27 more people who "hate America"

If anyone who questions the actions and policies of the Bush administration is someone who "hates America", then we'd better add these 27 four-star Generals and diplomats to that list (including Adm. William J. Crowe Jr., Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Reagan).

Choice quote from their statement: "Never in the 2 1/4 centuries of our history has the United States been so isolated among the nations, so broadly feared and distrusted."

Also mentioned in that article is the fact that the 911 Panel announced that they could find "no credible evidence" for any cooperation between Sadaam Hussein and Al Qaeda. In fact, Hussein rebuffed or ignored Al Qaeda's offers of partnership. No suprise, since for all his brutality, he led a secular state, and they are a bunch of fundamentalist nutjobs who denounced his regime whenever they took a break from calling for jihad against their "Great Satan".

This means that *both* of the stated justifications for our invasion (that Sadaam had WMD, and that he was actively partnered with Al Qaeda) have now been shown to be flatly untrue. Our country has perpetrated an unnecessary war against another sovereign state, and it was all based on a series of exaggerations and lies. We have committed violence, not only against the Hussein regime, but increasingly, against the innocent (and increasingly outraged) Iraqi people. We have no credible exit strategy. The deadline for handing power over to an Iraqi government looms ominously near, yet no viable potential leader has emerged (no suprise, given all of our clumsy attempts to subvert that process). The hawks thought Iraq would be a cake walk; they could not have been more wrong. Every week, more coffins return from Iraq, filled with the corpses of our soldiers (and of course, anyone who dares to publish pictures showing this real cost of the war also "hates America"). Meanwhile, far from making us safer from international terrorists, our little adventure in Iraq is distilling hatred for us all over the mideast and elsewhere into an extremely volatile cocktail just waiting to blow up in our faces.

Time to wake up. Al Gore is mad as hell. Are you?