Growing Doubts About Bush's War On Terror

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Friday :: Sep 1, 2006

From Left Coaster:

Growing Doubts About Bush's War On Terror

by Steve Soto

Many of you have wondered if the Kool-Aid Bush and Rove have been dishing out will work one more election. Can Bush, Cheney, and Rummy scare the base and swing voters enough to keep the House and Senate in GOP hands one more election? Can Bush’s message of “I let the terrorists into Iraq so you have to trust me to continue the madness” work for one more election? An AP/Ipsos poll out today indicates that there is a growing discontent with the cost of the war in Iraq and the war on terror, as well as the effectiveness of the Bush policies and their impact upon our personal freedoms. And the public is finally concerned about our vastly diminished standing abroad after six years of the Bush/Cheney foreign policy.

Doubts about the war on terrorism are growing. Most people worry that the cost in blood and money may be too high, and they don’t think al-Qaida kingpin Osama bin Laden will ever be caught, an AP-Ipsos poll found. (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14618513/)

more . . .

The public is simply doing a cost-benefit analysis on their own, as they have grown tired of waiting for Congress to do its job. That is why Boxer effectively hammered the "rubber stamp" and failing Congress theme last night on "Countdown." As would be expected after five years of a war without well-defined benchmarks and accountability measures but with constant political manipulation, the public is feeling fatigue and frustration with the environment created by this cabal and may want something new in November.

After reading Suskind's book, I conclude that Bush and Cheney have done their jobs in letting the intelligence agencies prosecute the war on terror. We haven't had another attack because Al Qaeda will choose its time, and because Bush and Cheney have let the intelligence community fight the war without the same level of micromangement and manipulation they forced on the community in the run-up to the war. But there is nothing extraordinary about Bush's war on terror: any president would have done the same things and may have done them better. The differences are that any other president would have read and acted upon the August 6, 2001 PDB, and any other president would not have embarked on the debacle in Iraq at a time when we had unfinished business elsewhere. And for those reasons, Bush is not to be commended for anything in the war on terror, and the public is finally catching up to that.

link: http://www.theleftcoaster.com/archives/008615.php


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