Mission So NOT Accomplished

We know, we know, you haven't got a clue what's going on in Iraq because El Presidente has successfully bamboozled our so-called news media into not reporting anything that doesn't square with his rosy insistence that "freedom is on the march" over there.

Let's see, insurgent attacks are now up to an average of 87 a day (according to the NYTimes), "the highest level since the war began last year." Freedom's on the march all right, the freedom of Hussein loyalists, Islamic fundamentalists, foreign Jihadists to attack American troops at will.

We've given up on Falluja and some 30 other cities. Even the supposedly safe American "green zone" in Baghdad came under sustained mortar attack for five hours (FIVE LONG HOURS!) during the past week, and American forces couldn't seem to quell the assault because it was coming from ... everywhere! Freedom, yes, marches on!

And it's not that we don't know what's coming, once El Presidente wins his reelection: military leaders say they've already been given the go-ahead to retake Falluja and other cities, American soldiers are going to die in greater numbers, Iraqis are going to die in HUGE numbers, Falluja is going to be leveled to "save" it, and the "insurgency" which was estimated at 5,000 combatants early this year and is now begrudingly estimated at 20,000 will swell to an infuriated 100,000 combatants, once they see their sacred sites in Falluja under assault from American forces. But relax! None of this will happen until the election is safely past.

Oh, yes, let freedom swing!

El Presidente has known the reality of the situation since at least July's National Security Estimate, leaked in the NYTimes early last week, but he's continued to lie outrageously that all is hunky-dory in Iraq (see his "freedom is on the march" standard applause line referenced above).

John Kerry seems to be getting a clue about all of this, if he can just unwrap himself from the painful contortions that he's tied himself in since Howard Dean came roaring out of the gate with an admirable moral clarity on the subject -- unjustifiable war unjustly pursued is horse crap! -- and very nearly ended John Kerry's ambitions before a handful of Iowans handed him the nomination for no good reason that we could ever discern, neither then nor since. We hear that John Kerry has a clue that the Iraq War -- Bush's War -- might actually be the issue. "The president runs around sugarcoating this thing every day, and we've lost 1,000 people," Kerry told voters in New Mexico. "And there [is] more territory in the hold of terrorists, more territory in the hold of insurgents and jihadists. And there are more terrorists in Iraq than there ever were before." Golden-tongued devil! But I ain't holding my breath. I'm too busy rah-rahing for freedom on the march!

It maybe wasn't El Presidente's advertized brand of freedom that marched that nice New Jersey mother with a dead son in Iraq right into handcuffs and a police van when she dared to protest the war at a Laura Bush appearance in the Garden State ... at approximately the same time the green zone was being shelled in Baghdad. She had the unmitigated GALL to exercise what she had thought was her freedom of speech, to wear a picture of her dead son on a T-shirt, with the words, "Mr. President, You killed my son." A local Republican office-holder (motha) said the arrested mother "ought to find something better to do with her time." "W is For Women," all right.

Based on what went down at that New Jersey campaign event, somewhere there must be a set of handcuffs and a police van just waiting for the right moment to grab up Sen. Chuck Hagel, the ex-Marine Senator from Nebraska, who's evidently not been reading his daily White House "talking points." "The worst thing we can do is hold ourselves hostage to some grand illusion that we're winning," said Hagel, a Vietnam War veteran. "Right now we're not winning. Things are getting worse." Hagel repeated that assessment this a.m. on CBS's "Face the Nation."

Oh, let freedom sing! I can hear the tune coming out of El Presidente's tight little mouth: "We're SO gonna draft your young butts, my college-age fraternity buds, 'cause I'm afraid I'm gonna need more soldiers after the election, when my commanders tell me we have to re-fight the whole Iraq war just to retake Falluja and 30 other cities. It is a sweet and fitting thing to die for one's country!"

That's another freedom this President has tended to enjoy at a safe distance.