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Bush Blames the Troops
By Robert Scheer
Truthdig

Tuesday 24 April 2007

Blame it on the military but make it look like you're supporting the
troops. That's been the convenient gambit of failed emperors throughout
history as they witnessed their empires decline. Not surprisingly then,
it's become the standard rhetorical trick employed by President Bush in
shirking responsibility for the Iraq debacle of his making.

Ignoring the fact that we have a system of civilian control over the
military, which is why he, the elected president, is designated the
commander in chief, Bush hides behind the fiction that the officers in
the field are calling the shots when in fact he has put them in an
unwinnable situation and refuses to even consider a timetable for
getting them out.

He did it again Monday, responding to the prospect that both houses
of Congress seem in agreement on setting guidelines for the "progress"
that the president continually proclaims is at hand. "I will strongly
reject an artificial timetable [for] withdrawal and/or Washington
politicians trying to tell those who wear the uniform how to do their
job." This is disingenuous in the extreme, because Bush is the
Washington politician who plotted this unnecessary war from the moment
the 9/11 attack provided him with an excuse for regime change in a
country that had nothing to do with the terrorist attack.

It was Bush who sent the troops to invade Iraq with the mission of
ridding it of weapons of mass destruction, which he should have known
Iraq did not have, and to end ties with al-Qaida that, the record shows,
he knew never existed. And it was the Bush administration that
micro-managed every aspect of the occupation to disastrous consequences
ranging from the de-Baathification that isolated the Sunnis to premature
elections that put Shiite theocrats in power. The economic
reconstruction of Iraq has been a failure for everyone except the U.S.
corporations that have ripped off U.S. taxpayers to the tune of many
billions of dollars. It is only now, when all of those policies for the
economic and political reconstruction of Iraq have come a cropper, that
a military surge has been ordered to provide a social order for Iraq
that this president's policies have destroyed.

This president has been denied nothing by Congress in the way of
financial underwriting for this boondoggle, yet he seeks to cast even
the mildest attempt to hold him accountable for the results as
unpatriotic. That is all that the Democratic congressional leadership
has proposed with its timetable - marks to measure progress on the
ground in a war that, as Hawaii Sen. Daniel Inouye pointed out, has
lasted longer than World War II. It is a very limited, nonbinding
attempt to hold the president accountable, for it does not ban him from
using any portion of the whopping $124 billion in new funds; it requires
only that he publicly and specifically defend his claims of progress.

It's a claim of progress that, until now, has not been met with any
congressional review, even though it is the obligation of Congress to
judge the effectiveness of programs paid for with the funds that
Congress alone can appropriate. If the proposed timetable were in place,
then it would be more difficult for the president to claim success for
his surge, as he did Friday, insisting that "So far, the operation is
meeting expectations" and then confusing his audience by conceding that
recently "We have seen some of the highest casualty levels of the war."

It's gobbledygook, and the Democratic leaders of Congress have
finally decided to call the president on it. "The longer we continue
down the president's path, the further we will be from responsibly
ending this war," said Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev. Not
content any longer to take Bush at his word, the leaders in both the
House and Senate finally posted some specific benchmarks of progress,
accompanied by a nonbinding suggestion of an end to U.S. troop
involvement in this quagmire within a year's time if genuine progress is
not made. Even that minimum restraint on the president's ambition was
accompanied with the caveat that sufficient troops would remain in Iraq
to protect U.S. installations, train the Iraqi army and fight
terrorists.

The proposal was the softest the Democrats could offer without
totally repudiating the will of the voters who brought them to power in
the last election. If the president vetoes this authorization bill, then
the onus is on him for delaying funding for the troops and showing
contempt for the judgment of the voters, who will have another chance in
less than two years to hold the president's party responsible. But that
will not restore life to the 85 U.S. soldiers killed so far in April
alone, or prevent even greater sacrifices to Bush's folly.

Nowhere in this blatantly political article did I see any indication of
bush 'blaming' the troops for any thing.

The title is a hook to get people to read the balderdash in the article.

PROPAGANDA.

Just for everyone to note- there are two threads by this name. Let this
one die and use the other one. Just to keep things simpler.