After General Petraeus delivered his sanguine yet dull stinking pile of poo to Congress it was time for Ambassador Ryan Crocker to spew his talking points. And boy did he ever! He delivered a performance that even Bush can be proud of.

Crocker began his croaking with the brutality of life under the regime of Saddam Hussein. He pointed out that the majority of Iraqis are under age 40 and only knew of a life under the brutal dictator. He spoke of the harsh treatment, torture, and killing Iraqis experienced under Saddam’s reign of terror.

He discussed the hope America brought to Iraq after the deposition of Saddam and how the Iraqi People were finally liberated; their national nightmare was over.

Once again what we have here is an Appeal to Pity argument being employed by a high level diplomat. Crocker’s statements about life under Saddam weren’t meant so much for Congress as it was for the American People. The argument is that despite what anyone thinks about the occupation of Iraq, we should all feel good about riding Iraq of Saddam Hussein. What a noble and great deed we did…or So Crocker Crock of Crap wants you to believe.

If deposing brutal dictators were a requisite for military intervention by the U.S. then we’d have a heckuva brownie lot of countries to be invading! Why just Iraq? There are dozens of “brutal” regimes in the world. Secondly, Saddam was our man bought, paid, and armed all throughout the 80’s by the U.S. of A. It wasn’t until Saddam invaded Kuwait (after we told him we didn’t care if he did so) that we decided to go to war against Iraq. And even then, as Cheney 94’ has told us, the U.S. did not make a move to depose Saddam Hussein because everyone knew it would a quagmire resulting in sectarian violence and a general destabilization of the region.

What’s worse is that we actually encouraged the Shi’a to revolt against Saddam. In Southern Iraq the Shi’a took up arms against Saddam expecting the Americans to have their back. But the Americans never came and the Shi’a were slaughtered by Saddam. No one seemed to mind about that blood bath.

But I digress. The point is that Crocker tried as do many loyal Bushies to reframe the Iraq debate and blur the reasoning for invading Iraq in the first place. In the minds of many Americans we went to Iraq to depose Saddam, a blood thirsty dictator.

However, the invasion of Iraq was sold to the American People on the premise that Saddam attacked us on 9/11 and had WMD. Bush told America and the world that Saddam was an imminent threat to the U.S. We were told Saddam had UAV’s loaded with Anthrax just waiting to hit a major U.S. City. Bush was concerned about Saddam’s supposedly fully advanced nuclear program. Condi didn’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.

All this was a pack of lies. Everyone knew Saddam posed no immediate threat to the U.S. and that Saddam had no nuclear capabilities. Weapons inspections were working and Saddam had been 95% disarmed. But we still marched off to war regardless.

As it became increasingly clear that Saddam had no WMD, no ties to 9/11, and posed no imminent threat to the U.S., the reasons for invading Iraq began to drift. We were told that Iraq was now the central front of the global war on terror (because we made it so). Bin Laden’s Al Qaeda wasn’t in Iraq prior to the invasion. And after the invasion as jihadis from around the world were drawn to Iraq like bees to a honey pot, a small fraction of those foreign fighters started calling themselves “Al Qaeda in Iraq” around 2004.

This was enough for the Bush Administration to run with. Soon all Iraqi insurgents were being labeled by the media and the administration as “Al Qaeda”. We were told that if we didn’t fight them there, we’d be fighting them here.

So the first punt occurred…”Give us 6 months!” the administration cried.

As numbers came out that nearly 95% of the insurgency in Iraq was made up of Iraqis and only 5% were foreign jihadis with 40% of that 5% being from Saudi Arabia (a friend to Bush), the reasons for staying in Iraq were once again shifted. Now we were staying in Iraq to prevent a “bloodbath” between Sunnis and Shi’a. Never mind that those who want to stay in Iraq to prevent the hyperbolic bloodbath are the same ones who want to cause blood to run in the streets of Iran.

And so Ambassador Crocker takes the stage today to deliver yet another pile of poo to the American People designed to make them feel better about the U.S. presence in Iraq. You see, we invaded Iraq to depose a brutal dictator. That’s why we really went to Iraq. And now we can’t just leave ‘cause the Iraqis need to be given a chance to get their lives back together. If it costs us a few thousand more American lives and few hundred billion more dollars isn’t that just a small price to pay?

That’s the line of reasoning Crocker wants you to accept and it’s crap. The mission drift in Iraq has been pathetic. The lack of coherent strategy, the waste, the fraud, and mismanagement of the occupation are inexcusable leading to the deaths of hundreds of thousands and the waste of hundreds of billions of dollars.

That, if anything else, is reason enough for the U.S. to unilaterally leave Iraq. This current administration and batch of diplomats have proven they cannot be trusted to prosecute this war. They have failed by every measurable benchmark. Yet here they are before us once again asking for more patience and more money so they can continue the exact same strategy they have been doing for over 4 years now.

At the end of the day and the arguments have settled; when it becomes painfully obvious to the majority of Americans realize that we need to leave Iraq immediately, the likes of Petraeus and Crocker play their trump card; that being the ability of this administration and its hacks to conflate opposing the occupation of Iraq with not supporting the troops. Both Crocker and Petraeus did this today asserting that somehow if we criticize the occupation of Iraq, if we demand accountability from our leaders, if we resist throwing billions more dollars at Iraq which end up in the hands of war profiteers, then somehow we are the ones not supporting the troops.

Bush, Crocker, and Petraeus know they can get away with this and have it play well in the American Mind. It’s an easy yet cowardly way to win an argument but extremely effective. All they have to do is ask why we are sullying the memories of those that have died in Iraq by suggesting that we leave before the “mission” is “over”. They say things like “they will have died in vain” or “how dare you dishonor the fallen!” They talk at length ad nauseam about the great sacrifice our troops are making and how it is just so deplorable that we have turned them into political pawns. They’re just soldiers serving their country and they deserve our blind loving support.

This is mixed up of course with a bunch of “greatest fighting force in the world” and “bravest of the brave” clichés.

Next thing you know, the right wing is yammering on about how the “far left” hates the troops, wants to cut and run, and surrender to “the enemy”. Just another day and another 6 months in Iraq bought by the Bush Administration.

And we’ll do it all over again in another 6 months. See you in March ’08 when we are once again asked to just have some patience and spare a few more billions of dollars.

Ryan Crocker Ryan Crocker David Petraeus David Petraeus