While George Bush Was Playing Macho With Saddam

There must be what, a handful of people here in America, who still believe the line of bull that George Bush laid about the Weapons of Mass Destruction in the hands of Saddam Hussein. Even fewer are looking for the 'mushroom cloud' spoken of by Dick and Condi. What a farce!

That radio jock in Cleveland bought the entire package and is still ranting about WMD's and mushroom clouds to his doltish audience, but the rest of us have moved on. Actually quite a few of us never bought the package at all. Many Americans wondered why, in middle of the Tora Bora mission in Afghanistan, our troops were being deployed to Iraq. Why was that? Did Mr. Bush or Cheney ever fully explain that to us Americans?

Experts tell us that indeed Osama bin Laden was at Tora Bora. Right there. Yet the massive air power of the United States could not blast him into paradise? Something is fishy. A piece of this puzzle seems to be missing. My gut wants to know.

"We're fighting them over there so that we don't have to fight them here!" How many times did you hear that one? But where is 'there?' Afghanistan? or Baghdad? I think back to those videos of the al-Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan, the same guys going over that wall again and again; I must have seen it four dozen times. Training camp, eh? Hardly a good location for what al-Qaeda does best- urban terror. Now if only al-Qaeda could set up a training camp in a large urban area, they would really have fertile ground to fully-train their recruits.

Baghdad comes to mind. A sprawling city of 6 million people with distinct neighborhood settings and many areas of vacant land. An ideal location for terrorist training.

Too bad George Bush never studied military tactics while in the Texas National Guard. Yet his military 'training' trumped Dick Cheney's. Condi Rice's work with Chevron hardly helped the tactical military sessions held in the WH. Then there were the neocons like Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, ideologues who knew what they wanted but had no idea of how to get there.

Today we read of two suicide bombers who killed 14 in Baghdad yesterday and over in Pakistan, 8 tribal leaders opposed to al-Qaeda were slain.

It seems that al-Qaeda is stronger than ever and operating with impunity anywhere it chooses. Tora Bora was the moment. Lost. And now we all are paying the price for the incompetence of George Bush.