Commander in Chief, Chief Executive Officer, POTUS, The President of the United States. Do these terms ring a bell? The President, George W. Bush, got us to where we are. Now he is selecting a "War Czar?"
What a pathetic and absurd decision. Frankly, it makes me sick to my stomach. The President of The United States, hiding behind an anachronism from Russian despotism, to lead us out of the mess of his design. If George W. Bush can't lead us forward then he should resign and get out of the way and let someone else fill the position of, "Commander in Chief." We do not need a war czar. We need a President.
Pentagon General to Be 'War Czar'
By BEN FELLER
The Associated Press Wapo
Tuesday, May 15, 2007; 6:10 PM
WASHINGTON -- President Bush has chosen Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute, the Pentagon's director of operations, to oversee the fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan as a "war czar" after a long search for new leadership, administration officials said Tuesday.
In the newly created position, Lute would serve as an assistant to the president and deputy national security adviser, and would also maintain his military status and rank as a three-star general, according to a Pentagon official.
Jon Soltz, who leads an organization of veterans critical of administration‘s war policy, said there is already a war czar — Bush.
ReplyDelete"The troops are now depending on Lt. Gen. Lute to do something the President wouldn‘t — listen to commanders who are telling him we need more diplomacy, not escalation," said Soltz, an Iraq veteran and chairman of VoteVets.org.
Retired Marine Corps Gen. John J. Sheehan was approached about the job, but declined because he thinks that decision-making in Washington lacks connection to a broader understanding of the region.
War Czar
This is the most despicable act of ass-covering I've ever seen.
ReplyDeleteWhat about a czar for Iran, while we are at it?
ReplyDeleteThe founding fathers called the war czar the "commander-in-chief" but we've got a frat boy and former male cheerleader in charge as the "decider". This is going to give the Donks a great campaign theme: "Obama for War Czar, 2008"
ReplyDeleteCome on guys, it's just another name for ceasar.
ReplyDeleteWhich may be what's in store, for the north american empire.
The people still trust in the legions, and a few Centurians.
That's about it, though.
The rest of the Federal Republic rots with overt corruption. The VA just the latest example. Bureau of Indian Affairs, a cess pool of theft, corruption and misplaced funds.
Diplomacy with whom? Bin Laden? Ahmadinejad? Some street thug? With Reid and Pelosi?
ReplyDeleteThere ain't nobody to talk with and there's nothing to talk about. All that's left is the killing and dying.
And the silly American electorate thinks we can just walk away and be Ok.
Bush is just a bit player in this drama and will be walking off-stage in 19 months. The American people won't follow so why try to lead? Better to let a czar tell the story that bores Americans. But the drama will go on ... forever.
Meanwhile the poor bastards strap on their battle-rattle and patrol the far marches...following ROEs that kill them.
Is there 3 or 4 of our guys captured? DOD says 4 but the media says 3. Hmmm...does America even care anymore?
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteDoes the Iraqi interpretor count as one of us?
ReplyDeleteSome may count him, like the DoD, but the media may not, if he's not one of US. If he is not, they're right, folk here do not care about him.
First it was a War Department
ReplyDeleteThen it was a Department of Defense.
An Army
A Navy
A Marine Corps
A Coast Guard
An Air Force
Then each had a lead dog, a general or admiral.
The Chiefs of Staff
Then A Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
See the way it goes down folks is that as the Commander in Chief, the President gets to outline these things and with some approval from the Congress gets them or not.
He usually gets them
In 1947 big changes occured.
Now like all previous Presidents , the current one desires a certain configuration. He is the Commander in Chief so he should be able to configure his supporting staff to his liking.
There appears to be some angst over this, his appearing as the Commander in Chief and moving the cheese around on you folks. Darn
Why I can remember during Vietnam LBJ would actually be talking to the pilots as they were being catapulted off the carriers. He was damned for that micromanagement and with good reason. He wasn't a military man, but was the Commander in Chief.
I can't recall a Commander in Chief actually shooting guns and fighting in too many of our wars. As Commander in Chief he, like other CEO's seeks out talented people to run with their expertise and provide him with advice.
Seems to me he's very much in charge, ORDERING as he is in his capacity as Commander in Chief another general to do work for HIM, report to HIM since he is the Commander in Chief.
Some of you folks have some very strange ideas about how our government works. I think it really comes from a simple dislike for President Bush. If he were leading a patrol you'd be complaining that wasn't his job...well his job as Commander in Chief is whatever he wants to describe it as.
But get this. Guess who still gives the BIG orders to ALL the Armed Services, Intelligence Agencies, and the entire Executive Branch, including all the various Secretaries of Whatever .... the BIG CHEESE, THE PRESIDENT, THE COMMANDER IN CHIEF ... Yep sure enough he is doing his job. And he's more popular than Congress, ain't that sump'in!
Bush is trying to hand off the public appearance of control of the Counterjihad War to someone who isn't faced by the reflexive toxic hate cloud of the Democrats and their socialist/fascist lapdogs in the media and academia.
ReplyDeleteBut I hate the idea of borrowing the word "Czar" or "Tsar" or "King" or "Emperor" or "Dictator" or "Fuhrer" or "Warlord" or any other word that is symbolic of a totalitarian ruler for any role in the United States. I can't recall which president first appointed a Drug Czar as his right hand in the totalitarian war on drugs, but that no president has publicly renounced this terrible direction for America is a great disappointment to me.
Whit/ Deuce
ReplyDeleteCan we arrange a show of hands to show who's favor of keeping 150,000 in Iraq at a cost of 150 billion a year?
For the record, I'm against. I think 20,000 is more than plenty. And I would keep them in Kurdistan.
Well, here's one fellow that votes For Staying in some form, Mat.
ReplyDeleteA terrorist Disneyland coming up, if we go, he says.
Technically he didn't have to audition generals for this slot. He could have simply choosen a general or admiral and ORDERED them to do the job. He could even have forced that person to remain in the service to do the job.
ReplyDeleteGeorge C. Marshall,
Now I'm bett'n that a good many of you bright fellas and gals out their know that name. And you probably know some things about FDR too. Here try this one on for a Commander in Chief decision..
George Catlett Marshall (1888-1959) was a failed Army man starting in 1902 until 1933 when he came under the protective wings of KGB "Agent 19"( consult recently declassified Venona Papers) Harry Hopkins and Soviet sympathizer Eleanor Roosevelt. In 1933 he was promoted to Colonel. In 1939 he was appointed Chief of Staff and four-star General of the Army over more than 400 hundred more qualified and senior individuals.
It caused quite a stink at the time but FDR's administration was riddled with Soviet agents so whattya gonna do? That was a bad Commander in Chief move.
He's not a real czar, he is-
ReplyDeleteAssistant to the President and Deputy National Security Advisor for Iraq and Afghanistan Policy Implementation.
I don't like czar either, but it is a lot simpler. It seems the press is pushing 'czar'.
Btw, This should be mandatory reading at the Bar:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.d-n-i.net
h/t: Elijah
Well, we've had a Drug Czar, an Energy Czar.
ReplyDeleteYou know I think it was the Fourth Estate that first coined the "Czar" moniker, not any of our Presidents. I don't much like it myself though.
I've always thought that it would be much more American to call the person the Drug Panjandrum, or the Energy Panjandrum.
For the vocabulary challenged..
(Panjandrum)
noun: an important or influential person.
Yep our Iraqi Panjandrum General!
Bob,
ReplyDeleteTo clarify: 150,000 strong?
I stick with my position Mat, I don't know what the hell is the best to do.
ReplyDeleteBob,
ReplyDeleteI know what not to do, and that is spend a trillion dollars on this Maliki.
Now if we take his real title, the one Bob-L gave us and anagram it for a minute leaving out the "of's and the's" we can call him
ReplyDeletePaid Pain As General
or
Aid Pain Sap General
Mətušélaḥ,
ReplyDeleteI'm sitt'n way in the back of the Bar and you might not have seen me raise my hand, but I did.
In fact just the other day I posted an article on how good we were really doing in Iraq and DR and I had a little colloquy and agreed that if we were doing as good as the article said then we should be real close to mov'in way out to redoubt "Suburbia" and just let the Iraqi's get 'er done.
Habu,
ReplyDeleteOk. We're doing good. The oil fields secure. The local militias paid by the oil smuggling revenues. Why the need for 150,000 troops at such a catastrophic cost?
Redoubt City sounds good to me, too. Getting all the way out, like the man said, might mean we'd need to go back in two or three years down the road, and that sounds hard to do.
ReplyDeleteIt rubs me wrong that Republicans, when in power, have to keep expanding bureaucracy. We got TSA, The Homeland Defense, now a war czar to join a drug czar. No agency, no department, no program, no treaty or obligation is ever ended.The answer is always more government. The affect is anyone's guess, but it is never good.
ReplyDeleteWhen we went into Afghanistan, the Northern Alliance controlled about 15% of Afghansitan ( If memory serves me correctly). Karzai rode into Kabul on a motor cycle and we had special forces on donkeys. We used our brains and played from our long suit and routed the Taliban. Sometime later we started to get sloppy. Taking Taliban prisoners from Afghanistan to Cuba being one of the more absurd moves. Whatever we learned in Afghanistan , it never transferred to Iraq.
ReplyDeletePerhaps it was the hubris of the idea that we were going to change the Islamic world instead of backing one Islamic group to achieve our objectives over another Islamic group. There is some historical disconnect between Afghanistan and Iraq. That was then. This is now. We need to ask a few basic questions:
Backing which group in Iraq gives the maximum advantage to the US over another group? Which group dominating provides the US with the most security against the AQ? Answer that question and you have your answer. If there is no answer, you still have your answer. Act accordingly.
So far, the Democratic Congress has been able to enact a mere 26 laws, 12 of which "changed the name of a federal building, post office or national recreation area."
ReplyDeleteBUSH MORE POPULAR THAN CONGRESS 33% TO 26%...George Bush is doing a darn good job
Habu, The person that said."A plague o' both your houses." was dying when he said it.
ReplyDeleteMətušélaḥ
ReplyDeleteHere's the article I mentioned talking about with DR. It's a very good piece and it was produced by a left of center think tank but it uses a good deal of data from many sources.
American Thinker Article
Deuce,
ReplyDeleteCould well be but I rathe think it's just good old American independence and being rebels from the dear old English taxes, through our own travails. I think Americans are the kindest most generous people who have ever lived but I also think that as a people (not the have to be dipolmatic people) we're son hell raising sons of bitches that will knock you silly if you really screw with us. It's the diplomats that are saving the world from our great unwashed handing out a big whup ass.
I read that article. I don't care about Iraqi power distibution. Which side winning brings the greatest avantage to US security?
ReplyDeleteSpending..ain't nobody left in Washington that knows how NOT to spend. Ain't a gnat's difference a'tween the Dems and the Reps except where to spend it.
ReplyDeleteInteresting threads today. thanks for your contribution Habu. pour yourself another one on me. I need some serious rack time.
ReplyDeleteHabu,
ReplyDeleteIt's not about electricity, it's about LAND. Everything else flows from there.
The 4th gen war and counterinsurgency strategists say that the era of successful colonial and neocolonial wars is over. This is a serious error, and where the Islamists have them beat.
That's about all I can think Bush has done, keep the taxes a little lower.
ReplyDeleteAid to the Communist takeover of China. After FDR, Marshall was the man most responsible for giving China to the Communists. Truman sent Marshall on a mission to China November 27, 1945. This mission was "one of the major factors contributing to the Red conquest of that nation" (Kubek, page 323). Marshall had been the person who appointed the American Communist General Stillwell to be Chiang Kai-Shek's Chief of Staff. Marshall favored a coalition government giving Communists power and enforced an embargo against the Nationalists. The net result of Marshall's 15 month mission was summed up in this sober epitaph by General Chennault: "The trend of a gradually stronger central government was reversed and the military balance shifted again in favor of the Chinese Communists" (page 343, How the Far East Was Lost, Dr. Anthony Kubek, 1963). When Marshall went to China the Communists had 300,000 badly equipped troops confined to a small area of China. He left them as 2,000,000 well equipped troops.
ReplyDeleteTruman appointed Marshall Secretary of State 1947-1949. His first order of business was to engineer the firing of anti-Communists like J. Anthony Panuch from the State Department. Communist agents flourished.
On June 5, 1947, at the Harvard Commencement he announced the "Marshall Plan" which was aid to developing countries. At the time this was the primary directive of Stalin to the Communist Party, USA - to get the U.S. to give aid to developing countries. By having Communist agents at the State Department direct the aid, the Soviet Union was able to conserve its resources while achieving all of its objectives. Marshall was Stalin's tool.
A Vitamin a Day May Not Keep Prostate Cancer Away
ReplyDeleteWhat's a person to do when the docs are always disagreeing? Nite.
Mat,
ReplyDeleteI'm not raising my hand. The war was over long ago. We won. We performed our responsibility afterwards and administered until a government could take over. That happened. We need to pull back and setup camp on a long term basis. See Germany/Japan/South Korea. Kurdistan sounds like a good option to me.
Approximate current number of troops in:
Germany - 70k
Japan - 40k
South Korea - 25k
An average of that equals 45k stationed securely in Kurdistan. Sounds like a good starting point to me.
Sam,
ReplyDeleteWe're not facing the Russian or Chinese army in Iraq. What we're facing in Iraq is military costs that completely have escalated out of control.
Habu,
ReplyDeleteThank you for the history lesson.
Really.
Thank you.
Bob,
ReplyDeleteThrow away the multis and just go with D:
"There's compelling evidence from the laboratory that very high doses of activated vitamin D stops cancer cell growth and inhibit and induce cancer cell death," lead researcher Dr. Tom Beer said.
Researchers say D-N-101 enhances the chemotherapy. Those in the study who took the high-dose vitamin D, on average, lived at least eight months longer than those who didn't take it.
In terms of this deadly cancer, that's a significant amount of time.
Cancer Patients
Danger!
ReplyDeleteLow Flying Oxygenated Brain!
Sick Brunstrom parades headless biker
North Wales Police have unveiled photographs of a decapitated biker in its latest anti-speeding campaign.
The image showed the man’s head with his eyes still open lying on a grass verge. In another shot the torso is embedded into a car.
North Wales Police Chief Superintendent Geraint Anwyl said the head was torn off by the force of the impact, he explained:
“His oxygenated brain went flying down the road for 50 metres, before he expired. It's horrific, I’m sure you’ll agree.”
We watch the demise of the GOP, We watch the demise of the USA as we know it, and some still defend GWB.
ReplyDeleteGo Figure.
---
If this passes, Conservatism is officially dead
And not just in the sense that our leaders continue to betray us, even after a stinging rebuke in the 2006 elections, but just by sheer demographics.
It is a pipe dream to think that Hispanics are ever going to be anything other than reliable Democrat voters.
These are not conservative people by any stretch. "Family Values"? The illigetimacy rate of Hispanics is now at 47% and rising fast. A Pew Research poll recently found that even the minority of Hispancs who IDENTIFY themselves as Republicans are very liberal when it comes to the size of government and taxes. In fact, this self-identified Republican minority was found to be MORE liberal on these issues THAN WHITE LIBERALS. And that's the most Conservative of this population!
This is the bunch we're importing in here by the millions with the intention of letting them bring in their entire families to make tens of millions of more? And then to become voters?
And Republicans are going along with this? WHY? Not only is it clearly the wrong thing to do from a fairness/common sense/policy standpoint, it is literally suicide for the entire Republican cause, and will doom this country to be a socialist nation just like the dead states in Europe within one more generation.
Do these "business leaders" who want cheap labor so badly that they'll sell out our country ever just stop and think of the results of these policies? Their business climate will be far less desirable in the socialist state they're helping to create by importing tens of millions of liberal voters from socialist countries to forever change this last best hope of real freedom on earth...
When they are taxed through the roof and regulated into nothing it will be their own fault. They will have not only slit the throat of this country, they will have slit their own throats as well.
Sam ,You are welcome..a bit more illumination. This is only part,see link for remainder.
ReplyDelete80
Dean Acheson, in the summer of 1951, decided that
Russia's participation in the war against Japan was
sought at Yalta because "it was the then military opin-
ion, concurred in by everyone, that The~ reduction of
Japan would have to be brought about by a large-scale
landing on the islands."*85* As anyone might know, that
happened to be specifically General Marshall's opinion,
which was not "concurred in" by General Henry H.
(Hap) Arnold, Admiral Ernest J. King, Admiral Wil-
liam D. Leahy, General Douglas MacArthur, and Ad-
miral Chester W. Nimitz. Dean Acheson likewise
claimed that "at the time these agreements were entered
into at Yalta, we did not know whether we had
atomic bomb or not."*86* Yet, Major General Leslie R.
Groves, the man who knew, shortly before the Yalta
Conference made a special effort to inform the Presi-
den~t that the atomic bomb was a 99 per cent certainty
and would be ready in August, 1945. Had Roosevelt
still been in his pre-Teheran condition of health, he
might, in 1945, have familiarized himself with the back-
ground facts of which Secretary of State Dean Goodwer-
ham Acheson appeared to be ignorant in 1951.
Yalta Sellout,FDR,Geo Marshall&Alger Hiss
Is it time to negotiate with the Taliban?
ReplyDeleteRather than the "War Czar" why not do something radical and promote the guy to Five Star and make him Supreme Commander of American Forces. That would seem like a wartime move.
ReplyDeleteWe're either in a global war that requires a nationwide effort or we are not.
If he's there to deal only with IRQ and AFG, then what the hell is CENTCOM for?
This is more limp-dicking from an Administration that is allowing the media to define it and the news cycle.
Great. Another buffer for the CIC to hide behind. Maybe he'll give us another speech and tell us to buck up and go to the mall. that'll rouse 'em up.
Hell, the Thinker Article Habu linked to sums it up:
Lastly, whenever the President campaigns to gain support for the war and explains the facts to the public, support for the war goes up. He should do much more of this. I am not talking about one or two speeches, I am talking about three and four week campaigns, with speeches made several times a day, across the whole country. A campaign that is as well thought-out, and as vigorously executed as any political campaign for elected office.
Our men and women in Iraq and Afghanistan are putting in 18-hour days, seven days a week, for 15 months. No vacations, no holidays, no weekends off. I think that the President owes them his full effort in doing his part to proclaim the real progress that is being achieved. Vague statements of progress are not sufficient. An information campaign is what is needed. It is time to cowboy up.
If there was a time when W had his mojo, it was when he was proud to call his walk a "swagger" and talk about wanting bin Laden "dead or alive" without worrying what Oprah and the NYTimes thinks.
If I see one more military technogeek general used as the spokesman for the war, I am gonna puke. Watching and listening to them is like watching oatmeal coalesce.
We need a swaggering, frat-boy, cowboy, cheerleader firing the country up and getting the country its backbone again.
Instead you have a guy with a siege mentality hunkered down behind his desk babbling the technogeek line with the occasional soundbyte from Cheney to scare the lefties.
Where is our George S. Patton?
Switching gears...
This whole "czar" thing sickens me to no end. Always has. Maybe it's just semantics, but this is America. We overthrow czars, we don't copy and paste them throughout our executive branch.
If the Secretaries of Energy, Treasury, etc., aren't getting things done, fire their asses and get someone in there who will. We don't need a layer of "czarocracy" to add more ego and bullshit to the process.
Brother,amen.
ReplyDeleteBrother D-Day
ReplyDeleteWe're gonna get'er fixed up.
He won't be the Czar..he'll be the Tsar...no,no
He'll be the
THE GREAT PANJANDRUM POOH-BAH HONCHO GENERALISSIMO
He will carry a Roman Fasces and wear high patent leather boots.
I threw in that last part to make our illegal aliens feel more at home here in their soon to be country.
Roman Fasces
zvzv
ReplyDeleteowijoovien
ReplyDeleteoouiu
ReplyDeleteiub
ReplyDelete