- President Bush has been bonked on the head by so many
facts that refute his rhetoric in recent days, he must feel like he's been
caught in a West Texas hailstorm. But don't worry about him. He's a hardheaded
man. I haven't seen a fact yet that can get past his hair.
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- Even as the president has been putting a dent in the
aviation-fuel inventory by flying around to tell Americans that they are
safer because of the war in Iraq, out comes a National Intelligence Estimate
and a couple of generals who say, "No, you're not."
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- As a number of people pointed out, even before the Iraq
invasions in 2003, sending the Army to Iraq was the biggest favor Bush
could possibly have granted to old Osama bin Laden. Invading a Muslim country,
and killing and abusing its people, has been a great recruiting tool. There
are now more insurgents than there were two years ago. There are now more
attacks than there were two years ago.
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- Open Records
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- A much-annoyed president ordered parts of the NIE to
be declassified (part of it had been leaked). Actually, the NIE should
never be classified in the first place. The American people and Congress
have a right to know about the work product of our $40 billion-a-year intelligence
industry. It's mostly bureaucratic heifer dust anyway.
-
- The only legitimate reason to classify anything is to
prevent an enemy from learning in advance of troop movements or to protect
a valuable source. Neither applies to the NIE.
-
- But the prez wanted it declassified to get to one of
those if-then scenarios so well loved in the Washington skunk works. The
NIE says that if the jihadists (apparently we have gone from Islamic extremists
to Islamic fascists to, finally, an official designation as "jihadists")
are defeated in Iraq, then they might become discouraged and lose popularity.
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- This, of course, is a pair of suppositions without any
supporting evidence. If we have not defeated the jihadists in three years
at a cost of a quarter of a trillion dollars, what evidence is there to
support the belief that we can defeat them in the future? And if we did
defeat them, what evidence is there to support the supposition that they
would become discouraged?
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- The Palestinians have been struggling with Israel and
losing for nearly a century, and they haven't given up. We fought the "insurgents"
in Vietnam for 10 years, dropping more high explosives on them than we
used in World War II, and they didn't get discouraged and give up. As a
matter of fact, we got discouraged and gave up.
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- We'll Cut And Run
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- Use your noodle. Who do you think is more likely to get
discouraged and give up? The insurgents, who are at home and whose supply
line stretches around the corner, or the U.S., which has 147,000 troops
at the end of a 7,000-mile supply line? It costs us far more to buy milk
and bottled water for our troops than it does to make improvised explosives,
since the bunglers in the Pentagon left Iraq littered with thousands of
artillery shells. There were not enough troops to police them all up -
though, of course, the secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, insisted
we had all the troops we needed.
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- Already a slight majority of Americans don't believe
the war is worth it, and as the dollars keep pouring out and the bodies
keep coming back, that figure will surely grow. On the other hand, nobody
gets to vote as to whether the insurgents should continue to fight.
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- As my fictional hero, Gus McCrae of "Lonesome Dove"
fame, would say, Congress has always been too leaky a bucket to put much
faith in. It was Congress that pulled the plug on our troops in Vietnam
and on the South Vietnamese government. It will eventually do the same
in Iraq and Afghanistan.
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- As much as the windbags in Washington aspire to be an
empire, they just don't have the staying power of the Roman legions. President
Bush, however, will leave office convinced he never made a single mistake
in eight years. I've known sociopaths who feel the same way.
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- - Write to Charley Reese at P.O. Box 2446, Orlando, FL
32802 or e-mail him at kfs-public-relations@hearst.com (write "Charley
Reese" in subject line).
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