Bush's speech disconnected from reality

[Thom Little]

By Jay Bookman
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Thursday, Dec. 1, 2005


When the media showed pictures of uncontrolled looting three years ago, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld dismissed the lawlessness as unimportant — newfound freedom is untidy. When press reports warned that a guerrilla insurgency was under way, U.S. officials refused for months to acknowledge that inconvenient fact, and even worse refused to adjust policy to it. And whenever the administration has repeated claims that a corner had been turned and the violence broken, events have sadly gone on to contradict them.

Just last May, Vice President Dick Cheney went on national TV to reassure us that we were seeing "the last throes, if you will, of the insurgency." But in the six months since last throes were announced, the rate of U.S. fatalities has increased.

That lack of honesty continued Wednesday. In his speech, Bush described an Iraq dedicated to democracy, with a quickly maturing military that would soon be capable of handling the bulk of the fighting. He made no mention of a civil war already under way, no acknowledgment that it will be many years, if ever, before the Iraqi military can fight on its own.

.......

From the beginning, this misbegotten adventure has been marked by a willful disconnect from reality. We would be greeted as liberators, Iraq would finance its own reconstruction, a democracy would quickly take root. . . . The illusions go on and on.

Throughout it all, it has been hard to tell whether the president and his advisers were incapable of telling the truth, or incapable of seeing it. The second explanation is more frightening, and more accurate.



http://www.ajc.com/opinion/content/opinion/bookman/2005/120105.html

[awoke_in_2003]

1. "Bush's speech disconnected from reality"

what else is new :sarcasm: