Must Read: Frank Rich: "Someone Tell the President the War is Over"

[flpoljunkie]

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/14/opinion/14rich.html?pagewanted=print

Someone Tell the President the War Is Over

By FRANK RICH

LIKE the Japanese soldier marooned on an island for years after V-J Day, President Bush may be the last person in the country to learn that for Americans, if not Iraqis, the war in Iraq is over. "We will stay the course," he insistently tells us from his Texas ranch. What do you mean we, white man?

A president can't stay the course when his own citizens (let alone his own allies) won't stay with him. The approval rate for Mr. Bush's handling of Iraq plunged to 34 percent in last weekend's Newsweek poll - a match for the 32 percent that approved L.B.J.'s handling of Vietnam in early March 1968. (The two presidents' overall approval ratings have also converged: 41 percent for Johnson then, 42 percent for Bush now.) On March 31, 1968, as L.B.J.'s ratings plummeted further, he announced he wouldn't seek re-election, commencing our long extrication from that quagmire.

<>It was on these false premises - that Iraq was both a collaborator on 9/11 and about to inflict mushroom clouds on America - that honorable and brave young Americans were sent off to fight. Among them were the 19 marine reservists from a single suburban Cleveland battalion slaughtered in just three days at the start of this month. As they perished, another Ohio marine reservist who had served in Iraq came close to winning a Congressional election in southern Ohio. Paul Hackett, a Democrat who called the president a "chicken hawk," received 48 percent of the vote in exactly the kind of bedrock conservative Ohio district that decided the 2004 election for Mr. Bush.

These are the tea leaves that all Republicans, not just Chuck Hagel, are reading now. Newt Gingrich called the Hackett near-victory "a wake-up call." The resolutely pro-war New York Post editorial page begged Mr. Bush (to no avail) to "show some leadership" by showing up in Ohio to salute the fallen and their families. A Bush loyalist, Senator George Allen of Virginia, instructed the president to meet with Cindy Sheehan, the mother camping out in Crawford, as "a matter of courtesy and decency." Or, to translate his Washingtonese, as a matter of politics. Only someone as adrift from reality as Mr. Bush would need to be told that a vacationing president can't win a standoff with a grief-stricken parent commandeering TV cameras and the blogosphere 24/7.

more..worth reading in its entirety

[RovianNightmare]

1. Week in, and week out

Frank Rich speaks for me. He's amazing. A theater critic has turned out to be the fiercest and smartest political commentator of the last year.

[Bellamia]

2. Great Article

Too bad Bush doesn't know what "courtesy and decency " is, even if it is politics.

[lildreamer316]

3. KICK

Happy. As far as I can be in a war.

[DemInDistress]

4. our Chimp wont meet with Cindy beacuse

of the release of the Downing Street Memo's.What could Chimpy possible say without incriminating himself and the reast of the Bush Crime Family.Last year when chimpy met with Cindy she wasnt aware of those DSM,just how could * explain he and Blair fixed,faked and forge documents that led to the deaths of over 1800...* is between a rock and a hard place, good for Cindy !!!!!

[rumpel]

5. I remember the soldier, Mr. Onoda was living in the jungles of Guam, that

image is so befitting to *.

and the finger pointing and infighting to cover their own butts within the circle has begun.

[demzilla]

6. Another false excuse from history

Not that Bush is Hitler -- I am not trying to compare their motivations or ideologies -- but there is something common in their approach to the truth when deciding to invade countries: Any excuse will do when you've made up your mind beforehand.

From Frank Rich:

. . . It was in Cincinnati on Oct. 7, 2002, that Mr. Bush gave the fateful address that sped Congressional ratification of the war just days later. The speech was a miasma of self-delusion, half-truths and hype. The president said that "we know that Iraq and Al Qaeda have had high-level contacts that go back a decade," an exaggeration based on evidence that the Senate Intelligence Committee would later find far from conclusive. He said that Saddam "could have a nuclear weapon in less than a year" were he able to secure "an amount of highly enriched uranium a little larger than a single softball." Our own National Intelligence Estimate of Oct. 1 quoted State Department findings that claims of Iraqi pursuit of uranium in Africa were "highly dubious."

It was on these false premises - that Iraq was both a collaborator on 9/11 and about to inflict mushroom clouds on America - that honorable and brave young Americans were sent off to fight. . . Iraq was a Bush administration idée fixe before there was a 9/11. Within hours of that horrible trauma, according to Richard Clarke's "Against All Enemies," Mr. Rumsfeld was proposing Iraq as a battlefield, not because the enemy that attacked America was there, but because it offered "better targets" than the shadowy terrorist redoubts of Afghanistan. It was easier to take out Saddam - and burnish Mr. Bush's credentials as a slam-dunk "war president," suitable for a "Top Gun" victory jig - than to shut down Al Qaeda and smoke out its leader "dead or alive."


From history.about.com:

So that Germany did not officially seem the aggressor (which it was), Hitler needed an excuse for entering/attacking Poland. It was Heinrich Himmler who came up with the idea; thus the plan was code named Operation Himmler.

On the night of August 31, 1939, Nazis took an unknown prisoner from one of their concentration camps, dressed him in a Polish uniform, took him to the town of Gleiwitz (on the border of Poland and Germany), and then shot him. The staged scene with the dead prisoner dressed in a Polish uniform was supposed to appear as a Polish attack against a German radio station.

Hitler used the staged attack as the excuse to invade Poland.

[rodeodance]

7. see this DU thread also (think there are 3 by now that I found).

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=103x146972

[strizi64]

8. kick & nominated

very good reading, thanks

[converted_democrat]

9. Snip....

"To this day it's our failure to provide that security that has turned the country (Iraq) into the terrorist haven it hadn't been before 9/11 - "the central front in the war on terror," as Mr. Bush keeps reminding us, as if that might make us forget he's the one who recklessly created it."


Edit- for clarity

[gristy]

10. wow

effin' wow.

[MH1]

11. Re: cable news -"it's hard to know which rat to root for"

The president's cable cadre is in disarray as well. At Fox News Bill O'Reilly is trashing Donald Rumsfeld for his incompetence, and Ann Coulter is chiding Mr. O'Reilly for being a defeatist. In an emblematic gesture akin to waving a white flag, Robert Novak walked off a CNN set and possibly out of a job rather than answer questions about his role in smearing the man who helped expose the administration's prewar inflation of Saddam W.M.D.'s. (On this sinking ship, it's hard to know which rat to root for.)

Frank Rich,

:yourock:

[kimpossible]

12. Kicked and nominated

Great read!