“Now, kid, you just sit down behind this machine gun and when the bad guys start coming over the top, you just keep firing. And don’t worry, kid, we’ll be back for you.”
I feel sorry for Dana Perino:
Q: Dana, on the “mission accomplished” speech, though, wasn’t the phrase something to the effect of, “the battle of Baghdad is over”? Clearly that’s not true.
PERINO: I think it was — it was major combat. And I — it was major combat operations. And at that point, if you’re going back — I’m not the greater historian on this, since I was at the Council on Environmental Quality during this episode, but Baghdad did fall very quickly. One of the things that we have learned over the years is how strong, first of all, that al Qaeda would be in Iraq, that they would set up this battle as, in their own words, the battle to win. And we did not know that their stoking of sectarian violence would do what it did last year. We had — at the end of 2005 and early 2006, you had the votes for a government and a vote for a constitution with millions of people in Iraq. And it looked like we were moving towards a period of political reconciliation. And then if you look at the marker of the bombing of the Samarra mosque in February of 2006, it really started this chain reaction, which is — then in the fall of 2006, the President heard the call of the American people who wanted to see a change in Iraq, and he underwent an extensive review, a comprehensive review which led to the new Baghdad security plan, which is now under way as General Petraeus –
And it goes on (link). Even for someone with a Bachelor’s Degree in Mass Communication, it should be easier than this.
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