My congressman, Rep. Bob Inglis, of the Fourth Congressional District of South Carolina, is an earnest man, fairly honest, I believe, in his assessments of issues and what he believes to be the correct method for finding solutions to problems related to them. One thing he believes in is “fact finding” missions and he has taken numerous such junkets to Iraq. He appears to honestly believe such trips, at taxpayer expense of course, arm him with the information he needs to judge the actual situation there. He appears to believe those short trips, arranged and directed by military public relations personnel give him the insight he needs to propose and/or support legislation that will provide long-term solutions to the ever more disastrous quagmire this invasion has become.
Bob Inglis’ ignorant earnestness coupled with the not-so-naïve, defiantly fraudulent, agenda driven efforts of the more sophisticated junket-takers in the House and Senate who realize the economic benefit to themselves involved in junkets, will turn the quagmire of Iraq into a mass grave of American principles, reputation, and influence in the world. If they have not already done so. Bob’s admiration for George W. Bush is evident in his interaction with his constituents and only compounds his inability to realistically assess the Iraq war situation. He will believe the “assessment” of the generals who are willing to do the bidding of the Commander in Chief and ignore the honest assessments of the invasion by generals like Zinni, Batiste, Shinseki, Clark, Odom, Sanchez, Haas, Garner, Fugh, Gunn, O’Meara, Brahms, Kennedy, Guter, McPeak, Montano, Karpinski, Haynes, Otstott and Irvin, a list of names that is probably not complete.
General Petraus and Ambassador Crocker will ostensibly report in September to President Bush, not the American people, that we are gaining ground, that “benchmarks”, that word parroted in stumbling appearances again and again by our mindless, gibbering, on-message Simian in Chief, are being met and that if we will only commit to six more months and thousands more troops Iraq will bloom into a burgeoning democracy in the middle east, a willing donor of crude oil to the free world. They will ask for six more months of bloody, senseless death and maiming and destruction on a cosmic scale. Then the Cheney/Bush report which has probably already been written will be released to the public.
When congress handed Bush that word “benchmarks”, were they aware that his vapid face would never again appear in public without that word issuing from his lips as if unenforced benchmarks embody a true and meaningful task of implementing measurable progress in Iraq imposed on him that he must discharge honestly and diligently? What a laugh! No, honesty and diligence are probably the most foreign words in the English language to this son of indolent privilege. He is of course inserting the word benchmarks into the dictionary of the Ministry of Truth to be employed in this latest propaganda campaign to stay in Iraq regardless of the cost to be born by the hundreds of thousands of people, American and Iraqi he carelessly sacrifices so that he does not have to admit his mistakes. But, Inglis admires Bush, believes him to be honest and therefore, is likely to base his approaches to solving the problem of the insurgency and the “major factor of Al Qaeda in Iraq” on his managed visits and his reliance on the truthiness of Bush and his willing lackeys.
” to Rep. Inglis with a message from me suggesting to him that his fact-finding time would be better spent at home reading assessments like these than in junketing off to listen to generals who have remained in the field because they are willing to do the bidding of a corrupt administration. The Times article was written by Army Specialist Buddkika Jayamaha, Sergeant Wesley D. Smith, Sergeant Jeremy Roebuck, Sergeant Omar Mora, Sergeant Edward Sandmeier, Staff Sergeant Yance Gray and Staff Sergeant Jeremy A. Murphy, men who were in the field because they were members of a military sent there by a corrupt administration. It has the ring of clear-eyed truth, a lack of duplicitous spin that deserves top billing in any honest public servant’s consideration when deliberating his/her legislative actions.
I do not expect that Congressman Inglis will be swayed by this impressive article. Therein lies the problem, that so few decision makers actually listen to the genuine and valid assessments of the truly unbiased military on the ground. They do not have the courage to reject obviously manipulated and spun propaganda by the Bush administration through the generals who have demonstrated that they will loyally “salute and perform” in the service of validating a fatally flawed, shallowly conceived, destructive, politically and profit-motive driven policy of a group of criminally inept men and women who came to power in the only super power in the world by extremely questionable means.
How much worse can the situation get? I don’t think I want to hear the answer to that question.
