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(Photo from Reuters via The Age.)

Note: Good morning. Marcy and Jane will be live blogging from the Libby trial courthouse as soon as things begin, probably around 9:30 a.m. EST. In the meantime . . .

In a recent post discussing only one week's worth of the Bush/Cheney regime's foreign policy disasters, I wrote this:

We are not going to resolve any of these issues as long as the Bush/Cheney Administration remains in power. That regime is too dishonest for us to trust their statements; too reckless for us to believe they will make wise choices; too radical to obey the law; and too incompetent for us to rely on their assessments, planning or implementation of any strategy, even if it were the correct one. The greatest problem we face is not on the list of last week's horrors. The problem is the radical regime of George Bush and Dick Cheney and the extremist zealots that advise them.

Just rhetorical excess from the left? Perhaps, but then why, as Christy's post on Tuesday reported, was the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, along with the independent General Accounting Office, warning Congress that the US military is so bogged down, badly equipped and overstretched by the Iraq quagmire that we do not have the ability to respond rapidly to any new, real threat to our national security? According to the report presented by General Pace:

Strained by the demands of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, there is a significant risk that the U.S. military won't be able to quickly and fully respond to yet another crisis, according to a new report to Congress.

You can read Christy's post and the linked articles for more details. But can anyone remember when the nation's highest military officer and Congress' independent watchdog both issued such damning indictments of any Administration's mismanagement of our national security? I sure can't. And that was just Tuesday.

On Wednesday, another independent commission reported that the condition of the National Guard was just as bad, which means that the National Guard we rely on to deal with domestic emergencies, such as hurricanes, floods, Western wildfires and so on may not be able to do their jobs if we have another serious catatrophe at home. From Thursday's Washington Post:

Nearly 90 percent of Army National Guard units in the United States are rated "not ready" — largely because of shortfalls in equipment worth billions of dollars — jeopardizing the Guard's ability to respond to crises at home and abroad, according to a congressional commission that released a preliminary report today on the state of U.S. military reserve forces. The commission found that heavy deployments of the National Guard and Reserves since 2001 for the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and other anti-terrorism missions have deepened shortages, forced the military to cobble together units and hurt recruiting. The problems threaten to undermine the nation's 830,000-strong selected reserves, the commission said.

"We can't sustain the [National Guard and Reserve] on the course we're on," said Arnold L. Punaro, chairman of the 13-member Commission on the National Guard and Reserves, established by Congress in 2005.

And one more story, this reported Thursday. It seems that back in 2002, the neocon zealots in the Bush White House were so convinced that anything President Clinton had done was wrong, and so anxious to pick a fight, that they recklessly misread intelligence regarding the North Korean's uranium enrichment capability and compliance with the agreement the Koreans signed with Clinton to suspend any work on enrichment that they — the White House zealots — unilaterally cancelled the agreement. That action got the IAEA inspectors — who had the prior North Korea efforts under inspection and seal — booted out of the country. With the inspectors gone, and facing a belligerent Bush/Cheney regime, the North Koreans then went on to develop a plutonium-based nuclear capability that led to the development of the bomb they exploded last fall. In other words, the Bush/Cheney regime's blundering belligerence created the conditions that led to North Korea's renewed efforts to develop nuclear weapons. As Josh Marshall put it today:

It's a screw-up that staggers the mind. And you don't even need to know this new information to know that. Even if the claims were and are true, it was always clear that the uranium program was far less advanced than the plutonium one, which would be ready to produce weapons soon after it was reopened. Now we learn the whole thing may have been a phantom. Like I said, it staggers the mind how badly this was bungled. In this decade there's been no stronger force for nuclear weapons proliferation than the dynamic duo of Dick Cheney and George W. Bush.

Is it any wonder that we have a Vice President who is hated abroad and the object of contempt and scorn at home, when he continues to make statement after statement that no one can believe?

So here is the national security report card on the Bush/Cheney Regime and its conservative/neocon supporters in the Republican Party (including Independent neocon Senator Joe Lieberman): America is bogged down in a horrific sectarian civil war in Iraq in which we cannot define the enemy or our soldiers' mission, with no end in sight. Because of the unnecessary war with Iraq, America is also bogged down in a nation-building exercise in Afghanistan and faced with a growing insurgency there fueled by a resurgent al Qaeda and Taliban on the Pakistan border. Our Army and Marines are so overextended, broken and depleted that they can't respond adequately to a serious new international threat, and our National Guard is so overextended and depleted that it might be unable to respond adequately to a serious domestic emergency. The Regime bungled the non-proliferation issue in North Korea, and its mismanagement of the Afghanistant/Pakistan connection means the Pakistani regime, possibly the world's most vulnerable nuclear power, is today more at risk from real terrorists than ever before.

In short, America is in a more vulnerable position than it has been in decades, in a more hostile, anti-American world than we've seen in decades, yet the people who caused that are still in charge and still making decisions that will likely make matters worse. We have a national security crisis on our hands, and we'd better recognize and deal with it quickly and intelligently before the next catastrophe happens.

So here's a message to the respected elders of the Republican Party: The Bush/Cheney regime is destroying the credibility of your party on the very issue that won you the White House. The regime is destroying the Army, the Marines, the National Guard. It has already stained the nation's honor and prestige, its influence in the world and thus undermined the security of our friends and allies throughout the Middle East. On possibly the most serious threat to our security, nuclear proliferation, the regime is recklessly incompetent. This regime has weakened America and they won't stop. You know these charges are true. You know what you need to do. Will you wait until they've destroyed your party? Your country?

I don't know how many grownups are left in the Republican Party. I don't know how much influence they have with a regime as radical, incompetent and dishonest as this one. But surely there must be some responsible Republicans in the Senate and House or former officials who realize the dangers the country faces and understand what a disaster the Bush/Cheney regime has created. If these grownup Republicans are wondering whether it's time for a delegation to visit the White House and deliver the message, "sir, it's time for your Administration to resign, for the good of the country and your party" the answer is, "Yes, it's time."

Related posts:

  1. Liz Cheney Warns Against “Walking Away” from Afghanistan, Apparently Forgetting that Dick Cheney Walked Away from Afghanistan
  2. Silvestre Reyes Announces Investigation into Violations of National Security Act
  3. How Dick Cheney Cowed Obama
  4. Republicans Furious Bush/Cheney Didn’t Win Nobel War Prize
  5. Electrocution Deaths: DOD IG Finds Multiple Failures by KBR, Military