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Editor & PublisherIn a letter to the editor published today by The New York Times, Sen. Christopher ("Kit") Bond of Missouri, an influential Republican, declares that the administration until recently had the "wrong plan" for Iraq for three years. Unfortunately, he did not tell anyone about his until today.
Bond's letter, meant to praise the current "surge" effort, raised the question of how often he had spoken out against the "wrong plan" since 2003. Glenn Greenwald, the Salon.com blogger, investigated and found: not at all.
"While he now claims that the last three years were a failure because we had the wrong strategy, Bond -- like the vast, vast majority of the Republican Party and war supporters generally -- spent the last three years telling Americans that we had the right strategy and were winning in Iraq, while attacking and demonizing those who suggested otherwise:," Greenwald writes.
He then cites several examples.
Read more:
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003615098
Bonds letter:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/22/opinion/l22iraq.html?_r=1&oref=sloginFrom Salon.com:
Sen. Christopher "Kit" Bond of Missouri, one of George Bush's most blindly loyal Senatorial servants, wrote a letter yesterday to the New York Times which contained a startling admission tossed in as a throwaway line:
It is clear that if we abandon Iraq as some want us to do right now, Al Qaeda will establish a safe haven there. This would give terrorists the resources of the petroleum-rich country to finance their operations, significantly increasing the threat of future attacks on the United States.
While I agree that we had the wrong plan for three years, we now have the right one, and the right man to lead it. The proper conclusion to be drawn from the N.I.E. findings is that Congress and the American people must remain vigilant and committed to the war on terror and its central front in Iraq.
Bond told AP the same thing:
"The strategy we had before was not the right strategy," he told reporters at midweek. "We should have had a counterinsurgency strategy."
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/?last_story=/opinion/greenwald/2007/07/22/bond/