Quotes of the Morning: Trust Me

“The succession of crisis after crisis has taken its toll. Some in the White House sound frazzled. While there are few stories of aides nodding off in meetings, some duck outside during the day so the fresh air will wake them up. "We're all burned out," said one White House official who did not want to be named for fear of angering superiors. ‘People are just tired.’"
-Washington Post, March 13, 2006

“That’s never a good sign.. These are people who screw an awful lot of stuff up when fully rested. I’d hate to find out how bad it is when they don’t get their naps. If these guys don’t get their rest things could really start getting bad.”
-Skippy

“The past two weeks have changed the war in Iraq, shifting its focus from a U.S.-driven fight against Sunni insurgents to a direct battle for power and survival between Iraq's empowered Shiite majority and disempowered Sunni minority. On Sunday, three car bombings in Baghdad's Shiite neighborhood of Sadr City killed about 50 people, the deadliest string of sectarian attacks since the Feb. 22 bombing of a Shiite shrine in Samarra touched off a wave of retaliatory killings.”
-Washington Post, March 13, 2006

“Baghdad is about a third the size of New York City. It is also just about the only part of Iraq that we ever hear about because the media does very little traveling outside the ‘green zone’ in Baghdad. You know, I realize that the press hasn’t really caught on yet, but when there are two sides to a conflict going to war in a single country they call that a ‘civil war’. You can look it up.”
-Skippy

“Other neighborhoods, such as Dora, are no-go zones for nearly everyone except residents too poor to move elsewhere. Sunni insurgents frequently lob mortar rounds into the Shiite neighborhood on Baghdad's southern edge, occasionally drawing a riposte of U.S. artillery rounds aimed at the insurgent-friendly farms outside of Dora.
In Dora and elsewhere around Baghdad, gunmen step out of cars, riddle with bullets targets ranging from businessmen to boys selling black-market gasoline, and drive off again, without warning or explanation to victims or terrified onlookers.
The shifting focus of Iraq's war does not mean the fight against the insurgency has ended. Bombings attributed to insurgents have held fairly steady. But execution-style shootings of the kind frequently laid to Shiite militias and police have skyrocketed since mid-2005, claiming more lives monthly now than bombings, according to figures from Baghdad's morgue.”
-Washington Post, March 13, 2006

“Sounds bad. We have created a situation where civil war seems almost certain because of our incompetence. We refuse to put enough troops in to actually stop the war, but we also refuse to take the troops out of harm’s way. How do we justify this kind of behavior?”
-Skippy

“Presidential adviser Karl Rove said Saturday that the Bush administration will not pull American troops out of Iraq until victory is achieved, despite the growing number of Democrats urging a withdrawal.
Abandoning Iraq now would signal to U.S. allies that America can't be trusted, Rove said during a Republican fundraiser at Bowling Green State University in Ohio.
‘Tyrants in the Middle East would laugh at our failed resolve,’ he said. ‘To retreat before victory would be a reckless act.’"
-Associated Press, March 12, 2006

“Yep. If we left Iraq it would show that America can’t be trusted (and oddly enough this Quote comes from a man who outed an undercover CIA agent). The fact that we invaded Iraq and overthrew its government in the first place based upon shoddy intelligence and didn’t figure out how to restore the peace afterwards is just proof that we are a reliable stand-up kind of government. Geez.”
-Skippy