Posted on 10/24/2011 10:30:25 AM PDT by presidio9
Now here comes Condoleezza Rice, the latest from the Bush White House trying to rewrite history on Iraq, make it out to be some kind of triumph for all of them, make herself a hero of a war that cost this country so many young lives and so much money and so much prestige.
So a war started under false pretenses becomes one given over to this kind of false past tense.
George Bush and Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld and now Rice all panhandle for a better place in history, trying to make the Bush administration into something so much more better and noble and high-minded than it actually was.
Rice is no better than Cheney trying to sell not just her book but this idea that somehow the decision to start a war and take out a regional thug who had absolutely nothing to do with 9/11 has somehow been vindicated. That it has turned all of them into great statesmen after the fact, and after they are all mercifully out of the room.
Asked about the cost of the war by the writer Christopher Dickey, this is what Rice says on the eve of the publication of her book:
"I don't think you put a price on a Middle East that will look very different without Saddam Hussein and with movement toward freedom."
She knows better, knows the price was nearly 4,500 dead American soldiers. The price was more than 30,000 American wounded and 100,000 dead Iraqis. And somehow after all that, after moving on a country that had no weapons of mass destruction, that was never going to pose a threat to this country, Rice not only wants to validate Bush's "Freedom Agenda" in Iraq, she wants to give Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld - and herself, of course - credit for the uprisings of Tunisia and Egypt and Libya in this year's Arab Spring.
It makes her one more lightweight from Bush's eight years in the White House trying desperately to move up in class now.
Regrets? Oh, Rice has a few, starting with the regrets over a shopping trip to this city during Hurricane Katrina, and a trip to the theater, even though as secretary of state she had no real role to play in helping out the people of New Orleans.
But then again, neither did the President of the United States at the time.
Now that she knows everything about how things in the Middle East have worked out, at least for now, you do want to ask her how she knows that the people of Iraq would not eventually have had their own Arab Spring, risen up against Saddam Hussein the way the rebels in Libya finally rose up against Khadafy. No matter. She defends the invasion of Iraq to the end, even though the blood of our dead soldiers goes on her hands the way it goes on the rest of them who had anything to say about things during the Bush/Cheney years.
Rice apparently thinks she can grow in stature now because war lovers like Cheney and Rumsfeld were mean to her, because Cheney said in his own doorstop of a book that she came into his office in tears once. Only she can't. And cannot take some kind of victory lap now that President Obama is finally getting our ground troops out of Iraq the way he promised he would as a candidate, after all the dead and broken bodies that came home over the past eight years.
Yesterday, the current secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, appeared on every television program except NFL pregame shows defending Obama's decision to bring home U.S. ground troops by Christmas against Republican criticism.
And when Clinton, who voted for the war when she was still in the Senate in 2003, who got carried along by the same wave of misguided patriotism as so many others who voted for the war, was asked if Iraq was worth it, she would not say that it was. She said that she preferred to look forward.
Of course Clinton was another one who bought into the cockeyed notion in 2003 that if you voted against going to war with Iraq that somehow you were a bad American. She found out differently. Everybody did. Now all these books come out of the Bush administration, hustling their own version of things the way they hustled war on us in the shadow of 9/11.
Rice wants to be better than Cheney because she didn't like torture as much as he did. But she is no better, and now has her own book to prove it. Putting one more price tag on the Iraq War the way Cheney did:
Thirty-five dollars in bookstores, 22 on Amazon.
My favorite line in this column. What a wonderful coincidence that all of these people in all of these countries chose this particular moment to rise up, so it possible it would have happened and been successful in the the second most powerful ME nation as well, right? While we're at it, what are the people of North Korea waiting for? I'm just saying.
Oh, and for Hillary Clinton to publicly defend the War on Iraq right now would be publicly contradict her president, and make him ask her to resign. She would then get some of the blame for him losing next year. She's keeping her options open for 2016. If he wins, she's resigning next year any way.
I never liked Lupica as a sports writer, and now he’s venturing into political commentary. Oy!
So we’re supposed to listen to a sports columnist (who’s not all that prescient on sports matters...) for news analysis now? Whiskey Tango Foxtrot.
Someone planted the idea that you could choose your own leaders. They did it right in the middle of some of the most authoritarian regimes in the Middle East Mullah club.
I’ll admit the results haven’t been to our liking as it people grow fond of their chains and are reluctant to shed them no matter the weight.
You don’t win if you don’t bet. The other option was to say “Thank you sir may I have another” each time we were attacked.
I am no fan of Bush 2, but who is reinventing history more than the Anointed One and his minions??? As usual, the NY Times analysts do their PRAVDA thing - disinformation of the highest order. Where are our “anti-war” zealots now that their PINO is doing such horrible things all over the earth? We are in more wars than ever, all designed to destabilize and install radical islamist replacements. Go Barry — it’s all about the CHAOS!
Is that commentary are signs of insanity?
By the way, what President signed that Regime Change in Iraq Act? I bet Lupica has mentally blocked it. Just like he blocked all the countries, like France, and Democrats who came out for the Iraqi invasion.
Lupica is nothing more than a pandering fool.
We need that picture with the caption, "Not this Sh!t again"!!!
So, overthrowing a brutal dictator and replacing him with a regime that favors sharia law (Libya)is good, but overthrowing an even more brutal dictator and replacing him with a nascent democracy somewhat less hostile to the west is bad?
Son of Olbermann?
That's the natural progression when you're 5'-1" and live in New Canaan,CT.
first of all, the ‘Arab Spring’ may turn out to be a disaster. One could look back at Iran during Carter’s presidency and initially have called it a ‘Persian Spring’, and look how well that turned out. Second, what was Bush supposed to do after 911? What policy toward the middle east should he have pursued? Whether or not we should have gone into Iraq after Afghanistan could be debated, but the idea that our response to 911 should have been ‘reaching out’ to rogue nations while hoping for an Arab Spring is absurd.
The only “false pretense” in this piece is that the writer is engaged in anything beyond fellating the liberal zeitgeist.
Phil Mickelson Ruined Mike Lupica’s U.S. Open
Many in sports media have seen New York Daily News writer Mike Lupica's arrogant-little-sonuvabitch-side firsthand, but never has there been a Lupica story that encapsulates the tiny prick's hubris than the one Patrick Sauer witnessed during the U.S. Open.
Well, that, and the false pretense that this writing knows what he’s writing about.
Second, there WERE terrorists there---this seriously can't be disputed. There were al-Qaeda, but even if there weren't al-Qaeda, even the whackos don't deny ansar al-Islam was there.
Finally, there is no question that everyone---not just the U.S. but Egypt, Israel, Jordan, the UK, Russia, China, and the UN all believed Saddam had WMDs.
Of course, a New York sports typist would know more than the key players about how it all went down.
Lupica's four feet of douchebag.
I can't imagine it either. :)
Please click the pic.
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We tried the sanctions and it only increased the suffer of the Iraqi people and leading to the death of hundreds of thousands to perhaps many more depending on which human aid orgaization you get the figures from. All as a result of the dirty tricks of Saddam and his friends in the so-honest, so- pure UN.
Any uprising against Saddam that Iraqis took part in ended in them being slaughtered, sometimes in hundreds of thousands without anyone of you, "humanists" rising a single sign of protest or being able to put a stop to it.
How many Iraqis should’ve died, how many innocent children should’ve got crippled in their first year and how many Iraqi women should’ve been raped before we could attempt get our freedom? Only now the pacifists have become so generous with your tears about the “poor Iraqi" -iraqthemodel.blogspot
We had a shooting war with this country in 1991 following their invasion of a neighbor; you might remember it. We lost hundreds of soldiers, some were captured, some never recovered. A ceasefire was declared, the terms of which Iraq regularly violated. They also regularly fired upon our aircraft which were enforcing the terms of the ceasefire. That's an attack in my book.
Saddam harbored terrorists who killed Americans, paid others and the families of suicide bombers who killed Americans and our allies, and attacked America's interests.
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