How Did He Get Away With It?, AS asks in picking up a Drum question about WMD and Bush's re-election.
First, I'm sure that Bush's advisers were among the most surprised. After having declared WMD to be around Tikrit and then finding nothing, Rumsfeld looked downtrodden with the sense that his President was a one-termer for sure, as I recall most distinctly, when he gave the news that the search would be ... 'ongoing'. (We later found out that it probably was the most costly search for nothing in the history of the world, but don't know for sure because the budget for the search group got classified, for reasons that will be known only to our grandchildren ...).
Second, they won partly because Kerry ran against the war and the nation just wasn't there yet or worried of failure.
"I Don't Know, Actually", AS writes about Petraeus' response to Senator Warner's question about whether the cost in lives and dollars was "worth it" in terms of making us safer. Also followed by Senator Graham on the same point.
Petraeus was hired to use a new set of tactics primarily to secure Baghdad, not to weigh the overall "moral costs" on a day-to-day basis or to offer a professional military opinion about progress in the "GWOT".
It is unfair and unwise to ask the military to weigh such costs (todays references to General MacArthur raised my brows, on that score). That task lies with Senator Graham, his colleagues, the President, the SecDef, and the electorate. It's a cop-out to ask ... someone else.
It's perfectly "fair" to ask the professional military if a battle or campaign can be won and at what estimated cost, but not to ask if it is "worth it".
Tuesday, September 11, 2007
Deuces Wild
