Great Game

by digby

I will once again second Duncan’s prediction that Bush will not be leaving Iraq before his term ends no matter how many ponies Bob Novak sees galloping around the halls of congress.

Here’s Cheney again:

“I think if we were to do what Speaker Pelosi and Congressman Murtha are suggesting, all we will do is validate the al-Qaida strategy. The al-Qaida strategy is to break the will of the American people … try to persuade us to throw in the towel and come home, and then they win because we quit.”

It doesn’t get much clearer than that. Furthermore, Iraq and even iran aren’t the only things they are thinking about. There’s this nugget from Tony Blankley:

MR. BLANKLEY: American military involvement started in Iraq 16 years ago, in 1991. We’ve had troops or airplanes and their crews there since then. They’re going to be there for another 20 years. We can’t get a powder out of that part of the world.

MS. CLIFT: Not in combat for 20 years.

MR. BLANKLEY: And there will be combat going on for many years to come.

[…]

MR. BLANKLEY: But the fact is that when the oil is challenged in the Saudi oil fields and the Straits of Hormuz are closed, we’ll be fighting, even by your definition …

This is only tangentially about terrorism, which is no surprise. 9/11 was an opportunity for the PNAC crowd to play their Great Game over resources and domination. They are not going to stop playing it and I suspect that a Democratic administration will be stuck carrying it on to some degree now whether we like it or not. The Republicans have done a fine job of messing things up so completely that it’s going to be very, very difficult to extricate ourselves from it. The most we can hope for is that we find someone sane, competent and at least slightly visionary to manage this historic miscalculation and convince the rest of the world that we have not gone completely off the rails.

To that end, I recommend this site today, sponsored by Wes Clark and VoteVets called StopIranWar. If you have a few minutes, please sign the petition. I don’t know if we can stop crazy Cheney from doing it anyway, but we have to try.

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