"It is house to house, block to block, street to street, sewer to sewer," said Brigadier-General Mick Bednarek, commander of Operation Arrowhead Ripper in Iraq's Diyala province.
June 22, 2007
Welcome to General Hoar's Nightmare. It's been almost five years in coming and it's not quite what we expected. But it's here. Wakey ...wakey....
"What would it look like?" Senator Ted Kennedy asked
"All our advantages of command and control, technology, mobility, all of those things are in part given up and you are working with corporals and sergeants and young men fighting street to street," the general said. "It looks like the last 15 minutes of Saving Private Ryan. That's what we're up against."
Sept. 28, 2002
Unfortunately, this isn't going to last 15 minutes... it could easily last ten years. Contrary to the new talking point, this isn't whack-a-mole... this is Ground Hog Day meets Nightmare on Elm Street.
Let's disenthrall ourselves from the carnage for a moment -- put it on pause if you will -- and consider an inconvenient truth About the Authorization to Use Military Force.
There are many Democrats running now who claim "we were misled" into supporting the war. They blame the White House and the Pentagon. I think this is cowardice compounded by cowardice. By not naming those who lied, people can avoid the responsibility of holding them personally accountable. It's a neat way of denouncing the policies while sidestepping any discussions of impeachment or war crimes.
This tactic reminds me of an old joke in Washington (I think it started during the Carter Administration) that goes like this:
Secretary: Sir, the White House called to say they want your support on this.
Senator: Buildings don't make phone calls. Next time, get a name.
The White House did not mislead people. George Bush, Dick Cheney, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, and Ari Fleischer, assisted by their staffers... absolutely misled people. And they did it knowingly. With malice aforethought. I will not bore you with the litany of documented examples supporting that indictment for each of these people ... I will merely remind you of the testimony of Randy Beers.
Five days before the war began in Iraq, as President Bush prepared to raise the terrorism threat level to orange, a top White House counterterrorism adviser unlocked the steel door to his office, an intelligence vault secured by an electronic keypad, a combination lock and an alarm. He sat down and turned to his inbox.
"Things were dicey," said Rand Beers, recalling the stack of classified reports about plots to shoot, bomb, burn and poison Americans. He stared at the color-coded threats for five minutes. Then he called his wife: I'm quitting.
"The administration wasn't matching its deeds to its words in the war on terrorism. They're making us less secure, not more secure," said Beers, who until now has remained largely silent about leaving his National Security Council job as special assistant to the president for combating terrorism. "As an insider, I saw the things that weren't being done. And the longer I sat and watched, the more concerned I became, until I got up and walked out."
The Pentagon did not mislead people. The people working in the Office of Special Plans did. Paul Wolfowitz, Doug Feith, William Luti, John Bolton, David Wurmser and Abram Shulsky, directed by Donald Rumsfeld ... absolutely misled people. And they did it knowingly. With malice aforethought. Again I won't bore you with the litany of documented examples supporting that indictment for each of these people... I will remind you of the testimony of Karen Kwiatkowski.
"Despite extensive planning by the U.S. Department of State's Future of Iraq Project to deal with post-Saddam chaos, much of which (including museum looting and extensive water and power shortages) was fully anticipated and provided for in those plans, these plans were simply set aside by Rumsfeld.
Air Force Lt. Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski, who worked in the Pentagon until her retirement, was with the Office of Special Plans: "What I saw was aberrant, pervasive and contrary to good order and discipline," Kwiatkowski wrote recently. "If one is seeking the answers to why peculiar bits of 'intelligence' found sanctity in a presidential speech, or why the post-Saddam occupation has been distinguished by confusion and false steps, one need look no further than the process inside the Office of the Secretary of Defense." She described the activities of Rumsfeld's Office of Special Plans as, "A subversion of constitutional limits on executive power and a co-optation through deceit of a large segment of the Congress."
But WAIT! some will cry... Kwiatkowski's statement proves we were misled! There is a difference between being deceived and allowing yourself to be deceived. Consider this exchange between Senator Kennedy and Tim Russert from 2005:
Russert: But Senator, what the Democrats stood for on the floor of the Senate in 2002, let me show you who said what I just read: John Kerry, your candidate for president. He was talking about a nuclear threat from Saddam Hussein. Hillary Clinton voted for the war. John Edwards, Joe Lieberman, John Kerry. Democrats said the same things about Saddam Hussein. You yourself said quote "Saddam is dangerous, he's got dangerous weapons." It wasn't just the Bush White House.
Kennedy : The fact is -- and I voted against the war -- because every military leader, highly decorated military leader, said it was foolish to have a military intervention. General Hoar, with the Marines, General Hoar who has more silver stars than you could possibly count, said that if we go into Baghdad, it will look like the last five [sic] minutes of Private Ryan. So, we know we had enough information to vote against it, I believe.
That was the reason I used to say "The only generals in favor of invading Iraq are General Electric and General Dynamics." Remember that next time you hear Hillary Clinton say "we didn't know" or "we were misled" and she uses that dodge to avoid saying "I was wrong." This is not an exercise in semantics. It's a political calculation that allows her to have her cake and eat it too. The inconvenient truth is that specious claim is the only way she can denounce the war as Republican folly while absolving herself of responsibility.
She is the only Democratic candidate taking this position. That is not the kind of leadership I can support. Fortunately, I don't have to. As Hillary noted during a recent "debate," we have a rich field where any one of the Democratic candidates would be better than any candidate offered by the Republicans. Faced with that situation, the task is not to figure out why any one of them should be president... it's to figure out which ones we should ignore. Hillary's position makes it easy for me to rule her out.
We now return you to the slaughter of innocents already in progress...