Planning for the future

Rolling Stone has really had some good articles in recent months. Of course, a lot of that is due to the ever-increasing writing talent of Matt Taibbi. Taibbi just gets better and better. He's already on his way to becoming one of the greats.

Here are links to two articles by Taibbi, the first addresses two ridiculous lies of the Right wing pundit machine: 1- that America hasn't spent enough money on this war and 2- that gosh darn it, we'd win in Iraq if the American people just believed in it enough.

Right War, Wrong Tactics - Taibbi

"The war in Iraq is lost, everyone knows that, but there are future wars to think about. When a war goes wrong, the reason can never that the invasion was simply a bad, immoral decision, a hopelessly fucked-up idea that even a child could have seen through. No, we always have to make sure that the excuse for the next war is woven into the autopsy of the current military failure. That's why to this day we're still hearing about how Vietnam was lost because a) the media abandoned the war effort b) the peace movement undermined the national will and
c) the public, and the Pentagon, misread the results of the Tet offensive, seeing defeat where there actually was a victory.

After a few decades of that, we were ready to go to war again -- all we had to do, we figured, was keep the cameras away from the bloody bits, ignore the peace movement, and blow off any and all bad news from the battlefield. And we did all of these things for quite a long time in Iraq, but, maddeningly, Iraq still turned out to be a failure.

That left the war apologists in a bind. If after fixing all of the long-held Vietnam excuses Iraq could still blow up in our faces, that must mean that we not only misjudged Iraq, but we were wrong about why Vietnam failed, too."

. . .

"The notion that our problem in Iraq is a resource deficit is pure, unadulterated madness. Our enemies don't have airplanes or armor. They are fighting us with garage-door openers and fifty year-old artillery shells, sneaking around barefoot in the middle of the night around to plant roadside bombs. Anytime anyone dares oppose us in the daylight, we vaporize them practically from space using weapons that cost more than the annual budgets of most Arab countries to design. We outnumber the active combatants on the other side by at least five to one. This year, we will spend more on the military than the rest of the world combined -- more than six hundred billion dollars. And yet Tom Friedman thinks the problem in Iraq is that we ordinary Americans didn't tighten our belts enough to support the war effort.

Friedman should be hung upside down and have holes drilled in his skull for even suggesting this, of course. We're talking about one of the richest men in media, a guy who in recent years got still richer beating the drum for this war from his $9.3 million, 11,400 square-foot mansion in suburban Maryland. He is married to a shopping mall heiress worth nearly $3 billion; the Washingtonian says he is part of one of the 100 richest families in America. And yet he has the balls to turn around and tell us that the pointless, asinine war he cheerleaded for failed because we didn't sacrifice enough for it. Are you reaching for the railroad spike yet?"
Read the whole thing

Here's another good one...
Too Much Blood-Taibbi

Another great Rolling Stone article is a panel of experts moderated by Tim Dickinson, who sketch out three scenarios for Iraq: The best we can hope for, the most likely outcome, and the worst that could happen. It's eye opening.

Beyond Quagmire

And lest some you of doubt the wisdom of PLANNING FOR THE FUTURE, maybe you can go back to some of the predictions Pre-war as to exactly how the invasion (and rebuilding)of Iraq was going to work out. It's time to listen to the people who were right.

On one side there was a horror story of invading a country so they wouldn't destroy us. "Giving" them democracy wasn't even a discussion point at that time.
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/10/20021007-8.html
(by the way, get a load of that Iraq: Denial and Deception header on the White House's page)

On the other, warnings that reality just isn't that simple. Iraq was not a threat. Saddam was contained. http://www.commondreams.org/headlines02/0922-04.htm

And about the Right wing's "Plan": Iraq Invasion plan Delusional http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/6364507.stm