According to MSNC yesterday, sources have said that Coneleezza RIce has let it quietly but firly be known she will not return if there's a second term. Secretary of State Colin Powell has long since broken with the administration on many issues, and will not be back. In the wake of the recent POW scandal, which has yet to be fully examined, many other positions, incluing Donald Rumsfeld's are less than secure. Now Tenet has resigned, for 'personal reasons', former WH golden boy and prime source of pro-war information Chalabi is under invesitigation for selling US intel secrets to Iran, another highly placed CIA official is resigning for 'personal reasons', and the Plume affair is taking on serious momentum. Oh, and the war isn't going well. Bush’s Baggage Washington is agog over George Tenet’s resignation, the Plame CIA case and fresh criticism of Dick Cheney’s Halliburton contacts. Are the wheels coming off the administration? By Eleanor Clift Newsweek Updated: 8:40 p.m. ET June 04, 2004 June 4 - The timing is odd. About to embark on a foreign trip, on his way to his helicopter, President George W. Bush stops to announce his CIA director has resigned. Bush’s words are halting and his body language hesitant, as though the news has taken him off stride. If George Tenet’s departure was carefully choreographed by the White House, it looks like somebody may have forgotten to tell Bush. The purpose of forcing the resignation of a high-level official is to make the boss look good, and the president looked shell-shocked. He said he was sorry the intelligence chief was leaving, and he praised Tenet’s tenure in government. Bush’s remarks had the feel of a negotiated settlement, as in "I won’t rat on you if you don’t rat on me." When the CIA director bails out this close to the election and in the midst of tense times at home and abroad, voters may wonder if the wheels are coming off the Bush administration. The way Tenet’s resignation was tendered leads to the conclusion this was not coordinated and that Tenet decided on his own it was a good time to get out. His resume is circulating on Wall Street with at least two major corporations, and he’d like to nail something down before his reputation gets further damaged. Bush did not try to persuade Tenet to remain at his post. The 9/11 commission report is due in July, and the harshest criticism, according to Hill sources, is directed at the CIA under Tenet. A Senate committee report reached the same conclusion. If Tenet hadn’t chosen to take an early exit, his head would be on the chopping block once these reports become public. Tenet is a skilled bureaucrat, but he became the butt of jokes when Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward revealed in his book “Plan of Attack” that Tenet assured Bush it was “a slam dunk” that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. The next big shoe to drop in Washington is the independent counsel’s investigation into who leaked the identity of a CIA operative to conservative columnist Robert Novak, ending her covert career and compromising national security. The White House confirmed this week that Bush has consulted a private lawyer with the expectation that he will be called to offer testimony in the Valerie Plame case. To refresh, Plame is the wife of Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who at the request of the CIA traveled to Africa in 2002 to research the claim that Iraq had tried to buy uranium from Niger. He reported back to the administration that the claim was bogus, and when it still showed up in Bush’s State of the Union speech the following year, Wilson went public with what he knew. The administration retaliated by discrediting Wilson and suggesting that the trip to Niger was a boondoggle made possible by his wife, who worked at the CIA. Plame had been an undercover CIA operative posing as an energy consultant. In his recently published book, “The Politics of Truth,” Wilson says Vice President Dick Cheney’s office ordered a “work-up” on him, and he repeats speculation in Washington that the leak may have emanated from somebody in Cheney’s office. “The real buzz is the veep’s office getting lawyered up,” says a top aide to a prominent Senate Republican. Cheney has gone underground again, hoping to bury all his baggage with him. But an internal Pentagon e-mail saying Halliburton contracts were “coordinated” with the vice president’s office provided fresh material for Cheney’s critics on Capitol Hill. Asked about the e-mail, Chellie Pingree, who heads the reform group, Common Cause, made a face and groaned in disgust. “Much of the world thinks we went to war over oil, and to boost the profits of the big corporations. This just gives validation to the terrorists.” Pingree points out that Cheney, when he was secretary of Defense in the first Bush administration, commissioned a $9 million study from Brown & Root, a subsidiary of Halliburton, on privatizing the military. When he left government, he went to work for Halliburton and built it into a huge conglomerate that takes advantage of the privatization of services he put in place. A fifth of the personnel on the ground in Iraq are private contractors without the accountability of the U.S. military. “Cheney is the godfather of this policy,” says Pingree, adding that the vice president collects more than $100,000 a year from Halliburton in stock options while serving in the White House. “He says it’s not that much. To the average American who has a son over there, that’s more money than most people earn, and it’s a side benefit for him.” Pingree predicted last summer that Halliburton would be Cheney’s downfall. It would be no less of a shocker if, in August on the eve of the GOP convention, Bush stopped on his way to the helicopter and announced his vice president is stepping down. © 2004 Newsweek, Inc.
I wonder how you guys would have thought past wars were going after just a year? I would have loved to have seen how today's media would have reported D-day.
Nice try. Well, we do know how 'Nam was portrayed by the media for the first few years. And as to how wars were going in the past, I might happen to know a little bit about that. This war isn't going well, by anyone's standards. There may be 'light at the end of the tunnel', we may be 'about to turn a corner', but this certainly isn't 'the beginning of the end.'
“Cheney is the godfather of this policy,” says Pingree, adding that the vice president collects more than $100,000 a year from Halliburton in stock options while serving in the White House It is a complete disgrace how Cheney feels this is appropriate.
After a year of a war that is justified (like Afghanistan or WWII), I would not be saying anything. I am not a pacifist, just an opponent of unjustified war, most especially when I am misled into supporting said war.
Just the fact that you are comparing this to Vietnam shows where you are coming from. There is no comparison.
You're right. We had a history with Vietnam and the other countries that had been there for years before we went in and we had historical reasons with the cold war along with the domino theory to take us to Vietnam. We didn't have anything but Bush and his cronies' exaggerations take us into Iraq. In that way, Vietnam was FAR more justified than Iraq.
Sigh. We were talking about media depiction of a war, not a war in itself. Seriously, these leaps you're attmpeting to make aren't all that interesting, but for arguments' sake; comparing any war to any other has all kinds of merits, from a military historians point of view.
Well, you dont have to go a full year after D-Day to get this: VE (Victory in Europe....oh and not just "mission accomplished") Day was May 8, 1945. Would you like to hear the our press reporting on it: http://hearitnow.umd.edu/1945.htm Of course thats just one biased media member....how did the average member of the Allies feel? Lets quote Tom Fletcher, London citizen: "On the 7th May l945 Germany surrendered and the 8th May was declared V-E day (Victory in Europe). The whole world seemed to go crazy with dancing, singing and parties in the street and celebration drinks. As a group of maturing teenagers we planned a ‘pub crawl’ that evening and off we went to the centre of Bristol. Although the dancing, singing, bonfires and kissing and hugging of complete strangers carried on, unfortunately the pubs ran out of beer! By about 9.30 pm every pub was dry, cleared out of anything drinkable but the fun continued dancing around the bonfires. The Government announced a Victory Parade would take place in London on 10th August" Seemed like a year after D-Day, people were pretty psyched with the results of the invasion. In fact, on June 6, 1945...the Soviets found Hitler's dead body in a garden. Pretty cool stuff. Oh, and August 6, 1945....which was 1 year, 2 months after D-Day, we blew the crap outta Japan, essentially ending that war. I'm thinking the press was pretty positive about that one, too. Honestly...I dont think you (or the Pres) should be comparing WW2 to this Iraqi mess.
Any links about Rice leaving? That's huge. Sometimes I wonder to myself if it's an exaggeration that this administration is one of the worst ever. Then I keep seeing stuff like this. I can't even count how many controversies/disasters/evasions of accountability keep coming down. The only thing giving the incumbent a fighting chance in November is that the conservative population of the US doesn't want to see an east coast liberal in the White House. Which is understandable. But even the conservatives think that W is a loser; they just prefer him to the alternative.
No, I'm not. I'm saying after D-day today's media would have talked about all the deaths in such a way that would have the public protesting and demanding that our troops come home without looking at the full picture.
Probably much like the NYTimes did on that day... _____________________ Hitler's Sea Wall Is Breached, Invaders Fighting Way Inland; New Allied Landings Are Made -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- All Landings Win -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Our Men Are Reported in Caen and at Points on Cherbourg Peninsula -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Big Air Armada Aids -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 10,000 Tons of Bombs Clear the Way--Poor Weather a Worry -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- All Landings Win; Sea Wall Broken -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Latest Communique By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS RELATED HEADLINES Country In Prayer: President on Radio Leads in Petition He Framed for Allied Cause: Liberty Bell Rings: Lexington and Boston's Old North Church Hold Services "Let Our Hearts Be Stout" A Prayer by the President of the United States Italian Drive Gains On 70-Mile Front: 2,000 Germans Captured Near Mouth of Tiber--French Take Tivoli Junction Roosevelt and Churchill Pleased by Invasion Gains Landing Puts End To 4-Year Hiatus: Fiery Renewal of Battle for France--Britain Recalls Grimness of Dunkerque Turks Hear Report Of Landing in Greece Russians Poised to Attack in East; Moscow Joyous on 'Second Front' Invasion and Other War News Summarized Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Force, Wednesday, June 7 --Allied forces continued landings on the northern French coast throughout yesterday and "satisfactory progress was made," headquarters announced today. United States Rangers and British Commandos formed part of the assault forces, the third invasion bulletin said. "No further attempt at interference with our sea-borne landing was made by enemy naval forces," it continued. "Those coastal batteries still in action are being bombarded by Allied warships," the bulletin said. "At twilight yesterday and for the fourth time during the day Allied heavy bombers attacked rail communications and bridges in the general battle area, and "there was increased air opposition," the announcement added. By Drew Middleton By Cable to The New York Times Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Force, Wednesday, June 7--The German Atlantic Wall has been breached. Thousands of American, Canadian and British soldiers, under cover of the greatest air and sea bombardment of history, have broken through the "impregnable" perimeter of Germany's "European fortress" in the first phase of the invasion and liberation of the Continent. Communiqu & eacute; 2, issued at the Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Force, before last midnight, reported that all initial landings, which had earlier been located on the coast of Normandy, in northern France, had "succeeded." The Germans told of heavy fighting with Allied air-bone troops in Caen, road and railroad junction eight and one-half miles inland from the Seine Bay coast, and the enemy said there was heavy fighting at several points in a crescent-shaped front reaching from St. Vaast-la-Hougue, on the west, to Havre, on the east. [The German Transocean News Agency said early Wednesday that the Allies had made "further landings at the mouth of the Orne under cover of naval artillery," according to The Associated Press. The agency said "heavy fighting" was raging. [A British broadcast, recorded by Blue Network monitors, said Wednesday that "another air-borne landing south of Cherbourg has been reported." Another British broadcast said that Allied bulldozers were busy "carving out the first RAF airfield on the coast of France."] At last midnight, just over twenty-four hours after the beginning of the operation, these were the salient points in the military situation: 1. Despite underwater obstacles and beach defenses, which in some areas extended for more than 1,000 yards inland, the Atlantic Wall has been breached by Allied infantry. 2. The largest air-borne force ever launched by the Allies has been successfully dropped behind the Atlantic Wall and has attacked by second echelon of German defenses vigorously. The Germans estimate this force at not less than four divisions, two American and two British, of paratroops and air-borne infantry. 3. Most of the German coastal batteries in the invasion area have been silenced by 10,000 tons of bombs and by shelling from 640 naval ships. The shelling was so intense that H M S Tanatside, a British destroyer, had exhausted all her ammunition by 8 o' clock yesterday morning. 4. Against 7,500 sorties flown from Monday midnight to 8 A.M., Tuesday, by the Allied Air Forces during the first day of the invasion the Luftwaffe has flown fifty, and the main weight of the enemy air force in the west, estimated at 1,750 aircraft, has not entered the battle. 5. The first enemy naval assault on the Allied invasion armada was beaten off with the loss of one enemy trawler and severe damage to another. There is reasonable optimism at this headquarters now, but there is no effort to disguise concern over several factors, among them weather and the shape of the first major German counter-blow. Navies 100 Per Cent Effective Admiral Sir Bertram Ramsay, Allied naval commander in chief, declared the Allied navies had "in effect" been 100 per cent successful in the task of landing the invasion troops in France. These troops have now become the most important of the fighting services involved in the invasion, for there are indications that the enemy to some extent is withholding reserve formations for a general counterattack once he is certain yesterday's landings constitute the main threat in northwestern Europe. The heaviest fighting in a 100-mile battle area appeared to revolve around Caen, according to the German News Agency, DNB. The enemy also admitted the establishment of an Allied bridgehead on both sides of the Orne estuary, and another in the area northwest of Bayeux, and the Germans said an Allied paratroop formation had a firm grip on both sides of the Cherbourg-Valognes road. A group of light Allied tanks and armored scout cars was placed northeast of Bayeux by the enemy. [Bayeux is about six miles inland from the southwest shore of the Seine Bay.] Earlier Allied tanks had been reported fighting in the area of Arromanches on the south coast of the Seine Bay. This group was attempting to join the main beachhead forces northwest of Bayeux, the enemy said. A German military spokesman reported fifteen cruisers and fifty to sixty destroyers were operating west of Havre last night covering a large number of Allied landing craft. The two naval task forces that led the invasion were commanded by Rear Admiral Sir Philip Vian, who won fame while commanding the destroyer Cossack early in the war, and Rear Admiral Alan Goodrich Kirk of the United States Navy. The two naval forces plus a third force, which came from the north, included one fifteen-inch gun battleship, the British Warspite; an American battleship, the Nevada, a veteran of Pearl Harbor; the American cruisers Augusta and Tuscaloosa and the British cruisers Mauritius, Belfast, Black Prince and Orion, and shoals of destroyers flying the Stars and Stripes and the White Ensign. Steaming through the English Channel, swept by 200 British minesweepers, the men o' war escorted thousands of landing craft, transports and assault craft bearing Gen. Sir Bernard L. Montgomery's landing forces to the beaches. Shortly before the first soldiers "hit the beach" three German torpedo boats and an undisclosed number of armed trawlers attacked. They were driven off with withering fire. One trawler was sunk and another severely damaged. Then the destroyers turned their guns on enemy defenses, while the ships engaged enemy batteries already battered by high explosives dropped from the air. The large air-borne forces that were dropped and landed in the night were already assembling behind the Atlantic Wall as the first troops scrambled up the beaches. Dawn was the climax of the first phase of the invasion. Wave after wave of American bombers- -at least 31,000 Allied airmen were in the air between Monday midnight and breakfast Tuesday--took up the task of flattening the German defenses and silencing guns. Fighters circled over the beachheads on defensive patrol, while fighter-bombers darted inland to attack German troops moving up to attack the air-borne and sea-borne invaders. So feeble was the German Air Force opposition that one fighter force swept seventy-five miles inland without meeting opposition. In one of the few clashes 300 Marauders ran into twenty Focke-Wulfe 190s, destroying a single enemy plane without loss. A great fleet of more than 1,000 planes, including gliders and towplanes, went almost unmolested when it carried the air-borne force to its objectives, while some Flying Fortress groups reported neither fighter interference nor flak fire. All day the weather forced medium and light bombers to attack at low level, 300 Marauders bombing from 3,000 feet during yesterday afternoon. Havocs on a similar attack jumped and halted a column of eight German armored cars. Road junctions and railway yards behind enemy lines were bombed repeatedly. Allied Integration of Arms Yesterday's operations, the greatest yet undertaken by the Western powers, were marked by a complete integration of all striking arms. Tens of thousands of bombs and shells tore at the German defenses as air force and Navy gave maximum support to the infantrymen struggling ashore or the airborne forces attacking the "Atlantic Wall" from the rear. The Bomber command of the Royal Air Force, the first Allied force to strike at the heart of Germany in this war, had the honor of opening the assault. At 11:30 o'clock Monday night the first of ten waves of Lancasters and Halifaxes swept in from the sea to begin bombardment of the German batteries along the French coast. There were more than a hundred bombers in this and subsequent waves, and the total number of "heavies" involved was more than 1,300. Since on such a trip each of these heavies can carry at least five tons of bombs, the batteries were hit by around 7,000 tons of bombs before the sun rose to reveal the great invasion fleet gently rolling on the choppy waters of the English Channel. The batteries attacked were of two types, with two different functions. There were long- range rifles--mostly 155 mm. and 177 mm. weapons--to engage shipping far out at sea. Equally important to the success of the landing were batteries of heavy howitzers sited on beaches or on areas just off the beaches where landing craft might congregate. Both types of batteries were strongly protected, with most of the 155's in casemates of reinforced concrete. The howitzers were in sandbagged emplacements or newly constructed casemates. The preliminary air attacks appear to have been successful, for reports from the front stressed the failure of German batteries to maintain determined fire. Many of the casemates were blown apart, while some of the howitzers were knocked over by the blasts and their gunpits were smothered with dirt torn up by the bombs. This destruction was well under way by dawn yesterday, when more than 1,000 Flying Fortresses and Liberators of the United States Eighth Air Force roared out from Britain to maintain the bombing. At the same time far out at sea gunfire flickered along the decks of battleships, monitors, cruisers and destroyers as they engaged not only gun batteries but strongpoints and blockhouses along the Normandy beaches. By this time troop carriers and gliders of the United States Ninth Army Air Force and the RAF had flown paratroops and air-borne infantry to their objectives and the two-sided battle of the so-called Atlantic Wall had begun on the ground as well as in the air and at sea. All day the big guns roared from the sea to shore and from the shore to sea. All day Liberators, Fortresses, Marauders, Mitchells, Typhoons, Havocs and Thunderbolts of the Allied Air Forces bombed the German coastal defenses and troop concentrations sheltered in the lush orchards of Normandy. All day Allied fighters patrolled the battle area and spread an air umbrella above the invasion fleet. Air Chief Trafford Leigh-Mallory, General Eisenhower's deputy commander for air, was so proud of the work done by the Allied air forces that yesterday morning while the battle was still developing he congratulated his forces on the "magnificent work* * *done in preparation for the invasion." As this order was flashed to the far-flung squadrons of the RAF and USAAF the battle on the ground, where it will eventually be fought and won, was beginning with the first air- borne landings. According to enemy radio reports, these were made "in great depth" in the area of the Seine Bay. British airborne units were dropped in the Havre area, while Americans floated to earth in the Normandy district. The enemy has already identified the First and Sixtieth British Air-Borne Divisions and the Eighty-second and the 101st American Air-Borne Divisions, according to Axis broadcasts. Air-borne troops landed at Barfleur, east of Cherbourg; Carentan, five miles from the Seine Bay on the Cherbourg peninsula, and northeast of Caen between the estuaries of the Seine and Orne, the Germans said. Air and naval losses for the first day were considered remarkably low at this headquarters, although it was emphasized the enemy had not attacked strongly in either element. One American battleship, risking unswept mines and shore torpedo tubes, moved in to short range in order to silence a troublesome battery that was holding up operations with its fire. The Allied seaborne landings began to develop along the coast of Normandy at the same time. The Germans placed the first attacks between the mouths of the Seine and the Vire, a stretch of coast about seventy-five miles long, beginning in the east at Trouville and Deauville, once filled with holiday crowds from all over Europe, and reaching to the Bay of Isigny in the west. The stretch of coast is the nearest to Paris and is connected with the capital by good rail and highway communications. American tanks poured ashore in the area of Arromanches, a small fishing village about fifteen miles northwest of Caen, and Asnelles, in the middle of the Seine Bay south coast, the Germans said, adding that thirty-five tanks had been destroyed in the fighting around Asnelles. What the Germans described as "particularly extensive landings" also were made at the small coastal village of St. Vaast-la-Hougue, close to the tip of the Cherbourg peninsula. The enemy also claimed the Allies had landed on Guernsey and Jersey in the Channel islands, the last bit of British Empire held by Germany. As the infantry scrambled over the beach obstacles from the sea, air-borne invaders were fighting a hot battle in the district of Caen, according to the enemy reports. Caen lies on the main railroad line running from Cherbourg to Rouen, Evereux and Paris and is a junction of nine highways. Other large air-borne concentrations were around Havre and Cherbourg, and the enemy claimed they had been made in order to seize those ports for the invasion fleet. The enemy claimed a battleship had been badly damaged and a cruiser and large transport sunk during a duel between shore batteries and the Allied naval escort. The enemy put the escort at six battleships and twenty destroyers, with well over 2,000 landing craft, some of them of 3,000 tons, participating in the landings along the Seine Bay. Enemy Claims Hits [President Roosevelt said at his Tuesday press conference that General Eisenhower had reported the loss of two American destroyers and one LST, a tank-carrying landing ship.] Sea-borne landings overcame intricate and elaborate German obstructions, mainly because General Eisenhower took a chance and landed his forces at low tide when naval engineers' parties could deal with underwater obstacles. These included mines moored below the low-water line, beach mines and hundreds of obstacles. The latter included a section of braced fences, concrete pyramids, and wood and steel "hedgehogs." All these obstacles were extensively mined, either with Teller mines or specially prepared artillery projectiles. But before the invasion armada could reach these defenses some 200 Allied minesweepers manned by 10,000 officers and men had to sweep a passage through extensive minefields with which the enemy had masked the approaches to the beaches. It was officially called the biggest and probably the most difficult, certainly the most concentrated, minesweeping operation ever carried out. The most delicate and dangerous work was done at night in a cross-tide of two knots. When dawn came the landing craft moved slowly toward the beaches through the swept channels, and the minesweepers were sweeping new areas. It was through this sort of sea defenses that the invasion ships had to make their way before they grated on continental beaches. Ashore the engineers and infantry found a variety of new obstacles. The entire beaches were guarded by bolts of wire. The exits from the beaches were blocked by an adaption of existing seawalls to become anti-tank walls, and steel obstacles were set up. Anti-tank ditches fifty to sixty feet wide were extensively employed and minefields had been laid up to a depth of more than 1,000 yards from shore, while inundations were employed wherever the ground was suitable. Allied Reinforcements Pour In Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Force, Wednesday, June 7 (AP)--Allied troops swiftly cleared Normandy beaches of the dazed Nazi survivors of a punishing sea and air bombardment, and armor-backed landing parties ranged inland today in a liberation invasion. Reinforcements streamed across the white-capped Channel. Some reports reached here that Gen. Sir Bernard L. Montgomery's men had cut at Caen the Paris-Cherbourg railway, a main route supplying Hitler's defense forces in the Cherbourg peninsula. Prime Minister Churchill first disclosed that Allied troops were fighting in Caen, on the River Orne. He said the invasion was proceeding "in a thoroughly satisfactory manner," and with unexpectedly light casualties. The German High Command asserted that no Allied troops had penetrated Caen. Returning RAF pilots said: "We could easily tell the beaches were secure--we could see our soldiers standing up." Caen was the only point specifically named here as a scene of fighting, although penetrations as deep as thirteen miles were reported. Nazi-controlled radios, however, reported Allied landings at a dozen points, with the most important on both sides of the estuary of the River Orne. From west to east along the 100-mile shoreline, Axis accounts said Allied sea-borne and air-borne forces struck at: The port of Barfleur, fifteen miles east of Cherbourg; the fishing village of St. Vaast-la- Hougue, five miles south of Barfleur; both sides of the Valognes-Carentan highway, a section of an important supply road to Cherbourg running five miles inland from the peninsular coast; the twenty-seven-mile-long area between Carentan and Bayeux; the River Orne estuary; a fifteen-mile stretch of beaches in the Villers-Trouville region across the Seine estuary from Havre; and the town of Honfleur, on the Seine six miles southeast of Havre. The German-controlled Vichy radio also said that a vicious fight developed last night north of Rouen, on the Seine, forty-one miles east of Havre, "between powerful Allied paratroop formations and German anti-invasion forces."
Here's another piece from Newsweek... includes some bits from Pyle about death... ________________ The Last Roll Call American soldiers in Iraq have been put in the wrong place at the wrong time for the wrong reasons. But like any G.I. Joe in World War II, they’re making the best of a bad situation Web-Exclusive Commentary By Christopher Dickey Newsweek Updated: 5:29 p.m. ET June 01, 2004 June 1 - The first time I visited the Normandy beaches, almost 20 years ago, I went with my father-in-law, who’d landed there on D-Day. We walked on the wide sand and through the green, wind-blown fields, and he looked a little lost, as many veterans do when they wander those cross-covered cliffs. You could see him gazing out to sea, but searching inside himself for the buddies who’d died, and for that young man who used to be him. Since then, we’ve visited other sites where he fought and his friends perished. The experience is always heartbreaking, not only because of the sad fact that death is, but because of the terrible scale of it in these places—a spectacle of killing which, thank God, we haven’t seen in my generation’s many wars. At least, not yet. The chronicler of G.I. Joe’s World War II was Ernie Pyle. When he was killed by a machine-gunner on the little Japanese island of Ie Shima in April 1945, after so many years reporting on the fighting, he had a draft column in his pocket that describes as eloquently as anything I’ve ever read the weight of the carnage on those who survived it. He was thinking back on Normandy: “Those who are gone would not wish themselves to be a millstone of gloom around our necks,” Pyle wrote. “But there are many of the living who have had burned into their brains forever the unnatural sight of cold dead men scattered over the hillsides and in the ditches along the high rows of hedge throughout the world. “Dead men by mass production—in one country after another—month after month and year after year. Dead men in winter and dead men in summer. “Dead men in such familiar promiscuity that they become monotonous. “Dead men in such monstrous infinity that you come almost to hate them. “These are the things that you at home need not even try to understand. To you at home they are columns of figures, or he is a near one who went away and just didn't come back. You didn't see him lying so grotesque and pasty beside the gravel road in France. “We saw him, saw him by the multiple thousands. That's the difference. . . .” Pyle, the son of a tenant farmer, mixed easily in the enormous conscript army mustered by the United States to take on what was, truly, an Axis of Evil. He knew what his country was fighting for, and his columns never doubted the rightness of the cause, even though he admitted he lost sight of it sometimes in the middle of all the killing. The way Pyle wrote about the common soldiers’ lives, sharing their pains and frustrations and horrors as well as their good humor and common sense and uncommon valor, made him probably the most widely read and best-loved correspondent of his time. But he well and truly hated war, as such, because he saw what it was from so close. Pyle understood that even the highest ideals get worn down by endless fighting. “I had come to despise and be revolted by war clear out of any logical proportion,” he wrote in 1943, when he began a brief trip back to the States. “I couldn't find the Four Freedoms* among the dead men. Personal weariness became a forest that shut off my view of events about me. I was no longer seeing the little things that you at home want to know about the soldiers.” When George W. Bush makes his D-Day anniversary visit to the Normandy beaches on Sunday, we’re going to hear a lot of well-honed speeches trying to compare the righteous combat forced on us in World War II with the war of choice we’ve entered into in Iraq. But only speechmakers from coddled, comfortable backgrounds who’ve never heard a shot fired in anger, much less seen “dead men by mass production,” would dare use the blood of those who died at Normandy 60 years ago to try to cleanse their conscience of those dying in Iraq today. The United States entered World War II, as it had entered World War I, to defeat a proven aggressor and bring the war to an end. The Bush administration actually won its righteous war, in Afghanistan after the aggression of September 11, 2001. But that victory came too quickly, it seems, for our leaders to get much satisfaction from it. So they sent our kids to Iraq. And what is the goal there today, now that the reasons we were given at first have proved to be grand delusions? To spread democracy? To extirpate the very idea of terrorism? To work the will of God? Sixty years ago, those who thought they could teach the world how to live the only right way, which was their way, and launched unprovoked wars claiming this was the only thing could do to defend their values—those were the people we called the enemy. But let’s be clear about the soldiers. Our soldiers. Those men and women in Iraq today are, indeed, just as heroic as those at Normandy. They have been put in the wrong place at the wrong time for the wrong reasons, but that’s not their fault. They are fighting and dying and trying to build something good as soldiers, despite the most foolhardy civilian leadership in the modern history of the United States. Like any G.I. Joe in World War II, they’re making the best of a bad situation. In his day, Ernie Pyle’s columns read like the letters every soldier wanted to send. But today’s soldiers, at least the ones who write to Shadowland (shadowland@newsweek.com), do a pretty good job of telling the story themselves. Last week, for instance, I got a long letter from Lt. Col. Richard Allinger, who works out of the heavily guarded Green Zone in Baghdad, where he ought to be pretty safe, but isn’t. “Yesterday, I thought I was on the way out twice,” he wrote. “I am still in a state of shock to some degree, and thankful in others that God just happens to love me a lot. “At about three in the afternoon I was walking into the parking lot of a café when—FIZZ, WHOOSH, WHOOMP—two mortars and one rocket flew directly over my head and blew up about 100 yards from me. I hit the deck, got my heart started again, and made it back to my brigade compound rather quickly. I thought, well it just ain’t my time yet. And finally got my pulse below 400. “Then last night at about 22h30 [10:30 p.m.], I am lying on my bed when—WHOOSH, WHOOMP, and KABOOM—my whole room bounced, the outside wall was peppered. I jumped up, put on my flack vest and some shoes, and looked outside our hootch. The mortar disintegrated the tiles, blew s—- in all directions and was still smoldering when I found the crater. I mean God really loved me yesterday. The 22h30 mortar would have entered my room if it had an angle of trajectory modified by less than one degree, considering how far it traveled. “I did not sleep well last night.” This sort of thing won’t end soon, “but I will maintain my sense of humor. I will maintain my resolve,” says Allinger. “The American soldier in Iraq is a fine human being,” he writes. “Young men and women, a zillion miles from home, watching their friends die day after day, being mortared just like me, eating lousy food, baking in the unbelievable heat. Young men and women who are attending too many memorials and last roll calls. These young men and women suffer these indignities routinely and go out each day to help rebuild a school, build a water line, repair a bridge, fix the substations, install air conditioners in orphanages, the list goes on and on. These young men and women are heroes, not prison guards gone wild. They are the bravest most incredible people I have ever had the pleasure to know.” To which I say, Amen. * President Franklin D. Roosevelt laid out what were called “The Four Freedoms” driving U.S. policy in January 1941, eleven months before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. These high ideals of cooperation as well as confrontation saw us through to the end of the war and the ambitious peace that was built afterward: “In the future days which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms. “The first is freedom of speech and expression—everywhere in the world. “The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way—everywhere in the world. “The third is freedom from want, which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants—everywhere in the world. “The fourth is freedom from fear, which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor—anywhere in the world.”
No, He didn't say that... Let me educate you on the phases: Phase 1: The overthrow of the Government...easier, much easier than imagined... Phase 2: The transitional process towards Iraqi sovergnity- This is by nature, a strategically unstructured manner...A bit more difficult than imagined... If anything, President Bush was mentioning the phase 1 completed objective...
Didn't realize we had to read code in presidential speeches. He was declaring victory in front of a "Mission Accomplished" banner on an aircraft carrier immediately following a ceasefire with our enemy. What are we supposed to think? Six months later, we're expected to believe that he was merely referring to a very specific, vaguely worded aspect of Phase 1. For such a dim-witted man, Bush sure has a fantastic gift for nuance and subtlety.
