Informed Comment : 10/01/2004 – 10/31/2004

Juan Cole truly rocks. This essay details the ample evidence of Bush’s failures at waging any sort of successful war on terrror and ends with the folowing.

The Bush administration thinks the problem is rogue states. But the real problem is radical terrorist groups. Bush has done all too little about the latter. Most of the al-Qaeda officials captured have been taken by the Pakistani military, so that this vital task has actually been outsourced. But where the Pakistani military wants to coddle an al-Qaeda-linked group, like the Army of the Prophet’s Companions, it does, and Bush seems too weak to stop it. Bush and Cheney want now to overthrow Syria and Iran, pushing them into the sort of instability we have seen in Iraq.

If you were a company that brought in terror consultants to work on this problem, and after 3 years you saw the sort of results we saw on Thursday, would you really rehire them?

I wonder about the same thing. Earlier today, I was reading a slate article about who novelists were voting for. Most were planning on voting for Kerry. But of those who were voting for Bush gave reasons that I’ve heard coming out of the mouth’s of more commonplace Bush supporters — that he had a strategy to keep us safe.

This dumbfounds me. Bush’s strategy may be sound, but at this point, its abundanty obvious that even if the strategy is a good one, the exectution is absolutely terrible and shows no signs of getting better. Why would anyone want to give him a chance to make things worse?