Sobering reading from The Guardian, also available here:
According to the US military’s leading strategists and prominent retired generals, Bush’s war is already lost. Retired general William Odom, former head of the National Security Agency, told me: “Bush hasn’t found the WMD. Al-Qaida, it’s worse, he’s lost on that front. That he’s going to achieve a democracy there? That goal is lost, too. It’s lost.” He adds: “Right now, the course we’re on, we’re achieving Bin Laden’s ends.”
And the politicians can’t blame the military for this.
After the killing of four US contractors in Fallujah, the marines besieged the city for three weeks in April – the watershed event for the insurgency. “I think the president ordered the attack on Fallujah,” said General Hoare. “I asked a three-star marine general who gave the order to go to Fallujah and he wouldn’t tell me. I came to the conclusion that the order came directly from the White House.” Then, just as suddenly, the order was rescinded, and Islamist radicals gained control, using the city as a base.
As David J. Morris writes in Salon:
The mainstream press has largely overlooked the fact that in the case of Fallujah, the White House unnecessarily injected itself into the military’s tactical decision-making process in Iraq, ignored the informed opinions of ground commanders, and in effect micromanaged the battle. According to many observers, the seemingly contradictory U.S. military actions over the course of the siege were largely the result of the wishy-washy directives being issued by the Bush administration and its failure to appreciate the implications of sending in a large Marine force to seize a notoriously hostile town.
To both outside observers and former high-placed officials, including former U.S. Central Command chief Anthony Zinni and historian Robert Kaplan, it appeared as if the Bush administration had ordered the punitive campaign out of anger and then lost nerve when Arab outrage over civilian casualties rose to a fever pitch.
I don’t care about Bush’s ANG career, or even that he was a pathological liar at college. I care about the fact that he’s demonstrated that he’s totally incompetent, and that his bad judgment has caused thousands of deaths. He deserves impeachment, not re-election.