Dubya's "Geraldo Moment"

Via Crooks and Liars.

On Friday, Keith Olbermann was talked to Paul Reikhoff, author of Chasing Ghosts: Failures and Facades in Iraq: A Soldier's Perspective and founder of the group Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America. During the conversation Reikhoff said this:

One of the things that did happen today that concerned me was that during Bush's press conference he actually showed a graphic that showed 24 urban military outposts in downtown Baghdad. I would argue that showing that to the world and potentially to our enemy might compromise moral - might actually compromise operational security.

Our enemies aren't stupid. They can look at that and figure out a grid coordinate and try and drop mortars on those exact locations. I mean, this is like a Geraldo moment during the invasion when Geraldo started drawing troop operation movements in the sand. I mean, this is unprecedented in my experience and maybe I'm missing something, but this is a real worry and I wouldn't go throwing this out on the airwaves for everybody to see if I were the President.

This concerns me, too. This is from dubya's press conference from that day:

My point is, is that the American combat forces are not alone in the effort to secure the nation's capital. And just as important as the growing number of troops is their changing position in the city. I direct your attention to a map showing our troop presence around Baghdad late last year. This is how we were positioned. Most troops were at bases on the outskirts of the city. They would move into Baghdad to clear out neighborhoods during the day, and then they would return to their bases at night. The problem was that when our troops moved back to the bases, the extremists, the radicals, the killers moved back to the neighborhoods.

And we're changing. Part of our strategy change, part of the new mission in Baghdad is for American troops to live and work side by side with Iraqi forces at small neighborhood posts called joint security stations. You can see from this map, there are now more than two dozen joint security stations located throughout Baghdad; more are planned. From these stations, Iraqi and American forces work together to clear out and then secure neighborhoods -- all aimed at providing security for the people of Baghdad. If a heavy fight breaks out, our forces will step in, and Iraqi forces learn valuable skills from American troops; they'll fight shoulder to shoulder with the finest military every assembled.

I would supremely doubt that the bases dubya identified as being in place "late last year" have changed all that much. And even if they had, dubya's just given out "to the enemy" the exact location of more than two dozen security stations.

The security of those stations has to have been compromised. Reikhoff is right. The Iraqis aren't stupid. Giving out any intelligence on the location of the Army/Marine troops station in Baghdad is.

How many more servicemen will die because dubya wanted to shore up support for his war?