Why We're Failing in Iraq

After we were attacked by Al Queda I—like many Americans—felt a need for payback. 9/11 created a sense of unity in our country, something that may not have existed since the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941.

We were scared. We wanted retribution. We wanted to know who had done this to us, how it happened, and why. But most of all we wanted the culprits caught and destroyed. Mentally and emotionally we were ready for war. Tens of thousands of our finest young men and women volunteered for military service. They wanted to defend our country from its sworn enemies. With the image of George W. Bush addressing recovery workers on the rumble of the World Trade Center, we left it up to our new president and his team to carry us through to ultimate victory.

So with that mindset, we watched as our armed services successfully wrested control of Afghanistan from its radical Taliban leaders. But one of our main objectives, to kill or capture Bin Laden, failed.

Why?

Then the administration began touting the danger posed to us from Iraq. We were told that the Iraqis had huge stocks of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD’s) stockpiled throughout their country. Supposedly they were in bed with Bin Laden and would supply these weapons to the terrorists. The case was made for attacking Iraq.

How did this happen and why?

With our overwhelming military force we had no problem defeating the conventional Iraqi army. Iraqi citizens were dancing in the streets with joy. We felt that we were liberators. At that point we had an opportunity to stabilize the country with a series of intelligent decisions. But the decisions that were made only led to hostility and persistent attacks on our service personnel. Four years later, with over 3,000 dead and more than 20,000 wounded, those attacks continue.

Why? How did we screw up so badly?

The answers to many of those questions are revealed in a new book by Andrew Cockburn, RUMSFELD, His Rise, Fall, and Catastrophic Legacy ($16.50 in hardback at Amazon.com). It is a scathing attack against Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, his leadership of the military establishment, and the decisions he forced through regarding our involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan. While I don’t know enough to concur with all of the author’s conclusions, the book offers fascinating insights into Donald Rumsfeld’s ambition which was limitless, his intellect which was overestimated, and his management style which was Machiavellian.

We may be analyzing what went wrong in Iraq for years to come, but if you are interested in the subject and those questions plague you as they did me, then this book is a fine start.

If you’d like to contribute to the foregoing, you can comment on this site by becoming a ‘blogger’ or you can e-mail me at WGDavis46@aol.com.

Visit my web site: www.authorsden/williamgdavis

The Wisdom of George Carlin

Some of our greatest social critics are comedians. They really good ones have the ability to hold up a mirror so we can observe the absurdity our societal conditions.

In their nightly monologues Jay Leno and David Letterman give us a glimpse of our deteriorating political situation, something the mainline media portrays with sobriety.

One of the greatest takes on what’s happening to the American people was summed up by George Carlin in his most recent HBO special.

Here it is (expletives deleted):

“ … The owners of this country don’t want (educated people).”

“I’m talking about the real owners now, the big, wealthy business interests that control things and make all the important decisions. They’ve got the politicians … politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice.

You don’t. You have no choice. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own and control the corporations. They’ve long since bought and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the statehouses, the city halls … They’ve go the judges in their back pockets.

And they own all the big media corporations so they control just about all the news and information you get to hear.

They’ve got you by the balls. They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying to get what they want. We all know what they want. They want more for themselves and less for everyone else.

But I’ll tell you what they don’t want. They don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well-informed, well-educated people capable of critical thinking.

They are not interested in that. That doesn’t help them. That’s not in their interests. They don’t want people who are smart enough to sit around the kitchen table and figure out how badly they’re getting f----d by a system that threw them overboard thirty f------g years ago.

They don’t want that.

You know what they want? Obedient workers, people who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork and just dumb enough to passably accept all the increasingly sh---y jobs with lower pay, longer hours, reduced benefits, the end of overtime, and the vanishing pension that disappears the minute you get to collect it.

And now they are coming for your Social Security money. They want your f-----g retirement money. They want it back so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street. And you know something? They’ll get it. They’ll get it from you sooner or later ‘cause they own this
f------g place. It’s a big club, and you’re not in it!

You and I are not in “The Big Club.” By the way, it’s the same big club they use to beat you over the head all day long where they tell you what to believe, all day long, beating you over the head in their media, telling you what to believe, what to think and what to buy.

That table is tilted folks. The game is rigged and nobody seems to notice. Nobody seems to care. Good, honest, hardworking people in white or blue collars—it doesn’t matter what color shirt you have on—good, honest, hardworking people continue to elect these sick c---------rs who don’t give a f--k about you. They don’t care about you at all, at all, at all …

And nobody seems to notice. Nobody seems to care. That’s what the owners (of this country) count on, the fact that Americans will probably remain willfully ignorant of the big red, white and blue d--k being jammed up their a------s everyday.

Because the owners of this country know that truth is called The American Dream, because you have to be asleep to believe it.”

Copyright 2005, George Carlin, HBO

Are we going to remain ignorant? A few media voices are speaking the truth about the loss of good jobs, the influx of illegal workers across the border, and the corruption of our politics. If you’d like to stay abreast of how our country is being sold out you might want to tune in Glen Beck (syndicated radio and CNN Headline News), Lou Dobbs (CNN), and Jerry Doyle (syndicated radio). All have web sites for additional information.

Remember, the first three words of the U.S. Constitution are “We the people.”