Vice President Dick Cheney must have been playing with his shotgun that doesn't shoot straight again. He is charging that the Democrats' attempt to stop President Bush's troop surge in Iraq will "validate the al-Qaida strategy."
Talk about an Alice-In-Wonderland view of the Iraq war. The Veep has it upside down. What's validating al-Qaida is the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld strategy of mismanaging the war. They jettisoned Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld after the voter backlash in November, but they kept a tired old war policy that's not working.
So instead of figuring out how to develop a winning strategy, the Bush/Cheney machine does the same old thing, and we get the same old results. Maybe the Democrats don't have a better idea about the war, but you can't blame them for the Iraq debacle. That came from the Bush/Cheney brain trust.
Now Cheney wants to divert attention from the mess by questioning the Democrats' patriotism. It's an old strategy by the Republicans. The public will see through it.
Bush and Cheney are right about one thing. We must fight terrorists on their soil, not ours. But the Taliban is reasserting itself in Afghanistan and now Iraq is a haven for terrorists. How are Bush and Cheney going to turn this around?
Iraq is one of the worst tactical mistakes in American history. The Iraq campaign is on par with Napoleon and Hitler's march into Russia. Like the French and German troops, our troops are overextended when our real enemies are in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Bush and Cheney are beating the war drums against Iran, which quite naturally strengthens Iranian support for their prime minister. Saudi support for Iraqi insurgents doesn't seem to bother them. Peace in the Middle East is perilous. We would need the draft if we strike Iran. It would probably take six months to train young soldiers for active duty, and our troops would be vulnerable to rear guard actions until the new soldiers are ready, just like the French and Germans troops were in Russia.
The tragedy of Iraq is that many people fighting us today supported our war against al-Quida. Iraq was a secular society with mixed neighborhoods and families. They knew the power of religious fanatics whom we have inadvertently helped establish in Iraq. The only al-Quida camp in Iraq before 1993 was far up in the mountains near Iran and Turkey. We should redeploy our troops to Afghanistan before al-Quida and the Taliban launch their spring offensive. They are tenacious, they beat the Russians and al-Quida offers a more serious challenge to peace than Iraq ever will. Questioning Bush and Cheney's tactical mistakes is what patriots should do.
I can't think of anything that would encourage al Qaeda more than hearing senior administration members saying that the U.S. has to plan its course of action around what does or doesn't "validate" them. They must feel like their little organization is leading the world's only superpower around by its nose.
As Mr. Ensminger pointed out, getting involved in Iraq was a serious strategic blunder. There are potential pitfalls no matter what we do now. Since Mr. Cheney was one of the chief architects of this misguided imperial adventure, it takes a lot of nerve for him to criticize anyone else.
they promised a permanent war, everything done since then has guaranteed it, indeed, the focus shifted from a few cave dwellers in afganistan,financed by friends of bush, baker,et al,{the bin ladens of saudi arabia},to the entire islamic world,{except for the saudi monarchy}...as far as i'm concerned, al quiada is a conspiracy theory,what's real is the trade off, resources squandered, treasury sacked,lives ruined, i also believe that the only way any of this happened is because most americans dont know how much money a trillion dollars is. if it was generally understood how many schools,for example, could have been built,instead we got debt, or hospitals,we got debt, alternative energy research, debt, our infrastructure crumbles, debt, karl marx said that, in the end, capitalism makes a few people rich, and leaves the masses with huge debt,...hey, i cant help it, he got it right...do you know how much a trillion is?