For the last five years or so, I've been thinking that this whole "Bush the idiot" routine has to be fake, there has to be some Master Plan. How could such an incredibly stupid person become the most powerful man on earth? I've tried to figure his plan out, even wrote in my blog about it HERE. Every time I think it makes sense, and I think I know what Bush is going to do, he just up and does some other idiotic thing.
Even people that believe Bush is right, on his word, have to be thinking by now that he's an idiot. Honestly, invading Iraq might have worked as advertised if everything was done right, instead of wrong. Bush could have pulled it off. Had his diplomatic efforts at the beginning not been such an atrocious failure, he might of actually had a coalition of the willing, rather than the grudging. Done effectively, he might even have had UN approval. The actual military invasion was spectacular; lightening fast and with comparatively few errors. You can't fault the military effort in Iraq. But, again, the post-invasion phase was a political catastrophe. Let's see, we want a stable and democratic Iraq, so let's fire all the soldiers and police and send them home where they will have guns but no source of income. After that, we'll hire new soldiers and police but we'll form units along sectarian lines. Then, we'll completely abandon security such that regional militias become popular means for protecting local neighbourhoods. Sure, that's really going to to build a stable country.
In reality, I can't help but think all the really stupid things the Bush administration has done in Iraq must have been deliberate. The choices sure seem like a deliberate attempt to incite civil war. Even the latest so-called surge seems more like an attempt to beat down the Shiite militias such that the Sunni insurgents will have a chance to hold their own. After all, if you want a civil war, each side has to at least have a fighting chance.
However, even when everything seems in place, and the optimal time to move on to the next phase is here, Bush just keeps on doing stupid things. I mean, if Bush wants to use all the military might he's assembled in the Gulf, he's going to have to start soon, like last week. Iran is going to need some serious bombardment to soften up its defences before any ground assault in the spring, the optimal time for such things. If he waits until the fall, the US military will have been sitting around, slowly loosing capability, for months. All those sailors and airmen, stationed far from home, will have been waiting around for nothing. The soldiers too will have spent way too many high-stress combat hours pointlessly wandering around Baghdad. Every deployment has its peak readiness, when units are deployed, finished their last minute training, and are chomping at the bit to fight. Over use them, over train them, or leave them waiting around too long, and they'll just want to go home.Maybe this really is just like a nightmare. My mind is attempting to stitch a story around random events, trying to make some kind of sense out of a collection of unconnected and totally senseless points of data. Maybe Bush, and all of his advisers, and Blair, and all of his advisers, are just a bunch of idiots. Maybe they're actually trying to do what they say, and just doing a very lousy job of it. Maybe Bush really is just a pathetic Commander in Chief, sending the most powerful military force in the world, here and there, willy-nilly, with no real plan of action. Maybe he's just trying to look tough, maybe he likes seeing little American flags shuffle around on situation boards, or maybe he just doesn't care about his people in uniform. Could it be that he doesn't care about the people suffering extended tours of duty, the separated families, the increased attrition this will cause? Could it really be true that he's doing all this without any plan? Is he really that much of an idiot?
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