Well before the news broke, the military was already investigating and taking action against prisoner abuse. Unfortunately, that was not enough. Once the pictures came out, the situation became a disaster.
But depending on how you look at it, the president had between a year and four months to ensure the strongest actions against the abusers, to lay the groundwork to salvage international relations and good will, and did not. He had a couple of weeks to prepare for the fallout of those horrible pictures, yet he did not even find out about the pictures until they were aired on CBS, the same as the rest of us.
Maybe if Bush were more focused on his job instead of maintaining his record as the president with the most vacations and campaign fundraisers in history, our nation would not be in quite such a vulnerable and compromised state. Maybe not. Maybe Rumsfeld hoping it would just quietly go away is still the real problem.
Certainly, fighting terrorism takes more than a group of war hawks sitting around, waiting to pounce on the next terrorist threat. It takes a preventative and responsible vision to foresee what larger, long-term effects our policies and actions will have globally. It requires being ever vigilant not just for Arabs with box knives on planes, but for American individuals, corporations and government giving radical Muslims reasons to feel martyrdom is a necessary or desirable choice to begin with.
These reasons include everything from our king-making practices, to our trade policies, to Iraqi prisoners being abused without real action or accountability being taken as swiftly and decisively as, say, a pre-emptive war.
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