IRAQ STUDY GROUP: DIFFERENT ANGLE
What am I missing here? A bunch of admittedly distinguished citizens submits a report and folks on both sides of aisle go "Ooh-Aah" as if they'd invented freaking flubber. It makes me ask two related questions:
1. Don't we already have a CIA, Terrorism Czar, Intelligence Overseer, Department of Defense, War College, Joint Chiefs and a National Security Council to do stuff like this?
2. Why is it that Washington types seem to think that, just because folks are old, they have no agenda of their own? Only young people are on the make? I kinda doubt it.
Labels: NATIONAL POLITICS
posted by UMRBlog @ 14:18
7 comments
7 Comments:
UMI Baby: you and I usually have a different take on issues, even though we agree philisophically when it comes to the bottom line. While the study was close to being finished Bush said he looked forward to their frank assessment. He was hoping their assessment would agree with what he is doing. It didn't. It took a day or two for his spinmachine to get their talking points to the poor deluded right wing talk show hosts. Now what we have is what we always had with Bush. Division. Bush will say he wants all options on the table and bipartisan solutions. He wants neither. He wants everyone to agree with him and Democrats to go away. As far as an agenda... The geezers on the study group have nothing to gain but feeling good for doing a service for their Country. I trust them more than any 1000 bureaucrats appointed by President Bush.
2. I agree. Other than Jimmy Carter, I can't think of a major public figure I like less than James Baker.
In his hate-fueled last years, Jimmy Carter has come to inhabit a world in which reality is optional.
Both of them share a strong desire to stick it to Israel
T-101,
Let me divide this up into three parts.
Bush Spin/Deflection/Denial: I am in complete agreement with you. If I hear "Going Forward.." one more time, I'm going to hurl!
Bush wants none of the bipartisan, all-options-on-the-table stuff: I agree completely. I don't know whether it's evil motive or simply being stuck farther into "the bubble" than any president in history but your conclusion is unavoidable and correct.
Influence and purity of advice by "bureaucrats": Here, we part company. By definition "bureaucrats" are not presidential appointees. They're on contracts or civil service. The good bureaucrats in the structure of the NSA, CIA and State Department have been telling anybody who will listen that this dog won't hunt. It's the bureaucrats who have been willing to say that the creation of a participatory democracy in the middle of the land mass we call arabia was, and always has been, a pipe dream and a fool's errand. Screw the neocon appointees but all the geezers did as to reaffirm what devoted public servants (bureaucrats) have been telling these colonialist cowboys since 9/12.
Thanks for your thoughts.
I stand 1/3 corrected. The approach I use and you take are interesting in the their difference. I use a phrase meant to strike emotion. "1000 bureaucrats." You educate us on good bureaucrats and appeal to our intelligence. It may not be in the cards, but I do believe we would make a good team.
T
I believe the whole is almost always greater than the sum of its parts and I am really easy to locate.
(Although, for those of you whom I prosecuted and who are now getting out of the penitentiary, I take a different route to work every day, so you'll need more than one grassy knoll.)
TYFCB
Surrender
There it is, the Iraq Study Group (ISG) report in a nutshell. Definitive proof that the cream of our establishment has exiled itself from planet earth and it has no apparent intention of coming home. If the ISG set out to secure a humiliating American defeat it couldn't have come up with more destructive recommendations.
Anon 0924
I'm not prepared to agree with you but I see some holes in the punch list.
"Change the force protection to protect the advisors". I guarantee you not one General gave them a low risk way of doing that. The protectors then become the targets and the protectors need protectors. This leads to a battle of body counts, exactly what we don't need.
"Challenge the Iraqis to step up and make progress" OK. How about some concret suggestions as to what the benchmarks should be for measuring progress. That's what this effort has always lacked and this report does not identify benchmarks as vital to defining when we have achieved a victory.
BTW, it drives me abolutely batpoop when somebody says we "are winning" or "aren't winning". That's not how war works. You add it all up at the end. The aggressor has either achieved his objective or he hasn't. Until the end, you don't know jack.
TYFCB
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