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Gates pulls same tricks?
Doc
Registered User, ClubPA regular
Registered User, ClubPA regular
http://www.cnn.com/2006/WORLD/meast/12/21/iraq.troops.ap/index.html
Does the whole thing seem incredibly staged to anyone else? It seems that nobody brought up actual concerns, and just agreed with whatever Bush policy is currently being pushed.
Does the whole thing seem incredibly staged to anyone else? It seems that nobody brought up actual concerns, and just agreed with whatever Bush policy is currently being pushed.
Doc on
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Not only is it almost certainly staged, it's also irrelevant. I mean, it's admirable that soldiers take their jobs seriously enough that they want to "succeed" at a doomed venture, but
1) They're not exactly in a great place to provide perspective for larger policymaking
and
2) being asked by the President's guys in front of news cameras hardly puts them in a position to advance alternatives.
Honestly, I think the president is asking for more troops in the hopes that Congress will say "no." Then, when the war fails, he can say "if only Congress had given me more troops, we would have won."
Also, Gates is proving to be a huge disappointment.
It wasn't Rumsfeld by himself. Other people signed on to the PNAC too, but he was definitely a proponent of unnecessary war. He just wasn't the only proponent.
The prez says he wants Gates to attend a pow-wow with the soldiers to find out what's "really" going on and notifies key personnell at the top of the chain of command.
These Generals/Colonels/Majors/Captains/Lieutenants (in that order) are all extremely career-minded and don't want to look foolish, so they put out a mandate to the lower echelons to pick out the "most squared away soldiers" for said pow-wow.
Generally speaking, anybody who's considered to be extremely "squared away" is someone who actually believes in what the military's doing. While that's not bad in itself, it means that the other 80% of the soldiers don't get to voice their opinions because they only gave a voice to the "teacher's pet" soldier, so to speak.
We all saw what happened when the soldiers drilled Rumsfeld about the insufficient gear and they'll be goddamned if they're going to let that happen again.
It was a photo op. Plain and simple.