Insulting Our Troops, and Our Intelligence

Insulting Our Troops, and Our Intelligence

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Published: November 3, 2006

George Bush, Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld think you're stupid. Yes, they do.


They think they can take a mangled quip about President Bush and Iraq by
John Kerry - a man who is not even running for office but who, unlike Mr.
Bush and Mr. Cheney, never ran away from combat service - and get you to
vote against all Democrats in this election.

Every time you hear Mr. Bush or Mr. Cheney lash out against Mr. Kerry, I
hope you will say to yourself, "They must think I'm stupid." Because they
surely do.

They think that they can get you to overlook all of the Bush team's real and
deadly insults to the U.S. military over the past six years by hyping and
exaggerating Mr. Kerry's mangled gibe at the president.

What could possibly be more injurious and insulting to the U.S. military
than to send it into combat in Iraq without enough men - to launch an
invasion of a foreign country not by the Powell Doctrine of overwhelming
force, but by the Rumsfeld Doctrine of just enough troops to lose? What
could be a bigger insult than that?

What could possibly be more injurious and insulting to our men and women in
uniform than sending them off to war without the proper equipment, so that
some soldiers in the field were left to buy their own body armor and to
retrofit their own jeeps with scrap metal so that roadside bombs in Iraq
would only maim them for life and not kill them? And what could be more
injurious and insulting than Don Rumsfeld's response to criticism that he
sent our troops off in haste and unprepared: Hey, you go to war with the
army you've got - get over it.

What could possibly be more injurious and insulting to our men and women in
uniform than to send them off to war in Iraq without any coherent postwar
plan for political reconstruction there, so that the U.S. military has had
to assume not only security responsibilities for all of Iraq but the
political rebuilding as well? The Bush team has created a veritable library
of military histories - from "Cobra II" to "Fiasco" to "State of Denial" -
all of which contain the same damning conclusion offered by the very
soldiers and officers who fought this war: This administration never had a
plan for the morning after, and we've been making it up - and paying the
price - ever since.

And what could possibly be more injurious and insulting to our men and women
in Iraq than to send them off to war and then go out and finance the very
people they're fighting against with our gluttonous consumption of oil?
Sure, George Bush told us we're addicted to oil, but he has not done one
single significant thing - demanded higher mileage standards from Detroit,
imposed a gasoline tax or even used the bully pulpit of the White House to
drive conservation - to end that addiction. So we continue to finance the
U.S. military with our tax dollars, while we finance Iran, Syria, Wahhabi
mosques and Al Qaeda madrassas with our energy purchases.

Everyone says that Karl Rove is a genius. Yeah, right. So are cigarette
companies. They get you to buy cigarettes even though we know they cause
cancer. That is the kind of genius Karl Rove is. He is not a man who has
designed a strategy to reunite our country around an agenda of renewal for
the 21st century - to bring out the best in us. His "genius" is taking some
irrelevant aside by John Kerry and twisting it to bring out the worst in us,
so you will ignore the mess that the Bush team has visited on this country.

And Karl Rove has succeeded at that in the past because he was sure that he
could sell just enough Bush cigarettes, even though people knew they caused
cancer. Please, please, for our country's health, prove him wrong this time.

Let Karl know that you're not stupid. Let him know that you know that the
most patriotic thing to do in this election is to vote against an
administration that has - through sheer incompetence - brought us to a point
in Iraq that was not inevitable but is now unwinnable.

Let Karl know that you think this is a critical election, because you know
as a citizen that if the Bush team can behave with the level of deadly
incompetence it has exhibited in Iraq - and then get away with it by holding
on to the House and the Senate - it means our country has become a banana
republic. It means our democracy is in tatters because it is so
gerrymandered, so polluted by money, and so divided by professional
political hacks that we can no longer hold the ruling party to account.

It means we're as stupid as Karl thinks we are.

I, for one, don't think we're that stupid. Next Tuesday we'll see.