On June 28, President Bush gave a speech where he talked about the difference between Iraq's Anbar province in the last quarter of 2006, and Anbar today :
Last September, Anbar was all over the news. It was held up as an example of America's failure in Iraq. The papers cited a leaked intelligence report that was pessimistic about our prospects there. One columnist summed it up this way: "The war is over in Anbar province, and the United States lost."That's not Bush's summary of a columnist's story or comment. It's published on the White House site as a direct quote, with no source. We've read before that Bush has used quotes claimed to be from "a journalist" or "one writer commented" and that most of them have been complete fiction. The rule is when Bush is trying to spin the situation on the ground in Iraq, and he uses the anonymous journalist, or columnist, to make his point, it's probably fake.
This time we decided to chase down a source for that quote, being the most recent of its kind.
We've used Google, Yahoo, Lexis Nexis and a number of other search engines to find this quote, or even a variation of it. We even tried translating it into a few other languages to see if that would help track down the source.
No dice.
Unless the statement was made in some obscure Iraqi newspaper that doesn't get picked up by Middle East and Iraqi news monitoring websites, a Bush speech writer, or Bush himself, made the quote up.
Why make it up something like that? To try and prove that the media has been wrong about progress in Iraq in the past and continues to be wrong.
More propaganda for the masses.
