{"id":8726,"date":"2006-10-11T13:36:45","date_gmt":"2006-10-11T17:36:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/archives\/8726.html"},"modified":"2006-10-11T13:36:45","modified_gmt":"2006-10-11T17:36:45","slug":"iraqis-are-willing-to-tolerate-violence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/iraqis-are-willing-to-tolerate-violence\/","title":{"rendered":"Iraqis are willing to ‘tolerate’ violence?"},"content":{"rendered":"

I can appreciate that word-choice hasn’t always been the president’s strong point, but this one<\/a> is even more embarrassing than most.<\/p>\n

SUZANNE MALVEAUX, CNN: Thank you, Mr. President. Back on Iraq, a group of American and Iraqi health officials today released a report saying that 655,000 Iraqis have died since the Iraq war. That figure is 20 times the figure that you cited in December at 30,000. Do you care to amend or update your figure and do you consider this a credible report?<\/p>\n

PRESIDENT BUSH: No, I don\u2019t consider it a credible report, neither does General Casey and neither do Iraqi officials. I do know that a lot of innocent people have died and it troubles me and grieves me. And I applaud the Iraqis for their courage in the face of violence. I am, you know, amazed that this is a society which so wants to be free that they\u2019re willing to \u2014 you know, that there\u2019s a level of violence that they tolerate.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The reliability of the Johns Hopkins report notwithstanding, there’s a “level of violence” Iraqis are willing to “tolerate”? Since when?<\/p>\n

Iraqis are now more willing to put up with the brutal violence that surrounds them than anyone else; they just aren’t in a position to stop it. Indeed, as Amanda noted<\/a>, nearly a million Iraqis who couldn’t “tolerate” the violence have already fled to surrounding countries in the Middle East. For that matter, a clear majority of those who remain would feel safer if we weren’t there<\/a>.<\/p>\n

If the president sincerely believes that there are millions of Iraqi civilians willing to “tolerate” the bloodshed that surrounds them, he’s in deeper denial than I thought.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I can appreciate that word-choice hasn’t always been the president’s strong point, but this one is even more embarrassing than most. SUZANNE MALVEAUX, CNN: Thank you, Mr. President. Back on Iraq, a group of American and Iraqi health officials today released a report saying that 655,000 Iraqis have died since the Iraq war. That figure […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8726","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8726","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8726"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8726\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8726"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8726"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8726"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}