The Puppet Cut His Strings

Splinters

The Decider has decided
That we should be divided
Unless you do his will
And swallow all that swill
Of Victory without a win
And justice just as spin
But all that Georgie sires
Is the mother of all quagmires
Even the Malaki puppet
Has told George to stuff it


Again, George W has failed to respond to the will of the people even while citing the will of the people in his press conferences and in his escapes from the homeland to visit Vietnam and Jordan as well as a tense few hours in Malaysia. He is rushing to make judicial appointments for the right wing reactionaries and has ignored Republicans and Democrats alike while talking of bipartisanship. He may not be trainable and has not yet learned that the people want us out of Iraq as quickly as we can leave. He speaks of progress in Iraq but continues to grind away at a “Stay the Course” approach with ever diminishing forces due to accumulating attrition of the Army through back-to-back tours in the hell that is Iraq. Retired General McCaffrey now claims that it will require $60 Billion merely to repair and replace the equipment used in Iraq. McCaffrey is no wild-eyed Socialist, but was the “Drug Czar” under GW Bush.

The platoon of Neocons that engineered this preemptive war is now a chorus of critics claiming that Bush ran the war badly. Bush did run the war badly along with at least some of the same Neocons who sacked Garner and enthroned Bremer thus enabling the insurgency to take root by instantaneously creating jobless Bathists and Iraqi Army veterans at every level who had few choices left. Doug Feith and Richard Perle have not suddenly found religion, but simply want to distance themselves from a failure that has their signatures all over it. Perhaps Paul Wolfowitz has kept his silence since he still has a job at the World Bank, but I would not be surprised if he found a way to disown the Devil Seed that has become Iraq at war with itself. Donald Rumsfeld will probably blame the disaster on “unknown unknowns,” but he is now irrelevant. Incoming Secretary Gates will probably revert to what he knows best and find a way to replicate Iran Contra in the Middle East except that Iran now has other sources for weapons.


Bush still speaks of victory in Iraq as though mere perseverance will save the day and that only a few changes in tactics are needed to turn the tide. Even while in Vietnam in the past few days, when asked to link the loss in Vietnam to the situation in Iraq, he stated that the lesson to be taken from Vietnam is that we should have stayed longer to win. We were there 10 years. Vietnam may not be the showplace of freedom and democracy, but it is now stable. Could it have been stable sooner if we had left sooner? The American people wanted us out of Vietnam and that fact is not some mere accessory to the notion of war, but is integral with waging war. If it is not the will of the people in a democracy such as ours that we wage war, especially a preemptive war, then who should do so? I seriously wonder about those of us who say that we could have won the war in Vietnam if it were not for the fact that the American populace rebelled and stopped the war. In a democracy, the will of the people is needed to wage war.

The man in the bubble lives his FOX News fantasy.
The Bush state of denial includes his insistence that Iraq is not in Civil War despite all the academic and practical evidence to the contrary. I guess that he is waiting for the statues and memorials to be built to acknowledge a civil war. Of course, if he were to admit that we were in the midst of a civil war, even he would not be able to defend the maintenance of forces in Iraq. General Officers who only last week concluded that we were in a civil war have marched about and are saying that it is not a civil war. In fact, the Pentagon (a building, remember) has indicated that we will send an additional 3500 troops to Iraq in January. This may be another sign of chaos at the Animal Farm (White House) with the Animal House Fraternity president. Bush now claims that al Qaeda has caused all this trouble with their attack on a Shiite mosque last spring. That, too, is irrelevant given that they are in their “last throes” anyway (Cheney) and never amounted to more than 3% of the forces facing American and Iraqi troops. As an ultimate sign that the Bush intelligence system is unproductive, today, Malaki refused to meet with Bush in Jordan. The puppet has not only cut his strings, but he has pooped in the lap of the puppeteer. More puppets can be made. Make your predictions.

Peace,
George Giacoppe
29 November 2006