Dean: 'Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz Must Go' -petition

[Rose Siding]

Howard Dean issued the following statement today. Join Governor Dean by signing the petition demanding that Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz must go:

http://www.deanforamerica.com/site/PageServer?pagename=mustgo

A decision to send our sons and daughters, brothers and sisters to war is the most solemn decision any president can make. As president, I will not hesitate to send our military anywhere in the world to defend the United States and its key interests, but I will never do so without telling the American people the truth. The American people expect and deserve the truth from their leaders – especially an Administration that purportedly took office to “restore honor and dignity” to the White House. But we have seen something very different from this Administration.

For officials at the highest levels of this Administration to exploit the emotions of the American people regarding the attacks of September 11 to achieve their political objectives is unacceptable.

This Administration has demonstrated no link between Saddam Hussein and the attacks of 9/11, nor was there any significant link between Saddam and al Qaeda. For the President and Vice President to continue to blur the facts and imply that there was such a connection is a corruption of democracy, which is based on the principle that leaders are honest with the people they govern.

And these assertions come in the wake of a long line of problematic statements from the highest levels of the Administration, from the discredited line in the President’s State of the Union address regarding Iraq’s supposed attempts to acquire uranium from Niger to the Vice President’s claim that Iraq had reconstituted its nuclear program to Secretary Rumsfeld’s claim that he had “bulletproof” evidence of ties between Iraq and al Qaeda. This pattern of deception is but one major reason that this Administration deserves to be fired by the American people.

A second major reason is the abject failure of planning for the post-war period in Iraq. There is no need to wait until the next election to hold the major architects of this disaster responsible for their gross incompetence. The time has come for the President to fire them. To get Iraq on track, it is vitally important that the Pentagon begins the task of restoring credibility not only in the world community, but here at home as well. That is not possible under the continued leadership of Secretary Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary Wolfowitz. They must go.

Americans are contemplating the President’s request for $87 billion -- and wondering why they are being stuck with the bill. They are asking why they will be asked to sacrifice so much to pay it, while the wealthiest in our society continue to reap the benefits of the President’s tax cuts.

Let me be clear on the spending request: We must support our troops, and we must do so by repealing the reckless Bush tax cuts. For the President not to make the political sacrifice of repealing his tax cuts means he is asking the troops on the ground to bear the entire burden of this war. After all, they are the ones on the frontlines fighting and dying every day.

Furthermore: our soldiers continue to fight the fight virtually alone because this Administration has damaged our relationships with our friends and allies to such a degree that most are not willing to commit meaningful numbers of troops or financial contributions to what they view as America’s misadventure. The President’s speech before the United Nations did nothing but perpetuate his foreign policy of petulance.

This is the team that told us that General Shinseki was “wildly off the mark” when he testified that the occupying force needed to number several hundred thousand. We now have fewer than 150,000 in Iraq, which experts have deemed inadequate to accomplish the mission.

This is the team that told us we knew exactly where the weapons of mass destruction were – “in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad” – and that “dismantling its nuclear weapons program a crucial part of winning the War on Terror.” Of course, we know that the WMD were not in the areas the Secretary of Defense described, and Deputy Secretary Wolfowitz’s claim of a nuclear weapons program remains equally specious.

This is the team that told us the war would cost “something under $50 billion” and that Iraq would be able to “finance its own reconstruction, and relatively soon.” As the price tag climbs toward $200 billion with no relief in sight from Iraq’s oil fields, they have proved to be flat-out wrong once again.

And this is the team that quite clearly failed to plan adequately to win the peace. With their unrealistic assumption that we would be greeted as liberators, it seemed to catch them by surprise that we have instead been dogged by persistent, organized resistance. As Deputy Secretary Wolfowitz put it, “Some important assumptions turned out to underestimate the problem.” Those assumptions have cost us lives; the absence of realism in their planning is both stunning and inexcusable.

Even their overall vision of transforming the department – with their grand plans of cutting as much as two divisions from the service while relying more heavily on technology – is proving incredibly short-sighted. More technology wasn’t needed to confront the enemy in Iraq – more troops were.

We are in Iraq now, and we cannot afford to fail. We are asking much from the American people and our armed forces to get through this. Our military men and women have already borne the heaviest burden, with 307 fallen soldiers in Iraq – 169 of those tragic deaths since the President declared major combat over.

To succeed, we will need the assistance of our allies and the international institutions that this Administration has so recklessly alienated. To rebuild those relationships, credibility must be restored to every aspect of the operation.

Until we have new leadership at the Department of Defense, that credibility will be nearly impossible to achieve. Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz must go.

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