<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN">
<HTML><HEAD>
<META http-equiv=Content-Type content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
<META content="MSHTML 6.00.2800.1555" name=GENERATOR>
<STYLE></STYLE>
</HEAD>
<BODY bgColor=#c0c0c0>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>
<DIV class=timestamp>November 3, 2006</DIV>
<DIV class=kicker><NYT_KICKER>Op-Ed Columnist</NYT_KICKER></DIV>
<H1><NYT_HEADLINE version="1.0" type=" ">Insulting Our Troops, and Our
Intelligence </NYT_HEADLINE></H1><NYT_BYLINE version="1.0" type=" ">
<DIV class=byline>By <A title="More Articles by Thomas L. Friedman"
href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/opinion/editorialsandoped/oped/columnists/thomaslfriedman/index.html?inline=nyt-per">THOMAS
L. FRIEDMAN</A></DIV></NYT_BYLINE><NYT_TEXT>
<DIV id=articleBody>
<P>George Bush, Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld think you’re stupid. Yes, they
do.</P>
<P>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.</P>
<P>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.</P>
<P>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. </P>
<P>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?</P>
<P>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. </P>
<P>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. </P>
<P>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.</P>
<P>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.</P>
<P>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.</P>
<P>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.</P>
<P>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.</P>
<P>It means we’re as stupid as Karl thinks we are.</P>
<P>I, for one, don’t think we’re that stupid. Next Tuesday we’ll
see.</P></DIV></FONT></DIV></BODY></HTML>