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Who's Really Morally and Intellectually Challenged?

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  • Who's Really Morally and Intellectually Challenged?

    Who's Really Morally and Intellectually Challenged?
    Saturday, September 2, 2006 by the _Miami Herald_
    (http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news /opinion) (Florida)

    by Joseph L. Galloway

    Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld
    took to the road this week trying to sell the message that Iraq is
    part of the waron terrorism and that anyone who thinks differently is
    morally or intellectually challenged.

    With the president himself batting clean-up on Thursday, the dynamic
    duo and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice made the rounds of the
    conventions of the biggest national veterans' organizations -- the
    Veterans of Foreign Wars in Reno, Nev., and the American Legion in
    Salt Lake City -- peddling the Bush administration's beleaguered line
    of bull to guaranteed friendly audiences.

    Rumsfeld's message to the American Legion was that critics of the Bush
    administration's policies on Iraq and terrorism were guilty of ``moral
    or intellectual confusion about what is right or wrong.''

    Cheney's sound bites out of the Reno gathering of the VFW included
    assertions that the federal-court ruling that warrantless wiretapping
    was unconstitutional was ''dead wrong.'' That ''sound policies by the
    president'' have prevented any more terrorist attacks on the United
    States since 9/11 and that the terrorists, whom he declared ''in the
    last throes'' last year, are now ``weakened and fractured, yet still
    lethal.''

    These statements reflect the administration's persistent moral or
    intellectual confusion about what is and isn't true. From Rumsfeld,
    Cheney and Bush, we hear how well things are going in Iraq, under new
    democratic local management.

    - In fact, Iraqis are dying by the thousands every month,
    Iranian-backed Shiite Muslim militias are growing stronger, ordinary
    Iraqis are lining upfor passports to flee a civil war that the
    administration won't admit is happening and the American death toll is
    rising above 2,600.

    - In fact, we are bogged down in a no-win, no-way-out war in part
    because our military commanders have been browbeaten into fighting it
    on the cheap, with perhaps half the number of troops they needed to
    get a grip on a fractious people before the place dissolved into
    anarchy, sectarian bloodshed and revenge-taking.

    Rumsfeld, Cheney and Bush claim that their invasion of Iraq has made
    us safer.

    - In fact, Hezbollah has survived an ill-conceived and
    U.S.-backedIsraeli campaign in Lebanon, Iran is defiantly pursuing
    nuclear weapons, the Taliban and al Qaeda are on the march in
    Afghanistan and terrorist cells keep popping up in Western Europe and
    elsewhere.

    We can't win in Iraq with the current U.S. force, strategy and
    tactics, even using the White House's fluid definition of victory,
    which currently is that we'll somehow train and equip Iraqi soldiers
    and police who will take control of the country and allow us to begin
    bringing our soldiers home.

    Those Iraqi soldiers who are taking over security in broad stretches
    of the country ran out of ammunition this week in a fierce gun battle
    with militiamen and were executed by their captors. Other Iraqi units
    refused orders to deploy to Baghdad in the wake of the debacle.

    So what's the administration to do to divert the attention of
    Americans on the eve of a mid-term congressional election and looking
    hard at the presidential sweepstakes in 2008? If I were betting on a
    likely next move, I'd put some money on a really big ''wag the dog''
    scenario. I'd suggest that some people high in government are going to
    start cooking the intelligence on Iran, just as they cooked the
    intelligence on Saddam Hussein's ties to al Qaeda, chemical and
    biological weapons and ''re constituted'' nuclear program, none of
    which actually existed.

    Our leaders know that the U.N. Security Council, where Russia and
    China are sure to veto actions against their business partner Iran,
    will never approve tough sanctions on Iran. If they can squeeze
    U.S. analysts hard enough or have some Iranian exiles (sound
    familiar?) cook up dubious intelligence about an Iranian
    nuclear-weapons program, they might have an excuse for a preemptive
    attack on Iran's nuclear facilities.

    Have the neoconservatives learned nothing from Iraq, Afghanistan and
    Lebanon? Yes, I fear that it could be so. If we go down that road,
    gasoline is going to cost more than Chanel perfume by the gallon, the
    entire Middle East will go up in flames and the conflagration will
    wipe out our moderate Arab friends. We will end up in even deeper
    kimchi than we are already in.

    Joseph L. Galloway is former senior military correspondent for Knight
    Ridder Newspapers and co-author of the national best-seller "_We Were
    Soldiers Once ... and Young_
    (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/067 9411585/commondreams-20/ref=3Dnosim)
    ."
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