Obama picks Shinseki for Veteran's Affairs

Obama announced that he would be appointing retired Gen. Eric K. Shinseki as Secretary of the Office of Veteran's Affairs. The following lines from the article on msnbc.com stood out to me.

"Shinseki’s tenure as Army chief of staff from 1999 to 2003 was marked by constant tensions with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, which boiled over in 2003 when Shinseki testified to Congress that it might take several hundred thousand U.S. troops to control Iraq after the invasion.

"Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, belittled the estimate as “wildly off the mark,” and the army general was forced out within months. But Shinseki’s words proved prophetic after President George W. Bush in early 2007 announced a “surge” of additional troops to Iraq after miscalculating the numbers needed to stem sectarian violence."

:-)

Bush's Post Petraeus Speech Tonight

Bush did what he should have done tonight--put the most positive spin on Iraq and his coming actions that he could. So we all know that he has to begin downsizing the troop levels. So he has portrayed that decrease as a consequence of success in the surge. Good political tact. At the same time, of course, they are only going to decrease to what they were before the surge at this point. Little consolation. But rather than such withdrawal looking like failed policy, he can pin it on the success of his actions. He's not conceding to Baker-Hamilton. Look, he did it his way and was right and can now begin some withdrawal.

Has the surge brought success? I believe it has made the situation in Iraq better, yes. The real question is whether it has made it better in the long term or only because there are more troops there right now to police things. Time will tell.

Let us rejoice with what seems to have happened in the Anbar province. It does indeed seem good news that the Sunnis have turned on the elements whose main purpose is to fight us. But of course Anbar is not a Sunni-Shiite, mixed place with a lot of civil war going on. The biggest problem in Iraq by far is not those there to fight us. It is the civil war going on between Sunnis and Shiites.

By the way, remember how hard the Bush administration fought against that label--civil war? Publically we have had nothing but denial after denial. Well, only 20 some % of Americans actually believe Bush's spin now. These are either the enlightened ones or the expected small group who wouldn't change their minds if the truth came up and bit them on the ... nose.

But as a Christian, and as an American, I have to hope that it works out. My human side wants Bush to be held accountable for a frivilous war that has cost us thousands of American lives and tens of thousands of innocent Iraqi lives, not to mention billions of dollars and the moral high ground vis-a-vis the world.

But I have to hope that, against all expectations, Iraq and the Middle East will be a better place in the end. We have to hope that Bush can gloat about how the Iraqi government became unified and the sectarian violence came to an end. I have to hope that things will begin to go so well that he can try to rub it in my face. "Look at how wonderful life in Iraq is now. It truly is better than it was under Saddam Hussein."

I hope we can say that one day, in the same way that a teenage pregnancy can result in the birth of a wonderful person that we would never wish had not been born. But the facts of the beginning of the war cannot be changed.

• That Bush launched an inappropriate preemptive war without prerequisites long established for over 1000 years. He did it on the basis of a overarching strategy for the middle east first and only secondarily because of Hussein and weapons of mass destruction. Without provocation, Hussein would not even have been a sufficient basis for going to war. Those who don't learn from history...
• That this war was a diversion that had nothing concrete to do with 9-11 or terrorists or Al Qaeda. We should have continued to pursue bin Laden. This was a switch-a-roo to accomplish side goals.
• That Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld launched this war with naive, utopian visions of Western freedom, thinking we probably would not lose much more than a 100 troops as they flocked to our ideals for them. Oops.
• That we are not "fighting them over there so that we don't have to fight them here." The terrorists in Iraq are not the 9-11 terrorists and they only joined to Al Qaeda after the war had started. I doubt what we have done in Iraq has diverted a single terrorist plot here in America.
• That our moral influence in the rest of the world is nil, that we have only pushed people away from the Christianity they associate with America. Rest assured no nation will be signing up for us to help them get freedom any time soon.

History will not be kind to President Bush.

Signed, a Republican

Baghdad in the Stone Age

Here is an article from Newsweek that I find very sad.


City in a Time Warp War is pushing Baghdad out of the 21st century and back to a bygone age of ferrymen, midwives, donkey drivers and shepherds.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20326315/site/newsweek/from/ET/

This is the fruit of Bush's naive belief that everyone wants Western freedom.

When will we own up to the fact that homo sapiens is an animal? Individuals can rise above the norm of the species. But most humans never truly exist. They are born. They eat, poop, and reproduce. Then they die. Oh, and the humans who are most animal kill those who want to exist.

Most people don't want to be created in the image of God.

Bush's State of the Union Address

State of the union night. I thought the beginning of the speech was good strategy. First, I think Bush is a good man with good intentions. His opening comments to Palosi and the Democrats were, dare I say, "Christian" and honorable.

I do give Bush and the economic philosophy of his cohort (including Greenspahn) credit for the quick turn around of the economy this decade. I am a Republican in my economics. I'm not competent to judge, but it seems to me that, whether we like it or not, whether it is Christian or not, economies are built when capitalists do their thing. The big economic blunder of Bush is the war in Iraq.

Some ho hum old plans. School choice. Fine, whatever. We'll see if it goes anywhere (I bet not). I'd be glad for something to shake out with health care and immigration. We'll see.

Nice things to say on shifting to alternative sources of energy. I smiled when he said "global climate change" and not "global warming." It's a way to acknowledge the issue without selling out the willful who continue to deny that the human element in global climate change is beyond reasonable doubt.

Bush's narrative of the Iraq story really leaves me speechless, dumbfounded. Is he even on the same planet as I am? Interesting subtle attempt to connect 9-11 to Iraq by calling them Sunni extremists. Again, no connection. He continues to make it sound like no one could have foreseen that these things would happen when there were a thousand voices he refused to listen to. Terrorists fear freedom, he says. I picture them laughing at him every time he says this nonsense. I don't know what the answer is but I'm glad Bush can't just continue blindly to do whatever Cheney wants anymore.

"Not the fight we entered but the one we're in"? No, we are responsible for this mess. Sheez.

Good words on Darfur. I hope he follows through.

The Iraqi Army and Police

One fear I have as we embed our troops among Iraqi troops around Baghdad is the likelihood that Madi army people are in the police and the army. Bush tended to talk about these forces as if they were neutral forces that might stabilize the sectarian violence. But the army was debathified and thus heavily de-Sunnified. These forces are overwhelmingly Shiite, and some seem loyal to Al Sadr.

So do we expect them to reign in themselves? What's worse, I fear that at some point they will turn on the embedded troops!

Bush and the Joint Chiefs

I read a brief piece today about disagreement between Bush and the unanimous joint chiefs over sending more troops. They don't feel he has a plan for what they would do there. The chiefs feel it would simply intensify anti-American groups while Shia militias melted away until the extra US troops left. Then they simply come back in greater force and we are right back where we started from.

Bush's problem plain and simple is that he can't admit the colossal mistake he's made. At least he's stopped talking about victory in Iraq. And to think he might still be worried about his legacy... He's already established his legacy as the worst foreign policy president in the history of the United States.

I don't know what the answer is at this point. I'm not necessarily for time tables on withdrawal. But there's no point in "staying the course" because there is no course other than "let's drive around, stop any bad guys we run into, and try not to hit an IED today." Brilliant!

This is a fine mess you've gotten us into, Bushy!

NIA Confirms my claims

The National Intelligence Agency has lent credence to what I've been saying all along while undermining once again the bizarre claims of the Bush administration that the war with Iraq is "taking the war to them so we don't have to fight them here."

The NIA has concluded that the Iraq War, far from decreasing jihadism around the world, has intensified it and actually helped with recruiting.

Believe it or not, I was watching Fox News tonight when they were reporting it. In keeping with their particular leanings (not denying the leanings in opposite directions elsewhere), they did their best to mollify the impact of this deeply undermining claim. Their best shots were 1) an administration official who repeated the ludicrous, "It's keeping them from coming here" thing (surely Al Qaeda can spare 4 or 5 for New York City?) and 2) that's why we need to win this war.

I'd be glad for us to "win this war." But let's admit that the Bush doctrine, with Iraq as its primary example, has proved to be a failure. Let's not try that again.

Early Days in Iraq

I was reading a piece on msnbc.com this morning:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14868608/from/ET/

I cannot know to what extent this is accurate or not. It would have been perfectly appropriate for the Bush administration to appoint some people who were loyal to his ideas and administration. But this article suggests that the practice was so dominating that it became a touchstone over expertise.

Again, just because it's in an article doesn't mean it's true. But of course it plays into my own impressions of the Bush administration. That his venture in Iraq was a test of neo-conservative ideology and of the conservative think tanks in Washington. Let's forget for a moment that the actual lives of thousands upon thousands of people were involved for a moment, including over two thousand dead American soldiers. Instead, let's take the Iraq war as an experiment in neo-conservative foreign policy.

Okay, the experiment isn't quite done yet, but we have enough data in to draw firm conclusions.

IT FAILED. Waiter, we'll have several plates of humble pie for the Bush administration and also for the fundamentalists and neo-cons who supported this "experiment." And for dessert, could you elect people next time who actually know how the world works rather than operating from some simplistic enculturated paradigm with superficial religious sprinkles.

The Blog Beginneth

My political views are distracting enough to so many who look at my primary blog, Schenck Thoughts that I've decided to create this blog for more "real world" issues such as world events and politics. Not that I won't sometimes post these kinds of things on my other blog. But this way I can let posts with greater gravitas simmer longer over there and posts here can vent my frustrations with things like President Bush's speech tonight.

I heard very little of it, but the 10 minute swatch I heard was trash. As if we have brought freedom to Iraq. What a disgrace, with top CIA operatives reporting to the Pentagon that we have lost Anbar Province to Al-Qaeda in Iraq. My impression of the classified report that I haven't read obviously is that in that province, we have already reached "Vietnam status."