Henry Kissinger has a very long piece on the op ed page of today's Washington Post. Oddly, it is not posted in the online version of the paper. He probably has some kind of copyright control, or something. His general point is that things are so bad in Iraq that the international community cannot afford to ignore it. So, the U.S. should call - and lead - an international meeting to try to solve the problem. In other words, Bush has made such a mess of things that we should essentially blackmail the rest of the world to try to get us out of the mess. I'm sure the world community will respond well.
But here's the quote that galls me:
"A democratic public eventually holds its leaders responsible for bring about disasters, even if the decisions that caused the disaster reflected the public's preferences of the moment."
Unbelievable. Bush and Cheney tell the American public that Hussein has weapons of mass destruction and was complicit in 9/11. In fact, we are warned that the "smoking gun could turn into a mushroom cloud. Then, having ginned up this war fever by suggesting we are directly threatened by Hussein, they demand a vote in Congress right before an election, suggesting that to vote no on this war would be to put the American public at risk of annihalation.
And, now, when the truth is known about their, at best, reckless disregard for the truth in the rush to war, we are supposed to have sympathy for Bush being the victim of a fickle American public. Poor Bush, he is being held responsible for a misguided public that forced him to go to war.
Boo hoo.
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