Bush's Ignoble Disaster

From the LA Times...

National security advisor Stephen J. Hadley said Sunday that congressional Democrats' efforts to put time limits on the Iraq war could doom U.S. military efforts and leave the strife-torn country a hub of international terrorism.

Terrorists "want to get a safe haven in Iraq from which they can then destabilize neighboring regimes and come and plan actions against the United States," Hadley said on CNN's "Late Edition."

As the war is about to enter its fifth year, lawmakers, military experts and pundits are assessing its progress and cost.

More than 3,200 members of the U.S. military and an estimated 60,000 Iraqis have been killed since the U.S.-led invasion on March 20, 2003.

By the end of 2007, the war's price is expected to reach $500 billion.

Hadley said the result would justify the bloodshed and other sacrifice. "The cost has been enormous for the Iraqis. The interesting thing is that the Iraqis are nonetheless willing to pay it," he said on ABC's "This Week."

Others strongly disagreed.

"If you're asking me about it, no, I don't think it was worth it at all," retired Army Col. Pat Lang, a former defense intelligence analyst and an Iraq specialist, told "Late Edition." "I think it was not, in fact, an essential part of the war against the jihadis across the world and has been a diversion from that and has put us in a real mess."

...Democrats also challenged Hadley's assertion that continuing the U.S. operation in Iraq was the way to win the U.S.-declared war on terrorism. "The central front of terror is not in Baghdad," Rep. Joe Sestak (D-Pa.), a retired three-star Navy admiral, said on "Meet the Press." "Osama bin Laden has not moved there."

Resources now devoted to Iraq would be better spent in Afghanistan and Southeast Asia, Sestak said.

...and in a related story by Kitty Kelley...

...The president tells us Iraq is a "noble" war, but his wife, his children and his nieces and nephews are not listening. None has enlisted in the armed services, and none seems to be paying attention to the sacrifices of military families. Until Jenna's trip to Panama, the presidential daughters performed community service only when mandated by a court after they were cited for underage drinking. Since then they have surfaced in public during lavish presidential trips with their parents, bar-hopping outings in Georgetown and champagne-popping art openings in New York.

The first lady, so often lauded for her love of literacy, has not been seen in the reading rooms of veterans' hospitals. The president's sister, Doro, publicly picketed Al Gore's last days in the vice president's mansion as he awaited the Supreme Court's decision on the Florida recount of 2000. Yet she has been strangely absent from publicly supporting her brother's war.

The presidential nieces and nephews also have missed the memo on setting a good public example. Ashley Bush — the youngest daughter of the president's brother, Neil, and Neil's ex-wife, Sharon — was presented to Manhattan society at the 52nd Annual International Debutantes Ball at the Waldorf Astoria. Her older sister, Lauren, a runway model, told London's Evening Standard that she is a student ambassador for the United Nations World Food Program, but she would not lobby her uncle for U.S. funds. Her cousin, Billy Bush, chronicles the lives of celebrities on "Access Hollywood."

"Uncle Bucky," as William H.T. Bush is known within the family, is one presidential relative who has profited from the Iraq war. He recently sold all of his shares in Engineered Support Systems Inc. (ESSI), a St. Louis-based company that has flourished under the president's no-bid policy for military contractors. Uncle Bucky told the Los Angeles Times that he would have preferred that ESSI, on whose board he sits, was not involved in Iraq, "but, unfortunately, we live in a troubled world.

"The only member of the Bush family to show the strains of our "troubled world" is former President George H.W. Bush, who shed tears recently while addressing the Florida Legislature. The elder Bush was talking about son Jeb's gubernatorial loss in 1994. Jeb, who was later elected, tried to console him. But the sobs of Bush 41 seemed to be more about his older son's "noble" war.

Perhaps the father's sadness sprang from his own experience fighting in what his parents called "Mr. Roosevelt's war" — the good war — the war that saved the world from tyranny. He enlisted at 18 to fly torpedo bombers. He flew 58 missions in two years and returned home a war hero. Since then, no one in his large family has seen fit to follow his sterling example of service and patriotism.

The sick red-herring argument proponents of the Iraq Occupation like to use is that Iraq is the central battle of this great war with "terror". They claim that to retreat from Iraq is to surrender to the terrorists. The truth is that Iraq has become a snakepit of Islamic and Baathist terrorists, solely because of the US invasion of choice and the President's incredibly inept "leadership" (Obviously his leadership of his own family is equally absent).

Again, for the Fox news viewers, invading Iraq after 9/11 made about as much sense as invading Argentina in 1941 because Japan bombed Pearl Harbor. None.

Our real enemy is the Sunni Islamic death-cult jihadis, nominally led by Osama Bin Laden and of course sponsored by our "great allies", Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.

The threat still lies mainly in those two countries and Afghanistan, not Iraq.

How many of the 9/11 hijackers were Iraqi again?