In other words, set up Garner to fail, which will make Garner turn to Chalabi, a known fraud and criminal (wanted, I believe, in Jordan for bank fraud — don’t these countries have extradition treaties with each other?). And we and the Iraqis will all live happily ever after with our puppet in control.

I’ve read that they’re making these kinds of Ralph Kramden assumptions now about Iran: we’ll bomb the crap out of their infrastructure, and that’ll make the Iranian people lose their electricity, water, sewage, food supply, security. This will make them lose respect for, and then rise up against and overthrow their government and install, with CIA help of course, a US-friendly government. We and the Iranians will live happily ever after. And in the near future, Iraqi- and Iranian-style democracies will flourish throughout the Middle East, and the handsome prince will find Sleeping Beauty and awake her with a tender kiss.

These people remind me of The Honeymooners, where Ralph comes up with some cockamamie scheme, based on a pile of questionable assumptions. He sells Ed on coming in on it with him, and then of course the whole thing falls apart and they lose everything and are revealed for the fools that they are. At least Ralph and Ed are lovable fictional characters; these guys are really perpetrating this crap on the world.

I think the crass and cynical hubris of the Cheney Administration has a facet that isn’t often mentioned, or at least hasn’t been emphasized sufficiently:

Because they are so wealthy, they simply do not give a rat’s arse how much other people suffer. It will never affect them personally. Young American women and men die, or are brutally maimed, psychologically scarred, for no good reason, but not their sons and daughters.
The American economy is a time bomb with a delayed action, slow motion fuse. Their wealth is sufficient to easily compensate for whatever catastrophies ensue. They will never feel it. Their comfort and opulent indulgences will not even be affected.

They have no conscience. No guilt. No sense of responsibility. They will go to their graves, smug with the comforting delusion that they have been self-sacrificing public servants who have done us a favor by holding the reins of power.
Our one recourse is to rein them in and take away their toys, insofar as we are able to, on November 7th. This is our last and only chance.

They’re really happy with misadministration in Iraq, it means Halliburton, etc. will be paid more, high profits=happy government leaders in the U.S.

They’re all a bunch of nasty whores that need to be let out to pasture. I hope they all get what the deserve.

And I hope everyone here in the U.S. Government who deserves it has the pigeons come back to roost and crap on their asses until the end of time.

I don’t want to give unwarranted credit, but the fact is they may have a plan.
It isn’t over until it’s over, and there’s always the danger that what we consider a massive failure can be the desired outcome for others.

I am with Sizemore on this. These guys are not stupid. They knew full well civil war was the likely outcome, given the power vacuum that would follow without the required level of US troops. It was in the suppressed analysis:

… the reams of postwar plans and memoranda produced by the State Department, or any of the analyses generated by the CIA, or even the unclassified report written by the military’s own National Defense University based on a two-day workshop involving more than seventy scholars and experts. Garner asked Feith for copies of planning documents that had been drawn up in the Pentagon and elsewhere in the U.S. government. Garner said Feith told him that nothing useful existed …

Of course, two things:

1. They couldn’t sell a war to the public with the actual price tag, including a re-instated draft, not to mention the dollars, so the option:

2. Civil war: they knew it would happen, and are just fine with 600K, 1 million, 2 million dead Arabs.

They, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Perle, Adelman, sleep just fine at night knowing that they themselves don’t have to pull the trigger.

The neocons really are determined to go out in a nuclear blaze of glory, whether triggered by American nuclear bunker busters, or perhaps the Pakistani government falling and losing control of its nukes in the messy aftermath of an attack on Iran. We’re entering a period that is far more dangerous than the balance of terror of “mutual assurred destruction” deterrence of the cold war, dangerous as that was.

Why so little outrage — including none from our leading liberal political figures? Perhaps because more and more folks seem to think nuclear war is survivable with just a little grit and determination — just another kind of war, and we’ve done that, right? It’s an incredible collective failure of memory.

Some thoughts about an increasingly oblivious world poised on the edge of the abyss: Dr. Strangelove, please keep an eye on your toys. The grandchildren are getting forgetful and might break something.

Jane, the big question is how these fuck-ups could have got to the point where they had enough authority actually to fuck-up. This seems to happen in business on a regular basis, so it must be something about the United States, or at least the Republican part of it. There are really two distinct issues here. One is assigning blame where it belongs; the other is asking ourselves, how in the hell did our system let such incompetents into power? That’s the money question. I assume a lot of Germans in 1937/38 were asking the same question.

Ever hear of the Peter Principle?
If you believe the ridiculous, you will commit the horrendous.

Stovepiping stupidity since 1981.

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