Military Intelligence and "Commanders" in Chief

Via As'ad AbuKhalil, I saw this Guardian article and originally posted something at around 6 o'clock. Then Blogger bloggered it. Between that and cache/DNS issues, I've been down for a while.

I guess the best thing you can say regarding the Guardian article--the gist of which is that the Army, like the people running Abu Ghraib, also had as a guide the salacious, shallow, and discredited book called The Arab Mind, by Raphael Patai--is that at least we're getting some insight into just how utterly screwed we are. The volume itself, in the words of some academics, is only useful as doorstop.

The entire neocon mindset seems to be infected with this work, except for perhaps the pResident himself, but anyone watching his speech knows that Bush is completely out of touch. Dubya barely seems to inhabit the same universe as the rest of us. I listened to a little of the C-Span call in, and there are a few people out there who share his planet--but a lot less than normal by that channel's standards. Plenty of folks, even in the Deep South, are skeptical. That's a hell of a bad sign for the Shrub. In particular, a surprising number of people calling themselves Republicans are starting to smell the stench.

At the same time, I have to wonder about those who would throw themselves off a cliff "because the president said we should." Did they sleep through the entire social science curriculum in primary and secondary school?

The more I think about the Bush pResidency, the more I draw a parallel to--Saddam Hussein. Saddam was pretty far out of the loop near the end too. Receiving nothing but the best of assessments, it's no wonder Saddam is useless as an intelligence source these days.

Ronald Reagan set the bar ridiculously low when it came to presidents--in the millimeter range--but George W. Bush doesn't even have to bend over when he walks underneath it. He lends a whole new meaning to "Ribbon Cutter in Chief." There's no way Karl Rove would ever trust him with a pair of scissors. Hell, tonight you could see for yourself: Bush Junior almost threw up a la Bush Senior in Japan a few years back. In the former's case, though, it wasn't jet lag and brocolli that caused it, but the simple, if unusual (for him) syllable combination of "AH boo Grāb." What the hell happened there? Did the tape recording get stuck?

As for the rest of the speech, one word: laff.

The Bush "plan" is yet another triumph of wishful thinking over actual policy. The Green Zone itself is barely better off than under siege , violence is endemic throughout most of the country, unemployment's at 60 percent...and Bush has his head in the coulds, if not up his ass, when it comes to actually doing something, aside from making vague references to the "rebuilding of civil society." Saying Dubya is out to lunch is an insult to those who are merely out to lunch.

Some of the pundits are beginning to notice. It'll be interesting to see how Rove responds. I've noticed a renewed effort to blast the media for not pointing out the "good news," like--I don't know, the fact that some people at Abu Ghraib weren't abused? Or that 60 percent unemployment means 40 percent employment? That at least it wasn't a dozen contractors killed in Fallujah, or that we "only" killed as many as a thousand residents of the city during the ensuing battle? That violence is contained to only 15 of the 18 provinces?

Sorry, but that won't fly with a large chunk of the public. This was supposed to be an "easy" war.

The other tack I noticed in Bush's speech is the ongoing justification that this war was necessary as a "battle" in the war on terror. That's a tough sell, and it's evident that the neocons don't really have their hearts in it. Long slogs of wars aren't really part of the battle plan. A "highly mobile" force kind of loses their mobility when caught in a quagmire. And the public has evinced little or no desire to learn anything about the region. That's more bad news for them: people don't like soldiers dying for a place they don't give a shit about.

If I were Bush, I'd be pretty worried. The speech didn't convince anyone but the true believers. They won't, by themselves, deliver four more years. Dubya is going to have to rely on his ultimate stealth weapon:

Osama bin Laden.

There are two ways Osama could help. One would be if he got himself captured. It looks like the US won't let things like Pakistani sovereignty get in the way of making yet another move to bag him. That looks to me like desperation.

The other way bin Laden could help Bush would be--by launching another attack against the US. Let's hope THAT doesn't happen.

But I wouldn't put anything past Karl Rove.