Stay the Crooked Course (Ray McGovern )

[RedEarth]

Stay the Crooked Course
by Ray McGovern

The editors of the New York Times this morning feign shock that in his speech at Fort Bragg yesterday evening President George W. Bush would “raise the bloody flag of 9/11 over and over again to justify a war in a country that had nothing whatsoever to do with the terrorist attacks.” Kudos for that insight! Better three years late than never, I suppose.

Forget the documentary evidence (the Downing Street minutes) that the war on Iraq was fraudulent from the outset. Forget that the U.S. and U.K. starting pulverizing Iraq with stepped-up bombing months before president or prime minister breathed a word to Congress or Parliament. Forget that Defense Secretary Rumsfeld and his merry men—his co-opted, castrated military brass—have no clue regarding what U.S. forces are up against in Iraq. The president insists that we must stay the course.

As was the case in Vietnam, the Iraq war is being run by civilians innocent of military experience and disdainful of advice from the colonels and majors who know which end is up. Aping the president’s practice of surrounding himself with sycophants, Rumsfeld has promoted a coterie of yes-men to top military ranks—men who “kiss up and kick down,” in the words of former Assistant Secretary of State Carl Ford, describing UN-nominee John Bolton’s modus operandi at the State Department. So when the president assures us, as he did yesterday, that he will be guided by the “sober judgment of our military leaders” he is referring to the castrati.

This is all lost on doting congresspeople like Sen. John Warner (R-VA), who has been around long enough to know better than to recite oxymorons. Most striking last week was his quixotic appeal to the military’s top brass to give a candid assessment of the situation.

http://www.commondreams.org/cgi-bin/print.cgi?file=/views05/0629-21.htm