The Unhappy Mr. Cheney
The Bush/Cheney war in Iraq has not gone well. And Cheney is a bit grumpy these days as his deceits and acts of incompetence are laid bare for everyone to see. But the fact remains that Dick Cheney and George W. Bush have still not been held accountable in any significant manner despite the results of the elections in November. There is much still to do.
If you read nothing else today, read New York Times columnist Frank Rich in Truthout; it's the kind of column The New York Times would not have published four years ago when it might have done a great deal more good:
Our troops have done the best job they can but it is never in the interest of the troops to send them into wars we do not need or to leave them in a war for political reasons, without an exit plan, to save the reputation of an incompetent administration. Iraq is now in a civil war. At the minimum, we need to stop pretending there is sufficient wisdom in the White House to figure out who to help in that war; we may need to keep troops nearby or on the borders to keep the war from spreading, but it's time to stop digging a hole and it's time to do the hard diplomatic work of arranging some kind of political solution. I'm not a pacificist but the people in Washington never bothered to understand who we're shooting at and why and what the consequences would be. This is not the kind of behavior one would expect from the leader of the free world. And it's unforgiveable that much of the media simply ignored the lies and incompetence for far too long.
One thing much of the media has never understood is that are many Cindy Sheehans out there trying to understand what happened to their loved ones; this is a strange war being run by a strange White House and while not everyone has the courage and strength of someone like Cindy Sheehan, there are many Americans who want answers, who need to understand why their loved ones were sent to a war based on lies. The last six years have been an historical embarrassment in our country; we need better people next time and they better be reasonably straight with the American people.
If you read nothing else today, read New York Times columnist Frank Rich in Truthout; it's the kind of column The New York Times would not have published four years ago when it might have done a great deal more good:
... From the start, the capital has belittled the Joseph and Valerie Wilson affair as "a tempest in a teapot," as David Broder of The Washington Post reiterated just five months ago. When "all of the facts come out in this case, it's going to be laughable because the consequences are not that great," Bob Woodward said in 2005. Or, as Robert Novak suggested in 2003 before he revealed Ms. Wilson's identity as a C.I.A. officer in his column, "weapons of mass destruction or uranium from Niger" are "little elitist issues that don't bother most of the people." Those issues may not trouble Mr. Novak, but they do loom large to other people, especially those who sent their kids off to war over nonexistent weapons of mass destruction and nonexistent uranium.
Our troops have done the best job they can but it is never in the interest of the troops to send them into wars we do not need or to leave them in a war for political reasons, without an exit plan, to save the reputation of an incompetent administration. Iraq is now in a civil war. At the minimum, we need to stop pretending there is sufficient wisdom in the White House to figure out who to help in that war; we may need to keep troops nearby or on the borders to keep the war from spreading, but it's time to stop digging a hole and it's time to do the hard diplomatic work of arranging some kind of political solution. I'm not a pacificist but the people in Washington never bothered to understand who we're shooting at and why and what the consequences would be. This is not the kind of behavior one would expect from the leader of the free world. And it's unforgiveable that much of the media simply ignored the lies and incompetence for far too long.
One thing much of the media has never understood is that are many Cindy Sheehans out there trying to understand what happened to their loved ones; this is a strange war being run by a strange White House and while not everyone has the courage and strength of someone like Cindy Sheehan, there are many Americans who want answers, who need to understand why their loved ones were sent to a war based on lies. The last six years have been an historical embarrassment in our country; we need better people next time and they better be reasonably straight with the American people.
posted by Poechewe at 1:42 PM
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