Letters to the Editor
had_enough
Published Letters: 817 Editor's Choice: 48
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why, why, why
[Read the article: George Tenet, spook for all seasons]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Mack wrote, in part:
And that I suppose is my point. As a lawyer, I regularly find myself asking clients, why did you do that, what were you thinking. In general, the most diabolical messes I ever find a client in usually gets the response of “it just seemed like a good idea at the time” with no why or wherefore. The Iraq war is one of those messes – no rationale, no solid analysis, a whole lot of lying and indeed self-deception. The other huge danger is underestimating the opponent, or assuming the other guy is stupid or incompetent.
-- MacK..
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I'm sure there's some truth to this. However, this was not an entirely ad-hoc affair. There is a clear,documented record that Bush had told associates directly, before the 2000 coup (no, it wasn't an election. The GOP lost in Florida, but committed vote-fraud to throw the election to the SCOTUS) that he had to be a "War President". So, it was a foregone conclusion that we would have a war, probably with Iraq. You did mention that war was pre-determined by Cheney, apparently, so no real argument there.
Two items:
1) By the Summer of 2001 it was clear to nearly everyone in Washington that, absent some kind of unforeseen crisis, Bush would be a one-term president. His straussian notions of demolishing our modern social-safety net, and turning the country over to corporate rule, were being laughed out of Congress, and everywhere else. Rove needed something to get GW re-elected. Nothing was forthcoming...until September 11, 2001.
2) The attack on the World Trade Center was tailor-made for Rove's purposes. Except for one problem, and it was a big problem: most of the terrorists were from Saudi Arabia, Salafists or Salafi sympathizers whose sponsors had, for years, been paid off by the Saudi Royals in that ongoing deal with the devil the Saudi government has been engaged in, to keep power. In short, any real investigation of 9/11 was going to lead straight back to the Saudi Royals, and their long overt and covert financial support of the most extremist elements in their society, including the jihadis in Afghanistan, which is where bin Laden comes in. None of this is conspiracy mumbo-jumbo, it's been public record for years, and outlined in a number of recent books.
In short, the Saudis were using quite a lot of OUR money, paid to them for oil, to finance the people who financed the 9/11 attacks. The connection is not direct, but it's not non-existent, either.
So, we couldn't go after the real, root cause of the 9/11 attacks. But we could go after bin Laden in Afghanistan. So we did. The notion that we let bin Laden escape is hardly far-fetched. After all, a boogey man in the shadows was far more useful than a dead terrorist. This is hardly arguable. Any reasonably intelligent political advisor to the Bush team would have said as much. And Rove is much more than reasonably intelligent.
The Afghan war was insufficent though. Bush and Rove and Cheney felt they needed more. And that may be where the Bozo-factor Mack writes about enters the equation. At that point, the Iraq war is probably highly overdetermined. However, a few salient points are worth considering:
A) We couldn't--or wouldn't--go after the real actors in the 9/11 attacks...the real actors in the ongoing Islamist Jihad. That would upset a carefully made political deal made by one of our largest oil suppliers.
B) Bush needed a war to be re-elected, and the Afghan war was insufficient, apparently, for that purpose.
C) X-factors: Bush's oedipal neuroses; Cheney's savage desire for war; the need to blame and punish someone other than the Saudis for the 9/11 attacks; the convenience of an endless "war on terror"; the numerous political benefits to the GOP of a war in the Middle East; the enormous opportunities for profit in a fine little war with Iraq.
Short of a genuinely truthful explanation from Bush and Cheney, assuming they could even give one at this point, this seems fairly convincing to me. You can re-arrange the blocks however you like, but to simply say Bush and Cheney were bozos, even if they were, and are, is insufficient.
I hope to be alive long enough to read thorough histories of this time, by writers with access to good sources. At some point our understanding of this moment in history will likely be as complete as our understanding of the medacity and incompetence that precipitated WWI. Too soon for that, now.
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yup, you're a commander guy
[Read the article: "I'm the commander guy"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]....as long as you can fire commanders at will when they disagree with you.
(how in hell have we tolerated this imbecile for so long? Even if he's always pandering to his right-wing nutball base, this is just getting ridiculous. How long do we allow this mostly southern, utterly antebellum-in-spirit, right-wing, nut-case voting block of foolish white males to run the entire country? If we don't stop this shit the South really will have won, finally, if it hasn't already. Every time Shrub opens his idiot mouth, he's talking to that block of southern, white, male voters...even if a lot of them live in the West and Midwest... these people and their "values" --such as they are--shouldn't be running anything, let alone a country supposedly founded on Enlightenment principles, however flawed. Phooey.)