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Only problem is that Wesley's pussy tactics would of done jack to sadaam.
Maybe not the Serbs, but the Croats and the Muslims are certainly better off. Milosevic sits in a prison at the Hague. I hardly consider that unpunished.NbaDan, you seriously believe the Serbs are now better off. Not to mention Milosevic went unpunished for war crimes. Kosovo was a disaster and it didnt achieve peace
Only problem is that Wesley's pussy tactics would of done jack to sadaam.
Why not? It obvious now that the sanctions and air embargo were working beyond belief, in fact, they were probably working too well. Saddam had not rebuilt any of his WMD programs and even his conventional Army was in shambles. Rumor is that by the end Saddam had become more of a figure-head in Iraq than anything else. This is why he had no idea that he didn't have any WMD's - his son-in-law had destroyed them all.Only problem is that Wesley's pussy tactics would of done jack to sadaam.
Iraq would still be able to shelter Al Queda with dumbass embargoes. And iraq had plenty of time to ship their weapons out of the country into syria before the invasion. Iraq would still be able to assist the palestinian terrorist fronts against israel. Plus, the embargoes were crap since iraq managed to cut around them through the Oil for FOod program.
Ummm, no. The only Al-Queda training camp in Iraq was in the Kurd controlled area of Iraq.
Syria had no need for Saddam's WMD since it has a hardy stockpile of its own, besides these weapons are dangerous and they have a relatively short shelf life. The 911 commission found no evidence that Iraq's WMD had been transferred anywhere.
Saddam paid palestinian bombers so that he could appease more radical elements within his country, but by no means did he supply arms or strategic aid to the Palestian bombers.
Great (lengthy) summation on Sheehan vs W from Tom Engelhardt of AOline
Confusion in the ranks
Ellen Knickmeyer of the Washington Post reported last week that "a US general said ... the violence would likely escalate as the deadline approached for drafting a cons ution for Iraq". For two years now, this has been a dime-a-dozen prediction from American officials trying to cover their future butts. For the phrase "drafting a cons ution" in that general's quote, you need only subs ute "after the killing of Saddam Hussein's sons" (July 2003), "for handing over sovereignty" (June 2004), "for voting for a new Iraqi government" (January 2005) - or, looking ahead, "for voting on the cons ution" (October, 2005) and, yet again, "for voting for a new Iraqi government" (December 2005), just as you will be able to subs ute as yet unknown similar "milestones" that won't turn out to be milestones as long as our president insists that we must "stay the course" in Iraq, as he did only recently as his Crawford vacation began.
After each e of violence, at each tipping point, each time a corner is turned, Bush officials or top commanders predict that they have the insurgency under control, only to be ambushed by yet another e in violence. In May, for example, more than three months after violence was supposed to have ed and receded in the wake of the Iraqi election, chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Richard Myers offered a new explanation - the "recent e in violence ... represents an attempt to discredit the new Iraqi government and cabinet". When brief lulls in insurgent attacks (which often represent changes in tactics) aren't being declared proof that the Iraqi insurgency is faltering/failing/coming under control, then the es are being claimed as "the last gasp" of the insurgency, proof of the impending success of Bush administration policies - those last throes that Vice President Cheney so notoriously described to CNN's Wolf Blitzer as June ended.
Recently in a throw (not throe) up-your-hands mode, Army Brigadier General Karl Horst, deputy commander of the 3rd Infantry Division, which oversees Baghdad, offered the following, taking credit for having predicted the very throe his troops were then engulfed in: "If you look at the past few months, insurgents have not been able to sustain attacks, but they tend to surge every four weeks or so. We are right in the middle of one of those periods and predicted this would come ... If they are going to influence the cons ution process, they have only a few days left to do it, and we fully expect the attacks to continue."
You would think that someone in an official capacity would conclude, sooner or later, that Iraq was a e in violence.
It's an accepted truth of our times that the Bush administration has been the most secretive, disciplined, and on-message administration in our history. So what an out-of-control couple of weeks for the president and his pals. His polls were at, or near, historic lows; his Iraq war approval numbers headed for, or dipping below, 40% - and polls are, after all, the message boards for much of what's left of American democracy. As he was preparing for his record-setting presidential vacation in Crawford, Bush and his advisors couldn't even agree on whether we were in a "global struggle with violent extremism" or in a "global war on terror". (The president finally opted for war.) He was, of course, leaving behind in Washington a special counsel, called into being by his administration but now beyond its control, who held a sword of judicial Damocles over key presidential aides (and who can probably parse sinking presidential polls as well as anyone).
Iraq - you can't leave home without it - has, of course, been at the heart of everything Bushworld hasn't been able to shake off, at least since May 2, 2003. On that day (when, ominously enough, seven American soldiers were wounded by a grenade attack in Fallujah), our president co-piloted a jet onto the USS Abraham Lincoln, an aircraft carrier halted off the San Diego coast (lest it dock and he only be able to walk on board). All togged out in a military uniform, he declared "major combat operations" at an end, while standing under a White House-produced banner reading "mission accomplished". Ever since then, Bush has been on that mission (un)accomplished and Iraq has proved nothing if not a black hole, sucking in his administration and the American military along with neo-conservative dreams and plans of every ambitious sort.
The Iraqi insurgency that should never have happened, or should at least have died down after unknown thousands of its foot soldiers were killed or imprisoned by the American military, inconveniently managed to turn the early days of August into a killing zone for American soldiers. Sixteen Marine Reservists from a single unit in Ohio were killed in a couple of days; seven soldiers from the Pennsylvania National Guard were killed, again in a few days. Thirty-seven Americans were reported to have died in Iraq in the first 11 days of the presidential vacation, putting American casualties at the top of the TV news night after night. And yet the administration has seemed capable only of standing by helplessly, refusing to give an inch on the "compassion" president's decision - he and his advisors are still navigating by the anti-Vietnam playbook - not to visit grief-stricken communities in either Ohio or Pennsylvania, or ever to be caught attending the funeral of one of the boys or girls he sent abroad to die. He did manage, however, to fly to the Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico to sign the energy bill and also left his ranch to hobnob with millionaire Republican donors.
In this same period, cracks in relations between an increasingly angry military command in Iraq and administration officials back in Washington began to appear for all to see. The issue, for desperate military officers, was – as for Cindy Sheehan - how in the world to get our troops out of Iraq before the all-volunteer military goes over an Iraqi cliff, wheels and all.
As July ended, our top general in Iraq, George W Casey, announced (with many conditional "ifs") that we should be able to start drawing-down American troops significantly by the following spring - that tens of thousands of them were likely to leave then and tens of thousands more by the end of 2006, and Rumsfeld initially backed him up somewhat edgily. Then, as Rumsfeld hedged, more military people jumped into the media fray with leaks and comments of all sorts about possible Iraqi drawdowns and there was a sudden squall of front-page articles on withdrawal strategies for a hard-pressed administration in an increasingly unpopular war. At the same time, confusingly, reports began to surface indicating that, because of another of those prospective es in violence, the administration would actually be increasing American troop strength in Iraq before the December elections by 10,000-20,000 soldiers.
Finally, after a war council of the Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice (Pentagon and State Department) "teams" in Crawford last week, the president held a news conference (devoted in part to responding to Cindy Sheehan) and promptly launched a new, ad-style near-jingle to explain the withdrawal moment to the American people: "As Iraqis stand up," he intoned, "we will stand down."
But in a week in which the American general in command of transportation in Iraq announced that roadside bomb attacks against his convoys had doubled over the past year, such words sounded empty - especially as news flowed in suggesting that, while the insurgents continued to fight fiercely, the new Iraqi military seemed in no rush whatsoever to "stand up" and that our own commanders believed it might never do so in significant numbers. At his news conference, our never-never-land president nonetheless spoke several times of being pleased to announce "progress" in Iraq. ("And we're making progress training the Iraqis. Oh, I know it's hard for some Americans to see that progress, but we are making progress.")
He spoke as well of attempts to ease the burden on the no-longer-weekend warriors of the National Guard and the Reserves (who are taking unprecedented casualties in August). He said: "We've also taken steps to improve the call-up process for our Guard and for our Reserves. We've provided them with earlier notifications. We've given them greater certainty about the length of their tours. We minimized the number of extensions and repeat mobilizations." Unfortunately, at just this moment, Joint Chiefs head Myers was speaking of the possibility of calling soldiers back for their third tours of duty in Iraq: "There's the possibility of people going back for a third term, sure. That's always out there. We are at war."
"Pulling the troops out would send a terrible signal to the enemy," the president insisted as he turned to the matter of withdrawal in his news conference. He then dismissed drawdown maneuvers as "speculation and rumors"; and, on being confronted by a reporter with the statements of his own military men, added, "I suspect what you were hearing was speculation based upon progress that some are seeing in Iraq as to whether or not the Iraqis will be able to take the fight to the enemy."
While that may sound vague, it was, nonetheless, the sound of a president (who, along with his secretary of defense, has always promised to abide by whatever his generals in the field wanted) disputing those commanders in public. General Casey was also reportedly "rebuked" in private for his withdrawal comments. Our commanders in Iraq are, of course, the official realists in this war, having long ago given up on the idea that the insurgency could ever be defeated by force of US arms and worrying as they do about those "wheels coming off" the American military machine.
In fact, the Bush administration's occupation of Iraq - as Howard Zinn put the matter recently, "We liberated Iraq from Saddam Hussein, but not from us." - is threatening to prove one of the great asymmetric catastrophes in recent military history. A rag-tag bunch of insurgents, now estimated in the tens of thousands, using garage-door openers and cell phones to set off roadside bombs and egg-timers to fire mortars at US bases (lest they be around when the return fire comes in), have fought the US military to at least a draw. We're talking about a military that, not so long ago, was being touted as the most powerful force not just on this planet at this moment but on any planet in all of galactic history.
Previously, such rumors of withdrawal followed by a quiet hike in troop strength in Iraq might have been simply another clever administration attempt to manipulate the public and have it both ways. At the moment, however, they seem to be a sign not of manipulation but of confusion, discord and uncertainty about what to do next. If the public was left confused by such "conflicting signals" about an Iraqi withdrawal, wrote Peter Baker of the Washington Post, "it may be no more unsure than the administration itself, as some government officials involved in Iraq policy privately acknowledge." An unnamed "military officer in Washington" typically commented to Anne E Kornblut of the New York Times, "We need to stick to one message. This vacillation creates confusion for the American public."
Even administration officials are now evidently "significantly lowering expectations" and thinking about how exactly to jump off the sinking Iraqi ship. The president, beseeching "the public to stick with his strategy despite continuing mayhem on the ground", is, Baker commented, "trying to buy time". But buy time for what? This is the question that has essentially paralyzed Bush's top officials as they face a world suddenly not in their control.
Cindy and the media
And then, if matters weren't bad enough, there was Cindy Sheehan. She drove to Crawford with a few supporters in a caravan of perhaps a dozen vehicles and an old red, white and blue bus with the blunt phrase "Impeachment Tour" written on it. She carried with her a tent, a sleeping bag, some clothes and evidently not much else. She parked at the side of the road and camped out - and the next thing anyone knew, she had forced the president to send out not the Secret Service or some minor bureaucrat, but two of his top men, National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley and Deputy Chief of Staff Joe Hagin. For 45 minutes, they met and negotiated with her, the way you might with a recalcitrant foreign head of state. Rather than being flattered and giving ground, she just sent them back, insisting that she would wait where she was to get the president's explanation for her son's death. ("They said they'd pass on my concerns to George Bush. I said, 'Fine, but I'm not talking to anybody else but him'.")
So there she was, as people inspired by her began to gather - the hardy women of Code Pink; other parents whose children had died in Iraq; a former State Department official who had resigned her post to protest the onrushing Iraq war; "a political consultant and a team of public relations professionals"; antiwar protestors of all sorts; and, of course, the media. Quite capable of reading administration weakness in the polls, trapped in no-news Crawford with a president always determined to offer them less than nothing, hardened by an administration whose objective for any media not its own was only "rollback", and sympathetic to a grieving mother from Bush's war, reporters found themselves with an irresistible story at a moment when they could actually run with it.
Literally hundreds of news articles - almost every one a sympathetic profile of the distraught mother and her altar-boy, Eagle-Scout dead son - poured out; while Sheehan was suddenly on the morning TV shows and the nightly news, where a stop-off at "Camp Casey" or the "Crawford Peace House" was suddenly de rigeur. And the next thing you knew, there was the president at his news conference forced to flinch a second time and, though Sheehan was clobbering him, offer "sympathy" to a grieving mother at the side of the road five miles away whom he wasn't about to invite in, even for a simple meeting, but who just wouldn't leave. ("And so, you know, listen, I sympathize with Mrs Sheehan. She feels strongly about her - about her position. And I am - she has every right in the world to say what she believes. This is America. She has a right to her position ... ").
Talk about asymmetric warfare. One woman against the massed and proven might of the Bush political machine and its major media allies (plus assorted bloggers) and though some of them started whacking away immediately, Cindy Sheehan remained unfazed. After all, she had been toiling in the wilderness and this was her moment. Whatever the right-wing press did, she could take it - and, of course, the mainstream media had for the time being decided to fall in love with her. After all, she was perfect. American reporters love a one-on-one, "showdown" situation without much context, a face-to-face shoot-out at the OK Corral. (Remember those endless weeks on TV labeled "Showdown with Saddam"?) In addition, they were - let's be honest - undoubtedly angry after the five-year-long pacification campaign the administration had waged against them.
But they had their own ideas about who exactly Cindy Sheehan should be to win over America. They would paint a strikingly consistent, quite moving, but not completely accurate picture of her. They would attempt to tame her by shearing away her language, not just the profanity for which she was known, but the very fierceness of her words. She had no hesitation about calling the president "an evil maniac", "a lying bas " or the administration "those lying bas s", "chickenhawks", "warmongers", "shameful cowards" and "war criminals". She called for the president's "impeachment", for the jailing of the whole top layer of the administration (no pardons). She called for American troops to be pulled out of Iraq now. And most of this largely disappeared from a much-softened media portrait of a grieving antiwar mother.
And yet Sheehan herself seems unfazed by the media circus and image-shaping going on around her. In a world where horrors are referred to euphemistically, or politely, or artfully ignored, she does something quite rare - she calls things by their names as she sees them. She is as blunt and impolite in her mission as the media is cir spect and polite in its job, as most of the opposition to Bush is in its "opposition". And it was her very bluntness, her ability to shock by calling things by their actual names, by acting as she saw fit, that let her break through, and that may help turn a set of unhappy public opinion polls into a full-scale antiwar movement.
What will happen next? Will the president actually attend a funeral? Will Cindy Sheehan force him from his Green-Zone world? Suddenly, almost anything seems possible.
However the media deals with her, she embodies every bind the administration is in. As with Iraq (as well as Iran), the administration can't either make its will felt or sweep her off the landscape. Bush and his officials blinked at a moment when they would certainly have liked to whack her, fearing the power of the mother of a dead son from their war. And then, completely uncharacteristically, they vacillated and flip-flopped. They ignored her, then negotiated. They sent out their attack dogs to flail at her, then expressed sympathy. Officials, who have always known what to do before, had no idea what to do with Cindy Sheehan. The most powerful people in the world, they surely feel trapped and helpless. Somehow, she's taken that magical presidential something out of Bush and cut him down to size. It's been a remarkable performance so far.
The tipping point?
Casey Sheehan died on April 4, 2004, soon after he arrived for his tour of duty in Iraq. His mother had never wanted him to go to a war that was "wrong", a place where he might have to "kill innocent people" and where he might die. ("I begged him not to go. I said, 'I'll take you to Canada' ... but he said, 'Mom, I have to go. It's my duty. My buddies are going'.") In her grief - always beyond imagining for those of us who have not lost a child - this woman found her calling, one that she would never have wanted and that no one would have ever wished on her.
For more than a year, having set up a small organization, Gold Star Families for Peace, she traveled the country insisting that the president explain, but in relative obscurity - except on the Internet, that place where so much gestates that later bursts into our mainstream world and where today, at Technorati.com, which monitors usage on blogs, her name is the most frequently searched for of all. As she has said, "If we didn't have the Internet, none of us would really know what was truly going on. This is something that can't be ignored."
In March, she appeared - thanks to prescient editors - on the cover of the Nation magazine for an article, The New Face of Protest?, on the developing military and military-family inspired, antiwar movement. She was giving a speech at the Veterans for Peace national convention in Dallas when she evidently decided that she had to head for Crawford, and the rest you know.
As our president likes to speak about "our mission" in Iraq and "our mission of defeating terrorists" in the world, so Cindy Sheehan has found herself on a mission. Our president speaks resolutely of "staying the course" in Iraq. That's exactly what Cindy Sheehan is planning to do in Crawford (and undoubtedly beyond). Bush prides himself on not flinching, giving ground, or ever saying he's sorry. But he also had remarkably good luck until he ran into Cindy. Whether in his presidential runs, in Congress, or elsewhere, he really hasn't come up against an opponent who was ready to dig in and duke it out blow for blow, an opponent ready never to flinch, never to apologize, never to mince words, never to take prisoners.
Now he's got one - and like so many personal demons, she's been called up from the Id of his own war: a mother of one of the dead who demands an explanation, an answer, when no answer he gives will ever conceivably do; a woman who, like his neo-con companions, has no hesitation about going for the jugular. And, amazingly, she's already made the man flinch twice.
No matter how the media surrounds her or tries to tame her, the fact is she's torn up the oppositional rule book. She's a woman made in the mold of Iraq war vet Paul Hackett, who ran in a hopelessly Republican congressional district recently. He didn't hesitate to call the president a "chicken hawk" or a "son of a ", and to the surprise of all won 48% of the vote doing so, leading Newt Gingrich to say that the race "should serve as a wake-up call to Republicans" for the 2006 elections.
There's a lesson in this. Americans are not, generally speaking, your basic turn-the-other-cheek sorts of folks. They like to know that the people they vote for or support will, at the very least, stand there and whack back, if whacked at. Whatever she may have been before, Cindy Sheehan was beaten into just that shape on the anvil of her son's death. ("I was stunned and dismayed when the United States invaded Iraq. I didn't agree with it. I didn't think it was right, but I never protested until after Casey was killed.") Some of her testimony at the Conyers hearings on the Downing Street Memo catches this spirit and it's well worth quoting:
Last week, the Pentagon relieved a four-star general of his command allegedly because he had an affair, while separated from his wife, with a woman not in the military or the government; and yet not a single top official or high-ranking officer (except for scapegoat Brigadier Gen Janice Karpinski) has suffered for American acts at Abu Ghraib, or murder and torture throughout our imperium, or for torture and abuse at our prison in Guantanamo, or for any of the disasters of Iraq. In such a context, the words "please hold someone accountable" by the mother of a boy killed in Iraq, a woman on a mission who doesn't plan to back down or leave off any time soon - well, that truly cons utes going directly for the president's political throat. It's mano a mano time, and while I would never underestimate what this administration might do, I wouldn't underestimate the fierce power of an angry mother either. The Bush administration is in trouble in Iraq, in Washington, and in Crawford.There are a few people around the US and a couple of my fellow witnesses who were a little justifiably worried that in my anger and anguish over Casey's premeditated death, I would use some swear words, as I have been known to do on occasion when speaking about the subject. Mr Conyers, out of my deep respect for you, the other representatives here, my fellow witnesses, and viewers of these historic proceedings, I was able to make it through an entire testimony without using any profanity. However, if anyone deserves to be angry and use profanity, it is I. What happened to Casey and humanity because of the apparent dearth of honesty in our country's leadership is so profane that it defies even my vocabulary skills. We as Americans should be offended more by the profanity of the actions of this administration than by swear words. We have all heard the old adage that actions speak louder than words and for the sake of Casey and our other precious children, please hold someone accountable for their actions and their words of deception.
Last edited by Nbadan; 08-16-2005 at 04:21 AM.
Day 10: Camp Casey
Volunteers fix Arlington in the West Crosses after a bush supporter methodically ran over them with his truck. He was arrested by Crawford Police a short time later and made to repent.
How do you know they were a Bush supporter? I've read several articles about the incident and nowhere have they stated the man was a Bush supporter. He obviousy didn't agree with what she was doing or maybe he didn't agree with how she was doing it, but that doesn't autmatically make his actions represent the other side of the spectrum.
Maybe he was a Wiccan and the crosses offended him.
Will this guy be sitting to the left or the right of Clinton at the next DNC?
lol... ing hippies....
dam hippies with their crosses on Texas Presidential Corridors
Damn hippies who spit on conscripted VietNam Veterans and called them baby killers and war criminals...
Damn hippies who ran to Canada.
Damn hippies who thought being a heroin addict was enlightenment...
Damn hippy who would never lift a finger in the aid of the defense of this country who is desecrating the graves of those who did...and using their dead bodies for his own political agenda.
Those soldiers would probably beat his ass if they could.
How did he repent, 2 our fathers and a hail mary?
yeah whottt
all these antiwar people in crawford we're the same people who spit on vietnam vets 35 years ago
Old hippies are awesome
I was just pointing out the ridiculousness of someone running over a religious/spiritual symbol because he does no believe in the cause they represent.
Kinda like burning the American flag, no?
What I dont get is that a couple of vacations ago, Dumbya sped from Crawford, Texas, back to D.C., at 2 a.m. to sign a bill overturning 20 state and federal court rulings in the case of Terri Schiavo, a brain-dead woman.
Now he can't take five minutes out of his five-week vacation to meet Cindy Sheehan, a living, breathing woman who simply wants to know why her son died.
WTF is up with that?
Where is the "compassion" for this grieving mother? Huh? Humm?
[QUOTEI was just pointing out the ridiculousness of someone running over a religious/spiritual symbol because he does no believe in the cause they represent.
Kinda like burning the American flag, no?]
Why are they allowed to put religious symbols on public property, it is endorsing Christianity....
"oh I'm religious
i belong to the master religion, even though its MY faith, i want to share it with you because I dont want you to burn in or teach my children your antifamily secular heresy
america was founded on christian values by christians"
by the way Im a christian i just like to imagine im a neocon RRWinger
but a persons religion is THEIR religion
I understand a lot of people in Crawford are just getting fed up with the intrusion of the media and the disruption that all these people are bringing to their town. For all you know, the guy who ran over crosses had no real political opinion, but had just lost his temper with these throngs of activists (lots of whom do look like total hippy freaks...not a style which will win you many friends in rural Texas.)
He already met with her. and he didn't have to "rush back" to sign any bill. He can sign any bill or exe order from anywhere... there is no rule it has to be the White House. As far as his vacation.. he's still putting in a full days work it's the same everyday as far as briefings and meetings.. just you get to cut some wood and sleep in your own bed.
Ok so maybe he should of met with her earlier cause the way she's kinda whacky she probably would of flip flopped back to her original praise of Bush that she had after the first time they met.
What a bunch of hot air.. if you light his ass does fire come out? Cause that article is so full bull
I guarantee you it was just a guy pissed off at all the people clogging up his Farm to Market road.
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