PublicChristian

With apologies to you who highly regard Oliver North, I have to say he is one of the least respected people on my list. But now he has done something respectable in a column for Human Events.

Human Events is a publication I do not recommend to you if you are interested in facts or in moral sensibility. But when the guy is right on such an important issue even when he has to oppose the President and his neo-cons – and even if Human Events is the place where he published his remarks – then it’s worth noting. [Thanks to SusanG at kos, and ThinkProgress.org for the links.]

North is talking about what he heard from top American officers and non-commissioned officers on a recent trip to Iraq.

Not one of the soldiers, sailors, airmen, Guardsmen or Marines I interviewed told me that they wanted more U.S. boots on the ground. In fact, nearly all expressed just the opposite …

North is making his point with explicit reference to Senators McCain and Lieberman, who support the escalation that Bush will recommend this week. In fact Lieberman says the same top officers and NCO’s told him just the opposite. (Senator Collins of Maine, who was in most of those same meetings, disagrees with Lieberman’s take.) Those two Senators are encouraging Bush to pursue the escalation that he wants to initiate. But North says that

McCain and Lieberman talked to many of the same officers and senior NCOs I covered for FOX News during my most recent trip to Iraq.

That is, M & L are either misrepresenting what they were told, or they listened very poorly, or North is lying about what he heard, or SOMEthing.

North even makes the uncool comparison to our Vietnam era tragedy.

[Bush's escalation] sounds eerily like Lyndon Johnson’s plan to save Vietnam in the mid 1960s.

And here is his wrap-up.

A “surge” or “targeted increase in U.S. troop strength” or whatever the politicians want to call dispatching more combat troops to Iraq isn’t the answer … Sending more U.S. combat troops is simply sending more targets.

If a guy is thinking a bit independently about such hot political issues, and is willing to go public with what he thinks, maybe he’s not as thoroughly corrupt as I thought. (Or maybe he just sees which way the wind is blowing.)

NEXT AND PRIOR POSTS:
« The Costly Beauty of an Ice Storm

   What Counts Is … »

Trackback URI | Comments RSS