Not one of my favorites – being dead wrong. None of us care for it very much. It’s always been interesting to me that I don’t have such lofty expectations of others. For them, "to err is human" works for me. All that I care about really is that when someone’s wrong, they are able to see it and change the course of things based on their mistake. When it’s me, at least in my youth, it was hard to admit and make those corrections. Somewhere along the way, it got easier. I’d like to say that I welcome finding out I was wrong, so I can have a mid-course correction. Sometimes, I can do that. More usually, I can see my mistake and correct my course, but my self esteem takes a pretty big hit for a while.
When I look at George Bush and his Administration, I see a bunch of people who made a colossal error – waging war on Iraq. They had this notion when they came into power that we needed to show some muscle in the Middle East, and had already picked Iraq out as the target. When 911 came along, they saw their chance. I don’t know if they really thought Hussein had Weapons of Mass Destruction [in spite of no evidence that he did] or if they knew he didn’t but trumped up the reason. It doesn’t matter any more, they were dead wrong. What’s more, they were wrong to destabilize Iraq no matter what their wrong reason for going there. I think that I could’ve lived with that, if they hadn’t compounded that wrong "staying the course" and multiplying their error a jillion fold. We’d have been a damn sight better off to say "Whoops!" and move our troops to Afghanistan. We’d be better off to do that today, or tomorrow, or yesterday.
Being wrong’s one thing. Being stubbornly wrong is worse. Screwing up the Constitution in order to stay wrong is treason…
on losing
I hated losing the 2004 election. Hated it. But, you know, I didn’t do anything before it happened. I didn’t really even know much, just that Bush was a fool for going into Iraq and that he was an incompetent elitist. So, I didn’t have any real right to complain. These last two years, I’ve learned a lot. I’ve ranted about it on this blog and other places. I’ve told anyone who would listen. I’ve made my financial and other contributions to political campaigns. There’s not much an old retired guy in the mountains can do, but I’ve done whatever it I can do. If we lose in a couple of weeks. I’ll be sad. But I won’t feel like I personally didn’t try, and I’ll do my best to live with the losing…
Bush has lost in Iraq. Not the War we went to fight – the Baathist Party, Hussein. That was a walk in the park. But he’s lost the War that was there to be fought – the naive notion that unseating Hussein would produce an Iraq that was a Democracy on our team. He has done the opposite. So he’s lost. Our strategy now? How to lose as gracefully and humanely as possible, and we’re not doing that. We’re hiding from the wrong that took us there, the wrong that kept us there, and the lost that should’ve been seen all along – that was always in the cards. We can’t do anything until George Bush and Dick Cheney are out of the drivers’ seats, so more rational minds can be brought to bear on the problem – the problem of losing.
These people can’t say either "We were wrong" or "We lost." They just keep compounding their error rather than acknowledging it. And it’s gone on now for years. No one really knew what to do after 9/11. I expect we’d have let them off the hook if they could have made a correction. Maybe not totally, because they lied. But now they’re just digging a deeper and deeper hole, and when it’s over and beginning to be history, it will be reviewed in scathing terms. And most of what will be looked on so negatively will be their inability to change direction in the face of overwhelming evidence, and overwhelming tragedy…
Mary, from the Left Coaster, points to a suggestion by former C.I.A. Agent, Larry Johnson, on how to proceed. Pretty interesting…
We have all lost in Iraq, ‘cept KBR et al. It’s WAY worse then any of us can glean from beneath our concrete made-in-the-USA-SLAB of neocon propaganda.
http://www.tbrnews.org/index.htm Look here.
Another Disastrous Coverup Forward Base Falcon Disaster by Brian Harring
…”evening of October 10, 2006 …Over 300 American troops, including U.S. Army and Marines, CIA agents and U.S. translators were casualties and there also were 165 seriously injured requiring major medical attention and 39 suffering lesser injuries 122 members of the Iraqi armed forces were killed and 90 seriously injured members of same, were also evacuated to the U.S. military hospital at al-Habbaniyah located some 70km west of Baghdad.
Satellite pictures and aerial photographs from neutral sources showed that Camp Falcon suffered major structural damage and almost all the U.S. military’s supply of small arms ammunition, artillery and rocket rounds, tons of fuel, six Apache helicopters, an uncounted but large number of soft-skinned vehicles such as Humvees and supply trucks were damaged or totally destroyed. Foreign press observers noted “an endless parade†of military vehicle recovery units dragging burnt-out heavy tanks and armored personnel carriers to another base outside Baghdad.
…Although official U.S. DoD statements indicated that there were no deaths; that only a hundred men were inside the base guarding billions of dollars of vital military equipment and that there were “only two minor injuries to personnel,†passes belief and certainly reality is more painful than propaganda.
Not only has the U.S. military machine lost much of its armor and transport, and its entire reserves of ammunition and special fuel, but the casualty list for only the first day is over 300.. ”
Overwhelming is right.
Interesting ‘revelation’ in the Kelly case: http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=20061020&articleId=3549