THE COMPLETE ARTICLE
The New York Times
No Way Out
By MAUREEN DOWDWe’re in a cycle of violence in Iraq that is so complex and awful that withdrawing American troops will make it worse and keeping American troops there may also make it worse.
Everything you've heard and read is true. And I am deeply sorry about that." Who said it?
(a) George Bush, about the chilling new intelligence report on Iraq.
(b) Joe Biden, about his self-imploding prolixity.
(c) Condi Rice, on her ability to understand Peyton Manning's vulnerabilities better than Nuri Kamal al-Malaki's.
(d) Silvio Berlusconi, on his wife's Junoesque lightning bolt after his public flirting.
(e) Jacques Chirac, after giving a Gallic shrug at the prospect of Iran getting un or deux nuclear weapons.
(f) Hillary Clinton, on enabling the president to invade Iraq.
(g) Barack Obama, for the ultimate sin of not being black enough or white enough.
(h) Mary Cheney, on her decision to work on her terrifying dad's homophobic campaign because the thought of John Kerry was "terrifying."
(i) Gavin Newsom, the mayor of San Francisco, about his affair with his campaign manager's wife.
The answer is Gavin Newsom.
It's rare to get a simple apology when a complex obfuscation will do.
Even after releasing parts of an intelligence report so pessimistic that it may as well have been titled "Iraq: We're Cooked," Bush officials clung to their alternate reality, using nonsensical logic and cherry-picking whatever phrases they could find in the report that they could use to sell the Surge.
In the 2004 National Intelligence Estimate, civil war was a worst-case scenario. In the 2007 one, Iraq has zoomed past civil war to hell: "The Intelligence Community judges that the term 'civil war' does not adequately capture the complexity of the conflict in Iraq, which includes extensive Shia-on-Shia violence, Al Qaeda and Sunni insurgent attacks on coalition forces, and widespread criminally motivated violence."
As John McLaughlin, the former acting director of central intelligence, told The Times's Mark Mazzetti: "Civil war is checkers. This is chess." ....
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