Dumb Ass...
Posted on 02/12/2007 6:32:33 AM PST by .cnI redruM
For much of America, the 70’s finally ended at Lake Placid, with the US Hockey Team beating the Russians. It ended a way of thinking, geared towards our inevitable decline. People had gotten royally sick of thinking of America as a failed state, the way it was portrayed to us nightly during the entire Presidency of James Earl Carter.
Carter left Washington, the Soviets folded and history marched us forward, even if not all of us wanted to go. However, the nostalgia for the 70’s still seems to color how many of our venerable statesmen in the US Senate view the relationship between the United States and the rest of the world. Senator Christopher Dodd from Connecticut offers us a perfect example.
It seems that Senator Dodd has finally gotten the memorandum that states to Iraqi guerrillas attacking the US forces their. To those of us not too busy running a quixotic campaign for the presidency; this was abundantly clear at least a year before the recent spate of effective attacks against US Army helicopters. It simply wasn’t data that Senator Dodd wanted to acknowledge, until he had his nose rubbed in the dog pile.
Unable to ignore the obvious anymore, he immediately blamed the George W. Bush. It proved easier than actually thinking about the situation. Christopher Dodd went on the morning news with his opinion that the reports from the US military that Iran was arming Iraqi insurgents were troubling. He suspected the reports were being made to give President Bush an issue to use in justification of an attack on Iran.
Christopher Dodd’s glib elision of the fact that 170 American soldiers have died from attacks using these weapons is part and parcel to the thinking of Iranian apologists. People who think we should engage with the Iranians and forge some sort of détente. The supporters of this sort of approach get all misty when Time Magazine points out the
For two weeks worshipers at Friday prayers even stopped chanting "Death to America."
That respite lasted two weeks. Then reality set back in; particularly when the US took down the regime of Saddam Hussein. This was good for Iran, because Saddam Hussein always hated the Iranians on a personal level and willingly worked to their detriment, even when it also damaged him. It was bad for Iran because it put the 1st Cavalry Division about one month away from Tehran and filled the Persian Gulf with US war ships.
Iran’s response to this has been tactically predictable. They have chosen Shiite militia groups to back to the hilt and are engaged in arming them with sophisticated weaponry. The military recently briefed the following.
According to the briefers, it was the use of EFPs by another Iranian-supported group, Lebanon’s Hizbullah, that led American military officials to suspect a possible Iranian link. Hizbullah has used EFPs against the Israeli Army in southern Lebanon repeatedly in the late '90s. In Iraq, they are used by splinter factions of the Shiite Mahdi Army, or "rogue JAM" in military shorthand, which have allegedly been assembling and planting the explosives. The officials also noted that they had been used by the "Shaybani network," a group run by a former commander of the Badr Brigade called Abu Mustafa Shaybani. The intelligence analyst said that Shaybani no longer had links to the Badr Brigade, a rival Shiite group to Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army that has now renamed itself the Badr Organization and has members in the Iraqi Parliament. Shaybani, these officials claimed, is currently in Iran and lives with members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), specifically the Qods Force.
The officials zeroed in on the Qods Force as the "enabler of violence." "[The Qods Force] really report directly to the Supreme Leader," the senior defense analyst said at the briefing. This had led the U.S. military to conclude that the campaign was being orchestrated at "the highest levels of [the] Iranian government."
This would suggest that Iran sees value in killing Americans through proxies in the Iraqi Resistance. It would also suggest that the central authorities in Qods, who truly control Iran’s affairs of state, have authorized and manage this macabre turn of policy. The Army has not rented out its credibility to fight a third simultaneous war for the benefit of Bush-Cheney-Hitlerburton Inc.
The entire manner in which Christopher Dodd has conducted himself smacks of a 1970’s era anti-Vietnam War agitator. He does not care about the truth; he does not care about its meaning. Christopher Dodd looked at this entire episode from one angle; what George W. Bush could use this for.
This smacks of stupid and paranoid fear-mongering. Christopher Dodd reminds me of Frank Burns looking stupid on an episode of MASH. George W. Bush wants to fight The Taliban, The Iraqi Resistance and Iran simultaneously about as much as he wants the US Senate to pass a single-payer healthcare system. Try not at all.
The unfortunate effects of Dodd’s intellectual pratfall will truly be felt if the Iranians push things to the point where we have to engage them in battle. Then he says “I told you so!” and undermines the necessity of the moment with the paranoid, delusional thinking that normally remains the province of Lyndon LaRouche. Christopher Dodd may think he helps the cause of peace. He does not do so by aiding and abetting the covert sabotage of Iraq. He particularly exacerbates world violence, when he inveighs on behalf of a nation that denies the holocaust, seeks nuclear weaponry and promises to wipe Israel of the map.
We had too many of this type of idiot back in the 1970’s. They are not entertaining to see on television now either.
Don Quixote had his head screwed on much straighter than Christopher Dodd...
Dumb Ass...
Uh, I meant Dodd! Not you... ;-)
Do you believe in miracles?
Chris Dodd's father, Thomas Dodd, was instrumental in bringing us the Gun Control Act of 1968. Nice legacy.
The apple isn't rotting very far from the tree then.
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