[Vision2020] Friedman's NYTimes Op Ed Column re American policy onIraq and w

[keely emerinemix]

Excellent!  Thanks, Linda.

keely

From: "Linda Pall" <lpall at moscow.com>
To: <vision2020 at moscow.com>
Subject: [Vision2020] Friedman's NYTimes Op Ed Column re American policy 
onIraq and who's really insulted
Date: Fri, 3 Nov 2006 13:36:33 -0800

November 3, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
Insulting Our Troops, and Our Intelligence
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
George Bush, Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld think you're stupid. Yes, they do.

They think they can take a mangled quip about President Bush and Iraq by 
John Kerry - a man who is not even running for office but who, unlike Mr. 
Bush and Mr. Cheney, never ran away from combat service - and get you to 
vote against all Democrats in this election.

Every time you hear Mr. Bush or Mr. Cheney lash out against Mr. Kerry, I 
hope you will say to yourself, "They must think I'm stupid." Because they 
surely do.

They think that they can get you to overlook all of the Bush team's real and 
deadly insults to the U.S. military over the past six years by hyping and 
exaggerating Mr. Kerry's mangled gibe at the president.

What could possibly be more injurious and insulting to the U.S. military 
than to send it into combat in Iraq without enough men - to launch an 
invasion of a foreign country not by the Powell Doctrine of overwhelming 
force, but by the Rumsfeld Doctrine of just enough troops to lose? What 
could be a bigger insult than that?

What could possibly be more injurious and insulting to our men and women in 
uniform than sending them off to war without the proper equipment, so that 
some soldiers in the field were left to buy their own body armor and to 
retrofit their own jeeps with scrap metal so that roadside bombs in Iraq 
would only maim them for life and not kill them? And what could be more 
injurious and insulting than Don Rumsfeld's response to criticism that he 
sent our troops off in haste and unprepared: Hey, you go to war with the 
army you've got - get over it.

What could possibly be more injurious and insulting to our men and women in 
uniform than to send them off to war in Iraq without any coherent postwar 
plan for political reconstruction there, so that the U.S. military has had 
to assume not only security responsibilities for all of Iraq but the 
political rebuilding as well? The Bush team has created a veritable library 
of military histories - from "Cobra II" to "Fiasco" to "State of Denial" - 
all of which contain the same damning conclusion offered by the very 
soldiers and officers who fought this war: This administration never had a 
plan for the morning after, and we've been making it up - and paying the 
price - ever since.

And what could possibly be more injurious and insulting to our men and women 
in Iraq than to send them off to war and then go out and finance the very 
people they're fighting against with our gluttonous consumption of oil? 
Sure, George Bush told us we're addicted to oil, but he has not done one 
single significant thing - demanded higher mileage standards from Detroit, 
imposed a gasoline tax or even used the bully pulpit of the White House to 
drive conservation - to end that addiction. So we continue to finance the 
U.S. military with our tax dollars, while we finance Iran, Syria, Wahhabi 
mosques and Al Qaeda madrassas with our energy purchases.

Everyone says that Karl Rove is a genius. Yeah, right. So are cigarette 
companies. They get you to buy cigarettes even though we know they cause 
cancer. That is the kind of genius Karl Rove is. He is not a man who has 
designed a strategy to reunite our country around an agenda of renewal for 
the 21st century - to bring out the best in us. His "genius" is taking some 
irrelevant aside by John Kerry and twisting it to bring out the worst in us, 
so you will ignore the mess that the Bush team has visited on this country.

And Karl Rove has succeeded at that in the past because he was sure that he 
could sell just enough Bush cigarettes, even though people knew they caused 
cancer. Please, please, for our country's health, prove him wrong this time.

Let Karl know that you're not stupid. Let him know that you know that the 
most patriotic thing to do in this election is to vote against an 
administration that has - through sheer incompetence - brought us to a point 
in Iraq that was not inevitable but is now unwinnable.

Let Karl know that you think this is a critical election, because you know 
as a citizen that if the Bush team can behave with the level of deadly 
incompetence it has exhibited in Iraq - and then get away with it by holding 
on to the House and the Senate - it means our country has become a banana 
republic. It means our democracy is in tatters because it is so 
gerrymandered, so polluted by money, and so divided by professional 
political hacks that we can no longer hold the ruling party to account.

It means we're as stupid as Karl thinks we are.

I, for one, don't think we're that stupid. Next Tuesday we'll see.


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