To our self-proclaimed "War President"

Robert Vincent Gladd, my beloved and patriotic (life-long Republican) father, once wore a real flight suit, and, now approaching the age of 90, he suffers to this very day from the physical and psychic after-effects of the leg he left behind in Europe during World War II while serving as an Army Air Corps aviator. One of my uncles came ashore in France off a landing craft during D-Day. Another I would never get to meet disappeared MIA, never to be found, somewhere over the skies of Asia. For me, the film “Saving Private Ryan” was not entertainment. It was a jolting, grisly reminder of the horrific sacrifices endured by many of those who serve in uniform during wartime.

Given that you have never personally faced a bullet nor a bayonet nor a bombardment — nor indeed any sort of hardship, in light of what we know of your “someone-with-juice-always-to-the rescue” life, I find your bellicose, arrogant, and narcissistic statements such as “bring ’em on” and “I’ve gone to war; I’ve raised twins; given a choice I’d rather go to war” [Houston Chronicle, 1/27/02] to constitute the absolute pinnacle of insult to the sacrifices made by millions of actual courageous warriors who gave so much in defense of the nation you seem so eager to sell out to the highest bidder, and whose Constitution you and your administration seem so bent on soiling in pursuit of the oligopoly so amenable to the ends of your self-interested, well-heeled crony contributors.

During your January 2003 State of the Union Address, with all the faux-gravitas you could muster, you ominously inveighed against the putative hundreds of tons, the tens of thousands of warheads and canisters of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction incontrovertibly poised on a hair-trigger toward our nation. The “gravest threat,” in your exact words. One year later, during your 2004 Address, your dismissive rhetoric decayed tragicomically in shake-’n-bake fashion to that of (again in your exact words) alleged “evidence of weapons of mass destruction-related program activities.”

Your own hand-picked WMD gumshoe, David Kay, has now publicly concluded that Hussein’s Iraq in fact had no WMD of any sort of quantity or consequence.

Only two possible rational conclusions obtain: [1] you and your subordinates are utterly incompetent to lead this nation, or [2] you lied. The upshot of either is comprised of the deaths and maimings of untold thousands and the enervation of a true and just war against terrorists. Osama remains at large—and curiously absent from your my-way-or-the-highway scolding preachments of late.

Your smug, phony Top Gun “Mission Accomplished” photo-op preening atop a carrier deck notwithstanding, you are a disgrace to this nation. And most recently, your use of September 11th World Trade Center imagery, while predictable, provides even more glaring proof of the extent of your brazen and shameless political opportunism.

Short of impeachment and indictments, I wish for you and your duplicitous and venal cabal an early aggregate retirement at year’s end.

Naomi Klein's Harpers Magazine article "Baghdad Year Zero" provides a clear, accurate, and comprehensive recounting of just how we created the dangerous mess we now see on the ground in Iraq. Her article squares utterly with myriad credible public information sources (including Paul Bremer's CPA [Coalition Provisional Authority] Orders, which she cites. http://www.cpa-iraq.org/regulations/).
Baghdad Year Zero

Next: In a Salon.com piece, Stephen Holmes makes a detailed and persuasive case against Bush and those driving his foreign policy.
The Case Against Bush

Finally, the esteemed mainstream journalist James Fallows, writing in The Atlantic Monthly, gives us a thorough and depressing risk/cost-benefit analysis of the myriad strategic and tactical failures of the ideologically mesmerized Bushies post-9/11.
Bush's Lost Year

Read these closely. There's TONS more, but these are plenty. Reflect in particular on the Klein, Holmes, and Fallows articles in mutual context. This administration is breathtakingly dishonest and incompetent. They are stoking dangerous geopolitical fires that are sure to rage angrily for years and cause MORE, not less, terror activity. And, given Bush's M.O. of long habit, he will, if re-"elected," likely tire of the irritating Iraq of his creation and once again leave the mess for others to deal with.

UPDATE: The Political War (9-27): "...In refusing to look at Iraq honestly, President Bush has made defeat there more likely. This failing is only the most important repetition of a recurring theme in the war against radical Islam: the distance between Bush’s soaring, often inspiring language and the insufficiency of his actions..." - George Packer, in The New Yorker.

It is argued that Bush "had no plan" for "postwar" Iraq. That could not be more wrong. (Read the above Naomi Klein article "Baghdad Year Zero.")

The "plan" was simple, an 11-Step Program (appropriately for GW, one step shy of an AA regimen):

[1] Shock & Awe;
[2] Bad Guys pee their aggregate britches and vanish "at the first whiff of gunpowder" (the 'cakewalk' thing);
[3] Us Noble Liberators are greeted with showers of flowers;
[4] Secure the Oil Ministry;
[5] Hang out the "Iraq-is-Now-Open-For-Business" sign (as Paul Bremer in fact did. Again, see Klein's article);
[6] Install Ahmad Chalabi -- the Iraqi Andrew Fastow -- as Prime Minister;
[7] Oil gushes forth, reconstruction is "cost-free";
[8] We get our strategic Big Footprint smack in the middle of the region;
[9] All regional Hostiles are duly cowed into compliance before the Blinding Majesty of Bushdom;
[10] PNAC opening salvo complete;
[11] On to Damascus and Tehran and beyond.

Simple. elegant. "Light and Mobile." It just didn't work. They NEVER considered that it might not, so in the thrall of their own fevered visions of Magnificence were they.

"They hate us for our freedoms." - President Bush
Bullshit. THIS (above) is why they increasingly hate us in Iraq. - BobbyG