Tying Hands Of The W, Rove and Co.

Of course, Condi and her compadres in the W, Rove and Co are in full spin mode trying to suggest that any attempt to block their strategy in Iraq is another weapon for the terrorists. Correct me if I am wrong, but the system of checks and balances was established by our founding fathers to prevent the deployment of absolute power given how it corrupts to. Thusly, as to whether tying the hands that brought us the Iraq conflagration is good or bad is in the eye of the beholder, no?

Asked if he was "tying the hands of the commander in chief," he answered in part: "Of course we're trying to tie the hands of the president and his policy. We're trying to change the policy. And if someone wants to call that 'tying the hands' instead of 'changing the policy' — yeah, the president needs a check and a balance."

This may be a day late and a trillion dollars and many thousands KIA short, but what say you, blogisphere participants?

Meanwhile, it's important to suggest one more time that, becuase the W, Rove and Co ignored the history, we are destined to repeat it:

Maude had arrived in Baghdad after a long and arduous military campaign. British forces had been fighting the Ottoman army for 2 1/2 years and had suffered one of the worst defeats of World War I in the six-month siege of the eastern city of Kut, which had ended in an ignominious surrender to the Turks in April 1916.

Having rallied from that loss and finally reached Baghdad, Maude tried to create common cause between the British army and the city's residents, whom he saw as having been oppressed by 400 years of Ottoman rule. "Your lands have been subject to tyranny," he declared in his proclamation, and "your wealth has been stripped from you by unjust men and squandered." He promised that it was not "the wish of the British Government to impose upon you alien institutions." Instead, he called on residents to manage their own civil affairs "in collaboration with the political representatives of Great Britain."

Maude did not live to see the failure of his efforts to rally the people of Iraq to the British occupation. He died eight months later, having contracted cholera from a glass of milk.

After his death, British policy toward Iraq changed repeatedly as the army attempted to dominate the country and suppress the population, while the government strove to adjust to Britain's diminished role in the international system after WWI. Initially, the aim was simply to annex the territory and make it part of the Empire, run in a fashion similar to India.

Blog on friends, blog on all.