Soapbox

The Magic 8-Ball

They were just guessing???!

George Bush has been saying for months that things in Iraq are looking up. All this past week he has been hitting that theme hard, telling America about schools opening and people returning to jobs, and how they just can’t wait for their first free, democratic elections. Gosh, with all the looking up theyve been doing, Iraq must be pretty teriffic place by now, huh?

The trouble is, no one else thinks things are going well at all. An increasing number of his own military advisors as well as former generals and chiefs of staff have spoken up recently to say that things are, in fact, getting worse in Iraq every day. Journalists who have been in Iraq since the invasion now say they are too frightened to stay any longer. Several leading Republicans, including John McCain and Chuck Hagel have said that they believe the situation is approaching desperate over there. And of course we now know that the President’s own National Intelligence Estimate told him back in July that the best scenario they could envision for Iraq involved a “tenuous security” and at worst the country is headed for civil war.

Well, since George Bush wasn’t impressed by a PDB titled “bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside U.S.”, why should he pay any attention to official concern that his very own baby empire-building experiment was headed towards anarchy? Apparently he didn’t, and doesn’t want us to, either. Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain! Everything is fine! My fellow Americans, freedom is on the march!

Yesterday Bush was asked to comment on this Intelligence report and why it stands in such stark contrast to what he insists is the true situation. Well, said the president, he doesn’t worry too much about that because after all, the CIA was just making a guess about what the future will be in Iraq.

Oh my God. Does the president really think the official reports of his own CIA are just guesses? Does he imagine that they sit around in their offices collecting salaries for playing with a magic 8-ball?? (I suppose this would explain why he ignored the PDB about bin Laden- he figured it was just a guess!( Or is he really so thick that he doesn’t understand the difference between an official estimate and a guess?

Of course not: he knows the difference. Well then, if Bush really believes the CIA is “just guessing” then he needs to grab the agency and shake them til their teeth rattle and get them to do a better job! Lives depend on the work the CIA does! This is a huge failure if the CIA is guessing!

But I belive he knows exactly what that estimate represents, in which case George Bush owes the analysts at the CIA a huge apology for taking all their hard work of gathering and interpreting data and reducing it to “a guess” just to win points in the polls. And he owes the American people an even bigger apology for heaping lie upon lie and insisting that up is down, bad is actually good and danger is safety!

It’s almost phantasmagorical. Bush creates pulse-pounding, imminent threats from vague, 3 year old intelligence chatter and puts men with rifles on the streets of New york, but ignores clear analyses of threat potentials when they’re laying on his desk in bold-face, 24-point font. His policies aren’t national security- they’re election security, nothing more.

A guess?