The emergence of
yet another group of foreign policy experts and state department officials, some of them Republican appointees, calling for the defeat of George Bush shows the seriousness of our security situation under the current administration.
Yes, our nation has a security risk. It's not "terror." It's not "al-Qaeda." It's not "Saddam bin Laden Sistani al-Sadr Zarqawi." (The exact spelling of his name escapes me at the moment.) It's the Bush Administration.
I know I get shrill at times, but in this case, I'm not the one standing alone shouting at the top of the hill.
Twenty-six former military officials and diplomats, among them former ambassadors to the Soviet Union and Israel under Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, have made the extraordinary public statement that the Bush Administration is endangering the country.
Pan camera to today's Salon.com ...
In this worrisome article, author and intelligence expert Thomas Powers describes what he calls a "civil war" between intelligence agencies and the Bush White House.
Powers calls Bush's seizure of war powers from Congress under false pretenses a "coup."
The White House that becomes apparent from this article and others sourced from insiders is one that is equal parts incompetence, arrogance and megalomania. Key players sense George Bush's weakness and his vanity. They flatter him, fool him, disobey him, anything they need to do to get done what they want.
The result is a U.S. government that presents itself to the world as a spoiled, unhappy child, holding a grenade it knows how to use.
I have argued before that now, no matter what happens, the U.S. cannot win the war with Iraq. All roads lead to actual physical defeat on the ground, moral defeat on our soil, or perceived defeat in the international sphere.
But I think now it is safe to extrapolate out and start to conclude that the factors that guaranteed our failure in Iraq will guarantee our failure in all our endeavors across the globe. The public face of our country, petulant, violent and unpredictable, frightens our allies and stirs our enemies to anger. Internal discord and incompetence ties the hands of our government from the inside.
And corruption runs just as deep and wide as incompetence.
Let's look at the world for a minute.
It's true. There are actual security problems in the world. There is a growing problem with energy cost and availability. There is a problem with states like North Korea, who are not full participants in the world community, claiming the right to develop nuclear weapons. There is an actual problem with terrorist groups like al-Qaeda.
But with the Bush Administration in charge, crippled by incompetence, arrogance and megalomania, we cannot address them.
And this spells trouble for us.