Remember That Story About the $1.6 Trillion?

It's true: I'm a lying sack of shit

Breathless accounts from Tuesday went worldwide with this nonsense about "hidden" costs for the Iraq war hitting $1.6 trillion and were dutifully picked up everywhere.

Well, never mind.

Somehow, I doubt the retraction will get nearly as much coverage.

Republican lawmakers have demanded that Democrats retract a report which says the US wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are costing double what was thought.

Senator Sam Brownback and Congressman Jim Saxton said the study had "many factual errors" and should not stand.

They are the senior Republicans on the Joint Economic Committee (JEC), whose Democratic members wrote the report.

It said "hidden costs" had pushed the total to about $1.5 trillion - nearly twice the requested $804bn (£402bn).

Higher oil prices, the cost of care for wounded veterans and the economic cost of pulling reservists from their jobs were taken into account in reaching the new total, the report said.

Some analysts questioned some of the figures, saying they were speculative.

In a statement, Mr Brownback and Mr Saxton said a number of "obvious errors" had been "quietly corrected" in the online version of the report without its authors alerting the press or public.

"In the rush to score political points, apparently no-one bothered to fact-check the report," the lawmakers said.

"When erroneous information is injected into the public domain, those responsible are obligated to publicly withdraw this information."

Mr Brownback and Mr Saxton said that "at least 24 multibillion dollar mistakes" had been amended on the web version of the report by Wednesday.

The White House had already dismissed the report as politically motivated.

White House press secretary Dana Perino said on Tuesday the JEC was "known for being partisan and political" and that Republican members had not been consulted.

Of course, actual facts do nothing to dissuade the unctuous Charles Schumer.

Democratic Senator Charles Schumer, chairman of the JEC, said: "What this report makes crystal clear is that the cost to our country in lives lost and dollars spent is tragically unacceptable."

Forget the facts, we have a soundbite to deliver.

I expect such perfidy from a lowlife scumbag like Schumer. Until the rest of the media outlets who reported this also retract and correct the story, I'll view them in the same vein.

Weapons of Mass Influence

Today being the 14th anniversary of the first World Trade Center attack, it's sobering to see the inroads Al Qaeda has made, especially when it comes to influencing popular opinon. New Jersey Republican Congressman Jim Saxton discusses how they've accomplished this.

Yes, it is true: House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and many other Western decisionmakers and political leaders have been influenced about Iraq. This has been done intentionally through a brand of conflict called "fourth generation" warfare.

The al-Qaeda led coalition recognized from the start they had no hope of defeating us on the conventional battlefield. All they had to do was to look at the results of the first Iraq war in 1991 or the short conventional war in Iraq in 2003.

The al Qaeda-led coalition had to ask itself this: how can we, a relatively weak conventional military force, outgunned and outmanned by a technologically superior giant, hope to win a military and political victory in Iraq? Their answer: by making it so costly in terms of bad news, too many dollars, and loss of life that their superior enemy, the United States, would decide the toll was too high and would leave.

Retired Marine Col. Tom Hammes best describes this in his book "The Sling and the Stone": "Fourth generation warfare uses all available networks -- political, economic, social and military -- to convince the enemies' political decisionmakers that their strategic goals are either unachievable or too costly for the perceived benefit."

In the case of Iraq, the al Qaeda-led coalition has used all these networks and added one more: the Western media. Each morning when the American people awake, including Mrs. Pelosi, the news comes in from Iraq. Al Qaeda has taken care that each event in Iraq -- be it political, economic, social and/or military -- is deliberately created for the purpose of generating "bad news." Let me explain how.

Read it all.

UPDATE: A Blog For All has more on the Battle for Ground Zero and Michelle Malkin notes the forgotten anniversary, February 26, 1993.