The Real Reason Bush & Co. Picked Hayden

The White House got itself a hitman. The war in Iraq has been the biggest mistake the Bush administration has made in five-and-a-half years of making horrendous mistakes. The White House thinks only in terms of power and votes. The Iraq war was never about ridding the world of a dictator or bringing freedom to an oppressed country. The war was about gaining power. The White House knew it had made a mistake shortly after the war started. And the reason the WH knows the war in Iraq was a mistake is that it has not resulted in power or votes. The cost to the nation, the world and loss of lives have never been important issues to the GOP. Power and votes, that's it. About the same time the war turned into an albatross around the necks of the neocons, the GOP realized it had made a terrible mistake in making George W. Bush president. But this administration makes no mistakes. It had to continue the fiction that George Bush was president. The third major mistake Dick Cheney and his neocon cronies made was to let Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld run the war in Iraq. Not only has Rumsfeld been the worst war strategist since Robert McNamara was Secretary of Defense during the war in Vietnam, but he has been increasing his power base in the Pentagon. He’s like a male cat marking out his territory. He’s pissing on everything while giving himself greater authority over more departments. The Bush administration can’t admit it’s been wrong about Rumsfeld but it can buy a guy who will neutralize him. That guy is General Michael V. Hayden. The White House has decided to castrate Rumsfeld and it has picked Michael V. Hayden to do the job, with the help of National Intelligence agency head John Negroponte. It’s not a bad plan, as Machiavellian plans go. It’s just that giving the CIA and the National Intelligence agency more power in order to rid the Pentagon of Rumsfeld and his fiefdom may be a cure that’s worse than the disease. And the Prez better check his own equipment if Hayden ever says, "You're doing a heckuva job, Georgie."