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Someone on another board complained that I refused to give Bush 'credit' for Saddam's capture, mentioning all the 'blame' I have heaped on his incompetant self over the past nearly-three years. This was my reply:
He gets the credit if he gets the blame. He gets the blame if he gets the credit.
He gets the credit for capturing a 66 year old man in a root cellar, someone who had no army supporting him, no air force, no navy, no general population, no family, no bodyguards;
who lived in a hole in the ground with a rug over it, yet was credited with masterminding deadly and near-daily attacks on the world's greatest military;
a man who was once an ally of his father, and the Republican president before that, who protected him from human rights sanctions, who sold him conventional arms, chemical arms, missiles, helicopters, who protected him from the Kurdish uprising of 1991, who prompted allies to loan him money to make war on Iran (which killed a million people) and then walked away when they sought severe repayment terms from his bankrupted economy; men who likewise walked away when it was obvious he was ready to invade one of those creditors (over potentially legitimate claims of oil theft), because they knew how good war would be for business.
He gets the credit for capturing a worn out dictator. He'll get more credit (from me, anyway) if he promptly turns him over to a legitimate judicial forum - instead keeping him quiet in a US jail, like his father did to Noriega, another former Reagan/Bush ally-miscreant turned military-political triumph. He'll get credit if he allows Iraqi victims to testify at his trial and face him in person. He'll get credit if he shows that the US isn't afraid to let the man have a fair trial before the world.
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But he gets blame for diluting our intelligence community's legitimacy, by cherry-picking the Iraqi manace, pressuring them to produce reports consistent with his policy goals (despite what the facts said);
he gets blame for lying to us about uranium purchases, despite having already been told that the original report was wrong, and the British report was based on the same wrong information;
he gets blame for outing a CIA deep operative for political reasons, dispatching her career (which was tracking WMD, ironically) and possibly dispatching the life of every person she worked with while undercover;
he gets blame for using the terror attacks of 9/11 to pressure the US Congress to grant him power to go to war with more or less no accountability, then blithely informs us and the world after the war that Saddam had nothing to do with 9/11;
he gets blame for pouring more taxpayer money into Iraqi roads, school and hospitals than US ones;
he gets blame for forcing the US to pay for reconstruction efforts our allies will not, because his arrogance turned those allies away;
he gets blame for pulling troops and interpreters out of Afghanistan to search for fictional Iraqi weapons to cover his own political hide, while endangering the US military mission in Afghanistan and the safety of aid workers and civilians there;
he gets blame for characterizing the Iraqi dictator as a threat repeatedly (17 times in his October 2002 speech), yet could not then and cannot now explain how a country with no air force, no significant missile technology, no navy, no nuclear weaponry, evidently no chemical or bio weaponry, a sanction-starved and poorly equipped army and almost one half of his territory under 24/7 military aircraft surveillence by US and British planes is a threat to anyone;
he gets blame for dissing the UN, then insists he spent billions of American dollars and the lives of our soldiers allegedly enforcing its will;
he gets blame for invading a soveriegn nation with no provocation and almost no allies, to install a friendly government, setting a new precedent for American foreign policy which puts us in the company of the Soviet Union, Red China, and North Vietnam;
he gets blame for creating a wedge with allies that have been our friends and trading partners for decades, or centuries;
he gets blame for talking of sacrifice, yet doesn't attend a single funeral for the military who gave their lives for his little adventure;
he gets blame for allowing his vice-president's old employer (who still pays him, btw) free hand to rape the American taxpayer with no-bid contracts, then protects them from competition from other countries, and never once addresses whether the Iraqis themselves get to decide who stomps into their country;
he gets blame for dissolving Iraqi ministries, police and military, putting people out of work because of Baathist affiliation, then can't understand why they riot when their families go hungry;
he gets blame for lying to us, lying to the UN, lying to Congress, lying to the Iraqis, lying to the world...
...and all of it to help us forget how he failed to protect us on 9/11/2001.
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