Terror and Turbulence Will Follow Bush Into His Reelection Year - Time Ed

[Khephra]

Two days after the September 11 attacks, President Bush declared that "whipping terrorism, hunting it down, finding it and holding them accountable" was "now the focus of my administration." Domestic policy would remain important, he said, but his priority was taking the fight to an enemy far away. A shell-shocked America rallied behind its President, putting to rest all questions over the nature and extent of his electoral mandate, the cut-and-thrust of partisan politics giving way to a broad Beltway consensus that the President rode all the way into Baghdad. To those charged with ensuring a second term for President Bush, the war on terrorism may once have looked like a dream ticket.

In his most optimistic scenario, Bush would be going into the election season this fall with solid victories in Afghanistan and Iraq — as well as the scalps of some of America's most noxious enemies — under his belt. Europeans and other naysayers would have been chastened by the discovery in Iraq of huge stocks of anthrax and nuclear weapons-in-the-making, and would quickly learn to be more like Tony Blair. Bush would also be pointing to a democratic Afghanistan emerging from the ashes of Taliban misrule, and the first rays of Iraqi freedom beaming into the dark corners of Arab autocracy and extremism, illuminating the steady progress of the Israelis and Palestinians along his "roadmap" to peace. And all of this would serve as a chilling deterrent to the nastier ambitions of his other designated "evildoers," North Korea and Iran. Not only that, these epic gains would have been achieved on the basis of minimal investment of American lives and treasure — the war in Afghanistan won from the air and the peace requiring no more than a handful of U.S. troops; Saddam's legions defeated by three mobile U.S. armored divisions who could then pack up and go home leaving handpicked Iraqi exiles to tap ballooning oil revenues and build the Arab world's first pro-U.S., pro-Israel democracy, and so on.

Reality has careened wildly off the Administration script:

more........................

http://www.time.com/time/columnist/karon/article/0,9565,477355,00.html

[gristy]

1. That's an excellent on-line editorial - has TONS of links

Thanks for posting it, khephra.

Covering the pre-emptive war fiasco, the Time editorial does not even mention the Administration's inability to right the economy and the damage this is going to cause to all the repukes' re-election efforts next year.

[Khephra]

2. You're welcome!

I love the title (who thought we'd see a headline like that a year ago?) and it is filled with a ton of links. It's a very handy little eye-opener of an article.

:hi:

[RedEarth]

3. Excellent read....

Thanks for the post.....now we just have to get rid our "evildoer"...b...