It's true. But, guess what,

- America didn't really join the allies in WW2 because Hitler was a Bad Man.

- WW1 wasn't really the result of Archduke Ferdinand having been assassinated.

- The American Civil War wasn't really fought to "free the slaves".

Nothing excuses the leadership and tactical failures along the way. But not telling us the "real deal" is not one of those failures... actually *stating* any one of those goals would make accomplishing it impossible. Like showing your poker hand. But more than five years out, they still make sense and, incredibly, most of them are still on the table.

They told you in 2001: it'll be a different kind of war. Doesn't excuse any kind of war; doesn't excuse losing; doesn't excuse the loss of favor of the rest of the world; doesn't excuse anything, really. But a lie? Let's be a little more sophisticated. More like a bumbled misdirection, followed by what is actually a steely resolve to see the matter through to completion.

Senate Intelligence Committee's Phase II Report on Pre-War Intelligence
Haven't read the full reports yet, but the summaries are pretty damning.

UT, back up for a second...first, bumbled misdirection? You're playing semantic games. They didn't even tell part of the truth. Second, let's assume that it was just misdirection, if they bumbled it, how is it not a failure? ;)
Lastly, it's good to talk to smart people that don't just call you names when they disagree with you. Thanks, Cellar!

A good retroactive view of most actions are a great way to hammer the process. To bad most of the time we don't have that view when the decisions are actually being made. Hindsight is a real boone to historians.

The last time I said that, all you could do was mock me for it.

I know that laying all our cards on the table would be shooting ourselves in the foot.

I also know what our enemies know; that the way to win a war against America is to bog us down in a quagmire until we lose political support. We couldn't have done a better job of that. We lost (or never got) support for the war by not providing a GOOD REASON for being there. It didn't have to be the comprehensive, actual reason; but at least a GOOD-SOUNDING REASON. Fail.

I think that's right. But did they A) fail to offer a good-sounding reason? or B) did they offer it and fail to communicate it well? or C) did everybody decide not to listen?

Bush stood days before the war's kickoff, at the American Enterprise Institute and spent, yes, half of his speech talking about WMD but the rest of it about the ^ goals, at least 1-1, 1-4, 1-6, mostly about the notion that success in Iraq would produce transformational change in the middle east. It hasn't so far. Fail. But they did talk about it, over and over and over, and everybody just bellowed Where Are The Weapons of Mass Destruction.

D. They threw a bunch of different bullshit at the wall, to see what would stick.

Is that like saying "I didn't cheat on all of my taxes"? In life, you get called on your bullshit.

Nothing new there. The goal of almost any invasion and occupation is to 'produce transformational change'. Usually, this involves imposing ones belief system on the target country.

BTW, TW makes a good point about the failure to supply relief to Indonesia and New Orleans. The GWB administration seems to have beaten down any independent action by subordinates in the system. If you look at the Monica Goodling situation, this system appears to be enforced in much the way political officers were used in the Soviet system. This might work better if the administration and its apparatchiks were at least competent, but sadly this was not the case. The Bush administration is anti-goverment and does not trust bureaucrats. In many ways, they have disabled the independent bureaucrats in most government agencies in the same manner they de-Baathified the Iraqi government, with much the same results.

We are left with a government on autopilot, with basic functions running, but all higher functions disabled or delayed by being micro-managed by political appointees selected more for their capacity for devotion than their ability to take independent action.

I agree that McClellan, when compared to someone like Clarke (I'm still wading through Against All Enemies), is a lightweight. However, he does have the advantage of being the 'safe' guy, one of the devout true believers that Bush thought he could trust to toe the line forever. Clarke was compromised on day one because he was a 30-year career bureaucrat who had major roles in two prior administrations. McClellan was insignificant enough that he may actually have been given more access.

Think of Mark Felt as Deep Throat. When going down the list, he was the last guy Nixon thought could be the leak. I'm reminded of the scene from 'Mr. Roberts' where the Captain is going down the list of possible troublemakers. When he gets to Pulver, he publicly dismisses him as insignificant even though he was the culprit.

Scott McClellan and Mark Felt are the real life Ensign Pulvers, people who were though to be so insignificant or blindly loyal that they were allowed to witness history being made. Bismark once made a remark about sausages and politics. These guys got to see exactly what was being stuffed in the sausage and it made them sick. What mixture of pride, patriotism, revenge, or disgust made them rat out the boss is open to debate. At least Felt never tried to make a buck off of the thing for 4 decades until his children outed him.

History will not be kind to GWB, and part of that history will be written by guys like McClellan.

Actually, they have not been discredited. Glib but fundamentally ill-advised leftists -- no friends of democracy -- will claim they have been, but the evidence of history proves them persistently wrong. But the poor SOB's never notice.

The Left will whine loudly at any attempt, in particular by Americans, to reduce the Non-Integrating Gap's number of nations. This is ridiculous given the high probability that any of the worlds troubles will develop within the Gap region.

Is there something mistaken in that idea that as the Gap shrinks, so do the chances for troubles?

Meanwhile I am persuaded the Left is collossally, systemically, congenitally small-caps STUPID. I refuse to follow stupid people. When I get it, and they don't...

Hmm, so a Republican Administration acts in accordance with a Republican fondness for limited government. I don't have a problem with that, not really.

They thought history would be similarly unkind to Harry S. Truman, too, particularly in the first few years after he left office. And really, who opposes W most strongly in our Republic? -- the kind of people who don't want us winning wars against the kind of foes we get into fights with. This, in my view, discredits these oppositionists profoundly and utterly. They seem unable to appreciate accurately the nature of our foes. We just don't shoot at the nice people. Haven't for over a century now, so it certainly seems to be our habit.

Making them ineffective, while leaving them and their budget in place, is stupid.

It certainly makes me sick, as sick as this.

Excellent post, richlevy.

eta:

Actually, we, as a nation, are all sick from this behavior, *already*. Reading about it from McClellan doesn't sicken us. It only alerts us to our condition. A condition brought upon us, and exacerbated by the deliberate policies and leadership of this administration. Reading about it helps us understand *why* we're sick, and that is the biggest help to becoming well and avoiding this avoidable peril in the future.

McClellan only confirms what the many others have long since reported. At this point, only wacko extremists could still have respect for these products from the Project for a New American Century. It is not possible to be logical and reject what even McClellan reports. Even Nixon loyalists could not take it anymore - finally decided to work for America rather than for Nixon's political agenda.

Meanwhile, what did we learn from Nixon's time? The great Americans were the ones who blew the whistle. Those here who hated whistle blowers also posted praise for George Jr. Deja vue Nam.

Bruce made my point much more succinctly then I did. Instead of cutting budgets, fixing issues, etc, the administrations approach was to reduce effectiveness while keeping costs the same. This is like ripping a cylinder out of a V8 and assuming that the owner will be so disgusted that he will go out and buy a horse.

So instead of actually fixing or at least maintaining stability, the administration kept costs in place, reduced efficiency, and cut taxes as if they had made any improvements in cost.

This is the equivalent of buying a V8, disabling 2 cylinders, and running up the difference between the cost of a V8 and V6 on a high interest credit card you have no intention of paying off under the assumption that since you're only using 6 cylinders, you deserve the extra money.:right:

F*****g insane.

Some funny satire from the internet email passing hordes

The speech George W. Bush might give:

Normally, I start these things out by saying 'My Fellow Americans.' Not doing it this time. If the polls are any indication, I don't know who more than half of you are anymore. I do know something terrible has happened, and that you're really not fellow Americans any longer.

I'll cut right to the chase here: I quit. Now before anyone gets all in a lather about me quitting to avoid impeachment, or to avoid prosecution or something, let me assure you: There's been no breaking of laws or impeachable offenses in this office.

The reason I'm quitting is simple. I'm fed up with you people. I'm fed up because you have no understanding of what's really going on in the world. Or of what's going on in this once-great nation of ours. And the majority of you are too damned lazy to do your homework and figure it out.

Let's start local. You've been sold a bill of goods by politicians and the news media. Polls show that the majority of you think the economy is in the tank. And that's despite record numbers of homeowners, including record numbers of MINORITY homeowners. And while we're mentioning minorities, I'll point out that minority business ownership is at an all-time high. Our unemployment rate is as low as it ever was during the Clinton administration. I've mentioned all those things before, but it doesn't seem to have sunk in.

Despite the shock to our economy of 9/11, the stock market has rebounded to record levels and more Americans than ever are participating in these markets. Meanwhile, all you can do is whine about gas prices, and most of you are too damn stupid to realize that gas prices are high because there's increased demand in other parts of the world, and because a small handful of noisy idiots are more worried about polar bears and beachfront property than your economic security.

We face real threats in the world. Don't give me this 'blood for oil' thing. If I were trading blood for oil I would've already seized Iraq's oil fields and let the rest of the country go to hell. And don't give me this 'Bush Lied; People Died' crap either. If I were the liar you morons take me for, I could've easily had chemical weapons planted in Iraq so they could be 'discovered.' Instead, I owned up to the fact that the intelligence was faulty.

Let me remind you that the rest of the world thought Saddam had the goods, same as me. Let me also remind you that regime change in Iraq was official US policy before I came into office. Some guy named ' Clinton ' established that policy. Bet you didn't know that, did you? Now some of you morons are considering another and more evil Clinton for president !!!! Go figure that one!! She wants to take your kids away and let the ' Whole Village ' raise them! i.e. governmental indoctrination .. Look this one up you dumb asses!

The rest of you morons want to be led by a junior senator with no understanding of foreign policy or economics, and this nitwit says we should attack Pakistan , a nuclear ally. And then he wants to go to Iran and make peace with a terrorist who says he's going to destroy us. While he's doing that, he wants to give Iraq to al Qaeda, Afghanistan to the Taliban, Israel to the Palestinians, and your money to the IRS so the government can give welfare to illegal aliens, who he will make into citizens, so they can vote to reelect him. He also thinks it's okay for Iran to have nucular weapons, and we should stop our foreign aid to Israel . Did you sleep through high school?

You idiots need to understand that we face a unique enemy. Back during the cold war, there were two major competing political and economic models squaring off. We won that war, but we did so because fundamentally, the Communists wanted to survive, just as we do. We were simply able to out spend and out-tech them.

That's not the case this time. The soldiers of our new enemy don't care if they survive. In fact, they want to die. That'd be fine, as long as they weren't also committed to taking as many of you with them as they can. But they are. They want to kill you, and the bastards are all over the globe.

You should be grateful that they haven't gotten any more of us here in the United States since September 11. But you're not. That's because you've got no idea how hard a small number of intelligence, military, law enforcement, and homeland security people have worked to make sure of that. When this whole mess started, I warned you that this would be a long and difficult fight. I'm disappointed how many of you people think a long and difficult fight amounts to a single season of 'Survivor.'

Instead, you've grown impatient. You're incapable of seeing things through the long lens of history, the way our enemies do. You think that wars should last a few months, a few years, tops.

Making matters worse, you actively support those who help the enemy. Every time you buy the New York Times, every time you send a donation to a cut-and-run Democrat's political campaign, well, dang it, you might just as well FedEx a grenade launcher to a Jihadist. It amounts to the same thing.

In this day and age, it's easy enough to find the truth. It's all over the Internet. It just isn't on the pages of the New York Times, USA Today, or on NBC News. But even if it were, I doubt you'd be any smarter. Most of you would rather watch American Idol or Dancing with Stars.

I could say more about your expectations that the government will always be there to bail you out, even if you're too stupid to leave a city that's below sea level and has a hurricane approaching.

I could say more about your insane belief that government, not your own wallet, is where the money comes from. But I've come to the conclusion that were I to do so, it would sail right over your heads.

So I quit. I'm going back to Crawford. I've got an energy-efficient house down there (Al Gore could only dream) and the capability to be fully self-sufficient for years. No one ever heard of Crawford before I got elected, and as soon as I'm done here pretty much no one will ever hear of it again. Maybe I'll be lucky enough to die of old age before the last pillars of America fall.

Oh, and by the way, Cheney's quitting too. That means Pelosi is your new President. You asked for it. Watch what she does carefully, because I still have a glimmer of hope that there are just enough of you remaining who are smart enough to turn this thing around in 2008.

So that's it. God bless what's left of America .

Some of you know what I mean. The rest of you, kiss off.

PS - You might want to start learning Farsi, and buy a Koran.

He should have punctuated it with 'God Damn America'.

Islam ain't taking over America until the majority convert to Islam. And the brand of Islam just might be you know distinctly American, in which the new American Muslims are instructed to bow towards New York City.