Cheney's big talk while the enemy walks

John Kerry released his Foreign Relations Committee report on Bush’s failure to get bin Laden in a timely fashion, just hours before Obama is to announce his plans for getting out of the ongoing Afghanistan debacle. Our Republican friends have screamed ‘politics!’, and they’re right, for once—and about time, too.

I’m constantly amazed by how the Democrats fail to wield the huge weapons handed to them on a platter. Imagine what Limbaugh and Beck would be saying if Obama had been in charge of chasing down OBL in the Tora Bora Mountains in 2001 and let him slip through. The utter incompetence of the Bushites as armchair soldiers should be a broken record with the volume turned up every time we hear more crap about ‘dithering’ or similar demagoguery.

The report outlines how it was precisely the Rumsfeld-Cheney axis that ‘dithered’ about going up the mountains to get the architect of 9/11 or even to close off escape routes into Pakistan with more U.S. troops. It attributes this failure of nerve to their reluctance to commit large numbers of troops that might then get bogged down in a ‘protracted insurgency’. This was the famous Rumsfeld Doctrine that would soon be put to the test in Iraq—with the well-known brilliant results.

In fact, the report makes clear that the White House was already charging top Pentagon brass to forget Afghanistan and cook up the next pretty little war in Mesopotamia and that they didn’t care about anything else—an ironic conclusion considering their non-stop pandering to American outrage over the Twin Tower bombings.

So by failing to finish the job in Afghanistan, Bush and Cheney allowed bin Laden to use his local contacts to escape to Pakistan and fight another day. His main ally, Mullah Omar, now directs one of the greatest military comebacks in modern history with the Taliban reoccupying much of the country.

From the teabagger/Christian fanatic point of view, this is treasonous incompetence, and the Democrats should remind them of exactly that in answering the whiny bullshit they will start spouting tomorrow before the ink is dry on Obama’s plans.