Who'd have believed it: Bush and Bin Laden on the same side
After listening to excerpts of the tape by Osama Bin Laden today, it is obvious that both Bush and Bin Laden want us in Iraq to continue the fight there. It is a great recruiting tool for Bin Laden and for this President it continues his denial of the truth, and keeps us fighting so that someday history will say it was someone else's fault the war was lost.
Even Osama knows the truth about the Democrats. It was like a sharp stick in the eye to them. Unfortunately the cowards that occupy those elected seats are afraid to not pass the supplemental bill the President has asked for, $50 Billion more to be exact, and will supply the money to continue the war and the exploitation by contractors like Haliburton and others sucking us dry. You wan't this war over? Stop passing the money bills or face defeat in the 2008 elections. We have all had enough of this hypocrisy.
Even Osama knows the truth about the Democrats. It was like a sharp stick in the eye to them. Unfortunately the cowards that occupy those elected seats are afraid to not pass the supplemental bill the President has asked for, $50 Billion more to be exact, and will supply the money to continue the war and the exploitation by contractors like Haliburton and others sucking us dry. You wan't this war over? Stop passing the money bills or face defeat in the 2008 elections. We have all had enough of this hypocrisy.
Labels: Bush, Democrats, hypocricy, Osama Bin Laden
posted by Charles Amico at 6:50 PM
4 Comments:
http://niemanwatchdog.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=ask_this.view&askthisid=00294
The above is a recent commentary by former Reagan NSA Director William Odom (Army Lt. General (ret) and Hudson Institute scholar).
Here's the take home message:
>>Those Sunnis who are accepting the offer to fight al Qaeda in return for weapons and ammunition do so because they mistrust the present government in Baghdad. Most say so openly. In other words, they will fight on the U.S. side precisely because they do not trust their own government. That tells us that we are arming the enemies of the government whose election and legitimacy we sponsored. Perhaps the president can explain why he favors such a strange policy.
>>Does it mean that Prime Minister Maliki’s government is now our enemy? And does it mean that the Baathists and other Sunni elements are now our choice to replace the present government in Iraq? Bush’s policy implies a “yes” answer to both questions.<<
Odom's article, specifically citing the coming Petraeus report, is written to clarify what is actually happening in Iraq. It's a combination of whack-a-mole and shifting alliances of convenience. For a long time, it was the Shiites aligned with the US for the purpose of gaining hegemony over their former Sunni oppressors. But then the US alarmed the Saudis and emboldened the Iranians. And the Sunnis, previously aligned with Al Qaeda in an alliance of convenience against the US and the Shiites, decided that a change in strategy was in order. They'd go after Al Qaeda in return for military support from the US that they could use in their never-ending stuggle against the Shiites. And Bush, realizing that he'd created a huge opening for Iran, while creating a huge problem for Saudi Arabia, and getting nowhere against Al Qaeda, has now essentially engaged in a re-Baathification program.
All of this is a continuation of the problems we created for ourselves by putting the Shah into power in Iran in the 1950s. This created the anti-American Iranian revolution, which made the Iranian Shiites our enemies. This created the need to support Saddam Hussein against Iran, including providing Saddam with the very WMD which were the only such WMD relics remaining in Iraq, when we later felt the need to de-fang the very person whom we fanged in the first place, because we needed someone with fangs to fight our proxy war with the Iran which we turned into an anti-US enemy. So we then built up the Iraqi Shiites and de-Baathified/de-Sunnied Iraq. But then that created the above problems, so we are now back to supporting the Sunnis, in a never ending quest to achieve the perfect "balance."
Odom is consistently the only person who consistently makes sense. None of the feckless Democrats make sense. Nothing that the Bush administration has done has made sense.
The very best thing that we could do is to realize that we'll never achieve that finely tuned balance between Iran/Iraq Shia and Saudi/Iraq Sunni. And our "liberation" of Kurdistan has led to a situation where the USA has an 8% approval rating in Turkey, and our overall Iraq/Afghan efforts have dropped our approval rating to similar lows in Pakistan.
Turkey and Pakistan are enormously important to our present and future national security. One of the captured German would-be bombers was a Turk. The Pakis have nukes. Musharraf is hanging on by a thread.
The more we fix it, the more broken it gets.
That's Odom's point about the "surge."
- Larry Weisenthal / Huntington Beach
Nice to hear from you Larry and also thanks for leaving a comment.
Odom has been a terrific spokesman for some rational thought since this war of choice began. He reminds me a lot of Eisenhower and what prophetically was his cautious reminder to all of us of the great Industrial Military complex we needed to control. If only the country had heeded his advice. Maybe we wouldn't have gone into Vietnam either. But the bigger it gets the more it wants to be fed. In this case more weaponry, newer tactics and bombs to test and coming at the expense of the view the world now has of this new experiment called America.
The voices are being raised. The Democrats are now starting to fear that many may face opposition in the 2008 election from a far more left constituency and their lack of support for this war. I have said here many times that if we had a Draft, this war would be all but over now or there would be 100's of thousands of student protesters in the streets, this time with no National Guard to keep the peace because they are all serving in Iraq. Keep raising your voice and get others to wake up to what is happening.
It looks like the slowing economy is going to be the last cautionary note to this chapter. We are broke as a Nation but no one can tell. Now individuals are going to have less cash, opportunity and the chance to stop the pending recession that is about to tighten credit in ways that many will be scared about their own future. That means a terrible Christmas season for the Corporate world and that may be just the last straw that gets some backbone to reverse course in Iraq. Heaven forbid we can't feed the consumption machine this Christmas. Corporate America will tell the politicians they must end this war as it is hurting the profit machine which in turn spins the world economy. :)
I'm in complete agreement with you regarding the corrosive effect of the all-"professional" army.
For example, a controversy down here in the OC is over seizing a dozen houses by eminent domain between Valley View and Seal Beach Boulevard in order to add an additional traffic lane to the 405 freeway. People would have an opinion on this, but the only people with a really strong opinion are those people living in the dozen houses which were going to be seized. We are talking less about the shifting of vast numbers of people to shifting the intensity of the opinion.
For example, the majority of people are now at least nominally against the Iraq War. But even these numbers swing a bit. The administration has been making a full court press to convince people that the war has taken a turn for the better. This has resulted in a small "surge" of popular support, but, more importantly, to a lessened intensity of opposition. The Democrats are thinking, what if this works, if we oppose it too strongly, we are going to be screwed.
Since the war is being fought with volunteers, representing a tiny percentage of Amerian families, the whole thing is simply an "issue," like any other issue.
Now, back in the Vietnam Era, it was entirely different. It wasn't just the numbers, it was the intensity behind the numbers. Most families had at least friends who had conscripts among family members. Both me and my brother were classified 1-A during the same two year period. I drew lottery number 268. I wasn't called up. My brother got lottery number 12. He received his "Greeting..." telegram Christmas Eve afternoon. Medical students got deferments, but once they graduated, they went into the doctor draft. There weren't many combat deaths among doctors, but for people who have 8 years of college and med school and 5 or more years of residency training beyond that, getting drafted was enough of a disruption to cause enough personal pain to cause one to pay attention to the whole issue of whether or not the war was worth it.
Support for the war finally collapsed with the publication of the Pentagon Papers, showing that both Johnson and Nixon had been misleading the American people about the war. This caused a tsunami, coming to the attention of a country which was fully engaged, on a personal level, with the affect of the war on their own lives. In addition to the war being fought by conscripts, the war was paid for by tax increases. Coming of top of this, disclosure of executive malfeasance was the last staw.
The Iraq War is nothing at all like this. I dare say that the people with the strongest anti-war feelings are baby boomers like me who lived through Vietnam. For us, it's deja vu all over again. It's real. It matters. It's important. For most of America, it's just not at all that important. Americans may have an opinion, but it's not a strong opinion. They might not particularly like the war, but it just doesn't have any impact whatsoever on their daily lives.
The canary in the coal mine during Vietnam were the college campuses. Because these were the people most immediately threatened by it. Opposition to the war began on college campuses and spread beyond the campuses to America at large. With Iraq, it's totally different. The kids today care more about Harry Potter than about Iraq.
It is dangerous to our national interests to have a society so disengaged from the war. And it's not just anti-war people like me who feel this way. I've read that many returning Iraq War vets are very disappointed to come home to an America for whom the war is only an afterthought.
- Larry Weisenthal / Huntington Beach
Again, Larry, nice to have this exchange on this topic.
Regarding, "I've read that many returning Iraq War vets are very disappointed to come home to an America for whom the war is only an afterthought", you are correct. Even more interesting is the number of Conscientious Objectors there are now from soldiers who have served at least one tour of duty in Iraq. These individual stories of bravery are starting to make the airways on programs like Democracy Now with Amy Goodman but not Main street media outlets. You will hear more and more returning soldiers with PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) starting to have problems in our society and to be causing problems too. Maybe it will be a murder or two or some other unfortunate tragedy, but it is coming.
Last week there was a story of a soldier who had served a tour of duty in Iraq, had second thoughts about doing another tour, said he was a Conscientious Objector, and then the Military notified Immigration that his papers were not in order and has been arrested and threatened to be sent back to his original homeland which was Haiti as he came here at age 5.
Individual stories are intense and compelling but as you said they don’t touch enough people and so are relegated to obscurity.
As background to how bad things are, I read this morning that Supreme Court Justice David Souter almost left the Supreme Court over the election decision the Court made after the Bush/Gore election in 2000. He was infuriated that the case was decided on politics rather than merit. If not for a few close friends convincing him to stay and be a force in the Court, he would have left. He is said to cry every time he thinks of this decision he is ashamed to be a part of, even though he was in the minority. Now there’s a true patriot.
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