The Bush Administration Disconnect Continues

Rush Limbaugh has become one of the last people in America to take Dick Cheney seriously. Cheney is a heartbeat away from the presidency but there have been many times in the last six years that he hasn't made much sense. Think Progress has a post on what 'last throes' Cheney has to say about Iraq:

Rush Limbaugh interviewed Vice President Cheney on his show today. At one point, Limbaugh asked Cheney to respond to growing frustration over U.S. efforts in Iraq.

Cheney acknowledged there is a “natural level of concern out there” because fighting didn’t end “instantaneously.” (Next month, the war will have lasted longer than U.S. fighting in World War II.) Cheney then pointed to various news items to paint a positive picture of conditions in Iraq and concluded, “If you look at the general overall situation, they’re doing remarkably well.”

Despite years of experience and knowing how to push and pull levers, Cheney's stubborn ideology and poor judgment renders him incapable of noticing a civil war in Iraq or the failed foreign policy of the Bush Administration.

Here's a week-old article from Trudy Rubin who gives us a more accurate assessment of Iraq:

Even key Republicans are finally beginning to grasp how dire is the Iraq situation.

While Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was on an emergency trip last week to Baghdad, insisting that Iraqis are "making progress," the Republican chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee was giving a bleak assessment of his trip there, also last week.

Sen. John W. Warner of Virginia said bluntly that if the Iraqi government was unable "to function" and reduce the violence "in two or three months," the U.S. government would have to consider whether "a change of course" was needed. "And I wouldn't take off the table any option at this time," he added.

He didn't suggest, however, what "a change of course" might mean.

(snip)

What Mr. Warner - and Ms. Rice - saw in Baghdad, however, is an Iraqi government that barely exists. For weeks, unnamed U.S. commanders and officials in Baghdad have been telling journalists that they are losing faith in Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. They say he is unable to check sectarian violence and foster national reconciliation. Even Ms. Rice warned that Mr. al-Maliki's 6-month-old government had reached "a critical time." Her own plane was forced to circle Baghdad for nearly an hour before landing because of a mortar attack near the airport.

Bush just gave Maliki a ringing election year endorsement including photo ops showing our president on the phone talking to the Iraqi prime minister. Feel reassured?

Bush and Cheney keep insisting on their reality, illusion or fantasy or whatever it is anyone wants to call it at this point. Smearing Democrats, Republicans and experts in their own administration can no longer cover up the Iraq fiasco. The John Hopkins study (or Lancet study as others call it) suggests 600,000 Iraqis died from violence alone in the last three years. Our country is twelve times bigger. If the death rate in the John Hopkins study is close to being right, more than 7 million Americans would die from violence over a period of three years if we had a similar surge in violence. In Iraq, the John Hopkins study suggests that 75,000 people died from air strikes alone. If that's accurate, only the US and Britain were capable of such air strikes.

It's the American people, and not the president or the party in control of Congress who are understanding the reality in Iraq. Here's an article by Jay Bookman that's reprised in Common Dreams (pay close attention to the last paragraph in the quote below):

American troops are still fighting and dying in Iraq and will be for months to come as we try to extricate ourselves from this mess, but it's over.

The U.S. Army may be planning ways to keep 140,000 troops in Iraq until at least 2010, but it's over. It's just over.

What we're doing in Iraq cannot be sustained, not militarily and not politically, and after the election a lot of people are going to start saying so. They'll say so if the Democrats take control of one or both chambers of Congress, and they'll say so if Republicans remain in control.

Because it's over, and everyone knows it.

In Baghdad, 65 percent of Iraqis now support an immediate pullout of U.S. forces from their country, according to a U.S. government poll. A second poll, conducted by the University of Maryland, found that 71 percent of Iraqis want us gone within a year, and more than 60 percent of Iraqis support attacks on the U.S. troops who are fighting and dying to try to protect them.

(snip)

Here at home, public support for the war has disappeared as well. In a Gallup poll, 66 percent of Americans disapprove of how President Bush is handling Iraq. In a CNN poll, 62 percent oppose the war.

The most telling numbers, though, come from a poll by the Institute for Southern Studies, based in Durham, N.C. Its survey of 13 Southern states found that 56 percent of Southerners believe that U.S. troops should be partially or completely withdrawn from Iraq, which is about the sentiment of the nation as a whole. Eighty-nine percent of Southerners say they are a little to very saddened about the war; only 12 percent say they are proud of the war.

We now know that the famous window of opportunity that the experts kept warning about three and even two years ago closed a long time ago but Cheney and Bush refused to listen and refused to do anything about it. Making phone calls for the sake of photo ops or making falsely optimistic claims is no way to run a foreign policy. We need a Congress that will demand an explanation of our policies and not merely rubber stamp arrogance, gut instincts or unfounded ideological assumptions. It's getting late in the day and George W. Bush and Dick Cheney have too little to show for all their hubris and almost six full years in office.