Darth Cheney and Chimpy saw 9/11 as an opportunity to invade Iraq.

Giuliani and Kerik saw it as an opportunity to cheat on their wives.

You have to give Kerik a little more credit than that – he saw it as an opportunity to cheat on both his mistresses too.

I’m with Christie – many’s the long talk about Giuliani I had with Steve and he would have ridden this like his own personal pony.

LS @ 100

TB, 97:

Wow. That sounds like Maliki and his crew are secretly arming the civilians in an end run around the US…there was word of that fairly recently when Maliki urged citizens to arm themselves…

Wonder what they are planning.

The US has begun dealing with and giving money and ammunition, the US says they are not arming Sunni groups, to Sunni groups that have been attacking and killing Shiites on a massive scale for years now.

Sounds like the Salvador option.

-GSD

Unannounced, the U.S. has switched sides in the Iraqi civil war. Originally, we were trying to establish an elected government in the 60% Shiite nation and were trying to protect from the 20% Sunni minority and their insurgents. Now we are arming and paying the Sunni, and this past month 73% of our casualties were at the hands of Shiite malitia.

Apparently we’ve given up on democracy and simply want to stay until 1/20/09. And IMHO the Sunnis need us to stay to prevent them from being ethnically cleansed.

Josh Marshall links to a piece about how Bush fu*ked up Afghanistan too, because they ended being so focused on Iraq.

i think this is wrong. atrios has a good post on this:

Opposition to the war in Afghanistan, to the extent that it existed, was premised on the notion that we’d go kill a bunch of people, not help the country afterwards, and ultimately not achieve any strategic goals.

and i think commenter af is exactly right:

But there were other reasons for not wanting to go to war with Afghanistan–reasonable, logical and strategic reasons. The primary one was that it was like trying to hit a fly with a nuclear weapon. It would have been more effective to go after bin Laden and his gang without going to war with a whole country. The bonus was that it would also have saved lives.

Because I think going after bin Laden in a “surgical” way,” if you will, would have been more effective, I am convinced that it was not only the war in Iraq that took our eyes off the ball, it was the war with Afghanistan.

RIP Merv Griffin.

-GSD

‘He won’t be right back’

Buddies Bernie Kerik and Rudy Giuliani both get off on macho-cop-danger-man scenarios in lieu of actually bothering to take such concerns seriously. They are self-centered enough to play games with other people’s lives.

We need to repeat this a thousand, thousand times. Then repeat it again.

That makes sense! Another piece of the puzzle and an explanation why they are constantly and irresponsibly throwing out scary stuff (that is not true). I guess it makes them feel alive.

TB, 97:

Wow. That sounds like Maliki and his crew are secretly arming the civilians in an end run around the US…there was word of that fairly recently when Maliki urged citizens to arm themselves…

Wonder what they are planning.

Despite Bush and Petraeus’ ongoing state of denial, Iraq is in the midst of civil war. Shia forces are certainly willing to let Americans arm their side or fight Sunnis for them but they will still go outside these arrangements to see that they get all the weapons they think they need.

In a lot of ways, this story is unsurprising. The Shia are just doing what they think they need to do to win the civil war whose existence this Administration continues to deny.

UK: Police to use terror laws on Heathrow climate protesters

A Republican victory in 2008 could sink America’s reputation in the world even lower.

By Joe Conason

Aug. 10, 2007 | Even if George W. Bush is the most awful American president in modern times, as many historians believe, and even though he has brought the United States into unprecedented disrepute around the world, as opinion polls indicate, the bombastic tone of the candidates seeking to succeed him from his own party raises a disturbing possibility.

If the next president is a Republican, this truly bad situation could become still worse.

Concerning the Iraq war, of course, there is no discernible difference between the current president and his would-be Republican successors (with the exception of Ron Paul, the libertarian antiwar candidate from Bush’s home state of Texas). The leading GOP contenders have all endorsed the current escalation of U.S. forces. They all share the president’s determination to keep our troops there indefinitely. They all insistently echo Bush by linking the invasion and occupation of Iraq with the attacks of 9/11.
Yet beyond the horrors of Iraq and the excesses of the “war on terror,” for which history will hold him culpable, Bush at least has acknowledged the importance of reaching out to the world’s Muslims (although he tends to reach out too often with bombs and a torture technique known as waterboarding). In his rhetoric, the president usually seeks to distinguish the religion of Islam, which he has honored in the White House on many occasions, from the murderous perversion of that faith. And in his best moments after 9/11, he has defended the rights of Muslim Americans to live here without suffering persecution or prejudice.