Mona: Bush Remains our Glorious Leader: Only the Generals Have Failed

Bush Remains our Glorious Leader: Only the Generals Have Failed

By Mona

The likelihood of my voting for John McCain in ‘08 was never high, but it is now extinguished; I will oppose him vehemently. The “maverick” Senator from Arizona who is supposed to be so reasonable and moderate, is loyally ripping pages from George Bush’s “How to Scapegoat Everyone and Evade Responsibility for My Own Insane, Warmongering Delusions” playbook, and former decorated POW McCain is not above demonizing General George W. Casey, just as his Leader has been doing. (Nevermind that McCain is also an ardent supporter of the “surge.”)

For ever so long Leader told us he faithfully followed the advice of his generals on the ground — but we now know that that obtained with the understood caveat there were certain things he was… not to be told, my emphasis:

For years now, George W. Bush has told Americans that he would increase the number of troops in Iraq only if the commanders on the ground asked him to do so. It was not a throwaway line: Bush said it from the very first days of the war, when he and Pentagon boss Donald Rumsfeld were criticized for going to war with too few troops. He said it right up until last summer, stressing at a news conference in Chicago that Iraq commander General George Casey “will make the decisions as to how many troops we have there.” Seasoned military people suspected that the line was a dodge–that the civilians who ran the Pentagon were testing their personal theory that war can be fought on the cheap and the brass simply knew better than to ask for more. In any case, the President repeated the mantra to dismiss any suggestion that the war was going badly. Who, after all, knew better than the generals on the ground?

Leader, that’s who. By shortly after the first of this year General Casey, according to Leader, didn’t know squat:

WASHINGTON- General George Casey, the United States’ Army’s senior commander in Iraq, will most likely be forced to pay the price of President George Bush’s strategic failures in the war in Iraq.

The New York Times reported that President Bush plans to fire the general, who was supposed to complete his service this coming summer, within the next few weeks.

The report said that Bush did not like his commanders’ strategy, which aimed for retreat without victory, and Bush is taking advantage of the replacement of Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld with Robert Gates in order to get rid of Rumsfeld’s senior general in Iraq as well.

And John McCain wants to extract a further pound of flesh from the sacrificial lamb, and humiliate a man who by all accounts is an honorable one who has faithfully served his country:

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said yesterday that he is inclined to oppose President Bush’s appointment of Gen. George W. Casey Jr. as the new Army chief of staff, on the grounds that Casey’s 2 1/2 -year tenure as U.S. military leader in Iraq was marked by “failed leadership.”

McCain, the senior Republican on the Armed Services Committee, which must confirm Casey’s appointment, and a likely presidential candidate in 2008, accused Casey of presiding over “a failed policy” in Iraq, in which McCain said Iraqi forces were expected too quickly to assume growing responsibility for security matters there.

Failed leadership. Got that? Everything wrong in Iraq is Casey’s fault. It is not that we never should have waged the war in the first place, or that having done so its prosecution was inept beyond describing, with no plan — literally — for how to keep the peace in a nation known to be suffused with bitter tribal and sectarian hatreds. There has been no failure in the White House. Perish the thought. It’s the damned idjit brass.

But let be quickly conceded that Leader, McCain and all the dead-ender war supporters love and support the troops, as we opponents of the war do not, else we would not voice our opposition on blogs and give comfort to the terrorists. Mean-spirited denunciations of the troops’ officers, announced in elite news outlets, could not conceivably gladden any Al Qaeda hearts because when war- and escalation-supporters speak such things, that’s different.