Dowd: Who's Losing Iraq?

[priller]

Mo gets it. FINALLY! I'm not a big fan of hers, after all her Gore-bashing, but she finally has the Bushies figured out and she nails 'em good. Full of zingers.

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/31/opinion/31DOWD.html

Who's Losing Iraq?

Karl Rove has got to be nervous.

The man who last year advised Republican candidates to "focus on war" is finding out that the Bush doctrine of pre-emption cannot pre-empt anarchy.

<snip>

As Paul Bremer admitted last week, the cost of the Iraq adventure is going to be spectacular: $2 billion for electrical demands and $16 billion to deliver clean water.

<snip> And she has Cheney's number:

It has also now become radiantly clear that we have to drag Dick Cheney out of the dark and smog. Less Hobbes, more Locke.

So far, American foreign policy has been guided by the vice president's gloomy theories that fear and force are the best motivators in the world, that war is man's natural state and that the last great superpower has sovereign authority to do as it pleases without much consultation with subjects or other nations.

We can now see the disturbing results of all the decisions Mr. Cheney made in secret meetings.

[Simeon Salus]

1. I like:

"When he wasn't meeting secretly with energy lobbyists, Mr. Cheney was meeting secretly with Iraqi exiles. The Iraqi National Congress leader Ahmad Chalabi and other defectors conned Mr. Cheney, Rummy and the naïve Wolfowitz of Arabia by playing up the danger of Saddam's W.M.D.'s and playing down the prospect of Iraqi resistance to a U.S. invasion.

According to The Los Angeles Times, U.S. and allied intelligence agencies are investigating to see if they were duped by Iraqi defectors giving bogus information to mislead the West before the war.

Some intelligence officials "now fear that key portions of the prewar information may have been flawed," the story said. "The issue raises fresh doubts as to whether illicit weapons will be found in Iraq."

This will smack down the Bushies who're now claiming our mission is failing because we didn't support Chalabi and his puppet council.

[florida_puppy]

3. DUH.....nt

[RamboLiberal]

4. I like these two paragraphs - she hit a home run with this one

You can't conduct a great historical experiment in a petty and bickering frame of mind. The agencies of the Bush administration are behaving like high school cliques. The policy in Iraq is paralyzed almost to the point of nonexistence, stalled by spats between the internationalists and unilateralists, with the national security director, Condoleezza Rice, abnegating her job as policy referee.

The State Department will have to stop sulking and being in denial about the Pentagon running the show in Iraq. And the Pentagon will have to stop being dogmatic, clinging to the quixotic notion that it only wants to succeed with its streamlined force and its trompe l'oeil coalition. Rummy has to accept the magnitude of the task and give up running the Department of Defense the way a misanthropic accountant would.

[izzie]

5. I can believe the people from Iraq put one over on our Vice.

I do not believe he and his wife are as smart as they think they are.

[Rose Siding]

2. I still wouldn't turn my back on her

She's an equal opportunity slice 'n dicer.

[pansypoo53219]

6. true

but she KNOWS she has to PAY for her missteps on 2000.

[DEM FAN]

7. I Wish Dowd Would Go Left All The Way. I Want To Like Her.

:shrug:

[The Zanti Regent]

8. Veg O Matic Whoreen Slices Dems more than GOP

Almost every column this witch writes pisses on the Clintons or Gore at some point.

Until she apologizes for lying about Al Gore, she can just drop dead!

[MasonJar]

9. Dowd

Is it possible that Modo relishes the nonpartisan approach and attacks miscreants when she sees them? Or perhaps she now realises her error. She deserves some responses. She is cleverly coming down hard on the bushies in almost every column; she is obviously not afraid of them. I never read her before Bush so I am not saying she was not unfair to Gore, but we need every voice we can find right now.

[lolly]

10. Goes beyond "nonpartisan"

She--like the rest of the Kool Kids--had no REAL dirt on the Clintons, so she made crap up. She's the source of the "Hillary had a bridal registry" b.s. that was repeated as gospel truth for months by the usual wingnuts.

To me, nonpartisan would mean judging each side fairly, not pretending that plunging a country into war and deficits by outright lying and manipulation is equivalent to lying about oral sex or wearing the wrong color make-up for a presidential debate.

If she would take a big public mea culpa for her role in tarring Gore and the Clintons, I might think she deserved some slack. But for her to go on pretending that it's 6 of one, a half-dozen of the other rules that out.