Troops in Iraq Ask Lieberman: When Are We Gonna Get Outta Here?

Hey, he's shopping for sunglasses at a Baghdad market, so don't bring him down with the facts. Lieberman put on another pair of rose-colored lenses and exclaimed about how much progress we're making. May death toll of U.S. troops in Iraq: 127. Ft. Lewis, home to one of every six of our soldiers killed in Iraq this month, has decided it can no longer hold memorial services for individual soldier deaths because it's too time consuming. They're opting instead for one monthly, one-size-fits-all memorial. I guess whatever constitutes "supporting the troops" is increasingly in the eye of the beholder. Meanwhile ....

Oh, and remember Retired Army Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez from the first year of the occupation? His assessment of our prospects in Iraq is one of the most grim in a long list of recent grim assessments. Excerpt from coverage on Think Progress:

“I think if we do the right things politically and economically with the right Iraqi leadership we could still salvage at least a stalemate, if you will — not a stalemate but at least stave off defeat. It’s also kind of important for us to answer the question, ‘What is victory?’, and at this point I’m not sure America really knows what victory is.” […]

“I am absolutely convinced that America has a crisis in leadership at this time and we’ve got to do whatever we can to help the next generation of leaders do better than we have done over the past five years,” Sanchez said, “better than what this cohort of political and military leaders have done.”

Meanwhile, expansion plans are already taking shape for our new imperial fortress, I mean embassy, in Baghdad:

“It’s as big as Vatican City and makes the foreign embassies dotting the tree-lined streets of Washington, D.C., look like carriage houses, but the barely-finished U.S. embassy in Baghdad is already primed for expansion.”

According to Dave Foley, spokesman at the State Department’s Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs, more Americans are still working at the embassy than initially expected, mainly because the overarching security problem in Baghdad has slowed and complicated efforts to rebuild the country and help establish a functioning central government there. […]

As designed now, the 619 blast-proof apartments may not be enough to accommodate some of the estimated 4,000 regular employees, contractors and local Iraqis working for the embassy, plus congressional and other diplomatic visitors who visit the capital on a regular basis.

I wonder if it has a moat. It doesn't say in this description. And no word yet on whether Exxon Mobil or Halliburton will have their own executive suites.