Washington Post:
Start a meme, get the crowds chanting. “Quack-quack, Mr Bush.” Flap your arms, make it loud. “Quack-quack, Mr Cheney.” To be precise, al-QaQaa. But quack-quack is close enough, with a secondary payoff ...the sound of soon-to-be lame ducks.
This ‘scandal’ goes all the way back to the beginning of the war.
Remember, “Things have gotten so bad inside Iraq ... we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators”? Mr Cheney was wrong then, and remains wrong today. We now know there were no reconstruction plans worth their salt, when troops began piling into Iraq, because of this misperception.
Major General Blount, of the Army’s 3rd Infantry Division, admitted last year that “Looting wasn’t taken into military consideration ... [snip] ... It never came in the order process that it would be a major problem.”
Undersecretary of Defense, Mr Feith, a personage who will figure larger in the coming months as we continue to analyze Iraq, said that taking time to deploy more troops would give Mr Hussein “more chances to send a Scud missile into Kuwait or Israel, rig bridges to explode, or prepare to hide or use chemical weapons. [snip] But if we didn’t have a looting problem, but we had the oil fields blown, and refugees fleeing across the border, and mass starvation, and all other things we planned against ... would everybody now say that was a brilliant job of planning because you put an extra 100,000 forces in and a building didn’t get looted?”
Mr Feith seems to forget there was a very long run-up to this war; plenty of time for Mr Hussein to prepare. That’s not a valid excuse. Neither are concerns about winning ‘popularity contests.’ You didn’t consider what might be *in* those buildings, Mr Feith. Weapons, perhaps, not just works of art or governmental documents?
Don’t expect help from the head quacker. Mr Bush quacked this up in November of last year: “We could have less troops in Iraq. We could have the same number of troops in Iraq. We could have more troops in Iraq. Whatever is necessary to secure Iraq.”
Not guarding all the ammo dumps qualifies as not getting the job done properly, in any military handbook. Those individuals who have served in a wartime military can illustrate it for you. The evidence of this having been overlooked is on the front pages of our news media every day.
Repeat after me: Quack-quack.
Later: Then again, the Hispanic ‘caca’ might be even better ... this situation epitomizes that word. Our troops are in it up to their eyeballs.
