Bush’s Definition Of Iraq Success Called ‘Naive’ By Cheney And ‘Frightening’ By Giuliani

[babylonsister]

http://thinkprogress.org/2007/05/02/bush-success-comfortable/


Bush’s Definition Of Iraq Success Called ‘Naive’ By Cheney And ‘Frightening’ By Giuliani

During the 2004 election, Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) explained that success against terrorism will occur when terrorist acts, such as those in Iraq, are reduced to the level that “they’re a nuisance.” Kerry explained gains can be made against terrorism when “it isn’t threatening people’s lives every day, and fundamentally, it’s something that you continue to fight, but it’s not threatening the fabric of your life.”

For laying out an honest assessment of his counterterrorism approach, Kerry was mercilessly attacked by President Bush, Vice President Cheney, and Rudy Giuliani:

BUSH: Just this weekend we saw new evidence that the Senator fundamentally misunderstands the war against terror. … Our goal is not to reduce terror to some acceptable level of nuisance. Our goal is to defeat terror by staying on the offensive, destroying the networks, and spreading freedom and liberty. <10/12/04>

CHENEY: Nor can we think of our goal in this war in the way Senator Kerry described it yesterday in The New York Times. Quote: “We have to get back to the place,” he said, where terrorism is “a nuisance,” sort of like - and these are his comparisons — sort of like gambling and prostitution. This is naive and dangerous. <10/11/04>

GIULIANI: “In a conference call with reporters arranged by the Bush campaign, Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former mayor of New York, mocked Mr. Kerry for comparing terrorism to gambling and prostitution. ‘The idea that you can have an acceptable level of terrorism is frightening,’ Mr. Giuliani said.”

But today in his remarks on Iraq, President Bush — without saying so explicitly — embraced Kerry’s definition of success against terrorism. “Success is a level of violence where the people feel comfortable about living their daily lives.” Watch it at link~

Bush is late in understanding how to fight terror. And while his rhetoric suggests his views have evolved, his policy has not.

Transcript:

BUSH: Either we’ll succeed, or we won’t succeed. And the definition of success as I described is sectarian violence down. Success is not, no violence. There are parts of our own country that have got a certain level of violence to it. But success is a level of violence where the people feel comfortable about living their daily lives. And that’s what we’re trying to achieve.

[sinkingfeeling]

1. So Dim Son did another flip-flop.

[babylonsister]

3. I know, hard to believe...

:eyes: I'd love to hear Cheney and Giuliani respond to what the dim one said.

[ginnyinWI]

7. That's because Kerry was right!

Sooner or later even the slowest minds catch on...sometimes MUCH later, as with the WH.

[blm]

8. Bush was ALWAYS the flip-flopper and Kerry is always being proved right these days.

There isn't a person in DC who knew more about terorism, its funding networks and how to track them than John Kerry.

Too bad the corpmedia did NOT want American public to know that - and neither did some powerful Democrats.

[karynnj]

2. Well he copied Kerry's answer when he was asked

what the bigget threat was in the first debate- unsecured nuclear wapons.

I guess Bush is just about a half year after people like George Will.

[babylonsister]

5. He's just saying whatever someone tells him to imo; I really

don't think he's changing tactics on his own. He's probably tired, cause prezidentin's hard werk.
I wish someone from a reputable news outlet would really blast him on all his discrepancies.

[Cessna Invesco Palin]

4. Such a blatantly stupid idea to begin with.

The idea that you can "defeat terror" entirely is ridiculous. As ridiculous as saying that you can "defeat murder" or "defeat drunk driving."

The thing that really pisses me off about this is that these people are smart enough to know that "defeating terror" is impossible. They're being painfully disingenuous.

[PreacherCasey]

6. Those who can be made to believe absurdities, can be made to commit atrocities. eom!

[gratuitous]

9. Well, the GOP warned me

They said if I voted for John Kerry, we'd have someone in the White House who fundamentally misunderstood the global war on terror, proposed naive and simplistic solutions to difficult problems, and would be an all around frightening bastard.

So I voted for John Kerry, and goddamn if the Republicans weren't exactly right!

[Jack Rabbit]

10. Oh, Mr. Frat Boy, are these yours?

[buzzard]

11. This article sums it up nicely IMHO.

http://www.polarisinstitute.org/new_oil_law_means_victory_in_iraq_for_bush
snip
"The American "surge" will be blended into the new draconian effort announced over the weekend by Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki: an all-out war by the government's Shiite militia-riddled "security forces" on Sunni enclaves in Baghdad, as the Washington Post reports. American troops will "support" the "pacification effort" with what Maliki says calls "house-to-house" sweeps of Sunni areas. There is of course another phrase for this kind of operation: "ethnic cleansing."
The "surged" troops - mostly long-serving, overstrained units dragooned into extended duty - are to be thrown into this maelstrom of urban warfare and ethnic murder, temporarily taking sides with one faction in Iraq's hydra-headed, multi-sided civil war. As the conflict goes on - and it will go on and on - the Bush administration will continue to side with whatever faction promises to uphold the "hydrocarbon law" and those profitable PSAs. If "Al Qaeda in Iraq" vowed to open the nation's oil spigots for Exxon, Fluor and Halliburton, they would suddenly find themselves transformed from "terrorists" into "moderates" - as indeed has Maliki and his violent, sectarian Dawa Party, which once killed Americans in terrorist actions but are now hailed as freedom's champions.
So Bush will surge with Maliki and his ethnic cleansing for now. If the effort flames out in a disastrous crash that makes the situation worse - as it almost certainly will - Bush will simply back another horse. What he seeks in Iraq is not freedom or democracy but "stability" - a government of any shape or form that will deliver the goods. As the Independent wryly noted in its Sunday story, Dick Cheney himself revealed the true goal of the war back in 1999, in a speech he gave when he was still CEO of Halliburton. "Where is the oil going to come from" to slake the world's ever-growing thirst, asked Cheney, who then answered his own question: "The Middle East, with two-thirds of the world's oil and the lowest cost, is still where the prize ultimately lies."
And therein lies another hidden layer of the war. For Iraq not only has the world's second largest oil reserves; it also has the world's most easily retrievable oil. As the Independent succinctly notes: "The cost-per-barrel of extracting oil in Iraq is among the lowest in the world because the reserves are relatively close to the surface. This contrasts starkly with the expensive and risky lengths to which the oil industry must go to find new reserves elsewhere - witness the super-deep offshore drilling and cost-intensive techniques needed to extract oil form Canada's tar sands."
This is precisely what Cheney was getting at in his 1999 talk to the Institute of Petroleum. In a world of dwindling petroleum resources, those who control large reserves of cheaply-produced oil will reap unimaginable profits - and command the heights of the global economy. It's not just about profit, of course; control of such resources would offer tremendous strategic advantages to anyone who was interested in "full spectrum domination" of world affairs, which the Bush-Cheney faction and their outriders among the neo-cons and the "national greatness" fanatics have openly sought for years. With its twin engines of corporate greed and military empire, the war in Iraq is a marriage made in Valhalla.
II. The Win-Win Scenario
And this unholy union is what Bush is really talking about when he talks about "victory." This is the reason for so much of the drift and dithering and chaos and incompetence of the occupation: Bush and his cohorts don't really care what happens on the ground in Iraq - they care about what comes out of the ground. The end - profit and dominion - justifies any means. What happens to the human beings caught up in the war is of no ultimate importance; the game is worth any number of broken candles.
And in plain point of fact, the Bush-Cheney faction - and the elite interests they represent - has already won the war in Iraq. I've touched on this theme before elsewhere, but it is a reality of the war that is very often overlooked, and is worth examining again. This ultimate victory was clear as long ago as June 2004, when I first set down the original version of some of the updated observations below."