The following article in the AP entitled “Bush Marks Anniversary, Never Says ‘War’ ” really had me going. It seems to try and fight back at his claims that the media “exaggerates” what is happening in Iraq he will try and sugar coat it:

President Bush marked the anniversary of the Iraq war Sunday by touting the efforts to build democracy there and avoiding any mention of the daily violence that rages three years after he ordered an invasion.

The president didn’t utter the word “war.”

“We are implementing a strategy that will lead to victory in Iraq,” the president assured a public that is increasingly skeptical that he has a plan to end the fighting after the deaths of more than 2,300 U.S. troops.

Pretty funny how we are implementing a strategy three years after the invasion started. A more correct response would be “we are righting the wrongs we have made to help make Iraq more secure”. We keep hearing about this “plan”. We even had a publication put out by the White House of their “plan”. The problem is this “plan” appears to be the same thing we have been doing.

Something else in this same article that really struck my eye was a statement by Rumsfeld:

“Now is the time for resolve, not retreat,” Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld wrote in a column for The Washington Post. “Turning our backs on postwar Iraq today would be the modern equivalent of handing postwar Germany back to the Nazis.”

Amazing how they get so defensive when someone compares our military prisons to gulags or Bush to Hitler yet they can easily make Nazi analogies. That’s not what really got to me though. What really got the old wheels turning was trying to remember when another nation invaded Germany and opened it up to the Nazis. Suddenly I remembered – that is not the way it went.

Iraq was not a haven for terrorists prior to 2003. No matter how evil of a person Saddam was (and he was), he did not have terrorists in his country. Most of the Arab world could not stand what Saddam was and there for would not even associate with him. There are terrorists in Iraq now because the United States came in, without a plan, and opened it up to our number one enemies.

If you still think that there was some big plan for dealing with Iraq then look at what General Pace said on Meet the Press this morning:

Yet there were acknowledgments from the top commander of U.S. forces in Iraq that the situation is fragile and that he did not predict the strength of the insurgency.

“I did not think it would be as robust as it has been,” Gen. George W. Casey said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “And it’s something that, obviously, with my time here on the ground, my thinking on that has gained much greater clarity and insight.”

Donald Rumsfeld even admitted on MTP last year that they did not plan for an insurgency. Insurgencies are something that goes hand in hand with war and not planning for it is like not planning for casualties.

We are getting more proof that people like General Shinseki were right. These people, who tried to give a professional and accurate assesment of what the war would be, were pushed out instead of listened too. If someone did not say something that was out of the original PNAC plan then they found themselves out of a job. This was done at the price of over 2,300 soldiers. It has also resulted in the near bankruptcy of our own country.

It amazes me that there are still people who can stand behind this administration and think they know what they are doing. I guess everything seems better inside that plastic bubble.