Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in.
My Son the Marine is days away from the end of his first deployment to Iraq. He's already packed up and moved to temporary barracks at Camp Fallujah, to allow "the new guys" to move in. With my sanity at the end of a rope, I hadn't planned on posting any more diaries until he was safely back on U.S. soil.
And then I read the lead editorial in this morning's New York Times that describes George W. Bush as dismissive of ex-strategist Matthew Dowd's change of heart because Dowd was "emotional" over his son's imminent deployment to Iraq.
I thought I had become inured to Bush's callous disregard for the precious lives of our sons and daughters lost to his folly of a war. But no.
Excerpts from the editorial are below. But I have this to say first: in the history of war, has it ever been so crystal-clear that the strategies employed by the wager are completely self-serving -- and without personal sacrifice -- in every regard?
As Peter W. Galbraith put it recently in his analysis "The Surge" in the March 15th issue of The New York Review of Books, "At best, Bush's new strategy will be a costly postponement of the day of reckoning with failure."
And who is paying the highest price for Bush's desperate face-saving measures? Besides untold Iraqis, it's the families of American and British troops who enlisted in good faith to defend their countries, not impose so-called democracy on other countries stuck in a binary existence between dictatorship and civil war.
As journalist Stephen Wright said on NPR's Talk of the Nation" yesterday, in discussing his opposition to the war and seeing his son deployed to Iraq (a familiar story), even if the surge clears most of the insurgents out of Baghdad, where are they going to go? They're not being captured, so they'll go out into the provinces and regroup all over again.
(And then there's the oil. But shhh...we're not supposed to talk about that.)
Madness. Horror. Devastation. Waste. This Marine mother takes it all personally AND emotionally.
President Bush and his advisers have made a lot of ridiculous charges about critics of the war in Iraq: they’re unpatriotic, they want the terrorists to win, they don’t support the troops, to cite just a few. But none of these seem quite as absurd as President Bush’s latest suggestion, that critics of the war whose children are at risk are too "emotional" to see things clearly.
The direct target was Matthew Dowd, one of the chief strategists of Mr. Bush’s 2004 presidential campaign, who has grown disillusioned with the president and the war...by extension, Mr. Bush’s comments were insulting to the hundreds of thousands of Americans whose sons, daughters, sisters, brothers and spouses have served or will serve in Iraq....
Mr. Dowd’s case, Mr. Bush said, "as I understand it, is obviously intensified because his son is deployable"....
Mr. Dowd said his experiences were a backdrop to his reconsideration of his support of the war and Mr. Bush. There is nothing wrong with that, but there is something deeply wrong with the White House’s dismissing his criticism as emotional, as if it has no reasoned connection to Mr. Bush’s policies.
This form of attack is especially galling from a president who from the start tried to paint this war as virtually sacrifice-free: the Iraqis would welcome America with open arms, the war would be paid for with Iraqi oil revenues — and the all-volunteer military would concentrate the sacrifice on only a portion of the nation’s families.
Mr. Bush’s comments about Mr. Dowd are a reflection of the otherworldliness that permeates his public appearances these days. Mr. Bush seems increasingly isolated, clinging to a fantasy version of Iraq that is more and more disconnected from reality.....