President Bush Taken Out of Context

By now you've probably heard or read about President Bush saying in regards to Iraq, "We're not winning, we're not losing". That quote has been spun by the MSM into almost a declaration of defeat. What gets left out though is the fact that Bush prefaced that comment with something like, "I agree with General Pace's view."

Assuming that General Pace's view is similar to the man he worked most closely with - Donald Rumsfeld - let me quote from Rumsfeld's final Pentagon "Town Hall":

I read the other day somebody was comparing the length of time we've been in Iraq to the length of World War II totally ignoring the period after World War II, where the German government didn't even have a government I don't think until 1949, and the -- trying to compare what we're in today -- I mean, just take Iraq or Afghanistan. The military can't lose. They can't lose a battle let alone a war over there, but they also can't win because it is not a conventional conflict. There isn't an army, a navy or an air force to go defeat. It takes political and economic activity, and you need that three- legged stool for success to be achieved. And that takes patience, and we have to understand that as a society, as a people and not be impatient.

I mean, I -- and I'll tell you that people over there in uniform get it. They really do. I was in Walter Reed the other day, and a fellow just come in with multiple wounds, and he was on his back and he had a tube in his nose. And he looked up and he said, "If only the American people will give us the time, we can do this. We're getting it done." And it's a fact it will take patience, and it will take understanding. And yet it takes that sense of urgency on the part of the people here, as we know, because we have such an important responsibility.

Emphasis added.

You can see that a full context gives a completely different perspective and I must believe that if I knew the context implied then the writer for the Washington Post must have also and that their defeatist slant was intentional.