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MARCH 17, 2004 – They pretend
they don’t get it, the very simple point most of the country -–and
the world – has been making for over a year now: it is not just a
matter of if you lead a country to war, but how you lead a country
to war.
While the Bush/Limbaughians – and of
course the entire non-Moderate Independent media – made the absurd
claim that you were either for the war, and so embraced what the
President did, or against the war, and so opposed the President.
Indeed, Democratic presidential
candidate John Kerry has been assailed repeatedly for supposedly
trying to have it both ways on the war, voting for the resolution
authorizing force and then criticizing how the President led us to
war.
All along the point was simple, and poll
after poll showed the vast majority of Americans agreed: if we need
to go to war, we should not do it alone.
And now the evidence is here: by going
it essentially alone, with only a handful of allies mainly on paper,
we put ourselves and our few allies in such a weak position that
Osama bin Laden was able to topple the government of Spain and
eliminate all of their troops from Iraq with just a few bombs. The
new Spanish Prime Minister is now calling his nation's being one of
the few to go along with President Bush a "fiasco."
Yes, the non-M/I media will follow the
Bush/Limbaughian grade school bully-level logic and issue article
after article saying this shows Spain is being too weak, giving in
to the terrorists.
In reality, President Bush’s greed and
diplomatic ineptitude are responsible for giving Osama the
opportunity to achieve what he did this past week.
There are two sides to any war, the
military side and the diplomatic side. Conservatives understand
this. As reported in the
Washington Post way back on last April 22, "(Newt) Gingrich said
in an interview yesterday that he wanted to contrast the success of
a transformed Defense Department with the "failure of State," which
he described as "six months of diplomatic failure followed by one
month of military success now to be returned to diplomatic failure
to exploit the victory fully."
Beginning in the Summer of 2002, and
continuing all through the run up to war, the Bush administration
made clear that not only didn’t they care if our allies came along
with us to war in Iraq, but that they thought we might be better off
without them. In reality, they simply figured we would do most of
the fighting anyway, and so why should we share control of the oil
contracts after the war? The Bush/Limbaughians truly were naïve
enough not to understand why you needed an international coalition.
And so now this past week we had a
textbook example of why going it basically alone was a choice that
made us much weaker and has made success that much more difficult to
achieve.
And so do you Bush/Limbaughians finally
get it? Of course not. All you can do is try and call Spain weak,
say they are caving in to terrorism.
War is a chess game, not a shoot out.
As strong militarily as the US is, President Bush is showing that
all brawn and no brains does not make a good warrior. The
President’s lone job with regard to a war is to set the diplomatic
stage, while the military makes the military plan. And President
Bush scored an absolute zero, showing zero diplomatic skills and
leadership, leving our nation and the few people who came along with
us weakened outcasts, easy targets for Osama-type terrorism.
To fight a war on terrorism, you must
have the whole world united. The unite the world, you need a
leader. A leader, by definition, is someone who can get people to
follow along with him.
President Bush has not only shown a
complete lack of leadership skills in the War on Terror, but actual
anti-leadership. He took what was a united world and divided it.
And he did it out of simple greed and a lack of basic understanding
about what power and strength is. (see our article on the subject,
President
Bush’s Great Diplomatic Success:)
The Bush/Limbaughians didn’t get it when
the rest of the nation and world said, “Don’t go it alone.” They
pretend, to this day, not to understand when people like Senator
Kerry say, yes, we needed to deal with Saddam, but we needed to do
it as part of an actual coalition. They pretended by saying
repeatedly they had put together a “coalition of the willing,” which
would help with poll numbers but not with the actual war, they were
fixing the problem.
And there in lies the basic problem of
the Bush/Limbaughians: they are, as two high-level people now who
have left the administration have said, only concerned about
politics and not about policy.
As former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neil
told us, they don’t care if they ruin the bankrupt the nation with
deficit-creating tax cuts, they have talk radio to smooth it over
for them.
They don’t care if they roll back
environmental policies or let global warming grow into a
full-fledged crisis, they have FOX News to cover for them.
And they didn’t get the point of
international law, international institutions, having allies, or
diplomacy of any kind in fighting the War on Terror or war in
Iraq. They simply do not think at a high enough level to understand
the basics of the world and reality. Their supporters like their
oversimplified bravado, that if our sons and daughters are being
killed in a shooting gallery, alone, he will stand up and say, “Oh
yeah? Well, bring it on.”
That is all nice for a man who will hang
around Texas bars drinking a lot and picking fights, but it does not
work for a President.
Rather than insulting Spain, President
Bush should apologize. They came along in defense of the US,
helping us in the War on Terror even though they had not been hit.
But rather than helping protect them in return, President Bush’s
lack of diplomatic skills and greed left them an open target and
exposed them to something they would never have faced if we had gone
in as a true world coalition.
By making the potential targets so few
and easily delineated, President Bush made things easy for Osama.
And this week, Osama was able to utterly destroy an entire flank of
our coalition in the War on Terror – in addition to furthering
damaging any hopes of us adding to that coalition – with just a
handful of small bombs.
In addtion, the number of groups rising
to Osama’s cause are rising, the number of nations willing to stand
with us is falling.
You tell me, which leader is showing up
which?
Misguided military campaigns, including
one against Osama, combined with bad financial policies that put the
nation too far into debt, brought down the second most powerful
nation in the history of mankind, the Soviet Union, without a single
shot being fired.
My 10th grade history teacher once told
me, “History does not repeat itself. If we do not study history and
learn from the mistakes, only then are we doomed to repeat them.”
Of course, the Bush/Limbaughians will
first have to graduate from grade school before they begin to learn
lessons like that. | 
