in a long time. And if something comes along that is truly serious, something like a nuclear weapon going off in a major American city, or something like a major pandemic, you are going to see the ineptitude of this government in a way that will take you back to the Declaration of Independence."
The investigation of Karl Rove, Scooter Libby et al. is the most sensational story coming out of Washington at the moment. But the story with the gravest implications for the U.S. and the world is the overall dysfunction of the Bush regime. This is a bomb going "Tick, tick, tick . . ." What is the next disaster that this crowd will be unprepared to cope with? Or the next lunatic idea that will spring from its ideological bag of tricks?
"The case that I saw for four-plus years was a case that I have never seen in my studies of aberrations, bastardizations, perturbations, changes to the national security decision-making process. What I saw was a cabal between the vice president of the United States, Richard Cheney, and the secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, on critical issues that made decisions that the bureaucracy did not know were being made."
When the time came to implement the decisions, said Mr. Wilkerson, they were "presented in such a disjointed, incredible way that the bureaucracy often didn't know what it was doing as it moved to carry them out." "
Wilkerson goes on to talk about the excessive and problematic secrecy of the administration, a disinterested Bush in international affairs and the danger of pulling out now is arming 5 million Middle Easterners that we will ultimately have to face.
The entire article is a necessary read.
[Source: http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/102405Z.shtmla]
Civil Rights Pioneer Rosa Parks Dies at 92 (AP)
DETROIT - Rosa Parks, whose refusal to give up her bus seat to a white man sparked the modern civil rights movement, died Monday evening. She was 92.
Mrs. Parks died at her home during the evening of natural causes, with close friends by her side, said Gregory Reed, an attorney who represented her for the past 15 years.
Mrs. Parks was 42 when she committed an act of defiance in 1955 that was to change the course of American history and earn her the title "mother of the civil rights movement."
At that time, Jim Crow laws in place since the post-Civil War Reconstruction required separation of the races in buses, restaurants and public accommodations throughout the South, while legally sanctioned racial discrimination kept blacks out of many jobs and neighborhoods in the North.
The Montgomery, Ala., seamstress, an active member of the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, was riding on a city bus Dec. 1, 1955, when a white man demanded her seat.
Mrs. Parks refused, despite rules requiring blacks to yield their seats to whites. Two black Montgomery women had been arrested earlier that year on the same charge, but Mrs. Parks was jailed. She also was fined $14.
U.S. Rep. John Conyers, in whose office Parks worked for more than 20 years, remembered the civil rights leader Monday night as someone whose impact on the world was immeasurable, but who never saw herself that way.
"Everybody wanted to explain Rosa Parks and wanted to teach Rosa Parks, but Rosa Parks wasn't very interested in that," he said. "She wanted to them to understand the government and to understand their rights and the Constitution that people are still trying to perfect today."
[Source: http://wap.oa.yahoo.com/raw?pd=PIIvihI&o=1d/VuubquVb/1d_wv_Pi_oI/wm4N_PwI1_d1PYI&Pv=oI&sd=BSEKA]
UN Inspector: "We Were Not Wrong"
UN Inspector Hans Blix made clear yesterday that it was the United States that was wrong about Iraq and weapons of mass destruction.
"Bush administration officials misled themselves on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and ''then they misled the world," Hans Blix, the former United Nations chief weapons inspector said yesterday."
Blix criticised the media and New York Times reporter Judith Miller as well.
"In addition to the Bush administration, Blix criticized the news media for ''not devoting enough critical thinking" leading up to the Iraq war. Asked about New York Times reporter Judith Miller's recent admission that she and other journalists got it wrong on weapons of mass destruction, Blix said of the UN inspectors, ''We were not wrong."
Assault on 'Liberals'
Eric Alterman in The Nation magazine article "Corrupt, Incompetent and 'Off Center'" shows how disparate the consevative pundits view of liberals and America with where America actually is. Although 30% of Americans deemed themselves "conservative" and only 18% "liberal", Americans overwhelmingly identify with liberal values:
"In a May survey published by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, 65 percent of respondents said they favor providing health insurance to all Americans, even if it means raising taxes, and 86 percent said they favor raising the minimum wage. Seventy-seven percent said they believe the country "should do whatever it takes to protect the environment.''
A September Gallup Poll finds that 59 percent consider the Iraq War a mistake and 63 percent agree that US forces should be partially or completely withdrawn."
And yet, Alterman points out that the political arena and the news media are dominated by vicious, right-wing pundits.
"In fact, all that's necessary to discredit an individual or an idea in the present poisoned atmosphere is to apply the label "liberal," which conservatives equate with "treason," "slander" and "treachery" (Ann Coulter); "idiocy" (Mona Charen); "Communism" (David Horowitz); inspiration for child murder (Newt Gingrich); Islamic terrorism (Andrew Sullivan, Christopher Hitchens, Horowitz again); and priestly pedophilia (Rick Santorum)."
U.S. Soldier Bryan Lentz on Iraq
The Majority Report and Dailykos.com feature US veterans that are running for office. One soldier, Bryan Lentz lays out his case for Iraq:
"First, we can (and should) establish a timeline for the withdrawal of U.S. troops. The president and his supporters have suggested that establishing a timeline would only embolden the enemy. This is false. Our current problem is not that we plan too much; it's that the Bush dministration has planned too little. History and experience make clear the price to be paid by such a failure.
The current open ended, bottomless strategy has weakened morale among U.S. troops and U.S. citizens, made it more difficult for the National Guard and Reserve units to meet their enlistment targets, and engendered despair among ordinary Iraqis who see no end in sight to America's military presence in their country. This is bad for the war effort, and bad for homeland security, as we are unable to effectively deal with natural and man made disasters at home when Guard and Reserve units are spread thin.
. . .
Second, we need to radically overhaul the reconstruction effort. Thus far, it has been an unmitigated failure. Today, roughly half of all Iraqi households are still without clean water, the average household is without electricity for 10 hours each day, and (outside of Baghdad) only 8 percent of households enjoy access to a sewage system. The reconstruction fiasco has created a drag on Iraq's economy - nearly 50 percent of the country is under-employed or unemployed - fertile ground for political instability, terrorism and a growing insurgency.
. . .
We need to remove reconstruction command authority from civilians and place it directly in the hands of the military; and, we need to transfer as many of the reconstruction contracts as possible directly to Iraqi firms. Not one cent of the remaining taxpayer money that we sent to rebuild Iraq should go into the pockets of American firms profiting from this war. The American and multinational companies that are currently handling reconstruction in Iraq have all been awarded "cost-plus" contracts which assure them a profit and leave them no economic incentive to actually finish the jobs they've been hired to undertake. As a result, enormous sums of money have been diverted to security services for American contractors, and generous salaries for American businessmen working in Iraq.
I have witnessed this madness first hand, and it has to stop. Iraqi firms have proven that they can get the job done quicker and cheaper. In Karbala and Kut, two Iraqi firms spent a total of $185 million to build twin water treatment facilities. By contrast, a partnership between two London-based and California-based companies spent $200 million to build just one water treatment plant."
The entire assessment can be read at: http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2005/10/20/12449/765.
www.burymebroken.blogspot.com
Frank Rich at the New York Times on the Fitzgerald investigation of the leak of the identity if CIA operative Valerie Plame as a political attack by the Bush entourage:
"Now, as always, what matters most in this case is not whether Mr. Rove and Lewis Libby engaged in a petty conspiracy to seek revenge on a whistle-blower, Joseph Wilson, by unmasking his wife, Valerie, a covert C.I.A. officer. What makes Patrick Fitzgerald's investigation compelling, whatever its outcome, is its illumination of a conspiracy that was not at all petty: the one that took us on false premises into a reckless and wasteful war in Iraq. That conspiracy was instigated by Mr. Rove's boss, George W. Bush, and Mr. Libby's boss, Dick Cheney."
The crux of this matter is the selling of the war:
"Very little has been written about the White House Iraq Group, or WHIG. Its inception in August 2002, seven months before the invasion of Iraq, was never announced. Only much later would a newspaper article or two mention it in passing, reporting that it had been set up by Andrew Card, the White House chief of staff. Its eight members included Mr. Rove, Mr. Libby, Condoleezza Rice and the spinmeisters Karen Hughes and Mary Matalin. Its mission: to market a war in Iraq.
Of course, the official Bush history would have us believe that in August 2002 no decision had yet been made on that war. Dates bracketing the formation of WHIG tell us otherwise. On July 23, 2002 - a week or two before WHIG first convened in earnest - a British official told his peers, as recorded in the now famous Downing Street memo, that the Bush administration was ensuring that "the intelligence and facts" about Iraq's W.M.D.'s "were being fixed around the policy" of going to war."
. . .
"The official introduction of that product began just two days later. On the Sunday talk shows of Sept. 8, Ms. Rice warned that "we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud," and Mr. Cheney, who had already started the nuclear doomsday drumbeat in three August speeches, described Saddam as "actively and aggressively seeking to acquire nuclear weapons." The vice president cited as evidence a front-page article, later debunked, about supposedly nefarious aluminum tubes co-written by Judy Miller in that morning's Times. The national security journalist James Bamford, in "A Pretext for War," writes that the article was all too perfectly timed to facilitate "exactly the sort of propaganda coup that the White House Iraq Group had been set up to stage-manage.""
So as ultraconservatives continue to spin this as a nonstory, lack of evidence, that the reporters that spoke to Rove already knew the Plame identity, etc., the truth is the American public will find out the truth about the fabrication of this war. What is truly sad is that Americans can be duped into accepting that we went to war to capture WMDs but there were no weapons. No public outrage -- that is truly outrageous.
Ego Be Damned
I woke up this morning with the truth. I don't know why I feel this way except maybe the death of my aunt who was one of the oldest relatives and the most significant matriarch in our extended family, next to my own grandmother, which occurred this week.
Truth hit me this morning, my truth. Not only did it hit me, it asked me to share. Sharing the truth is difficult at times because as Paul Lawrence Dunbar said, "we all wear the mask that grins and lies." I have an ego and I protect it like everyone else but today ego be damned
The truth is I have been fearful for the future of this nation and thus the world. I know back in the back part of my head that we are on this stage for a brief moment and that no matter what George W. Bush and the neocon entourage have done, in the words of Bob Marley, "everything's gonna be alright." But most of the time, I forget that, caught up in my attention being hooked (Don Miguel Ruiz) by those who would have me look this way while they perform their dastardly sleights-of-hand, with our lives, in the other direction.
The truth is I have been fearful because so many people voted for our president in 2004. I didn't want to believe, I couldn't believe that our attention spans were so short, that the environment didn't matter, that the economy didn't matter, that this attack on science didn't matter, that thumbing our noses at the rest of the citizens of the planet didn't matter and that the fact that there were no weapons of mass destruction didn't matter. I didn't want to believe that so many people could be herded like cattle into the booths for a single issue. I didn't want to believe that so many people would repeat a thing simply because they heard it regurgitated, unaware that it originated with the RNC or the AEI or any of those other dastardly initials. I didn't want to believe that my next door neighbor's attention was hooked with patriotism and freedom fries when the aluminum tubes and biological dispersing drone aircrafts were obvious forgeries from Tom Clancy.
I am not the fearful type I told myself. Why, I grew up in the hood, fought to survive, joined the Army, I skydive. Me, fearful? Yes, I have been.
But why? Because I have forgotten. I have forgotten the truth.
The truth is I spend more time at DailyKos than I do with my wife and she, the most incredible person I have ever known, is cool with it because she sees how empowered I am, how knowledgable I have become, how enthusiastic I am when I am talking about Jerome a Paris or Plutonium Page, kid oakland or MaryScott OConnor, Hunter going off or Meteor Blades, AnnArborBlue who isn't female or Darksyde coming way out of left field, talking about you all like I've known you since college, like "they so crazy" or like you'll be over for barbecue in the summer.
The truth is I have screamed at the monitor when we have argued over the infinitessimal in light of what I (ego) have judged to be the monumental. "Damn y'all," I have said when we went through the Barack Obama. "Damn y'all," I have said when we have argued there is no God. And, my ego has also said, "that sucks" because my comments never deserved to be troll rated, every diary I write should get a million recommends and my ego wants (dun dun da da)Trusted User status. [What kind of world do we live in where my diary just disappears down the list, never to be seen again?]
The truth is I don't even need to take those deep breaths anymore, the fear is gone. I know who we are and I know what we stand for and I know what our platform is and I ain't gonna tie myself in knots trying to frame it right. The truth is the Dean campaign gave me the opportunity to travel throughout the South and speak to people one-on-one and I don't need the latest study (though I read it) to tell me that this demographic hasn't changed the way the hellhound magicians would have us all believe. The truth is I just have to roll up my sleeves. The truth is I can make a difference right here in Orlando.
[Note to self: Steal more hair from Katherine Harris and continue mixing it with eye of newt and wing of bat; it seems to be working.]
The truth is I have been given a glimpse of another man's moccasins and I've seen how atheists in this society has suffered, and in that I am black, I recognize that beast. The truth is I have seen passion here unmatched anywhere else in my life; I can only hear about my mother's participation in the civil rights struggle or read about the bravery of those who hid the persecuted during Hitler's reign.
So I'll be back tomorrow (or actually later on today and of course tonight) and I'll be back the next day. Hello cruel world; I am posted up here like squatter's rights. And tomorrow we argue again but I won't be fearful. Tomorrow we argue again, but I won't be fearful.
Morning Reading
- What Iraqis Really Think About The Occupation, The Nation [via Truthout] by Tom Hayden
A majority of Iraqis in polls favor US military withdrawal and an end of the
occupation. At the time of January's election, 69 percent of Shiites and 82
percent of Sunnis favored "near-term withdrawal." Surveys done for the Coalition Provisional Authority in June 2004 showed that a 55 percent majority "would feel safer if US troops left immediately."
- CIA Leak Scandal: Rove Defied Bush's Command?, The Nation, David Corn
The White House was signaling--rightly or wrongly--that it had no worries about its uber-strategist. And a year later, a White House aide who had just left his job at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue told me that the consensus view within the Bush gang at that point was that Rove was too smart for special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald and that there was no reason for Rove to explain--or admit--anything. (One prominent Washington defense attorney said--after I recently mentioned this conversation--"only a fool would think he or she could outsmart a prosecutor.")
Has the white working class abandoned the Democratic Party? No. White voters in the bottom third of the income distribution have actually become more reliably Democratic in presidential elections over the past half-century, while middle and upper-income white voters have trended Republican. Low-income whites have become less Democratic in their partisan identifications, but at a slower rate than more affluent whites--and that trend is entirely confined to the South, where Democratic identification was artificially inflated by the one-party system of the Jim Crow era--itself a holdover from the legacy of the Civil War and Reconstruction.
Bush Evacuee Deadline Costing $11 Million a Night
Deadlines. Deadlines. Deadlines. [No this isn’t the Iraqi constitutional process, implementation of permanent tax cuts or the forestalling of environmental safeguards.]
From the
NYTimes:
Straining to meet President Bush's mid-October deadline to clear out shelters, the federal government has moved hundreds of thousands of evacuees from Hurricane Katrina into hotel rooms at a cost of about $11 million a night, a strategy local officials and some members of Congress criticize as incoherent and wasteful.
[snip]
The reliance on hotels has been necessary, housing advocates say, because the Federal Emergency and Management Agency has had problems installing mobile homes and travel trailers for evacuees and has been slow to place victims in apartments that real estate executives say are available throughout the southeast.
Hotel costs are expected to grow to as much as $425 million by Oct. 24, a large expense never anticipated by the FEMA, which is footing the bill. While the agency cannot say how that number will affect overall spending for storm relief, critics point out that hotel rooms, at an average cost of $59 a night, are significantly more expensive than apartments and are not suitable for months-long stays.
The criticism is not solely partisan as is always the claim with this administration.
Even conservative housing experts have criticized the Bush administration's handling of the temporary housing response. "I am baffled," said Ronald D. Utt, a former senior official at the Department of Housing and Urban Development and Reagan administration aide who is now a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, the conservative research organization. "This is not incompetence. This is willful. That is the only way I can explain it."
Willful. Really. You mean to tell me that in the aftermath of Katrina that actions taken, actions negating the possibility of progress or saving lives could be seen as willful. You mean like this
post and this
post. Is it a surprise after the shining example of no-bid contracts in Iraq that we saw Halliburton licking their lips in the Big Easy? Is it a surprise to anyone that the labor desperately needed by the citizens of the area would be outsourced to KBR?
I will not make the error of attributing a motive to the Heritage Foundation senior fellow other than his stated surprise but I will say that folks there and at the American Enterprise Institute have been doing Titanic-style, perfect 10, pike two and a half, no splash dives off the deck of the USS Bush Administration when it has been their scholarship, their economics, their foreign policy, world view and ivory towered machinations that are responsible for this administration's failures. Theoretical, unempirical policies begat this stagnant economy, privatization and outsourcing of everything, the great capitalist venture that was Iraq, the attempted ambushing of Social Security, tort reform, corporate protection against lawsuit and a host of others.
Harvard B-School Alums Blast Bush Tax Man
This
post from pat208 at Daily Kos is an incredible view of the response of Harvard Business School alums to the number one economic advisor Grover Norquist, head of Americans for Tax Reform:
Michael Hogan, an '88 MBA alum said:In fact, we are the victims of an administration promoted by Mr. Norquist that pursues a set of foreign and domestic policies with an implicit taxpayer burden of historic proportions, but which he would have someone else, that is, our children and grandchildren, pay for. That's what passes for "family values" according to Mr. Norquist and his cronies. It's high time we call a spade a spade - Mr. Norquist wants a first-class physical and economic infrastructure, the military to support a sole superpower status, and someone else to pay for it. My HBS expected a higher standard of intellectual honesty and rigor.
Fran Henry, an '82 MBA alum said:[Norquist and the ATR] paint a chilling picture of our future society...Middle-class children no longer have what I had as a child: small classes, and arts and music programs. If his work continues to succeed, more resources will be concentrated in the already-wealthy population. The shared community value of helping disadvantaged people will be debunked.
Uwe Lembke, a '61 MBA alum said:The opinions expressed by Grover Norquist and especially the way they are presented remind me of the writings of a late politician who suggested that the intellectual content of propaganda must be targeted at the lowest common denominator of the population in terms of intelligence. In other words, the subtlety of the message declines in direct proportion to the number of people the slogan is attempting to reach. "The receptivity of the great masses is very limited, their intelligence is small, but their power of forgetting is enormous." In case you're wondering, that quote is from Adolf Hitler's "Mein Kampf."
Concluding with John Sweeney, a '69 alum that began these letters to the Harvard Business School organ:The contrast between the two 1981 MBA graduates profiled in the June issue could not be more profound. [One] is working with UNICEF in Sudan to alleviate the suffering of impoverished Sudanese children. Grover Norquist is working with the Republican Party in the US to eliminate government expenditures on health care, education and Social Security... To continue on the past espoused by Norquist and his cohorts is to sow the seeds of destruction of democracy. It is creating an American aristocracy callous to the human condition. We cannot expect to foster democracy in Iraq and other places abroad if we do not set an example of democracy's compassion for all its citizens here in the United States.
Read the full
post.
An American In Chains
Times Online:
James Yee entered Guantanamo as a patriotic US officer and Muslim chaplain. He ended up in shackles, branded a spy. This is his disturbing story
My cell was 8ft by 6ft, the same size as the detainees’ cages at Guantanamo. Barely a week ago I had received a glowing evaluation for my work as the US army’s Muslim chaplain among the “Gitmo” prisoners. Now I was the one in chains.
It was my turn to be humiliated every time I was taken to have a shower. Naked, I had to run my hands through my hair to show that I was not concealing a weapon in it. Then mouth open, tongue up, down, nothing inside. Right arm up, nothing in my armpit. Left arm up. Lift the right testicle, nothing hidden. Lift the left. Turn around, bend over, spread your buttocks, knowing a camera was displaying my naked image as male and female guards watched.
It didn’t matter that I was an army captain, a graduate of West Point, the elite US military academy. It didn’t matter that my religious beliefs prohibited me from being fully naked in front of strangers. It didn’t matter that I hadn’t been charged with a crime. It didn’t matter that my wife and daughter had no idea where I was. And it certainly didn’t matter that I was a loyal American citizen and, above all, innocent.
I was accused of mutiny and sedition, aiding the enemy and espionage, all of which carried the death penalty. I was regarded as a traitor to the army and my country. This was all blatantly untrue — as would be proved when, after a long fight, all the charges against me were dropped and I won an honourable discharge from the army.
Read the full article.
New Deal, Raw Deal
From the Washington Post via
African Americans for Democracy:
It was during the administrations of Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman thatsuch great progressive policies as Social Security, protective labor laws and the GI Bill were adopted. But with them came something else that was quite destructive for the nation: what I have called "affirmative action for whites."During Jim Crow's last hurrah in the 1930s and 1940s, when southern members of Congress controlled the gateways to legislation, policy decisions dealing withwelfare, work and war either excluded the vast majority of African Americans ortreated them differently from others.
Between 1945 and 1955, the federal government transferred more than $100 billion to support retirement programs and fashion opportunities for job skills, education, homeownership and small-business formation. Together, these domestic programs dramatically reshaped the country's social structure by creating a modern, well-schooled, homeowning middle class. At no other time in American history had so much money and so many resources been targeted at the generation completing its education, entering the workforce and forming families.
But most blacks were left out of all this. Southern members of Congress used occupational exclusions and took advantage of American federalism to ensure thatnational policies would not disturb their region's racial order. Farmworkers and maids, the jobs held by most blacks in the South, were denied Social Security pensions and access to labor unions. Benefits for veterans were administered locally. The GI Bill adapted to "the southern way of life" by accommodating itself to segregation in higher education, to the job ceilings that local officials imposed on returning black soldiers and to a general unwillingness to offer loans to blacks even when such loans were insured by the federal government. Of the 3,229 GI Bill-guaranteed loans for homes, businesses and farms made in 1947 in Mississippi, for example, only two were offered to black veterans.
This is unsettling history, especially for those of us who keenly admire theNew Deal and the Fair Deal. At the very moment a wide array of public policieswere providing most white Americans with valuable tools to gain protection intheir old age, good jobs, economic security, assets and middle-class status,black Americans were mainly left to fend for themselves. Ever since, American society has been confronted with the results of this twisted and unstated form of affirmative action.
Read the entire article.
Six Marines Killed in Iraq
From the
Washington Post:
Six U.S. Marines died in two separate bombing incidents in Iraq, the military announced Friday.
The six Marines killed by bombs in western Iraq had been taking part in stepped-up anti-insurgent operations ahead of Iraq's Oct. 15 national vote on a new constitution.
The most violent months in Iraq coincide with the efforts of bringing about the democratic process. In April and May of 2004 when the discussion was Iraqi elections culminating with the Coalition Provisional Authority establishing the Independent electoral Commission of Iraq (IECI),
215 U.S. soldiers were killed by stepped up violence. When voter and candidate registraton began for electing the transitional government in November of 2004,
137 U.S. soldiers were killed, the deadliest month ever in Iraq. With the elections held at the first of the year,
107 U.S. soldiers were killed in January, 2005. In August of this year, with the date of the draft of the Iraqi constitution looming,
87 U.S. soldiers were killed.
So my question is, how many more steps is there in this democratic process. Without regard to the legitimacy of the steps, the
legitimacy of the constitution itself, the
changing of the rules or whether the three major ethnicities are represented,
the burning question is how many steps to this process because every time a new step is introduced and subsequently implemented, more Americans die.- October 15, 2005 - Date by which a national vote is to be held regarding the ratification of the proposed constitution.
- December 15, 2005 - Date that elections for a permanent government take place if the constitution is ratified. If the constitution is not ratified, this is the date by which elections for a new national assembly are to be held.
What next? In the unfortunate case that the constitution is not ratified, what next? The national assembly begins anew on a constitution?
We were told again this week by General George Casey that the average insurgency lasts nine years. He also told the Senate Armed Services Committee that the number of Iraqi batallions were down from three to one batallion in terms of those in top level shape able to command and secure without U.S. troop support.
So it seems to me the question is how many more democratic steps do the Iraqi have before there are no more significant events that are being used to step up violence and kill Americans?
