If we are getting Bush’s best, God save us from a bad day.
What’s new in this article? If you ask Bush 1000 times if he thinks the Iraq war was a mistake, he will say “no” 1000 times. Ask him again, and you’ll get the same answer.
All I see in this article is sloppy reporting. There is no direct quote from Bush to substantiate either the article’s title or the claims made in the first paragraph (from which the blurb in the OP was taken). I’d like to see the exact questons asked in the interview and the exact response from Bush to each question.
Is that it, John? That the best you can do for him, suggest that maybe he was taken out of context by those dastardly liberals over the Washington Post? Are you expecting some denial from the WH? Some “clarificiation” that will make it all go away?
Strawman. I never said anything about liberals. Can you show me the quotes in the article that validate the title and the stuff in the first paragraph?
I have no idea. Frankly, I wouldn’t be too surprised if the article does in fact reflect Bush’s thinking. But none of that would be new, and the reporter does a terrible job substantiating his claims.
We made good use of them against the Taliban, who they didn’t like.
But they were friendly with Al Qaeda - hell, some of them were former members or on the payroll.
Using them against Bin Laden was bad strategy, no matter the excuses used to eliminate accountability.
You don’t go to war on “commonly believed”. You go to war on evidence. Info from people the CIA tells you are criminals and liars is not good evidence. Blatant lies are not good evidence. Yes, they may be commonly believed - but you damn well better get proof before you go in. We didn’t. The only possible extenuating circumstance is an imminent threat, and Bush has admitted there wasn’t one.
The weapons inspections were looking for evidence, and if you notice near the end Saddam was giving them more freedom and they were discovering a distinct lack of WMD. This is likely one of the reasons we had to rush to war with insufficient numbers and equipment - we sacrificed lives to get in before our claims were debunked.
First of all, even if it were only the Sunni minority against us, that doesn’t change the fact that we were woefully unprepared for resistance. Again - the army has complained that they had such insufficient forces that they had to let nuclear material be looted for use in potential dirty bombs. We didn’t have armor on our vehicles. We disrespected the lives of our military men and women. We weren’t prepared - I don’t see how you can even debate that.
Second, even IF we may have been welcomed by the rest of Iraq, we wore out our good feeling when we allowed torture and showed lack of any respect for their lives or dignity. At this point we are just creating more and more hatred of us.
Your own cite says they are at “65 percent electricity”. Baghdad gets 6 hours a day. The unemployment is 70%. Halliburton doesn’t hire many Iraqis. What do you expect them to do with no jobs?
http://www.reliefweb.int/rw/rwb.nsf/AllDocsByUNID/846fd96df1b5d45149256f1100135dd8
The government conceded as of September (a few months ago) that they had barely begun to repair Iraq, spending only 1 billion of the 18 billion set aside for repair. And how long has it been since we went in?
Lots of people expected it. It’s just that the Bush administration had fallen for Chalabi’s lies, and actually thought that bringing him along would give legitimacy.
They thought they would be treated as liberators, and they were as wrong as you can get. The army and intelligence agencies told them time and again that their strategy wouldn’t work, that there weren’t enough troops, that Chalabi was lying to them, but they simply wouldn’t hear it. They only heard what they wanted.
No. He has betrayed you, Brutus (shouldn’t that be your job, given your name 
).
I believe that you thought he would take action to improve his information gathering and resources.
But this latest declaration shows he has no such plans. He is not going to hold anyone accountable, least of all himself, for the mistakes. In fact he is going the other way - eliminating anyone who is not a yes man.
Not only that, but he deceived you, waiting until after the election to tell you that nobody would be held accountable, and nothing would change. Doesn’t that make you angry? I get the feeling that the anger of intelligent conservatives at this administration has to boil over sometime.
And the headline says “Bush Says Election Ratified Iraq Policy” And the quote has, well, quote marks around it. Which I take to mean the verbatim words of GeeDubya. Is there a subtle intepretation that makes those words mean something different to what I think it means?
Pending further advisement, I remain politely skeptical.
There is that fellow Makhtadi (sp?). Pretty sure he’s one of them Shia. You could look it up, we were in firefights with his followers. I’m willing to stretch being fired upon as a pretty sincere statement of non-welcome. No doubt you have an alternative explanation.
Do you seriously think that Brutus cares that he was decieved? It is what he wants to hear, so it is natural to accept it. Any partisan would. He also doesn’t care that nothing would change, because he thinks things are peachy keen in Iraq, Afghanistan, and at home.
Regarding the power issue, it is somewhat vague and misleading. Saddam had dilapidated power plants that were poorly managed, and most of the power in the country was diverty to Baghdad, leaving them powerless but supplying Saddam’s oasis. What we did was re-route the system so that the outlaying areas got more of the electricity, at the expense of Baghdad, resulting in a greater overall electricity situation, but a worse one in Baghdad. So most reports are misleading and biased. It is one of those political ink blot tests, or a glass is half full or half empty situations.
Regarding the intelligence that Bush went into the war with, it was spotty at best. “Most people” believed Saddam had WMDs because that’s the kind of person Saddam is. It doesn’t take much “evidence” to convince people of something they already think is true. The “Saddam has WMDs” argument is a holdover from the Gulf War. It never went away, it just got quieter… no one ever bothered to provide any evidence about it, but the meme continued to float around. This is why there were UN weapons insepection committees constantly operating in Iraq. They had found nothing after 10 years of looking, but Bush swooped in with “evidence” spoon fed to him, a few grainy satellite photos of vague structures and a few rumors some guy told the CIA that proved to be utter lies, sprinkled with some completely made up Al Qaeda story. Like I said, it is just what they wanted to hear.
I am unaware that the Northern Alliance (whose leader was killed by AQ members shortly before 9/11) was on the payroll of AQ, or that they were chummy. I don’t think anyone else is aware of that, either, as it isn’t true.
But to call it a bad strategy is silly. For one, it was the only strategy available to us at the time. I am not going into another schpiel about logistics and Afghanistan, but suffcient to say: They place is a shithole, and it is incredibly difficult to to move troops in and out of the urban areas, much less the mountains. What is your plan B? Airdrop the 82nd on Tora Bora and hope for the best?
There is an astonishing condescension present in you guys. Golly, of course, the intelligen conservatives must be at the verge of boiling over. :rolleyes:
While supporting existing insurgency (oops, is that a naughty word?) to help a state overthrow another state is a concept as old as war itself, yes, much more could have been done that wasn’t. Given that we’ve had 3 years to make some real change in Afghanistan, the country is no better off today than it was a week after the Taliban were driven out. More troops could have been deployed, certainly. More structure could have been given to the Afghani government, and more security could have been left in place to make sure said structure stayed up. Instead, most resources were redirected at Iraq.
When you find one, let us know.
That isn’t condescension, friend Brutus, that’s hope. A prayerful hope, that honest conservatives will place conscience above partisanship. Its been done before. When the left forced through the Civil Rights Acts, they wrote off the South for a generation. They knew it when they did it, that the electoral and political consequences would be enormous. The handed the cynical wing of the right the means to clobber us for years. And they did. Gleefully.
When have the Tightie Righties ever made such a sacrifice, in the name of doing what was right?
If they bail out on GeeDubya, there will be consequences, sure. Nothing like that, I daresay. The Bush toadies in the House and Senate will be flushed out, but there are men standing in the wing eager to replace them. And you still got the grave and growing threat to the sanctity of marriage from the Homintern to rely on. Might not lose more than one mid-term election, maybe not even that.
Is that so grave a sacrifice? Wasn’t for the left, they stepped right up.
That is funny, considering that a higher percentage of Republicans voted for the Act than did Democrats. Tell me, did Rove have something to do with it? He really is The Wizard of Space and Time, isn’t he?
Regardless, it’s sort of amusing to hear you guys wax eternal about partisanship: When it is an issue you won’t budge on, it is because you are being the very pillars of princicples and justice. When we do it, it’s because we are base partisan hacks.
Iraq.
That bit about Rove probably embarasses you by now. I’ll overlook it.
Once upon a time there was such a thing as liberal Republicans, men committed to social and civil equality, at least in terms of political rights. Honorable men, those. And there were creatures known as Southern Democrats, bigots who would rightly be considered a blight on any party. A lot of them ceased to be Democrats. Wanna guess which party they joined? A hint, it starts with an “R”…
Are you about to suggest that GeeDubya and Co. knew that a political debacle would result from this principled stand, but went ahead and made the sacrifice? Is that really what you’re going to try and sell here? You see, in your desire to be pithy and succinct, you’ve left quite a bit out with that one word retort. Needs a bit of fleshing out, I should think.
And if such a principled stand is what we are seeing, whats with all the weaseling?
This is the best description of the events I have found. It is unbiased, and gives credit for the earlier sucess of the Afghan campaign. Our own government admits that the warlords and their men had a conflict of interest - some had worked for AQ, others were paid.
One of the warlords the US used against Bin Laden:
“Known to many as a ruthless player in the regional smuggling business, Ghamsharik was given a rousing party on his return, including a 1,000-gun salute. He became the Jalalabad commander of the Eastern Shura. But he still didn’t have the support of his own Afghan tribesmen (Khugani). Many of them, in fact, were proud to admit that they worked for Al Qaeda inside the Tora Bora base as well as in several nearby bases.”
Another:
A key powerbroker, Maulvi Younus Khalis, a Jalalabad patriarch who supported bin Laden, had stacked the Shura with his own sympathizers. “The Americans can bomb all they want, they’ll never catch Osama,”
Another:
“Our problem was that the Arabs had paid him more, and so Ilyas Khel just showed the Arabs the way out of the country into Pakistan,” Mr. Musa adds.
And:
“We are not interested in killing the Arabs,” Mr. Gul went on to say. “They are our Muslim brothers.”
Finally:
There were only 21 bedraggled Al Qaeda fighters who were taken prisoners. “No one told us to surround Tora Bora,” Mr. Zahir complained. “The only ones left inside for us were the stupid ones, the foolish and the weak.”
The outcry about the lack of armored vehicles for the troops, and Rumsfeld’s comments on it, did not come entirely from Democrats.
Also, you know very well that the army has complained that it had nowhere near enough troops to secure Iraq, and that it was actually forced to let nuclear material be looted and potentially used in dirty bombs. That isn’t a partisan issue, is it?
Support for the war, even among Bush supporters, is decreasing as the facts about the deceit and egregious errors become known.
And now Bush tells his supporters that he isn’t going to do anything about it? That he is going to continue to make the same mistakes? That he absolutely refuses any accountability for anyone?
I have no doubt that some intelligent conservatives are going to get fed up. Whether it is enough to influence the political landscape significantly, I don’t know.
All I can do is hope.
My mistake. It was YOUR sloppy reporting, not the guys who wrote the article. Their title isn’t really a bad summary of what Bush said, but yours is. I didn’t originally notice the difference.
But what’s really confusing is how the reporters get this (my emphasis):
from this:
Certainly one could INFER from Bush’s actions that the reporters were correct (he hasn’t fired anyone associated with the Iraq war), but it’s a terrible interpretation of what Bush actually said, assuming the quote is what they are paraphrasing. If it isn’t, then why not give us the actual quote?
Further fissures: Christine Todd Whitman, Bush’s first EPA Administrator, did not leave the EPA “to be closer to her family” after all. She left because even for HER … and her defense of the environment could be described as lukewarm by many standards … the Bush administration wouldn’t let her do ANYTHING to defend the enviroment. They hung her out to dry on Kyoto. Dick Cheney called her incessantly to make sure she didn’t do ANYTHING that went counter to the interests of her big biz buddies.
Now she’s written what – for her – is a tell-all book about the way the Bush admin. has shafted the environment. She decries the Pubbie abandonment of environmental issues under Bush.
This is a MAJOR fracture within the Pubbie structure, because Whitman’s family is Old Money in Pubbie circles, a family right up with the Bushes themselves.
Speaking as a Dem, yum, yum, couldn’t happen to a more deserving political party.
It was an answer to a question.
Q: Why hasn’t anyone been held accountable, either through firings or demotions, for what some people see as mistakes or misjudgments?
A: “We had an accountability moment, and that’s called the 2004 elections,”
It makes it pretty clear what he is saying. As far as he is concerned, the “accountability” thing has passed.
Of course, he didn’t tell us this before the election. “By the way, if you vote for me you are eliminating all responsibility for mistakes made by anyone in the government, and I will therefore not fix the problems, 'cuz you’re voting them out of existence.”
Where in the article are you getting that from? I can’t find it.
It’s not in the article, you have to look at the actual transcript of the interview:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A12570-2005Jan15.html
These are some rather elaborate rhetorical pirouettes you are performing here, John.
If, as you say, one can “certainly infer” from Bush’s actions that the reporter’s assessment is correct, how then is that a “terrible” interpretation? If you want to try and infer bias on the part of the reporters, some dishonest attempt to twist GeeDubya’s words, say so. You seem to sidle up to the suggestion but won’t actually make it.
And note: the President says that the American people made an assessment of two versions of what’s going on in Iraq, and chose his. One is compelled to the conclusion that Bush’s assessment is that things are going well, and this has been proven true by the electorate. Nothing wrong with this reasoning, then, in John Mace’s book? All perfectly hunky-dory? Avaiable evidence assures you that this is an entirely reasonable conclusion?
Logic like this makes baby Jesuits cry.