It may be that George W. Bush is the King Midas of crap. Everything he touches turns into the stuff. From gas prices to the environment to the world's opinion of the United States, Bush has left pretty much everything much, much worse than he found it. You've really got to wonder if any terrorist could've done as much lasting damage.A big part of the problem is Bush's apparent belief that every damned thing the country has ever done was done incorrectly. In the invasion of Iraq, Bush -- listening to deluded visionary Donald Rumsfeld -- decided that sending an overwhelming force (as Colin Powell had recommended) was the wrong way to go. That had been done to death, apparently. All the cool kids were invading with a light force. Fast and lithe and, above all, cheap.
As a result, US forces rolled into a town, chased off all the insurgents and militias, then rolled off in a triumphant cloud of desert dust. And, of course, as soon as we rolled off, the militias and insurgents would come right back. Worse, ammo dumps and armories were cleared of Iraqi military, then left unprotected. The insurgents then came in and armed themselves with all the rifles and RPGs and mortars. IEDs that still kill people on the roads of Iraq are made from abandoned artillery shells and mortar rounds. In short, the "plan" -- such as it was -- was such a stupid, stupid idea that anyone capable of learning to play checkers should've known it would lead to disaster.
But the non-disastrous way of doing things was the old way. Never mind that the old way worked, never mind that the new way was idiotic beyond words, everything anyone had done before the neocons showed up was wrong, wrong, wrong. Everything had to be rebuilt from the ground up. Like the first Chinese emperor Chin, the neocons believed that history began with them.
So it's no surprise that our treatment of detainees would be entirely retooled. Where the Geneva Conventions were a primary consideration for prisoners, those international laws were now deemed "quaint." It was now a new world, led by great men -- Ubermenschen, really. And these men were so great that anything that wasn't actually their idea was wrong...
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