The Real "Mission Accomplished"

Osama bin Laden Dead Eight Years to the Day of Bush's "Mission Accomplished" Banner

Via Wikipedia:

"Mission Accomplished" refers to a banner titled "Mission Accomplished" that was displayed on the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln during a televised address by United States President George W. Bush on May 1, 2003 and the controversy that followed. The speech was not actually titled "Mission Accomplished".

Mission Accomplished!

That was five years ago.

Look closely. Isn't it just a delicious coincidence that the photographer just happened to be the right place to put dubya's head in line with something curved? Gives our Commander-in-Chief a wonderful, well, halo, does it not?

Just a coincidence, I am sure.

To be sure, much has happened in five years. From CBS:

Five years after that speech, after the meaning of the phrase "mission accomplished" and when is a job truly "done" has been endlessly parsed, and after responsibility for creating and hanging the sign was first denied and later accepted, the White House said Wednesday that President Bush has paid a price for the banner, with its affirmative message becoming a target of mockery and a symbol of U.S. misjudgments and mistakes in the long and costly war - a war in which major combat operations are still being waged.

After shifting explanations, the White House eventually said the "Mission Accomplished" phrase referred to the carrier's crew completing their 10-month mission, not the military completing its mission in Iraq.

"President Bush is well aware that the banner should have been much more specific and said 'mission accomplished' for these sailors who are on this ship on their mission," White House press secretary Dana Perino said Wednesday. "And we have certainly paid a price for not being more specific on that banner. And I recognize that the media is going to play this up again tomorrow, as they do every single year."

"Shifting explanations" I like that. They first lied about where the banner came from and then had to admit it that the White House staff did the deed. From Time:

The perfect photo-op has flopped. Engineered by the most image-conscious White House in history, the carrier landing portrayed Bush as master and commander, an ideal bookend to his spontaneous performance with a bullhorn in the rubble of the World Trade Center after 9/11. Instead, the hothouse tableau already sharply at odds with the reality in Iraq did even more damage to White House credibility last week. Asked at a news conference whether the "Mission Accomplished" banner had been prematurely boastful, the president backed away from it, saying it had been put up by the sailors and airmen of the Lincoln to celebrate their homecoming after toppling Saddam's regime.

Not long afterwards, the White House had to amend its account. The soldiers hadn't put up the sign; the White House had done the hoisting. It had also produced the banner — contrary to what senior White House officials had said for months. In the end, the White House conceded on those details, but declared them mere quibbles. The point was, they said, that the whole thing had been done at the request of the crewmembers. Even that explanation didn't sit well with some long-time Bush aides. "They (the White House) put up banners at every event that look just like that and we're supposed to believe that at this one it was the Navy that requested one?" asked a senior administration official. Others remember staffers boasting about how the president had been specifically positioned during his speech so that the banner would be captured in footage of his speech.

But the real tragedy, of course, is what's happened since dubya declared "major combat operations in Iraq have ended."

There were 140 American casualties between the invasion in March and dubya's declaration on the 1st of May. There have been (as of this writing) 4,056 confirmed casualties so far.

By my count, that means that 3,956 American deaths since dubya stood, halo enhanced, on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln. As CBS continues:

Tens of thousands of Iraqis have been killed (the true number may never be known, since the Iraqi government does not record tallies of the dead), and millions have been displaced from their homes. And there are currently more U.S. troops in Iraq than there were when the U.S. invaded with a contingent of other coalition forces.

True to form, of course, was Dana Perino's complaint that the media would "play this up" as they do every year.

Hmm, let's see. A horrific blunder by an arrogant administration that leads to the deaths of thousands of American servicemen and women and the White House doesn't want any of the embarrassing stuff to be covered by the media.

Sorry.

Mission Accomplished

It's been 4 years and 3,211 American dead (3351 dead as of 7/1/07 minus the 140 dead prior to 7/1/03) since George W. Bush stood on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln and declared:

Major combat operations in Iraq have ended. In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed.

Recently White House Press Secretary Tony Snow has asserted that:

there has been no attempt to try to link Saddam to September 11.

Well then, let's see how dubya did just that in his "Mission Accomplished" speech. The speech itself (by my count from the page at whitehouse.gov) is 28 paragraphs long. Paragraph 11 begins the section on 9/11:

The battle of Iraq is one victory in a war on terror that began on September the 11, 2001 -- and still goes on.

So the victorious "battle of Iraq" is a part of a war that began on 9/11. By paragraph 14 dubya's saying:

The liberation of Iraq is a crucial advance in the campaign against terror. We've removed an ally of al Qaeda, and cut off a source of terrorist funding. And this much is certain: No terrorist network will gain weapons of mass destruction from the Iraqi regime, because the regime is no more.[emphasis added]

So Iraq was an ally of al Qaeda. And the "victory" in the "battle of Iraq" removed the possibility of Iraq delivering WMD to al Qaeda or other terrorists. Paragraph 15:

In these 19 months that changed the world, our actions have been focused and deliberate and proportionate to the offense. We have not forgotten the victims of September the 11th -- the last phone calls, the cold murder of children, the searches in the rubble. With those attacks, the terrorists and their supporters declared war on the United States. And war is what they got.[emphasis added]

So at the very least, dubya's declared Iraq to be "supporters" (he's already declared them to be "allies") of the 9/11 terrorists who "declared war on the United States."

And yet Tony Snow still tries to declare that no attempt had ever been made to link Saddam to 9/11.

Meanwhile, more than three thousand American troops are dead. The bloodshed and chaos continues unabated in Iraq.

Mission Accomplished.