Text 19110, 53 rader
Skriven 2006-04-19 09:01:34 av BOB SAKOWSKI (1:123/140)
Ärende: MoDo
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Note to Vern, the following is an example of how to link to a cite.

http://select.nytimes.com/2006/04/19/opinion/19dowd.html?hp=&pagewanted=print

[snip]
He suggested invading Iraq the day after 9/11. He didn't want to invade
Iraq because it was connected to 9/11. That was the part his neocon aides
at the Pentagon, Wolfie and Doug Feith, had to concoct. Rummy wanted to
invade Iraq because he thought it would be easy, compared with Iran or
North Korea, or compared with finding Osama. He could do it cheap and show
off his vaunted transformation of the military into a sleek, lean fighting
force.

Cloistered in a macho monastery with W. ("The Decider"), Dick Cheney and
Condi Rice, Rummy didn't want to hear dissent, or delve into worries about
Iraq, the tribes, the sects, the likelihood of an insurgency or a civil
war, the need for more troops and armor to quell postwar eruptions.

"He didn't worry about the culture in Iraq," said Bernard Trainor, the
retired Marine general who is my former colleague and the co-author of
"Cobra II." "He just wanted to show them the front end of an M-1 tank. He
could have been in Antarctica fighting penguins. He didn't care, as long as
he could send the message that you don't mess with Hopalong Cassidy. He
wanted to do to Saddam in the Middle East what he did to Shinseki in the
Pentagon, make him an example, say, 'I'm in charge, don't mess with me.' "

The stoic Gen. Eric Shinseki finally spoke to Newsweek, conceding he had
seen a former classmate wearing a cap emblazoned with "RIC WAS RIGHT" at
West Point last fall. He said only that the Pentagon had "a lot of turmoil"
before the invasion.

Just as with Vietnam, when L.B.J. and Robert McNamara were running the war,
or later, when Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger took over, we now have
leaders obsessed with not seeming weak, or losing face. Their egos are
feeding their delusions.

Asked by Rush Limbaugh on Monday about progress in Iraq, Rummy replied,
"Well, the progress has been good." He said that if you always listened to
critics about war, "we wouldn't have won the Revolutionary War" or World
War I or World War II, and America would have been a different country "if
it existed at all."

But the conscience-stricken generals are not critics of war. They are
critics of having a war run by a 73-year-old who thinks he's a force for
modernity when he's really a force for fantasy. It's time to change the
change agent.
[snip]

The Consumate Corruptables, aka the conservative wing of the Republican
Party.
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