Progressive Talking Points 1/12/06

Tell Me, Mr. President, What Can I Say?

As Washington has been consumed this week with the nomination hearings, President Bush has begun to let Americans know how they can and cannot conduct debate on Iraq. In Washington on Monday and in Louisville yesterday, the president claimed that Americans know the difference between “honest critics” and those who argue the war occurred “because of Israel, or because we misled the American people.”

• For the Bush administration, good debate on Iraq = positive gains in Iraq. Bad debate on Iraq = everything else they don’t want to hear. The failure to secure adequate body armor for troops is just the latest example of the president turning a deaf ear to needs on the ground in Iraq. A secret Pentagon study made public this month revealed that "as many as 80 percent of the marines who have been killed in Iraq from wounds to the upper body could have survived if they had had extra body armor." Clearly this is not constructive debate in the president’s eyes, but it news everyone needs to hear if we are going to have a real national discussion on Iraq.
  
  
• The president is unwilling to except the facts on the ground. In recent speeches the president has touted successes in Iraq and improving security, but the facts on the ground paint a different picture. Since the Dec. 15 elections, 498 Iraqis and 54 Americans have been killed.
  
  
• The president has failed to convince Americans to support Iraq. Despite a month-long public relations offensive, a new CBS News poll finds that most Americans aren’t buying what President Bush is selling. The trends over time in a series of CBS polls demonstrate that President Bush has lacked support and approval from a majority of Americans on Iraq for two years. The last time a clear majority of Americans said that they approved of President Bush’s handling of Iraq was December 2003, just after the capture of Saddam Hussein.