The Democrats could have used the attack on John Kerry, especially after his strong statement denouncing it, to highlight the RW's use of attacks (on Ford, Tester, Lamont, Webb and all the other Vets running) for political gain and to talk up the Iraq war.
Bush and the White House needed to make a mountain out of a molehill -- and to muster the Swift Boat Kerry bashers -- because they have been swamped by bad news and reports of incompetence related to Iraq.
No wonder they went into a Kerry feeding-frenzy.
In September, an intelligence report said the war in Iraq had heightened, not lessened, the terrorism threat by fueling recruitment of Islamic radicals.
October turned out to be the fourth-deadliest month for U.S. forces since the war began, with 105 deaths reported by the Associated Press. As of Friday, the AP had placed the number of the U.S. military killed since the war began at 2,829.
As for civilian deaths, a study by Johns Hopkins researchers estimated the number of Iraqis killed since the war began at more than 600,000. Bush said the Hopkins report was "not credible" and "flawed," which, oddly enough, are some of the kinder words used to describe Bush and his handling of the war. There are other reasons why Bush needed the distraction Kerry created.
On Monday, The New York Times reported that the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR) found discrepancies in records on more than 500,000 weapons given to the Iraqis during the last few years, including grenade launchers, assault rifles, machine guns, shotguns, semiautomatic pistols and sniper rifles. The U.S. military failed to note the serial numbers of all but a few thousand of them; they don't know where the weapons are or whether they have fallen into the wrong hands.
Further, the Times reported, Iraqi security forces still depend heavily on the United States for food, fuel, ammunition, troop transportation, health care and maintenance, and there doesn't seem to be any inclination on the part of the Iraqi government to pay us back for all this support. Wait, there's more!
"The American military," the Times reported, "was not able to say how many Iraqi logistics personnel it has trained
a computer network crash erased records. These problems have occurred even though the United States has spent $133 million on the weapons program and $666 million on building up Iraqi logistics capabilities."
And more: The inspector general, a Republican attorney named Stuart Bowen, has uncovered millions of dollars in cost overruns of Iraq reconstruction contracts, and his staff accused a State Department agency of cooking some books to hide the rising costs of projects and withholding information from Congress.
And more: The Iraq government doesn't seem inclined to do anything about seeking compromises toward ending sectarian tensions and violence, so more and more military leaders on the ground are moving to the belief that deadlines need to be imposed and a timetable established on the reduction of U.S. forces.
Snip...
Eliot Cohen, another neocon adviser to the Bush administration, says: "I wouldn't be surprised if what we end up drifting toward is some sort of withdrawal on some sort of timetable and leaving the place in a pretty ghastly mess."
John Kerry botched a joke. George Bush botched a war. You tell me what we should be more concerned about on Election Day 2006.
linkThis was a perfect time to pounce them on Iraq. Kerry would have been doing that had he remained out on the campaign trail.
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