Doubts Behind Bush Administration Facade

Several Bush Administration figures, including Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, came to Washington in 2001 with fat resumes going all the way back to service under Nixon. In the last six years, we have learned the hard way that experienced right wing Republicans don't do well without close supervision. And the fiasco continues.

Here's the story from Karen DeYoung of The Washington Post:

The success of the Bush administration's new Iraq strategy depends on a series of rapid and dramatic political and economic reforms that even the plan's authors have little confidence will work.

In the current go-for-broke atmosphere, administration officials say they are aware that failure to achieve the reforms would result in a repeat of last year's unsuccessful Baghdad offensive... ...

(snip)

A pessimistic new National Intelligence Estimate released Friday described the Iraqi government as "hard-pressed" to achieve sectarian reconciliation... ...

(snip)

Several sources expressed concern that the administration, by publicly rejecting a "containment" option -- withdrawing U.S. troops to Iraqi borders to avoid sectarian fighting while preventing outside arms and personnel from entering the country -- has not left itself a fall-back plan in the event of failure.

I wish DeYoung had said how many sources expressed concern. We've had a situation several times now where good advice is ignored and the Bush Administration will come up with spin that their decision was the only one possible and the only one that most people they consulted agreed on.

At this point, only the Iraqis, either now or later, can create a government with legitimacy, but only if we stop micromanaging their affairs. It won't be pretty but that is where we are, that is where President Bush has led us. We could start drawing down in Iraq in three months if an effort were made to get some kind of a political settlement, but the war will go on. At some point in the next eighteen months, the spin could easily be this: that we have accomplished what we set out to do by toppling Saddam Hussein and that we're going to have peace after the 2008 election...if Americans elect a Republican. It doesn't get any more cynical or more incompetent than just that. Just listen to John McCain whose moral compass, thrown out three years ago, is now stuck at the bottom of a quagmire.

We need a foreign policy that advances the real long-term interests of our nation, not the short-term interests of politicians or political parties incapable of understanding the times or dealing with the growing issues of our nation and the world. Even the defense industries better start thinking about what they're doing to our country with their campaign contributions and their incestuous relationship with Washington (read about the Duke Cunningham scandal because that's exactly what it was about). Republicans in the White House and Congress have truly failed our nation.