Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

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

To: JohnM who wrote (110374)	8/7/2003 11:04:17 AM
From: NightOwl	Respond to of 281500

There is no doubt the Bush administration was warned, and warned repeatedly, about their bad planning for post war Iraq. Yes, but we have all been warned repeatedly JohnM. It seems to be a very popular mode of communication among homo sapiens, not to mention apes, monkeys, orangutans and the vast majority of predatory types. <g> ...Indeed, one might claim that anyone who hasn't been warned isn't even in the competition! <Hoo> Of course, I suppose the interesting question is why we accept some "warnings" and discount others. 0\|0

To: JohnM who wrote (110374)	8/7/2003 11:10:17 AM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 281500

Congress Beginning to Wake Up ______________________ by Jules Witcover Published on Friday, August 1, 2003 by the Baltimore Sun WASHINGTON - What's that faint stirring we're hearing from Capitol Hill? Can it be that Congress is finally waking up to the fact the war's still going on, that we're fighting it for reasons other than the principal ones put forward by President Bush, and that his administration won't tell us what it's going to cost? After blandly going along with the president's war resolution and invasion of Iraq, some of the good legislators seem to be coming around to the awareness that they and their brethren bought a pig in a poke without a price tag attached to its hoof. The president's chief intellectual architect and salesman of the adventure, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, took his case to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee the other day and ran into an uncommon torrent of criticism about what he has wrought. Also uncommonly these days, some Republicans joined Democrats in a bipartisan inquisition of the man who still insists on the basis of skimpy or nonexistent evidence that Saddam Hussein was in cahoots with Osama bin Laden. As they sought to extract from him how much the administration will have to pay for his brainchild, Mr. Wolfowitz blithely clung to his flawed rationale that the war wasn't about some imminent threat from weapons of mass destruction at all. It was about the Iraqi dictator's well-known beastliness. Mr. Bush, meanwhile, has been keeping U.S. warships merely treading water off Liberia, whose strongman, Charles Taylor, has a reputation of comparable beastliness. From all reports, the Liberian people have suffered the same sort of mayhem Mr. Wolfowitz said justified pre-emptive war against Iraq. In what a committee member called the administration's "shifting justification" for the invasion, Mr. Wolfowitz proclaimed that the war in Iraq was "the central battle in the war on terror." It's a theme that has also been expressed by the president and by Vice President Dick Cheney - obviously off the latest administration talking points. Republican Sen. Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island was blunt in sifting through the Wolfowitz chatter. All he was hearing in "a steady drumbeat," he said, was "weapons of mass destruction. ... So, I'll ask the question, Secretary Wolfowitz - What are we doing there?" Mr. Wolfowitz replied that he and his administration sidekicks had always talked about what a bad guy Mr. Hussein was. Others will remember, however, that in the runup to the war, such references were distinctly secondary to the supposed imminent chemical and biological weapons threat that President Bush said required immediate action. Another Republican, Sen. Richard G. Lugar of Indiana, despite his always reasonable manner, was not going to be put off by Mr. Wolfowitz about the cost of putting the Iraq Humpty Dumpty back together again. Mr. Lugar also wanted to know why the administration wasn't being more successful in bringing in peacekeeping troops from other countries. Members of Mr. Bush's "coalition of the willing" have been dragging their feet, and as for the coalition of the unwilling that wouldn't back his war, the reason is all too obvious. Having called the United Nations "irrelevant," the president can't expect its members who opposed the invasion to enlist in the cleanup. Mr. Wolfowitz allowed that the administration was willing to have such assistance "provided it does not put limitations" on the Iraq reconstruction being undertaken on an essentially unilateral basis by the president's on-site czar, L. Paul Bremer III. In other words, give us your bodies but keep your kibitzing to yourselves. The deputy secretary observed at one point that "speed is of the essence here, and the U.N. isn't always speedy." Certainly its weapons inspectors weren't speedy enough for him in his eagerness to launch the invasion. The administration's subsequent search for the same weapons is not being clocked so impatiently at the Pentagon. Meanwhile, Congress and the American taxpayers will have to be more patient waiting to find out not only where those weapons are, but also how much bigger a hole will be shot in the federal budget by this war of shifting justifications. _______________________ Jules Witcover usually writes from The Baltimore Sun's Washington bureau. Copyright © 2003, The Baltimore Sun commondreams.org

To: JohnM who wrote (110374)	8/7/2003 11:18:48 AM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 281500

THE SILVER BULLET ______________________ By David Podvin “My Republican opponent voted to cut medical benefits for our war heroes in order to give a tax cut to himself.” This should be the mantra of Democratic candidates in 2004. It should be vigilantly repeated until Republicans howl in protest. It should be endlessly repeated until conservatives wail about the class warfare of it all. It should be relentlessly repeated until every right wing pundit across America is foaming at the mouth…even more than usual. And then it should be repeated again. What George W. Bush and company did was unpatriotic – they sent young Americans off to fight for this country while stabbing them in the backs. Those soldiers who do not return in body bags will come home to a dangerous future of severely reduced medical care, courtesy of the flag waving phonies of the Grand Old Party. The Republicans must be made to pay for this act of treachery. They must be exposed as pseudo-patriotic frauds. They must be publicly humiliated and politically destroyed. It is the only moral thing to do. The most recent all-out liberal assault on the decadence of conservatives happened during the 1964 campaign. A team of Lyndon Johnson’s operatives – led by Bill Moyers – accurately portrayed America’s right wingers as racist warmongers. On Election Day, the Republicans were sniveling about “vicious tactics”, while the Democrats were celebrating a landslide victory. Following LBJ’s departure, Democratic leaders unwisely discarded the winning confrontational strategy in favor of being conciliatory. Over the last thirty-five years, liberals have responded to conservative gutter sniping by seeking to “elevate the level of the national debate”. Instead of telling the truth about Republicans, Democrats have chosen to “take the high road”. It has usually been the road to oblivion. If the Democratic Party is willing to get tough, the military medical benefits issue can be used to put the Republicans on the defensive and keep them backpedaling all the way through the 2004 election. Here is the chance for Democrats to align with America’s soldiers against the malicious reactionaries who exploit the issue of patriotism to do some very unpatriotic things. Continues......... makethemaccountable.com