Crazy Pills: Ruminations on Sy Hersh

Will the Chicken-Hawk-in-Chief never tire of hiding behind our troops? Follow the pretzel logic if you will. We must attack Iran in order to "protect our troops."

At Rice’s Senate appearance in January, Democratic Senator Joseph Biden, of Delaware, pointedly asked her whether the U.S. planned to cross the Iranian or the Syrian border in the course of a pursuit. “Obviously, the President isn’t going to rule anything out to protect our troops, but the plan is to take down these networks in Iraq,” Rice said, adding, “I do think that everyone will understand that—the American people and I assume the Congress expect the President to do what is necessary to protect our forces.”

That's right. We must set Iran on fire, while our troops are sitting ducks in Iraq, in order to protect them. We must exhaust what's left of our military supplies and hardware in order to protect them. I fail to see how destroying our military readiness protects the troops or the country, for that matter.

This is where the rhetoric meets the road and shreds on contact. Protect the troops?! How does not giving them adequate body armor and up-armored vehicles protect them? How does warehousing our injured heroes in fetid squalor, complete with vermin and black mold protect them? How does an overburdened, underfunded VA protect the troops? How does announcing cuts in veteran's health care, while they are busy dodging bullets and IEDs protect them? How does leaving them penniless and homeless protect them?

The Bush Administration gave up any authority to talk about "protecting the troops" when they put them in the most wrong-headed war in American history and allowed comments like this to issue from their cabinet:

As you know, you go to war with the Army you have. They're not the Army you might want or wish to have at a later time.

For this Administration to talk about "protecting the troops" is as Orwellian as their entire "war is peace" strategy. Sometimes I think their overarching strategy is to short-circuit the collective psyche of the American public with cognitive dissonance. They'll just keep bombarding us with illogic until we shut down like the Mudd's androids. Reading this latest from Sy Hersh, I am left feeling, once again, like I'm taking crazy pills.

"The Redirection" may be the most mind-melting expose of the Bush agenda yet. As near as I can tell, the goal is simply to make the Middle East as unstable as possible; just knocking over as many dominoes as they can to see if they form a pattern. That's certainly what it looks like, as they progress with their impossible plans for attacking Iran. According to Hersh they themselves made this attack necessary by destroying the only viable check on Iran: Iraq. To paraphrase Colin Powell: They Broke it. We bought it.

It's pretty clear to those of us who scrolled through the PNAC papers back in the day, that Iran was always in their sights. That Iraq is in a shambles, Afghanistan is erupting, and our military is nearly broken, doesn't even slow the Bush juggernaut down. They have so little respect for our cognitive abilities that they don't even bother to update their sales pitch. There are weapons of mass destruction! They're over here. No they're over here. Did I say that? Look over here.

Make no mistake. We are in no way prepared to attack Iran. And that's why the generals are balking.

A British defence source confirmed that there were deep misgivings inside the Pentagon about a military strike. “All the generals are perfectly clear that they don’t have the military capacity to take Iran on in any meaningful fashion. Nobody wants to do it and it would be a matter of conscience for them.

The most damning part of Seymour Hersh's newest piece of investigative journalism was highlighted over at Think Progress with video and transcript of Hersh's interview with Wolf Blitzer. Put simply the Bush Administration is funding terrorists. I seem to remember something about the Patriot Act making that explicitly illegal. I wonder if they'll be prosecuted. I won't hold my breath. Bush probably exempted himself from the Patriot Act with a signing statement.

Yes. We are fighting a "war on terror" by funding terrorists.

War is peace.
Freedom is slavery.
Ignorance is strength.