Hey There Georgy Girl

George Tenet, formerly CIA, currently FOS, went on 60 Minutes to say that the Bush Administration, though apparently not Bush himself, made and continues to make too much of his "slam dunk" assessment that Sadie had WMDs.

In the words of a still dead loud-mouthed Texas hag, "Poor George."

The good news so far is that neither side's buying Tenet's pleadings.

Still more good news is the fact that WMDs were never the reason we attacked Iraq, so Tenet's words could hardly be an excuse for the final go ahead, as he claims.

But Tenet is still the fall guy because the idiots on the left, "Lidiots" if you will, continue to think WMDs were the reason, the sole reason, and nothing but the reason we took out Hussein. And why not, after all, they are, first and foremost, idiots.

And THAT'S why people continue to cite Tenet's comment. He said the weapons and materials were there, and he knew more than anyone, case closed.

But the story doesn't end with that, of course. That's because the other George didn't fire Tenet for his enormous mistake. Instead, he gave him the Medal of Freedom. Thus, George Bush took ownership of George Tenet's every failure.

More important, none of this would matter if Bush had waged the war I expected him to wage. If he had, by the end of 2003, Baghdad and perhaps much of the rest of Iraq would lay in rubble, and people would be begging for us to rebuild, retrain, and reshape their new government.

Instead of doing that and handing them a constitution, Bush behaved, as we have come to expect - like a good Lidiot, and today we have the Iraq any lib leader would have crafted had he been forced to invade...

Except that no liberal would have done it, and thus we wouldn't be in the mess we are today. We might be in an even bigger mess, but it would be a different mess to be sure.

In a commentary in the Washington Post countering Tenet's new claims, Michael F. Scheuer, who founded the bin Laden unit of the CIA, displays the sort of attitude so necessary if we are to win this war against Islam:

"I argued for preemptive action. By May 1998, after all, al-Qaeda had hit or helped to hit five U.S. targets, and bin Laden had twice declared war on America. I did not -- and do not -- care about collateral casualties in such situations, as most of the nearby civilians would be the families that bin Laden's men had brought to a war zone."

And I argued long ago that if we are to remain the greatest, most civilized country on Earth, we are going to have to wage swift, ferocious and ruthless war against Islamic fanatics (who are, contrary to what you've been told, perhaps as much as 75% of Muslims, as you will see in a moment).

After I'd first made the above comment, someone asked me how we'd be any different from those who attacked us? I said that when it was over, we'd go back to being civilized, and they'd remain primitive, albeit pacified.

In a column today, Diana West (no relation) puts it a little more tactfully:

Nation-building in a war zone is nuts. Nation-building in an Islamic war zone is suicide. When the United States embarked on its most successful cases of nation-building in Germany and Japan, both countries lay in ruins, their cities and infrastructure devastated, their populations decimated.

These appalling conditions worked wonders toward opening both countries to all manner of Americana... in Japan's case, not just a constitution practically written by Gen. Douglas MacArthur, but also baseball. In other words, Total War was followed by Total Pacification.

In Iraq, we have fought a Limited War for Limited Pacification, which has resulted in a perpetual, if limited, war zone. At about $200 million a day, this war may not sound very "limited"... "Sunni insurgents," "Shiite militias" and assorted thugs and jihadi groups... after a hard day's maiming and killing... go home to safe houses. Now, ask yourself whether, say, a George Patton or a Curtis LeMay would allow them to wake up again.

Such generals would have seen to it that the enemy's home, his neighborhood, his entire town if necessary, was destroyed, doubtless killing innocent (and not innocent) civilians in the process. Total War. It's ugly and barbaric, but it leads to Total Pacification, not to mention Total Victory... Limited War is ugly and barbaric, but it just leads on and on. And where is the moral purity in war unending?

The Limited Warrior struggles for the answer, and comes up with ... Hearts and Minds: The superpower that doesn't want to use its super powers will instead make everyone like it a lot. To that end, Gen. David Petraeus, our top commander in Iraq, has ordered troops out of their well-fortified bases into "outposts" in Iraq's most dangerous enclaves. (One such outpost was recently struck by suicide bombers, killing nine Americans and wounding 20.)... I hate to be the one to break it to Gen. Petraeus, not to mention President Bush, but the fact is, in an Islamic war zone, an "infidel" army just isn't going to win Islamic allegiance.

OK, maybe she wasn't more tactful, but she certainly was more vivid.

Michael Scheuer obviously shares Ms. West's perspective, but he makes the point that Tenet didn't share theirs:

"'You can't kill everyone,' he (Tenet) would say. That's an admirable humanitarian concern in the abstract, but it does nothing to protect the United States. Indeed, thousands of American families would not be mourning today had there been more ferocity and less sentimentality among the Clinton team."

Ms. West has come the closest of any "right & right" columnist I've read to putting the blame where it fully lies - on George Bush, even if she hasn't done it nearly as forcefully as she should. That might be because she's afraid of offending the other idiots - conservatives, who would rather wage an endless war than hold their leader accountable.

As for the enemy, in a recent worldwide survey of various Islamic countries, anywhere from fifty to seventy-five percent of people believe in the strict application of Sharia Law, and two thirds want to see the Muslim world united under one caliphate - a nice sounding word (much like "KristallNacht") that means slavery and death to me and you.

Yet here we are wondering how to deal with Islamic taxi driving jackasses in Minneapolis who don't want to transport passengers with alcohol in their possession, either internally and externally, and blind people with dogs (despite that in an intelligence competition between dog and Muslim, guess who I'd bet on?).

And now were going to put (I can hardly write it) basins in the Kansas City airport for these fools to wash their feet at prayer time. I wouldn't mind it if the basins were a trap and we apprehended everyone who used them and promptly ran them out of the country.

Who ever thought we'd need two new amendments to the Constitution:

28) Separation of Church and Taxi

29) Separation of Church and Toilet

As Lamont Sanford would say, "ARE YOU CRAZY?!?"