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Bush Jr.'s War on the Iraqis Repudiated
by His Daddy's Military Policy Expert

Bush advisor Brent Scowcroft called Junior on the carpet last month for the quagmire in Iraq, a quagmire Scowcroft warned Condoleeza Rice and Bush Junior they would get into if they tried to conquer that country.

WASHINGTON, Oct. 24 (UPI) -- The following are extracts from former National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft comments in the article "Breaking Ranks: What Turned Brent Scowcroft Against the Bush Administration?" by Jeffrey Goldberg in the Oct. 31 edition of The New Yorker which was on published Monday.
     Scowcroft, 80, the former national security advisor and close friend of President George W. Bush's father, President George H. W. Bush, told the New Yorker it would have been no problem for America's military to reach Baghdad. The problems would have arisen when the Army entered the Iraqi capital.
     "At the minimum, we'd be an occupier in a hostile land," he said. "Our forces would be sniped at by guerrillas, and, once we were there, how would we get out? What would be the rationale for leaving? I don't like the term 'exit strategy' -- but what do you do with Iraq once you own it?"
     "This is exactly where we are now," he said of Iraq, with no apparent satisfaction. "We own it. And we can't let go. We're getting sniped at. Now, will we win? I think there's a fair chance we'll win. But look at the cost."
     "I'm not a pacifist," he said. "I believe in the use of force. But there has to be a good reason for using force. And you have to know when to stop using force." Scowcroft does not believe that the promotion of American-style democracy abroad is a sufficiently good reason to use force.      More here...

   
Decisions by "a secretive cabal... not unlike the decision-making one would associate more with a dictatorship than a democracy."
COLIN POWELL'S CHIEF MILITARY EXPERT REPUDIATES BUSH Jr.'s WAR ON THE IRAQIS

The White House Cabal
By Col. Lawrence B. Wilkerson -- The Los Angeles Times
WEDS. OCTOBER 19th--

In President Bush's first term, some of the most important decisions about U.S. national security - including vital decisions about postwar Iraq - were made by a secretive, little-known cabal. It was made up of a very small group of people led by Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.
    When I first discussed this group in a speech last week at the New American Foundation in Washington, my comments caused a significant stir because I had been chief of staff to then-Secretary of State Colin Powell between 2002 and 2005.
    But it's absolutely true. I believe that the decisions of this cabal were sometimes made with the full and witting support of the president and sometimes with something less. More often than not, then-national security advisor Condoleezza Rice was simply steamrolled by this cabal.
    Its insular and secret workings were efficient and swift - not unlike the decision-making one would associate more with a dictatorship than a democracy. This furtive process was camouflaged neatly by the dysfunction and inefficiency of the formal decision-making process, where decisions, if they were reached at all, had to wend their way through the bureaucracy, with its dissenters, obstructionists and "guardians of the turf."
     But the secret process was ultimately a failure. It produced a series of disastrous decisions and virtually ensured that the agencies charged with implementing them would not or could not execute them well. More here...

 

 
   
When you combine limited government with incompetent government, lethal stuff happens

Maureen Dowd wrote an essay about the gross, pervasive incompetence of the Bush Junior Administration's current set of shameful failures...this time in Louisiana and Mississippi, as they slashed the money for securing levees

The United States of shame
The New York Times -- MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 5, 2005

Stuff happens. And when you combine limited government with incompetent government, lethal stuff happens. America is once more plunged into a snake pit of anarchy, death, looting, raping, marauding thugs, suffering innocents, a shattered infrastructure, a gutted police force, insufficient troop levels and criminally negligent government planning. But this time it's happening in America.

{SNIP}Why does this self-styled "can do" president always lapse into such lame "who could have known?" excuses. Who on earth could have known that Osama bin Laden wanted to attack America by flying planes into buildings? Any official who bothered to read the trellis of pre-9/11 intelligence briefs.

Who on earth could have known that an American invasion of Iraq would spawn a brutal insurgency, terrorist recruiting boom and possible civil war? Any official who bothered to read the CIA's prewar reports.

Who on earth could have known that New Orleans' sinking levees were at risk from a strong hurricane? Anybody who bothered to read the endless warnings over the years about the Big Easy's uneasy fishbowl. In June 2004, Walter Maestri, emergency management chief for Jefferson Parish, fretted to The Times-Picayune in New Orleans: "It appears that the money has been moved in the president's budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq, and I suppose that's the price we pay. Nobody locally is happy that the levees can't be finished, and we are doing everything we can to make the case that this is a security issue for us."

Read this powerful one here

 

   
 
 


 
 
   

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