Friday, September 24, 2004

Political Reasons

Why hasn't Iraq been a resounding success? Political Reasons.
Before the war, we passed up a chance to take out terrorist mastermind Abu Musab Zarqawi — for political reasons. We invaded with too few troops — for political reasons. We lowballed the cost of the war — for political reasons. We ignored the UN and then turned around and pleaded for their help — for political reasons. Then we installed Iyad Allawi as president behind the UN's back — for political reasons.


And just recently we've learned that the Marines were yo-yoed in and out of Fallujah — for political reasons. The president has bizarrely dismissed his own intelligence agencies' analysis of Iraq as "guessing" — for political reasons. He's ignored the advice of his own generals about troop requirements for the upcoming elections — for political reasons. And assaults on Baathist enclaves have been postponed until December — for fairly obvious political reasons.

And Thursday's press conference was just scary. It's no longer clear if George Bush is merely a cynical, calculating politician — which would be bad enough — or if he actually believes all the happy talk about Iraq that his speechwriters produce for him. Increasingly, though, it seems like the latter: he genuinely doesn't have a clue about what's going on. What's more, his staff is keeping him in a sort of Nixonian bubble, afraid to tell him the truth and afraid to take any positive action for fear that it might affect the election.


1 comment:

Kendall Miller said...

If you read the contents of the first link, you would see that the reason Bush passed up the chance to attack Zarqawi was because it would do violence to the case the administration was fabricating to go after Saddam. If they took out Zarqawi they couldn't get enough traction on the "Saddam harboring al-Qaida" canard.

The right thing would have been devise a strategy to get Zarqawi as an minor extension of the Afghan effort. Of course that might have entailed some sort of cooperation with Saddam. And Saddam would have made hay out of it, I'm sure.