Failure In Iraq? Its The American People’s Fault
Mort Kondracke’s (of Fox News) new column in Roll Call is as Josh Marshall at TPM notes, “sickening.”
All over the world, scoundrels are ascendant, rising on a tide of American weakness. It makes for a perilous future.
President Bush bet his presidency — and America’s world leadership — on the war in Iraq. Tragically, it looks as though he bit off more than the American people were willing to chew.
The U.S. is failing in Iraq. Bush’s policy was repudiated by the American people in the last election. And now America’s enemies and rivals are pressing their advantage, including Iran, Syria, the Taliban, Sudan, Russia and Venezuela. We have yet to hear from al-Qaida.
- Mort Kondracke
It really does seem as though the cardinals of DC punditry are constitutionally incapable of believing that George W. Bush has ever — in the real sense — gotten anything wrong or that they, the Washington establishment, has gotten anything wrong over the last six years.
I don’t like to use such words but I can only think to call the denial and buck-passing sickening. I can’t think of another word that captures the gut reaction.
This is all right out of the playbook of any despot or megalomaniac. Comparisons to Hitler are always dangerous rhetorical devices, but in the case of ‘The Decider’, they are becoming increasingly apt. Particularly in this instance, as it was while Hitler’s delusional fantasies came crumbling to the ground under the weight of Allied bombs, he proceded to blame the collapse of the Third Reich not on his overambitious and ideologically driven war plans, but on the weakness and inabilities of the German people. These being the same German people he had built an entire political career and short-lived empire upon by exclaiming to be the Ubermensch Aryan race, for whom defeat was all but impossible, under the leadership and command of the Nazis.
Another good TPM Post on the topic points out…
This is a central, perhaps the central issue in the whole shambling, tragic, dingbat debate. But we don’t return to it often enough. Saying the American people don’t have what it takes to finish the job, or come up with a new job or, really, figure out a way to help George W. Bush keep his job in Iraq amounts to blaming the public for the lies this White House told to get the country into the war. It’s really that simple.
