McClatchy Report: Are Americans Getting Truth on Iraq?

[rodeodance]

http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003532412

McClatchy Report: Are Americans Getting Truth on Iraq?



By Mark Seibel, McClatchy Newspapers

Published: January 14, 2007 9:15 PM ET

WASHIGNTON President Bush and his aides, explaining their reasons for sending more American troops to Iraq, are offering an incomplete, oversimplified and possibly untrue version of events there that raises new questions about the accuracy of the administration's statements about Iraq.

............

"When I addressed you just over a year ago, nearly 12 million Iraqis had cast their ballots for a unified and democratic nation," he said. "We thought that these elections would bring Iraqis together - and that as we trained Iraqi security forces, we could accomplish our mission with fewer American troops.

"But in 2006, the opposite happened. The violence in Iraq - particularly in Baghdad - overwhelmed the political gains Iraqis had made. Al-Qaida terrorists and Sunni insurgents recognized the mortal danger that Iraq's election posed for their cause. And they responded with outrageous acts of murder aimed at innocent Iraqis.

"They blew up one of the holiest shrines in Shia Islam - the Golden Mosque of Samarra - in a calculated effort to provoke Iraq's Shia population to retaliate," Bush said. "Their strategy worked. Radical Shia elements, some supported by Iran, formed death squads. And the result was a vicious cycle of sectarian violence that continues today."

That version of events helps to justify Bush's "new way forward" in Iraq, in which U.S. forces will largely target Sunni insurgents and leave it to Iraq's U.S.-backed Shiite government to - perhaps - disarm its allies in Shiite militias and death squads.

.................

[Slothrope]

1. The Samarra mosque bombing was an al Qaida victory

It was Zarqawi's mission to create a civil war and the mosque bombing finally did it.

[Kagemusha]

2. I think the act accelerated it, rather than start it per se

but I, too, see it as a victory for political terrorism.