We have come to a point where all the contradictions and deceptions of the Iraq War are beginning to fall asunder, and the full measure of President Bush’s mendacity and incompetence are starting to stick out. He has put our troops in an untenable situation, which he maintains is necessary by making up more and more fanciful scenarios.
A report in Thursday’s Washington Post shows us why the situation is untenable:
At least four and perhaps as many as 13 people were killed, including a number of women and at least one child, in a U.S. military operation Wednesday against a house where insurgent collaborators were believed to have taken refuge, local officials and the U.S. military said.
. . .
“The killed family was not part of the resistance; they were women and children,” Ahmed Khalaf told the AP. “The Americans have promised us a better life, but we get only death.”
I am sure these American soldiers were doing their best, and I have sympathy for them, because the killing of a child must take a toll I cannot understand on the killer. Nevertheless, events like this were bound to happen in the guerilla war with the insurgents. Conducting searches like this and policing civilians are not things our military was designed or trained to do, and it is cruel to put the burden on them. The person at fault is the one who ordered them into the country in the first place: Bush.
Bush has put our soldiers in harm’s way, ordered them into situations where they risk their own lives and the lives of innocents around them, all for something that turned out not to be true. They are at risk for George W. Bush’s fantasies.
Bush does not admit to any responsibility, or offer any concrete plan. Robert Scheer describes it this way, writing in The Nation:
Of course, Bush would have us believe this expanding civil war is the work of insidious foreigners rather than of competing agendas arising from within an Iraq society long stunted by colonialism and dictatorship. It does not occur to him that he is the foreigner who the majority of Iraqis hold responsible for the country’s despair
. . .
Such bright contradictions were on display in Bush’s latest strategically bankrupt “plan” for victory: Spending $3.3 billion to fight the IEDs Bush now claims Iran is smuggling into Iraq–to the very Shiite forces that won the US-engineered election and are positioned to form the first real post-Hussein government.
Bush chooses to scapegoat Iran and IEDs. IEDs are a weapon just like any other. You cannot justify a war because the enemy uses weapons. While it would be of great benefit to our soldiers if the threat from IEDs could be lessened, I don’t think of choosing to do that as particularly praiseworthy–the President should always be doing his best to protect the troops. As for Iran, let me refer you to another Washington Post report:
Marine Corps Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joints Chiefs of Staff, said today he has no evidence the Iranian government has been sending military equipment and personnel into neighboring Iraq.
On Monday, President Bush suggested Iran was involved in making roadside bombs, known as improvised explosive devices, that are being used in Iraq. And Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld last week accused Iran of sending members of its Revolutionary Guard to conduct operations in Iraq.
Get your stories straight while the cameras are off, guys. There is no evidence that Iran is helping the insurgents. Why should they? The Shiites who won the elections are Iran-friendly, and once we leave they will no doubt get very well acquainted.
In that report is a money quote you will not believe:
Asked how long Americans might be fighting in Iraq, Rumsfeld said: “We know that insurgencies can last five, eight, 10, 12, 15 years and we’ve said that. We also know that insurgencies ultimately are defeated, not by foreign occupying forces but by the indigenous forces of that particular country . . .”
Did you get that? Foreign occupying forces don’t defeat insurgencies! So what the f**k have we been doing there these last few years! Here’s hoping that the time when sending people off to die for a fantasy comes to a sudden halt in November of 2006.
thank you, thank you
one more voice against the insanity
thank you, thank you
one more voice of reason vs the megalomania