Reason To Believe
Retired Marine Corps General Anthony Zinni, who headed Central Command before becoming President Bush's personal emissary to the Middle East, said recently that our nation's current course is "headed over Niagara Falls."That's Al Gore, at NYU in May, quoted at Bruce Springsteen's official site.
The Commander of the 82nd Airborne Division, Army Major General Charles H. Swannack, Jr., asked by the Washington Post whether he believes the United States is losing the war in Iraq, replied, "I think strategically, we are." Army Colonel Paul Hughes, who directed strategic planning for the US occupation authority in Baghdad, compared what he sees in Iraq to the Vietnam War, in which he lost his brother: "I promised myself when I came on active duty that I would do everything in my power to prevent that ... from happening again. " Noting that Vietnam featured a pattern of winning battles while losing the war, Hughes added "unless we ensure that we have coherence in our policy, we will lose strategically."
The White House spokesman, Dan Bartlett was asked on live television about these scathing condemnations by Generals involved in the highest levels of Pentagon planning and he replied, "Well they're retired, and we take our advice from active duty officers."
But amazingly, even active duty military officers are speaking out against President Bush. For example, the Washington Post quoted an unnamed senior General at the Pentagon as saying, " the current OSD (Office of the Secretary of Defense) refused to listen or adhere to military advice." Rarely if ever in American history have uniformed commanders felt compelled to challenge their commander in chief in public.
The Post also quoted an unnamed general as saying, "Like a lot of senior Army guys I'm quite angry" with Rumsfeld and the rest of the Bush Administration. He listed two reasons. "I think they are going to break the Army," he said, adding that what really incites him is "I don't think they care."
In his upcoming book, Zinni blames the current catastrophe on the Bush team's incompetence early on. "In the lead-up to the Iraq war, and its later conduct," he writes, "I saw at a minimum, true dereliction, negligence and irresponsibility, at worst, lying, incompetence and corruption."
Zinni's book will join a growing library of volumes by former advisors to Bush -- including his principal advisor on terrorism, Richard Clarke; his principal economic policy advisor, former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, former Ambassador Joe Wilson, who was honored by Bush's father for his service in Iraq, and his former Domestic Adviser on faith-based organizations, John Dilulio, who said, "There is no precedent in any modern White House for what is going on in this one: a complete lack of a policy apparatus. What you've got is everything, and I mean everything, run by the political arm. It's the reign of the Mayberry Machiavellis."
Army Chief of Staff General Eric Shinseki told Congress in February that the occupation could require "several hundred thousand troops." But because Rumsfeld and Bush did not want to hear disagreement with their view that Iraq could be invaded at a much lower cost, Shinseki was hushed and then forced out.____
It's good, I'm with it, right up until the thud when it's time to say whether Bush is a moron and screwed up, or he's a tool. A moronic tool but a tool. In whose hand?
Nobody seems to be doing that. Because it makes everything really uncomfortable. Because then you have to ask whether or not Kerry and Edwards might be tools as well. Or susceptible to being manipulated as tools. Or something.
As opposed to - Bush did it, get rid of him and there you go.
I would really like to think so too. But nothing I'm seeing, nothing I've seen for the last two years leads me to any other conclusion than that the invasion and occupation of Iraq were done for no other reason than Israel's strategic interest in establishing a kind of dukedom, or empire, in the Middle East.
Oil money was and is bribery, lubricant if you can take the pun. The Halliburton graft and kickback was the same grease for the same wheel. Look at how you never heard anything about Israelis in Iraq. It's right there in the neighborhood, they're our biggest allies in the Middle East, but they have no presence in Iraq whatsoever.
So I'm wondering if maybe it's that the seeming incompetence of this administration and the destruction of Iraq, the demoralizing carnage and the steady persecution of local Iraqi leadership is exactly what was intended. That any kind of free and democratic Iraq, any kind of independent Iraq is unacceptable to the real power behind the invasion and occupation.
Kerry has promised to continue the policies of dominance and control in Iraq; and no one is questioning the overall goal, the invasion itself; and the benefits to Israel, which are real and quantifiable, are never mentioned publicly by anyone. That alone casts a large shadow on all this.
These guys, BushCheney and Co. are villains, everybody's talking that up, but you know you have to say then, if they're the bad guys, then maybe the bad guys aren't really the bad guys - if the good guys are the bad guys, I mean.
What I'm saying is, it wasn't about Saddam and it wasn't about oil, (though oil isn't insignificant, the US now burns 380 million gallons of gasoline a day) but it was about Iraq itself, and the Iraqi people - Muslims, in control of one of the largest oil reserves left in the world. An obstacle to Israel, too close to home.
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In a lot of ways it's like it was with Viet Nam in the late '60's, on the streets and college campuses. Except it's even more dangerous to suggest that we may be in the wrong here, again.
The history of that time in the popular imagination is mostly scruffy hippies carrying signs and "protesting". Kent State, where four unarmed kids were shot down in cold blood by the United States government, is never mentioned outside of college campuses, certainly not on TV.
The beating of demonstrators, the nationwide news blackout that came down in 1970, the violence against peaceful college kids demonstrating against an unjust war, at Arizona State and other places you had to know someone who'd been there to even hear about - in those days before the internet - these things are almost secrets in America today, except to those who lived them. And we were later proved right, our positions were in the main justified, and the government and its supporters were wrong.
And so again I'm wondering, and slowly coming to believe, the bad guys may be here, at home, just like last time.
Surrounded by a huge crowd of misled good-hearted Americans who put their emotions ahead of their minds and do pretty much what they're told to, even when they're being told by people they know are liars and cheats, who care nothing for them, or for their children.
The simmering debate over the role of Jewish neoconservatives in drawing America into war in Iraq erupted with new fury this week. One of America's most respected ex-generals took to the airwaves to charge on CBS News' "60 Minutes" that the war had been fought for Israel's benefit, just days after a similar charge was leveled on the floor of the U.S. Senate.
The retired general, Anthony Zinni, a past chief of the U.S. Central Command and President Bush's former Middle East special envoy, told "60 Minutes" on Sunday that the neoconservatives' role in pushing the war for Israel's benefit was "the worst-kept secret in Washington." Three days earlier, Senator Ernest "Fritz" Hollings, a South Carolina Democrat, rose on the Senate floor to defend a newspaper essay he had written earlier in the month making the same charge. Both men complained that they had been unfairly labeled antisemitic for speaking out.
