Who Knows Best?
President Bush and Republican congressmen seem to be talking a lot about the Democrats not having a plan for Iraq. It seems a strange issue for them to bring up because if what is going on in Iraq is the Republican idea of a plan, then just having a plan doesn’t seem to be much of an advantage.
The President keeps saying that we have to “win the war�, or “finish the job� in Iraq, but when asked to define what that means, he starts talking about the terrorists coming to America if we don’t defeat them in Iraq. That is not an answer; that is a distraction.
It seems as if the idea is to side track us into fear of the consequences of not “staying until the job is done� so we will forget that no one seems to have a clear idea of what it means to have the job done. And if we don’t know what “job done� means, then how do we know when we’ve achieved it? Puts me in mind of the President’s idea of “Mission Accomplished� and how different it was from mine.
Perhaps the Democrats don’t have a plan but the Republicans have been in charge for 5 years and so far things have gone from bad to worse so if they are an example of having a plan then maybe not having a plan is a good thing.
It is amazing to hear so many people - the President, congressmen from both parties, news commentators, and just ordinary people - speak so authoritatively about what should or should not be done in Iraq. The situation is so chaotic, the factions involved so divided, the culture so different from ours, that it seems the height of arrogance for anyone to think he has the answer. Surely such overconfidence in one’s own wisdom stands in the way of finding the real solutions.
The President claims he is guided by God but I see little that is God-like in the results of his decisions: so many men, women, and children killed and maimed in our military and the civilian population of Iraq; a destroyed country that has lost most of its infrastructure, and is unable to offer its people even the basics of a civilized, safe life. This does not look like God’s work to me.
Perhaps we need to borrow a page from the medical field and require that, when they take office, all elected officials take an oath to “first do no harm.�