Maybe it’s the envoys

July 22, 2005

When Bush delivered his June 28 speech on Iraq and the war on terrorism, one interested observer watched in disgust, knowing full well that the president wasn’t telling the nation the truth.

The problem, at least from the White House’s perspective, is that observer was Bush’s hand-picked envoy to Afghanistan after we invaded the country in 2001.

“I was horrified by the president’s last speech on the war on terror [on June 28] — so much unsaid, so much disingenuous, so many half-truths,” James Dobbins told me. Dobbins was Bush’s first envoy to Afghanistan and is now director of international programs at the Rand Corp., a defense think tank.

Dobbins has been what conservatives might call a “disgruntled former employee” for quite a while. He’s noted, for example, the president’s failure to follow through on his commitments to Afghanistan, arguing, “Afghanistan remains the least-resourced nation-building exercise in the last 60 years.”

But Dobbins’ response to his former boss’ recent claims is fairly devastating. Here we have the man Bush asked to oversee development in Afghanistan coming back and telling the nation that the White House is being “disingenuous” and intentionally trying deceive. When a Dem partisan says that, it’s immediately dismissed. When Bush’s former envoy to Afghanistan says it, the charges deserve more attention.

It reminds me a bit of Retired Marine Gen. Anthony Zinni, former commander of the U.S. Central Command, who served as Bush’s hand-picked special envoy to the Middle East up until 2003. Describing his impression of the president’s policies in Iraq, Zinni said he saw “at a minimum, true dereliction, negligence and irresponsibility, at worse, lying, incompetence and corruption.”

What does this tell us? If you’re a Republican, you see the need for the White House to choose better special envoys who will ignore reality and toe the party line. If you’re with the reality-based community, you see a White House with a misguided approach to foreign policy. Take your pick.

If you’re a Republican, you see the need for the White House to choose better special envoys who will ignore reality and toe the party line. If you’re with the reality-based community, you see a White House with a misguided approach to foreign policy. Take your pick.

I’m going with door #2.

  • “If you’re a Republican an extremist neo-con artist hack or the willfully deceived, you see the need for the White House to choose better special envoys who will ignore reality and toe the party line.â€?

    Republicans aren’t bad, the people in charge are. We need a bunch of these Republican guys and gals to vote blue if you want to see this country moving forward. Was Gore an acceptable choice? Kerry? I guess, with hindsight, seeing what a pack of liars Bu$hCo is. But not at the time, when Bush seemed so direct. I mean, they chose an idiot, knowing he was an idiot, because Dems can’t put a guy with a pulse out there and get aggressive.

    I can’t blame people for picking the wrong bad candidate (OK, maybe I can in ’04).

  • Eadie, Gore WAS an acceptable choice until the inside-the-beltway punditocracy decided that he was unworthy of their imprimatur. If you haven’t yet, search the Daily Howler archives on this topic, and you will have as much rage at the media idiots that I do for what they almost single-handedly cost us when the SCOTUS was put in the position of being able to coronate Bush. Was Gore a stiff? Maybe, but we got the caricature from the pundits, starting with how they focused on his sighs — not his substance — in the first debate rather than on Bush’s lies and his nonsensical answers. Sort of like the media warm-up for the “Dean Scream” that shot down Dean’s candidacy four years later in 2004.

    Also, the vast majority of those who support Bush, his base — and it is still anywhere from 1/3 to 2/5 of the American people — ARE Republicans, and yes, they are bad. They have tuned out reality, as we like to joke about here and elsewhere on progressive blogs, but it is the truth. They enable the bad Rethug leaders to get a way with their hubris and lack of accountability over the shenanigans that passes for the Rethug agenda today.

    Blame it on scandal fatigue that came with the Clinton presidency. Many people simply tuned out of politics, and paint ALL politicians with the same brush. But we here at The Cappetbagger Report know otherwise. And the scandal fatigue? That can almost single handedly be blamed on the same inside-the-beltway punditocracy, who for some reason took Clinton’s indiscretion with Monica personally — which, if you think about it, may explain why they are finally going after Rove, because they were lied to by McLellan and the gang. The pundits didn’t give a damn about national security, about the lies to go to war and all of the deaths and mayhem that resulted. But lie to the media — not to America, TO THEM — and make them look bad, THEN AND ONLY THEN they finally get angry and act like professionals.

    So, read the Daily Howler, read some in-depth analysis of the media hacks, and how they function in THEIR best interests, not for America’s best interests. Is it any wonder that we have no respect for them? They have let BushCo get away with lies, incompetence, distortion, dishonesty, and corruption FOR FIVE F**KING YEARS with barely a whimper of protest; they could hardly have cared less that Americans were being duped and harmed, since the media got to be embedded as war cheerleaders. Why did they wake up? Because the lies finally hit them where THEY live; ONLY THEN did they start to notice what the hell was going on.

    I submit that Kerry and Gore were ineffective; the media made them “incompetent” in the eyes of the American public. You’ll never convice me otherwise.

  • In the end, what difference does it make what those special envoys say if the public won’t listen? Most Americans supported the war in Afghanistan but how many of them bother to ask what they got for their money? Why don’t Americans demand an explanation from Bush as to why Afghanistan continues to supply most of the world’s supply of heroin? Terrorism 101 – drug money can be used to finance terrorism. We spend billions on the DEA to do what, count poppy fields?

    In its stampede to nail the Bush administration for outing one CIA operative, the left of late seems determined to portraying the entire CIA as made up of heros with the noblest of intentions. Could we stop for a minute and remember that the CIA is responsible for the mess in Afghanistan in the first place? Maybe we should be asking what the hell the CIA is doing in Afghanistan these days.

    As far as asking what we got for our money in Afghanistan, I would like to hear from some of those terrorists that we caught, especially Khalid Shaikh Mohammed. The 9/11 Commission relied heavily on what he purportedly told the CIA or whoever interrogated him yet the commission was not allowed to interview him or even interview his interrogators. We’ve been robbed, folks!

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