In this Sunday's Washington Post, Bob Woodward ran the first part of a series of excerpts from his latest book about the Bush White House and the Iraq war, The War Within, a Secret White House History, 2006-2008, his fourth book on the subject so far.
Here is the link to the book.
And here is the link to the article.
Woodward details how out of touch the Bush White House of 2006 really was with events "on the ground" as they soooo love to put it, how divided the administration was on how to handle the war, the huge gap between what General Casey was trying to do and what Bush thought he should be doing, and the happy-talk lies that were being told to Bush by Rumsfeld and others about what was going on.
Oh--and most important of all--how screwed they were politically and how badly they wanted to cover it all up so they could win the mid-term elections decisively.
And how hard that was to do, what with ONE THOUSAND ATTACKS A DAY on American troops, many being played out on the evening news.
There has been much hoopla about Woodward's book, as there always is, and a great deal has been made about how Bush spied on Maliki, or about how Bush's "surge" really didn't stop the violence nearly as much as more sophisticated intelligence and the contribution of Anbar sheiks with the Marines did.
But tucked into this first article is an outrage so offensive, so insulting, and so blatantly ignorant to our men and women who have fought and died and come home broken with such incredible courage that I am stunned this has not gotten more attention.
This is my attempt to remedy that. I strongly urge all of you to forward links to, or copy the whole thing over in e-mails and forward it on to as many military families as you can, and to as many people as you can.
To any combat family, this quote speaks for itself:
By mid-2006, Casey, a stout four-star general with wire-rim glasses, had been the commander in Iraq for two years. As American military units rotated in and out, Casey remained the one constant.
He had concluded that one big problem with the war was the president himself. Since the beginning, Casey felt, the president had viewed the war in conventional terms, repeatedly asking how many of the various enemies had been captured or killed. Casey later confided to a colleague that he had the impression that Bush reflected the "radical wing of the Republican Party that kept saying, 'Kill the bastards! Kill the bastards! And you'll succeed.'
Casey was troubled by the thought that the president didn't understand the nature of the fight they were in. The large, heavily armed Western force was on borrowed time, he believed. The president often paid lip service to winning over the Iraqi people, but then he would lean in with greater interest and ask about raids and military operations, grilling Casey about killings and captures.
Months earlier, during a secure video conference with top military and civilian leaders looking on, he told Casey that it seemed the general wasn't doing enough. 'George, we're not playing for a tie,' Bush had said. 'I want to make sure we all understand this, don't we?' Later in the video conference, Bush emphasized it again: 'I want everybody to know we're not playing for a tie. Is that right?'
In Baghdad, Casey's knuckles whitened on the table. The very suggestion was an affront to his dignity that he would long remember, a statement just short of an outright provocation.
Mr. President,' Casey had said bluntly, 'we are not playing for a tie.'
Asked later about Casey's perceptions, Bush insisted in an interview that he understood the nature of the war, whatever Casey might have thought. 'I mean, of all people to understand that, it's me,' he said. But several of his on-the-record comments lend credence to Casey's concern that the president was overly focused on the number of enemy killed.
'I asked that on occasion to find out whether or not we were fighting back,' he said during the May interview. 'Because the perception is, is that our guys are dying and they're not. Because we don't put out numbers. We don't have a tally.' He said his overall question to his military commanders was, 'Are we making progress in defeating them?'
'What frustrated me is that from my perspective,' he said at another point, 'it looked like we were taking casualties without fighting back because our commanders are loath to talk about our battlefield victories.'
Let me get this straight.
The commander-in-chief--the dude in the flight suit--had to ASK, not once mind you, but REPEATEDLY over the course of the first four years of the Iraq war, whether our troops were FIGHTING BACK?
They weren't FIGHTING BACK in Fallujah in November of 2004, when hundreds were killed and wounded in a single battle?
Since Bush never had to fight in a real battle before in his life, what with his congressman daddy's connections and all, then perhaps Bush ought to read Bing West's book about that battle, No True Glory, a Frontline Account of the Battle for Fallujah--
It details the horrors and bloodshed and death experienced not just by men in a book, but by my son as well.
West has a new book just out, The Strongest Tribe: War, Politics, and the Endgame in Iraq, about how it was the infantry grunts and junior officers who saw the horrors up close and personal, who finally figured out how to end this war--not Bush and not Petraeus.
He will get 26, 841 results--
Many of them written by brave men and women who survived to tell their own stories about how valiantly they and their buddies FOUGHT BACK.
Or, wait, I've got a better idea, Mr. Bush.
Why don't you just ASK?
In my own family, I've got three family members who fought in Bush's War six different times, and each time was grislier than the last. I'll give you their phone numbers, Mr. Bush. You can ask THEM if they FOUGHT BACK.
Or, you can ask the Gold Star mothers who have buried sons and daughters; you can ask THEM if their children FOUGHT BACK.
You can ask military widows and widowers and orphans. They can give you an answer on whether our troops FOUGHT BACK.
You can drop in at Walter Reed--you know, that place where your administration allowed war heroes of a different generation than John McCain, to rot in cockroach-infested rooms--and ask THEM whether they think they FOUGHT BACK.
You can call up a 24-hour suicide hotline for the record numbers of active-duty Iraq-vet troops, and other Iraq veterans who can't deal anymore with the pain and the nightmares and the sleeplessness--you can ask THEM if they FOUGHT BACK.
You can check in with families of deployed troops who must each and every day live with the agonizing fear of a slow blue sedan making its way up the driveway--you can ask THEM whether they believe their loved ones are, as we speak, FIGHTING BACK.
I am so angry as I type these words that my hands are shaking. Please understand that our troops are being abused not just by the Bush administration but by the Bush/McCain campaign; they're being used as stage-prop backdrops for stirring patriotic speeches while heedlessly being dragged out of rehab centers where they're still recovering from wounds sustained in Iraq and then sent back, and all this time, those who would send them back and back and back again and again worry that maybe, just maybe...they haven't been fighting hard enough, because hey, we can't have that big photo-op victory parade that Rumsfeld actually budgeted for in his Pentagon.
I am sick unto holy death of these people and this mind-set.
I beg of all of you to read this Marine mom's words:
"Don't be fooled by the rippling flags and surging music and war-hero speeches."
John McCain wants to keep the Iraq war going into the next century, and he has given absolutely no suggestions for how he intends to keep sending the same troops back and back and back again and again in order to do that, while, at the same time, dealing with the growing mess in Afghanistan--or any of the other potential wars he seems to see on our horizon, whether they be with Iran or Russia or whoever else sets off his famous temper.
John McCain thinks Bush's War is one of the best ideas of the past eight years.
I beg of you. Do not put them back in the White House. Our boys and girls, our men and women--they have fought back enough. Enough.