| Topic: |
Science > Abortion |
| User: |
"james g. keegan jr." |
| Date: |
11 Nov 2004 10:56:51 AM |
| Object: |
'Mission' is still not completed |
'Mission' is still not completed
Maureen Dowd
First published: Thursday, November 11, 2004
WASHINGTON -- During the campaign, President Bush and ***** Cheney gave the
ominous impression that there was a dire threat that terrorists could
incinerate Americans at any time if that powder puff John Kerry got
anywhere near the Oval Office.
We felt the hot breath of the wolf pack bearing down on us. But only a week
later, the alarms have dimmed.
The administration lowered the terror threat in New York and Washington on
Wednesday, and the Capitol Hill police were dismantling the elaborate
security checkpoints they had put on streets around the Capitol to thwart
would-be bombers.
In his handwritten resignation letter, John Ashcroft reassured Bush that
"the objective of securing the safety of Americans from crime and terror
has been achieved."
Mission accomplished. Tell those wolves to scat and let that eagle soar,
baby. It was a tad surprising that Ashcroft would want to leave just when
he had a mandate to throw blue curtains over every naked statue in town and
hold Bible study for government employees in a federal office. (He called
his daily devotionals at the Justice Department "RAMP": Read, Argue,
Memorize and Pray.)
The President is putting his own counsel, Alberto Gonzales, who wrote the
famous memo defending torture, in charge of our civil liberties. Torture
Guy, who blithely threw off 75 years of international law and set the stage
for the grotesque abuses at Abu Ghraib and dubious detentions at
Guantanamo, seems to have a good grasp of what's just. No doubt we'll soon
learn what other protections, besides the Geneva Conventions and the
Constitution, Gonzales finds "quaint" and "obsolete."
With the FBI investigating Halliburton and the second-term scandal curse
looming, Bush and Cheney want a dependable ally -- and former Enron
attorney -- at Justice. But since the country is controlled by one party
and the press has tended toward the pusillanimous, cowed by the special
prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald as he tries to throw reporters in jail, the
White House may be able to suppress any second-term problems.
Bush should quit fiddling around on the domestic side and revamp his war
council and national security team. The Bushies can stop mentioning Osama's
name and tell themselves that his last, less militant video was a sign of
weakness, but it's just part of their dangerous denial. Osama Bin Laden
killed 3,000 innocents on 9/11; let's nail him.
Even as Karl Rove boasts that "moral values" swept his boss back into the
White House, it never seems to occur to the President that it's immoral to
endanger our troops in a war shaped by the political clock, a war with no
visible enemy, no coherent plan and no exit timetable.
Fallujah, supposed to be a defining battle, showed only how undefined this
guerrilla war is. The Marines swept into a city deserted by most of the
insurgents, who were terrorizing and kidnapping Iraqis elsewhere. "Fallujah
isn't Masada or the Alamo," Fred Kaplan wrote in Slate, "some last-ditch
outpost where the rebels whoop their final battle cry, rally one more round
of resistance, then pass into history when their last rifleman falls."
Wednesday night, the military said it dominated 70 percent of Fallujah. But
what good does that do if 98 percent of the bad guys have already moved on,
or if 100 percent of the Sunnis boycott the elections out of anger over the
assault? It's just like when Bush says 75 percent of the al-Qaida
leadership has been killed or captured. What good is that if al-Qaida has
become an inspirational force for 100 percent of the jihadists?
Just as there is talk here that John Kerry may want to run again, there is
also talk that Donald Rumsfeld wants to stay on to continue his
transformation of the military. Rummy's stubborn need to show we could do
more with less is what kept us from having the strength to secure Iraq at
the start, turning our troops into targets for a foe armed with the
explosives and missiles looted from unguarded caches.
The president should say to Rummy what the Democrats should say to Kerry:
"Thanks, you've done quite enough."
http://www.timesunion.com/AspStories/story.asp?storyID=303800
&category=OPINION&newsdate=11/11/2004
--
http://www.votetoimpeach.org/
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