Bush trusts right-wing bloggers' reports about Iraq over those of U.S. generals …

Posted by Joshua Holland at 7:30 AM on March 29, 2007.

If anyone fits the description of a "highly-respected career military officer" it's retired general and former CentCom chief Barry McCaffrey.*

For much of the occupation, the general's been upbeat about Iraq. In 2005, he told Congress, "The momentum is now clearly with the Iraqi government and coalition forces" and predicted that Iraq would soon see a "dwindling number of competent, suicide capable jihadist [sic]" (PDF). Last April, he again visited Iraq and wrote another report in which he expressed increasing concern about the situation on the ground, but was still confident that Team USA would pull it out in the end. "The situation is perilous, uncertain, and extreme," he wrote, "but far from hopeless…. There is no reason why the U.S. cannot achieve our objectives in Iraq."

This week, Barry McCaffrey made another assessment …

An influential retired Army general released a dire assessment of the situation in Iraq, based on a recent round of meetings there with Gen. David H. Petraeus and 16 other senior U.S. commanders.

"The population is in despair," retired Gen. Barry McCaffrey wrote in an eight-page document compiled in his capacity as a professor at West Point. "Life in many of the urban areas is now desperate."

McCaffrey found a few causes for optimism, like the fact that U.S. commanders are now targeting senior members of the Mahdi Army.

Nevertheless, his bottom line is that the U.S. military is in "strategic peril" -- a sharp contrast to his previous views …

The government lacks dominance in every province, he added. One result is that "no Iraqi government official, coalition soldier, diplomat, reporter, foreign NGO [nongovernmental organization], nor contractor can walk the streets of Baghdad, nor Mosul, nor Kirkuk, nor Basra, nor Tikrit, nor Najaf, nor Ramadi, without heavily armed protection."

Militias and armed bands are "in some ways more capable of independent operations" than the Iraqi army, he added.

McCaffrey is gloomy about the continuing strength of the insurgency. At this point, he said, about 27,000 fighters are being held, and at least 20,000 others have been killed, yet enemy combatants continue to produce new leaders and foot soldiers. The result, five years into the war, he said, is that "their sophistication, numbers and lethality go up -- not down -- as they incur these staggering battle losses."

It must be rough for the Bushies to face up to this kind of stark assessment of their adventure in Mesopotamia.

Or maybe not. Editor and Publisher …

To back up his point that pulling out of Iraq would be a disaster, President Bush had said today, "They have bloggers in Baghdad, just like we've got here," in a speech to the National Cattlemen's Beef Association.**

Then he quoted two of them: "Displaced families are returning home, marketplaces are seeing more activity, stores that were long shuttered are now reopening. We feel safer about moving in the city now. Our people want to see this effort succeed."

Only hours later did the White House reveal that the bloggers were brothers, Mohammed and Omar Fadhil, and these supposedly little-known average Joes had met Bush in the Oval Office in 2004. They are dentists and write an English-language blog from Baghdad called IraqTheModel.com, also available via Pajamas Media.

Howard Kurtz interviewed the brothers more than two years ago during their visit to the U.S. and quoted Mohammed Fadhil in a Dec. 20, 2004 column: "Now we want to say in a loud and clear voice that we welcome American troops and consider this a liberation, not an occupation." Fadhil added: "People outside Iraq are more worried than the Iraqis themselves."

As Gandhi at Bushout detailed, the two brothers are, of course, funded by a shady cabal of neocons with a lot of blood on their hands.

What a stinking mess.

* McCaffrey’s no hero of mine, I should note.

**I see Evan wrote about these bloggers earlier in a post about Keith Olbermann discussing John McCain. Oh well.

Tagged as: bush, iraq, wing-nuts, mccaffrey

Joshua Holland is a staff writer at Alternet and a regular contributor to The Gadflyer.