War Is Peace, Or -- Was The Iraqi Information Minister Simply Seeing the Future?

Who could forget the great words of Muhammed Saeed al-Sahaf, the former Iraqi Information Minister who repeatedly assured Iraqis that Bush's invasion of Iraq back in 2003 was falling on its face and that Iraq would ultimately prevail. Here are a few of his greatest hits (from WeLoveTheIraqiInformationMinister.com):

"Now even the American command is under siege. We are hitting it from the north, east, south and west. We chase them here and they chase us there. But at the end we are the people who are laying siege to them. And it is not them who are besieging us."

"We have them surrounded in their tanks"

"I can say, and I am responsible for what I am saying, that they have started to commit suicide under the walls of Baghdad. We will encourage them to commit more suicides quickly."

"Faltering forces of infidels cannot just enter a country of 26 million people and lay besiege to them! They are the ones who will find themselves under siege. Therefore, in reality whatever this miserable Rumsfeld has been saying, he was talking about his own forces. Now even the American command is under siege."

It's interesting how some of al-Sahaf's words have lost their hilarity now that Bush's Iraq Quagmire is about to enter its fourth year. Indeed, BushCo is starting to sound more and more like that Iraqi Information Minister every day. It was Dick Cheney who said last May that "[t]he level of activity that we see today from a military standpoint, I think, will clearly decline," and "I think they're in the last throes, if you will, of the insurgency."

Over 500 American troops have been killed in Iraq since Cheney made those ridiculous remarks, but that isn't stopping BushCo from piling on even more Orwellian spin. The chairman of the Joints Chiefs got into the act over the weekend when he responded to the fact that nearly 30 U.S. troops had been killed in Iraq since last Thursday:

Asked if the attacks were a sign that the December elections had failed to diminish the insurgency in Iraq, Gen. Peter Pace said the opposite was true.

Pace, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that with each of the country's three elections, voter turnout increased, indicating that "the terrorists failed at each of their primary missions of stopping the vote."

"What's clear to me is that each of the elections has been a major blow to al Qaeda," Pace said at a Pentagon news conference Thursday. "I think what you're seeing now is a continuing attempt to disrupt the proper formation of the Iraqi government, and I'm confident they will fail."

So what's the deal? Should we start worrying when the number of insurgent attacks are down, and start to feel better about Bush's War when the violence surges? Or is it all good? SusanG at Kos sums it up this way:

I guess from Pace's point of view, it's been a great few days for Iraqis and U.S. troops.

Back here in the real world, where The Onion's take on reality is making more sense than those of our military commanders, I'll go with their August 2004 headline: Please Stop Bringing It On.

Our hearts, prayers and thoughts go out today to the families of the U.S. troops and the Iraqis who have been killed in recent days.