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President Bush's 9/13/07 speech on Iraq was designed to indicate that his "surge strategy" had succeeded, while ignoring the fact that levels of violence in Iraq and dysfunctionality of the Iraqi government and society make the occupation an unmitigated failure. Bush has not given reasonable justification for why America is fighting the ware, what it has accomplished and when it could be over. His speech was just another neo-con self-justification for illegal foreign interventionism and violence perpetrated on innocent civilians in the name of the American people. By use of carefully selected statistics from the Petreas report, mathematical progress is proclaimed, when the fundamental strategy continues to fail miserably.

The Iraqis are not better off under American occupation than they were under Saddam Hussein. That opinions has been well documented now for years. Bush and his henchmen ignore that just as they ignore other inconvenient facts in favor of carefully massaged data designed to support their story. Just as at every other junction in the build up, execution and follow-up to the invasion, facts are carefully found by trolling through data and if necessary, they are fabricated. About 70% of Iraqis are unemployed. Baghdad has electricity for only several hours per day (compared to 24 x 7 most of the time under Saddam). An estimated 1.2 million Iraqis have been killed, another 3.5 million may have been mortally contaminated by depleted uranium and 3 to 6 million have become refugees. By any measure, that is a humanitarian disaster!

Bush tried to convince that because of recent decreases in American casualties, that the tide of the war has changed, yet by early November, 2007 became the year that more Americans had been killed in the war than any previous years. Although the total deaths had been decreasing or plateauing, it is again increasing. The cost of the War on Iraq has also substantially increased this year. These two fundamental statistics were ignored by Bush's speech, since he cherry-picked data to support his desired conclusions.

The Bush propaganda succeeded in stemming any efforts to decrease Congressional funding for
the war. His "war of choice" has received overt and covert support by the Democrats. They prefer to "give Bush enough rope to hang himself" by adopting his budgets. They think that they will always be absolved of responsibility for his pre-emptive strikes, since he led the charge. Actually, all who have supported funding the war are enablers. All who caused this war of attrition are responsible for it.

Learn more about this author, Robert C. Sage.
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