The second quote also sounds like something we have heard before. Like certain congresscritters not doing due diligence and not being fed real information.

I had exactly the same question.

I would guess that Crocker is just thrifty in his use of the carriage return key.
"The response was good.
I have not found any element of the Iraqi government that will admit to being consulted."

makes perfect sense. It would mean

"The senior officials agreed to back Maliki's effort.

By the way, all of them insist that they weren't consulted."

Look the guy is busy. He doesn't have time for punctuation.

Of course, the punctuation was chosen by Mr Gordon; and the New York Times copy editor,

but who am I to question a New York Times copy editor ?

I consult with washingtonmonthly.com every day, but never would I admit to doing so. I know all.

It's no wonder Bush is such a fan of Maliki: he sounds like a chip off the old block.

Quality snark! But of course the sad thing is that Bush would support whoever he put in to the bitter end, because the alternative is admitting a mistake.

The response was good because no element of the U.S. government would admit that they were properly informed after things went south in Iraq. Again, the Iraqis are emulating the Americans, and this is a good thing.

We obviously were in the know on this if we had soldiers fighting on the streets in support of the mission, along with tanks, along with artillery, unless we were just dupes in the whole process, in which case you would expect a little outrage, but we weren't dupes, this happened right after Dick Cheney showed up, the week before the mission hearings, this is no mystery.

Did he used to be a pollster? Maybe the "response was good" means that he had a 30%+ response rate. The rest of them hung up on him.

In the headlines today: al Qaida in Iraq has been elected by a wide margin to dominence in the Iraq parliment. They've secured nearly 80% of seats and notified American military authorities a President of al Qaida choosing will be installed tomorrow. President Bush has hailed the election outcome as a gift from God for the United States and a sign the war has been a rousing success. "al Qaida must now devote considerable time and resources to governing Iraq. Our best experts predict this means al Qaida will be far too busy there to try and attack us here. I'd like to restate all Americans owe our brave members of the military a debt of gratitude. By protecting average Iraqis and assuring their ability to vote this great result has been achieved. We look forward to a similar outcome in the pending vote in Afghanistan."

"The senior officials agreed to back Maliki's effort.
By the way, all of them insist that they weren't consulted."

I wonder if, rather than "By the way," the diplomatic omission is "Even though"--i.e., he's praising the senior government officials for acting in the national interest despite Maliki having ignored them. They could have refused to help because Maliki didn't bother to consult them, but they put the country's interest before their annoyance at Maliki's diss.

They dropped a "not". Here is a fuller explanation of this narrative of success told by Mr Crocker: Yesterday, he begins, the senior officials complained that they were excluded, that is, not consulted, by Mr. Maliki's decision-making on invading Basra. They wanted to act like Republicans and consider only their own interests not the interests of the nation, calling names, whining, complaining, undercutting the President, etc. etc. Most of us can see that this would be bad for Iraq. This was the entire rationale for the surge, to end this political bickering.

Into the breach steps heroic Mr Crocker to exhort the wavering with a stirring vision of the principles and responsibilities of the leaders of a New Liberated Nation: "Are you or are you not Iraqis??? Hath not an Iraqi eyes? noses? mortgages? This is a hour of national crisis! The birthing pains of freedom! A time when all good men should come to the aid of their country! From this day to the ending of the world, we in it shall be remember'd; We few, we happy few, we band of brothers; Failure in Basra will be bad for all Iraqis! We shall fight them on the beaches! " and so on.

Then, we have the punchline. The response [to his stirring exhortation] was "good." So good in fact that Crocker now cannot find "any element of the Iraqi government that will admit to NOT being consulted." In other words, his instructive speech turned that fractious Iraqi government into a cohesive patriotic whole. The surge has been a success, don't you know! George Bush was right to invade Iraq, and the USA has saved the day, again.

The response was good. I have not found any element of the Iraqi government that will admit to being consulted."

What he meant is that this helps support McCain's assertion that we should be there for 100 years. It'll take that long to get the various elements of the Iraqi government to start talking to each other.

Interviews with a wide range of American and military officials...suggest that Mr. Maliki overestimated his military's abilities and underestimated the scale of the resistance. The Iraqi prime minister also displayed an impulsive leadership style that did not give his forces or that of his most powerful allies, the American and British military, time to prepare.

I don't buy it. The story fits for now and leaves Maliki holding the bag, which is also what's wrong with the story.

A more likely scenario: Cheney (or one of his minions--they're everywhere) pressured Maliki to launch an attack. Maliki was reluctant and finally gave in once he had assurances that U.S. and British forces would come to his assistance if things started turning against him. This was supposed to demonstrate to the United States that the Iraqis were standing up so that we could (after 100 years?) stand down. Petraeus is probably rewriting his upcoming testimony in collaboration with the same crew that pushed the Basra offensive.

Looks like it might take a little bit longer, unless McCain is defeated.

Agree with Boolaboola... Talk about connecting the dots... dot 1, cheny makes unannounced visit to Bagdad... dot 2, Maliki finds balls and launches Basra attack... Any connection?!

I shouldn't be, but I'm astonished at the failure of Americans (especially the media and the Democrats) to ask some basic questions and draw some basic conclusions about the Basra attack.

1. Did Cheney approve the Basra attack? Almost certainly. Was it his idea all along? The timing of his visit to Iraq suggests that it might have been. No one's asking.

2. What about Fred Kagan's confident statement a couple of days before the attack: The Civil War Is Over. Why isn't everyone ridiculing Kagan now, the way he just ridiculed people who believed that the civil war was going to continue? Why didn't Kagan's career as a talking head and policy adviser come to an end the day the attack began? He obviously knows nothing about anything.

3. What about Bush's statement that the Basra attack was "a defining moment for a free Iraq"? What got defined in Basra was the extreme weakness of the central government and its lack of authority even over its own troops. Shouldn't someone be asking Bush about this? The Iraqis are clearly unable to "stand up".

4. What really happened? As more detail comes out, it seems that the failure of the offensive was even greater than the first reports had it. The mere fact that Maliki failed at what he tried to do, after making grand statements about his intentions, should have left him crippled from then on out. But there's evidence that the battle was much worse than just a standoff, and would have ended up being far more disastrous than it was except for a last minute rescue by the Americans, the British, and the Iranians.

It's at times like this I wish that the U.S. had a two-party system. For example, just hypothetically: if we were in the middle of a Presidential campaign right now, one of the candidates from the opposing party would probably have something to say about the emptiness and falseness of our President's speech on Iraq, and about the incompetence and destructiveness of Cheney's recent intervention in Iraqi policy-making.

But just as there are no magic ponies in Iraq, there are none in the U.S. either.

This story is a little old for it to genuinely turn out to be the Iraqis' fault now and not earlier. My guess is that the righties heard that people were calling them fools over how poorly the Iraqis performed, so the righties decided to shift the blame to the Iraqis, and used some of their spoiled-rich-kid influence at the Times to do it.

For those of us too naive to believe that anyone who works at the Times (besides certain opinion writers) is anything other than a true-blue pure-heart hippy who would never bend to this pressure, time to grow up: a snort of cocaine or some other bribe or pressure can go very far, even with the rich, despite how they like to portray themselves as somehow higher than everyone else and unsusceptible to things everyone else is susceptible to.

They're standing down so we can stand up.

The Bush viewpoint is that we and the puppet government are the good guys fighting for Iraqi freedom against the bad guys.

The Iraqis for the most part regard us as invaders and unwelcome occupiers, and members of the puppet government dare not leave the Green Zone lest they lose their heads while all about them are losing theirs.

As not learned by the rigid thinking Bush in Fallujah, Iraqis are not particularly eager to kill fellow Iraqis. They join the army from the desperation of joblessness, not to fight for the Christian Zionist Bush and Israel.

Some estimate Iraqi dead at 1 million, which would be equivalent to 10 million American dead as a proportion of population, and we softies whine about the 3000 dead of 9/11! Add to all this the violent ethnic conflicts and a miscellaneous score of major blood feuds.

Well, since they're are so incompetent, we'll just have to stay there for the next 1000 years until they get everything right.

"They went in with 70 percent of a plan. Sometimes that's enough. This time it wasn't."

That sounds....familiar, doesn't it?
--

Bush went in with 70% ??? More like 0% plan and 70% war profits for his war profiteering friends.

PS: A 5 year war of complete and total FU. I just can't believe Bush/Cheney are not impeached, indicted, and jailed for stupidity crimes against humanity.

Well, over to Noam Chomsky. We live in a nation of liars creating miasmic fogs of fantasy and fear, and the only thing a politician can actually mispeak is to tell the actual truth.

Consider the NYT, larded with copy editors and punctuation experts, and totally unembarrassed about lying us into a $500 billion war. Or the WaPo, equally obsessed with their supposed 'gatekeeper' duty and just as rabid and foaming at the mouth when they consider Venezuela, the nation they prefer we would attack.

In this context, language becomes a very poor and imperfect substitute for my cats practice of sniffing each others behinds to establish identity. Sure, it limits their ATM transactions, but they never complain about identity theft.

To paraphrase a quotation I no longer remember perfectly, while we are trying to figure out what the doubletalk means, they will steal again.

Bush is one of those types who can't stand anyone under him smarter than himself.

Bush is one of those types who can't stand anyone under him smarter than himself.

And therefore he hates the world, and everybody in it.

"The senior officials agreed to back Maliki's effort.
By the way, all of them insist that they weren't consulted."

It's called plausible deniablity. The hallmark of BushCo.

Possible scenario so far unmentioned: The use of this attack to sort out the Iraq "army." Reports, which Kevin referred to a while back, indicate that thousands(!?) of members of the attacking force, the Iraq army division used in Basra, refused to fight and attack fellow believers (Sadr's followers). They are being cut out, as mutineers, and being replaced by forces from the Badr group, somewhat loyal to Maliki. So what was accomplished was a weeding out of Sadr followers from the army and the ability to replace them with members loyal to Maliki. Sounds like a good offensive...for Maliki.

"It's called plausible deniability"

Yup. And it sounds exactly like the assertions of US politicians who all maintain that the Basra offensive "caught them by surprise".

It's obvious. But it doesn't prevent the NYT or WashPo from passing on the lies without question.

I wish they would just insert, into these stories carried along by politicians unverifiable assertions, a simple disclaimer, "the US was not informed beforehand of the Basra offensive, Administration officials claim. We were not able to independently verify these claims".

Ideally, they could follow up with "but independent experts A, B, and C believe the Administration's version of events is most unlikely. These officials have been known to make similar incorrect assertions on occasions X, Y, and Z, and here is why establishing this false narrative would be advantageous to the Administration."

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080403/ap_on_re_mi_ea/iraq_al_maliki;_ylt=AqC34PYN6hoB32ktaP1fPxms0NUE

Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki said Thursday he planned to launch more security crackdowns like the one in Basra against "criminal gangs" in Baghdad.

Al-Maliki did not mention by name the Mahdi Army militia, which is led by radical Shiite leader Muqtada al-Sadr. Sadr City and Shula are militia strongholds and any attack by government troops there is likely to trigger a backlash by the militia like what happened in Basra last week.

We did not make mistakes, but we had points of weakness," al-Maliki said of the performance of the security forces. "We discovered that we have a shortage of appropriate weapons for the fight in Basra which we will work quickly to end."

We didn't make mistakes. Who could have imagined that some citizens would rally behind Sadr, including members of the Iraqi army?

Got to give the man credit for quick learning. Too bad he's chosen to learn from idiots.

Boolaboola raises a good point. As I write over at Harper's, the Times itself reported the details of the initiative more than a week prior to the date Crocker claims to have first heard about it. Crocker's claim that any of this was news to him is absurd.

www.harpers.org/archive/2008/04/hbc-90002791

from swimming freestyle:

"The U.S., up to this point, has viewed Iraq through a prism of it's own objectives, ignoring an Iraqi perspective: When will our involvement end? How do we define "victory"? It would not be in U.S. strategic interests to set withdrawal dates. Should we have a long term presence in Iraq? How do we stem Iranian influence in Iraq?

Following next week's march, the Bush Administration could find itself caught between it's own high minded proclamations about the Iraqi people's quest for democracy and an unmistakable expression of Iraqi democracy: an Iraqi call for U.S. forces to get out of Iraq."

http://swimmingfreestyle.typepad.com

It is too early for a postmortem.

"An air strike in the southern Iraqi city of Basra has destroyed a house and killed at least one occupant."

"The US military said a militant died, but would not confirm reports from Iraqi sources that up to six civilians may also have been killed."

Robert Waldman (3rd comment) parsed it almost right; my exegesis of diplomat-speak is:
'Mr. Crocker said. "Because nobody should think that failure in Basra is going to benefit any element of the Iraqi community. The response was good."'
That means, everybody(Crocker talked to) agreed that failure in Basra would be a terrible disaster.
"I have not found any element of the Iraqi government that will admit to being consulted."
That means, everybody said, he wanted to have nothing to do with this disaster.--

Somebody on NPR this morning said something to the effect that some cease-fire offered by Maliki stopped fighting successfully, and therefore this all was a great success. (I didn't get it clearly). Apparently there's some spinning going on already, presenting this obvious disaster as a success.