Glass Maze Every jumbled pile of person

Reality-Building

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates isn’t happy with whoever leaked the story about troop deployment extensions. Premature, he says:

Some very thoughtless person in this building made the unilateral decision [Tuesday] to deny the Army the opportunity to notify unit commanders who could then talk to their troops 48 hours before we made a public announcement. And I can’t tell you how angry it makes many of us that one individual would create potentially so much hardship not only for our servicemen and -women, but their families, by letting them read about something like this in the newspapers.”

You know what else creates hardship for the servicemen and -women and their families? Having to stay in Iraq for three more months.

Seriously, it’s statements like this that cement the Bushites’ position as the worst administration ever. I think they seriously believe that the tragedy here is not the fact of the extension but the mishandling of its announcement. They’ve moved beyond cause and effect into some sort of postmodernist twilight zone where reality consists entirely of what you say — and, even more, of how you say it.

Wait, Bush didn’t know about this in advance?

Must not have been one of the interesting briefing reports…

Bastards. No, make that rat bastards. There are so many things wrong with the whole Iraq debacle, that it’s hard to know where to start. I’ll just content myself with the subject of the Regular Army, of which I was a proud member during Vietnam. Without going into THAT subject, I’ll venture the comment that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and now, Gates, have taken a fine instrument and are reducing it to tatters in a vicious occupation fight with no end in sight. BTW, I define “tatters” as dead and maimed boys and girls, and worn out military units, mauled and demoralized in a fight not of their making, but one in which they are definitely alone, unfortunately…..