January 11, 2007 by lonbud
The President, In The Library, With The Plan
Little more than one year ago, on November 30, 2005, the Bush administration unveiled to great fanfare a glossy, red, white, and blue publication entitled, National Strategy for Victory in Iraq. The president made a big speech to the midshipmen at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, MD, where he said, among other things,
“Coalition and Iraqi security forces are on the offensive against the enemy, cleaning out areas controlled by the terrorists and Saddam loyalists, leaving Iraqi forces to hold territory taken from the enemy, and following up with targeted reconstruction to help Iraqis rebuild their lives.”
Last night, in a prime-time speech before the nation, he confessed he’d been wrong.
Today, about 1000 dead U.S. soldiers and countless dead Iraqis later, the President is forced to admit, “The situation in Iraq is unacceptable to the American people — and it is unacceptable to me.”
While some cause for hope might be found in having the commander-in-chief on the same page with the rest of us, last night Mr. Bush revealed himself to be as out of touch with reality as ever, and gave every indication that “the situation” will get worse before it gets better.
The National Strategy of ’05 stressed “learning from our experience [and] adjusting our tactics to meet the challenges on the ground,” as well as deferring to military commanders to determine troop levels necessary to salvage a mission the president declared accomplished more than three years ago.
The totality of his experience leads the president to conclude an additional 21,500 troops will get the job done. The first of those are already on their way to Iraq.
Mr. Bush has also seen fit to replace a command structure in Iraq whose troop level determinations ran counter to his own. And while his most recent strategy for victory has characterized the increased commitment of U.S. fighting forces as a “temporary” measure, all indications are that Mr. Bush intends to escalate his war on terrorism to Iran and Syria.
In the waning months of his interminable presidency, Mr. Bush is gambling with the lives of American youth, with the treasure of the American people, on a hubristic fantasy that he has been chosen by God to rid the world of evil, to make it safe for freedom and the pursuit of wealth. He has chosen to ignore the overwhelming sentiment of public opinion, the advice of commanders in the field to whose judgment he just yesterday pledged fealty, and the considered opinion of a majority in congress as well as that of many of the members of his own party.
As a child I enjoyed immensely “Clue,” the board game in which a crime was assumed to have occurred and the challenge was to solve the whodunit mystery. Now I’m an adult, and the crime is no longer a game, the culprit no longer a mystery.
As of last night, it’s the president, in the library, with the plan.
Tam O’Tellico - January 11, 2007 @ 9:32 pm
Battle Fatigue
I made myself watch – it was not pretty. George Bush gave his long-awaited speech that was supposed to provide the answer that would untie the Gordian knot that is Iraq. He did not deliver that answer, but for the first time, he gave the impression that he at least understood the magnitude of the problem.
Gone was the cowboy swagger, and its place was a kind of deer-in-the headlights numbness that did little to inspire confidence. And though he finally hinted at error – what error or whose error was not addressed – nowhere in his speech was there anything approaching contrition. I was hoping against hope that at long last there might be some admission that he made a mistake of catastrophic proportions, that he would at long last level with the American people and admit what most of us already know: Iraq is lost.
The battle for Iraq is over save for the consequences that will surely fall this nation for an approach to the problem of Saddam that was – and is – at one and the same time unimaginably expensive while being fought on the cheap. That paradox is one for which Donald Rumsfeld, like Robert McNamara before him, will have to answer to history.
But another battle looms that has even more dire consequences – the battle for the United States. Now that the November elections have turned Congress over to the Democrats, the struggle will begin in earnest for who will rule this nation, and I don’t mean Republicans or Democrats.
The battle will determine whether we will be governed by the plodding compromises necessary in a system of three more or less balanced branches of government or by a would-be Caesar who promises to subdue our enemies and get the trains to run on time, neither of which this would-be Caesar has accomplished. One would suspect that the utter failure of this administration would make this a moot question, but the hard-liners in the Bush administration will fight Congress tooth and claw not only because they believe in the ideology of the Unitary President, but because some of them could end up in serious legal trouble if the truth comes out.
This is not the first battle in this war, and this one is eerily familiar to the last such battle, one very much alive in the memories of those of us who witnessed Viet Nam and Watergate first-hand. Ironically, not only are many of the disputes the same, but so are many of the characters, including Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, and now, Fred Fielding – Bush’s replacement for Harriet Miers as White House counsel. For those who may not recall, Fielding worked under John Dean during the Watergate scandal.
By reputation, Fielding is a shrewd but relatively honest Washington lawyer. But it’s certain Bush will be far more interested in his shrewdness than his honesty. With the Democrats in power, Bush will need someone who knows all the tricks of the trade to stonewall against their subpoena power. Expect to hear the phrase “executive privilege” bandied about freely over the next two years as Democrats demand some answers about faulty pre-war intelligence and no-bid contracts.
Given his many awful failures, one might think Bush would begin to err on the side of caution, but it is apparently not in his nature. But by pressing the issue, he will be pushing his luck. How will it end? At the moment, the Democrats are saying all the right things in regard to the I-word. They know all too well that the public is suffering battle fatigue after suffering the idiocy of the Clinton impeachment and the incompetency of the Bush presidency.
But if Bush invokes “executive privilege” and “national security” in an attempt to thwart the Democrats every move, he may leave them no choice. The same intransigence, paranoia and secrecy that brought down Nixon could do the same to Bush. All that’s lacking is some hard evidence.
If I were Fred Fielding, I’d make damned sure there were no tapes in the basement.
janfran - January 11, 2007 @ 9:34 pm
That’s a scary thought to leave us with…
Paul Burke - January 12, 2007 @ 6:34 am
Once again Tam nails it! I couldn’t watch – I think I had season two of Rescue Me on. In fact I haven’t watched anything this yutz has had to say since day one of his first campaign. He is such an obvious phony, it hurts to watch. Having been in broadcasting myself, his mangling of the language is too pathetic for me to endure. His blatant pursuit of individual wealth while hooking up his oil buddies is treason. That the same cast of characters that presided over the Kennedy assassination are still running the country is biblically horrible, and that they are doing it in the name of Jesus is a plague on all mankind. Gosh wasn’t Gerry Ford a great guy – he sat on the damn Warren Commission, so he’s just another sell out in my book.
Single bullet – thanks Gerry – from about thirty different directions – that’s what Kennedy got for wanting to end the war in Vietnam and axe the CIA. Why was the secret service waved off the back of the car – why was the driver waiting until the kill shot to speed away – why were the five deep crowds along both sides of the street prevented from lining the parade route on Dealey Plaza? This government is as horrible as we can imagine, and the job will never end as long as money and profit are the false idols of man. Until the collective enlightenment puts commerce and profit down a few notches and brings up “helping one another” as the top priority we will all struggle against injustice, poverty, hunger, war, pollution, disease, and that emptiness inside that gnaws away at everyone.
lonbud - January 13, 2007 @ 11:30 am
Paul, I take it you don’t believe it was the patsy, in the book depository, with the Mauser…
The Forces of Darkness gained a great victory that day in Dallas, but I can feel us coming soon into an era of Light, when it may dawn upon even those in positions of the highest privilege and the greatest power that the security and comfort of even one of us depends upon a promise of hope and opportunity for us all.
Tam O’Tellico - January 15, 2007 @ 1:39 pm
Oh, God! Please no more Kennedy assassination theories!
Why is so hard to believe that one psycho loser desperate for attention, an ex-marine with a sharpshooter rating, a mail-order rifle, AND a job at the book depository could take out a target in a slow-moving convertible in broad daylight?
Why is it easier to believe the alternative – that the CIA, LBJ, the Mafia, Castro, the Military-Industrial Complex and the Illuminati all conspired to take out JFK so they could make billions off the Viet Nam War — AND — concocted a scheme to have Jack Ruby take out Oswald — AND — the Warren Commission deliberately whitewashed its investigation — AND — not one of the conspirators every breathed a word about any of this to anyone in the last forty years.
Given that level of gullibillity, is it any wonder people voted for the fool who would be king?
Tam O’Tellico - January 15, 2007 @ 2:06 pm
Speaking of conspiracies …
At least Bush and his cronies are no longer trying to convince us that everything is hunky-dory in Iraq and that the Liberal Media is conspiring to deceive Americans, presumably because the Liberal Media is in cahoots with Terrorists and Insurgents.
What other possible motive could there be for deliberately deceiving us? I mean everyone knows the Liberal Media hates Bush so much they are willing to have us lose a war just to make him look bad.
Well, it the Ridiculous Right believes that, no wonder they blindly follow the childish ruminations of Rush and O’Reilly.
Anyone who wants to know the truth about the situation in Iraq has only to do what the lawyers do – follow the money. According to Parade Magazine (about as MOR a rag as exists) “former prime ministers, cabinet members and even an heir to the throne have left Iraq for the comfort of Britain.” Adnan Pachachi, Iyad Allawi and Ibrahim al-Jaafari – to name just a few – are all doing quite well, thank you. An Iraqi judge estimates that up to $2.3 billion was looted from the Iraqi treasury during the interim government period overseen by Paul Bremer.
According to Laurie Mylroie, an Iraq expert at the American Enterprise Institute (a right-wing economic think tank), “Individuals in the interim government used their 10 months in office to massively enrich themselves.”
Parade points out that it isn’t just the elite who are voting with their feet – at least 1.5 million Iraqis have left already and about 3,000 more leave each day.
Meanwhile, our President plans to solve these problems by sending more troops and more money.
lonbud - January 15, 2007 @ 11:16 pm
ahem.
the current situation was well-covered beforehand.
why debate remains as to the proper course of action is beyond me.
Tam O’Tellico - January 16, 2007 @ 8:44 am
Chomsky: “It is extremely unlikely that Saddam Hussein would use nuclear weapons, which is a recipe for instant suicide – except in a desperate reaction to an attack.”
Chomsky is a brilliant analyst, but he was a fool for trying to reason with unreasonable men – his cold logic was wasted on men too quick to attribute the motives of our enemies to ideology, perhaps because they are ideologues themselves. In their view, bad beliefs compel our enemies to operate against their own interests. Hmm – that certainly has a familiar ring.
It may be easy to dismiss Chomsky as a wild-eyed Leftist, but the same can’t be said of Winston Churchill who put the matter succinctly: “Jaw, jaw, jaw, not war, war, war.” But rather than “jaw, jaw, jaw”, Washington is again beating the drums of “war, war, war” – this time in regard to Iran.
At a recent Congressional hearing, James Woolsey went on and on about the mad mullahs subverting the will of ordinary Iraqis and deliberately marching that nation toward Armageddon. But how is that different from our own leader who is ignores the will of his people (and many of his military leaders) and proceeds with his egomaniacal fantasies?
Woolsey’s analysis sounded all familiar: Iraq and Germany, Islamists and Nazis, Commies and Viet Nam. But such comparisons are risky, just as it is rhetorical excess to compare Hitler and Bush – no matter how tempting. In the end, the real question is this: Are the mullahs more Hitler or Ho Chi Minh?
How can anyone truly know the answer to that question? But Woolsey and others have no doubt.
During the hearing, a Congressman from Samoa asked an obvious, if politically dangerous, question: Don’t Iranian leaders have every reason to be suspicious of us, too? Woolsey blithely skirted the question with an “us good, them evil” response.
It would be foolish to suggest that the mullahs are on the side of the angels, but it is fair to question the notion that they are all completely mad. In fact, history suggests that religious leaders in theocracies are often far more politicians than preachers and prophets. So it is probably safe to assume that at least some of Iran’s leaders are interested in maintaining their own lofty status – and in the continued existence of their nation.
Otherwise, the mullahs truly are insane. After all, we are the ones with the WMD, and we have clearly demonstrated we will use them when we deem it necessary. Even mild-mannered Jimmy Carter is supposed to have threatened to do exactly that during the hostage crisis. Does anyone doubt Bush would order the obliteration of Tehran?
Right now, the same people who brought us the Iraq War are doing their best to promote another against Iran. Right now, they are arguing that there is no point in talking, that negotiating with tyrants only encourages them. That may well be true, but it is also true that we stopped talking and invaded Iraq, and that has produced an awful outcome.
Is it possible that one reason we don’t want to talk is that the facts may not all be on our side?
Michael Herdegen - January 17, 2007 @ 5:36 pm
The UK, France, and Germany have been negotiating with Iran about Iran’s nuclear weapons programme for over three years now.
Is it your position that three years of talks aren’t enough, or is it that the UK, France, and Germany aren’t important enough nations for Iran to bother with ?
Either proposition is absurd, but I’m curious about which it is.
Tam O’Tellico - January 17, 2007 @ 9:41 pm
I thought I made my position pretty clear, but since Bush and his defenders seem to be having a hard time getting any messages these days, here we go again:
My position is that we are in no position to be threatening Iran while we have 140,000 American troops in harm’s way in Iraq. My position is that unless we are prepared to obliterate Iran with nuclear weapons, the only other course open to us at the moment is to do our best – not our least – to find a way to make it worth their while to not develop nuclear weapons. My position is that bluster and bullying makes that virtually impossible since it worsens their fears and makes their desire to possess nuclear weapons all the more logical from their point of view. My position is that regardless of whether or not the Iranians would like to defeat America, they are in no position to do so at the moment and exhausting all diplomatic avenues makes far more sense than acting like a frightened bully ourselves.
Now, you may argue that my position makes me just another liberal dreamer, save for the fact that my position happens to be that favored by most grown-up Conservatives. As usual, it it only Bush and his bully-boys who are engaging in adolescent fantasies about “cleaning up the playground”. And as always, they will let someone else do the fighting for them.
lonbud - January 18, 2007 @ 11:41 pm
Well said, Tam O’.
The insanity that passes today for our foreign — let alone domestic — policy is at complete odds with a logical assessment of the game board.
At root, the Iranians, and any other nation or loosely affiliated conglomeration of desperate characters you might care to identify, will know they face imminent obliteration, so soon as to be almost coincident with their very first use of whatever primitive nuclear capability they might secretly conceive in the next 5 to 50 million years.
So why is anyone afraid of the potential threat of THEIR being THAT insane?
Tam O’Tellico - January 19, 2007 @ 8:23 am
I suggest that anyone who fears the Mad Mullahs read the piece cited below for the ugly truth about what is going on with our own lunatic leader:
Bush and the Psychology of Incompetent Decisions
By John P. Briggs, MD, and J.P. Briggs II, PhD
(concluding paragraph)
Psychologically, President Bush has received support for so long because many have thought of him as “one of us.” Most of us feel inadequate in some way, and watching him, we can feel his inadequacies and sense his uncertainties, so we admire him for “pulling it off.” His model tells us, “If you act like you’re confident and competent, then you are.” We are the culture that values the power of positive thinking and seeks assertiveness training. We believe that the right attitude can sometimes be more important than brains or hard work. He’s bullied us, too. We don’t dare to confront the scale of his incompetent behavior, because then we would have to face what it means to have such an incompetent and psychologically disabled decision-maker as our president. It raises everyone’s uncertainty. And that is, in fact, happening now.
Meredith Charpantier - January 19, 2007 @ 10:44 am
Kindergarten teachers, all of us, recycling the lessons that we learned fresh from the womb, about playing fair, and sharing, and accepting that the universe is not our personal play thing.
NO DUH is my general response, fresh from the kindergarten playground as I am. No Duh that threatening a lunatic is not the safest negotiating tactic.
and No Duh that GW is the biggest baby in the bunch.
How come it has taken this long to reveal these glaringly obvious realities to half our nation.?
because they also failed to learn the basics in kndergarten. Who left them behind?
There is a lot of make up work to do. Here we go.
Michael Herdegen - January 20, 2007 @ 11:55 am
…exhausting all diplomatic avenues makes far more sense…
Yes, we’ve done that. The French foreign minister is so fed up with Iran that last year he suggested that we should nuke ’em.
So, now what ?
Talking failed, as it has with Kim Jong Il. What’s left in the ol’ “liberal dreamer” toolkit ?
lonbud - January 21, 2007 @ 8:53 am
The answers to this particular question are not to be found in tool-kits doled out on one side or the other of the liberal-conservative divide. The answers involve agreement that use of nuclear weapons is unacceptable.
The only point at which one can conclude “talking failed” is a point after which nuclear weapons have been used. It is thus inaccurate to say that “talking failed” with Kim Jong Il or, despite frustrations voiced by the French foreign minister, that talking has failed with Iran.
Many on the political right in this country bleated the same inaccurate assessment about exhausted avenues of diplomacy with regard to Iraq’s possession of weapons of mass destruction in the run-up to Mr. Bush’s misguided adventure in that now-ruined land. How difficult is it to avoid making the same mistake so close in time?
Tam O’Tellico - January 23, 2007 @ 9:29 pm
Bush’s Wager
George W. Bush is a gambler, a hip-shootin’ cowboy who’s not afraid of a fight – as long as someone else does the fighting. That’s why it was easy for him to bet his Presidency on remaking the Middle East in his image. Call it Bush’s Wager.
Now, like a reckless riverboat gambler, Bush wants to double-down on his bet and send another 21,000 under-equipped American troops into Iraq. That may make sense to Bush – disastrous as his presidency has been; success in Iraq may be his only hope of avoiding becoming viewed as the worst President in U.S. history.
Bush may have nothing to lose, but the rest of us – most especially the young men and women who toil in Bush’s fields of folly – have a great deal to lose. Suddenly Bush’s Wager seems so absurd, we can’t believe that this is really happening. How did we ever get involved in what sometimes seems like a grim fairy tale?
Once upon a time, French Philosopher Blaise Pascal offered up his famous – or infamous depending on your point of view – wager concerning faith-based decisions:
“God is – or He is not. Let us weigh the gain and the loss in wagering that God is. Let us estimate these two chances. If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing.”
On the face of it, Pascal’s Wager may seem not only perfectly logical, but as he asserts, perfectly harmless. But as other wise men have warned, if a thing seems too good to be true, it probably is. Take Pascal’s Wager – please!
Suppose instead that there is a God, and He is truly just. Would a just God reward someone for claiming to believe something simply to gain an undeserved advantage? And what punishment might such a God have in store for those who behaved so despicably?
So much for Pascal’s Wager – but what does that have do with Bush’s Wager? Both wagers begin with assumptions that seem perfectly logical, but draw conclusions not supported by thoughtful analysis.
During the buildup to the invasion of Iraq, the specter of WMD was tossed about all too freely. Those who dared to question whether Saddam Hussein actually possessed such weapons were dismissed with a Pascalian, rascalian sniff.
“What if you’re wrong about that? What proof do you need – a mushroom cloud over one of our cities?” (See Fox’s 24 for continuing promotion of this scare tactic).
Like the assumption of cheering Iraqis greeting us with flowers or that the war would pay for itself, the administration’s fallacious assumptions about WMD were never questioned by most of the press or most of the public. Why not? Because most people fell victim to the same fallacy as that found in Pascal’s Wager – a faulty assumption.
To most, it seemed perfectly logical and rational to operate on the assumption that it was better to wage war and be wrong than to wait and be wrong. But such logic is no more than the old saw “Better to be safe than sorry”. As with any aphorism, it’s true as far as it goes – it just doesn’t go very far before it collides with another aphorism going in the opposite direction. “Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.”
Fools rushed into Iraq without proper preparation and with no real plan for getting out. That is a conclusion based on hindsight for much of America, but there were some like much-maligned Ambassador Joseph Wilson who had foresight as well.
“The underlying objective, as I see it… really has little to do with terrorism, because everybody knows that a war to invade and conquer and occupy Iraq is going to spawn a new generation of terrorists. So you look at what’s underpinning this, and you go back and you take a look at who’s been influencing the process. And it’s been those who really believe that our objective must be far grander, and that is to redraw the political map of the Middle East.” CNN interview, March 2, 2003
Why did people like Joe Wilson get it right when so many got it so wrong? Because they avoided aphorisms and sought answers. They asked tough questions.
Where is the hard evidence, not supposition, that Saddam possesses such weapons? Even if he does, how real and imminent is the threat? What does this President know that no one else in four thousand years has known that would bring lasting peace in Babylon?
Certainly, these were very difficult questions, and at that moment some may have been unanswerable. But as experience has proven once again, the pursuit of answers is usually preferable to the pursuit of a war based on poorly examined assumptions.
But instead of thoroughly examining assumptions and addressing tough questions, this administration chose to belligerently berate those who disagreed. People like Wilson were called “soft”. But as anyone from Galileo to Gore will attest, you can’t be soft and voice an unpopular opinion or stand up for an inconvenient truth.
In this case, it was soft logic, soft thinking, and soft living that led those too lazy or too pig-headed or too vain or too convinced of their connectedness to the Almighty to duck the tough questions and opt for soft answers passing as a hard truth. They chose a soft truth like that of Pascal’s Wager, like the illusion that we can claim a connection to God without walking the arduous path of enlightenment. The hard truth requires dedication, precision – and reason.
The soft truth leads men to be ruled by passion, not reason. Without reason, men fall victim to simple-minded sloganeering. Without reason, men go too easily to war. Without reason, much of the world has become mere chips thrown into the pot to cover Bush’s Wager.