Thursday - February 22, 2007

The Eternal Pessimists At The NY TIMES

Media bias? Anti-Americanism? Defeatism? Insulting our allies? Whatever you want the NY TIMES has got it in 12pt Times font across a hundred pages of recycled paper, every day, day in and day out. All for the price of a cup of coffee. And as an extra special bonus they’ll even throw in an arrogant, insulting cartoon like the one here at right so the elite Liberals out in the Hamptons can snicker over their foie gras at those “poor, poor Brits who were fooled by Bush.”

I may have to assign one of you to read the SLIMES each day and report back to us. This is starting to make me real depressed reading this obnoxious shit every day. And they have the nerve to call themselves the “newspaper of record”. It must be a 45rpm single in a continuous loop from what I see.

Take the two editorials below (please). The first one is from the editors themselves and right off the bat they spin it as a bad thing for President Bush. Then they go on to describe how the Brits have been “cut-and-running” since Day One and finally throw in their clinical observation that Dick Cheney is fruit loops.

Then they throw at you a “guest editorial” from a Brit with a truly appropriate last name. This is probably done to assure you that there are Brits that agree with the TIMES arrogant, defeatist bullshit. Mr. Bull simply repeats the TIMES liberal mantra and obliges us with a recollection of a recent visit to the south of Iraq where he discussed pesticides with date palm farmers, ostensibly to promote British agricultural prowess.

Mr. Bull winds up his bull with a clear statement that his British mates in the field never intended to “win” anything and were only biding time until they could slink away in the dead of night while no one was looking.

Ahem! Bulldog, if you’re reading this I’ll -uh- be willing to buy you and your lads a night on the town if you can see your way to break this chaps legs. Nothing serious, you know. Just a friendly kick in the shins will do. We’ll take care of the NY TIMES over here. Their circulation is already down to three monkeys, four chimps and a small group of Manahtten hoi-poloi with over-inflated egos.

Britain Cuts Its Losses
_{EDITORIAL (NY TIMES) - February 22, 2007}

Spin it any way you like, Prime Minister Tony Blair’s announcement that Britain will be withdrawing up to 1,600 of its 7,100 remaining troops in Iraq can’t be welcome military or political news for President Bush.

This isn’t the first reduction in the British contingent, which originally numbered 40,000. But it comes at a time of spiraling violence in Iraq and emboldened opposition in Washington to Mr. Bush’s disastrous war. It also comes as Mr. Blair is preparing to leave office, painfully aware that popular fury over the war threatens to overwhelm his entire legacy.

The British announcement has already served as the catalyst for other departures. Denmark, with 460 troops under British command, announced yesterday that it would leave by August. With the Pentagon already straining to find enough soldiers for Iraq, a troop drawdown by its most militarily capable ally can only add to the strain — and to the clamor for bringing American forces home as well.

The White House strove to cast Mr. Blair’s political necessity as a sign of “some progress in Basra,” Iraq’s second-largest city, which British forces have had military responsibility for since the invasion. Vice President Dick Cheney — even more disconnected from reality — chimed in that the British pullback shows that there are some parts of Iraq where “things are going pretty well.”

Whether it is Basra with fewer British troops or Baghdad with more Americans, nothing in Iraq is “going pretty well.”

The End of the Alliance
--By BARTLE BREESE BULL
_{LONDON (NY TIMES) - February 22, 2007}

Yesterday’s announcement by Prime Minister Tony Blair that Britain will cut its troops in Iraq by 30 percent over the next six months and perhaps fully withdraw in 2008, followed by the news that the Danish contingent is also heading home, may seem like the death knell of the so-called coalition of the willing and a severe blow to American hopes.

Still — and I am well aware of how unpopular the presence of British troops in Iraq is among his electorate — Mr. Blair’s decision may have as much to do with strategic good sense as it does with domestic politics.

The truth is that the British gave up trying to win their war in southern Iraq a long time ago, and they probably accomplished as much as they could. Contrary to the grumbling among many Americans, they have done a lot of good work in southern Iraq. I have seen British troops on patrol in the marshes and countryside, watched grateful Iraqis rush to ask for their help in mediating tribal disputes or providing more protection from the militias.

Thanks to British oversight and protection, Saddam Hussein’s cruel efforts to drain the country’s southern marshes have been completely reversed. The marshes are now back to about 40 percent of their original size, with parts visibly flourishing. (With 75 percent of the water of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers now siphoned off by neighboring countries before it gets to Iraq, it is unlikely that the marshes will ever recover fully.)

When I visited a date palm plantation near Basra last year, Iraqi farmers told me that British aircraft had sprayed almost 100,000 trees with insecticide, helping their production to double since the days of Saddam Hussein’s rule. (One of the men also insisted that I visit the old British cemetery in Baghdad. It was beautiful, he said: a sanctuary, a paradise. “And the gravestones are safe,” he assured me. “I have removed them, so no one will destroy them.”)

The British successes have also been political. In the south, Iraq’s elections and constitutional processes have been far more successful in terms of security and turnout than almost anywhere else in the country. There was never a popular uprising against the British presence.

True, after the Coldstream Guards stormed a Basra police station in 2005 to free two special operations troops being held captive, a photograph of a guardsman on fire atop his armored vehicle led newspapers around the world, giving the impression of a city and a region in flames. But the reality was quite different: that day, the angry crowd numbered only 200 — this in a city of two million, after two years of war.

Even over the last 12 months, the British military posture in the south has not been as passive as has widely been perceived outside of Iraq. One night last December, in a successful effort to capture weapons caches and terrorist leaders, more than 1,000 British troops in Basra, using high-speed landing craft and dozens of armored vehicles and tanks, carried out the largest coalition “strike operation” since the invasion.

But despite these successes, it seems the British never intended to “win” the war in southern Iraq. The British withdrawal from Iraq began almost immediately after the invasion. The British presence in the south, which was 46,000 troops in April 2003, has been under 10,000 since May 2004.

Unwilling or unable to rid the streets and farmland of Maysan, Dhi Qar, Muthanna and Basra of the militias who are the main threats to order in the largely Shiite south, the British troops’ goal has been to keep a lid on things until they could leave. They have not had the resources or the mandate to win a war against either the Iran-backed Badr Brigades or the more nationalist Mahdi Army of Moktada al-Sadr. And if those rival Shiite forces were to begin a fratricidal conflict, there is little the Britons would be able to do to intervene.

Posted by The Skipper     on 02/22/2007 at 12:15 PM   
Filed Under: • Media-Bias •  
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