Faced with substantial opposition both in Congress and among the American public to their Iraq plans, President Bush and Vice President Cheney vowed yesterday to forge ahead with the deployment of more than 21,000 additional troops.
In an interview broadcast last night on CBS's "60 Minutes," Bush said he has the authority as commander in chief to move ahead with the deployment, regardless of what the Democratic-controlled Congress does in opposition.
"In this situation, I do, yeah," Bush said. "I fully understand they could try to stop me from doing it. But I've made my decision. And we're going forward."
National security adviser Stephen J. Hadley said yesterday that the money is already in place to begin moving additional troops to Iraq.
"We have authority in the -- we have money in the '07 budget, which has been appropriated by the Congress, to move these troops to Iraq, and the president will be doing that," he said on ABC's "This Week."
I assume they won't be crawling back to congress with their habitual supplemental budget requests then?
Bush said on "60 Minutes" that the only option besides boosting troop levels would be to withdraw -- a move supported by some Democrats but one he called tantamount to defeat.
"I began to think, well, if failure is not an option and we've got to succeed, how best to do so? And that's how I came up with the plan I did," Bush said.
He 'began to think'? You just know that's dangerous...
"Congress, obviously, has to support the effort through the power of the purse, so they have got a role to play and we certainly recognize that," Cheney said. "But also, you cannot run a war by committee."
Unless it's a committee made of unelected neocons handpicked by Cheney to fulfill disastrous policies.
Meanwhile in Iraq, where the actual war is going on, Maliki's government has sided with Tehran in calling for the release of Iranians scooped up by the US military in a raid in Irbil last week, the Iraqi president was in Syria for talks with al-Assad, Maliki has chosen a top military commander that the US claims to be unfamiliar with, Newsweek reports on 'The Next Jihadists: Iraq's Lost Children', and...well...read this.
What kind of president goes in front of his citizens and the world, admits mistakes have been made in the oversight and planning of a war, lays out his so-called 'new' plan (which is just recycled policy that didn't work) and then tells congress and the American people that he has made his decision and is sticking to it? Again? No matter what? I thought 'stay the course' had already proved to be a huge disaster. But that's the difference between me and Bush I guess. He only claims to think. Millions of us out here actually do. And it doesn't involve thinking about how to make the same mistakes over and over and then doing exactly that.
The chain reaction of evil--wars producing more wars -- must be broken, or we shall be plunged into the dark abyss of annihilation.
~Martin Luther King, Jr.
Related:
60 Minutes interview with Bush
Administration leaving out important details on Iraq
Saddam Half Brother, Ex-Official Hanged
Sunday: 101 Iraqis, 3 GIs Killed; 26 Iraqis, 5 GIs Wounded
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