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Stars And Stripes" Lands Exclusive, And Revealing, Bush Interview

by Open-Publishing - Friday 7 July 2006
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"Stars And Stripes" Lands Exclusive, And Revealing, Bush Interview
By E&P Staff
Published: July 05, 2006 3:20 PM ET

NEW YORK When Stars and Stripes nabbed anexclusive interview with President Bush on July 4 — aboard Air Force One — it devoted most of the questions to ones submitted by service members.

One, put to the commander-in-chief by the newspaper’s Jeff Schogol: Has he attended even one funeral for a fallen soldier from Iraq? No, he replied. “Because which funeral do you go to? In my judgment, I think if I go to one I should go to all. How do you honor one person but not another?” he said.

A soldier now serving in Iraq asked how many times he would have to return to the war zone in the next five years. Bush said he did not know. “The conditions on the ground will determine our troop levels, and one of the main conditions on the ground is the capacity for the Iraqis to take the fight to the enemy, and therefore it is very difficult for me to predict with certainty how many times this particular person would be sent back to Iraq,” Bush said, in the article published on Wednesday.

Another soldier asked if Army rotations in Iraq could be shortened from one year to six months. Bush: Not likely. A question about special benefits for troops who had served multiple tours in Iraq and Afghanistan brought pretty much the same response, with Bush explaining that he had already boosted normal benefits.

The newspaper’s reporter put forth his own query: Would the president accept a timetable for a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq in return for a cease-fire by insurgents?

Bush called the question hypothetical. Reminded by Schogol that the media had reported just such an offer from Sunni insurgents, Bush answered, “I’m not sure they have or haven’t. ... I will tell you that whatever decisions I make will be made upon the recommendations of commanders and and with one thing in my mind: Can we win?”

Bush was also asked if the strategy of putting relatively few U.S. troops in Afghanistan had backfired, with the Taliban reviving. He replied: “The strategy all along was to help internationalize the effort, and NATO troops are now moving into where the Taliban thinks that they may be able to make a foothold, or gain a foothold."

Forum posts

  • What does this reveal beyond the fact that this UNPRESIDUNCE is delusional? This entire administration is a fraud and a joke. He has destroyed one of the most hopeful, wonderful places to live and converted it into the very portrait of Big Brother’s world. He cares not for the countries that he is attempting to conquer and nothing for those that are scarred, burned, torn or mentally destroyed in the process. Evil thy name is George.

  • REVEALING....that Bush makes a virtue of his own incompetence.

  • He is a murderer and a crook.

  • I have five grown daughters, the youngest is about to be married next month. Her mother and I will not be able to attend her wedding due to extreme circumstances, but she understood our dilemma. Having been the maid of honor at her older sister’s wedding two years ago, and having attended three of her sisters’ weddings with me, she understood that we had tried our utmost to be there with her. I love all my daughters equally, and it pains me to think that I cannot be with my youngest on her most memorable of days.

    Now, suppose I had told my daughters, when they were all much younger, that their mother and I would not be able to attend each & every one of their weddings, saying it would not be feasible, thus it would not be prudent to attend any of their weddings since I could not ’honor one daughter over another’.

    What would they have thought of me if I were to make such a self-serving statement like that?
    I’ll tell you what they would have thought: they would have thought their dad was one miserable, arrogant, egotistical piece of shit for making such a statement, that’s what, and they would have been in the right.

    A President that REFUSES TO ATTEND ONE SINGLE FUNERAL OF EVEN ONE AMERICAN SOLDIER WHO HAS DIED FOR HIS WAR, NOT OURS, AND GIVES SUCH A SELF-SERVING, ARROGANT EXCUSE FOR HIS FAILURE OF BEING THERE WHEN HE IS MOST NEEDED BY THE BEREAVED, IS A PRESIDENT WITH ABSOLUTELY NO HONOR, NO SHAME, NO MORALITY AND NO CONSCIENCE WHATSOEVER.

    Americans who continue to support this shameless, amoral man display the same lack of honor, & the same lack of knowledge of what duty means as this self-serving, disgusting excuse of a man. Christians who continue to support this pathetic excuse of a ’World Leader’, need to go back to kindergarten Sunday School for remedial moral training, to relearn the Golden Rule.
    They have no leg to stand on when they attack others for being immoral, for they let this miserable, arrogant man do what he sees fit, as though our moral code came down from him, instead of God Almighty.

    Come to think of it, these soldiers’ families are better off not have had this walking piece of garbage attend their loved ones’ funerals. His presence would have sullied their last farewell to their fallen beloved who invariably lived lives with far more honor than he ever will know.