Robert Scheer, The Pasadena Star News, April 29, 2007
Blame it on the military, but make it look like you’re supporting the troops. That’s been the convenient gambit of failed emperors throughout history as they witnessed their empires decline. Not surprisingly, then, it’s become the standard rhetorical trick employed by President Bush in shirking responsibility for the Iraq debacle of his making.
Ignoring the fact that we have a system of civilian control over the military, which is why he, the elected president, is designated the commander in chief, Bush hides behind the fiction that the officers in the field are calling the shots when in fact he has put them in an unwinnable situation and refuses to even consider a timetable for getting them out.
He did it again April 23, responding to the prospect that both houses of Congress seem in agreement on setting guidelines for the “progress” that the president continually proclaims is at hand. “I will strongly reject an artificial timetable \ withdrawal and-or Washington politicians trying to tell those who wear the uniform how to do their job.”
This is disingenuous in the extreme, because Bush is the Washington politician who plotted this unnecessary war from the moment the 9/11 attack provided him with an excuse for regime change in a country that had nothing to do with the terrorist attack.
It was Bush who sent the troops to invade Iraq with the mission of ridding it of weapons of mass destruction, which he should have known Iraq did not have, and to end ties with al-Qaida that, the record shows, he knew never existed. And it was the Bush administration that micro-managed every aspect of the occupation to disastrous consequences, ranging from the de-Baathification that isolated the Sunnis to premature elections that put Shiite theocrats in power. The economic reconstruction of Iraq has been a failure for everyone except the U.S. corporations that have ripped off U.S. taxpayers to the tune of many billions of dollars.
[Blame it on the military, but make it look like you’re supporting the troops.]
They are about the only people left he has not tried to blame on since he has tried to put the blame on everyone else except his own ignorant, greedy, vindictive little failure of BFEE attempt at grandiosity, George dimwit Bush!
He would rather veto funding for the troops than have his “god given mission” interfered with, especially by Democrats.
Funny, we have not heard any of his neocon fundies or dubya himself repeating any new messages from “the invisible cloud being” lately.
HAVE THE GODS FORSAKEN THE SELF PROCLAIMED 21ST CENTURY MOSES?
Does anyone remember how ‘GOD’ rewarded Moses after 40 years of loyal, backbreaking service and having made only ONE small mistake?
After striving to reach the Promised Land for forty years, Moses and Aaron are denied entry because Moses had struck a rock in anger to obtain water. Moses is allowed to look at it once though just before he dies. Numbers 20:11-12 and Deut 34 [The Christian God might have shown a little compassion for Moses who was probably at his wits end.]
Comment by kerry — May 1, 2007 @ 2:38 pm