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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Bilow who wrote (100218)	6/4/2003 3:19:27 PM
From: LindyBill	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

it is going to be a hell of a long time before the people of this country again trust the Republicans with control over foreign policy. Really? Been too depressed to read the polls, Carl? Here are the latest numbers from CBS polls. In fact, evaluations of the president are mostly unchanged over the past few months. Now, 64 percent approve of the overall job he is doing as president. He receives extremely high marks on his handling of Iraq and terrorism (about eight in ten approve of his handling of terrorism). But his weak spot continues to be handling the economy; less than half approve of the job he is doing in this area. RATINGS OF GEORGE W. BUSH Overall Approve <http://www.cbsnews.com/common/images/blue.gif> 64% Disapprove <http://www.cbsnews.com/common/images/blue.gif> 29% Handling terrorism Approve <http://www.cbsnews.com/common/images/blue.gif> 79% Disapprove <http://www.cbsnews.com/common/images/blue.gif> 16% Handling Iraq Approve <http://www.cbsnews.com/common/images/blue.gif> 72% Disapprove <http://www.cbsnews.com/common/images/blue.gif> 20% Handling economy Approve <http://www.cbsnews.com/common/images/blue.gif> 44% Disapprove <http://www.cbsnews.com/common/images/blue.gif> 49% cbsnews.com The President you consider a "Moron" is doing just fine, Carl. And looks like a shoo-in for reelection at the moment. You can "Quagmire" the bumps in the road as we go settle things in Iraq, but your record on this subject is so bad that we could make a living betting the opposite of what you predict. Hey, stick around and tell us your thoughts. You can add to the comic relief provided by Jacob's posts.

To: Bilow who wrote (100218)	6/4/2003 3:34:12 PM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 281500

Why the truth is so elusive in Iraq _________________________________ By Steve Chapman Columnist The Chicago Tribune Published June 1, 2003 chicagotribune.com President Bush is such an admirer of Winston Churchill that he keeps a bust of him in the Oval Office. You don't have to agree with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who likens Bush to Churchill, to see that the president has taken one of the British statesman's maxims to heart. "In wartime," Sir Winston confided, "truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies." What is dawning on many people now is that in making the case for war, the administration and its allies did not make a fetish of strict honesty and candor. Why? Because if the American people had gotten the truth and nothing but the truth, they might not have been willing to go along with the whole enterprise. But the strategy worked so beautifully that it's being used for the postwar occupation as well. We were given no idea of what would happen once victory was achieved, and we have been given no idea what lies ahead. The danger for Bush is that one of these days, the public may be hit in the face with a cold dash of reality. The chief rationale for the invasion was that we had to prevent Saddam Hussein from using his vast arsenal of unconventional weapons. Unfortunately, those munitions have yet to be found, and Rumsfeld now admits that they may never be, because the Iraqis may have destroyed them. Why a thug regime that defied the United Nations for years would be so fastidious about eliminating all evidence of guilt at its hour of doom is a deep mystery. But the administration would rather live with this puzzle than admit that maybe Saddam Hussein didn't have the arsenal that Bush told us about. The U.S. government is not the only one capable of embellishing reality. Bush's ally, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who may prove to be a distant relative of Jayson Blair, put out a report saying that Iraq could use its weapons on 45 minutes' notice. But an anonymous British intelligence official told the BBC that claim was added at the insistence of the prime minister and "wasn't reliable." The administration also did its best to connect Saddam Hussein to the Sept. 11 atrocities. By endlessly relating the war on Iraq to the war on terrorism, the president managed to create some useful confusion. By the time the war began, 51 percent of Americans were operating on the assumption that Hussein was "personally responsible" for the terrorist attacks--which is about as plausible as blaming them on Lee Harvey Oswald. These deceptions are not exactly without precedent. If there is one constant in American history, it's that presidents of both parties tell lies to justify wars. Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon both made a habit of it in Vietnam. Ronald Reagan intervened in Lebanon insisting it was a vital U.S. interest, which his own national security adviser later admitted it was not. Bill Clinton sent troops to Bosnia in 1995 with a promise that they'd be home within 12 months. They're still there. So it should not be a surprise that the current president was willing to mislead us to build support for his invasion. Nor has the quality of information available to the public improved since the war. When it comes to the aftermath, the question is not whether Americans were misinformed: The picture painted by hawks was that the Iraqi people and their liberators would all live happily ever after, and that has turned out to be a fairy tale. No one in the White House predicted widespread looting, the collapse of order, anti-American protests, continuing attacks on U.S. troops, or the rise of fundamentalist Shiite groups. The only issue is whether the administration failed to tell us out of ignorance or out of deceit--whether the president and his aides were deliberately fooling us, or inadvertently fooling themselves. In any case, President Bush now has the problem of maintaining public support for a mission that promises to be expensive, open-ended, messy and thankless. But he has given the American people only the vaguest idea what they can expect. At a recent hearing, Sen. Joseph Biden (D-Del.) asked, "When is the president going to tell the American people that we're likely to be in the country of Iraq for three, four, five, six, eight, 10 years, with thousands of forces and spending billions of dollars?" Sen. Richard Lugar (R-Ind.), chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, complained that "the administration has not sufficiently involved Congress and the American people in its plans regarding the costs, methods and goals of reconstructing Iraq." No, it hasn't, and it isn't about to. ---------- E-mail: schapman@tribune.com

To: Bilow who wrote (100218)	6/4/2003 4:42:43 PM
From: Jacob Snyder	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 281500

Wolfowitz shoots himself (or maybe Blair) in the other foot (how many feet does he have?): "Let's look at it simply. The most important difference between North Korea and Iraq is that economically, we just had no choice in Iraq. The country swims on a sea of oil." guardian.co.uk JS@bloodforoil.pov

To: Bilow who wrote (100218)	3/6/2006 3:17:01 AM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 281500

Iraq Veterans Against the War: ivaw.net interesting website. An Open Letter to Bubba By Charlie Anderson, Iraq Veterans Against the War I’ve seen you around. I’ve seen you driving your gas guzzling SUV with the “Support Our Troops” ribbon on the back. I’ve seen you wearing your pro-war/pro-bush t-shirts as you walk right past me in my Iraq Veterans Against the War t-shirt as if I don’t exist. And I’ve seen you at anti-war rallies and meetings where I often speak, as you wave your American flag and call me a traitor. In this country we have freedom of speech. But you owe me and every other veteran of this war the respect of listening to our experience. Your magnet says “support our troops,” but what have you done for us? Not a penny of the proceeds go to us, instead they go to sweatshops in...You say that I am not supporting the troops when I say that they should come home. But I am, because I know that there was no threat to our nation from Saddam Hussein, I know that he had no weapons of mass destruction, and I know that we were not welcomed in as liberators. I know that the war was not worth fighting. I know, because I fought there. You say I’m confused. But what do you know about ? You’ve never been there. You have the audacity to claim that by not supporting the president, I don’t support the troops. Yet, the president chose to send over 160,000 of us to unprepared and without a defined mission. We had no body armor, no vehicle armor, and poor supplies of ammunition. Our families spent thousands of dollars that they did not have to supply us, while President Bush did nothing. In fact he didn’t even scold his Offensive Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, when he told our forward deployed troops, “you go to war with the army you have, not the army you wish you had.” Moreover, the mission was originally about weapons of mass destruction, but there were none. Then it was making a democracy, but yet the “insurgency” worsens. Now the president has decided that in order to honor those who died for nothing, more must die for nothing. At present, 2,241 of my brothers and sisters in arms have died. In some way, they may be the lucky ones. Over sixteen thousand others have been wounded in this war, thousands more than planned. The term wounded sounds sterile, bland, and inoffensive. But, in reality, many of them have been so horribly damaged that medical science had to create a new word to describe their wounds: polytrauma. These people would have died in earlier wars, but because of the gallant efforts of brave doctors and medics, they get to live. They get to live with teams of ten or more doctors just trying to get their broken, mangled bodies through another day, as their families look on in horror. They get to live in a physical and emotional hell, not able to recover and not able to voice the pain they feel or the psychological demons they face. All the while suffering with a Veterans Administration under funded by nearly three billion dollars and unable to care for them in the manner they deserve. So which one of us supports the troops? You, who has never set foot in Iraq and wants to leave my brothers and sisters there until they complete whatever the undefined mission of the week is, or me, the veteran of this war who has seen the carnage of battle, the rampant indifference of my countrymen, and just wants to bring my brothers and sisters home alive and care for them when they get here? Keep coming to the rallies. Maybe I’ll get through your thick skull eventually. But remember I waved my flag in Baghdad , so you can sit down, shut up, and listen to me.