reality-based educator

...For the poppy growers - it's been a banner year for the opium harvest:

KABUL, Afghanistan, Sept. 2 — Afghanistan’s opium harvest this year has reached the highest levels ever recorded, showing an increase of almost 50 percent from last year, the executive director of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, Antonio Maria Costa, said Saturday in Kabul.

...

He said the increase in cultivation was significantly fueled by the resurgence of Taliban rebels in the south, the country’s prime opium growing region. As the insurgents have stepped up attacks, they have also encouraged and profited from the drug trade, promising protection to growers if they expanded their opium operations.

“This year’s harvest will be around 6,100 metric tons of opium — a staggering 92 percent of total world supply. It exceeds global consumption by 30 percent,” Mr. Costa said at a news briefing.

He said the harvest increased by 49 percent from the year before, and it drastically outpaced the previous record of 4,600 metric tons, set in 1999 while the Taliban governed the country. The area cultivated increased by 59 percent, with more than 400,000 acres planted with poppies in 2006 compared with less than 260,000 in 2005.

The administration claimed success in its war with the Taliban and pulled the majority of American troops and resources out of the country and sent them to Iraq. Now the Taliban controls the south, NATO troops are engaged in bloody battles with Taliban forces and taking casualties, poppy growers are enjoying a record harvest, and the Karzai government controls less and less of the country.

Sounds like another Bush success to me.

In the meanwhile over in that other Bush success story in Iraq:

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Sept. 4 — The bodies of 40 people, including 25 who were found blindfolded and shot at close range, were found in Baghdad today, an Interior Ministry official said, and a mass grave containing 18 bodies of people who appeared to have been executed in the 1980’s was discovered in the northern city of Kirkuk.

American military officials announced today that four soldiers and two marines have died since Sunday. All but one of the deaths were because of hostile fire. Two British soldiers were also killed today in a roadside explosion in Basra.

The violence occurred on a day when senior Iraqi government officials announced a plan to formally take over operational command of Iraq’s army from the United States next week. The handover has been held up for several weeks by disagreements among representatives of each government over the wording of the relationship between the two armies, a spokesman for the Iraqi prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, said today.

11 American military personnel have been killed in Iraq so far in the first four days of this month. More than 334 Iraqi civilians have been killed this week in Baghdad (most had been kidapped, tortured, hogtied and shot.) Iraqi casualties have grown by 50% in the last three months. A Pentagon report released on Friday said that Sunni/Shiite factional fighting has eclipsed the Sunni insurgency against U.S. forces and has spread outside of Baghdad to other parts of the country.

Sounds like another Bush success story to me.

Gee, I think that Rocky guy from Jefferson Parish who showed up at the White House to suck Bush's ass and tell him how great he's handled the Katrina disaster is right: Bush is such a great preznit that he deserves a third term!