In Bush's mind, I bet Iraq is comprised of Baghdad, Fallujah, and a vast, unoccupied desert full of cow skeletons and sweet, sweet oil.

If Iraq is so happy to have us fight for their freedom, why is gas still $3.00 a gallon? You'd think they'd kick us some free oil here and there.

your kidding, right?

but there's so much good going on. That's what Bush will say. It seems everyday it gets worse and worse. It won't end until we leave.

Looks like that attack has already been brushed under the carpet to last page news here.

Why are you always focusing on the NEGATIVE news coming out of Iraq. What about all the good news? I read a report there was a fluffy little kitten over there that played with a ball of string for over 45 minutes! Of course you don't hear anything about THAT in the mainstream media...

I wonder how long it will be before people start looking back on the days of Saddam with nostalgia.

I think it already happened.

As terrible as it is, the crime is the responsibility of the criminal who committed it, not George Bush.

In a black and white world of limited thinking, yes.

Specifically he said:

That's not necessarily unfair. It was this administration's military adventurism and incompetence that established the conditions under which these actions are even possible.

That's what I was gonna say.
At least before they knew who their enemy was...
they had schools and jobs and ways to get food.
They gathered for holidays and weren't worried about getting blown up in the street.

There's good news from Iraq, which has produced almost nothing but bad news since the 2003 invasion. The U.S. military surge, widely denounced as a last-ditch effort by an embattled, lame-duck president fighting an un-winnable civil war, is working. Even as vocal a war critic as Deputy Senate Majority Leader Dick Durbin, D-Ill., has now acknowledged as much, telling CNN that the U.S. military is "making real progress."

The surge is also having a positive impact on Iraq's political equation, according to Petraeus: "We're also heartened by the number of Iraqi tribes and local citizens who have rejected al Qaeda. We cannot attribute that to the surge but the surge certainly enabled that to move much more rapidly, we believe, than it otherwise would have."

Military and political progress is heartening but with it comes a critical decision for war critics, especially Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-NV, who declared the war lost months ago, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who last week pledged to continue seeking withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq. Public support for the war effort has been growing in recent weeks and the expected positive report from Petraeus to Congress in mid-September will likely generate additional support for giving victory a chance. In other words, the political ground on which Reid and Pelosi are standing is shifting beneath them. Do they now really want to bring our boys home just when they are poised to win?

This is not the time to let arm-chair generals on Capitol Hill second-guess Petraeus by demanding arbitrary withdrawal dates, abruptly cutting off funding for the counterinsurgency, or interfering with his military decisions. If true bipartisanship was ever needed in Washington, it's now _ while our nation is engaged in a military struggle with a dangerous, determined enemy.

The violent acts in Qahtaniya are the cowardly acts of a cowardly enemy...and WE MUST NOT GIVE THEM SOLACE.....EVER! Even if one wants to go so far as to say that by removing Saddam (who employed rapists on the government payroll) we've allowed a systematic civil war to begin, one cannot argue that we've given the Iraqis the opportunity to fight for a lasting freedom. Freedom has never been free. It is only the complacency of lazy Americans that has made it seem so, and for us here at home the cost of freedom is measured by the number of obscene characters we can wear on our clothing. But in Iraq it is, as it was during Saddam's reign of terror, a matter of life and death.