Jim Hightower is a renowned political activist, and editor of "The Hightower Lowdown", a monthly newsletter that had been a pain in George W. Bush's backside ever since Bush assumed office. Toward the very end of 2006, Hightower wrote a column for his progressive readers, entitlted "Our Clueless War Leaders". It was a brutal critique on the absolute ignorance of the Bush administration in regard to its war in Iraq:
"The most basic rule of war is this," wrote Hightower: "Know your enemy.
A major reason that Bush's Iraq war is such a disaster is that the commander-in-chief is clueless about the culture of Islamic people. That's no surprise, since George W. Bush has the intellectual curiosity of a butter bean. But most of the Bushite counterterrorism officials also don't know beans about theie enemy.
Jeff Stein, the national security editor at Congressional Quarterly, has recently been asking a rather fundamental question: 'Do you know the difference between a Sunni and a Shiite?' Since the Sunni-Shiite culture clash is a 1,400-year-old conflict that is now playing out in civil war in Iraq, with our soldiers trapped in the middle, an understanding of this difference is crucial to the war.
The head of the FBI's national security branch agreed that it is important for a man in his position to know the difference....
but he didn't. He could not even tell whether neighboring Iran is Sunni or Shiite - a rather crucial distinction, since the new Iraqi government is forging alliances with Iranian theocrats.
Stein's question stumped Rep. JoAnn Davis, who heads the subcommittee overseeing much of the CIA's work in Islamic countries. 'The Sunni are more radical than the Shia. Or vice-versa,' she said.
Rep. Terry Everett, head of a subcommittee on tactical intelligence, also stumbled. 'I thought it was differences in their religion, different families, or something,' he said. Then he added, 'Now that you've explained it to me, what occurs to me is that it makes what we're doing over there extremely difficult.' Golly, Terry.....really? Shouldn't you have thought about that several hundred thousand lives and $373 billion ago? Sheesh, these people clearly don't know what they're doing!"
Hightower's column exemplified the absolute arrogance and implicit ignorance of the Bush administration. It was as if George W. Bush, brave and courageous bullfighter, had entered the arena without knowing that a crazed, wild bull will charge and attack if you wave a red cape in front of it!
Even Roget's II "The New Thesaurus" didn't have a synonym better than 'stupid' to define the woefully inadequate and - more pathetically - incompetent Bush administration as it stumble-bummed its way through a radical war it failed to even try to understand. Hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars had been pissed away; hundreds of thousands of lives had been lost; hundreds of thousands more victims had been permanently injured, maimed, or disabled; American taxpayers were now trillions of dollars in debt, and the inmates running the insane asylum refused to recognize the reality they had so badly mangled.