Will the President's old gang meet up at Rancho Crawford?

courier-journal.com > Columnists > Betty Baye
Betty Bayé



I can hardly imagine a more thankless job than to be in charge of U.S. military operations in Iraq with President Bush as my commander-in-chief.

One general after another has walked the plank trying first to make sense of, and then justify, the incoherent policies that have given us, and the Iraqis, a long and unpopular war with an ever-shifting agenda that's driven as much by politics as real terrorist threats.

Whatever was driving the President back in '03 (some say it was a fit of pique), he tapped former Secretary of State Colin Powell, who had been an Army general, to do what everyone now knows was the dirty deed.

Powell sold the urgency for America to attack Iraq because Saddam Hussein, he said, had weapons of mass destruction.

It was all baloney, but Powell said it.



More recently, Powell has been saying that he had deep misgivings all along, which he shared with the President -- notably, the negative consequences likely to accrue if the U.S. invaded and occupied an Arab country.

But because, back in '03, Powell was still being a dutiful solder, America went to war.

Now it is Army Gen. David Petraeus who is taking the hit for the fiasco in Iraq. Petraeus did his best this week to convince a war-weary and skeptical American public that the troop surge ordered by President Bush earlier this year, which put 30,000 more troops on top of 130,000 boots already marching around in Iraq, really is having some positive effect toward stabilizing Iraq.

Petraeus can imagine a significant troop drawdown by next summer, but also says that he sees the need for a significant U.S. military presence in Iraq for years to come. The Iraqi government that the U.S. is backing isn't ready for prime time and apparently won't be, at least any time soon.

Meanwhile, the reputed instigator of 9/11, Osama bin Laden, is hardly ever mentioned by President Bush any more. This is interesting, given that he once, in his best John Wayne imitation, vowed to bring bin Laden in by any means necessary, and dead or alive.

Well, six years later bin Laden is very much alive. He so craves attention that every now and then he releases a video to remind us he's still on the loose.

Six years after 9/11, and five years after an invasion of choice, U.S. troops remain bogged down in Iraq, and Osama bin Laden is mocking the inability of our cowboy-in-chief to bring in him.

But now, one after another, the other organizers of the Iraq posse are "retiring." Pretty soon the current commander-in-chief will join them, leaving behind a reeking pile for somebody else to clean up.

I can see them now -- Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld, Condi Rice, Karl Rove and George W. Bush -- having a grand old time at Bush's country place in Texas, which was called Prairie Chapel Ranch before he bought it. Turkeys and hogs were raised there.

I can see the old gang now, chowing down on barbecue, swatting flies and telling lies about how, back in the day, they showed the world a thing or two.

At the same time, other people will still be burying their children, husbands, wives, fathers and fiancés, or spending lots of time in hospitals and nursing homes with loved ones who have lost limbs and, in some cases, their minds in Iraq.

Yeah, I know, they were volunteers.

When he visited recently, Sen. Mitch McConnell said he didn't know whether any of us on the editorial board had attended the funeral for a fallen warrior. His tone suggested that perhaps he believed none of us had. After all, as some would have you believe, editorial writers don't live in the real world.

But we do, and Sen. McConnell, as a matter of fact I have attended the funeral of a fallen soldier. That he had to die so young was sad enough. But worse, from my perspective, is that this member of my extended family, when he was killed in December 2005, wasn't chasing Osama bin Laden to the gates of hell. Instead, a sniper shot him in the head while he was on patrol on a street in a city in a country that had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks.

Bush calculated that Iraq would be a cheap and quick victory. He celebrated on May 1, 2003, just months after the initial invasion. With arms raised in victory, he stood aboard the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln, backed by a banner that said, "Mission Accomplished."

Oh yeah.

The President seems to have calculated that Americans were so irate over 9/11 that many wanted somebody, anybody, in the Middle East to pay. Unfortunately for them, the Iraqis were available.

Never mind that the mastermind of 9/11 and those who actually attacked America on 9/11 were not Iraqis. And never mind that bin Laden is believed to be operating somewhere in Pakistan or Afghanistan.

Betty Winston Bayé is a Courier-Journal editorial writer, and columnist. Her column appears on Thursdays. Read her on line at www.courier-journal.com; e-mail her at bbaye@courier-journal.com.

that Americans were so irate over 9/11 that many wanted somebody, anybody, in the Middle East to pay. Unfortunately for them, the Iraqis were available."

That statement hits home. Remember in the first days after 9/11 how dumshits all over the US went around kickin the shit out of anybody with a turban? Most Amurkins didn't (and still don't) know the difference between Muslims and Sikhs, between Arabs and Persians, let alone between Sunni and Shia.

They're all ragheads, sand n-words, and camel jockeys to us. plus they have oil. That's all we need to go and kick their ass.