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Politics : Sioux Nation -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Patricia Trinchero who wrote (95509)	1/14/2007 7:27:05 PM
From: SiouxPal	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 361152

Rich: Aside from Laura and Barney, who's in the bunker with Bush? Aside from the first lady and Barney, who's in the bunker with President Bush, New York Times columnist Frank Rich asks in his latest Sunday column. "Bush's own support from the American people is not coming back," Rich writes. "His 'new' Iraq policy is also in defiance of Iraqi public opinion, the Joint Chiefs, the Baker-Hamilton grandees, and al-Maliki, who six weeks ago asked for a lower American profile in Iraq." "Which leaves you wondering exactly who is still in the bunker with the president besides the first lady and Barney," Rich continues. Excerpts from article: # It's a very short list led by John McCain, Joe Lieberman, and neo-conservative dead-enders like William Kristol and Frederick Kagan, who congregate at The Weekly Standard and the American Enterprise Institute, the Washington think tank. The one notable new recruit is Rudy Giuliani, who likened taming Baghdad to "reducing crime in New York," without noticing that even after the escalation there will be fewer American troops patrolling Baghdad than uniformed police officers in insurgency-free New York City. .... The discrepancy between the policy that Bush nominally endorses and the one he actually ordered up crystallizes the cynicism of this entire war. If you really believe, as the president continues to put it, that Iraq is the central front in "the decisive ideological struggle of our time," then you should be in favor of having many more troops than we've ever had in Iraq. As T.X. Hammes, an insurgency expert and a former Marine, told USA Today, that doesn't now mean a "dribble" (as he ridicules the "surge") but a total of 300,000 armed coalition forces over a minimum of four years. But that would mean asking Americans for sacrifice, not giving us tax cuts. Bush has never asked for sacrifice and still doesn't. If his words sound like bargain-basement Churchill, his actions have been cheaper still. The president's resolutely undermanned war plan indicated from Day 1 that he knew in his heart of hearts that Iraq was not the central front in the war against 9/11 jihadism he had claimed it to be, only the reckless detour that it actually was. Yet the war's cheerleaders, neocon and otherwise, disingenuously blamed our low troop strength almost exclusively on Rumsfeld. rawstory.com