Earlier today on Countdown, Russ Feingold explained one of the various reasons the Iraq Study Group is such a very stupid joke (see the video at C&R):
The fact is this commission was composed apparently entirely of people who did not have the judgment to oppose this Iraq war in the first place, and did not have the judgment to realize it was not a wise move in the fight against terrorism. So that’s who is doing this report. Then I looked at the list of who testified before them. There is virtually no one who opposed the war in the first place. Virtually no one who has been really calling for a different strategy that goes for a global approach to the war on terrorism. So this is really a Washington inside job and it shows not in the description of what’s happened – that’s fairly accurate – but it shows in the recommendations. It’s been called a classic Washington compromise that does not do the job of extricating us from Iraq in a way that we can deal with the issues in Southeast Asia, in Afghanistan, and in Somalia which are every bit as important as what is happening in Iraq. This report does not do the job and it’s because it was not composed of a real representative group of Americans who believe what the American people showed in the election, which is that it’s time for us to have a timetable to bring the troops out of Iraq.
In weak moments, one does begin to wonder exactly how horribly fucking wrong a person has to have been about the most grievous foreign policy failure in modern history in order not to be taken seriously about that very same failure. Why aren’t they just laughed right off the stage? Not that it matters, of course. So long as Bush is our president, nothing but the magnitude of the chaos and the number of dead is going to change.
