No more hiding from failure
Des Moines Register columnist
Rekha Basu writes that regardless of what comes out of Patrick Fitzgerald's grand jury, Bush can no longer escape the weight of his accumulated failures:
But whatever happens criminally, Americans should be asking this question: Why was the Bush White House so hell bent on going to war with Iraq that it relied on discredited evidence to build the case? And what was President Bush's role in that?
Either he was unimaginably disengaged or he had other reasons.
More from Basu, and more pundits below, including:
- E.J. Dionne perfectly wraps up the Miers mess
- Frida Ghitis takes threatening words from Iran's president seriously
- Today's cartoon
Basu, continued:
You've heard the theories: Access to Iraq's oil (though we sure haven't seen cheaper gas prices). Lucrative reconstruction contracts for American businesses such as Dick Cheney's former employer, Halliburton. A strategic plan of conservatives, in the works long before September 2001, that called for a major war in the Persian Gulf. That blueprint, prepared for Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz, by the Project for the New American Century, said the Gulf region was of strategic importance and America should have a substantial troop presence there regardless of Saddam Hussein.
The Iraq War has cost 2,000 American and 30,000 Iraqi lives so far and shows no signs of ending the terrorist threat - only expanding it. Whether or not Cheney and Karl Rove are indicted, Bush is ultimately responsible, as commander in chief, for the conduct of his top advisers and for making the decision to go to war.
Conservative hypocrisy exposed
The Washington Post's E.J. Dionne nailed the post-Miers punditry head-on:
This has been a powerfully instructive moment. The willingness of conservatives to abandon what they had once held up as high and unbending principles reveals that this battle over the Supreme Court is, for them, a simple struggle for power. It is thus an unfortunate reminder of the highly unprincipled Supreme Court decision in 2000 that helped put Bush in the White House. Conservatives who had long insisted on deference to states' rights put those commitments aside when doing so would advance the political fortunes of one of their own.
Miers will recover from all this in a way Bush and the conservatives will not. She has suffered collateral damage caused by a president who did not understand the degree to which his power has eroded and did not grasp the nature of the movement that elected him. And conservatives will come to regret making their willingness to contradict their own principles plain for all to see.
Threats from Iran
Frida Ghitis writes in the Miami Herald that we need to take Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's belligerent words against Israel, the U.S., and the West, very seriously:
So, another Muslim fanatic has just called for the destruction of Israel. Big deal. Another day, another genocidal anti-Semite. That might have been the reaction of some at news of the Iranian president's declaration on Wednesday that Israel must be ''wiped off the map.'' Look more closely, however, and this is not your everyday spewing of poisonous extremism. Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has shown his cards and the world may live to regret its passivity if it fails to take him seriously.
The statement did not come from some masked teenage radical or from a fringe shadowy group. And the call to arms did not urge forcing Israel to withdraw from occupied territories or even for regime change. This was the president of a country, the man who recently represented his nation at the U.N. podium, urging his followers to obliterate another country from the face of the Earth.
As it happens, Ahmadinejad is not just the president of any country. He leads a nation that much of the world believes is actively working to arm itself with nuclear weapons.
Does anyone recall Saddam Hussein ever claiming he would rid the world of the United States?
By exhausting our blood and treasure on the Iraq Debacle, Bush has severely diminished our ability to deter dangers from far greater threats, such as Iran. And the political outcome in Iraq appears to be only strengthening the Iranian influence in the Gulf region.
Today's cartoon
From Stuart Carlson, from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: