Team Bush's Yugo of a Foreign Policy


I remember reading at the Car Talk website some comments about the Yugo, which managed to "win" the "Worst Car of the Millenium" award. Here's one:

"...it had heated rear windows--so your hands would stay warm while you pushed."

And that's pretty much where we are vis-a-vis Operation Enduring Clusterfuck: the administration keeps insisting that hey, we've got a nicely heated rear window, while the rest of us in the reality based world can't help but notice that the damn thing no longer runs, and requires ever more pushing (in the form of wasted lives/wasted tax dollars) up an ever steeper incline.

Oh--and the "heated" rear window isn't...not since the engine died.

Ok, maybe it's not a perfect analogy, but after reading these editorials from Yahoo News/USA Today--one based in reality, the other (by Stephen J. Hadley) firmly in the head in sand/up backside mode...and a news story about the latest element of tragic absurdity--yet another report about how our erstwhile Iraqi "allies" are actually insurgents taking advantage of our ignorance to obtain free training AND operating intel, I can't help but think that, if foreign policy was an internal combustion vehicle (work with me here), then Team Bush foreign policy could ONLY be the "worst car of the millenium." And the vote isn't all that close.

Now, to use a term I don't really like, but one that's part of the lexicon, let's "fisk" Hadley's pathetic little op-ed:

After our nation was attacked on 9/11, President Bush made clear that America had a choice — to root out the terrorists, or wait to be attacked again. He decided that to protect the American people, our nation must go on the offense and destroy the terror networks.

Actually, the evidence is beginning to show pretty clearly that one, the administration was pretty much in head up backside mode until 9/11, the Rice dismissal of Richard Clarke, Cofer Black, and George Tenet just one more of THAT particular series of dots to connect (the other series of dots being the ever mounting evidence that the administration ignored what amounted to everything short of a time and date for Al Qaeda's, yes, unbelievably vicious and ugly attack. But, just as you don't reward a night watchman for falling asleep on the job, neither should you proffer a blank check to an administration that took eight months...and one disastrous day...to finally understand what they'd been told by the outgoing Clinton administration officials).

The president has chosen a difficult path, and he has been honest with the American people about the challenges. He has said the enemy we face is determined and ruthless. He has been blunt about intelligence failures and stains on our national honor such as the Abu Ghraib facility in Iraq. He has highlighted the courage of our men and women in uniform who have served — and sacrificed — for freedom. He has called this war a long struggle, and a generational conflict.

Huh? Honest? No, Mr. Hadley, that's the one thing the administration HASN'T been--and that's rather easy to demonstrate, using their own words (e.g., look for press releases/announcements from 2002 and 2003. Rummy's on the record commenting on the relative ease in conquering Iraq (well, sure--for HIM--it's not like he's gonna get shot at). Big Time lied about Iraq's nuclear program, lied or was horribly ignorant in understanding the opinions of Iraqis vis-a-vis our soldiers (see the same link--"liberators"), and was the same re: "last throes."

Wolfowitz lowballed the cost of invasion by an enormous factor (as did other administration officials), and Dick Perle--in a profoundly stupid moment even by his standards--suggested that by 2004 "some grand square in Baghdad" would be named after George W. Bush.

As for Abu Ghraib and our "national honor," hmmm...we've just had a long debate, spurred by this administration--that culminated in the sanctioning of TORTURE, Mr. Hadley. National honor? More like National Shame.

Our strategy is far from "stay the course." The president continually challenges all of us to learn from experience, adapt to change and improve our performance. In Iraq, we have modified our approach to training the Iraqi army so Iraqi soldiers can be more effective in defeating terrorists and insurgents. We have redoubled our efforts to train Iraqi police so that they can earn the confidence of all the Iraqi people. We have sought new approaches to reconstruction and economic development.

A quick search for "stay the course" re: Iraq by the Bush administration returns over 12 million hits. Enough said. As for "training police," Mr. Hadley, see the story above--here's the lede:

Iraqi authorities have taken a brigade of up to 700 policemen out of service and put members under investigation for "possible complicity" with death squads following a mass kidnapping earlier this week, the U.S. military said Wednesday.

You know, it'd be, to cite Joe Pesci's character in Goodfellas, "funny like...a clown," if it wasn't so tragically deadly on a day to day basis, and such an unmitigated disaster for the country on both a tactical and strategic level: a disaster that creeps like Hadley haven't so much as apologized for, much less tried to correct. No, they're too busy obfuscating or lining their damn pockets with the filthy lucre of war profiteering to so much as care about their nation. Nice work, shitheads.

Yet our objective has not changed. We will fight alongside the Iraqi people to win this war. We will refuse to surrender to the terrorists who view Iraq as the central front in their war against their fellow Muslims and the entire free world. We are determined to deny them a platform from which to launch attacks on America and our allies.

Which Iraqi people? The ones who, ahem, are a little busy because they're FIGHTING US? Or their base of support, which turns out to be a majority of Iraqis?

Talk about denying reality: the truth is that right now the United States has virtually zero bargaining power in Mesopotamia, and all warring factions know that. Our rather precarious position doesn't allow for the support of one faction or another, the fact that we're ultimetly outsiders in a highly insular region further limits our options, and there's ample, on-the-ground PROOF that we're unable to maintain a modest degree of order, much less protect any "ally." That's neither a winning strategery, nor an enticement to the Iraqis for anything beyond, well, insurgents taking advantage of free training and operating intelligence...the flip side of this is the ever increasing reliance of the US military on gang members and skinheads to fill out the ranks--they're taking advantage of the training, too. That's not a war on terror--that's a clusterfuck.

The president has said this war will not be dictated by domestic politics. A drawdown of our troops in Iraq right before U.S. elections in November would be the politically expedient thing to do. But our military commanders believe it would be the wrong thing to do. Based on their advice, we have actually increased our troops in Iraq.

The president will continue to speak directly and candidly to the American people — about this war, about the enemy we face, and about why we can and must see this war through to victory.

The war, Mr. Hadley, has sadly been dictacted--no pun intended--from the get-go by domestic political considerations, from the timing of the war resolution--right before the 2002 elections--to the timing of the invasion--in time to film cod-pieced "Mission Accomplished" moments for a martial-themed 2004 campaign...which turned instead to Plan B--play seesaw with the terror code--when "Mission Accomplished" didn't turn out according to plan--to the current considerations, stalling, playing for time, and otherwise holding off on admitting the scale of the disaster until AFTER the elections (and maybe even longer still, provided they can keep the sheep-like media from bleating too loudly).

No, Mr. Hadley, this whole sorry operation has been dictated (actually, a good choice of word) by politics. If Mr. Bush or his administration truly had the "interests of the American people" at heart, they would NOT have invaded Iraq, and indeed, would've seen the necessity of not invading. Like it or not, Saddam, thug that he was/is, was NOT a terrorist, and he had no love for Al Qaeda. Al Qaeda was a threat to his regime. And the Bush administration knew this. As awful as Saddam was/is, the administration could have and should have used his enmity towards Islamic fundamentalism to isolate the latter even further, while keeping the former as boxed in as he was prior to 2003 (recall that the Kurdish region was de facto independent, there were "no fly" zones in both the south and north, that US planes routinely launched airstrikes--which perhaps could have been curtailed as a sop to Hussein for cooperation--and that Iraq had crumbled apart from the inside-out, thanks to extremely harsh sanctions, again, a bargaining chip we had that could well have ensured cooperation from the regime as we fought the REAL enemy.

And, finally recall that Iraq was ready to offer some serious, wholesale concessions prior to the beginning of the war in 2003. Concessions that the Bush administration haughtily dismissed in favor of "Shock and Awe."

Well, Shock and Awe certainly did nothing of the sort--and Rummy's idiot plan ensured a more than ample supply of weapons will be available to the insurgency--for years, if not decades, to come.

So, Mr. Hadley, maybe you enjoy the administration Kool-Aid to the extent that you've got an equal supply stashed in your office. And maybe it doesn't much bother you when yet another American (originally from Baton Rouge) is killed while you look at "the big picture" (translation: how much longer can you keep it swept under the rug?)...it's pretty obvious that you don't really much care for the Iraqi casualties--hell, you probably don't even lose any sleep.

But don't think you can fool everyone with your pathetic little op-ed. As it turns out, you couldn't even fool the people who published it.