We Know a Good Deal More Than We're Able To Say Publicly

George Bush, today, on Iraq exit strategy:

"People don't want me making decisions based on politics. They want me making decisions based on the recommendations of our generals on the ground. And that's exactly who I'll be listening to."

He's right, in a way. People should want him to receive vital input from generals on the ground regarding the military situation. But I really hope that people don't want generals on the ground in Iraq deciding for us whether it's worth risking the loss of more American lives for the sake of killing a few violent Sunnis here and there until such time as the Shiites are able to take over the task of killing a few violent Sunnis here and there. That is properly (and, I think, eventually will unavoidably be) a political decision.

Bush, again:

"I'm interested in winning. I want to defeat the terrorists."

Hmmm. "Defeating the terrorists" sounds like it could take years, decades, centuries, or an eternity. And didn't the objective in Iraq have something to do with WMDs? Why is it now about defeating terrorists?

"And I want our troops to come home. But I don't want them to come home without having achieved victory. We've got a strategy for victory."

Well, it's good you have one, I guess, but would you kindly stop telling us that you have a strategy, and start telling us what it is.

With any luck, we won't wait as long to find out what the strategy is as we've waited to find out exactly what kind of WMDs Saddam has and where in Iraq Bush & Cheney think they are.

And CIA Director Porter Goss says of the agency that it knows "a good deal more" about Al Qaida leaders Bin Laden and al-Zarqawi "than we're able to say publicly."

One might hope that would go without saying.

Victory Is a Moving Target?

George Bush, in remarks prepared for a speech at Osan Air Base in South Korea Saturday:

"'And as long as I am the commander-in-chief, our strategy in Iraq will be driven by the sober judgment of our military commanders on the ground. So we will fight the terrorists in Iraq, and we will stay in the fight until we have achieved the victory our brave troops have fought and bled for.'"

Unless his commanders on the ground are telling him that it's still possible for Saddam to acquire WMDs, victory is pretty much achieved, no? I'm sure that's what he means by "victory" — he would never try to rewrite history and claim there was some other objective, would he? I mean, if the purpose of all of this were not the separation of Saddam from his WMDs, it really wouldn't matter whether we found them or not; it wouldn't matter whether the White House twisted WMD intelligence or not; it wouldn't matter whether there were massive intelligence failures or not — and the Bush administration has fought very hard to convince us that all of those things matter very much.

Hillary = the Next Trent?

On his radio show today, Sean Hannity and guest Jeannine Pirro, who is challenging Hillary Clinton for her Senate seat, tried to equate Clinton's attendence at a birthday party for one-time KKK member Robert Byrd with Trent Lott's speech at an observance of Strom Thurmond's birthday, in which he pined for the days of segregation.

I don't know whether any speeches were given at Byrd's celebration, or what Hillary may have said there; I'll go out on a limb and just assume it wasn't anything pro-segregationist. However, this is a good excuse to remind ourselves of what Trent Lott said of Thurmond, who in 1948 ran for President on a pro-segregation platform against Harry Truman and Thomas Dewey:

"I want to say this about my state: When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We're proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn't have had all these problems over all these years, either."

Oh, and speaking of Robert Byrd: boy, I'll bet Bush and Cheney and pretty much everyone in the White House are sorry they didn't heed Byrd's warnings about the risks of rushing to war, don't you imagine? Since the administration was just as bamboozled by that bogus intelligence as anyone else? Gosh, they must feel just awful about so much as having considered going to war now, given the massive intelligence failures and all.

And that Robert Byrd fella happened to be right all along — who'd've thunk?

Now might be as good a time as any to recall some of Byrd's prose, too — this bit from the eve of the passage of the war resolution:

"We are rushing into war without fully discussing why, without thoroughly considering the consequences, or without making any attempt to explore what steps we might take to avert conflict. The resolution before us today is not only a product of haste; it is also a product of presidential hubris. This resolution is breathtaking in its scope. It redefines the nature of defense, and reinterprets the Constitution to suit the will of the Executive Branch. It would give the President blanket authority to launch a unilateral preemptive attack on a sovereign nation that is perceived to be a threat to the United States. This is an unprecedented and unfounded interpretation of the President's authority under the Constitution, not to mention the fact that it stands the charter of the United Nations on its head."

Winning Hearts And Minds

AFP reports that "an Iraqi woman who dramatically confessed on Jordanian television to her role in the deadly multiple bombings on Amman hotels last week had three brothers and a brother-in-law killed by US forces in Iraq."

Bush Remembers Details, Misses Big Picture

George Bush, speaking at Elmendorf Air Force Base, Alaska, Nov. 14: "Some Democrats who voted to authorize the use of force are now rewriting the past. They're playing politics with this issue and they are sending mixed signals to our troops and the enemy. That is irresponsible."

While remembering well what his critics were saying years ago, Bush again seems to have forgotten that the Iraq war resolution some of the critics voted for called for the President to exhaust all diplomatic avenues before resorting to force.

Bush's Iraq-attack is also a violation of U.N. Security Council resolution 1441, which requires that the Security Council, not the White House, make the determination as to the necessity of military action.

There is no mixed message being sent to our troops: we're indebted to them for their service, and are doing all that we can to encourage our leaders to make responsible use of our military.

If, by "the enemy", Bush refers to Saddam, he's in prison, and it makes little difference what message we're sending him. And I think other enemies are probably already as aware as anyone to what extent Bush misled America regarding the urgency of taking military action.

If Bush really wants a unified America, he ought to really lead, and start giving us something we can get unified behind.

Manipulating Intelligence And/Or the Public

National security adviser Stephen Hadley, Sunday, November 13, speaking on CNN's "Late Edition": "Allegations now that the president somehow manipulated intelligence, somehow misled the American people, are flat wrong."

Really?

Perhaps Hadley could review some of the statements made by the Bush administration before and just after the war, and explain, given the intelligence we now know was available to it at the time, and point-by-point, exactly how they are not misleading:

"[Iraq] possesses and produces chemical and biological weapons. It is seeking nuclear weapons... And surveillance photos reveal that the regime is rebuilding facilities that it had used to produce chemical and biological weapons." -President Bush on October 7, 2002 in Cincinnati

"Right now, Iraq is expanding and improving facilities that were used for the production of biological weapons... Iraq has made several attempts to buy high-strength aluminum tubes used to enrich uranium for a nuclear weapon." -President Bush on September 12, 2002 to the UN General Assembly

"Well, there is no question that we have evidence and information that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction, biological and chemical particularly...all this will be made clear in the course of the operation, for whatever duration it takes." -White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer on March 21, 2003 in his daily press briefing

"Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction...What he wants is time, and more time to husband his resources to invest in his ongoing chemical and biological weapons program, and to gain possession of nuclear weapons." -Vice President Cheney on August 26, 2002

"We believe [Saddam Hussein] has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons. I think Mr. El Baradei frankly is wrong." -Vice President Cheney on March 16, 2003 on "Meet The Press"

"There is no doubt in my mind but that they currently have chemical and biological weapons." -Secretary Rumsfeld on January 7, 2003 at a press briefing

"We know where [weapons of mass destruction] are, they are in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad." -Secretary Rumsfeld on March 30, 2003 on ABC's "This Week"

"We've also discovered through intelligence that Iraq has a growing fleet of manned and unmanned aerial vehicles that could be used to disperse chemical or biological weapons across broad areas. We're concerned that Iraq is exploring ways of using these UAVS for missions targeting the United States." -President Bush on October 7, 2002 in Cincinnati

"Iraq has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes and other equipment needed for gas centrifuges, which are used to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons." -President Bush on October 7, 2002 in Cincinnati

"The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." -President Bush on January 20, 2003 in his State Of the Union address

"We know he has been absolutely trying to acquire nuclear weapons and we believe he has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons." -Vice-President Dick Cheney on March 16, 2003

"If there's a problem with intelligence it doesn't mean that anybody misled anybody. It means that intelligence is an art and not a science." -Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz on June 18, 2003

"I think the intelligence was correct in general." -Secretary Rumsfeld on June 19, 2003

"This revisionist notion that somehow this is now the core of why we went to war, a central issue in why we went to war, a fundamental underpinning of the president's decisions, is a bunch of bull." -Ari Fleischer, 2003-Jul-14

"Those who say we haven't found the banned manufacturing devices or banned weapons are wrong. We found them." -President Bush, Krakow, Poland on May 30, 2003

Cornyn Strikes Again

Texas Sen. John Cornyn, Nov. 7, speaking on the Senate floor: "The Democrat leaders' latest accusation that the administration has manipulated intelligence and exaggerated the threat is nothing more than an effort to use the war in Iraq for political gain, and that is shameful."

If Bush neither manipulated intelligence nor exaggerated the threat, then Democrats have nothing to gain, politically or otherwise, from an investigation. What would be shameful, however, is for an administration to intentionally distort its depiction of the state of affairs it feels necessitates military action; if that were the case with the current White House and Iraq, it's vital that Bush be held accountable.

Republicans tend to downplay the significance of the manner in which Bush's Iraq policy was promoted. But war policy is not any policy: it's not like the consequences are lower taxes or better education. This policy's consequences are measured in terms of U.S. military deaths, Iraqi civilian deaths, and so on. The ethical bar for selling a war policy ought to be correspondingly higher.

More Hadley

Hadley:: "Some of the critics today believed themselves in 2002 that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. They stated that belief and they voted to authorize the use of force in Iraq because they believed Saddam Hussein posed a dangerous threat to the American people. For those critics to ignore their own past statements exposes the hollowness of their current attacks."

Those who Hadley describes as having "voted to authorize the use of force in Iraq", according to the text of the resolution, actually voted for the use of diplomacy toward the end of continued monitoring of Iraq's military programs, only authorizing the use of force as a last resort in the event of failed diplomacy. Conveniently for Hadley & Bush's White House, it is almost always true that if you pub no effort into diplomacy, you will fail at it.

Depends On What the Definition Of "Conclusion" Is?

National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley, Thursday, on pre-war intelligence:"We all looked at the same intelligence, and most people -- on the intelligence -- reached the same conclusion." Which conclusion: that pre-emptive war against Iraq was the only option? There was hardly broad agreement on that. I think the real point - that the White House is trying to avoid - is that, while most with access to the Iraq intel may well have agreed that it suggested that Saddam desired and sought the capability to command WMDs, it was only the White House and the real hardcore neocons that insisted the intel was sufficient to warrant immediate military action.

Demagogue Vs. Demagogue

Carter: Americans were misled on war - Nov 4, 2005
Shown live footage of the [Summit of the Americas] protests, [former U.S. president Jimmy] Carter said the United States' reputation in the world is as low as it's been in his lifetime and that the United States has lost its prestige, authority and influence in Latin America. He added, however, that the chief opponent to the Free Trade Area of the Americas, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, is a "demagogue."

Is George Bush less a demagogue than is Chavez?

Anti-Bush Rhetoric In Argentina

Summit city hit by clashes as Bush struggles to push agenda

....

Among anti-US activists in Mar del Plata were Nobel Peace Prize holder Adolfo Perez Esquivel, the populist frontrunner in Bolivia's presidential race, Evo Morales, and Argentine football idol Diego Maradona who received a rapturous ovation.

"I love you. Argentina is great. Let's get rid of Bush," Maradona told the cheering crowd.

Earlier, Maradona called Bush "human rubbish" in comments to AFP as he traveled to Mar del Plata from Buenos Aires in a special train.