July 12, 2007


IMPEACH BUSH


IMPEACH CHENEY

THE REALITY IN IRAQ

If you wish hard enough for something, it still doesn't necessarily happen. And so it is with the situation in Iraq. Despite an avalanche of evidence to the contrary, the Bush administration insists that things are getting better. In the meantime, our soldiers continue to get killed and maimed, Iraqi civilians continue to get killed and maimed, and our treasury gets bled dry. A new assessment from all sixteen U. S. intelligence agencies merely states what most of us can see, that it's time for the United States to get out of Iraq. This article by Jonathan S. Landay and Nancy A. Youssef is at www.mcclatchydc.com:

The Shiite Muslim-dominated government of Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki has made only "halting efforts" to end the power struggle fueling the war between Iraq's religious and ethnic communities, a new U.S. intelligence report said Wednesday.

Even if the bloodletting can be contained, Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish leaders will be "hard pressed" to reach lasting political reconciliation, the report stated.

The report, reflecting the consensus of all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies, cast new uncertainty about the chances of success for President Bush's plan to contain the war through the deployment of an additional 28,000 U.S. troops, mostly in and around Baghdad.

The conclusions also appeared to be bleaker than a White House assessment produced by the top U.S. officials in Baghdad, which found that Iraqi politicians have made satisfactory progress on some of the 18 benchmarks set by Congress in May.

The new intelligence findings were contained in a 23-page Global Security Assessment presented to the House Armed Services Committee by Thomas Fingar, the chairman of the National Intelligence Council, the intelligence community's top analytical body.

BUSH IS NO JFK

In the years since he was murdered in Dallas, there has been a lot written about President John F. Kennedy. There were initial adulatory accounts. Then there were vicious revisionist histories talking about JFK's sex life, his health, and his role as a cold warrior. A balanced recent book is David Talbot's Brothers, which shows that JFK had to contend with a hard-core right-wing establishment within the United States. Generals such as Curtis LeMay were calling for first nuclear strikes against the Soviet Union. The "wisdom" of right-wingers back then might well have set events in motion to exterminate the human race. I can't imagine JFK launching a debacle like Iraq with total callousness toward the military, toward the Iraqis themselves, and toward the good of the country. This article by Andrew Greeley is at www.suntimes.com:

The warrior culture, which can make a lot of pseudo-patriotic noise, tends to be male, Southern, and never to have seen combat. In 1963 they were the ones who were denouncing President John F. Kennedy because he did not nuke them and "get it over with." He also had to fend off his own military leaders who almost started a war without his consent.

Last week's Time magazine praised Kennedy's restraint in those terrible days, for which conservatives and Republicans have always condemned him. Without perhaps knowing it explicitly, he was following the Catholic teaching on war -- only when there is absolutely no other choice. It was this long tradition of restraint, of which the missile crisis was the high point, that eventually won the Cold War, and not President Ronald Reagan's grandstanding at the Brandenburg Gate.

It was a great good fortune for this country that a man of restraint who thought war was stupid was in the Oval Office in those anxious days. It would turn out later that the Russian commanders in Cuba had been ordered to return fire if they were attacked. One shudders at the image of what the current incumbent of the Oval Office would have done if he were the "decider" then. Many Americans would have died, and many more would never have been born.