The narrative of the American Right about Iraq is that Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki is finally in control, that the Iraqi armed forces are performing well, and that in short things are now going swimmingly. This narrative is a variation on the “Good News” story that the Bush administration has used all along to propagandize the American press and public.
The supine US press even goes along with al-Maliki’s assertion that he reestablished control without firing a shot in the big city (1.7 million) of Mosul, a stronghold of Sunni Arab resentment of his government.
McCain, continuing the deliberate falsehoods that Scott McClellan politely called a ‘permanent campaign’ even managed to praise the Iraqi forces as having done “pretty well” when they failed in a frontal assault on a small rag tag militia in Basra.
Occasionally the facade is accidentally pulled away and we see the hell hole that is Iraq under Bush more clearly. A senior intelligence official accidentally left a Secret dossier on a London train from Waterloo to Surrey. Another passenger found it, was alarmed by the contents, and passed it on to the BBC. The British government is trying to get it back.
One of the documents? A “‘top secret and in some cases damning’ assessment of Iraq’s security forces.”
Shh. Don’t tell John McCain or Fred Kagan, but they’ve just been busted.
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