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The Great Ballyhoo

 

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What a Mess

Summer 2006


The United States is Mired in Cowboy Diplomacy

Let's take a peak around the world, shall we?

The US is still bogged down in Iraq with each political triumph being destroyed with intensified insurgent attacks.  Iran is defying the UN and is enriching uranium.  North Korea is testing missiles that can reach the US mainland and we know they have nukes.  India is blaming Pakistan for it's terrorist attacks at its train stations.  Israel is bombing the shit out of Lebanon and has a military attack going on two fronts.  Russian President Vladimir Putin is cracking jokes about Whiskey Dick Cheney's inability to shoot correctly and laughing out loud while rejecting Bush's version of Democracy for his country.  Wow, where did all the good times go?  Just to show that I am not completely full of crap, here are the headlines from around the world:

  • Lebanon now a 'disaster zone'
  • Attacks destroying Lebanon, prime minister says
  • Israel attacks Lebanese ports, border near Syria
  • Beirut hit again, Hezbollah HQ targeted
  • Barrages of rockets fired into northern Israel
  • President Bush urges Syria to rein in Hezbollah
  • Europe lines up ships to rescue citizens
  • Gunmen kidnap Iraq's Olympic leader, 30 workers
  • Wall Street: Desperately seeking relief
  • Putin rejects Bush's Iraq democracy model
  • India: Pakistan helped train bombers

That was a single moment in time's headlines.  So how did we get here?  Why are things not looking so great?  Weeeeell, the easiest thing is to point the finger at a person and say they did it.  But that's not really it, it took a whole lot of people to cause all of this.  Let's focus on just a couple of things.

When we went into Iraq, we went under four main subheadings:

  1. We would be welcomed as liberators
  2. We would disarm Hussein of Weapons of Mass Destruction
  3. We would use the oil money to reconstruct the country
  4. We would stop Hussein from building a nuclear missile.

As we all know now in that untrammeled hind-site, none of this panned out.  We may have been welcomed initially after toppling the dictator, who does deserver to rot in hell for this crimes against his people, but that was as short lived as a Beatles Reunion Tour.  We haven't found any viable weapons of mass destruction and even discovered that his WMD's were below Gulf War I levels.  Reconstruction has been put on hold indefinitely because of security and the oil flows sluggish and haltingly.  We found there was only the "hope" of reconstituting a nuclear program.  All in all, we have experienced the largest intelligence failure in the history of the United States.  No matter how you put it, we went to war on false pretenses and now we are in quite a pickle.  I do hear good things out of Iraq every once in a while, but they never seem to slow the insurgent juggernaught from creating a sectarian rift in the very country we are trying to put back together.  It's not that I am a pessimist, but it is very difficult to judge any progress as the insurgency has done nothing but keep cranking up.  The death tolls get higher and higher, the casualties, the reprisals, the so-called Shi'ite "Death Squads" kidnapping and killings, hostages, et al ad nauseum.

The next piece of this puzzle is who caused this?  We in America like to blame, and our blame can only be an individual because as we all know, you can't sue the Bush Administration, but you can sue George W. Bush.  So we have to find that fall guy to pin this on.  Was this George's fault?  I would sure love to say yes, as I believe the American people were very successfully swindled not once, but twice by this guy.  Hailed as an ideologue and a man of principle, we began discovering that Money is the new Democracy.  If you follow that single motto, well you too can be an ideologue and a man of principle.  There can be no deeper cynicism than laughing threw all the hits.  I just have this to say: The president hasn't vetoed a single bill until just last week; he declined to federally fund the next level of medical research.  So he doesn't impede a single spending bill but will veto something which will actually progress us as a people.  Not just Americans, all people.  Americans seem to think of themselves as above the rest of the world so when they start thinking other people will benefit, then we have to package and export it with a duty, a tariff and a partridge in a pear tree.

So we can't blame Bush entirely, but he is fully culpable for the mess.  No, I think the blame lies with Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz.  They co-authored, along with Jeb Bush and Lewis Libby,  a paper in September 2000 called Rebuilding America's Defenses.  In this paper they talk of a "pearl harbor" like attack which could galvonize the American people into supporting regime change in Iraq:

Further, the process of transformation,
even if it brings revolutionary change, is
likely to be a long one, absent some
catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a
new Pearl Harbor.

So, they basically said the only thing holding us back was we needed a preclusion to war, and it needed to be big, like the single attack that got us fully committed to World War II.  I don't like to entertain conspiracy theories because they are cool and usually ask assinine questions with the thinnest of proof relying on implicit logic and lacking hard facts.  But, come on!  They basically outline a full policy based upon a "catastrophic and catalyzing event" allowing them to fullfill a plan they call Rebuilding America's Defenses.  They got exactly what they were wanting.  I don't believe they caused 9/11 or were behind it, but I think coincidence happened.  Does anyone else remember a note Donald Rumsfeld wrote down on his notepad during the first meeting right after 9/11?  The note read: