Now that is what I call a leak about not leaking… seems the White House is a battleground for Egos and power.
The more horrendous the bombing, the greater the number of casualties, the better things are going.
The 200+ casualties are a sign of how well things are going.
Ummmm…
That should be titled
Bush Proposes a Metric for Iraq
Or since Bush doesnt know the metric system:
Bush Proposes a Imperial System for Iraq
Am I the only one who’s noticed a very loud silence from one entire wing of the political spectrum here recently, now that Rummy’s confirmed that even the Administration doesn’t believe the Administration line?
C’mon, guys, you have to have opinions about this.
I have an opinion about this. War is difficult, and the only people that actually believed this war and subsequent rebuilding process would be a cakewalk are apparently left-wingers such as yourself, who are now using what was obvious to the rest of us to try to score some sort of political points. The mere fact that the road we’re travelling is difficult or long doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t be travelling it. And the mere fact that right-wingers aren’t joining these debates should not signal to you that the Bush Administratin is wrong. It’s just that the outcome of a debate over “Is the Rebuilding Effort in Iraq Difficult” is so monumentally unimportant that they can’t muster the energy to post.
Limbaugh’s on “vacation”, so the Usual Suspects haven’t gotten their talking points yet.
Agis, your post is so disingenuous as to be laughable. In a spate of belated honesty, you and all the Iraq apologists have conveniently forgotten the myriad of concocted justifications for invasion in the first place. In the most basic terms, the Bush administration overrode with great success the objections of the public and the Congress by convincing both that not only would the war indeed be a “cakewalk”, but that it would be a cheap cakewalk. “Long” never entered into the equation in the public debate except as a word intentionally tossed into speeches to provide plausible deniability down the road.
The neo-cons are the ones who believed it would be a cakewalk, the proof of which is scattered all over the airwaves, the Internet, and in every conservative think-tank in America.
So you subscribe to the theory that Rummy, Wolfowitz et. al. were cynically lying their asses off in order to bring naive lefties onboard for their cakewalk of a war ? Why do you hate America so much ?
What a pile of hot, steaming, unadulterated crap.
In the debates during the run-up to the war (and during the war, too) we lefties kept on saying, “aftermath, aftermath, AFTERMATH, the war may be easy, but it’s gonna be a tough aftermath.” At that time, one had to practically hold a gun to the Bush Administration’s metaphorical head to get them to talk about plans for the aftermath in even the most vague terms. The general message from the right, back then, was “don’t worry about it. Once we topple Saddam, everything will be fine.” And afterwards, we got the big “Mission Accomplished” banner, way prematurely.
So tell me again, how obvious was it to “the rest of us” besides us lefties, that the rebuilding process - and not the war itself - was going to be the real test?
Not by itself, no. But the reality that the long, difficult part of the road was barely mentioned when the Administration sold the American public on the war last fall, does kinda suggest that their popular mandate for this war extended only through the military victory last spring, and doesn’t extend to this long, hard slog. This being a representative democracy and all, the Bushies are kinda out on a limb here.
And there’s the real question of whether we know how to reach the other end. Last fall and winter, the discussion never got that far, because it didn’t even talk about the road at all, past the first mile or two. And if we don’t know how to reach the other end, then we shouldn’t be travelling the road. But here we are, stuck on this damned road.
OK, I’ll concede this one. That even the SecDef agrees that the happy face that Bush has been putting on the war is total BS, is totally unimportant. That we can’t believe a thing these turkeys say, despite the fact that they’re running the country, is trivial. Right?
This is the problem. Some people seem utterly incapable of seeing the world except as colored by Paul Krugman columns and Howard Dean speeches. Admittedly, this problem exists on both sides, but the posts in this thread highlight the lefties, so I’m going to pick on them.
kwildcat: You acknowledge that the Bush Admin said the war and rebuilding efforts were going to be long, but you’re apparently incapable of acknowledging the obvious fact that they meant it. Instead, you try to twist it around into an accusation that they were lying when they said the war would be long. You’ve got to do that because otherwise, you’d lose your ability to criticize them on this point, right?
Squink: You accuse me of hating America because – after creating a strawman wholly absent of any shred of my argument – you remember that Al Franken’s book says that anyone who criticizes the Bush Admin is accused of hating America. Never mind that I’ve neither criticized the government, nor accused you or anyone else of hating America. Al Franken said it, so it’s got to be funny and true, right?
Yes, it’s hard to believe that conservatives are avoiding this thread.
Hardly. The admin’s hawks stated repeatedly before the war that it would be EASY, and that the Iraqi’s would greet us as liberators, with open arms. Now you claim that no one but naive lefties believed them. Since Rummy and Wolfowitz are not lefties, it follows that they didn’t believe what they were saying at the time they said it. That makes them LIARS in your eyes.
I doubt it was obvious to anyone, either on the left or right. But then again, most of us thought the actual war part would be much, much harder. We expected much worse casualties in the war, as opposed to the rebuilding. As for myself, I expected the rebuilding would be more difficult than the war, but I expected the war to be a test, too.
Certainly, there were those on the far left and far right that predicted the most dire results from the war: increased terrorist attacks in the US; a destabilized Middle East; the spread of chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons throughout the wacko organizations in the Middle East. If that’s what you mean by “AFTERMATH,” then I’ll concede that the left harped on it more than the right. But the reality is much different than those on the left predicted. There have not been an increase in terrorist attacks on the US; the Middle East does not appear to have destabilized; and WMD have apparently not spread throughout the Middle East.
That’s not to say that the righties were correct on all counts either (WMD, I’m looking at you), but your insinuation that the lefties accurately predicted the aftermath of the war is just plain silly.
Do you really think the American people are so stupid that they didn’t realize that overthrowing the government in Iraq would entail some sort of rebuilding effort on our part? And why do you assume they weren’t informed about the potential aftermath when, as you said, "In the debates during the run-up to the war (and during the war, too) we lefties kept on saying, “aftermath, aftermath, AFTERMATH, the war may be easy, but it’s gonna be a tough aftermath.” " Do you think they didn’t hear anything from lefties? I think you give the American people too little credit.
And now a well-respected poster appears to have fallen into the same trap as the other posters I just mentioned. The happy face the Bush Admin has been putting on the war is no more “total BS” than the pictures of Armaggeddon being painted by the opposition on the left. The Bush Admin was no less correct about the war and its aftermath than those that were (and still are) predicting devastating consequences. And the mere fact that Bush does’t lead his speeches with predictions of dire consequences doesn’t mean that he is lying.
Interesting. Did I say that? Because I don’t believe the Bush Admin said the war and subsequent rebuilding effort would be easy. In fact, as I think I pointed out earlier to kwildcat, and you have conveniently ignored, the Bush Admin actually said that it would be a long process that would require a national committment. I have no idea how you’ve translated that into “easy.”
I’d appreciate it if you’d restrict your responses to arguments that I’ve actually made, please.
[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by Rashak Mani *
You know that leaving Saudi Arabia helps and I know it too… but it was never clearly (or never at all ? ) stated as being a reason. Instead the WMD circus and other excuses were cooked up.
** It was and it wasn’t. In Bush’s pre-war speeches, he threw up many reasons for war to see what would stick to the wall. WMD was the one that stuck. He also talked about pulling troops out of Saudi Arabia starting in August. It is my firm belief that this is the reason for the war. It just doesn’t have a glamorous sound to it. The President would be saying that we are giving in to the wishes of terrorists by leaving the area. A Withdrawal from Saudi Arabia required a solution to the stalemate with Saddam. This wasn’t a secret among the major players in the UN and yet nothing was offered. Germany, France, and Russia could easily have swapped positions with the United States and deployed troops in Saudi Arabia. Instead, they chose to keep things the way they were and let the United States take all the abuse.
** Diplomacy is for these things… you convince people of the idea that certain things must be done. Now most said that it was the wrong moment and way to take down Saddam. Especially when the big problem is terrorism… not Saddam. Was War the only way to take him down too ? This urgency to take down Saddam before any other options could be presented or relevance of the WMD threat. naturally stank of Oil Interests.…
Diplomacy is a great thing when someone bothers to use it. Instead of helping the United States the UN’s solution was to continue doing what they were doing. That is not a solution. And the stink of oil would be from countries that use Iraqi Oil, which the United States does not. Kuwait oil, yes, Saudi oil, yes. That is why the troops are there in the first place. To keep Saddam out of those 2 countries.
** As for the “blitzkrieg” style of invasion… what else did you expect them to do ? You have loads of tanks and you want little casualties. Fast and mobile war were tech prevails over numbers. I disagree with you that it was plausible to capture high ranking people by this fast war… Baghdad has a few million people. Way too easy to dissapear no matter how fas you invade. Most Saddam cronies are being given in by informants instead now…
As for the surrendering of officers. Consider the common (and correct) notion of the US invasion being illegal … would you surrender to Bush’s troops if you were a Iraqi general ? Afterall if the US isn’t respecting UN charter why would the “bloodlusting and revengeful” americans respect human rights ? Whoa in fact they didn’t… see Guantanamo. Plus the fact that every Iraqi general has a crime or two on his resume. Surrendering to the americans was to be dangerous and humiliating to any fool that accepted it. This was no formal war either in legitimacy or in the balance of power among the opponents. A formal surrender would never have been forthcoming IMHO. **
I have no Idea how Iraqi Generals viewed the war but your point about personal civil crimes is well put.
Sigh.
Wolfowitz Concedes Iraq Errors
I love the way Wolfy admits in that last bit that the Admin’s enemy here was not Saddam, or terrorists, but reality itself. You can only have reality as an enemy if you’re off in cloud-cuckoo-cakewalk land.
So maybe they did believe that Iraq’d be easy. But that goes against your argument that only the naive lefties believed it’d be easy. Take your choice. Which of your two conflicting arguments do you want to declare to be “Full of Shit” ?
Sure would be cool if we had some sort of a metric to be able to tell how quickly we were travelling on the road, whether we were going backward or forward though wouldn’t it? I don’t remeber that last time that the Bush Admin came out and said, “Gee, I don’t know if what we’re doing is helping or not.”
So we’re not really even sure if we’re “travelling” the road or not.
What about the debate over whether we’re going about the process in the right way? What about the debate over how things are going over there?
The only thing that’s “Full of Shit” here is your assumption that “underestimate” means that they thought it was going to be “easy.”
Oh, wait. There’s also the fact that you originally said this:
Evidence that the Admin admitted they may have underestimated the problem does not mean that they stated anything before the war.
And again, how this means that anyone hates America is beyond me.
Actually, it was Kenneth Adelman, a member of the Defense Policy Board who used the term “cakewalk.” While the DPB is selected by members of the Bush Admin, I’m not sure it’s technically correct to call Mr. Adelman a member of the Bush Admin.
All good points. And all of those topics are certainly worthy of debate. But the topic of debate here appears to be whether Rummy has lied about whether the Iraqi rebuilding is “easy.” That’s not the same thing.