William Rivers Pitt, t r u t h o u t, May 2, 2007
“There are some similarities, of course. Death is terrible.”
- George W. Bush on comparisons between Iraq and Vietnam, April 19, 2007
Four years after a humiliating strut across the flight deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln, four years after declaring major combat operations in Iraq ended and the mission accomplished, four years and more than three thousand dead American soldiers later, four long years to the day, George W. Bush delivered a veto that only ensures more wretched and bloody carnage.
“Bush used his veto pen for only the second time Tuesday,” reported NBC News, “after Congress sent him a war spending bill that would impose timelines to withdraw US troops from Iraq, which he called a ‘prescription for chaos.’ The bill is unacceptable because it ‘substitutes the opinions of politicians for the judgments of our military commanders,’ the president said in a nationally televised address to explain why he was vetoing a bill that would also provide more than $100 billion in emergency spending for the war.”
Take a moment to absorb the twin-bill nonsense within that explanation.
The now-vetoed, multi-billion-dollar Iraq spending bill, which contained withdrawal timelines demanded by Congressional Democrats, “substitutes the opinions of politicians for the judgments of our military commanders,” according to Bush. Many of us must have missed the memo explaining how Bush, Cheney, and the rest of this administration aren’t politicians anymore. We also missed the memo explaining how it was the “judgments of our military commanders” that sunk us into this mess to begin with.
Speaking of military judgments, here are two worth considering; both came after Bush deployed the veto pen on Tuesday.