Snatching defeat from the jaws of victory George W. Bush went to war when he shouldn't have,  and put complete dummies in charge Here's how greed, incompetency, & macho bullshit screwed up the USA & Iraq at the same time

The U.S. War in Iraq was ill-advised, poorly-planned, and based on intelligence that was not only completely, utterly faulty, but also heavily coached by an administration that was discussing an Iraqi invasion within ten days of taking power in 2001. All they ever wanted was an excuse. Before anybody knew who'd launched the 9/11 attacks, the administration focused on Iraq, and made the evidence fit the theory. This thing has been a screwup from day one, with lots of blame to go around.

WHY THE SURGE WON'T WORK.  The dummies keep pointing at a one-month drop in casualties. Military casualties are down drastically, sure. We've flooded the place with troops, so the bad guys are either laying low or relocating, as they've done in the past. Civilian casualties are down, but still ridiculously high. And in lots of areas, like Fallujah, sectarian violence has already been decreasing because they've run their rivals out. When you're a Shia neighborhood, and you've driven out all the Sunnis, you've got less people to shoot in the head. They've also changed the accounting they use to count deaths due to insurgency. They blame more of the casualties on common criminals, based (no shit) on whether you've been shot in the front of the head or the back. See, only criminals shoot you in the front.
      None of this matters. Colin Powell's former second-in-command at the state department, Larry Wilkerson, says that the military cannot possibly sustain its numbers in Iraq, so the pullout is inevitable. And when that happens, the violence will skyrocket once again. The surge is only a band-aid. Fox News and other idiots keep saying the USA must give it enough time to work, meaning the surge itself won't do the trick, it is only designed to give the Iraqi gummint time to get their shit together. But as every single report states, they aren't doing that. Al-Maliki and his band of corrupt boobs are no closer to stable rule than they were a year ago. 
 

THE LATEST BUSH LIES ON THE SURGE!!!!!!   This freaking boob, in asking for 21000 more troops for Iraq, forgot to mention that he'll need at least that many in support troops. So the true cost in people and dollars will be literally double what he claimed. And yet they keep saying that the British troops pulling out is a sign of stability. WHAT ???????   May 2007, they're now saying they're deploying 35,000 more troops, and will need to keep the additional forces in Iraq at least until spring 2008. This story keeps changing, and keeps changing.

September 2007: The White House was quick to doctor up the Petraeus report on Iraq before it even came out, so that it didn't tell the American people what they already know (that Iraq is a hopeless, unfixable mess), got blindsided by the leaking of a GAO report that tells the American people what they already know (that the Iraqi gummint has scratched the surface on three of its expected goals, and done nothing on the other fifteen). John Warner and other influential GOP leaders are telling Bush to start packing the troops up.

BUSH's BIG SPEECH TO THE COUNTRY (9/14) WAS A VOW TO MAKE NO PROGRESS. It's just more of the same. The White House sees little progress, but the teeny bit they DO see is enough to make them wanna commit 130,000 troops for another year. We've been told to wait for September 2007, when General Petraeus was to make his big report. The result is that we're supposed to wait until March 2008 now. WTF! This damn thing will never end. By summer 2008, Bush expects to be back at the pre-surge level of troops. That means the USA will have made no progress at all in fixing things enough to get the soldiers home. No progress whatsoever. 

In a stunning bit of bullshit, Bush talks of troop withdrawals starting soon. What that means in a drop int he bucket between September and December 2007, with the 30,000 surge troops to start coming home by summer 2008. This means that by midway through 2008, U.S. troops will be back at the same level as the beginning of 2007.   HOLY SHIT !!!!
 

Moqtada Al Sadr has told his army to settle down for six months. So supporters of the surge, like the idiots at Fox "News," say it's working, violence is down. NO, you bozos, it's just as predicted, he's laying low and waiting for the U.S. troops to leave. And one day, they'll have to. Tomorrow, next month, next year, whatever. Soon as they leave, it goes to hell. So might as well get it over with.

Republicans and others support hanging in there because once we leave, we expose the fact that we've gotten nowhere. But already the GOP is nervous, because there's an expected progress report due in September 2007, and everybody already KNOWS that will suck, and THEN they finally have to face facts.

MAY 2007: Retired Major-General John Batiste, former commanding general of the First Infantry Division in Iraq, put out a video ad debunking the notion that Bush listens to commanders on the ground. Bush has cherry-picked commanders, like Petraeus, who will follow his lead, not the other way around. Check out VoteVets.Org for more info.

Bush's proposed troop "surge" was a joke from the beginning. Democrats and Republicans joined together to pronounce this idea a bad one. The commanders on the ground in Iraq already said it wouldn't work.  His nominee for Chief of Staff, during his confirmation hearings (at which John McCain shit all over him for "bad judgment"), said they needed only half the number Bush wanted. GOP Senator Susan Collins from Maine went to Iraq, then came back and said that the commanders there didn't want more troops. The guy in charge over there didn't want to do it, so Bush replaced him with somebody who would go along. Can Bush and his people come up with ANY consensus on this?

HERE'S THE TRUTH ABOUT THE SURGE: The "surge" of troops won't even reach 28,000 (and remember, it was supposed to be only 21,500) until June 2007, and according to the surge plan, they're supposed to start pulling out by September 2007. But they won't even have the actual LARGER number of troops all THERE until September. Lieutenant-General Raymond Odierno, the day-to-day commander of American forces in Iraq, said that the extra troops need stay until at least February 2008, but two months after he said that, Petraeus said they'd have to stay months LONGER. August 2007, various commanders are saying we'll need to be there "for years" and that the surge will easily last into summer 2009. 

January 10, 2007, Bush gave a speech about sending more troops to Iraq. This speech proves him to be what we've always known him to be: a liar and a hypocrite. 

• He's been saying for years, even as recently as October, that the USA was "winning the war in Iraq." Have things changed that fast? No. He's simply admitting finally what has been obvious to everybody else for a long time.

 
• He said in previous speeches that the commanders on the ground didn't want any more troops. This was a lie.

 
• He said that sending more troops would indicate that the USA was "gonna be there forever." What does it say now? 

 
• He said tonight that he'd informed the Iraqi government that the US commitment was not "open-ended," but THEN in the same speech he said that if the USA doesn't prevail, the Iraqi gummint will collapse and this would force America to stay there even longer, which means the commitment IS open-ended.

 
• It wouldn't hurt to admit what will come out eventually: the US govt shoved through the Iraqi govt a new "hydrocarbon law" which gives Shell, Exxon-Mobil, and BP Oil rights to pump Iraqi oil and keep 75 percent of the profits. This law was actually drawn up even before the invasion. It's as many said all along, this war was about oil, and disguised as something else. 

 
• Bush lied once again when he said that, before deciding on the extra troops, he had consulted with members of Congress. Actually, he didn't, and he CERTAINLY didn't talk to the Democrats who can eaisly screw up his plans. Once again, this dolt doesn't know how to play bipartisan.

 
• He's sending an aircraft carrier and Patriot missiles to the region. WHY? The insurgents have nothing that require that kind of hardware. Ah, but he's also conducted a raid on an Iranian consulate in northern Iraq. He is preparing for a strike on Iran. There you go, get us into ANOTHER f_____g war, you idiot.

The Baker-Hamilton group, Bush's new secretary of defense, lots of the troops, and many of the commanders all say, DON'T SEND MORE TROOPS TO IRAQ. Simply sending more troops won't actually do anything except help clamp down on the bad guys for as long as they're over there. Once they leave, and one day they'll HAVE to leave, the bad guys will bolder than ever.

WHY THE SURGE? It's only enough troops to provide more targets, and only a FRACTION of the troops needed to pacify Iraq. If the complete freaking idiot Bush had listened to his generals, to his predecessors, to the military guys who had run all the wargames and simulations, and all the Middle East experts, he would have gone in with lots more resources to begin with. Idiots like Wolfowitz told us that there would be no sectarian violence. Rumsfeld said we could take Iraq with five guys and a mule. These are the kinds of dumb assholes Bush hired and listened to.

Two previous "surges" accomplished nothing.  Face it, there is no good answer. It can't be fixed. It will be an open sore for many years to come. Republican Senators are also quite skeptical. It's a band-aid on a giant, self-inflicted wound. The USA has already had two mini-surges, to no effect. And ultimately we'll hand over control to Iraqis who regularly flee when confronted with danger.

January 2007, just before he's to speak to the public about his new strategy, which really isn't terribly new, Bush replaces the two guys running things for him over there. This is because they don't agree with him on a troop "surge." Sending in 20,000 or so more Marines isn't going to solve a freaking thing, especially if it's only temporary. All this is, is an attempt to salvage his competely wrecked legacy.

THE LATEST OUTRAGE ON THIS IS, Bush officials admitted in Jan 2007 that they didn't release the results of their own review of Irq until after the midterm elections specifically because they knew the published results WOULD affect the elections. 

Oh, and the right-wing fanatics need to stop asking, "Well, what is the Democrats' plan?"  If somebody comes into my house, nails all the doors and windows shut, then sets the place on fire, it's not fair for him to ask, "What's your plan?"  We've been put in an unwinnable situation. There is no GOOD solution, only shitty, awful, and really f___g crappy.
 

Where are the idiots who helped make the war happen? Check out 
              http://thinkprogress.org/the-architects-where-are-they-now/

April 2007: George Tenet, ex-CIA chief of the infamous "slam dunk" comment, says that Cheney and his evil brood (Wolfowitz and Feith) in the White House rushed to war without ever seriously debating whether the USA should go to war. Tenet says it's ridiculous that Cheney would base so much on the "slam dunk" thing, and when WMD weren't found, he says that Cheney and the gang blamed it all on the CIA, when in fact the idea of invading Iraq was already a foregone conclusion, which was already a well-documented fact. It's what everybody knew already: these guys were determined to go to war from the earliest days of their first term, and were only loooking for an excuse.

December 2006: Gerald Ford confided in Bob Woodward in 2004 that he didn't buy Bush's rationale for war in Iraq. He said that the USA shouldn't go "hellfire damnation around the globe" for a cause that isn't directly related to the USA's national security. Ford was barely cold when this information came out AND conservative wags started ripping on Ford, before he'd even been buried, because of these comments.
 

Why did we go in the first place?  Hmmmm, not sure.

September 2006: Bush claimed in an interview with Brian Williams that "I didn't think about Iraq until after we were attacked." But THIS IS A COMPLETE LIE. It's well documented that just ten days into his first term, Bushie was talking about regime change in Iraq. He claimed that "the war came to our shores." Yeah, terrorism, not Iraq. 
 

April 2006: 90% of US troops in Iraq think their mission is to "retaliate for the 9/11 attacks." The Bush administration has American soldiers all screwed up in the head, believing their old propaganda. No WONDER they had to lower the standards for admission. They need to recruit idiots dumb enough to believe something that's been discredited for two years now.
 

February 2006 Bombshell: Paul Pillar, a 28-year veteran of the CIA, confirmed what's been said by SO MANY SOURCES, namely that the Bush administration ignored all the intelligence that indicated there was NO link between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda, and was determined to go to war with Iraq no matter what. They subverted the intelligence to justify the decision they'd already made to invade Iraq.

December 2005: Bush goes on TV and tells the country that most of the intelligence used for making the case was wrong. Then he sys he would've gone to war anyway. He says he takes responsbility, and admits his mistakes. BUT IT'S ONLY TWO YEARS TOO LATE. The rest of the country, and the rest of the world, knew he'd screwed up for a long, long time.
 

Bush kept saying that Saddam and Al Qaeada were in cahoots, but....
Colin Powell, Secretary of State:  "But if the heart of your question is whether or not we see any complicity between Iraq and the events of Sept. 11 through Al Qaeda, we do not have that connection."
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/nightline/DailyNews/powell_transcript021112.html
 

Bush and company made the case that Saddam had massive weapons of destruction, but......
Powell 2001: WMDs Not Significant
Asked about the sanctions placed on Iraq, which were then under review at the Security Council, Powell said the measures were working. In fact, he added, "(Saddam Hussein) has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction. He is unable to project conventional power against his neighbors. So in effect, our policies have strengthened the security of the neighbors of Iraq, and these are policies that we are going to keep in place."
http://www.startribune.com/stories/1519/4119353.html
 

"On May 15 2001, Powell went further and said that Saddam Hussein had not been able to "build his military back up or to develop weapons of mass destruction" for "the last 10 years". America, he said, had been successful in keeping him "in a box"."
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/allnews/content_objectid=13434081_
method=full_siteid=50143_headline=-THE%2DBIG%2DLIE-name_page.html
 

Condoleeza Rice 2001:  "Saddam does not control the northern part of the country," she said. "We are able to keep his arms from him. His military forces have not been rebuilt."
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/allnews/content_objectid=13434081_method=full_siteid=50143_
headline=-THE%2DBIG%2DLIE-name_page.html
 

November 2005: Larry Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Colin Powell, says that Bush was "too aloof, too distant from the details" when it came to planning post-war Iraq. Wilkerson blames Bush for not paying attention, and also blames Cheney, Rumsfeld, and other chickenhawks for insulating Bush from details so that they could pursue their agenda. Wilkerson says Cheney also ignored any data that contradicted evidence which supported going to war.   BUSH IS CORNERED AT LAST. May 2005, The London Times has released a memo containing the minutes of a high-level meeting regarding  Iraq. This meeting was held July 23, 2002. The memo describes how an unnamed British official met with Bush administration officials and returned to London, having concluded that  "war was inevitable" "Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD."  Neither of which turned out to be the case.  "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy"   Which we already knew ...... the Bush folks made sure the intelligence reports were spun in order to justify military action "There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action." That's obvious too, since the post-war situation is a DISASTER. "It seemed clear that Bush had made up his mind to take military action, even if the timing was not yet decided," the memo said. In other words, his blather about discussions with other countries was just a smoke screen. And then he wonders why other countries hate the Bush administration. "But the case was thin. Saddam was not threatening his neighbors, and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran." And Bush and the other liars say they know that NOW, but in fact they knew that in advance. November 2005, we get to see a Jan 2003 CIA report saying that they knew their source for info on Saddam's bio and chem weapons was a liar. The British officials determined to push for an ultimatum for Saddam to allow U.N. weapons inspectors back into Iraq to "help with the legal justification for the use of force ... despite U.S. resistance." Bush only wanted war, and to hell with the cost in money and lives. Britain's attorney general, Peter Goldsmith, advised the group that "the desire for regime change was not a legal base for military action" and two of three possible legal bases -- self-defense and humanitarian intervention -- could not be used.  But Bush doesn't give a damn about law, international or otherwise. We acted unilaterally, and stupidly.

Achmed Chalabi, longtime Iraqi exile, has long fancied himself the future Iraqi PM. But he can't even walk into Jordan without being arrested, because of a bank fraud conviction in absentia. For $330K / month, for years, he gathered intelligence on Iraq for the USA. Turns out almost all of it was wrong. He fed the US all sorts of bad info on WMD. It wasn't inaccurate, it was FABRICATED. He was one of the biggest sources for this data. He lied like hell, figuring that once America knocked off Hussein, he'd be dropped into take over the country. But he had no power base there, nobody really knew who he was, and later, he got busted for a variety of crimes inside Iraq, including counterfeiting. 

When confronted with all his false evidence, he laughed it off and essentially said, "What's the difference? We achieved our goal, and got rid of Saddam." These are the kinds of sources the Bushies used to justify putting Colin Powell in front of the U.N. to make the case for invasion.

Another source for WMD data was a guy whose credibility was so low within the CIA, he was referred to as "Curveball." Aides didn't want Powell using, as part of his U.N. pitch, anything that came from Curveball. Oops.
 

DONALD RUMSFELD IGNORED ALL GOOD ADVICE

General Eric Shinseki, Army Chief of Staff, said that the USA would require a lot more troops on the ground to hold Iraq than to conquer it in the first place. He was absolutely right. But the very short-sighted team of Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz said that Shinseki didn't know what he was talking about, and ran the general off. He was forced to retire, in humiliating fashion, with no high ranking officials at the ceremony.
 

October 2007: Retired Lieutenant-General Ricardo Sanchez, who used to head up all US forces in Iraq, now says the war is "a nightmare with no end in sight." He goes on to say that the Bush administration, the State Department, and Congress all share the blame. This would be the GOP-dominated rubber stamp Congress, of course, that ruled for six years and gave Bush whatever he wanted. Sanchez also says that the war plan from the very beginining was "catastrophically flawed, unrealistically optimistic," and that the White House didn't commit the necessary resources to succeed. He predicted failure for the surge, whose only purpose is to "stave off defeat."
 

September 2006: Major General John R.S. Batiste testifed on Capitol Hill that "Secretary Rumsfeld ignored 12 years of U.S. Central Command deliberate planning and strategy, dismissed honest dissent, and browbeat subordinates to build 'his plan'...[he] refused to acknowledge and even ignored the potential for the insurgency...Rumsfeld's dismal strategic decisions resulted in the unnecessary deaths of American servicemen and women, our allies, and the good people of Iraq."

So why does Rumsfeld still have a job?
 
 

Larry Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Colin Powell, says that Bush was "too aloof, too distant from the details" when it came to planning post-war Iraq. 

During the 2004 campaign, the administration and its cronies hypocritically complained that John Kerry's non-support for Bush's desired blank check for the war meant that Kerry "didn't support body armor for the troops." The big question SHOULD have been, "why were the troops sent there without that armor in the FIRST PLACE?" The troops were, in fact, sent to Iraq without a whole lot of things they should have had, including armored vehicles (especially important in a place where roadside bombs kill so many).

Bush claimed he had a "true coalition" to help with the war. But other than the UK, most countries who contributed provided only perfunctory help, and only because they were sucking up to the USA.

The blunders

October 2007: Members of the military want to declare victory over Al Qaeda in Iraq. Yeah, that'll work. So many, many things have been done wrong before and during this war that it's hard to keep track. But let's try. 

We didn't bring enough guys. Army Chief of Staff General Eric Shinseki said we'd need at least 200,000 troops. We went with a lot less. So we knocked off a two-bit army, and then we couldn't control the population. The result was looting, of museums, hospitals, schools, and WEAPONS DEPOTS. Lots and lots of guns entered the general population.

We staffed the place based on party affiliation. Read Bob Woodward's book "State of Denial" and it will scare the f__k out of you. Cheney in particular told the guys picked to run post-invasion Iraq to staff up only with loyal Republicans, leaving out many necessary and talented people.

We dissolved the army and police force. We took the only bunch of guys there who could keep order and told them to go home. No paycheck, no job, but everybody's got a gun. This was the birth of the insurgency.

We declared victory.  Bush landed his moronic ass on an aircraft carrier in a jumpsuit, for the dumbest damn photo op since Dukakis rode around in a tank, and in front of a banner which read "Mission Accomplished." When it tured out that the mission was not truly accomplished, the White House blamed the banner on the ship's crew. After he resigned, former White House adviser Dan Bartlett finally admitted DID originate in the White House. F____g liars.

De-Baathification. The new U.S. authorities, led by that flaming idiot Paul Bremer, went about kicking out of their jobs anybody he could find who had been in the ruling Baath party. The assumption was that they were evil jerks who'd been corrupting and mucking up the country. But as with the Soviets or the Nazis, people signed up as members of the ruling party for one reason only: to get a job. Every teacher, doctor, bureaucrat, etc. was a Baath member. In an instant, Bremer and crew wiped out hospital and school staffs countrywide. It took two years to sort of get the schools back on track.

We tried declaring victory AGAIN.  In October 2007, various idiot members of the miltary said they wanted to declare victory against Al Qaeda in Iraq. Holy sheepshit, where do I start? First, we've done this before, and it backfired huge. Just back up a couple of bullet points. Second, we've knocked off the Number One or Number Two guy at Al Qaeda many, many times, and they always seem to have more guys ready to take over. Third, if we declare victory and say that the terrorists are out of the equation, then we're left with a civil war. The USA should NOT be refereeing somebody else's civil war.

April 2007: Bush accuses Democrats of all manner of evil, in tying war funding to a withdrawal. Here's the shit he's trying to pull. October 2007: Bush wants an additional $43 billion for 2008, making the total tab for the coming year $190 billion. He says Congress is screwing the troops if they don't pass it. And yet he can easily veto a fraction of that cost (paid for with cigarette taxes) to insure poor children. The war that didn't have to take place has now cost the American people $650 billion. 

And don't forget about the budget shell game.
 

Bush's blustery blather	The reality
Says that Congress is failing to support the troops, and they will "feel the effects" of a funding cut-off	What does he think they're feeling RIGHT NOW? Extended tours, repeated tours, lack of proper medical care once they're home (Walter Reed is only one symptom of  overall neglect), continuing lack of armor, watching private contractors getting rich over there, etc. BUSH has failed to support tthe troops from the beginning. Remember, Congress voted to fund the war. They simply put conditions on it.
Said the April 2007 funding bill was full of pork.	How about that bloated highway spending bill, loaded with 4200-plus bits of pork? The one Bush told them to cut, and which they made bigger ANYWAY, and which he then signed and called "fiscally responsbile?" The Dems' pork was relatively small, and included hurricane relief, and a whole bunch of other necessary items. All they did was follow the GOP blueprint of the last six years.
Along with Cheney, calls the Dems armchair strategists who think they know better than t he generals on the ground.	But this is precisely what Bush did. When the generals on the ground, including the commander of all the forces over there, disagreed with Bush's surge plan, he REPLACED him, with an ambitious guy who went along. Even conservative magazines ripped on Petraeus for selling out to politics. So WHO is saying they know better than the generals?
Says the Dems will be responsible for a U.S. defeat	A U.S. defeat is a foregone conclusion. Whenever American forces leave Iraq, that's when the shit will hit the fan. It is UNAVOIDABLE. But Bush doesn't want it on his watch. He will gladly pawn this off on the next sucker. So he's going to blame the inevitable disaster on the people who opposed it all along.
He told the Dems in spring 2007 to "come off their vacation" and get him a bill he can sign.	And he said this JUST as he was going away on vacation. By the way, no president has EVER spent as much time on vacation as Bush, including the FIVE WEEKS he was gone during the Hurricane Katrina disaster.
He gave Nancy Pelosi all sorts of grief about her visit to Syria, to discuss Iraq. In fact, so did Newt Gingrich, the serial adulterer who considered running as the values candidate.	Pelosi was accompanied by Republicans. And ANOTHER Republican delegation went there separate from Pelosi as well. Bush said not a peep about THEM.

October 2007: The humanitarian crisis created by the invasion is immense. Every month, 60000 Iraqis leave home. Syria, with less than 20 million people, has taken in over a million Iraqis in two years. Thre-quarters of a million have fled to Jordan. In 206, the USA took in less than 600 Iraqis, less than before the invasion. Even Iraqis under death threat for aiding US forces can't get in.

May 2007: The governor of Kansas complained that when he needed National Guard help after a devastating tornado season, a lot of the necessary equipment was in Iraq. Tony Snow, Bush's mouthpiece, said that all the governor had to do was ask for that equipment. Turns out the governor HAD been talking about this for literally years, including in an extended private chat with Bush himself back in 2005. Oops, Tony.

March 2007: Un-goddamn-believable !!!! What has Halliburton pulled NOW? These slimy bastards have announced that they're moving their HQ and CEO to Dubai. So after all the no-bid contracts they got from Cheney and Rumsfeld, and the massive, multi-million-dollar overcharges they've stuck the American taxpayers with, they want to escape U.S. taxes. They say that's not why they're doing it, but that's going to be the bottom line. They want to rape and pillage the U.S. Treasury, but they don't want to pay taxes anymore. They are going to f__k American citizens yet again. 

February 2007: Auditors and the GAO have cited unbelievable fraud and waste in war spending. The biggest culprit? Of course, it's HALLIBURTON, Dick Cheney's old company, supposedly the only outfit that could perform all those jobs in a no-bid contract. Of the latest $10 billion in undocumented or overcharged contracts and costs, Halliburton accounted for $2.7 billion.

Halliburton's subsidiary KBR (Kellogg Brown & Root) has been cited for numerous overcharges, lost money, shoddy construction, non-delivery of paid-for items, and lack of security for their personnel, some of whom have been shot or blown up. Some lovely documentaries have been produced on the screwing of American taxpayers in this war, a lot of it through Halliburton, and much of that through KBR.
 

As of January 2007, only NINE PERCENT of the costs of the Iraq war went through the usual budgetary process. The rest of it was grabbed through "emergency supplemental appropriations" bills, without caps, without Congressional oversight (not that the GOP Congress EVER exercised oversight of Bush).  By not including the war in the budget, Bush could claim that the budget didn't look so bad after all. In the meantime, Bush has continued to pass and hold the line on tax breaks, even for the rich. NO OTHER PRESIDENT has waged war and not paid for it.
 

November 2006: Republican lawyer Stuart W. Bowen Jr. has been leading a large team of auditors who've dug up all manner of waste in Iraq spending, including bribery, conspiracy, fraud, unbelievably bad construction (including by Halliburton and its subsidiaries), and literally hundreds of thousands of missing weapons. His reward for doing this duty, and indirectly embarrassing the Bush administration (especially former Halliburton honcho Dick Cheney) is getting canned. This firing was done in the sneakiest, sleaziest way possible. As Republicans have done repeatedly under Bush, they snuck in a last-minute provision to a military authorization bill, after it had been examined by all parties, and just before it came to a vote. After the elimination of Bowen's job, nobody would even admit to inserting this provision.
 

Over 2700 American soldiers dead. Twelve thousand Iraqi policemen in two years, dead. Over HALF A MILLION Iraqis killed by warfare since the invasion. In getting rid of Saddam, we've topped his murder rate.
 

Economic advisor Lawrence Lindsey said the war would cost $200 billion or more. Wolfowitz pronounced him "out of line" and Lindsey was out of a job. At last count, the costs far exceed $200 billion. In addition, Wolfowitz, Cheney, and others said that Iraqi oil revenues would help offset the costs. This was ALWAYS a wacky idea, for two very simple reasons: first, any Iraqi government that would hand over oil money to an invading country would be viewed as a puppet, and second, such a move would give ammunition to the critics who said that the USA invaded Iraq for its oil to begin with.

War costs plenty, even without profiteers. But the Iraq war has seen more profiteers than any U.S. war since the Civil War. First and foremost among these is HALLIBURTON. Dick Cheney's old company received a series of no-bid contracts. Predictably enough, they've been caught numerous times gouging the American taxpayers with overcharges on all manner of things, from the food they serve the troops (several bucks for a can of Coke, for example) to the importation of fuel for military and cilivian vehicles. In nearby Kuwait, you can fill your tank for literally pennies. But Halliburton was charging several dollars per gallon of gas that THEY brought in.

Halliburton has paid back some piddling amounts, and can't pass standard audits. But they're Cheney's boys, so they've gone WAY back into the black on Iraq.

March 2006, it's found that Halliburton didn't bother putting in proper water purification. It was pumping water directly from the filthy Euphrates river into the camps for washing and laundry. A manager at Halliburton's KBR subsidiary, responsible for the water supply, resigned when he was prevented by his bosses from informing the military of the contaminated water.

NO OTHER WARTIME PRESIDENT has EVER  1) cut taxes WHILE waging war, or 2) failed to find bipartisan support. Bush Jr. wants it both ways, so he starts a needless war AND drops taxes, and then he complains about the deficits. He has also relentlessly pronounced anybody who doesn't support his stupidity as unpatriotic.
 

An American construction company spent $75 million building a police academy in Baghdad that was built so poorly that it leaks. In fact, human waste leaks from the first floor ceiling. The place is a wreck, without even being shelled. It's to be completely abandoned. 
 

The Bush administration has tried to pull all sorts of shell games with the war budget. One nifty trick is two-fold. First, instead of budgeting for the war, they ask for the money in separate appropriations. This way, it doesn't look like they're spending ANY money on the war, and they can make the Congressional budget look less ghastly than it already does because of all that GOP red ink. The second ridiculous aspect to this financial trick is, THE WHOLE FREAKING WORLD CAN SEE IT BEING DONE, and yet they do it anyway.

Economic adviser Lawrence Lindsey said early on in the conflict that a war with Iraq would cost over $200 billion. He was swiftly pronounced "out of line" by Paul Wolfowitz, and sent packing. But the war has cost far more than that $200 billion. Wolfowitz, whose math skills apparently rank behidn Bush's, got somehow promoted to head of the World Bank. The mind boggles.

When John Kerry and others balked at signing Bush's original blank check appropriation for the war (demanded WITHOUT any kind of itemization; so I guess they were just taking a wild ass guess at $89 billion), it was suggested that opponents to the demand were "against body armor for the troops." This was in response to the revelation that many troops in Iraq lacked sufficient armor against bullets and shrapnel. The more appropriate question should have been, why were they sent there without that armor in the FIRST PLACE?
 
 

Well, we're stuck now ANYWAY

Even though the White House now acknowledges that all the reasons given for invading Iraq were WRONG (the polite term for BULLSHIT), they say we're stuck there anyhow because to leave would create an even bigger problem. But our very presence is a great recruiting tool for terrorists, as has been stated by even experts sent there by the administration.
 

Fumbling for words

Trying to make the war sound less hideous than it really is, the Moron in Charge had the nerve to say in October 2006, "I like to tell people when the final history is written on Iraq, [ the invasion ] will look like just a comma."  Actually, you bozo, it will look like a whole lotta kids you got killed because you wanted to invade a country your own dad was smart enough to leave be.
 

FINGER POINTING

Richard Clarke was a security adviser to several administrations, including GOP administrations, going back to Reagan.  He has oodles of credentials and credibility.  He said in his book that the Bushies didn't pay attention to the terrorist threat.  He said Condy Rice had no idea what he was talking about half the time when he brought up the subject of Al Qaeada.  The GOP attack dogs went after him and said he was "out of the loop."  Interesting they should say that, considering that on 9/11, while Cheney was in hiding and Bush was flying all over the place trying to decide on a safe place to land, the security decisions, including the grounding of all planes, were being made by RICHARD CLARKE.  I'd say that puts him in the loop.

CHEAP SHOTS AT THE COMPETITION

Bush and his cronies extrapolated John Kerry's unwillingness to back any more blank checks as "not supporting the troops."  Specifically, they said that Kerry is saying "no to body armor," referring to the soldiers without proper flak jackets and armored vehicles.  Why was this an issue?  Soldiers have been buying THEIR OWN BODY ARMOR.  Instead of asking why Kerry wouldn't back another multi-billion dollar bailout of this idiotic police action, the question truly should have been WHY WERE THEY SENT THERE WITHOUT BODY ARMOR IN THE FIRST PLACE?

IN FALL 2003, BUSH SAID WE WERE GOING TO SEND A MANNED MISSION TO MARS.  Why?  Because he was dumb enough to think that would distract people from the disaster the war was becoming.  And it did distract that portion of the population that was too stupid to understand this was just misdirection.  So what ever happened to that Mars stuff ?
 

IN EARLY 2004, BUSH INSERTED INTO HIS STATE OF THE UNION THE LONG LIST OF COUNTRIES IN HIS WAR COALITION.  The problem is, if somebody sends you five guys and a mule, they're not really in your coalition.  Most of the countries he listed have sent next to nothing.  The Spanish actually sent significant resources, but they've pulled them all out. Several others have also done so, or are planning to.

The fallout

By not finishing the job in Afghanistan, and instead draining military resources to enter Iraq, what's Bush done?

• Let Afghanistan turn back into a stronghold for the Taliban
• Let Afghanistan put out a record amount of opium. In 2006, it will supply 95% of the world's supply.
• Stretch the U.S. military so thin, that even his own commanders buck the party line and say
• they can't do their jobs.
• Piss off the entire world, including U.S. allies who can now say "told ya so" on the WMD that 
• were never found and never will be.
• Drive the U.S. debt even higher than it already was because of his spend-happy Congress and his
• inability to veto a single damn thing that means anything.
• Render the U.S. unable to respond to any other military threats anywhere else in the world.
• Sacrifice U.S. soldiers through inadequate equipment and inadequate numbers.
• Turned Iran into the region's superpower.

June 2006: Al-Zarqawi, the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq, is dead. Big frigging deal. Al Qaeda was the smallest of the murderous groups there. He was more important in name than in deed. He commanded maybe a few hundred. There are still tens of thousands of hardcore insurgents, with perhaps up to 200,000 in total opposing the USA with money and logistics.

December 2005: Bush has just presented his "plan" for victory in Iraq. All it is, is a rehash of stuff he said two years earlier, and no detail AT ALL. The American people still have no clue WHEN the USA will pull out, HOW MUCH MORE it will cost, HOW to measure "victory" or "success," or IF the Iraqis are any closer to standing up on their own.
 

The troops are spread too thin.  All the MP's talking about the Iraqi prisoner scandal all say (and there's lots of them) that they were completely understaffed.  At one notorious prison we set up (which was really just a huge area surrounded by coils of barbed wire), there were fewer than fifty soldiers guarding over 7000 prisoners.
 

BUSH HATES THE U.N., AND APPOINTED AS OUR U.N. AMBASSADOR A BULLY WHO HAS CLEARLY STATED HIS CONTEMPT FOR THE U.N., but one of his biggest alibis for going to war against Iraq was to enforce U.N. resolutions against Saddam Hussein. In fact, Bush has been leaning on the U.N. for all sorts of things, after first telling them to f___k themselves, and then saying they better reform or he won't pay our dues. Go figure.
 

IN 2000, BUSH SAID HE WOULD NEVER USE THE U.S. MILITARY FOR NATION-BUILDING.   But that's exactly what we're doing.  And it's PAINFUL.
 
 
 

DONALD RUMSFELD wanted a light, efficient force to attack Iraq.  And whaddaya know, that light, efficient force took Baghdad pretty quickly.  But it was too small to HOLD Iraq.  Then Army chief of staff General Eric Shinseki said back in MARCH 2003 that we'd need to keep several hundred thousand soldiers in Iraq after Saddam's fall to keep the peace.  His career was shot to hell by Paul Wolfowitz, Deputy Defense Secretary and head warhawk, who said that Shinseki's estimate was "way off the mark."  So who turned out to be right?

The complete idiot Wolfowitz also said "To assume that we're going to pay for it is just wrong."  Cheney also chimed in that Iraq was one of the world's biggest oil producers, i.e. the money would come out of that.  But guess what?  The USA is paying for the whole damn thing, and no money is coming out of oil revenues.
 
 
 

THE TEAM CAN'T GET THE STORY STRAIGHT

Paul Bremer, the administration's guy running Iraq for the first year, was quoted in a speech in early 2001 that the Bushies were not paying attention at all to terrorism.  When he was asked in spring 2004 about it, he says he was referring to the Clinton administration, which was already gone.  So he was talking in the present tense, but he really meant past tense.  Uh-huh.
 
 

PRISONER ABUSE  and  SOLDIER ABUSE

Bush has said nothing substantive while prisoners have been abused in Iraq and elsewhere, which not only hurts the USA's reputation, but is simply the wrong thing to do.

Meanwhile, Bush's budgets and his military cronies have conspired to mistreat the troops in a number of ways. Benefits for veterans have been chronically cut under Bush, and he even forced out a fellow Republican from an important committee when that guy complained about it.
 

Bush told a crowd during a speech that if bad guys were going to attack us, that they should "Bring it on!"  Well, W., they did just that.  They've continued to slaughter our boys and girls over there.  They brought it on.  It's astounding that a guy who went way out of his way to avoid his own term of service would actually invite the bad guys to attack us.  Because that's what they did.

October 2007: Almost 1200 members of the Minnesota National Guard were singled out to have their benefits screwed. The 1162 soldiers served a record 729 days in Iraq. TWO FREAKING YEARS. And in order to qualify for educational benefits, they needd to serve 730. Was this some kind of oops? No, that would be too bizarrely coincidental. It took the military only a month to amend their orders to send their asses over there for that horribly extended tour, but it will take the military over six months to correct the situation so these guys can get those benefits.

September 2007: The GOP and a few slug Dems (like Lieberman) managed to kill a bill (that Bush threatened to veto ANYWAY) which would have lengthened the time that troops get to be home with their families and away from combat. Troop morale stinks, and most experts agree that the prolonged Iraqi conflict and the extended tours of duty are breaking the military. But Bush and his buddies don't give a shit about the troops, only about his already-doomed legacy.

April 2007: Jessica Lynch, severely injured and captured by Iraqis early in the invasion, was propped up like a heroine with a completely false story put out by the military. She testified in front of Congress that most everything said about her during and after her ordeal (which she weathered bravely and is still recuperating from) was bullshit. She has always said great things about her comrades who were killed in the fight. But she's been honest about her own role. The military, of course, has not. On the same day, the family of Pat Tillman lamented the bullshit put out about their fallen family member, who was killed by friendly fire. Before his family was even informed of his death, the army went to great lengths to cover up the specific details, and they took weeks to tell the family that he had in fact been killed by his fellow soldiers by mistake. The military has taken the lead of this incompetent, lying administration in misrepresenting the facts when they don't match the story they want the American people to hear.

February/March 2007: Turns out that under Rumsfeld, the commander in charge of Walter Reed hospital, where so many wounded soldiers end up, had an entire building infested with roaches, rats, and mold. Plenty of our vets were stuck there while recuperating, some for very long periods. One brain-injured soldier who could barely navigate was handed a map of the complex and shoved out the door, where he promptly bounced off the walls, trying to find his place for therapy. The biggest problem turned out to be Bush's penchant for privatization. This came about because he only loves Big Business. The new defense chief removed the commander, but the idiot secretary of the army replaced him with the commander who'd been running the place just six months earlier, and as it turns out, the abuses have being going on for at least three years. So that guy was never approved, and the army secretary resigned. Holy crap, accountability from the Bush cabinet. That's never happened. But let's remember, Rumsfeld got a wonderful send-off.

March 30th 2007, Bush finally visits Walter Reed Army Medical Center, six weeks after reports of terrible conditions there. Retired Major General Paul Eaton commented, "I'm convinced he whould honor them [the soldiers] more if he would refrain from using soldiers as props in political theater .... I would be very happy to see him do the Walter Reed visit more like the commander and secondarily as an inspector general, rather than as a politician." Bobby Muller, president of Veterans for America, said, "Walter Reed is not a photo-op. Walter Reed is still broken. The DoD health care system is still broken .... Our troops need their commander in chief to start working harder for them." He also said that Bush wasn't seeing the worst areas of Walter Reed.
 

While running for the presidency, George W. Bush lied through his teeth by saying that the previous administration had cheated the troops.  In fact, under Clinton, many troops got raises.  Bush was looking for the overseas soldier votes.  He also promised lots more money for defense.  Well, no sooner did he get elected then he put Rumsfeld in charge of a review of what money was needed.  The Army got pretty testy, in fact, over the fact that they'd been promised some cash, and then it got all tied up in a "review" that was completely secret, with no available timeline for its completion.  Rumsfeld got hauled in front of a Senate committee to explain, and the most common answer to most questions was "I don't know."  The headline in the Chicago Tribune was "Rumsfeld's I-don't-knows irk Senate." 

After the fall of Saddam, Bush landed on the deck of an aircraft carrier in a jet, and emerged in a flight suit.  Cheering troops welcomed him as he appeared under a banner which read "Mission Accomplished."  Later, as more and more troops died, and it was clear the mission wasn't done yet, critics pointed out the irony of that banner.  White House officials actually blamed the troops on the carrier for printing the banner.  But the idea came from the White House in the first place.

Soldiers were sent to Iraq for a war we didn't need to fight. Our brave young men have died (500+ as of February 2004) to get rid of a powerless dictator.  Sure, he wasa bad guy.  There are worse ones.  But those worse ones don't live in the middle of oil country, and Bush-Cheney, the two-headed budget-busting monster, is all about OIL.

Soldiers were sent to Iraq without armored vehicles in many cases.   The Humvees are easily pierced by bullets and shells.  This accounts for the many deaths via roadside bombs. 

Soldiers were sent with flak jackets that didn't come with ceramic plates that stop bullets.  Many soldiers have used their own money to buy these plates.  Because Kerry didn't support the $87 billion blan kcheck spending for Iraq, a GOP TV ad said Kerry didn't support "body armor for the troops."  Hey, why were they sent there without it in the first place?  The problem wasn't entirely corrected until a year and a half after the war started. January 2006, it's been nearly three years since the war started, and a new Pentagon study (which they tried to keep secret) reveals that 80% of the soldiers who died from abdominal wounds as a result of roadside bombs could have been saved, if the proper body armor had been given out.  NO SHIT !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
 

Many soldiers have been fined for losing their body armor. How did they lose it? They woke up in emergency rooms to find out their body armor had been cut off, so doctors could reach their wounds. 

Many soldiers have been docked or even sued to recover portions of their recruiting bonuses, because they left the military early. Why did they leave early? Because of catastrophic combat wounds.

Talented soldiers have been cut loose unnecessarily, while crappy candidates are now welcome. There's no evidence that gays in the military have ever caused problems simply by being gay. But based on the vague possibility that they MIGHT, a whole bunch of them, even in hard to replace spots, have been dumped. More than 11000 gays and lesbians have been dropped because of "don't ask don't tell," including eight percent of them considered to hold "critical occupations," and this includes HUNDREDS who spoke necessary foreign languages, such as those spoken in the Middle East. In the meantime, the military has lowered its recruiting standards to fill their quotas. This has meant allowing more and more felons to enter the ranks. Oh yeah, that's a good trade-off.

Successful weapons systems are ignored if they don't enrich American contractors. A very highly successful anti-RPG system from Israel, called Trophy, is great at defending troops against cheap, deadly RPG rockets. But the U.S. military won't use it, because they're developing their own system, and are afraid that their program will get killed off if the Israeli version turns out to be effective. The U.S. army won't have their own version in the field until at least 2011. In the meantime, they will deploy NOTHING. It's all about politics, and not about the troops. Officially, the story from the Pentagon is that they can't vouch for the Trophy system. But other Pentagon insiders say it's all about who knows who, including the guys at Raytheon, who will likely develop the army's version.

There was a plan to have soldiers wounded in Iraq pay for their own meals once they were moved back to U.S. hospitals.  But once the papers got hold of that one, it was put aside.
 

Bush has shit all over veterans

Healthcare for veterans and for the National Guard has been cut back. Good timing, George Jr.  In fact, in January 2003, just before the war, Bush said "I want to make sure that our soldiers have the best posible pay."  Then a couple of months later, he rolled back danger pay, and cut the family separation allowance by 65%.

January 2004, the same day Bush visited a vet hospital and praised veterans, 164000 veterans lost their health benefits.

Just before Memorial Day, the White House announced massive cuts for vets' healthcare by 2006.  It will cut these benefits by over $900 million.

Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ) was stripped of his chairmanship of the Veterans Affairs Committee after he expressed his concern that the White House was taking away healthcare benefits for veterans. Smith says it "all came down to the fact I wanted to spend too much on veterans......I am not a yes man. I am a loyal Republican who believes in fighting for good public policy and that is the best way to show loyalty."

Yeah, but that's the problem. Bush has no loyalty.

For another dose of info on how Bush, while skipping his own military obligations, screwed the troops, check out http://www.awolbush.com.