Down the drain in Iraq

[Manix]

<snip>


H. ROSS PEROT, the Texas maverick who ran for president back in 1992, used to talk about the "giant sucking sound." He was talking about jobs being drawn out of the country by foreign competition. Bill Clinton won that election with the slogan: "It's the economy, stupid." This time around I suspect that the slogan will be: "It's Iraq, stupid," and the economy will play a role.

The giant sucking sound today is America being drawn deeper and deeper into the Baal-like maw of what used to be Babylon. President Bush is going back to Congress for another $25 billion of taxpayers' money for Iraq, and there can be no doubt that the tab will continue to mount into the hundreds and hundreds of billions. A Financial Times headline on a stock exchange story read: "Iraq proving the biggest drag of all."



<snip>


"The Bush administration seems not to recognize how widespread and how bipartisan is the view that Iraq is already lost or on the verge of being lost," write the conservative and prowar columnists William Kristol and Robert Kagan. "The administration therefore may not appreciate how close the whole nation is to tipping decisively against the war." Kristol and Kagan hear the slosh of the neoconservatives' dream of changing the Middle East into America's image also going down the drain.

Democrats and Republicans alike, even those who support "staying the course" in Iraq, are mystified by the denial the administration seems to be in about Iraq. The course Bush says he's keeping seems rudderless, and nobody in the world can tell you what Iraqi sovereignty is supposed to look like after the end of next month.




Boston Globe

[teryang]

1. Kristol and Kagan, neo-con war mongers

...now trying to dissociate themselves from the diastrous results of policies they advocated. They are idiots.

[Veggie Meathead]

4. On the contrary, Teryang, these vile PNAC authors are smart

snakes.By making critical remarks about the Iraq venture when they know the Bush administration is sinking, they preserve their credibility with whoever picks up the pieces of this trainwreck
and come back to cause another calamity for our country at a later date. As Admiral Crowe once remarked about Eliot Abrams during the
Iran-Contra disaster, this a snake that just wouldn't die.He had it easy.He had to deal with just one.Now we have a wriggling, seething mass of them.

[teryang]

5. Perhaps I should have said

...that they are obscurantists. But since both are enourmously egotistical intellectual pretenders, I prefer to call them idiots.

They were wrong, dead wrong. They are little more than propagandists. The only credibility they have is gained by their unfettered access to the media to repeat their false and hypocritical messages (to the uncritical low brow audience).

They are now in the same class of credible scribes as Thomas Friedman. No one takes them seriously, except to acknowledge that they are the official apologists for the regime. You can read what they say for what it reveals about intentions but no military planner or political strategist could seriously consider their writings in an advisory capacity.

This indeed is the modus operandi of the PNACers. Create the reality on the ground as leaders and "men of action." Then the world will follow. This is a part of their ridiculous German based ideology.

[mhr]

2. The Problem Is Pretty Obvious Yet The Freepers Babble On While Babylon

BURNS!

[callous taoboy]

3. My perspective-

Iraq will get massively worse after June 30. Look how bad it turned after the invasion when we didn't have a plan. Nobody has a clue what will transpire after June 30.