hmmm…

Posted on Monday 27 August 2007

As long as Bush and Cheney remain in power, we’re still in harm’s way. They are blocked from doing much new damage, but they have enough power to prolong the War, and, of course, our main fear is that they’ll attack Iran. I don’t know what the right thing to do about Iran is. But I do know that it’s wrong for Bush and/or Cheney to decide.

This time last year [August 2006], my post was about Dick Cheney’s speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars. He said:

"Some in our own country claim retreat from Iraq would satisfy the appetite of the terrorists and get them to leave us alone," Cheney told a Veterans of Foreign Wars convention in Reno, Nevada. "A precipitous withdrawal from Iraq would be … a ruinous blow to the future security of the United States."
 
"They overlook a fundamental fact. We were not in Iraq on Sept. 11, 2001, but the terrorists hit us anyway," he said, in a reference to the hijacked plane attacks that killed almost 3,000 people.
Cheney said terrorists wanted to arm themselves with chemical, biological and even nuclear weapons, "to destroy Israel, to intimidate all Western countries and to cause mass death in the United States."
"Some might look at these ambitions and wave them off as extreme and mad," he said. "Well, these ambitions are extreme and they are mad. They are also real and we must not wave them off, we must take them seriously."
Cheney said he welcomed the vigorous debate over Iraq but added: "There is a difference between healthy debate and self-defeating pessimism. We have only two options on Iraq – victory or defeat – and this nation will not pursue a policy of retreat."
So now it’s a year later. There are 1000 more dead American Soldiers. Thousands of dead Iraqis. Bush and Cheney are making the same speeches to the VFW. It’s no different now. There are no palpable signs that it will be different this time next year. The only reason we’re in Iraq is that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney want us to be there for whatever reason. That’s not a good enough reason for a war.

Today, it occurred to me that if Congress were to cut off funding for this war, Bush and Cheney both might resign. I think what put that possibility in my mind was thinking about Gonzales and Rove resigning – as a harbinger of something to come. I would not be surprised to see that happen. They don’t really care about the country anyway. They care about getting their way. And I could hear them blasting Congress as they sailed into the sunset. They are very destructive people…

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