Iraq'd all up

It sounds like Allawi knows how to cap some insurgent ass, for better or worse. They say he shot six captured rebels, but that's the way it goes these days...

Spencer Ackerman's blog Iraq'd is back up and he has no idea if the man is a "cold-blooded murderer." eh....

Good piece from Hoaglund on the 'perception gap' on Iraq, pointing out that Allawi has a tendency to make pronouncements aimed at the beltway, and that whole attitude could cause even more divergent pointless thinking about Iraq:

Iraq and the world will benefit if Allawi can deliver on his promises to establish stability and democracy. Wish him well. But a dangerous gap is opening up between the determinedly upbeat pronouncements in Washington and from Allawi, and more disinterested reports from the field.

Last Friday, Jim Krane of the Associated Press quoted unnamed U.S. military officers saying that Iraq's insurgency is led by well-armed Sunnis angry about losing power, not by foreign fighters. They number up to 20,000, not 5,000 as Washington briefers maintain, Krane added in his well-reported but generally overlooked dispatch.

The point is not 5,000 vs. 20,000. The insurgency's exact size is unknowable. The point is that enough officers in the field sense that what they see happening to their troops in Iraq is so out of sync with Washington's version that they must rely on the press to get out a realistic message. That is usually how defeat begins for expeditionary forces fighting distant insurgencies.

There is some new stuff in the Valerie Plame case. So Wilson didn't actually debunk the Iran-Niger story? And wives pull all the strings, rendering a man worthless, or so they say in the WaPo.

Josh Marshall is hacking through the details as usual but I found the following via Raimondo:

Fafnir is a broken-hearted Fafnir. For I was deceived. Deceived by the story of Joe Wilson who as it turns out lied about absolutely everything he said to anyone ever because there in the Washington Post last Saturday exists definitive proof that somebody somewhere has said that his wife, exposed CIA agent Valerie Plame, got him his job checking out if Saddam Hussein had tried to buy uranium from Niger.

Poor foolish Fafnir! I had thought somehow this was all about how exposing the identity of a covert CIA agent is a federal crime but apparently it is really about how her husband is a big fat jerk who got a job by ridin his wife's coattails. I don't quite understand what that has to do with a criminal investigation but hipublican intellectual Jonah Goldberg does so that's OK.*

Washington journalist Laura Rozen is exploring the echo theory on intel distortions, that is, the same spoofers spoofed many different agencies, creating the appearance of truth such as WMDs all over the place.

Found a nifty Mesopotamian blog Iraq the Model, that I don't think I'd seen before.

Older news that polygraph tests have been done in the Chalabi-Iran leak investigation.

Look out, the NAACP says that Bush treats black people like prostitutes. What more can I say? A man with 8% of the black vote can't be wrong, can he?

Posted by HongPong at July 20, 2004 03:38 AM
Listed under Campaign 2004 , Iraq , War on Terror .