In his Article titled "No graceful exit", Walter Shapiro

writes (in the 10th paragraph):

It is telling that this week Newt Gingrich -- the

smartest strategist and the most maladroit practitioner

in the Republican Party ...

Is it Mr. Shapiro or one of his editors who thinks that

"maladroit" has the opposite of its correct meaning?

For the life of me, I can't figure out why people credit our Iraq policy with anything at all benign or noble. Our Iraq policy is only about oil. Babies have to die for this? But of course! It's a given! That's George W. Bush's last concern. His first concern is, how to make himself and his friend in the oil business as rich as possible. He has the resouces of this country at his command. He can kill off as many of our young men and women as it takes, to secure control of one of the world's richest sources of oil. He has never had to do a lick of work in his life. He has never cared for the convenience or safety or wellbeing any anyone but himself. This monster has enjoyed support from all the right people, including a large number of leading Democrats. So he can do as he wishes. That is still true now that control of Congress has passed over to the Democrats. George W. Bush has stolen his last election. But by having done so, twice, in recent years, he has been enabled to do catastrophic damage to this country. George W. Bush should stand at the Hague and answer for his crimes. Instead, he will retire to Crawford with a pension he doesn't need. At last, though, maybe his arrogance, indolence and stupidity will not be a hazard to the rest of the world.

Enough said? No American should hold his or her head high, no American. Let that weigh on the conscience of the American Elite. With any luck, the day of corporate national policy and corporate policy is coming to an end. Now, if only half of the US economy wasn't owned by China, we could have some leverage over the other humanitarian crisis in Darfur!!! Wishful thinking from the "Greatest Nation on Earth".

Linda M. wrote:

But as bad as Iraq is, it's not the worst problem we have. The ubiquitous War on Terror was mishandled from the start.

**********

And this, folks, may be the true nut of the matter.

I realize this is off-topic, but...

If you haven't read William Langewiesche's superb, and chilling, article in the December Atlantic, do so as soon as you can.

"How to Get a Bomb" appears to have more understanding of just how dangerous Bush and Cheney have made our world than they will ever have. And it has a number of good suggestions in it for how to make us a lot safer, none of which have been followed, apparently, by the current incompetents now running things.

I sometimes can't help wondering if the ruling elite in this country actually *wants* a terrorist to set off a home-made 10-20 kiloton highly-enriched-uranium bomb in a major US city. They they could just suspend the Constitution, and congress, and the courts, and rule by decree, and by a domestic military and police force.

Because the way we're acting, right now? It looks to me like we WANT a terrorist to make a bomb. And use it.

Read the article. At the end, Langewiesche, with admirable restraint, points out "in the end, if you wanted a bomb and calculated the odds, you would have to admit that they were stacked against you, simply because of how the world works--and that this may be why others like you, if there have been any, have so far not succeeded. You would understand though, that the odds are not impossible. You would of course have many concerns as you moved ahead. But perhaps the thing that should worry you the least in the American government's war on terror."

That's it. Not only have Bush and Cheney and their stooges in Congress squandered half a TRILLION taxpayer dollars on a war fought solely for the Current Occupant's political benefit..and, worst of all, a war that has created thousands more potential terrorists who would love to detonate a nuclear device on our soil, they have, in their idiocy, left us, if not wide open, certainly deeply vulnerable, to a terrorist nuke.

And if that ain't a fucking impeachable offense, I don't know what is.

Georgyboy should have tried it on his bunch, but he could not because the bunch was who really made the deciders decisions.Hitler started a war and what did it get him? A suicide at 56 and a lost war. George is still alive but his war is lost. Time to face reality. Germany got democracy BACK after 1945 because it existed there before the Fuehrer. Iraq is a completely different matter. They never had it, dont really want it; its different ethnic and religious groups have to overcome their differences first. The Germans did that almost 400 years ago in a war that lasted thirty years and needed two different peacetreaty locations (one catholic one protestant). Does Shrub really think he wants the US to hang in Iraq another 27 years so that some future president can truly say mission accomplished? If he really does he must be not only an idiot but a complete one. Time to admit the war was miserably planned and destined to be lost. Democratization is a matter of convincing people, but not with brutal power. It never worked, why should it now?

"There was something inherently comic about a Bush administration memo complaining that a foreign leader is the captive of 'a small circle' of advisors who are 'coloring his actions and his interpretations of reality.'"

Well put. I'm glad I'm not the only one who noticed the supreme irony in Hadley's memo.

It's difficult to imagine what "Stay-the-Course" advocates ever envisioned for the outcome of this Iraq adventure. Three years ago it was already clear that the situation was a thousand miles from the nation-building ideal that supporters of the war had been hoping for. Even if grudgingly you had been willing to accept the pale justification that Iraq was better off without Sadam, and that our military was to serve suitably as the midwife of Iraqi democracy, by the time of Hussein’s capture, these pretenses were already so clearly flawed and misconceived that it appeared one had to be a fool or a demagogue (usually, the two go hand in hand) to not be thinking about ways out of the morass.

Still, the talk from our elected officials about withdrawal strategies, if heard at all, was a mere murmuring; they seemed then--and still do now--incapable of countering the absurd and strident sloganeering that has characterized this new age of the War on Terror: "If we leave now, we've let the people of Iraq down"; equally as preposterous: "If we leave now, we've shown terrorists the limits of American will". Why would nobody answer that the Iraqis themselves didn't want us, and that they'd be better served by an eventual Iraqi Marshall Plan (to be implemented after they sort out their own affairs)? Why would nobody respond that Iraq was not the place to demonstrate America's will in fighting terrorism, and that the manner of fighting terrorism was not by deploying hundreds of thousands of American soldiers as if "Terror" has some physical terrain with neat geographic borders.

Our leaders have bought wholesale the illusion (perpetuated skillfully, if unwittingly, by this President) that we are now in an historic period in which Terror is a part of our daily lives, like a malignant mole. Atrocities are committed both by evildoers (most of whom are Muslims), or by the guardians of all that is good (the West and Israel), but this is all in the new nature of things and is sadly unavoidable. This simplistic worldview has all the flexibility and amorphousness of a cosmic struggle: the conflict between "good" and "evil" is as old as Man. So we should not expect to extricate ourselves from it any time soon. To give material substance to this struggle, we have invented the chaos that is Iraq. Consequently, we can't conceive of a way out.

Certainly, it would be a challenge for our leaders to pitch the idea instead that, though terrorism is despicable and unjustifiable, it is nevertheless rationalizable. People are not inherently evil (or exclusively good), and there is no such axis of evil as that speciously described by the ad men in Bush's inner circle. We should instead use all of our resources to eliminate the root causes of terrorism and to destroy in a surgical and localized way the fanatics who cannot be reasoned with. We should not be fooled into a War on Terror, but should choose a War Against Terrorists. A main campaign in this war will be the battle for ideas, a battle that our leaders (and perhaps much of the American public) is loathe and ill-equipped to fight. Most of us Americans, after all, hate heavy lifting, and this applies as much to philosophy as to other realms.