And his Bully Boy Buddy as well, Richard Bruce Cheney!
The Tardy New York Times – well I remember its rapt support of Bush’s big misadventure in Iraq with tales of Chalabi duly copied down and put into print by dear Judith Miller, intimate of Irving "Scooter" HotLips Libby and his damned mountain ashes, or bloody birches, or what the hell ever, in the fall – the retarded Times now delivers its 5-year eulogy to Bush’s Iraq misadventure.
Poor little John F. Burns of the Times has a dreadful premonition on April 9, 2003:
On April 9, the day the Marines entered Baghdad and used one of their tanks to help the crowd haul down Saddam’s statue in Firdos Square, American troops stood by while mobs began looting, ravaging palaces and torture centers, along with ministries, museums and hospitals. Late in the day, at the oil ministry, I discovered it was the only building marines had orders to protect. Turning to Jon Lee Anderson, a correspondent for The New Yorker who had been my companion that day, I saw shock mirrored in his face. "Say it ain’t so," I said. But it was.
http://www.nytimes.com/...
Johnny Goes To War then cites a catalog of sins:
At the least, it was the first misstep in what quickly became a long chronicle: the failure to find weapons of mass destruction, the primary cause the Bush Administration had given for the war; the absence of a plan, at least any the Pentagon intended to implement, for the period after Baghdad fell; the disbanding of the Iraqi Army, and thus casting aside the help it might have given in fighting the insurgency that began flickering within 10 days of American troops entering Baghdad; the lack of an effective American counterinsurgency strategy, at least until the troop increase last year finally began bringing the war’s toll down.
Do tell, Johnny Boyo.
Anne-Marie Slaughter lays bare the stupidity of Das Rumsfeld:
IN April 2003, just after American troops secured Baghdad, Iraqis looted the Iraqi national museum. American soldiers nearby made no effort to stop them, much less provide a guard. We either did not have enough soldiers to protect the museum, or we did not care enough to try.
This failure was simply a "matter of priorities," according to Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld thought it was a "stretch" to attribute the theft and destruction of priceless Mesopotamian artifacts to "any defect in the war plan."
http://www.nytimes.com/...
L. Paul Bremer the Second or Third Moans:
Where Was the Plan?
http://www.nytimes.com/...
Ever the Dear Little SweetiePie Dickie Perle sneers:
Too Heavy a Hand
http://www.nytimes.com/...
Just a soupçon of blood and violence, darlings!
Kenneth M. Pollack chews his nails nervously:
WHAT matters most now is not how we entered Iraq, but how we leave it. If we leave behind an Iraq more stable and less threatening to its neighbors than the one we toppled, I think the intelligence community’s (and my own) mistakes about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, the Bush administration’s exaggerations of that threat and its baseless insistence on links between Iraq and Al Qaeda will all lose their edge — even though they will not, and should not, be forgotten.
http://www.nytimes.com/...
My dear Mr. Pollack. How does one gracefully exit a room wherein one has cataclysmicly stormed and roundly abused the inhabitants, murdered a sizable number, torn the furniture and everything in the room into shreds and nonrepairable bits and forced many others to leave precipitously with much of their clothing torn off their backs. How then, does one gracefully exit a room? Does Miss Manners have anything to say about that?
Danielle Pletka, vice president for foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, naively supposes:
There’s No Freedom Gene
http://www.nytimes.com/...
It all depends on how you define the word "freedom," dearie. The Iraqis might have a different view of freedom than you and me.
Nathaniel Fick recalls the worries of those actually engaged in the ground aspects of Bush’s Big Iraq MisAdventure:
The prospect of being "slimed" — and having to battle through a chemical attack — dominated every part of our planning. We wore heavy charcoal suits to protect us from chemicals, taped nerve-agent-detection paper to the windshields of our vehicles, and practiced jabbing antidote needles into our thighs. ... Our conviction was strengthened on the second day of the war, when we interrogated an Iraqi officer found carrying a gas mask, rubber gloves and nerve agent antidotes. Did he really believe we would use chemical weapons against Iraq? No, he replied, but he expected that Saddam Hussein would use them against us, and his unit would be caught in the cross-fire.
This deception twisted our priorities dangerously out of whack. Methodically clearing areas of enemy fighters, and then securing them to protect the populace, seemed like a risky luxury in March and April. By August, with the insurgency in bloom, it had become a colossal missed opportunity.
The weapons, we now know, were some combination of relic, bluster and ruse.
http://www.nytimes.com/...
Ya know who really got slimed? Us guys who were dead set against this damned invasion and occupation from the getgo! We are still mopping off the goddamned slime.
Paul D. Eaton nails it in three paragraphs:
Congress in Recess
MY greatest surprise was the failure on the part of Congress to assert itself before the executive branch. That failure assured continued problems for the military in the face of a secretary of defense who proved incompetent at fighting war.
Had Congress defended the welfare of our armed forces by challenging the concentration of power in the hands of the president, the vice president and the secretary of defense, our Army and Marine Corps would not be in the difficult position we find them in today.
The Republican-dominated Congress failed us by refusing to hold the necessary hearings and investigations the Army desperately needed. Without hearings, the Army could not advance its case for increasing the number of troops and rearming the force. The result is an Army and Marine Corps on the ropes, acres and acres of broken equipment, and tour lengths of 15 months because we have too few troops for the tasks at hand.
http://www.nytimes.com/...
Frederick Kagan gushes enthusiastically, he is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute after all and his contract obliges him to periodically gush rhapsodically at Bush’s Big Iraq MisAdventure periodically:
However, the most surprising phenomenon of the war has been the transformation of the United States military into the most discriminate and effective counterinsurgency force the world has ever seen, skillfully blending the most advanced technology with human interactions between soldiers and the Iraqi people. Precision-guided weapons allowed our soldiers and marines to minimize collateral damage while using our advantages in firepower to the full.
http://www.nytimes.com/...
So what, Kagan! That ain’t gonna pay off the multi-trillion dollar debt your PeeWee President is handing off to my kids, my grandkids, my great grandkids and ever onward.
Devout Republican Anthony D. Cordesman, fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, is amazed:
Worse Than Lyndon Johnson’s Team?
.... As a Republican, I would never have believed that President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld would waste so many opportunities and so much of America’s reputation that they would rival Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara and McGeorge Bundy for the worst wartime national security team in United States history.
http://www.nytimes.com/...
Quit drinking the Kool-Aid, idiot! PeeWee Bush’s Big Iraq MisAdventure easily toppled any record of LBJ, et al, for wartime strategy and national security big time, major big time.
Unfortunately, we are saddled with the PeeWee and his Bully Boy Buddy for another, let’s see, ten months?
Counting the days, just counting off the days until we are rid of PeeWee. And unchained of Cheney.