End of Silence

While I’ve been unimpressed with the Kerry campaign since the democratic convention, I must say that things are not looking good for ol’ G.W. despite his slight surge in the polls.

In the the time since the republican convention, questions have been raised again about his national guard service (although the documents causing the stir appear to be fakes), new books have arrived from respected Florida senator Bob Graham and veteran controversial biographer Kitty Kelley that paint an unflattering portrait of our current president, a National Intelligence Estimate was released painting a rather bleak picture of the current situation in Iraq, one of G.W.’s economic professors from his grad school days is speaking out about what an arrogant yutz he was in those days, a number of the 9/11 widows, who were instrumental in getting the administration to appoint the independent 9/11 Commission endorsed Kerry and finally, Donald Rumsfeld emerged from his virtual media blackout last Friday to give a talk to the National Press Club where he confused Saddam Hussein with Osama Bin Laden not once, but twice.

If I were prone to conspiracy theories, I’d say that the Bush administration is setting Rumsfeld up as the fall guy for the laundry list of blunders they’ve perpetrated over the last four years. I can see it now.

“Rumsfeld? He was crazy. It was all his idea. You heard how he confused Saddam and Osama in that speech. It was him, not us!”

You get the idea.

Oh yeah, I somehow missed all of the stuff Anthony Zinni was saying a few months ago. Here’s an example and here’s another.

Look out, I feel a rant coming on…

I think he’s absolutely right on. I think containment was working. There was no imminent threat from Iraq. The inspectors were there. They were having an effect. Congress (John Kerry among them) foolishly voted to give the president a blank check, thinking that he’d wave it around, but wouldn’t actually fill it out. What they didn’t count on was that he and the intelligence community were listening to the neoconservatives in the administration that we all know had a hard-on for Iraq ever since the Gulf War. They had Ahmed Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress exile group who had a vested interest in seeing us go in there feeding them fabricated crap about what was going on in Iraq when it was really a big mess. We went in. We weren’t prepared to stop the looting. We weren’t prepared to do the nation building that G.W. swore we shouldn’t be doing when he campaigned in 2000. We relied on Halliburton, Bechtel and other contractors for way too much stuff. If you were an Iraqi out of work and you saw that a bunch of foreigners were being employed by american companies and being paid exorbitant salaries to drive trucks in your country, wouldn’t you be pissed off too? At what point do those who keep pointing out that Iraq is part of the global war on terror step back and decide to do a little cost-benefit analysis. Look at what we’re spending in hard cash, lives and political capital. Is it worth it?