Sunday, April 30, 2006

I just know that nobody speaks in polite company in that way


So Colin Powell suddenly remembers having suggested that more troops were needed to occupy Iraq. On “Face the Nation” (pdf), Condi (in remarkably bad form even for her) claimed she can’t remember what Powell had said, “but I do know that if there were questions about troop levels, they were, of course, raised.” And “The number of troops on the ground was there to execute the plan.” Evidently the plan was that we would defeat the Iraqi military and then immediately start relying on it to run security during our occupation: “Well, I--I--but if you look at what happened in the immediate aftermath of the war, the Iraqi Army in effect kind of disintegrated.” See, the Iraqi Army failed to hold up its part of The Plan. And yes, we were the ones who ordered the Iraqi army disbanded, she admits when Shieffer brings it up, but it had already “melted into nothing”. And unfortunately we weren’t the only ones with a Baldrickian cunning plan: “Secondarily, there was systematic looting that obviously had been planned, really, where it was not really the number of forces on the ground, it was the--the systematic looting that took place.” But, like the Flight 93 movie, it’s just too soon to be talking about this, why there’ll be plenty of time after the heat death of the universe: “As I’ve said many times, Bob, there will be time to go back and look at those days of the war and after the war to examine what went right and what went wrong.”

Addressing the number one topic of the week, she refuses to condemn or to support or indeed to express any coherent opinion on the Spanish version of the National Anthem.

On CNN (she was interviewed everywhere today, as was George Clooney; they must have kept bumping into each other; wonder what they said?), Blitzer asked if Iranian President Ahmadinejad is a psychopath. She refused to offer a diagnosis, but said “I just know that nobody speaks in polite company in that way.” That put him in his place.

Gen. Rick Lynch, Military Moron, disputes the claim that many people have been forced out of their homes in Iraq: “We see reports of tens of thousands of families displaced here in Iraq, and we chase down each and every one of those reports. But we have seen some displacement, pockets of families moving, but not in large numbers.” They chase down each and every one of tens of thousands of reports? Man, are you sure there are enough troops?

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