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Cheney: "We will succeed in Iraq, just like we did in Afghanistan"
Vice President Dick Cheney on Thursday defended his recent comment that the Iraqi insurgency was in its "last throes," insisting that progress being made in setting up a new Iraqi government and establishing democracy there will indeed end the violence — eventually.
However, in an exclusive interview with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, Cheney said he thinks there still will be "a lot of bloodshed" in the coming months, as the (…)

In the wake of the Downing Street Memo and other leaked British documents created before the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, many have begun to question the legality of the Bush administration’s actions. In particular, families of soldiers, a few Democratic senators, and hundreds of thousands of outraged Americans, are calling for an independent investigation of the Bush administration’s manipulation and outright fabrication of intelligence to justify the invasion of Iraq. The word "impeachment" (…)

June 25 (Bloomberg) — President George W. Bush, previewing his speech next week to mark the anniversary of Iraq reclaiming its sovereignty, said insurgents in that country have consistently failed to undermine its emerging democracy.
The terrorists’ objective is to break the will of America and of the Iraqi people before democracy can take root,’’ Bush said in his weekly radio address today.Insurgents have tried to achieve that goal before’’ and ``failed.’’
U.S. forces have struggled to (…)

By William Fisher
Senator Joe Biden has always been a favorite of mine. The Delaware Democrat is one of our most knowledgeable voices in foreign affairs. And he speaks plain English, not John Kerryish Senate-speak.
Part of Biden’s ‘solution’ to our Iraq problem is his plea to President Bush to ‘level with the American people’. The president, he says, should go on primetime national television and tell us the truth about what’s going on in Iraq, what it means, what’s required of our (…)

In attacking liberals’ reaction to Sept. 11, Bush’s senior advisor once again resorts to McCarthy-style tactics.
Karl Rove is a liar and a scoundrel. He is not a patriot but a pure partisan, as his own record proved long before now.
The other night Rove lied about the liberal reaction to the Sept. 11 attacks and again exploited patriotism for narrow partisan advantage in a time of war. He seeks to divert public opinion from the failures of the Bush administration by suppressing dissent, (…)

"Damn those ungrateful liberal commies, we’re freedomizing them!" - white house fly
Friday, June 24, 2005
Gilbert Achcar kindly sends along his translation of this newspaper article:
’ Student Unions [in Iraq] Call for Withdrawal of Occupation Troops
Baghdad - Abdel-Wahed Tohmeh - Al-Hayat, June 24, 2005
11 Student Unions approved the call made on al-Jaafari’s Government to set a timetable for the withdrawal of multinational forces and considered that the request made [by the (…)

I want to thank Liz Burbank for giving me the heads up on this story.
June 24, 2005
The stark but informative site Cryptome.org < http://cryptome.org/ > is carrying a story with photos of how a Marine unit gathered the bodies of teenage boys from a soccer field, and rounded up nearby living teenaged boys, and posed them all with weapons that the Marines already had ( http://cryptome.org/bkz/buhriz-kill02.htm ) .
Before I riff a bit on this, let me suggest we cluster-blog these (…)

Iraq would like to see United States forces withdraw as soon as feasible, but setting a date for their departure would be a mistake, Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari said in an interview published on Friday.
"We would like to see the withdrawal of American forces as quickly as possible, because the presence of any foreign troops on our land means there is a weakness that we cannot by ourselves control the security situation," Jaafari said in an interview with The Washington Post. (…)

Iraq is Saddam’s fault Iraq bad intel is CIA’s fault Notion that Iaq was buying Uranium from Niger was Britain’s fault. Not listening to Richard Clarke regarding Terrorism’s rise was Clarke’s fault for not being more insistent. 911 and the WTC was Osama’s fault Not scrambling military aircraft on 911 to shoot down the “high jacked” planes was Osama’s fault. Not finding any wreckage or bodies, or even a black box at the Pentagon on 911 was - the fault of .... Somebody. The Anthrax scare right (…)

U.S. President George W. Bush on Friday rejected calls for a timetable for withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq and Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari called on Americans to stand firm as six more U.S. troops were killed.
"There are not going to be any timetables," Bush said after Oval Office talks with Jaafari. "I have told this to the prime minister. We are there to complete a mission, and it’s an important mission."
At a news conference, both Bush and Jaafari insisted progress was (…)