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If This Is Winning, I Couldn't Take Losing
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By rickyjames, Section Commentary
Posted on Sun Dec 28, 2003 at 09:29:34 AM PST
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There's an article in today's Washington Post that everyone should read. I'll get back to it in a moment. But first, to the undoubted joy of many, here are my final words at SciScoop on Iraqi WMDs until some are actually found (yeah, right):
As you may have noticed, I haven't done one of my Southern-Baptist-style, shout-loud-from-the-pulpit rants on WMDs in Iraq lately. What's the point of ranting when nobody seems to care that a lack of WMDs is equally if not moreso disturbing than actually finding them? The official word about the State-Of-The-Union yellowcake fiasco is that it wasn't a lie; it was just a "goof." Reports from Iraqi scientists themselves about the impotence of the Iraqi nuclear program are all but ignored. In a national secuity matter where the stakes couldn't be higher, vampire hunter David Kay is laying down his wooden stakes. His Iraq Survey Group task force searching for Iraqi WMDs is reportedly being reduced in number from 1400 to only 40 under a disturbing virtual American media blackout. Iraqi occupation governor Paul Bremer calls recent claims of WMD labs in Iraq a "red herring," politically backing off from such strong words only when told the quote he's attacking was actually uttered by Tony Blair. With poll numbers supportingly high, President Bush sees no need whatsoever to directly address a failure to find WMDs in Iraq.
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| With this recent ABC interview, President Bush has effectively recast the U.S. national security debate from finding actual caches of WMDs to neutralizing perceived impending threats to America the Bush way. His patriotic rhetoric belies, in my opinion, a humbling reality and grave tactical mistake that he and his Administration have certainly not acknowledged to the public-- more troublesome, perhaps, not even to themselves.
America may be a land of unlimited opportunity, but it certainly is not a land of unlimited resources. American military power is one such limited and even fragile resource which has arguably been overcommitted to war with Iraq. The reality of what paltry American military forces are left to deal with countries who REALLY DO have WMDs and REALLY DO wish America ill places America in greater peril than ever since 9/11. When does the national security debate focus on THAT, as I fear it should?
Osama bin Laden is, in my book, a dangerous military strategist, currently in command of courageous and loyal troops who realized that hijacked Boeings are de-facto WMDs and may well have other very interesting insights on just how to fight a jihad in downtown Manhattan that may be shared with us any time now. It is a disgraceful fact that the search for Osama was put on the back burner while we focused for months on finding some neutralized bearded guy hiding in a spider hole. So now that we've found Saddam, now that we've all but given up on finding Iraqi WMDs, isn't it time at last for an all-out push to find Osama, the enemy of America who started this whole mess by killing ten times the American citizens in New York than have died at Saddam's hand in Iraq?
Not according to Dubya. He's supporting Pentagon decisions regarding the ultra-secret Task Force 121 commando unit previously hunting Saddam, redeploying them to hunt insurgents in Iraq who are not a threat to America, instead of Osama in Afghanistan, who is. According to that last link, Dubya has also supported pulling out half of the 800 commandos in Afghanistan who were directly hunting for Osama and sending them to looking for harmless-to-America Iraqi insurgents, too. Ditto for the 1360 people who have been reassigned from the Iraqi Survey Group's WMD hunt that David Kay is abandoning. And in the ultimate in bad decision making, Dubya has made National Security Advisor Condi Rice and her staff head of Iraq reconstruction efforts. Huh? Just who's left minding the store? Does Dubya think there aren't enough WMD national security threats out there to keep our National Security Advisor and her staff occupied fulltime? Sheesh.
Unfortunately, there are. In one report that was barely covered in the next-to-last sentence of isolated U.S. media reports, David Kay himself said one "African country" that was not Niger (but that he declined to identify) had offered to supply Iraq with uranium. Kay found no evidence that Saddam followed up on the offer. Hmm, wonder who this "unnamed African nation" offering uranium to dictators is, and why we haven't clobbered it already like Dubya said we would in the OTHER, non-yellowcake State of the Union address from 2002?
Maybe this secret font of uranium is from the terrorist nation Libya, the rogue nation that downed Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. Its nutty Muslim leader, Col. Moammar Gadhafi, recently acknowledged a serious nuclear weapons program. But here's the thing I don't understand. Dubya has been negotiating with Libya for months to Make America Safer From Libyan WMDs and is willing to allow UN inspections to handle Libyan nuclear disarmament. These are EXACTLY the same two steps Dubya refused to take a year ago because we were in Imminent Danger from Saddam. We start a $150-billion-plus war in the name of national security against Arabs that have no nukes, then talk for months and send in the UN to deal with Arabs that do. Huh? I just don't get it. And Libya has oil, too...but not as much as Iraq.
Well, if we're not going to hound and pound Saudi Arabs who kill Americans by the thousands or Libyan Arabs who have bona-fide nuclear weapons programs, we might as well get back to talking about the defenseless Iraqi Arabs we utterly clobbered nine months ago. And that's where the article in today's Washington Post that everyone should read comes in - remember that? In a nutshell, the article says America has totally backpedaled from our grand pronouncements of what we promised to do in Iraq for those freedom-loving, democracy-craving Iraqi people. Just like we've backpedaled from our grand pronouncements of what we promised to do in Afghanistan, but that's another story I'm sure you don't want me to get started on now. I'm sure the Afghani people understand your impatience with me to end this rant.
Notes the Washington Post article: "There's no question that many of the big-picture items have been pushed down the list or erased completely," said a senior U.S. official involved in Iraq's reconstruction, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. "Right now, everyone's attention is focused [on] doing what we need to do to hand over sovereignty by next summer."
These big picture items now being ignored include replacing daily government handouts of food to 90% of Iraqis with cash payments of $15 per day to allow growth of "supermarkets"; privatizing state-run industries that would throw thousands of workers out of work (probably to become additional insurgents) in a necessary step in creating a viable economy that could lower Iraq's 60% unemployment rate; dissolving armed Kurd and Shiite militias that are protecting their ethnic groups (over two-thirds of Iraq's population) from the Saddam-Sunni minority remnants that ruled over them for decades; and most importantly of all, establishing an Iraqi constitution before sovereignty turnover.
Dubya has made frequent comparisons to how hard reforming Iraq would be; well, he's right about that. He often compares the process of stabilizing Iraq to the reform of Germany and Japan after World War II, a process that officially took seven years and practically took even longer. So just what kind of totally idiotic lunacy is handing over sovereignty to Iraq by next summer? In a land where 90% of the people are getting food handouts, where 60% are unemployed, where 50% of the New Iraqi Army troops mustered have just up-and-quit, where militias from more than one ethnic group are still in operation, WHERE THERE IS NOT EVEN A CONSTITUTION IN PLACE? This isn't the response of an America who gave Germany and Japan a new start that eventually let them regain their status as major world powers. This is a recipe for a very bloody civil war five minutes after we hand government over to a bunch of bickering, grievous people who aren't ready to govern themselves yet.
Why is Dubya so hellbent on turning over sovereignty in Iraq by July 1, 2004? One reason and one reason only: to get ready for a re-election bid as American President on November 2, 2004.
There is something worse than going after Osama only half-heartedly, not like a rat terrier that smells something down in a hole. There's something worse than the hypocrisy of decimating one nation while secretly dealing with and sending in UN surrogates to disarm a more dangerous one. There's something worse than the hypocrisy of condemning another nation of failing to consider international implications of their actions to secure freedom when you yourself do the same thing. There's something worse than handing over a county to almost assured civil war. There's even something worse than WMDs.
That something is to use the powers of the American Presidency for personal gain. |
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