When You Hate Being Right

You might recall that I predicted the Iraq conflict would become an urban guerrilla war. The international section of today's New York Times (sorry, registration may be required) quotes Gen. John Abizaid as saying that allied forces face a “classical guerrilla-type war situation”. Aside from being off Rummy's message, the remarkable thing about Gen. Abizaid's statement is the fact that he is the new head of the U.S. Central Command.

He is also quoted as saying that ground forces should expect to be in Iraq for a year. Forget those three-month tours of duty you were promised, guys & gals!

The official Administration position these days is "We never promised you a rose garden." Well, that's only partly true, in that there was no clear exit plan defined prior to the official declaration of conflict – nor was there any exit plan defined once major hostilities were declared ended. The irony of this is, of course, that the Republicans made quite a fuss about there being no exit strategy for Bosnia, Somalia, etc. The pity is that the Dems haven't forced the Republicans to eat their words.

Meanwhile, there's the little matter of the faulty intelligence concerning Hussein seeking nuclear materials from Niger. Our Chief Executive Liar has said, in effect, that this error doesn't matter because it was so important to remove Hussein from power. Other Administration apologists have been saying that no intelligence can be expected to be 100% accurate all the time.

Excuse me, but shouldn't we have a pretty high standard for statements made in Presidential State of the Union addresses? Especially when those statements are being made to initiate a war? I mean, when so many lives are on the line, shouldn't the intelligence be held to an extremely high standard?

Certainly, the Niger statement doesn't even rise to anything but a frat boy term paper standard of accuracy. Saying we got it from the British is the worst sort of hearsay; not much better than saying we got information from a friend of a friend.

As I see it, there are two scenarios which make sense. Either our intelligence community is extremely incompetent, which is pretty scary. Or the Administration encouraged members of the intelligence community to inflate facts to support the case for a pre-emptive strike. I believe either scenario demands an open Senate investigation.

Our government was almost brought to a screeching halt over the definition of "is". I believe this situation is much more serious and threatening to our national security than a little semen on someone's blue dress.