8 replies
  1. Anonymous says:

    Condi should not be let off the hook here. The former national security advisor will try to run from iraq so it doesn’t tarnish her image, but she was smack in the middle of that decison and many others in the first term.

    Allowing any rehabilitation as a ’statesman’ is a farce thast should not go unchallanged..

  2. Anonymous says:

    True. Though I was kind of limiting things to Trainor and Gordon’s take.

    MARGARET WARNER: And then, of course, ultimately, General Trainor, it’s the civilian leadership that really is running the show.

    To what degree, in terms of the decisions, whether they were good or not wise in retrospect, would you say that Secretary Rumsfeld and Vice President Cheney and President Bush were really involved, were hands-on?

    BERNARD TRAINOR: A troika, three of them joined at the hip.

    They were the ones that ran the war. The president presiding, the vice president kind of being the brains behind the organization, and the man that carried the thing out would be Rumsfeld, the secretary of defense.

    Everybody else was kind of in and out of circle. Condi Rice, the national security adviser, Colin Powell cut out, even the so-called neo-cons, they were part of the great cause.

    But those three were joined at the hip and they thought the same way and acted the same way.

    Though it should be said that Gordon takes on Franks just before this.

  3. Anonymous says:

    The portrayal of Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld jibes with what Suskind says, based on interviews with â€the invisibles,†that is, the men and women who toil in obscurity to try to provide info to the troika and carry out its wishes. he shows all three as being contemptuous of experts, analysis, evidence and thought period. They wanted action, and they wanted to take the gloves off. A perfect and deadly combination of circumstances.

    They all think they are above reality, that they can create their own reality. And then, of course, they can’t admit any errors, because that would make the whole house of cards fall down.

    The neo-cons are a little different, since despite their pretentions to being manly, they were basically intellectuals (or pseudo-intellectuals, in some cases). They are now blaming the stupid and savage and ungrateful Iraqis for not understanding how their noble enterprise would have been so good for them, and in this they are like British colonials, or even some liberals who get disgusted when the downtrodden don’t properly and gratefully respond to their efforts to â€raise†them.

    Maybe we should call this the hard bigotry of raised expectations.

  4. Anonymous says:

    Great comment, Mimikatz, the whole thing. Though, â€Hard bigotry of raised expectations†is a class.

  5. Anonymous says:

    Iraq’s new society was deliberately planned to create a totalitarian terror environment modeled after the Palestinian experiment. The talk of ignorance and obstinance by the Bush war pigs is a cover, and makes us citizens feel better about the catastrophe the Iraqi people are living. The horror was created on purpose, I think, for oil.

    Henry Kissenger is credited with calling normal people useless eaters. The new Iraq totalitarian society was created to separate useless eaters from their natural resources.

  6. Anonymous says:

    oh great, blame the Iraqis

    Sun Tzu says that you must know your enemy

    from Mimikatz:

    â€They are now blaming the stupid and savage and ungrateful Iraqis for not understanding how their noble enterprise would have been so good for themâ€

    so shouldn’t we be asking why these dolts didn’t know that the Iraqis were â€savage and ungrateful ???

    blaming your enemy for something you didn’t know about your enemy seems to be an open admission that you do not understand the science of warfare

    or maybe it’s just me …

  7. Anonymous says:

    so shouldn’t we be asking why these dolts didn’t know that the Iraqis were â€savage and ungrateful ???

    Exactamundo.

    The practical issue is how to get us out of this mess, preferably without allowing the Right to manufacture a Those-Liberals-Lost-Iraq mythology that they can recycle every election for the next 20 years.

    For that purpose, â€savage†Iraqis – and the Bushies’ failure to recognize that fact – will do perfectly well. In some cosmic sense it is unfair to the Iraqis, but so what? It isn’t as if many Iraqis care, or are likely to care, what Americans think of them. And it creates a simple framework – easy for even the lazy to grasp – for pinning the blame for the whole Iraq misadventure, and any dismal things may happen after we leave, on the people who got us into the mess instead of the people who get us out of it.

  8. Anonymous says:

    A country is invaded, the invaders fail to provide basic services and protections given by the previous regime, sectarian civil war is touched off — well then, who is responsible? This recent Los Angeles Times article, nominally a profile of Saddam’s lawyer Boushra Khalil, helped me understand why so many Iraqis and members of the Arab intelligentsia see the U.S. on trial in a Baghdad courtroom, not Saddam.

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