The Inside Story of How Bush's Team Dealt With Its Failing Iraq Strategy

Is the what you really want repeated if you plan to vote for McCain? He was part of the group telling Americans to shut up and just support the troops when all this was happening to them.

Doubt, Distrust, Delay
The Inside Story of How Bush's Team Dealt With Its Failing Iraq Strategy
By Bob Woodward
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, September 7, 2008; Page A01

During the summer of 2006, from her office adjacent to the White House, deputy national security adviser Meghan O'Sullivan sent President Bush a daily top secret report cataloging the escalating bloodshed and chaos in Iraq. "Violence has acquired a momentum of its own and is now self-sustaining," she wrote July 20, quoting from an intelligence assessment.

By mid-2006, Casey, a stout four-star general with wire-rim glasses, had been the commander in Iraq for two years. As American military units rotated in and out, Casey remained the one constant.

He had concluded that one big problem with the war was the president himself. Since the beginning, Casey felt, the president had viewed the war in conventional terms, repeatedly asking how many of the various enemies had been captured or killed. Casey later confided to a colleague that he had the impression that Bush reflected the "radical wing of the Republican Party that kept saying, 'Kill the bastards! Kill the bastards! And you'll succeed.' "

Casey was troubled by the thought that the president didn't understand the nature of the fight they were in. The large, heavily armed Western force was on borrowed time, he believed. The president often paid lip service to winning over the Iraqi people, but then he would lean in with greater interest and ask about raids and military operations, grilling Casey about killings and captures.
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2008/09/06/AR2008090602691.html?hpid%3Dtopnews&sub=AR

This was also the time Bush was saying he was listening to the generals and attacked anyone telling him it was time for a change.

What is worse that never seems to be talked about in any of this is that the VA had less doctors and nurses working with two occupations than they had right after the Gulf War. In 2005, Bush cut funding for the VA. He did this with the blessing of the GOP congress that McCain forgets he was a part of. They knew this was a mess and there would be many more wounded and killed, but they did nothing to address it. They did nothing while soldiers, Marines, National Guards and Reservists were coming back wounded by body and mind and suffering. All along they knew but they wanted to make sure no one was paying attention to facts they could not control. They covered it up, dismissed it and accused others of not only lying but as being in support of "terrorists" because they tried to fight for the sake of the troops.