The Return of the One-And-Only Donald Kaul
MinutemanMedia
He’s
b-a-a-a-c-c-k….and you can find him at MinutemanMedia.Org – our
old friend, the world’s most under-rated columnist and RAGBRAI
co-founding father, O.T. (Over the Coffee) Donald Kaul…..Enjoy.
DEC 22, 2004
by Donald Kaul
Who says
there’s no good news anymore? The news lately may not have been
thrillingly good but a lot of it’s been very funny, which is the next
best thing. For example:
Medals – [Bush] gave the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest
national honor that doesn’t involve getting shot at, to three
architects of the current war in Iraq, George Tenet, former director of
the CIA; Paul Bremer, former civilian administrator of the occupation
of Iraq, and Gen. Tommy Franks, the overall commander of the invasion.
Tenet,
you’ll remember, is the guy who said that finding Weapons of Mass
Destruction in Iraq would be a “slam dunk;” Bremer the chap who
disbanded the Iraqi army, leaving no effective local forces to keep
order, and Franks the fellow who, though he argued privately for more
troops, publicly supported the disastrous decision to try and run the
occupation on the cheap with as few troops as possible.
You know
who didn’t get medals? The people in the intelligence community who
were right on WMDs, right on the need for keeping Iraq forces intact
and right on the need for more troops.
Proving
again the truth of the maxim: “There is no greater sin a bureaucrat can
commit than to be right when his superiors are wrong.” Incompetent,
laziness, bad judgment – all that can be forgiven. A failure to go
along with the program, never.
I hope Tenet, Bremer and Franks enjoy their medals; they earned them.
Deception
– Word comes via The New York Times that the Defense Department (and
they really should change the name back to “War Department,” don’t you
think?) is considering “manipulating” information it dispenses with an
eye toward influencing opinion abroad. There’s a technical term for
that, of course: “lying.”
Opponents
within the government argue the plan would risk shattering the
Pentagon’s credibility and might make folks skeptical of everything the
military says.
I feel
safe in saying that the Bush administration should stop worrying about
damaging its credibility overseas. It doesn’t have any.
Europeans,
Middles Easterners and Asians are far more cynical than Americans. They
don’t believe governments tell the truth, ever. It is only Americans
who swallow what their politicians tell them.
In any
case, what credibility the United States did have was shredded when
Secretary of State Colin Powell went before the United Nations with
badly forged documents to argue that invading Iraq was necessary
because Saddam had (the still-missing) Weapons of Mass Destruction.
So go
ahead and lie if you want to, people, you won’t be fooling anyone but
American voters, and only 51 percent of them at that.
Donald
Kaul recently retired as Washington columnist for the Des Moines
Register. He has covered the foolishness in our nation’s capital for 29
years, winning a number of modestly coveted awards along the way.
E-mail Donald Kaul.
(click here to read the entire column).
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