"It's About Osama"

[Cha]

snip~

By Harold Meyerson

So let’s try to get this straight. We invaded Iraq because Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, except he didn’t, and because he was tied in to the attacks of September 11, except he wasn’t. We’re staying in Iraq, President Bush said Tuesday night, because terrorists with the same ideology as those behind 9-11 have congregated there since we arrived.

Iraq is now the “central front” in the war on terrorism, the president said. And just how did it become that? Whatever the ghastly defects of Hussein’s Iraq, it was not a playground for terrorists. There was no terror in the old Iraq but Hussein’s own, which was a nightmare for his own citizenry, but not a threat to ours. Now, Bush argued, Iraq is in danger of becoming something it never was -- the equivalent of Afghanistan under the Taliban. But it’s Bush’s war that transformed the country and created that threat, if we are to believe the president's own assessment of the danger that the Iraqi terrorists pose. And if we don’t take on the terrorists there, he said, we’ll have to take them on here.

But which ones? Surely not the bitter-enders from Hussein’s regime, or the Iraqi Sunni extremists; their fight is there. As to the Islamic militants who have arrived from other lands, they are a threat, but no more of one than the Islamic militants who are not in Iraq. Yet it is in Iraq where we have deployed the lion’s share of our forces, so much so that our ability to respond to the threat of a very different kind of terrorism -- from North Korea, say -- has clearly been diminished. Bush spoke as if we had the terrorists tied down in Iraq. One could plausibly argue that it’s the other way around.

On the other hand, one could also plausibly argue that we don’t have, and never have had, enough forces in Iraq to secure the country or ensure domestic tranquility. Bush noted that no ground commander had ever told him that we needed to send in more troops, and I don’t doubt that. Before the war even began, the one commander who did make that argument, Army Chief of Staff General Eric Shinseki, drew the audible ire of Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz. Shinseki did not have his term of duty renewed and was told to find employment in civilian life. A starker object lesson for ground commanders thinking about questioning the wisdom of Rumsfeld and the size of our force could scarcely be imagined."


More at..
http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewWeb&articleId=9916

Hope it's not a dupe, I did a "search" to no avail.

[Cha]

1. Been to work for 4 hours and

not one bite!

Oh well, hopefully someone gets to read Harold Meyerson's fascinating take on the chimp's rah, rah, rah, war is good speech.

[Tamyrlin79]

2. This is really a good piece.

It puts the issues involved in W's Big Blunder very clearly. Thanks for posting.

[Cha]

3. You're welcome..I thought

it was really good, too..but we're the only two :)

I think Harold Meyerson really took that speech apart piece by piece and explained why it didn't work.