I suppose some of this is subjective but where there's smoke...

A tragicomedy of errors

In an excerpt from his new book, The Fall of the House of Bush, author Craig Unger details how Bush is, well, screwing up the world

By: CRAIG UNGER

It was not until after George W. Bush and Dick Cheney were narrowly re-elected that many Americans began to realize that the Iraq War represented a dangerous moment in American history, a turning point both in terms of America’s place on the global chessboard and, domestically, in terms of its fate as a constitutional democracy. Gradually, the horrors of the war, its related scandals, and its ramifications began to reveal themselves.

On November 7, 2004, five days after the election, it was reported that thousands of surface-to-air missiles that had once been under Saddam’s control were unaccounted for because the US-led force had not secured all the weapons depots in Iraq. The next day, US-led forces moved in to clear out Fallujah, a stronghold for Sunni insurgents, launching a ferocious 10-day battle that killed at least 1000 insurgents and left 54 Americans dead and more than 400 seriously wounded. Colonel Gary Brandl led his troops into battle with words evocative of a Holy War. “The enemy has got a face,” he said. “He’s called Satan. He’s in Fallujah and we’re going to destroy him.”

During the assault, a marine deliberately shot and killed an unarmed Iraqi civilian in a mosque, and the videotaped incident was televised across the world. In response, violence raged across Iraq. On November 9, militants kidnapped three members of interim prime minister Ayad Allawi’s family. A few days later, in the north, saboteurs set fire to four oil wells northwest of Kirkuk. Astoundingly, despite having the second largest oil reserves in the world, Iraq was forced to import oil from nearby Kuwait because of lack of refining capacity and hundreds of terrorist attacks on its facilities.

By now, repercussions from the war were also being felt throughout the entire Middle East. Iraqi authorities had already captured Saudis crossing the Saudi border into Iraq to fight the United States. In response to Fallujah, 26 prominent Saudi religious scholars urged their followers to support “jihad” against US-led forces. Militant Islamists from America’s oil-rich ally had now taken up arms against the United States.

Paradoxically, even though their policy failures were finally evident, the neocons had become empowered as never before. Just before the election, Bush had quietly dismissed Brent Scowcroft as chairman of PFIAB [the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board] — without even bothering to speak to him personally. Cheney and Bush had both known that the phenomenally popular Colin Powell was crucial to their re-election chances. But now he, too, was expendable. On November 10, eight days after the election, Powell got the phone call from White House chief of staff Andy Card. He was out.

Doing everything possible to put a good face on his resignation, Powell told reporters at a November 15 press briefing that “it has always been my intention that I would serve one term,” and that he and Bush “came to a mutual agreement that it would be appropriate to leave at this time.” But Frank Carlucci, a former secretary of defense himself during the Reagan administration, who was close to both Powell and Cheney, and who continued to think highly of Cheney, was more forthright. “Colin has been used,” he said.

Bush and Cheney reshuffled the cabinet, strengthening the neocon hand. Condoleezza Rice replaced Powell. Much to Scowcroft’s dismay, she had proven to be less a voice for the realists than an enabler and repeater of others’ formulations, in effect a neocon fellow traveler. Her deputy, Stephen Hadley, a Cheney ally, in turn took her old job as national security adviser. As for intelligence, Porter J. Goss, a former Republican congressman from Florida, who had become the new CIA director before the election, issued a memo to CIA employees that instantly confirmed his reputation as an administration loyalist: “As agency employees we do not identify with, support or champion opposition to the administration or its policies.” The memo added that their job was “to support the administration and its policies in our work.”

With Rice, Hadley, and Goss in key positions, Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld had consolidated control over national security to an unprecedented degree. The notion that America’s $40 billion intelligence apparatus would speak truth to power had become a pipe dream. State Department veterans desperately fantasized that Scowcroft, former Secretary of State James Baker, or even Bush 41 himself would somehow soon ride to the rescue.

Purple fingers, blue in the face
Meanwhile, in both Iraq and Washington, the dream of spreading democracy throughout the Middle East continued to be mocked by the brutal realities of war. On January 30, 2005, 58 percent of the Iraqi electorate defied threats of violence to vote in the first elections since Saddam’s ouster. After reaching the polls, Iraqis proudly displayed their ink-dipped purple fingers as indications that they had voted. In Washington, Republican congressmen flaunted purple fingers as a sign of solidarity with Bush and pride at how the United States had brought democracy to Iraq. “Giving Terrorism the Purple Finger,” read a headline. “Purple finger” cocktails were concocted, consisting of grenadine, cassis, black currants, and vodka.

After nearly two years of bombings, kidnappings, and assassinations in Iraq, at last the White House had a concrete achievement to celebrate — one that no one could deny. In his 2005 State of the Union address on February 2, President Bush proudly saluted the Iraqi voters and the American soldiers who had made the election possible, introducing as his special guest Iraqi human-rights advocate Safia Taleb al-Suhail: “Eleven years ago, Safia’s father was assassinated by Saddam’s intelligence service. Three days ago in Baghdad, Safia was finally able to vote for the leaders of her country — and we are honored that she is with us tonight.” At last, Bush said, Iraq had turned the corner.

The speech also showed that Bush had been reading from the neocon handbook — he proclaimed to the world that his administration’s goal was the promotion of “democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.”

“This is real neoconservatism,” Robert Kagan, a leading neocon, told the Los Angeles Times. “It would be hard to express it more clearly. If people were expecting Bush to rein in his ambitions and enthusiasms after the first term, they are discovering that they were wrong.”

Dimitri Simes, president of the Nixon Center, a conservative think tank that hewed more closely to realist policies, had a different point of view. “If Bush means it literally, then it means we have an extremist in the White House,” he said. “I hope and pray that he didn’t mean it.”

To anyone who believed in democracy, the sight of Iraqis voting was potentially inspiring. But the political reality on the ground was starkly different. Yes, Shi’ites flocked to the polls in huge numbers. But the Sunnis, alienated by America’s de-Ba’athification policies, which removed members of the largely Sunni Ba’athist regime from government, angry because they had lost jobs and security when the United States disbanded the police and the military, and enraged by the American assault on Sunni mosques in Fallujah, boycotted the election in droves. Even before the elections were held, Brent Scowcroft had warned that voting had “great potential for deepening the conflict” in Iraq by exacerbating the divisions between Shi’ite and Sunni Muslims, and that it might lead to a civil war. As the Bush White House basked in the glory of having shown the world it could create a new democracy in the Middle East, it soon became clear that Scowcroft had been prescient.

The Shi’ites took office, but the Sunni insurgency went after new targets. US forces had protected its own bases, including the Green Zone, but not the general population in Baghdad or any of the major cities. “When we did not secure the population,” General Jack Keane told PBS’s Frontline, “the enemy realized that the population was fair game. . . . All through ’05 they exploited it. They began to kill people, take them on. . . . In ever-increasing numbers they began to kill more and more of the Iraqis. . . . They were exposed.”

Immediately after the election, the Sunnis struck back with a vengeance. On February 3, bombs killed at least 20 people in Baghdad; insurgents stopped a minibus near Kirkuk and gunned down 12 of its occupants; gunmen ambushed and killed two Iraqi contractors near Baghdad; others overran a police station in the town of Samawah — not to mention innumerable assassination attempts, car bombs, and the like. On February 17, a string of attacks killed at least 36 people, mostly Shi’ites. The next day, at least eight suicide bombings and other attacks targeted Shi’ite worshippers observing the religious festival of Ashura. By the end of the month, suicide bombers targeted crowded marketplaces near Baghdad, killing as many as 115 people with one bomb.

Meanwhile, Osama bin Laden had ordered his supporters to attack Iraqi oil facilities — which they had begun to do with considerable success. Terrorists had begun an all-out war against the country’s oil facilities, costing it billions in lost revenue.

Having put so much stock in the Iraqi elections, the Bush administration now had another problem. Like it or not, the administration was wedded to a Shi’ite government led by Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari of the Islamic Dawa Party, one of two major Shia parties in the ruling coalition, the United Iraqi Alliance. A militant Shi’ite Islamic group that had supported the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran and that had received support from the Iranian government during the Iran-Iraq War, the Dawa Party had moved its headquarters to Tehran in 1979. There, according to Juan Cole, professor of Middle Eastern history at the University of Michigan, it “spun off a shadowy set of special-ops units generically called ‘Islamic Jihad,’ which operated in places like Kuwait and Lebanon.” The party, Cole wrote, was also “at the nexus of splinter groups that later, in 1982, began to coalesce into Hezbollah.” Moreover, the party had been founded by Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr, the uncle of Moqtada al-Sadr, the powerful Shi’ite leader of the Mahdi Army, which has been tied to ethnic cleansing of Sunnis.

One by one the contradictions behind America’s Middle East policies emerged — and with them, the enormity of its catastrophic blunder. Gradually America’s real agenda was coming to light — not its stated agenda to rid Iraq of WMDs, which had been nonexistent, not regime change, which had already been accomplished, but the neoconservative dream of “democratizing” the region by installing pro-West, pro-Israeli governments, led by the likes of Ahmed Chalabi, in oil-rich Middle East states.

Now that Chalabi had been eliminated as a potential leader amid accusations that he had been secretly working for Iran, and the Sunnis had opted out of the elections entirely, the United States, by default, was backing a democratically elected government that maintained close ties to Iran and was linked to Shi’ite leaders whose powerful Shi’ite militias were battling the Sunnis.

Professing to train Iraqi soldiers to “stand up,” so Americans could “stand down,” the United States was in fact training soldiers who were loyal to the Shi’ite cause, rather than to any concept of Western democracy. “[T]hey weren’t really Iraqi security forces,” explained journalist and author Nir Rosen. “They were loyal primarily to Moqtada al-Sadr, to Abdul Aziz al Hakim [the Shia leader of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq], but not to the Iraqi state and not to anybody in the Green Zone.” As shown in a PBS Frontline documentary, Gangs of Iraq, Iraqi soldiers, even when accompanied by Americans who were training them, intentionally kept the Americans away from large weapons caches that could be used against the Sunnis. Unwittingly, America was spending billions of dollars to fuel a Sunni-Shi’ite civil war.

Even worse, in the larger context of the region, by deposing Saddam and supporting the Iran-leaning Shi’ites, the United States had inadvertently empowered Iran, its biggest foe in the Middle East. And Iran’s ascendancy posed problems for Israel and Saudi Arabia as well. Potentially, the Sunni-Shi’ite conflict could spread throughout the entire region.

By 2005, for tens of millions of Americans, it was increasingly impossible to ignore the realities of what was happening in Iraq — the absence of WMDs, the escalating sectarian violence, the vast expenditures of blood and treasure in pursuit of a mission that was unclear at best, constantly changing, and had never been accomplished at all. Polarizing the nation more profoundly than at any time since the Vietnam era, the war had become a litmus-test issue that defined and linked whole sets of belief systems — red state America versus blue; evangelical Christians, anti-abortion activists, NASCAR dads, and other denizens of the Bible Belt versus the secular, post-Enlightenment America that has long been on the cutting edge of science and the embodiment of modernism. Those who questioned US policies in the Middle East, as their foes saw it, were cut-and-run traitors who aided and abetted the enemy. On the other side were Neanderthals waging a holy war in the Middle East, shredding the Constitution, destroying civil liberties, rolling back not just the New Deal but the Enlightenment, all in the name of God.

Hate filled the air, at times evoking the specter of McCarthyism, the hate and fear mongering of Father Coughlin, and even the assault against reason undertaken by the Puritans. Right-wing pundit Ann Coulter expressed her regret that Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh “did not go to the New York Times building.” Americans who did not vote for Bush, she said, were “traitors,” her critics, members of the “Treason Lobby.” To Rush Limbaugh, Democrats “had aligned themselves with the enemy” and were “PR spokespeople for Al Qaeda.” To Fox News host Bill O’Reilly, the American Civil Liberties Union were “terrorists” who were almost as dangerous “as Al-Qaeda.” Thanks to the neocons and religious conservatives, the radical right was driving America as never before.

With the Republicans still in control of Congress, Bush’s critics vested their few remaining hopes for retribution in Patrick Fitzgerald, a newly appointed federal prosecutor who had recently taken charge of the Valerie Plame Wilson–CIA leak investigation. But in many respects, it seemed as if the nation had regressed to the era of the Scopes Monkey Trial. Tens of millions of people in the only country that had put a man on the moon, that had unraveled the human genome, now questioned whether evolution was real. A Creation Museum was under construction near Cincinnati, Ohio, to demonstrate that it wasn’t. Tourists to the Grand Canyon were treated to creationist tours assuring them that geologists had been wrong, and that one of America’s greatest wonders had not been formed slowly over millions of years, but was God’s creation dating “to the early part of Noah’s flood.” The Kansas State Board of Education held hearings about redefining the word “science” to remove bias toward “naturalistic” (nontheistic) belief systems. Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum — who believed that states should be able to arrest gay lovers in the privacy of their bedrooms — backed an amendment to allow the teaching of intelligent design as an alternative theory to evolution.

The Bush administration and the religious right declared war on science. Slogans that had once been bumper stickers — JUST A THEORY — became government policy: global warming is a hoax; condoms don’t work; intelligent design is legitimate science. The administration’s initiative to fund AIDS programs in Africa was hailed by the press, but information about the benefits of condoms was removed from government Web sites. The global-warming section of the Environmental Protection Agency was dropped entirely. In deference to the Christian Right, morning-after contraceptive sales were banned, even after having been approved by the Food and Drug Administration. According to Howard Dean, the former Vermont governor and 2004 Democratic presidential hopeful, a National Cancer Institute fact sheet was “doctored to suggest that abortion increases breast-cancer risk, even though the American Cancer Society concluded that the best study discounts that.”

And when it came to dealing with the “liberal” judiciary, Pat Robertson sought help from God during a prayer retreat, and the Lord told him, “I will remove judges from the Supreme Court quickly, and their successors will refuse to sanction the attacks on religious faith.” Asking his television audience to pray that three liberal Supreme Court justices retire, Robertson said, “I don’t care which three, I mean as long as the three conservatives stay on. . . . There’s six liberals, so it’s up to the Lord.”

If the once powerful Christian Coalition had become moribund — and it had — that was because it had been replaced by a far more powerful institution: the Republican Party. Indeed, in 2004, no fewer than 41 out of 51 Republican senators voted with the Christian Coalition 100 percent of the time. When the new Congress took office in early 2005, it included Tom Coburn, newly elected senator from Oklahoma, who believed that doctors who performed abortions should be executed. Asserting that global warming was a hoax, Senator Jim Inhofe (R-Oklahoma) compared environmentalists to the Nazis. He argued that American policy in the Middle East should be based on the Bible, that Israel had a right to the West Bank “because God said so.” And on the Senate floor, in a speech about the proposed Federal Marriage Amendment, he displayed an enormous photo of his extended family, and told the august assembly, “We have 20 kids and grandkids. I’m really proud to say that in the recorded history of our family, we’ve never had a divorce or any kind of homosexual relationship.”

Meanwhile, the White House sought extraordinary means to get its message across. In late January 2005, a man named James Guckert showed up at a presidential news conference using Jeff Gannon as a pseudonym, and lobbed softball questions to President Bush. “Senate Democratic leaders have painted a very bleak picture of the US economy. . . .” he told President Bush. “Yet in the same breath they say that Social Security is rock solid and there’s no crisis there. How are you going to work — you’ve said you are going to reach out to these people — how are you going to work with people who seem to have divorced themselves from reality?”

Gannon’s questions were so friendly, critics suspected that they might have been planted, and found out that he worked for Talon News, an apparent front for the conservative website GOPUSA. More titillating, Gannon had appeared naked on several gay-escort sites, such as hotmilitarystud.com, and was reported to be “a $200-an-hour gay prostitute.” More titillating yet were reports that Gannon visited the White House regularly, often on days in which there were no press conferences. Was it possible that he might be part of what was known in Washington circles as the Lavender Bund, the coterie of closeted right-wing gays who helped the religious right and the Republicans advance an agenda that was often explicitly anti-gay? Later came revelations about Congressman Mark Foley and his suggestive e-mails to young congressional pages, and Ted Haggard, head of the National Association of Evangelicals, who had a relationship with a male prostitute.

As the culture and political wars continued, they took a toll on the White House’s credibility. In March 2005, Republican politicians and the religious right — most of whom, theoretically at least, had been proponents of States’ rights — ignited a national controversy when they tried to intervene on behalf of Terri Schiavo, a Florida woman in a persistent vegetative state, to prevent the removal of her feeding tube.

In April, federal prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald continued to investigate the leak of CIA officer Valerie Plame Wilson’s name. But journalists Matthew Cooper of Time and Judith Miller of the New York Times refused to divulge their sources. The question of who in the Bush administration had leaked her name was both a Washington parlor game and a profound inquiry into what was really going on in the White House.

Bled dry
Meanwhile, two years into the war, America’s all-volunteer military force was being drained. With ongoing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, there were not enough boots on the ground. To replenish their forces, officials raised the age limit for enlistment from 34 to 40. Tours of duty for soldiers were extended repeatedly, leaving many of them feeling tricked and demoralized. In particular, the military relied on call-ups from the National Guard, many of whom were “weekend warriors,” middle-aged men wrenched away from their families and jobs, at great sacrifice.

And what about Osama bin Laden — the all-but-forgotten villain behind 9/11? “We’re on a constant hunt for bin Laden,” Bush reassured America. “We’re keeping the pressure on him, keeping him in hiding.”

But Bush’s promises were wearing thin. The administration’s practice of transferring prisoners from Guantánamo to other countries where they might be tortured was called into question. There were multiple reports of brutal treatment of detainees by the government. Likewise, attorneys for Guantánamo detainee Salim Ahmed Hamdan, who had been Osama bin Laden’s driver, argued in court that their client must be afforded the same legal protections that American citizens have. The numbers of wiretaps and secret searches soared.

By late spring of 2005, approximately $200 billion had been spent on the war in Iraq. Tens of thousands of people had been killed. Countless more were wounded or living as refugees. There were no WMDs. Iraq’s oil riches were being destroyed by saboteurs and stolen by terrorists. A report prepared for the UN Human Rights Commission showed that malnutrition rates in Iraqi children under five had nearly doubled since the US invasion.

Yet the administration continued to assert that victory was around the corner. “The level of activity that we see today, from a military standpoint, I think will clearly decline,” Cheney told Larry King in May 2005. “I think that they’re in the last throes, if you will, of the insurgency.”

But by the end of June, more than 1700 Americans had been killed in Iraq. Baghdad’s mayor decried his city’s crumbling infrastructure. The Iraqi capital of more than six million people was now plagued by shortages of electricity and fuel, incessant bombings and suicide attacks, and did not even have adequate drinking water for its residents. With one revelation after another about the Bush administration’s secret rendition policies, detention of prisoners without rights at Guantánamo, and Abu Ghraib, America, rather than Saddam, had become known for torture and abuse.

Then, on July 7, 2005, four terrorist explosions rocked London’s transport system at the height of rush hour, killing at least 33 and wounding roughly a thousand others. A group calling itself the Secret Organization of the Al-Qaeda Jihad in Europe later claimed credit for the attacks, and asserted that the attacks were payback for Britain’s involvement in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. The bombings sent a ripple of dread through Americans, especially New Yorkers. Many people could not help but wonder if the war in Iraq might induce such attacks on American soil rather than prevent them.

President Bush had argued, “If we were not fighting and destroying this enemy in Iraq, they would not be idle. They would be plotting and killing Americans across the world and within our own borders.” But the London bombing proved that exactly the opposite was true. According to a study published in Mother Jones by Peter Bergen and Paul Cruickshank, research fellows at the Center on Law and Security at the NYU School of Law, the net effect of the Iraq War was that it increased global terrorism by a factor of seven. “The rate of terrorist attacks around the world by jihadist groups and the rate of fatalities in those attacks increased dramatically after the invasion of Iraq,” said the study. “A large part of this rise occurred in Iraq, which accounts for fully half of the global total of jihadist terrorist attacks in the post–Iraq War period. But even excluding Iraq, the average yearly number of jihadist terrorist attacks and resulting fatalities still rose sharply around the world by 265 percent and 58 percent, respectively.”

Four days after London, a suicide bomber in Baghdad killed 23 people outside an army recruiting center in Baghdad. Among other victims that day were nine members of a Shi’ite family. It was all but official. As Iraq’s former interim prime minister Ayad Allawi now asserted, Iraq was facing a civil war, and the consequences would be dire not just for Iraq but for Europe and America. A long-time ally of Washington, Allawi said, “The problem is that the Americans have no vision and no clear policy on how to go about in Iraq.”

As if the situation in Iraq were not enough, the neocons still had their eyes on Iran. To that end, in July 2005, House intelligence-committee chairman Peter Hoekstra (R-Michigan) and committee member Curt Weldon (R-Pennsylvania) met secretly in Paris with an Iranian exile known as “Ali.” Weldon had just published a book called Countdown to Terror: The Top-Secret Information That Could Prevent the Next Terrorist Attack on America . . . and How the CIA Has Ignored It, alleging that the CIA was ignoring intelligence about Iranian-sponsored terror plots against the US, and Ali had been one of their main sources. But according to the CIA’s former Paris station chief Bill Murray, Ali, whose real name is Fereidoun Mahdavi, fabricated much of the information. “Mahdavi works for [Iranian arms dealer and intelligence fabricator Manucher] Ghorbanifar,” Murray told Laura Rozen of the American Prospect. “The two are inseparable. Ghorbanifar put Mahdavi out to meet with Weldon.”

In a similar vein, in a speech before the National Press Club in late 2005, neocon Raymond Tanter, of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, recommended that the Bush administration use the MEK [the Mujahideen e-Khalq, the Marxist-Islamic urban guerrilla group of Iranian dissidents who had been designated as a terrorist organization by the United States] and its political arm, the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), as an insurgent militia against Iran. “The NCRI and MEK are also a possible ally of the West in bringing about regime change in Tehran,” he said.

Tanter even suggested that the United States consider using tactical nuclear weapons against Iran. “One military option is the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator, which may have the capability to destroy hardened deeply buried targets. That is, bunker-busting bombs could destroy tunnels and other underground facilities.” He granted that the Non-Proliferation Treaty bans the use of nuclear weapons against non-nuclear states, such as Iran, but added that “the United States has sold Israel bunker-busting bombs, which keeps the military option on the table.” In other words, the United States couldn’t nuke Iran, but Israel, which never signed the treaty and maintains an unacknowledged nuclear arsenal, could.

If the MEK was being cast as the Iranian counterpart to the INC [Iraqi National Congress], there were more than enough Iranian and Syrian Ahmed Chalabis to go around. Reza Pahlavi, the son of the late shah, who was installed by the United States but had lost power as a result of the Islamic Revolution, was shopped around Washington as a prospective leader of Iran. And Farid Ghadry, a Syrian exile in Virginia who founded the Reform Party of Syria, was the neocon favorite to rule Syria. Ghadry has an unusual résumé for a Syrian — he’s been a member of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the right-wing pro-Israel lobbying group — and has endured so many comparisons to the disgraced leader of the INC that he once sent out a mass e-mail headlined, “I am not Ahmed Chalabi.”

Nevertheless, according to a report in the American Prospect, Meyrav Wurmser introduced Ghadry to key administration figures, including the vice-president’s daughter Elizabeth Cheney, who, as principal deputy assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs and coordinator for broader Middle East and North Africa initiatives, played a key role in the Bush administration’s policy in the region.

The biggest blow of all to Bush came on August 29, 2005, when Hurricane Katrina devastated the gulf coast of Louisiana and Mississippi, killing more than 1836 people and causing more than $81 billion in damage. It was not the storm itself, of course, but the monumental incompetence of the Bush administration and its inability to manage the disaster that devastated New Orleans. Under Michael Brown’s aegis, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) failed to heed warnings that the city’s levees might be breached, failed to evacuate the city, and failed to bring housing and relief to the victims after the storm. Disengaged and ineffective, Bush, most memorably, told the director of FEMA, “Heckuva job, Brownie.”

With Katrina, whatever myths were left about Bush’s presidency had been shattered. His approval ratings plummeted to 38 percent. When New Orleans needed the National Guard, the National Guard was in Iraq. Only 34 percent of the public approved of Bush’s handling of Iraq — roughly the same percentage who had approved of LBJ’s handling of Vietnam in March of 1968.

By this time, any chances that American forces could prevail in Iraq were gone. Less than a year after the marines’ horrific siege, Fallujah had morphed into a police state patrolled by thousands of Iraqi and American troops who lived in its bombed-out buildings. But the Sunni insurgency there had somehow survived. In a 12-day stretch in late summer, 48 Americans died. They would not be the last. Bush’s fate was sealed. His presidency was an irrevocable failure.

Last edited by Halo82; 2007-11-28 3:22 PM.