The "Progress" In Iraq The President Keeps Talking About

U.S. President George W. Bush on Wednesday rejected calls for a timetable to pull U.S. troops from Iraq, but the top Democrat in the U.S. House of Representatives added to the pressure by announcing her support for a quick withdrawal of forces.

Bush sought patience from a U.S. public increasingly critical of the Iraq war, while the killing of nine people near Baghdad underscored a dire security situation two weeks before Iraqis vote in a milestone election.

“I will settle for nothing less than complete victory,” Bush said in a speech at the U.S. Naval Academy, his latest effort to explain his Iraq strategy. “It’s worth the time and it’s worth the effort.” (source)

“Complete victory” of what? We have, under this administration, completely botched this war we are blindly proceeding with. We hear time and time again that the war is “hard work” and that we have to “stay the course” and that “lives are always lost in war”. But shouldn’t those people, those soldiers, die for something that matters?

We are supposed to be training Iraqi troops to maintain the peace in that country and to “establish democracy”. At least, this is what I’ve been told. This is the “democracy” that is being established at the hands of the Iraqi military that we are putting into place.

Hundreds of accounts of killings and abductions have emerged in recent weeks, most of them brought forward by Sunni civilians, who claim that their relatives have been taken away by Iraqi men in uniform without warrant or explanation.

Some Sunni men have been found dead in ditches and fields, with bullet holes in their temples, acid burns on their skin, and holes in their bodies apparently made by electric drills. Many have simply vanished.

Some of the young men have turned up alive in prison. In a secret bunker discovered earlier this month in an Interior Ministry building in Baghdad, American and Iraqi officials acknowledged that some of the mostly Sunni inmates appeared to have been tortured.

Bayan Jabr, the interior minister, and other government officials denied any government involvement, saying the killings were carried out by men driving stolen police cars and wearing police and army uniforms purchased at local markets. “Impossible! Impossible!” Mr. Jabr said. “That is totally wrong; it’s only rumors; it is nonsense.”

Many of the claims of killings and abductions have been substantiated by at least one human rights organization working here - which asked not to be identified because of safety concerns - and documented by Sunni leaders working in their communities.

American officials, who are overseeing the training of the Iraqi Army and the police, acknowledge that police officers and Iraqi soldiers, and the militias with which they are associated, may indeed be carrying out killings and abductions in Sunni communities, without direct American knowledge.

But they also say it is difficult, in an already murky guerrilla war, to determine exactly who is responsible. The American officials insisted on anonymity because they were working closely with the Iraqi government and did not want to criticize it publicly. [...]

“There is no question that bodies are turning up,” said the investigator, who agreed to speak on the condition of anonymity, citing safety concerns. “Quite a few have been handcuffed and shot in the back of the head.” (source)

This is the “real progress” that President Bush speaks of. Apparently, the man lives in his own little private world with the likes of Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter, and VP Cheney. I prefer to live in the world of reality. The reality is, what we are putting into place in Iraq to maintain the peace is nothing but an army of thugs who will eradicate anyone who gets in their way. It kind of sounds like... Saddam Hussein, all over again.