No End in Sight

Quote of the day:
“Online input, offered in real time from legions of customers, is beginning to make traditional focus groups seem old-school.”
--AP, yesterday

Statistic of the day:
Average daily number of insurgent attacks in Iraq:
July 2003: 16
May-July 2007: 161
--Brookings Institution

The news right now is that General Petraeus is saying that we should not remove any troops from Iraq until the fall.

USA Today has published a compelling graphic with both individual information and compiled statistics about the 4,000 soldiers killed in Iraq. I highly recommend it.

At the Washington Nationals’ home opener, President Bush was loudly booed from the stands--and it wasn’t just a few cranky loudmouths. We’re talking thousands of people booing the president of the United States.

I’m a fairly respectful person. I know it’s hard to believe, but I am. If any other president in my lifetime had been booed at a baseball game, I would’ve been embarrassed--and I would consider it disrespectful. No matter how I felt about that president’s policies.

I was not embarrassed when Bush was booed, and I was surprised at myself. I never thought I’d lose respect for a president.

This is not because I disagree with the Iraq war or any other policy. It is rather because of the way this presidency has been conducted.

Specifically, this administration has repeatedly neglected or ignored good, reliable information when making decisions. It’s as if the decision is made first, and then information backing it up is cherry-picked from various sources.

If there weren’t such dangerous and deeply tragic consequences from these decisions, this would be merely ridiculous. But this is beyond arrogant. It is blithely, ignorantly cruel and deadly.

This has now been proven time and again, with many different decisions involving many different people. The case began to be made in 2004 in National Security insider Richard Clarke’s excellent book “Against All Odds,” detailing the flawed and ideological thinking after 9/11 that resulted in the Iraq war.

Since then, there has been a steady stream of former administration, military and CIA officials who have spoken of presenting detailed on-the-ground information about a situation to the president, only to have it ignored--sometimes not even read.

The documentary “No End in Sight” presents this very clearly. The film was not made as an anti-Bush polemic. It made very effort to be fair and objective--efforts that were made difficult by the refusal of several senior administration people to even be interviewed.

It is an excellent documentary, but I do have to pass along a warning. When I watched it, I found myself gradually becoming literally enraged watching highly-experienced intelligence and diplomatic people be cavalierly ignored, with the result being nothing but increased chaos, suffering and death.

That is why, for the first time in my life, I can watch thousands of Americans boo the president at a baseball game and not be embarrassed or ashamed.

Instead, I’m embarrassed and ashamed the rest of the time.