A "Bumpy Road" for America

I was encouraged today to read how President Bush was answering questions about Iraq. He is aware that things aren't going to be easy. He stated:

Democracy is hard," Bush said in a brief question-and-answer session in the White House. "Our own country's had a history of kind of a bumpy road toward democracy."

But I was a little concerned about his explanation about WHY things were "hard" in Iraq. As Bush stated:

"I know it's hard, but it's hard for a reason. And the reason it's hard is because there are a handful of folks who fear freedom."

A "handful of folks"??? WHERE is this President getting his news?

As the London Times has just related, the head of Iraq's Intellligence Service, General Muhammed Abdullah Shahwani reported:

“I think the resistance is bigger than the US military in Iraq. I think the resistance is more than 200,000 people,” General Muhammad Abdullah Shahwani, director of Iraq’s new intelligence services, said.

General Shahwani went on to relate:

...there were at least 40,000 hardcore fighters attacking US and Iraqi troops, with the bulk made up of part-time guerrillas and volunteers providing logistical support, information, shelter and money.

And where did these "insurgents" come from? General Shahwani pointed out:

“People are fed up after two years without improvement,” he said. “People are fed up with no security, no electricity, people feel they have to do something. The army (dissolved by the American occupation authority) was hundreds of thousands. You’d expect some veterans would join with their relatives, each one has sons and brothers.”

So some of the problem, according to the Iraqi General in charge of Intelligence, was due to America's mistake of dissolving the Iraqi army. Now WHERE have we heard that before?
How about from John Kerry? Kerry has been visiting Iraq the last couple of days, in sort of a foreign policy trip/boycott of elector certification, and pointed out:

Kerry attacked what he called the "horrendous judgments" and "unbelievable blunders" of the Bush administration. The mistakes, he said, included former U.S. occupation leader Paul Bremer's decisions to disband the Iraqi army and purge the government of former members of Hussein's Baath Party. Both moves are widely believed to have fueled the largely Sunni insurgency.

"What is sad about what's happening here now is that so much of it is a process of catching up from the enormous miscalculations and wrong judgments made in the beginning," he said. "And the job has been made enormously harder."

He added, however, that it was time to move forward.

"Mistakes have been made," he said. "Now, it's a different time and different set of judgments that have to be made. I'm here to make judgments about what moves are available to us."

John Kerry is the "reality-based" candidate who should have been President now, and who deserves to be President in 2008. Instead, we have a President who finds the job "hard", and finds the road to democracy in America to be "bumpy." Bush believes that the problems in Iraq are due to just a "handful of folks". HUH?

America deserves better. America deserves a leader with intelligence, insight, military experience, and the humility to know when mistakes are made. America needs John Kerry to pull us all out of the water!

Bob