""Abizaid, who I think is one of the really great thinkers, John Abizaid -- I don't know if you've ever had a chance to talk to him, he's a smart guy -- he came up with this construct: If we leave, they will follow us here. That's really different from other wars we've been in. If we leave, okay, so they suffer in other parts of the world, used to be the old mantra. This one is different. This war is, if they leave, they're coming after us. As a matter of fact, they'll be more emboldened to come after us. They will be able to find more recruits to come after us.
"Abizaid clearly sees this struggle -- he sees the effects of victory in Iraq as having a major impact on other parts of the Middle East. He also sees the reciprocal of that, a defeat -- just leaving -- the only defeat is leaving, is letting things fall into chaos and letting al Qaeda have a safe haven.
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"This stuff about 'stay the course' -- stay the course means, we're going to win. Stay the course does not mean that we're not going to constantly change.""
and your president speaks some more:
" Protecting this country is the number-one issue. And you talk to -- admittedly, my focus groups are not broad, but people always say to me, thank you for protecting us. I view this as a struggle of good versus evil, by the way. I don't think religious people murder. I think people are misusing religion to justify their murder. And a lot of Americans understand it that way. Maybe it's not nuanced enough for some of the thinkers and all that stuff -- that's fine. But that's exactly what a lot of people like me think. And my job is to make it clear to the American people the stakes, and to spell it out as plainly as I can. And a lot of people understand it.""and your president speaks some more:
"I'm trying to figure out a matrix that says things are getting better. I think that one way to measure is less violence than before, I guess. We'll have to see what happens here after Ramadan. I believe these people -- oh, I was going to tell you Abizaid believes Ramadan, no question, caused them to be more violent because he says there's some kind of reward during Ramadan for violence. And I think they're trying to affect the elections."
3 comments:
one small consolation of listening to bush's twisted, inarticulate meanderings... he sounds SO much better than rummy... check THIS out... rummy on iraq...
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Well, it’s a political season. And everyone’s trying to make a little mischief out of this, and make — turn it into a political football, and see if we can’t get it on the front page of every newspaper and find a little daylight between what the Iraqis say or someone in the United States says or somebody else in the United States says.
And it is not complicated. I’ve explained it two or three times. The president did an excellent job of explaining it yesterday.
And the situation is this. It is that the United States, in the persons of our ambassador and the Embassy and General Casey and his team, have been, over a period of time, in continuous discussions with the Iraqi government at various levels. And they’ve been discussing the way forward through the rest of this year and next year. That’s a perfectly logical thing for them to do.
[…]
Now, you’re looking for some sort of a guillotine to come falling down if some date isn’t met. That is not what this is about.
This is complicated stuff. It’s difficult. We’re looking out into the future. No one can predict the future with absolute certainty.
So you ought to just back off, take a look at it, relax, understand that it’s complicated, it’s difficult. Honorable people are working on these things together. There isn’t any daylight between them. They’ll be discussing this and discussing that. They may have a change there, a change here. But it’ll get worked out.
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good lord...
http://takeitpersonally.blogspot.com/
Prof - that really was an outrageous presser - i watched it live. he said something like 'sit back and enjoy the democracy' or some such.
egads.
oldschool: "I'm beginning to think you have a bit of a sadistic streak."
i must admit, it kinda puts a smile on my face every time i type those words :-)
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