Bush has made us much less safer, and Iraq is FUBAR

Right now many right wing bloggers are still focused on trivia such as fonts on allegedly forged memos relating to Bush going AWOL (as though that gives Bush's dishonorable behavior during the Vietnam war a pass).

Meanwhile, Salon has two excellent articles on the REAL issues of this campaign, and why Bush wants to avoid that discussion at all costs.

First, regarding Iraq...

Retired Gen. William Odom, former head of the National Security Agency, told me: "Bush hasn't found the WMD. Al-Qaida, it's worse -- he's lost on that front. That he's going to achieve a democracy there? That goal is lost, too. It's lost." He added: "Right now, the course we're on, we're achieving [Osama] bin Laden's ends."

Retired Gen. Joseph Hoare, the former Marine commandant and head of the U.S. Central Command, told me: "The idea that this is going to go the way these guys planned is ludicrous. There are no good options. We're conducting a campaign as though it were being conducted in Iowa, no sense of the realities on the ground. It's so unrealistic for anyone who knows that part of the world. The priorities are just all wrong."

"I see no ray of light on the horizon at all," said Jeffrey Record, professor of strategy at the Air War College. "The worst case has become true. There's no analogy whatsoever between the situation in Iraq and the advantages we had after World War II in Germany and Japan."

"I don't think that you can kill the insurgency," said W. Andrew Terrill, professor at the Army War College's Strategic Studies Institute, the top expert on Iraq there. According to Terrill, the anti-U.S. insurgency, centered in the Sunni triangle, and holding several key cities and towns, including Fallujah, is expanding and becoming more capable as a direct consequence of U.S. policy. "We have a growing, maturing insurgency group," he told me. "We see larger and more coordinated military attacks. They are getting better and they can self-regenerate. The idea there are X number of insurgents and when they're all dead we can get out is wrong. The insurgency has shown an ability to regenerate itself because there are people willing to fill the ranks of those who are killed. The political culture is more hostile to the U.S. presence. The longer we stay, the more they are confirmed in that view."

After the killing of four U.S. contractors in Fallujah, the U.S. Marines besieged the city for three weeks in April -- the watershed event for the insurgency. "I think the president ordered the attack on Fallujah," said Gen. Hoare. "I asked a three-star Marine general who gave the order to go to Fallujah and he wouldn't tell me. I came to the conclusion that the order came directly from the White House." Then, just as suddenly, the order was rescinded, and Islamist radicals gained control, using the city as a base, al-Qaida ("base" in Arabic) indeed.

"If you are a Muslim and the community is under occupation by a non-Islamic power, it becomes a religious requirement to resist that occupation," Terrill explained. "Most Iraqis consider us occupiers, not liberators." He describes the religious imagery common now in Fallujah and the Sunni triangle: "There's talk of angels and the prophet Mohammed coming down from heaven to lead the fighting, talk of martyrs whose bodies are glowing and emanating wonderful scents."

"I see no exit," said Record. "We've been down that road before. It's called Vietnamization. The idea we're going to have an Iraqi force trained to defeat an enemy we can't defeat stretches the imagination. They will be tainted by their very association with the foreign occupier. In fact, we had more time and money in state building in Vietnam than in Iraq."

"This is far graver than Vietnam," said Gen. Odom. "There wasn't as much at stake strategically, though in both cases we mindlessly went ahead with a war that was not constructive for U.S. aims. But now we're in a region far more volatile and we're in much worse shape with our allies."

Things are not getting better- Iraq has been a strategic disaster, and Bush supporters bear a great deal of the blame here, for supporting a man who would, through sheer hubris, get us into such a debacle.

The other article in Salon concerns the so-called "War on Terror":

Before 9/11, as we know from Bush's former top anti-terrorism advisor, Richard Clarke, the Bush administration cavalierly downplayed the terrorist threat. Prisoners of its own "pre-9/11 mind-set," it focused on extremely expensive and technically unproven Cold War programs such as ballistic missile defense, utterly irrelevant to the war on terror, and exhibited only lukewarm interest in ongoing programs to limit WMD proliferation. ...

A reasonable answer requires a reasonable question. The question should not be: Would the world be better off if Saddam Hussein were still in power? The politically responsible question, instead, is: Has the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq made the world and the U.S. safer than before? The answer to this question, obfuscated by Bush electioneering, is most certainly no, and that means, as perverse as it may seem, that the world is not better off with Hussein removed from power in this way, at this cost, with these consequences. The invasion and occupation of Iraq has weakened American national security because Bush's unimaginably clumsy management of postwar Iraq has swollen the ranks of young, enraged and lethally armed anti-American jihadists; has irritated and alienated potential partners around the world; and has tied down scarce national-security assets that we desperately need to confront much more dangerous and imminent threats.

The rest of this article makes a very damning case why Republicans have so completely botched the "War on Terror." Being hostile to the use of goverment means being hostile to the use of the very powers that can be used to make America safer.

And, of course, being so hostile to the concepts of civil rights and civil liberties makes it all the more likely that this hostility will mean that the "War on Terror" will take the form as a war on American's liberty.


People who hate goverment should not be running it. People who hate civil rights and civil liberties should not be entrusted to the powers of state. Period. End of story.

This, in a nutshell is why the Bush junta must be turned out of power.

The future of the United States as a free country depends on it.