President George W. Bush warned in an interview that Democratic candidates’ plans to withdraw abruptly from Iraq could “eventually lead to another attack on the United States” and would embolden terrorists.

“The United States pulling out of Iraq or pulling out of the Middle East or not maintaining a forward presence would send all kinds of signals throughout the Middle East,” he told the Politico and Yahoo! News.

“And it would shake everybody’s nerves, and it would embolden the very same people that we’re trying to defeat.”

For the first time, Bush revealed a deeply personal and important choice he made to acknowledge the sacrifice of soldiers and their families.

Bush said he made this critical policy decision after the August 2003 bombing of the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad:

“I don’t want some mom whose son may have recently died to see the commander in chief playing golf. I feel I owe it to the families to be in solidarity as best as I can with them. And I think playing golf during a war just sends the wrong signal.”

NOTE #1: Starting an unnecessary and endless war, however? That signal is cool. This is also the first time we’ve seen the act of playing golf equated with disrespect for U.S. soldiers. Anyone want to buy a set of used clubs?

NOTE #2: The picture above was taken in 2004! Not only is Bush’s argument probably the dumbest thing we’ve ever heard, it’s not even true!

Follow the jump for more amazing George W. Bush quotes from the interview …

Continue reading this article …

The Iraq war and the U.S. economy are both in a desperate state, yet the brilliant Bush administration doesn’t see a connection between the two.

Some media reports have estimated the cost of the war in Iraq at around $5,000 per second. Despite this staggering cost, there’s been no apparent effort to figure out how we should pay for it.

Nor is there an end in sight. Details, right?

The political cartoon below addresses this issue - and the insignificance of the supposed economic stimulus plan put into effect this spring.

NOTE: This political cartoon was created by and is property of journalist and cartoonist Andrew Wahl. Visit his blog, Off the Wahl, for more of his work.

The more he opens his mouth, the clearer it becomes that John McCain’s views on global affairs are rather consistent with those of the great George W. Bush.

Much like Bush, McCain sees the world in oppositional terms - us vs. them, good vs. evil. He speaks of taking the lead “in fighting the transcendent issue of our time” - an unending, undefined crusade against “evil.”

Really, we could end this post right now. But we’ll continue.

During the Cold War, the new, central tenet of neo-conservatism emerged - that America is locked in a battle with evil. The U.S.S.R. was evil - but this hazardous way of framing any and all conflict has prevailed ever since.

Bush’s foreign policy - his refusal to think for more than five seconds about any situation or consider diplomacy, his outright dismissal of the United Nations, his increasingly aggressive nuclear posturing - is a function of this.

John McCain maintains the same outdated, epically disastrous world view, no matter how “maverick” or “independent” he fancies himself.

DON’T KID YOURSELF: George W. Bush and his aspiring successor, John McCain, share the same bellicose, inherently dangerous world views, no matter what “criticism” the latter supposedly has regarding the former’s policies.

Like many conservatives during and since the Cold War, Sen. McCain has embraced this “moral” attitude that the United States is a force defending all that is good, battling the forces of evil. As if it could possibly be that simple.

• He has morphed this into an laughably simplistic, strategic guidebook.

• He rejects negotiation and coexistence out of hand. Even if this means mass casualties, unending conflict and unstated goals.

• He confuses our enemies - Sunni Al-Qaeda with Shiite Iranian extremists - not because he’s old (well, maybe a little for that reason), but thanks to the narrow-minded ignorance that assumes evil is a single, uniform entity.

John McCain may lambast Donald Rumsfeld and nitpick Bush on foreign policy, but that’s all it is. The fundamental principles, or lack thereof, are essentially the same, and cannot be allowed to continue in such reckless fashion if our once-respected nation is to repair its relationships with the rest of the world.

In a world of ambiguity, marred by deep-rooted and rapidly-transforming threats such as terrorism, nuclear proliferation and, yes, global warming, such a dumbed-down, overly nationalistic approach will inevitably fail.

It has, and it will. Vote for this man at your peril.

Former Secretary of State and retired Gen. Colin Powell, 71, insists he hasn’t yet decided who he’ll back in the 2008 presidential election.

“I’m looking at all three candidates,” Powell told Diane Sawyer in a new interview scheduled to air on Thursday’s Good Morning America on ABC.

“I know them all very, very well. I consider myself a friend of each and every one of them. And I have not decided who I will vote for yet.”

Colin Powell, who served as President George W. Bush’s first secretary of state, is a Republican, but that apparently is not enough to sway him (at least right now) toward Arizona Sen. John McCain, the GOP’s presumptive nominee.

McCain has staked much of his presidential prospects on the success of the surge strategy in the Iraq war, a subject of great debate in Washington this week as Gen. David Petraeus took to Capitol Hill for hearings on the conflict.

“The United States Armed Forces are very, very stretched. It appears that after the surge is over, we’re going to go down to 140,000 troops in Iraq. That’s 10,000 more than we had before the surge,” Powell told Sawyer.

The former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said that reductions in troop levels going forward isn’t just an option, but the reality:

“What they’re all going to face — whichever one of them becomes president on January 21, 2009 — they will face a United States military force, that cannot continue to sustain, 140,000 people deployed in Iraq, and the 20-to-25,000 people we have deployed in Afghanistan, and our other deployments,”

On other hot topics, Powell rejected the idea of boycotting the opening ceremonies of the Olympics in China later this year, and condemned controversial remarks by Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Barck Obama’s pastor of 20 years.

He complimented the Democratic Senator for Illinois for his “A More Perfect Union” speech on race that followed in the aftermath, however.

“Rev. Wright is somebody who made enormous contributions in his community and has turned a lot of lives around, and so, I have to put that in context with these very offensive comments that he made, which I reject out of hand,” Powell said.

“I think that Sen. Obama handled the issue well … he didn’t look the other way. He didn’t wait for the, for the, you know, for the storm to go over,” he added. “He went on television, and I thought, gave a very, very thoughtful, direct speech. And he didn’t abandon the minister who brought him closer to his faith.”

Colin Powell, along with Condoleezza Rice, has been mentioned as a possible vice presidential candidate in this election for the Republicans.

One thing is clear: Gen. David Petraeus, the top commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, testified before our nation’s next commander in chief yesterday.

What wasn’t clear was which one of the presidential candidates sitting in two packed hearing rooms on Capitol Hill will be in the Oval Office in ‘09.

Sens. John McCain, Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama all took detours from the campaign trail to hear status reports on the Iraq war.

The hearings turned the spotlight on the candidates‘ wide differences on the most important security issue that will face the next president.

It was a critical show of strength for the Democrats in particular, although the questioning remained mostly respectful and low-key, lacking fireworks.

No references to 935 lies, in other words.

At the morning hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee, John McCain argued that it was “reckless and irresponsible” to call, as Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have, for the phased withdrawal of U.S. troops.

He did not remain in the room long enough to hear Mrs. Clinton’s response - that it’s even more irresponsible to stick with the current strategy.

“It might well be irresponsible to continue a policy that has not produced the results that have been promised time and time again,” she said.

John McCain enjoyed a bit of a tactical advantage in that as the panel’s senior Republican, he was one of the first senators to question Gen. David Petraeus.

He used his time to underscore the pillar of his campaign:

Progress is being made via the troop surge, and U.S. withdrawal will cause irreparable damage to Iraq and to American interests.

“To promise a withdrawal of our forces, regardless of the consequences, would constitute a failure of political and moral leadership,” John McCain said.

Sometimes overtly and other times not, both Clinton and Obama have referred to the seemingly interminable Iraq conflict the Bush-McCain War.

Barack Obama, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, attended the general’s second, afternoon hearing before that panel.

Continue reading in the Los Angeles Times …

The Iraq death toll just marked a saddening 4,000, but perhaps more disturbing is that as far as the mainstream media goes, this is the only figure that counts.

This cartoon below deals with “The Numbers Game” - an oversimplifying of U.S. casualty reports seen too frequently. “Only” 4,000 dead may be low compared to past wars, but nearly 30,000 more have been wounded in Iraq as of this post.

Better body armor and faster, superior medical care keep troops alive at much higher rates than in the past. But many of these brave men and women still must dealing with severe, life-long injuries such as loss of limbs, brain damage and blindness. The toll of the five-year war is far greater than we usually think.

NOTE: This political cartoon was created by and is property of journalist and cartoonist Andrew Wahl. Visit his blog, Off the Wahl, for more of his work.

The Iraq war, as we know, recently celebrated its fifth birthday. Well, in the very same month, the conflict achieved yet another dishonorable milestone…

NOTE: This political cartoon was created by and is property of journalist and cartoonist Andrew Wahl. Visit his blog, Off the Wahl, for more of his work.

As we all know, the Iraq war turned five years old yesterday. What we wouldn’t give for it not to make it to six. The illustration below speaks for itself …

NOTE: This was created by and is property of journalist and cartoonist Andrew Wahl. Visit his blog, Off the Wahl, for many more great ones.

“We learn from history that we learn nothing from history.”
- George Bernard Shaw

The night of March 19, 2003, U.S. forces received reports that Iraqi despot Saddam Hussein was visiting his sons, Uday and Qusay Hussein, at Dora Farms, within the al-Dora farming community on the outskirts of Baghdad.

Four satellite-guided, 2,000-pound “Bunker Busters” and 40 missiles were dropped on the compound. Saddam was not present, nor were any Iraqi leadership or Hussein family members. The attack resulted in the deaths of 15 civilians.

That evening marked the beginning of a military invasion of Iraq which President George W. Bush said was “to disarm Iraq of weapons of mass destruction, to end Saddam Hussein’s support for terrorism, and to free the Iraqi people.”

Five years later, there is no doubt that the Iraq misadventure was the work of contemptible and clueless men, and that the end is nowhere in sight.

Seemingly willful ignorance of Iraqi and Islamic realities on the part of Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld were aided by Congress, which did not heed the undeniable fact that presidents can lie (up to 935 times, in fact).

Of course, all of us bear some measure of complicity.

An overwhelming number of voters dislike preemptive wars, and now want the troops out of Iraq, but don’t know what the best exit strategy would be.

The result is apathy, which is a critical step in allowing a nation to have the wool pulled over its collective eyes, year after year, by manipulative hacks.

How many more deaths and trillions of dollars wasted in Iraq will it take for the public to say enough? With such opposition, how does this go on?

Most Iraq-Vietnam comparisons are too sweeping and broad, but here in 2008, the state of political discourse has devolved to early 1970s levels.

Upon suspending his White House bid, Mitt Romney made an unbelievable statement that he was dropping out GOP race to benefit us all:

“In this time of war, I simply cannot let my campaign be a part of aiding a surrender to terror,” the former Massachusetts Governor said.

This crap is what we’ve boiled down to. Keep fighting a meaningless war waged on hubris and false pretenses or else … you’re a terrorist!

Putting a stop to such bastardized attitudes will be an uphill climb, but unless we wish to resign ourselves to 100 years more of the same, it is our duty.

We can start by electing Barack Obama President of the United States, but we must also do more to express our dissatisfaction with the war on local levels.

Elected officials in all capacities need to know, in no uncertain terms, that we want this unmitigated disaster over with. The sooner the occupation ends, the sooner we can move forward and repair this country, both domestically and abroad.

With the Eliot Spitzer sex scandal, the sparring over Florida and Michigan delegates and various name-calling in the Democratic presidential race, it’s easy to see how the war in Iraq falls off the table as a campaign issue for periods of time.

But the better question, some observers believe, is why the war in Iraq is still an issue at all. The answer to that prompted the cartoon below …

NOTE: This was created by and is property of journalist and cartoonist Andrew Wahl. Visit his blog, Off the Wahl, for many more great ones.

We laugh, but the stark reality is that unless the Democrats can write better tales than this, the John McCain campaign platform will win out.