Commander In Chief

[Guest guest]

For Friday, October 29, 2004

 

Commander In Chief

 

George Bush, our present commander in chief who has never seen combat,

believes that combat-veteran John Kerry is unfit to be commander in

chief. Well, let's look at Mad George's record.

 

In August 2001, he was warned that al-Qaida wanted to attack the

United States in our own territory. He did nothing. His claim that he

is excused since he did not know the time or place or manner of attack

is bull. He should have alerted the airports and airlines, as well as

the immigration people, to tighten up and keep a sharp watch. Instead,

he thought about Iraq.

 

Pursuing his obsession with Iraq, he disdained all the warnings from

people who know the area. He did indeed deliberately mislead the

American people in regard to weapons of mass destruction. When you

censor all the caveats and disagreements that were present in the

intelligence briefings and instead state as undeniable facts that not

only were there weapons but we knew exactly where they were, then you

are misleading people. You are misleading people when you cleverly

juxtapose talk about Saddam Hussein with the attack on Sept. 11. He

had nothing to do with that, and the Bush administration knew it.

 

So, he takes us to war anyway, without waiting for the U.N. inspectors

to complete their work. That's why he lost the support of France,

Germany and Russia. Bush's position was absurd. He gets a U.N.

resolution demanding inspections. Iraq agrees. Inspectors start their

work. Then, Mad George says, " Stop, I want to go to war. "

 

So, he takes us to war, but how well did this commander in chief

perform? Damned poorly. He disregarded advice that we needed more

troops. He was confident, according to his big Christian buddy Pat

Robertson, that the United States would suffer no casualties. They now

stand at 1,103 dead and 8,000 wounded.

 

When the American forces reached Baghdad, they didn't know what to do.

They had to stand around and watch an orgy of looting. No plans for

the aftermath had been made. Then Bush put in an occupation czar, Paul

Bremer, who committed blunder after blunder. He disbanded the Iraqi

army; he disbanded the police force; he fired all the Baathists who

knew how to run the government; he holed up inside the Green Zone, a

heavily fortified former Saddam palace, and couldn't go out without a

heavy guard.

 

So there's Bremer, stuck with the results of his commander in chief's

bad decisions. He doesn't have enough U.S. troops to provide security,

much less secure Iraq's borders. He has fired and alienated all the

Iraqis who could have helped. Then the Central Command's top brass

start committing their own blunders.

 

They publicly announced that we were going to go into Fallujah and

take out the " terrorists. " After several days of heavy fighting, we

stopped and backed off. We publicly boasted that we would arrest or

kill the firebrand cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. Well, Muqtada al-Sadr is

still alive and free. In a combat situation, when you say you are

going to do something and then fail to do it, you send a message to

the enemy that you are weak. A competent commander in chief would

never do that.

 

Then, because of further incompetence of the top brass, we have the

scandal of Abu Ghraib prison. The damage this has done to America's

image in the Muslim world is incalculable.

 

The big contractors with their no-bid contracts were too busy raping

the American taxpayers to rebuild the electricity, water and sewer

systems that we had destroyed. To this day, those systems are not

fully functional.

 

Trying to use front-line forces whose training is destruction and

killing as police units resulted in the alienation of the Iraqi

people. Iraqi civilian deaths, that famous " collateral damage, " are

now estimated between 13,000 and 15,000 human beings, many of them

women and children. In that culture, every death requires vengeance.

 

Meanwhile, our incompetent commander in chief opposed the creation of

the Homeland Security Department, opposed the creation of the 9/11

Commission, refused to testify under formal conditions and failed to

hold a single human being responsible for anything. At the present

time, a CIA inspector general's report is being withheld, presumably

until after the election.

 

If George Bush is your idea of a competent commander in chief, then

God help America.

 

© 2004 by King Features Syndicate, Inc.