Nice try, wrong person

[khaosworks]

Everyone's is focusing on Bush as being the central issue in this falafel about Iraq and the uranium, as if the only question worth asking is, did he knowingly lie to the American people and if the answer is no, then everything's okay. On a broader perspective, the Democrats are asking whether or not intelligence was manipulated to get America into war. But what if the answer is no? What if the answer is that people just got things plain wrong?

Because that's not the end of it, you see - if the Administration did not knowingly lie to the American people, what did they know, if anything? We're talking about an administration who is now admitting to gross incompetence, that does not know what one hand is doing and communicating that to the other. That one hand - George Tenet - has fallen on its sword is no answer. It's not the fact that Tenet didn't pluck that sentence out that's important - it's the infrastructure that allowed that sentence to get put in there in the first place. It's the possibility that, if there was no malice or manipulation involved, that Rice, Rove, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, even Powell - their focus being so dead set on war with Iraq - were proceeding with blinkered eyes and making decisions made on pre-determined assumptions. This is sheer recklessness.

What we have here is arguably the most powerful nation in the world that doesn't know what's going on and isn't getting the right information and doesn't care. It's not just: Does George Bush deserve to be President? It's: Does this Administration deserve to push the buttons?

Yes, the bitch is back. Miss me?

Comments

[amezri.livejournal.com]

I missed the bitch! XD

[sdorn.livejournal.com]

Yes!

[patoadam]

I read somewhere that during the Cuban missile crisis, JFK offered to show Charles de Gaulle photos of Soviet missiles in Cuba. De Gaulle replied that he didn't need to see the photos, because a nation of the stature of the United States would not act without convincing evidence. You can guess what I think of the stature of the U.S. with Dubya in the White House.

Another thing. Dubya seems proud of the fact that we "only" killed 2 or 3 thousand Iraqi civilians. In 1937, when hundred of civilians were killed in Guernica, the world, including Pablo Picasso, was horrified. Is the mass killing of civilians less horrific because it has happened before?

And how many thousands or tens of thousands of Iraqi soldiers did we kill? Is not the death of an Iraqi soldier, whose only crime was defending his country against foreign invaders, also a tragedy?

Yet another thing. Didn't North Korea resume its nuclear weapons program shortly after Dubya's 2002 State of the Union address in which he declared that Iraq, North Korea, and Iran were an "axis of evil"? Now, I can't read Kim Jong Il's mind, but it seems reasonable that the "axis of evil" remark might have convinced him that he would need nuclear weapons to deter a future U.S. attack. Nuclear weapons in the hands of North Korea are surely a far more serious threat than anything Saddam Hussein was up to. So isn't it possible that the mere act of threatening Iraq and, by implication, North Korea, had consequences far more dire than any threats we may have eliminated by conquering Iraq? And even if North Korea resumed their nuclear weapons program for other reasons, wasn't it foolhardy of Dubya to give them another reason to want nukes?

I have not seen this argument in the American media. Is the American press cowed, or am I simply wrong?

I could go on like this for some time, but I'll stop here.


Do not weep for them, madre.
They are gone forever, the little ones,
Straight to heaven to the saints,
and God will fill the bullet-holes with candy.
-- Norman Rosten, "In Guernica"

[khaosworks.livejournal.com]

It's an interesting idea, that Bush has goaded NK into resuming its weapons program, but then again, it's like saying just because I call a guy a super-villain he decides that he is going to be a super-villain. The guy has to be a bit cracked in the first place, my remark notwithstanding, to do that. I've heard it actually suggested though, half-seriously, that Bush may have done this just so he can push his missile defence program.

I think the reason no one gets on Bush's ass about the failure of diplomacy in NK is that NK is still a long ways away and most people agree that Kim is a psychopath and demagogue that should be gotten rid of at first opportunity, more so than Saddam ever was. My opinion always was that the war effort should have been directed at NK instead of Iraq - that would have been a war I could have gotten behind, to preserve international stability and for humanitarian reasons - but sadly, NK has no oil.

[cellio]

Welcome back! It's been too long.

[osj.livejournal.com]

MIXED METAPHOR ALERT! MIXED METAPHOR ALERT!

How does a hand fall on its sword? Especially since it would presumably be holding the sword...

[khaosworks.livejournal.com]

It lets go of the sword first, then while the sword is still balancing on its handle, impales itself on it.

You can't lead a horse to water, but you can still teach it new tricks with bird in hand, that's what I say.