5 Years In Iraq ~ And A Civics Lesson for Dick

Apologies, kittens, but your Demon didn't have time this past week to appropriately remark the Anniversary of the Grand and Glorious War in Iraq, nor to lobby for the commendable idea of expanding it to Iran. Why not bring a campaign that's met with so much success to other nations we really dislike since we can't control them anymore (and happen to be sitting on oil reserves that should be ours, anyway?)

Lessee: bonuses and dividends so far: the normalization of lying, spying and torture abroad and at home; the suspension of habeus corpus; giving Faux News Network and hate-spew radio a reason to exist and; the complete suspension of international and domestic law! Those things are quite an achievement in a democratic democracy! *wink, wink*

To all of which, Dick Cheney sez, rightfully: SO?

If we were stupid enough to surrender all that power to them on such feeble and unexamined pretexts, don't we deserve what we get? And all the rest of the world, too ~ SO?

Wouldn't there be rioting in the streets if such things had really happened? Wouldn't they have been impeached by now?

A former bigwig GOP supporter has the nerve to upbraid the excellent Mr. Dick and presume to give him a civics lesson:

"For at least six years, as I've become increasingly frustrated by the Bush administration's repeated betrayal of constitutional -- and conservative -- principles, I have defended Vice President Cheney, a man I've known for decades and with whom I served and made common cause in Congress. No longer.

"I do not blame Dick Cheney for George W. Bush's transgressions; the president needs no prompting to wrap himself in the cloak of a modern-day king. Nor do I believe that the vice president so enthusiastically supports the Iraq war out of a loyalty to the oil industry that his former employer serves. By all accounts, Cheney's belief in "the military option" and the principle of president-as-decider predates his affiliation with Halliburton.

"What, then, is the straw that causes me to finally consign a man I served with in the House Republican leadership to the category of "those about whom we should be greatly concerned"?
It is Cheney's all-too-revealing conversation this week with ABC News correspondent Martha Raddatz. On Wednesday, reminded of the public's disapproval of the war in Iraq, now five years old, the vice president shrugged off that fact (and thus, the people themselves) with a one-word answer: "So?"

.."Policy, Cheney went on to say, should not be tailored to fit fluctuations in the public attitudes. If there is one thing public attitudes have not been doing, however, it is fluctuating: Resistance to the Bush administration's Iraq policy has been widespread, entrenched and consistent. Whether public opinion is right or wrong, it is not to be cavalierly dismissed.
[...]

"The decision to go to war, I told the students -- to send young Americans off to battle, knowing that some will die -- is the single most difficult choice any public official can be called upon to make. That is precisely why the nation's Founders, aware of the deadly wars of Europe, deliberately withheld from the executive branch the power to engage in war unless such action was expressly approved by the people themselves, through their representatives in Congress.

"Cheney told Raddatz that American war policy should not be affected by the views of the people. But that is precisely whose views should matter: It is the people who should decide whether the nation shall go to war. That is not a radical, or liberal, or unpatriotic idea. It is the very heart of America's constitutional system.

"In Europe, before America's founding, there were rulers and their subjects. The Founders decided that in the United States there would be not subjects but citizens. Rulers tell their subjects what to do, but citizens tell their government what to do.

"If Dick Cheney believes, as he obviously does, that the war in Iraq is vital to American interests, it is his job, and that of President Bush, to make the case with sufficient proof to win the necessary public support.

"That is the difference between a strong president (one who leads) and a strong presidency (one in which ultimate power resides in the hands of a single person). Bush is officially America's 'head of state,' but he is not the head of government; he is the head of one branch of our government, and it's not the branch that decides on war and peace. "
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/03/21/AR2008032102482.html

Personally, Mr. Mickey Edwards's op-ed on the topic sounds like heresy to me. If all that was true, how is it that Bush and Cheney have been able to convince "the people" to go along with things that are not supposed to happen under a Constitutional framework that provides for 3 separate, co-equal branches of government?? He must be hallucinating.

I want some of what he's injecting.

And If You Believe This, I've Got A Bridge For Sale ~ And Some Wars

Ill: Indybay.org

The Pentagon Investigates Itself & Concludes There Was No Manipulation of the Intelligence in the Lead-up to the Iraq War

~ Or if there was, it merely inappropriate, not illegal ~

The Associated Press reported today:

"Some of the Pentagon's prewar intelligence work, including a contention that the CIA underplayed the likelihood of al-Qaida connections to Saddam Hussein, was inappropriate but not illegal, a Defense Department investigation has concluded.

"In a report to be presented to Congress on Friday, the department's inspector general said former Pentagon policy chief Douglas J. Feith had not engaged in illegal activities through the creation of special offices to review intelligence. Some Democrats also have contended that Feith misled Congress about the basis of the administration's assertions on the threat posed by Iraq, but the Pentagon investigation did not support that.

...

"Feith [alleged to be at the center of manipulations] called 'bizarre' the inspector general's conclusion that some intelligence activities by the Office of Special Plans, which was created while Feith served as the undersecretary of defense for policy — the top policy position under Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld — were inappropriate but not unauthorized.

"'Clearly, the inspector general's office was willing to challenge the policy office and even stretch some points to be able to criticize it,' Feith said, adding that he felt this amounted to subjective 'quibbling' by the IG.

"Feith left his Pentagon post in August 2005 and now teaches at Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service. He has maintained throughout the controversy over the role of the Office of Special Plans, as well as other small groups that were created after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, that their intelligence activities were prudent, authorized and useful in challenging some of the intelligence analysis of the CIA.

"At the center of the prewar intelligence controversy was the work of a small number of Pentagon officials from Feith's office and the office of Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz who reviewed CIA intelligence analyses and put together their own report. When they briefed Rumsfeld on their report in August 2002 — a period when Vice President Dick Cheney and other administration officials were ratcheting up their warnings about the gravity of the Iraq threat — Rumsfeld directed them to also brief CIA Director George Tenet.

"Their presentation, which included assertions about links between al-Qaida and the Iraqi government, contained a criticism that the intelligence community was ignoring or underplaying its own raw reports on such potential links.

"The controversy has simmered for several years. The Senate Intelligence Committee included the Office of Special Plans in its investigation into the prewar intelligence on Iraq, but the committee did not finish that portion of its work when it released the first part of its findings in July 2004.

Hmmm....why not?

"In a dissenting view attached to the committee's report, three Democratic senators, including Levin, said that Pentagon policymakers sought to undermine the analysis of the intelligence community by circumventing the CIA and briefing their own views directly to the White House.

"This was a particular problem when the spy agencies' judgments did not conform to the administration's dire views on Iraqi links to al-Qaida, the senators said.

"Later, two senators — Levin and Pat Roberts, R-Kan. — separately asked the Pentagon's inspector general to review the role of Feith's office. It was not immediately clear whether the intelligence committee would press ahead with its own investigation, or if the inspector general's report would suffice."

Suffice to do what, & for whom, DP wonders? Stave off impeachment proceedings?