While the wisest ponder an exit strategy — as you’ll learn below through a powerful MSM newspaper editorial — we find that taking a sampling of the latest news about Iraq yields, as it does every day, unendingly worrisome, saddening and cruelly maddening reports:
- there’s word that yet another marine killed …
- in today’s WaPo, we find out that even for a sergeant dubbed “Big Daddy,” death was “quick and capricious” …
- and, from Professor Juan Cole we learn that Blair could have delayed the beginning of war. Cole analyzes the statements of Sir Christopher Meyer, the former British ambassador to the U.S.
Cole’s Tidbits: Irving Lewis Libby, Cheney’s then chief of staff, told Meyer that Britain is “the only ally that matters.” This is Neocon doctrine, which holds that the US, Britain, and Turkey are the only permanent partners in war, whereas other allies can be brought in or cycled out at will. Berlusconi must feel badly used. (And the Turks rather let Libby down . . . )
Karl Rove … told Meyer that an Iraq War could be delayed until September of 2003, and that the delay would have no impact on the presidential campaign. … (Emphases mine.)
Continued below:
And the news is infuriating in its exposure of greed and abuse …
The LA Times has a shocker: “Ziad Cattan was a Polish Iraqi used-car dealer with no weapons-dealing experience until U.S. authorities turned him into one of the most powerful men in Iraq … chief of procurement for the Defense Ministry, responsible for equipping the fledgling Iraqi army. As U.S. advisors looked on, Cattan embarked on a massive spending spree, paying hundreds of millions of dollars in Iraqi funds for secret, no-bid contracts, …”
Pam’s House Blend blog calls Ziad Cattan “The ‘Brownie’ of Iraq military procurement.”
Perspective and leadership are needed. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer does it again. Their editorial pages have long been a moral compass for me:
Pressure is growing on the Bush administration to enunciate a detailed strategy for the U.S. military occupation of Iraq, particularly about how it might end.
It’s been little noted in the U.S. media, but the U.N. mandate that provided President Bush the diplomatic imprimatur for using military force in Iraq is due to expire. As reported in The Financial Times on Friday, Resolution 1546 is set to expire after the December elections in Iraq. The president has, of course, not always shown himself willing to wait for international sanction, but his Iraq adventure would be diplomatically complicated by the failure of the U.S.-backed resolution to extend the U.N. mandate for another year.
A resolution with bipartisan support in the U.S. House, meanwhile, would demand that Bush at least lay out a road map, if not a timetable, for what the war in Iraq should accomplish and when.
It’s an example of Congress’ attempt to regenerate a spine. The indictment of Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff and the continuing investigation into the administration’s prewar justifications for the invasion have given members of Congress who voted for the war reason to question whether they were bamboozled.
And the slog in Iraq plays a big role in the president’s plummeting approval ratings, with more than twice as many people strongly disapproving of Bush’s performance than strongly approving.
Painful as it may be for some, this harsh examination of our foreign policy — and of ourselves — is healthy and long overdue.
-from the SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER EDITORIAL BOARD, via Howie in Seattle’s blog
P.S. Democracy for America has created a new service:
On a single page, you can write your members of Congress as well as your local daily newspaper.
Hooray for the P-I! And thanks for the one-stop link to congresscritters and local papers. I’ll use it. Am in process of composing a magnum opus to Olympia Snowe, who is on the Senate Intel Committee, asking her why the hell she is allowing Pat Roberts to stomp all over the process.
Whenever I hear his name, my mind throws up (hah!) the picture of Pat Robertson conflated with Patrick Buchanan. Urg.
When I first clicked on that DofA link, I was confused .. a huge pop-up came up. But, when I closed that, there was the DofA page with the handy form for letters. It’s a great idea.
Susan, thanks for this. Congress is seeking a timetable, Hell must have finally frozen over.
Isn’t that something. And the word “bipartisan” is mind-boggling…. I haven’t looked it up yet. Has anyone else?
From the WaPo story I linked but didn’t have space to quote:
X-posted at Daily Kos.
Death was capricious. The epitaph of war.
The Bush Administration had to invade when it did. The UN inspectors were finding nothing. This fact would have filtered through the drumbeat of propaganda and would have undermined their whole justification for invading Iraq.
Bush Administrations epitaph “American global hegemony killed at Iraq Kuwait border March 20, 2003”.
Did any of you run into this Massey at Cindy’s Crawford protest? Or elsewhere?
Lies about atrocities don’t help.
The article says that he stories are “demonstrably false”, but aside from other people telling stories, I don’t see any “demonstration” that he lied….the article says that there is no “evidence” that any of the things that he says happened, but they sure didn’t convince me with any evidence that they DIDN’T either.
Did you hear him speak in Crawford, Brinnainne?
I am willing to entertain the idea that he is one very messed up Marine who saw things and/or did things that have him lashing out in all directions and confused about what happened where, when and who. Maybe he IS even deliberately lying — not for me to say. All I was saying was that in that article, they did little to convince me that the things he said he saw never happened at all….
Really, it doesn’t matter any more. Who is telling the truth and who is lying is impossible for me to tell from here — I don’t trust any of the conduits of information to present any kind of an honest picture of what is happening in Iraq — all I know is that I look at the pictures that RubDMC and others post and am sickened to the core.
Yup. I’m with you, brinnainne.
And as Jimmy Carter said last night on booktv.org, we have at least 25,000-30,000 dead Iraqs and over 2,000 dead soldiers + roughly 13,000 wounded — and all that to get rid of one despot?
The down side is that people will read that story today and could be influenced to question other substantiated claims of abuse and torture and murder. So it goes, eh?
60 minutes did a piece on the Airport Highway, portraying our legal occupattion and the brave American fighting men and women defending the freedom of ordinary Iraqazoid citizens to use that highway so they can do whatever Iraqazoid people do to fullfill their sub-human needs.
The interviewer looked brand new. The new look of 60 minutes was unprofessional. She looked like a cross between Jiminy Glick and Ali G. Really I mean that. It was awful.
What’s going on at 60 minutes?
Oh right. She used to be on “60 Minutes II.” It was painfully obvious that she was brought in because they think she’s a “babe.” And I don’t know what that accent is, but the way she speaks it is annoying.
People keep asking Bush to present “a plan for getting out of (or winning in) Iraq. He can’t do it. It is structurally impossible for this White House to design such a plan, let alone successfully implement it and hold to it.
As has been said on numerous occasions, this White House has no policy-making apparatus. Everything they do is politics, which means gearing to win the next election.
That is why they fill administration jobs with political hacks instead of competent administrators. They don’t recognize what administration is, let alone know how to do it. Even if they announced a plan, they have no idea how to get the plan out to the people who should implement it, nor do they know how to control for results. You can’t implement and control a policy (a plan) with incompetent political hacks to work with.
That is why they appoint and promote political hacks instead of effective administrators. Like Bush, they have no interest in or knowledge of government administration.
Instead they depend on sending out “the right people” to accomplish any job. Personal trust, not administrative competence, is their priority. They don’t know how to direct and control an administrative mechanism, but they have Rove who knows how to win elections.
This is the difference between a feudal family-type organization and a modern bureaucratic administration (and please ignore the pejorative aspects the term “bureaucratic” has taken on – Bureaucracy is the only way to operate a large organization, private or government.)
Bush will never announce a plan for Iraq. He can’t formulate one that he believes he can live up to. That is a good assessment, since The administration is filled at the top with people who have a horror of “bureaucracy” and thus cannot operate an administrative organization and make it work. Thus, any plan they presented would be an off-the-cuff set of guesses strung together and have little connection to reality. Instead they will continue to offer political sound-bites as a substitute for a plan.
The Bush song and dance for Iraq is beginning to look and sound much like the tactics they tried in the Social Security bamboozlepalooza. First they announce a Noble (but shifting) Goal. Then they attack any attempt to pin them down as unworkable or unAmerican. The next step is to blame the Other Side for not having any ideas. They have no plan, and trying to run a government engine on 100% ideology is pretty thin fuel.
Exactly right. All flash, no substance.
And worse, they neither recognize nor want substance.