Bob Woodward appeared on 60 Minutes last night to pimp his new book, The War Within: A Secret White House History 2006-2008. Woodward explained the president’s lack of understanding about what he unleashed on Iraqi society.
WOODWARD: He has a meeting at the Pentagon with a bunch of experts and he just said, ‘I don’t understand that the Iraqis are not appreciative of what we’ve done for them,’ namely liberating them.
PELLEY: But tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis have been killed in the invasion and through the occupation. He didn’t understand why they might be a little ungrateful about what had occurred to them?
WOODWARD: His beacon is liberation. He thinks we’ve done this magnificent thing for them. I think he still holds to that position.
An order of magnitude more than ‘tens of thousands’ of innocent Iraqis have lost their lives in Iraq and several million have become refugees.
Ironically, it was Senate Intelligence Committee chairman Senator Pat Roberts (R-KS) who had a ready explanation for why the Iraqis are less than impressed with their liberation.
Sen. Pat Roberts on Thursday opened up confirmation hearings for CIA director nominee Gen. Michael Hayden, and, in doing so, made remarks that immediately raced through the blogosphere.
The Gulf Times reports: “Committee Chairman Pat Roberts, a Kansas Republican, gave a strong defence of the administration’s programme to eavesdrop on international telephone calls of suspected terrorists without court approval. He said this and other programmes needed to remain secret to be effective.
“’I am a strong supporter of the First Amendment, the Fourth Amendment and civil liberties. But you have no civil liberties if you are dead,’ Roberts said.”
At the time, Sen. Roberts’ comment was compared unfavorably with Benjamin Franklin’s quip, “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.” And, in this comparison, Ben Franklin is still the man with more wisdom, courage, and patriotism. But it’s astonishing that the Republicans could turn out such a talking point in favor of unconstitutional violations of our liberty at the same time that they are confounded by the same logic in Iraq.
It’s the very fact that the people will support the curtailment of their rights during a time of crisis that made it necessary to enshrine certain of those rights as inviolate in the Constitution. Think about it. The Ninth Amendment states: “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.” We created the Bill of Rights to address just those sort of rights most likely to be legislated out of existence in a time of national crisis. The Ninth Amendment was necessary to prevent people from arguing that any rights that did not fall into that special category were not still rights retained by the people.
It’s almost a cliche to say that you can’t bring liberty to people at the point of a rifle. The phrase is overused and made to do more work than it can handle. Some people have been liberated at the point of a rifle. But you must bring security and the rule of law. You have no civil liberties if you have no functioning court system and you can’t leave your house without fear of being murdered because of your ethnic background or religious beliefs.
Bush’s love of liberty came with a lust for blood.
Meanwhile, Woodward reports that Casey, the president’s commanding general in Iraq from 2004 to 2007, came to believe that Bush did not understand the nature of the Iraq war, that the president focused too much on body counts as a measure of progress.
“Casey had long concluded that one big problem with the war was the president himself,” Woodward writes. “He later told a colleague in private that he had the impression that Bush reflected the ‘radical wing of the Republican Party that kept saying, “Kill the bastards! Kill the bastards! And you’ll succeed.” ‘ “
Asked about his interest in body counts, Bush told Woodward: “I asked that on occasion to find out whether or not we’re fighting back. Because the perception is that our guys are dying and they’re not. Because we don’t put out numbers. We don’t have a tally. On the other hand, if I’m sitting here watching the casualties come in, I’d at least like to know whether or not our soldiers are fighting.”
On the one hand, Bush was asking his military commanders why the Iraqi people didn’t appreciate their ‘liberation’, while on the other hand he was pushing them to “Kill the bastards! Kill the bastards! And you’ll succeed.” And, all the time he was pretending that we were fighting some man named Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and some organization named Al-Qaeda in Iraq. Did the president actually believe any of this psy-ops crap? Did Cheney use the same forgeries on Bush that he used with the UK Telegraph?
Who knows? What’s clear is the president has neither any clear understanding of the conflict, nor any moral compass. As his administration sought to use fear to curtail our domestic civil liberties, he sought to bring mass death to Iraqis that resisted the invasion of their country and the ensuing lack of competent government. There was no liberty to appreciate.
The big lie of the Iraq War is that resistance to the American occupation was carried out by people that opposed liberty. America won its liberty by throwing out foreign occupiers. India won its liberty by throwing out foreign occupiers. France won its liberty by throwing out foreign occupiers. Bush, like McCain, thought we could treat Iraq like Japan or Germany and occupy it for a 100 years. McCain still thinks that.
If there is any good to come from The Surge, it is the opportunity for Iraq to establish the bare minimum standard of security where one might aspire to protecting people’s civil liberties. On that score, I leave with two headlines.
Bomber strikes in Iraq after drawing crowd to car crash:
At least six people were killed and 50 wounded when a suicide car bomber apparently staged a traffic accident to draw more victims to the explosion.
The suicide attack happened around midday Saturday at an outdoor market in Tal Afar in northern Iraq, an Iraqi Interior Ministry official said.
The bomber got into a traffic accident and began arguing with the driver of another car, the official said. He detonated his car bomb as a crowd gathered around the shouting men, he said.
Iraq expects to sign Shell gas deal within a month:
BAGHDAD, Sept 8 (Reuters) – Iraq expects to sign a natural gas deal with Royal Dutch Shell within a month, the Oil Ministry said on Monday.
Iraq’s cabinet on Sunday approved a preliminary deal between the energy giant and the state-run South Oil Company that covers the venture in southern Basra province.
Where will we get the troops to protect that contract for the next 100 years? Ask the Dutch. Ask John McCain. But don’t ask the president because he’s got better things to do.
