reality-based educator

The following two grafs from David Sanger's NY Times article about the newly declassified portions of the National Intelligence Estimate memo ought to be made into Democratic campaign commercials and played in districts and states all acorss this land:

WASHINGTON, Sept. 26 — Three years ago, Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld wrote a memo to his colleagues in the Pentagon posing a critical question in the “long war’’ against terrorism: Is Washington’s strategy successfully killing or capturing terrorists faster than new enemies are being created?

Until Tuesday, the government had not publicly issued an authoritative answer. But the newly declassified National Intelligence Estimate on terrorism does exactly that, and it concludes that the administration has failed the Rumsfeld test.

Everybody got that now? We are creating terrorists and sympathy for terrorism within the Muslim world faster than we are killing or capturing terrorists:

The intelligence report bears none of Mr. Bush’s long-range optimism. Rather it dwells on Mr. Rumsfeld’s darker question, which he put cheekily as, “Is our current situation such that ‘the harder we work, the behinder we get?’ ”

Tuesday’s declassified report asked a more subtle version of that question. It notes that while democratization might “begin to slow the spread’’ of extremism, the “destabilizing transitions’’ caused by political change “will create new opportunities for jihadists to exploit.’’

And while Mr. Bush talks often of transforming the Middle East, the report speaks of the “vulnerabilities’’ created by the fact that “anti-U.S. and antiglobalization sentiment is on the rise and fueling other radical ideologies.’’

The result, it said, was that other groups around the world are radicalizing “more quickly, more widely and more anonymously in the Internet age.’’

In short, it describes a jihadist movement that, for now, is simply outpacing Mr. Bush’s counterattacks.

“I guess the overall conclusion that you get from it is that we don’t have enough bullets given all the enemies we are creating,’’ said Bruce Hoffman, a professor of security studies at Georgetown University.

And we are creating enemies because the Bush administration has decided that the only tool it has in its War on Terror toolbelt is military force and intimidation.

Ask yourself where the country would be today if the Bush administration had finished the mission in Afghanistan, an invasion for which we had world-wide support, and completely eradicated the Taliban and dismantled the Al Qaeda terrorist network instead of invading Iraq and taking down Saddam on the false pretense that he had weapons of mass destruction that he was about to unleash on the United States and was partly responsible for the 9/11 attacks.

Just imagine.

Instead, we have an Afghanistan rapidly being retaken by the Taliban and an Iraq that has slid into a low-level civil war and United States that has stretched itself militarily, politically and financially to accomplish these two failed missions.

And don't forget, we're about to start a third in Iran.

It's a mess and instead of truth and facts we get spin and optimistic bullshit from the boy king and his merry band of public relations boys and girls.

About all these stupid fuckers can do is spin stuff.

Thankfully, the spin is starting to lose its effectiveness as the gravity of the situations in both Iraq and Afghanistan become too clear for all but the most ardent Bush apologist to ignore.