Tuesday, November 29, 2005

NY Daily News - W deaf to bad news on Iraq

Same old, same old... Incompetent and just plain dumb...

W deaf to bad news on Iraq:

"Bush and his inner circle are so determined to follow their own plan that generals fear saying what's wrong in Iraq - and senior advisers are snubbed if they have bad news.

'I tried to tell' the President about problems in Iraq, one former senior official told the magazine. 'And he couldn't hear it.'

The News quoted another Bush confidant yesterday saying that Team Bush has an 'unyielding belief in the wisdom of what they're doing' in Iraq and elsewhere, and that 'they're talking to people who could help them, but they're not listening.'

New Yorker reporter Seymour Hersh said that Bush is motivated in part by religious fervor and that he believes the war must be judged on a time line of decades, not years. 'He's a utopian, you could say, in a world where maybe he doesn't have all the facts and all the information he needs and isn't able to change,' Hersh said on CNN yesterday.

'I'll tell you, the people that talk to me now are essentially frightened because they're not sure how you get to this guy.'

Hersh said such tunnel vision helps explain why the Bush administration went ballistic when Rep. John Murtha (D-Pa.), a Vietnam War hero, recently declared the war is tanking and it's time to bring the troops home.

"The generals know him and like him," Hersh said. "His message to the White House was much more worrisome than maybe to the average person in the public. [White House officials] know that generals are privately telling him things that they're not saying to them.""

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