On a day where Republican Senators such as our almost-President McCain have made the rounds of talk shows doing their level best to undermine the July 2011 withdrawal deadline from Afghanistan, Fox News wants you to know that they think we should still be moving full steam ahead in Iraq.

Vice President Joe Biden visited Iraq today and pressed Iraqi leadership to push toward shoring up their government as the US troop withdrawal continues on schedule from that country.

For some in Iraq and in the US, Iraqi violence and instability is seen as a sign that the US should not withdraw its presence. The fear is that sectarian violence will overwhelm Iraq's wobbly democracy. It's not entirely without foundation; however, sectarian violence has been a part of Iraqi history before the US inserted itself and it will be again, with or without a US military presence.

This is clearly not what Fox News wishes to convey to its readers and viewers. While Vice President Biden was in Iraq, several mortars were fired inside Baghdad's green zone. The green zone includes the US Embassy, the Iraqi parliament and the Iraqi Prime Minister's offices. It is hardly unusual for mortars to be fired there, but look at how it was reported by Fox News:

Rockets were fired at the U.S. embassy in Baghdad while Vice President Biden visits Iraq.

The rockets were fired at the embassy, located inside the International Zone.

Vice President Biden is currently in the country to meet with U.S. troops and talk to Iraqi political leaders.

It isn't until the fourth paragraph (below the fold) that they get to the truth of the matter:

"According to Embassy Public Affairs there was a small explosion in the International Zone," a U.S. Embassy spokesperson said. "The incident is being investigated. There were no injuries or property damage."

I'm sure it will come as no surprise that Fox News distorted the story to make it sound as though those mortars were specifically fired at the US Embassy while our Vice President and his wife were there. It is only one example of many and points to a larger and far more orchestrated effort to use the press for the express purpose of stoking support to continue a war we never should have started in the first place.

One of the more interesting paragraphs in the Fox article mentions 2 unnamed soldiers whose statement (as reported) leave a distinct impression those rounds fell inside embassy walls:

Two soldiers inside the compound reported there was an impact from the incoming fire.

Are you pissed off yet? Worried? Concerned for the safety of our Vice President and angry about mortar rounds falling on protected diplomatic property?

Don't be. It's a carefully worded non-statement. Here's what it says, if anyone takes the time to actually read it: Two soldiers felt an impact from mortar fire in the area but not in the embassy.

Until we are actually out of there (and out of Afghanistan) there will be two recurrent themes which the press will play for all they're worth, regardless of whether they are considered "liberal" or "conservative".

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I know I'm going to miss the Green Zone. Ah, good times! Just think back to when Paul Bremer and the rest of the hapless Republican incompetents first attempted to impose their neocon and libertarian fantasies onto Iraq's economic and social system:

BAGHDAD, Dec. 31 -- The walls of the majestic Republican Palace in Baghdad's Green Zone have been stripped bare. The vaults that secured American cash and classified documents are gone, and the cement blast walls that protected the front entrance were taken down this week. The U.S. military dining facility inside what was once the American Embassy served its last meal New Year's Eve.

"This is the end of the world as we know it," said Sgt. 1st Class Patrick McDonald, 47, who co-authored a guide to historic sites in the Green Zone. "It's not like everyone is shredding documents and fleeing Saigon. But we are stepping away from a building."

Saddam Hussein had the palace compound's main building decorated with giant busts of himself to demonstrate his hold over Iraq. After the 2003 U.S.-led invasion, the palace came to symbolize the American role in the country, first as the headquarters of the U.S. occupation authority and later the U.S. Embassy. American civilians and troops held "salsa night" dances around the pool behind the palace before retiring to trailers sheathed in sandbags.

When the clock struck midnight on Wednesday, the U.S. returned the palace to the Iraqi government and relinquished formal control over the Green Zone, a heavily fortified six-square-mile enclave on the Tigris River where key U.S. and Iraqi bureaucracies are situated.

The handover is a sign of the shrinking footprint and influence of the United States in a country where it has lost thousands of lives and spent billions of dollars. For many Iraqis, the handover represents a significant step forward in their gradual reassertion of dominion over their own affairs.

"On January 1, we are going to control this," Adnan Karim, 22, an Iraqi soldier manning a checkpoint at one of the entrances to the Green Zone, said, beaming. "The U.S. will be here just as observers. It's a matter of pride."

10 days ago, the Obama transition team notified about 90 of the Pentagon's 250 Bush political appointees that their services would no longer be needed after Inauguration Day. But despite DoD spokesman Geoff Morrell's declaration that holdover Republican Defense Secretary Robert Gates was "absolutely satisfied" with way the transition was being handled, one loyal Bushie at the Pentagon was anything but. Jim O'Beirne - the same Jim O'Beirne who famously populated the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad with Republican campaign hacks and Bush bath-water drinkers - is crying foul.

On Tuesday, O'Beirne emailed the Bush loyalists who had learned of their looming dismissals from Scott Gration, a senior official on Obama’s transition team. In his seething missive, O'Beirne, the outgoing special assistant to the secretary of defense for White House liaisons, accused Team Obama of playing politics. As The Hill reported:

In the email, O'Beirne tried to assure the soon-to-be displaced employees that the decisions were based on "policy change in the Obama administration" and not based on performance.

However, he said, if employees "harbor residual doubts" then they can "content yourself with the likelihood that it was your outstanding performance as a Bush appointee that drew the opposition's attention to you."

"In that regard, you may take justifiable satisfaction that you were among the first to be chosen," O'Beirne wrote.

Of course, when it comes to evaluating the qualifications of Bush appointees, Jim O'Beirne knows best.

As Rajiv Chandrasekaran detailed in his shocking 2006 account of the bungled American occupation of Iraq (Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone), O'Beirne was the gatekeeper on personnel assigned to Baghdad. And to be sure, the GOP loyalist and husband of crypto-conservative columnist Kate O'Beirne used the crudest of political litmus tests.

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I get to talk to John Amato multiple times a day, but it's easy for me to forget no matter how familiar and frequent that voice is in my ear, most other C&Lers don't know what John looks or sounds like. But luckily for all you curious C&Lers out there, Jason Linkins, HuffPo's roving reporter at the DNC, caught up with John in Denver and asked him his take on Maliki's insistence that the newly negotiated withdrawal of US troops from Iraq is a "real" withdrawal:

Iraq and the United States have agreed that all U.S. troops will leave by the end of 2011, Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki said on Monday, but Washington said no final deal had been reached.

"There is an agreement actually reached, reached between the two parties on a fixed date, which is the end of 2011, to end any foreign presence on Iraqi soil," Maliki said in a speech to tribal leaders in Baghdad's heavily fortified Green Zone.

"An open time limit is not acceptable in any security deal that governs the presence of the international forces," he said.

Maliki's remarks were the most explicit statement yet that the increasingly assertive Iraqi government expects the U.S. presence to end in three years as part of a deal between Washington and Baghdad to allow them to stay beyond this year.

Leave it to a wingnut Republican to post a video from inside the green zone after an attack. I would think that's a no-no, but I'm not a Republican in Congress.

The Pentagon told a North Carolina lawmaker Tuesday that he couldn’t re-air a video he'd shot in Baghdad after accusations surfaced that he breached operational security in detailing enemy rocket attacks. Rep. Patrick McHenry, a Republican, traveled to Iraq with other lawmakers for the first time on March 22. The video was the second incident stemming from that trip that has drawn unwanted attention to McHenry.

I wonder if he had on his lapel pin? Here's a golden oldie?

(posted on January 11th, 2007)

Barney came down on McHenry for breaking the rules and trying to implement an amendment. It's a new dawn in the House and the Republicans will not like it all that much…

Download | Play Download | Play (h/t Mark)

He cracked me up when he said his past behavior was not relevant…Hilarious.

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I can't even watch this gibberish anymore. I started editing down the clip to find the most ridiculous statements Bush made on the war, but it's all ridiculous.

Here's the speech. Al-Qaeda is everywhere, but we're winning. Blah, blah, blah...

dday:

As if on cue, news came out that two Americans had been killed in rocket attacks inside the Green Zone, the city of Baghdad is under a weekend curfew, per MSNBC all Green Zone personnel has been told to stay inside fortified areas, and the Iraqi Army may have "faltered" in Basra...

  A team of FBI agents is headed to Baghdad to oversee a murder investigation involving Blackwater security. While they’re there, the agents will be protected by … Blackwater security.

When a team of FBI agents lands in Baghdad this week to probe Blackwater security contractors for murder, it will be protected by bodyguards from the very same firm, the Daily News has learned.

Half a dozen FBI criminal investigators based in Washington are scheduled to travel to Iraq to gather evidence and interview witnesses about a Sept. 16 shooting spree that left at least 11 Iraqi civilians dead.

The agents plan to interview witnesses within the relative safety of the fortified Green Zone, but they will be transported outside the compound by Blackwater armored convoys, a source briefed on the FBI mission said.

"What happens when the FBI team decides to go visit the crime scene? Blackwater is going to have to take them there," the senior U.S. official told The News.

What could possibly go wrong?

Thank the higher being of your choice for journalists like Lara Logan. While Katie Couric stays in the Green Zone and with heavily guarded escorts through a security-cleared market, Logan goes in and slogs through bio-hazardous waste and shows us exactly how much "success" our tax dollars have bought in Afghanistan.

Download | play Download | play ... (h/t David for video)

I so wish I was just being snarky. Atrios found this from the Charlie Rose Show:

I am so horrified by this macho over-compensation manifesting itself as foreign policy that I must again ask, when you say something so heinous, so egregious, so over-the-top offensive, why in the HELL are you allowed a continued place on the national platform?

I think that Tom "F.U." Friedman and the NYTimes public editor deserve to have you ask them that question, don't you? Otherwise, I'm thinking that maybe we should take up a collection to send Tom to Basra (no Kevlar vest in the Green Zone, guarded by 100 troops and Blackhawk helicopters for him) and let him go door to door and see how the Iraqis left would respond.

Burning hot hits  from The Heretik today (plus a few misses):

Time, time, time, look what's become of me . . . . out of time (and all out of Friedmans) in Iraq. What time is last call at The Green Zone Bar and Grille?

Too Little, Too Late, Sad Story du Jour: is anybody buying what the sellout Colin Powell is now offering?  Plus Dick du Jour.

Josef Conrad goes to Washington: "The heart of darkness is the president," the person said. "Nobody knows what he thinks, even the people who work for him."

How green was my concert?  Take the pledge.  Flat Earth blues. Sandman.

Bedtime stories: Will the nightmare ever end? Plus the story of Oedipus Dix? And spy vs spy? How about the spy who billed me? What happens when the children wake up before the rest of us?  Did somebody say impeachment?  What's it all about, Arlen ?

Send hot links to The Heretik at joe.ivory.mattingly AT gmail DOT com.