Rat-Holes and Rats

Exiting the Rat-Hole: Iraq & CheneyBush

By Bernard Weiner, The Crisis Papers

Excerpts:

The American people in the past several years have learned about all sorts of previously-kept secrets involving the Bush Administration: its pay-to-play corruptions via Abramoff and other lobbyists, its advocacy and implentation of torture as official state policy, its sending detainees in its custody to secret CIA prisons around the globe, its "extraordinary renditions" that deliver high-value suspects to countries abroad that are notorious for excrutiating torture methods, its eavesdropping without court warrants on Americans' phone calls and emails, its memos outlining how Bush can rule as an unchecked king able to ignore laws because of "national security" concerns (an assumption of power ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court when President Nixon tried it), and on and on. [...]

But everything we've learned in the past several years about the Bush Administration's policies and programs reveals an over-reaching drive for power and secrecy -- and always desiring more of both -- carried out by incompetents that never have had to face accountability for their drastic mistakes. Katrina is just the tip of the very large iceberg.

Bush claims that he did face a moment of "accountability," the 2004 election; he thereby claims that nothing can be done since then to hold him accountable for anything. He almost dares the House to impeach him, since he's pretty sure they won't. [...]

And then there is Iraq. [...]

This isn't even a lame-duck presidency. It's on artificial life-support and there is no guarantee it can last through the next two years without infecting the entire body politic with its dangerous dementia. [...]

Since Bush will never resign -- to him, it would be the equivalent of ego suicide -- that means the economic and political forces behind his administration will encourage the Democrats to finish him off, perhaps through impeachment. [...]

Thanks to CheneyBush's war, there is such a mess in Iraq now that maybe nothing will work. But we all know that continuing the war and Occupation under the current Administration's disastrous leadership offers little hope either to Americans or to Iraqis. Indeed, continuing on with the present leadership is a recipe for further disasters. [...]

Right now our troops are dying and coming home maimed for no good purpose, and nearly a half-trillion dollars have been poured down the rathole of this baseless ideological adventure, money that could be far better spent at home.

America will not be able to start dealing with the immense political and economic reconstruction work that needs to be done inside America until we can begin to get the 800-lb. gorilla that is Iraq off our collective back.

First published by The Crisis Papers, 12/12/06.
© 2006 - Bernard Weiner