Here and There

Just how divorced from reality do you have to be to keep your job in the Bush administration? Well, I guess if the point is to emulate and worship (deify) your boss, Donald Rumsfeld tops the list of loyal sheep.

In an op-ed in today’s Washington Post, the secretary of state who should’ve resigned years ago has the gall to claim that history will see our little “adventure” in Iraq as a success. He dismisses the trees for the forest, basically, warning his readers not to trust “daily headlines, blogs on Web sites or the latest sensational attack” for a true sense of how things are going.

Yeah, what a stupid, stupid move that would be. Daily car bombings can’t overshadow the fact that the electrical grid still isn’t operating anywhere close to 100 percent.

And don’t let those pithy body counts get in the way of the fact that former Prime Minister Eyad Alawi today asserted that Iraq is, indeed, in the midst of a civil war.

Rumsfeld says, “Another significant transformation has been in the size, capability and responsibility of Iraqi security forces. And this is vitally important, because it is Iraqis, after all, who must build and secure their own nation.” But these Iraqis are still getting killed, and must obviously need our help for the foreseeable future. Otherwise…uh, why are we there?

While Rumsfeld is not wrong to accentuate the positive, he cannot rightly dismiss the hard facts of what’s going on day-to-day. American military, Iraqi military, coalition military, Iraqi civilians and politicians…they’re all increasingly getting caught in the crosshairs of a bloody struggle. And it’s so very arrogant to sit at your desk in Washington and utter statements like, “To be sure, violence of various stripes continues to slow Iraq’s progress.” Much of what has gone wrong can be directly tied back to Bush administration incompetence and/or ignorance. It’s the same story we saw just off our own gulf last August and September with Hurricane Katrina.

The point is Rumsfeld and Bush are lighting the candles on this third anniversary of the war in Iraq, when in reality they should be doing everything in their enormous stock of power to try and put the fires out. And they shouldn’t be eating the cake, either.

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