Read Em And Weep

“This deck of cards is crashing down and it’s landing heavily on the heads of the soldiers and the Marines who have been deployed again and again while the rest of the country sits back and debates Iraq as an intellectual or emotional exercise.” – Sen. James Webb

As a Missourian, I am here to say where the buck stops – President Bush.

I understand the pressure that presidents are under to protect our country from attack. However, that is why we need a leader. A leader who will consider all of the factors as well as the costs and the consequences.

Analysts and experts specifically stated before the war that the years-long sanctions and previous military attacks on Iraq could have had a very negative effect on the country and the army and that Iraq could very well be in disarray making the possibility of an insurgency much more likely. There was no shortage of people who analyzed all of the possible scenarios before the war started.

Bush made no secret of the fact that he was inexperienced in foreign affairs and so he surrounded himself with the people he thought were the best. They were the “neocons” who had written a paper to overthrow Sadaam many years earlier and they just dusted off that plan and used it as if time stands still in Iraq.

And they put all their money on these exiles (Chalabi - a crook) who had not been in the country for years and who said we would be received as liberators - that was not proven to be true.

It was reported that dissenting views were not "strenuously" presented to the president. Rumsfeld set up his own little CIA inside the CIA to get the "information he wanted." And Cheney was over there DAILY breathing down their necks.

I judged from everything I had read that Iraq at the time of the invasion was relatively at peace - considering the difficulties that were likely to be encountered. Many experts said that Sadaam had been largely "defanged." In fact, there were so many reports cautioning about a quagmire and an insurgency and house-to-house combat and the insufficient number of troops going in that I was literally in shock when they did.

Of course, the U.S. is a superpower and we could probably take on any one. But, they would have to invest much more heavily in equipment than the "lean, mobile, and specialized" army that was the only army that Rumsfeld wanted - not just the only one he had.

And, they would have to have a draft because it appears that people are not so eager to enlist and some are not so eager to reenlist and even officers are not reenlisting at the same rate. It has been reported that the army is “cannibalizing” officers from other branches and some soldiers are doing jobs they were not trained to do.

There have also been reports that new enlistees are not getting the desert training they need before being sent off to combat where they must rely on equipment they are unfamiliar with because all equipment is left behind from former deployments.

“Al-Qaida Connections

WASHINGTON | President Bush contended anew Tuesday that the perpetrators of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the United States are the same as al-Qaida in Iraq.

It was the second time in two weeks that Bush has made the link in an apparent attempt to transform lingering fear of another U.S. terrorist attack into backing for the current buildup of U.S. troops in Iraq.

“Al-Qaida is doing most of the spectacular bombings, trying to incite sectarian violence,” Bush told a business group in Cleveland. “The same people that attacked us on September 11 is a crowd that is now bombing people, killing innocent men, women and children, many of whom are Muslims.”

Al-Qaida in Iraq did not emerge until 2004. While it is inspired by Osama bin Laden’s violent ideology, there is no evidence that the Iraq organization is under the control of the terrorist leader or his top aides, who are thought to be hiding in tribal regions of Pakistan bordering Afghanistan.
Moreover, the two groups have been divided over tactics and strategy.”

----------------------------------------------
The report that says al-Qaida is back in Afghanistan is much more relevant I would think because that is where they train people, there and Pakistan, while our troops in Iraq and the Iraqi people are easy targets.

The war supporters (not troop supporters) are always saying that no one else has a plan. My plan would be to treat the global war on terror for what it is - criminals, extremists who are without a nation state scattered widely throughout the world who would have to be contained by using intelligence and cooperation from the other peoples of the world.

Instead, with his arrogance, Bush has alienated some of the very people we need to rely on. Would you blow NYC to smithereens to wipe out a terrorist on the loose? The war fanatics that are always saying we should indiscriminately bomb the Middle East need to get a grip. That is not going to happen. I don’t know how you could be informed and still think that that is the way to defeat this enemy; “shock and awe” certainly did not do it. And the destruction left behind would bear another crop of extremists.

The right-wing often accuses the other side of moral relativism. How is the above described indiscriminate bombing as well as the ends-justifies-the-means mentality not? Some of us believe that besides being ineffective, we don’t have the right to bring our war on terror to bear on the innocent people of Iraq.

Another favorite scare tactic that the catastrophe-supporters use is to say that al-Qaida wants to see a Democratic president and Congress because they are not as likely to respond in strength if attacked. Gijs de Vries, a former counter-terrorism expert of the Netherlands, said, “One of the time-honored tactics of terrorists is to draw governments into overreacting.” The war in Iraq would certainly qualify for that thousands of American lives as well as $5-6 billion dollars a month – a figure the Bush administration scoffed at before the war.

Also, the calamity-supporters say that we should profile Middle Eastern people at airports and other such venues. It was reported some time ago that al-Qaida was trying to recruit Asians to throw us off, the same with women. That's why you don't profile, that's why you don't assume. You just get it right.

What of the disaster-supporters idea that because of the war in Iraq we haven’t had another terrorist attack? The 9/11 plot reportedly took years to pull off and afterwards security was ratcheted way up. Awareness is way up, too. And it is much easier for them to attack our soldiers right next door.

The tragedy-supporters often ask what would happen upon a precipitous pullout. My hope would be that the terrorists would stop targeting innocent people. As for the sectarian violence and the so-called security vacuum, the Iraqis will just have to sort their differences out or their militias will, just as they are doing now.


Here is a link "In challenging war's critics, administration tinkers with truth" that spells out the different kinds of intelligence that the president is privy to and the way they have repeatedly misled the American people about it.

http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/13185357.htm