Clueless
By GREG DOBBS
Apr 22, 2004, 07:38
Well, has it struck home yet that the Bush team doesn't have a clue?
The way I figure it, if I, as a mere former war correspondent, could know how tenuous our intelligence was on Iraq, our nation's top leaders with all their resources surely should have known, which is reason to revile them for exploiting only the intelligence they liked to manipulate support for the war.
We see today the human cost of their preconceptions. If they didn't know, we can condemn them for outright negligence.
Likewise, just as they failed to accept the reality of conflicting pre-war intelligence, Bush & Co. failed to face the reality of post-war chaos. When we saw Iraqi citizens celebrating the fall of Saddam Hussein, I drew on my own years covering the Middle East and wrote, "Don't make the mistake of equating their joy at being cut from their shackles with a deep love for the people who cut them out."
If I could understand the limits of Iraqi loyalty, surely our leaders, with all their experience, should have understood. Yet Vice President Dick Cheney predicted that Iraqis would greet us with "garlands and flowers." Some did. But others keep killing us. For hundreds of American troops, flowers have adorned only their coffins.
The administration's wishful thinking was not a cheap miscalculation. Just ask the fast-growing number of widows and fatherless children and thousands of combat amputees. We can't cut out now; Bush made this mess, and we have to clean it up. But he never should have opened the door.
We can't blame President Bush for everything that's bad. The terrorists started planning their Sept. 11 strikes long before he took the oath of office, and his predecessors coddled the despots with which the United States still must deal. But Bush and his lieutenants do deserve blame for being so wrong about the war. Now they have obscured their own deeply defective and debatably deceptive reasons for it -- weapons of mass destruction, Saddam the Threat -- with the argument that by deposing the dictator and hopefully setting Iraq on the road to democracy (which hasn't been so smooth this month), we still have something to crow about.
For those who buy this revisionist history, a question: Would you bust our budget, trash certain social services and surrender hundreds of young Americans in uniform to a brutal death to rescue every nation that suffers as Iraqis suffered? I'd guess you never wanted to before.
And don't respond that we can't blame the Bush crowd because the Clinton crowd also thought Saddam had WMD. All that means is, Clinton's team was wrong too, although maybe, based on the arguable accuracy of our intelligence, they had enough reasonable doubt that they chose not to endure the costs of war.
And the worst wrong of them all? The president's ill-defined declaration, "If you're not with us, you're against us." Originally he really might have meant countries that oppose his policy, but some of his defenders have translated it to mean Americans who are against it. Recently, Rush Limbaugh was railing about John Kerry, Bush's Democratic opponent, because Kerry has been so brash as to criticize the president's performance on Iraq. The nerve.
Limbaugh ended by asking, "Why is he siding with the enemy?" Whoooooa, is that what it means if we criticize our president? That we're "siding with the enemy?" What could make the enemy more ecstatic than to learn that freedom of speech -- a liberty we purport to spread throughout the world -- can be equated with treason? Bush was wrong to open that door, too.
(Greg Dobbs was an Emmy Award-winning correspondent for ABC News, then a PBS interviewer and radio talk show host. He now reports on global issues for cable TV's HDNet. His email is: dobbsnews@yahoo.com.)
© Copyright 2004 by Capitol Hill Blue
By GREG DOBBS
Apr 22, 2004, 07:38
Well, has it struck home yet that the Bush team doesn't have a clue?
The way I figure it, if I, as a mere former war correspondent, could know how tenuous our intelligence was on Iraq, our nation's top leaders with all their resources surely should have known, which is reason to revile them for exploiting only the intelligence they liked to manipulate support for the war.
We see today the human cost of their preconceptions. If they didn't know, we can condemn them for outright negligence.
Likewise, just as they failed to accept the reality of conflicting pre-war intelligence, Bush & Co. failed to face the reality of post-war chaos. When we saw Iraqi citizens celebrating the fall of Saddam Hussein, I drew on my own years covering the Middle East and wrote, "Don't make the mistake of equating their joy at being cut from their shackles with a deep love for the people who cut them out."
If I could understand the limits of Iraqi loyalty, surely our leaders, with all their experience, should have understood. Yet Vice President Dick Cheney predicted that Iraqis would greet us with "garlands and flowers." Some did. But others keep killing us. For hundreds of American troops, flowers have adorned only their coffins.
The administration's wishful thinking was not a cheap miscalculation. Just ask the fast-growing number of widows and fatherless children and thousands of combat amputees. We can't cut out now; Bush made this mess, and we have to clean it up. But he never should have opened the door.
We can't blame President Bush for everything that's bad. The terrorists started planning their Sept. 11 strikes long before he took the oath of office, and his predecessors coddled the despots with which the United States still must deal. But Bush and his lieutenants do deserve blame for being so wrong about the war. Now they have obscured their own deeply defective and debatably deceptive reasons for it -- weapons of mass destruction, Saddam the Threat -- with the argument that by deposing the dictator and hopefully setting Iraq on the road to democracy (which hasn't been so smooth this month), we still have something to crow about.
For those who buy this revisionist history, a question: Would you bust our budget, trash certain social services and surrender hundreds of young Americans in uniform to a brutal death to rescue every nation that suffers as Iraqis suffered? I'd guess you never wanted to before.
And don't respond that we can't blame the Bush crowd because the Clinton crowd also thought Saddam had WMD. All that means is, Clinton's team was wrong too, although maybe, based on the arguable accuracy of our intelligence, they had enough reasonable doubt that they chose not to endure the costs of war.
And the worst wrong of them all? The president's ill-defined declaration, "If you're not with us, you're against us." Originally he really might have meant countries that oppose his policy, but some of his defenders have translated it to mean Americans who are against it. Recently, Rush Limbaugh was railing about John Kerry, Bush's Democratic opponent, because Kerry has been so brash as to criticize the president's performance on Iraq. The nerve.
Limbaugh ended by asking, "Why is he siding with the enemy?" Whoooooa, is that what it means if we criticize our president? That we're "siding with the enemy?" What could make the enemy more ecstatic than to learn that freedom of speech -- a liberty we purport to spread throughout the world -- can be equated with treason? Bush was wrong to open that door, too.
(Greg Dobbs was an Emmy Award-winning correspondent for ABC News, then a PBS interviewer and radio talk show host. He now reports on global issues for cable TV's HDNet. His email is: dobbsnews@yahoo.com.)
© Copyright 2004 by Capitol Hill Blue
