Segmentation Fault: Core dumped..;-)

If you don’t read Thomas Friedman’s articles, start reading them today!

Posted : October 21, 2004 at 12:23 pm [America/Los_Angeles]

President Bush has a different problem. The threshold test that Mr. Bush had to pass was: “Does this man understand that we are on the wrong track?” Even though the situation is still salvageable, right now Iraq is a terrible mess because of the criminal incompetence of the Bush national security team, and we are more alone in the world than ever.

Conservatives profess to care deeply about the outcome in Iraq, but they sat silently for the last year as the situation there steadily deteriorated. Then they participated in a shameful effort to refocus the country’s attention on what John Kerry did on the rivers of Vietnam 30 years ago, not on what George Bush and his team are doing on the rivers of Babylon today, where some 140,000 American lives are on the line. Is this what it means to be a conservative today?

Had conservatives spoken up loudly a year ago and said what both of Mr. Bush’s senior Iraq envoys, Jay Garner and Paul Bremer, have now said (and what many of us who believed in the importance of Iraq were saying) - that we never had enough troops to control Iraq’s borders, keep the terrorists out, prevent looting and establish authority - the president might have changed course. Instead, they served as a Greek chorus, applauding Mr. Bush’s missteps and mocking anyone who challenged them.

Conservatives have failed their own test of patriotism. In the end, it has been more important for them to defeat liberals than to get Iraq right. Had Democrats been running this war with the incompetence of Donald Rumsfeld & Friends, conservatives would have demanded their heads a year ago - and gotten them.

Did the president, in the debates, answer these concerns? He barely tried. His strategy is to focus all his energy on fanning doubts about whether Mr. Kerry understands that we have real enemies, so voters will not focus on how much we are on the wrong track - with virtually no friends in the world and an Iraq that is now so insecure our own soldiers are afraid to drive certain roads.

In British politics there used to be a standard test for candidates for prime minister: Would you want to go on a tiger hunt with this person? That is, would this candidate kill the tiger or try to reason with the tiger? Graham Allison, the Harvard international relations professor who just published a book called “Nuclear Terrorism: The Ultimate Preventable Catastrophe,” said to me the other day that the tiger hunt is even more relevant in America today.

“The big question about Kerry is, Will he pull the trigger?” Mr. Allison said. “And the big question about Bush is, Can he aim? With Bush, we know he can pull the trigger, but it’s like he shot himself in the foot - and the tiger is still out there. It’s the tiger who needs to be shot, not us.”

NYTimes: Hunting the Tiger

Bravo! If you like this article, try reading this or browse the archives of his Op-Ed pieces.

Personally, I just luv the “way” he writes and the fact that he hardly ever uses “flowery” English words. Simple, yet very effective. And it sure does not hurt that he actually looks (especially his nose and moustache) a lot like my elder brother

- Anand

Category: United (or not) State of American Politics 2004