Karen Watters Cole wrote:
It is not difficult to make the case that economic issues – and
scandal - will damage the Bush administration in upcoming elections
more than the Iraq war, which the president acknowledges will be his
legacy. But we should not just judge the war hawk administration for
incompetence in the execution of a war of choice, we should hold them
accountable for going to war in the first place. This is the issue
that will divide the political establishment this year.
In the foreword of his /War and the American Presidency/ (2004) Arthur
Schlesinger, Jr., the eminent presidential historian, says the
obvious: “Pres. Bush has rendered the Bush Doctrine obsolete. [It]
requires near-perfect intelligence about the enemy’s intentions and
capabilities. Its first application to Iraq shows that our
intelligence agencies have a damned long way to go in the quest for
accuracy. The credibility gap opened up by the failure to find WMDs in
Iraq makes a second application of the Bush Doctrine very unlikely.
Remember the boy who cried “wolf”.”
We went to war against Iraq because of presidential reaction to phony
intelligence. Thirty years ago in a book called /The Imperial
Presidency/, I pointed out that war customarily expands presidential
power. Then the return of peace emboldens the Congress to restore the
constitutional balance between the executive and the legislative
branches. After the end of the Civil War, in which James Bryce noted
that Abraham Lincoln “wielded more authority than any single
Englishman since Oliver Cromwell”, it took only 3 years for Congress
to impeach Lincoln’s successor. After the end of the Cold War,
Congress took 7 years to find a second president to impeach.
Impeachment is an extreme way of teaching presidents lessons.”
*Iraq: What Cheney Truly Has to Answer For*
/Tom Lasseter, intrepid war correspondent for Knight Ridder, has an
appointment in Samarra. In this city, "re-taken" by the U.S., death,
devastation and cries of "Why? Why?" come from both Iraqis and
Americans. /
By Greg Mitchell, Editor, Editor & Publisher, Feb. 16, 2006
We’d like to give Vice President Cheney a break from the wall-the-wall
coverage of the face-shooting incident of this past week, so let’s
turn to his war in the Middle East, which continues maiming (and
creating more terrorists) every day. Over there, the warriors on each
side are not using birdshot.
My favorite editorial cartoon of the week comes from my local paper
here in the Hudson Valley, The Journal News, which happens to employ
recent Pulitzer winner, Matt Davies. He pictured a barren landscape,
looking much like Iraq, with buckshot-riddled bodies strewn across the
field, Cheney with his shotgun still smoking, and flying harmlessly
overhead a duck labled “WMDs.” Cheney looks up at the honking duck,
says, “Damn. Missed.”
Well, that pretty much says it all. Yet one of the top American
correspondents in Iraq, Tom Lasseter of Knight Ridder, still manages
to say quite a bit more, in a gripping, and depressing, article
distributed today and posted at the www.krwashington.com site.
E&P has profiled Lasseter and his work numerous times in the past 2
years, and last we heard he was supposed to be back home in the USA,
but there he is, still risking life, limb and, no doubt, sanity in Iraq.
Based in Baghdad, Lasseter often gets embedded with U.S. or Iraqi
troops out in the hellish beyond. Inevitably he gets ordinary grunts
to speak honest truths. His latest piece focuses strictly on Samarra,
a city that has lost half of its population of 200,000 since the U.S.
supposedly pacified the area more than a year ago. Lasseter reveals
the true costs—and the real chance that the death and destruction will
go for naught.
Lasseter opens by observing that more than a year after some 5,000
Iraqi and U.S. soldiers re-took the city from the enemy, “American
troops still are battling insurgents in Samarra. Bloodshed is
destroying the city and driving a wedge between the Iraqis who live
there and the U.S. troops who are trying to keep order.
“Violence, police corruption and the blurry lines of guerrilla warfare
are clouding any hopes of victory. ‘It's apocalyptic out there. Life
has definitely gotten worse for’ Iraqis, said Maj. Curtis Strange, 36,
of Mobile, Ala., who works with Iraqi troops in Samarra. ‘You see
Samarra and you almost want to build a new city and move all these
people there.’
“Soldiers such as Sgt. Powell desperately want to reach out to the
community, but they're mired in daily skirmishes. Residents have fled,
and a 7-mile-long, 5-foot-high earthen wall that U.S. soldiers built
around the city last August has failed to keep out the insurgents.
“Many of the American troops who patrol the city say they don't see
much hope for Samarra. Some officers privately worry that the city
will fall to insurgents as American troops withdraw." Already,
roadside bomb attacks are increasing, with at least 15 going off in
January.
And it’s hard to tell who is in the enemy. U.S. military officials
suspect that many of the Iraqi soldiers, including a company
commander, are on the insurgents' payroll, possibly in league with
terror master Zargawi. Yet the 101st Airborne plans to hand over the
town to the Iraqi police and army by July 1.
One recent day, which Lasseter describes in vivid detail, a
.50-caliber machine gun, on the roof of a schoolhouse, manned by a
21-year-old Texan name Michael Pena blasted an unarmed man on the
street into oblivion. Horrified soldiers rushed to the Iraqi, or what
was left of him—his organs were now slithering out—and watched him
die, as he praised god and muttered, “Why? Why?”
“Haji, I don’t know,” an American soldier replied.
A few days later, Lasseter finds the gunner, Pena, still manning the
machine gun on the same roof. Pena doesn’t say a word about the man he
killed but he is boiling with frustration.
"No one told me why I'm putting my life on the line in Samarra, and
you know why they didn't?" Pena asks. "Because there is no f------
reason."
Perhaps Vice President Cheney, or his new press secretary, Katharine
Armstrong, can explain that to him.
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/columns/pressingissues_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1002034521
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Werner Herzog's "Lessons of Darkness" continues, in reality, not just on
DVD....
And in that time, men will seek death, but they will not find it,
For death will flee from them....
There are events which change "things". Hitler may have been one.
Far more than the Soviet Union, Germany's course thru the 1930s
may have been determined more by one man than by a movement ("party") --
although we will never know what Trotsky would have done with
that so-unhappy country and people....
George W Bush looks like another. This guy *is* the 20th hijacker (only
metaphorically, of course -- we know he doesn't go looking for opportunities
to do flight time).
The classic Greeks, however, would not have been too pessimistic
about Mr. Bush, for they believed (as we may not) that:
He who, venturing high above his place,
mistakes what is-not for what-is,
Loses his place in the end.
AKA hubris. (Perhaps Lyndon Johnson was the
last [classical] Greek?)
\brad mccormick
--
Let your light so shine before men,
that they may see your good works.... (Matt 5:16)
Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21)
<![%THINK;[SGML+APL]]> Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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Visit my website ==> http://www.users.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/
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