These Aren't The Dead Zimbabweans You're Looking For

I guess when delusion has kept you in power for 30 years, you keep going with it:

President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe declared Thursday that a cholera epidemic in the southern African nation had been "arrested," even as the United Nations said deaths from the illness had risen to 783.

In a speech at a funeral for a ruling party official, Mugabe credited the World Health Organization for helping contain the outbreak in Zimbabwe, which last week declared a national health emergency.

"Now there is no cholera, there is no cause for war," Mugabe said, according to news service reports. "We need doctors, not soldiers."

Mugabe's assessment of the outbreak was disputed by health-care organizations, which have flooded the economically devastated country in recent weeks with supplies and personnel. On Wednesday, the United Nations called for an additional $6 million to tackle cholera, which it said threatens "the well-being of thousands of people."

Nelson Chamisa, a spokesman for the opposition party Movement for Democratic Change, told the Bloomberg news service that Mugabe's claim was "clearly madness."

This is beyond the point where anyone can shake their heads. People are dying because of Mugabe's fictions. The international community must come to their rescue.

...the latest claim from a Zimbabwean minister is that the UK used bioterrorism to cause the cholera outbreak. It wasn't the grinding poverty and dysfunctional government leading to disease. Nope.

How Dare They Don't Appreciate Lying In A Puddle Of Their Own Sick

So Bob Woodward has a new book out. It's the usual compendium of "inside the palace" gossip and amazing revelations that upon further inspection aren't usually all that revelatory. For instance, it's interesting that Bush thinks the Iraqis are ingrates, but he's actually said this publicly and privately on a few other occasions, and it's been reported thusly.

Still, the shock of that perspective never fails to wear off:

WOODWARD: He has a meeting at the Pentagon with a bunch of experts and he just said, ‘I don’t understand that the Iraqis are not appreciative of what we’ve done for them,’ namely liberated them.

PELLEY: But tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis have been killed in the invasion and through the occupation. He didn’t understand why they might be a little ungrateful about what had occurred to them?

WOODWARD: His beacon is liberation. He thinks we’ve done this magnificent thing for them. I think he still holds to that position.

Never mind the dead, the wounded, the displaced. Can't they feel the warm wind of freedom at their backs now? Or maybe that's the queasy feeling of disease:

Cholera has broken out in a province south of Baghdad and at least 20 cases of the waterborne disease have been confirmed there, a Health Ministry official said Monday.

However, local authorities in Babil province insist the real figure is much higher and have complained that the government in Baghdad has been slow in responding to the outbreak.

Health Ministry official Dr. Ihsan Jaafar said the figure of confirmed cases was based on an examination of samples taken from the victims over the last week. He said one death — a 60-year-old man — had been confirmed [...]

Cholera is endemic in Iraq, which lacks facilities to supply clean drinking water, especially in the countryside. Last year, a cholera outbreak in northern Iraq killed 14 people.

So five years after invasion and occupation, Iraqis are dying from filthy water, which we haven't managed to provide yet. And the clueless Boy King wonders why they're not sufficiently grateful of our fine work blowing up their buildings and switching a Sunni strongman for a Shiite one. "The nerve of them!" he must think.

By all rights, this should be an issue in the campaign. We bombed a country that did not attack us, overthrew their leaders, and did so little for their infrastructure and political stability that the new regime is at an impasse and kids are dying of cholera. And this is the foreign policy John McCain wants to ape.

Of course, there are a lot of things that should be an issue in this campaign...

A New Reality

John McCain's floor speech on Iraq today was a return to the "we've turned the corner" lie that characterized the first 3 1/2 years in Iraq. He cobbled together a series of stats and omitted the more ominous ones to portray what he literally called "a new reality," where Gen. Petraeus is boldly moving forward with his counterinsurgency plan, making Baghdad and Iraq safe for democracy. He's decided we've turned around Iraq and that we just need a few more dollars and a few more good men to secure it completely.

This is absolutely absurd. This Green Lantern strategy of "if we will it, we can win" has gone on for too long and has produced next to nothing. We're putting more troops into the conflict, and yet we're winning. The surge has already been surged twice. If we're doing so well, why are we adding troops with each passing day?

Here's the new reality in Iraq: there isn't any clean water.

United Nations agencies working in Iraq warned on Thursday a chronic shortage of safe drinking water risks causing more child deaths and an outbreak of waterborne disease such as cholera during the summer.

There's no water. That's reality. This is a country that is largely desert and there's no water that's safe to drink.

Four years after the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, millions of Iraqi children still find that safe water is no easier to access, said a statement issued by leading U.N. aid agencies operating in Iraq.

The agencies, whose offices are based in Amman, issued the statement to mark World Water Day.

The United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) said shortages of drinking water threatened to push up diarrhoea rates, particularly among children. Diarrhoea is already the second highest cause of child illness and death in Iraq, it said.

"Latest reports suggest we are already seeing an increase in diarrhoea, even before the usual onset of the diarrhoea season in June," said Roger Wright, UNICEF representative in Iraq.

The reality has caused children to die because they get sick from drinking water. This is the new reality. The reality you cannot hope to ever see. The reality you cannot hope to admit because it would mean you have the lives of 3,200 US troops, but millions of children, on your consciences.

Efforts to repair Iraq's damaged water networks have been hampered by electricity shortages, attacks on technicians, infrastructure and engineering works and underinvestment in the water sector, the agencies said.

Iraq was still relying on U.N. support to provide essential water treatment chemicals with UNICEF alone providing 1,650 tonnes of chlorine last year, the statement said.

The suspension of water tankering services to tens of thousands of people in Baghdad, especially to displaced families and communities hosting them, increased the risk of cholera outbreaks, the agencies warned.

4 million Iraqis have either been killed, displaced, sickened, or never born due to living daily with war for over four years. That's the new reality. It's disgusting to suggest that there's any kind of surge to victory going on. It's a surge to the morgue.

When you live on the streets of Iraq like an average citizen, and realize that it's 110 and you won't be having anything safe to drink for the next week, you tell me about reality. You can look at facts and figures and numbers and body counts and twist them up into making a decision that you are succeeding. But you don't get to call that reality. You can call it statistics. You can call it trendlines. You'd be wrong. But to have the temerity to suggest that there's a new dawn, a new reality that nobody can see but Sen. McCain, is as irresponsible as the Administration was for years. It's amazing to see the same zombie lies pop up over and over again.

(UPDATE: Here are some of the lies of Huckleberry Graham in his "me too" speech on the floor: "This is the first congress ever to set a hard date to withdraw from a war" - um, not true, little thing called Kosovo - "It took 13 years to write our constitution" - no, it took a few months to write the Articles of Confederation, they didn't work and so it took a few months to write the Constitution, and by the way who's James Madison in Iraq? - "If you had the courage of your convictions, you would amend to stop funding by a date certain" - which is what the House did, and Huckleberry slandered that, so it's just a talking point)

"There will be no victory or defeat for the United States in Iraq. There is no military solution in Iraq. Iraq belongs to the 25 million people who live there." -Chuck Hagel, just now.

UPDATE: Here's that new reality for you, John, courtesy Michael Ware in Baghdad:

Honestly, Wolf, you'll barely last twenty minutes out there. I dont know what part of Neverland Senator McCain is talking about when he says we can go strolling in Baghdad.

Video at the link.