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| Iraq War - Foreign Policy Disaster |
quixotic_Choux |
05/06/06 |
".....But the war did not go well for long. Though Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice now seems to have replaced Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld as chief cheerleader for the war, many now see the invasion of Iraq as an historic disaster on par with Napoleon's invasion of Moscow in 1812 and the Athenian invasion of Sicily in 415 BCE. Both ended empires that had seemed invincible. Tom Ricks reported in The Washington Post April 30, that military leaders are considering whether, "the surest -- and perhaps now the only -- way to bring stability to Iraq is to divide the country into three pieces." The alternative view is not to press on to victory, Ricks says, but to withdraw and allow a civil war to settle the question.
America has lost more than a division's worth of brave soldiers to the war, with over 2,400 killed and 17,500 maimed. Our national debt increases by over $2 billion every week to pay for the war. America's international reputation is at its lowest point in history. Even our closest allies mistrust our motives, question our vision and are saddened by our abandonment of shared values. It is not that they resent American leadership; they just do not want this kind of leadership.
The danger of nuclear terrorism has also grown as the ideology of al Qaeda has spread like wildfire throughout the Muslim world. But our programs to secure and eliminate the highly-enriched uranium and plutonium scattered in stockpiles in dozens of countries have not kept pace. If Osama bin Laden can get his hands on these materials, his group can almost certainly build, deliver and detonate a bomb that can destroy any American city. Without this material he is powerless to do so. Yet we spend only $1 billion on year these programs. We spend this much every 4 days in Iraq.
Perhaps the most disheartening is that our senior government officials have not acknowledged these failures or given the slightest indication that they are working on correctives. On the contrary, the 2006 National Security Strategy of the United States repeats the emphasis on preemptive war, this time focusing on Iran rather than Iraq. As faux news anchor Stephen Colbert said in his mocking tribute to President Bush at the White House Correspondents dinner, "When the president decides something on Monday, he still believes it on Wednesday - no matter what happened Tuesday."
The administration is strategically exhausted. Its only solution to the problem of Iran is to repeat the Iraq playbook. The speeches, the refusal to negotiate directly with Iran, the unnerving presence of Iranian exiles whispering sweet promises in Washington, the framing of the issue as one of the "credibility of the Security Council" are all straight out of the campaign that successfully fooled a majority of the nation, convincing them that Iraq was an urgent threat and somehow linked to September 11.
Thus, it falls to those of us outside of the governing circles to detail the failures, to forge new strategies and champion a new course. Some are already doing just that; more are needed. Most importantly, we must expose fully the mistakes of this strategy and of those who developed it so that America does not lurch into an unnecessary war. Not again".....Shortened from an article by Joe Cinicincione.
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Blunder after horrific blunder, and now today, his hand picked replacement to head the CIA, Goss, had to "resign" hastily leaving a seriously damaged agency...after only 19 months. |
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