Our President Is in Denial

An invasion based on false assumptions and a prolonged war riddled with incompetent policies does not bring out the moderates, it brings out the extremists. Put innocent people in prison, bomb a city like Fallujah back into the stone age, allow an insurgency to gain ground because you're trying a new untested military doctrine, allow a civil war to fester and then break out, throw in scores of other blunders including outright mindless greed over Iraq privatization schemes and you're going to have trouble making even moderates believe you're in Iraq to bring democracy. And that says nothing about our policies in other areas of the Middle East.

TPMMuckraker has a post today on an answer that Bush gave to an honest question about the growing number of failures in Iraq and elsewhere; here's the first part of what Bush had to say (see the original question and full answer):

David, it's an interesting period because, instead of having foreign policies based upon trying to create a sense of stability, we have a foreign policy that addresses the root causes of violence and instability.

For a while, American foreign policy was just, Let's hope everything is calm - kind of, managed calm. But beneath the surface brewed a lot of resentment and anger that was manifested on September the 11th.

And so we have, we've taken a foreign policy that says: On the one hand, we will protect ourselves from further attack in the short run by being aggressive in chasing down the killers and bringing them to justice.

Our president and his advisers can't even properly identify the killers. In fact, putting innocent people in prison and killing thousands of innocent civilians is creating more killers. But our president and much of the media have difficulty even noticing the problem.

Bush slips in enough buzz words and PR nonsense that I suspect he doesn't even believe his own crap anymore (let me get back to that in a moment). The real problem is that there are still people who believe that Bush's incompetence and belligerence will somehow lead to democracy in Iraq (and if not, at least we've killed some 'bad people' as if we can ignore all the innocent blood on our hands). That scares me. Bush isn't implementing a foreign policy. He's implementing a fantasy.

Is Bush in such a bubble that he's in profound denial and still believes he's accomplishing something? Does he believe he's just on a run of very bad luck? Or is it beginning to dawn on him what a fiasco has emerged from his policies? I'll offer yet another theory: Bush is paralyzed by what is confronting him and his only goal is to get through the midterms so that he doesn't have to face accountability if the Democrats take control of a house.