December 03, 2006


IMPEACH BUSH


IMPEACH CHENEY

BUSH'S DISCONNECT

George W. Bush continues to make astonishing claims about Iraq. The latest is the claim that the insurgency is an al-Qaeda "plot." I resist calling Bush totally delusional because that might give him an excuse for starting this horrible war in the first place. It wasn't lying, you see, or massaging the intelligence; it was because Bush was delusional. I think he deliberately lied us into the war, and maybe lying has become so habitual it's the first response. In this column Frank Rich looks at the pathetic figure Bush has become, and the tragedy he has inflicted. This column is at roziusunbound.blogspot.com:

The most startling example was his insistence that Al Qaeda is primarily responsible for the country’s spiraling violence. Only a week before Mr. Bush said this, the American military spokesman on the scene, Maj. Gen. William Caldwell, called Al Qaeda “extremely disorganized” in Iraq, adding that “I would question at this point how effective they are at all at the state level.” Military intelligence estimates that Al Qaeda makes up only 2 percent to 3 percent of the enemy forces in Iraq, according to Jim Miklaszewski of NBC News. The bottom line: America has a commander in chief who can’t even identify some 97 percent to 98 percent of the combatants in a war that has gone on longer than our involvement in World War II.

But that’s not the half of it. Mr. Bush relentlessly refers to Iraq’s “unity government” though it is not unified and can only nominally govern. (In Henry Kissinger’s accurate recent formulation, Iraq is not even a nation “in the historic sense.”) After that pseudo-government’s prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki, brushed him off in Amman, the president nonetheless declared him “the right guy for Iraq” the morning after. This came only a day after The Times’s revelation of a secret memo by Mr. Bush’s national security adviser, Stephen Hadley, judging Mr. Maliki either “ignorant of what is going on” in his own country or disingenuous or insufficiently capable of running a government. Not that it matters what Mr. Hadley writes when his boss is impervious to facts.