Quotes of the Morning: Exactly the Same Thing

“Maj. Gen. William Caldwell, a U.S. military spokesman, said the joint effort has reduced the number of killings, abductions and attacks reported so far in August. The number of car bombs dropped from 16 two weeks ago to eight last week, and he said Baghdad's murder rate is down by nearly half since July.
‘However, as we know, the insurgents and terrorists are punching back,’ Caldwell said.”
-CNN, August 28, 2006

“The murder rate in Baghdad is down. It looks like increasing the number of troops in the city has had the desired effect. Now that we are finally gaining some control things should be looking up…”
-Skippy

“The U.S. military did not count people killed by bombs, mortars, rockets or other mass attacks when it reported a dramatic drop in the number of murders in the Baghdad area last month, the U.S. command said Monday.
The decision to include only victims of drive-by shootings and those killed by torture and execution, usually at the hands of death squads, allowed U.S. officials to argue that a security crackdown that began in the capital August 7 had more than halved the city's murder rate.
[…]
At the end of August, the top U.S. military spokesman in Iraq, Maj. Gen. William B. Caldwell, said violence had dropped significantly because of the operation. Caldwell said ‘attacks in Baghdad were well below the monthly average for July. Since August 7, the murder rate in Baghdad dropped 52 percent from the daily rate for July.’
However, Caldwell did not make the key distinction that the rate he was referring to excluded a significant part of the daily violence in and around the capital. On Monday, for example, at least 20 of the 26 people slain in the capital were killed in bombings.”
-Associated Press, September 11, 2006

“…Except of course the problem is that this isn’t the military winning as much as it is our accounting procedures changing without anyone being told. No, this little vanity war has so far killed about 40,000 Iraqi civilians and 2,500 US troops, and it doesn’t show any sign of getting better.”
-Skippy

“But he [Cheney] defended the invasion of Iraq as being in America's long-term strategic interests. Arguing that ‘the world is much better off today’ with Saddam imprisoned, Cheney said: ‘Think where we'd be if he was still there. He'd be sitting on top of a big pile of cash, because he'd have $65 and $70 oil. He would by now have taken down the sanctions’ imposed by the United Nations.
‘He would be a major state sponsor of terror. We also would have a situation where he would have resumed his WMD programs’"
-New York Times, September 11, 2006

“Yep. Unless you happen to be one of the 40,000 innocent Iraqis who have died so far, or one of the 20,000 casualties in the U.S., things have been going much, much better that if an isolated dictator was still ruling his little patch of dirt while hemmed in my the UN sanctions. If Saddam was still there we’d be, well, home. How important was this to our security?”
-Skippy

“Vice President Dick Cheney has backed away from his insistence last year that the insurgency in Iraq was in its ‘last throes,’ but in a contentious television interview said that even if he had known in 2003 that his claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction were mistaken, ‘we'd do exactly the same thing.’"
-New York Times, September 11, 2006

“Important enough that if we had the power to turn back time we’d go back and kill those 40,000 civilians all over again. Makes you proud to be an American doesn’t it? What about that guy that actually was behind 9/11? You know.. the criminal mastermind that we invaded Afghanistan to catch? The one that we stopped looking for?”
-Skippy

“Q Osama bin Laden -- there was a Washington Post story today saying that the trail has gone stone cold.
MR. SNOW: That's just wrong. That's just flat wrong.
[…]
One of the things I can say is that bin Laden is harder to find these days because he, in fact, does not feel at liberty to move about, he does not feel at liberty to use electronic means of communications. In many ways, the senior leadership of al Qaeda has been degraded. And under such circumstances, somebody leaves fewer clues.
[…]
Q It sort of sounds like since he's harder to find is a sign of our success.
MR. SNOW: Well, in some ways, it is. I mean, if bin Laden was thoroughly successful, he'd be sitting on a throne conducting press conferences or issuing fatwas in full view of everyone -- and he is not doing so.”
-Press Gaggle with White House Spokesman Tony Snow, September 11, 2006

“Success! The fact that we can’t find Osama is just proof that we are winning the war on terror. And a big thank you goes out to Tony Snow for providing us with that doubleplusgood answer.”
-Skippy