What Bush Will Be Doing This Summer

Before I explain what Bush will be doing on his long annual vacation in Crawford, Texas, this summer, let me note a post by James Fallows (hat tip to Kevin Drum) about former CIA Director, George Tenet and the run up to the war in Iraq:

Tenet, as mentioned earlier, would have better served his country (and his reputation) by speaking up more promptly about the Bush Administration’s failure ever to have a “serious debate” about whether it was worth invading Iraq.

But his failing was telling the truth too late — not sticking to, well, a lie like the one Bartlett uttered yesterday (according to the AP) as part of the White House’s attempt to rebut Tenet:

“This president weighed all the various proposals, weighed all the various consequences before he did make a decision.”

I say plainly: that is a lie. To be precise about it, no account of the Administration’s deliberations, by anyone other than Bartlett just now, offers even the slightest evidence that this claim is true. Innumberable accounts offer ample evidence that it is false. I have asked this direct question to many interviewees who were in a position to know: was there ever such a meeting or discussion?

The answer is: there was no discussion. Tenet, who allowed himself to fall under the spell of Bush and did too little to stop the machinations and pressure coming from Cheney and his crowd, is trying to set the record straight very late in the day. I'm not sure we're ever going to get the full story but it's become obvious that every time we get more details, the failure of Bush's presidency just becomes all that much more obvious. Think of it. We went to war without a discussion. We went to war without a realistic strategic assessment of what we were trying to accomplish (sorry, right wing or neocon fantasies about the world don't count). We went to war without a plan. We went to war with an incompetent president and vice president and a secretary of defense who should have been left retired after serving in government for too many years.

When President I'm-the-Decider Bush goes to Crawford, Texas, this summer, he'll be kicking a big can down the road. The name on the can will be 'Iraq' and he'll be kicking it all the way to the next presidency. But it won't be the only can he'll be kicking on those dirt roads of his, just the biggest one. He'll be kicking a can with Nancy Pelosi's name on it, and Harry Reid's name on it, and Henry Waxman's name on it and he'll be kicking a can with Alberto Gonzales's name on it and George Tenet's name on it and Paul Wolfowitz's name on it and he'll even be kicking a can with Carol Lam's name on it and David Iglesias' name on it. Then he'll go have dinner but he'll send out Karl Rove to kick a few more cans and then late at night, when the lights are out, he'll sneak out and he'll kick two more cans in the moonlight when no one's looking: a can with Dick Cheney's name on it and Karl Rove's name on it and he'll be kicking those two particularly hard.

No one should feel sorry for George W. Bush. The bipartisan Iraq Study Group provided Bush with the perfect opportunity to partially redeem himself, but he spurned the opportunity. He has chosen to kick the can. In the end, no one is more to blame for Bush's failed presidency than the shrub himself. George W. Bush will be blaming a lot of people in the years to come—and that too will be a measure of his failure.

White House Correspondents Wimp Out at Dinner

Rich Little was a flop but that wasn't the problem. The association for the White House correspondents picked about as safe a comedian as they could while they concentrate on those seven and eight figure salaries so many of them are shooting for. Here's something to think about. Does anyone think Jonathan Swift would have been easy on our boy king? Does anyone think Mark Twain would give George W. Bush a free pass for trying to resurrect the Gilded Age? Will Rogers would have twirled his lariat and had you thinking the Decider-in-Chief was dizzy with all that rope tightening around him.

These kind of dinners are not supposed to be safe. Not with an incompetent president. Not with a president who thought it was funny to look behind his chair for WMDs. Not with a president who increasingly rambles even when he's speaking to a carefully selected audience. The White House correspondents should be a little restless six years into Bush's presidency with so little for the Mayberry gang to show for it. The president's behavior is a disgrace. The correspondents know it and they continue to act as if it's a kind of parlour game. How's his style? How his haircut? Is he aging? Did he do a good job of putting on a photo op? Was his strutting effective? Does he look like Mister Rogers in that flight suit or like John Wayne? Ah, being a White House correspondent is apparently a difficult life.

Here's a story from Editor & Publisher, people who still care about journalism and the functioning of our democracy:

Rich Little, with shockingly dyed hair, said at the outset that he is “not political” but rather a “nightclub performer who does a lot of dumb, stupid jokes,” then proved that.

He started with a couple of Canada (his native country) jokes and a weak Sen. John McCain, which bombed...

(snip)

Little followed by doing six presidents, including a man he “loved,” Ronald Reagan. He put in false teeth to play Jimmy Carter saying that when he was a peanut farmer “I had the biggest nuts in the county.”

As the presidents got more recent, the impressions got weaker: George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton and then possibly the worst impression of all, the current president. But he closed with the one he is most famous for, Richard Nixon, saying, “Let’s bring him out of the mothballs one more time.”

(snip)

Speaking to E&P afterward, probably aware that his routine went over rather poorly, he said, "this is not the easiest audience in the world." But he said Bush told him when it was over, "absolutely perfect."

Some in the crowd walked out in the middle of the routine-- far more than left during Colbert's performance last year.

Embarrassing. Harry Reid says something to the effect that we're losing in Iraq and the media types, particularly on the right, go nuts. I've said for over three years we're gaining nothing out of this war. We'll end up spending $2 trillion for what? A strut on an aircraft carrier? What are we gaining from Bush's incompetence, lies, cronyism, ideological rigidity, and repeated blunders, all quite visible in his fiasco in Iraq? What are we gaining? Does anybody buy the garbage that if we don't kill Iraqis, they'll come here? Sorry, but the 9-11 attackers came by way of Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan and most of them were from Saudi Arabia. The logic of attacking Iraq does not hold.

Should it take five years to finish the first war? Should it take ten years to finish the second? Should these idiots be allowed to start a third? It's not about losing. It's about a president and vice president who don't know what they're doing. Other than engaging in fantasies about bringing democracy to the Middle East at the point of our guns and fighting terrorism in about as half-assed a way as one could possibly ask for, Cheney and Bush have no policy in Iraq worthy of the name. It's stall, it's dodge, it's tantrums and overblown rhetoric, it's pompous statements about running out of patience or insurgents in their last throes, it's bluster that only the Republican base deludes itself into buying.

Are Bush and Cheney impeachable? Of course they are. Should it happen? Yes. Will it happen? No, not in the current political environment with a media that still does a poor job of revealing the damage the current administration is doing to our country. But enough Americans are aware of what's happening that Bush and Cheney can be held accountable. It's time for a special prosecutor. Forget the incompetence. There's plenty of dishonesty and deception in the current White House for a special prosecutor to deal with. There are plenty of laws being broken. A special prosecutor needs to be appointed by Congress.

If we are to keep our country strong, it's time to bring most of our troops home while keeping troops in strategic position to keep the neighbors out of Iraq. It's time for Bush and Cheney to negotiate a settlement in Iraq and Iran; and if they won't, it may be time for Congress to appoint people who will. There's nothing in the US Constitution that says the American people have to put up with arrogance, gross negligience and obstinate incompetence. Bush, not the Democrats, not Congress, not the American people, is the one who chose to ignore the recommendations of the Iraq Study Group. The people of the Iraq Study Group, both Republicans and Democrats, have a record of competence. Our president does not. The surge is a profoundly flawed political stunt that puts our troops at risk. It is not a change of strategy: it's just more of the same.

Let me ask it again. Are we losing? Sorry, but that's the wrong question. The question is this: do we have an administration that knows what it's doing? The answer is no. Bush has no trouble talking like a tough guy but he didn't know what he was talking about when he launched the invasion and never had an honest strategic purpose for invading Iraq in the first place, and even if he had managed to come up with an honest strategic purpose, it's highly unlikely he could have executed it with cronies, ideologues and party hacks. We're still a strong and powerful nation. But the current president is a failure. The rest is just hot air and a lot of self-justifications by the right and a lot of nonsense by a media that still can't fully acknowledge the crisis in Washington and particularly the White House.

Bush's Bubble Troubles Continue

For a growing majority of Americans, the painful disconnect between what Bush says and what the reality is continues. A growing number of his supporters and allies are joining the ranks of Bush's critics. Even the Republican rank and file no longer support him with their usual enthusiasm.

The conservative magazine US News has a column by John W. Mashek:

All two-term presidents seem to suffer from a fatigue factor, but none like what George W. Bush is going through.

The Bush second term has been battered by the never-ending war in Iraq, a failing policy on the environment, a mess on the firings of eight U.S. attorneys, and the self-destruction of Paul Wolfowitz at the World Bank. There are other flaps as well but you get the picture.

Poll after poll show Bush's popularity and performance in office is in the mid-30s or so. Vice President Cheney has embittered friends as well as enemies with his rhetoric and behavior.

With the help of many Republicans, including rubber stamp Republicans in Congress, Bush is failing Americans on issue after issue. Back in December, Bush had the chance to regroup after the November elections and the timely recommendations of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group that provided him the chance of political cover. But Bush chose to ignore the Iraq Study Group and the many experienced and successful foreign policy hands who said it was time to change course. Bush's arrogance and rigidity got the better of the president and his failed presidency continues with no relief in sight.

Here's just one issue, this one felt particularly hard in California, that's irritating everyone, including many Republicans; here's the story from the San Francisco Chronicle:

About 44 percent of Californians said they've had to cut back on such expenses as food and clothing to afford rising fuel prices, according to a Field Poll to be released today. But responses were sharply divided between higher- and lower-income groups.

The poll found lower-income workers -- those earning less than $40,000 a year -- were twice as likely as those earning more than $80,000 to feel the pinch, with 62 percent reporting reduced spending and 54 percent describing the price rise as "very serious."

(snip)

Californians pay an average of $3.33 per gallon at the pump compared with $2.86 per gallon for regular nationwide, the AAA auto club reported Monday. San Francisco and Oakland both set records, reaching per-gallon rates of $3.45 and $3.35, respectively.

According to the Field Poll, voters cited the oil companies and the Bush administration as those most responsible for the price increases.

The oil companies have donated far more money to Republicans in recent years than Democrats. Obviously the oil companies found their men in Cheney and Bush, both former oil executives. Neither have come to grip with America's growing energy problems and oil companies are only too happy to make record profits. It's hard to find a single issue where Bush has done something useful for the majority of Americans. Even Bush's tax cuts are meaningless for most Americans if most people end up paying more for credit, gasoline and health care while wages continue to stagnate.

Here are Bush's latest poll numbers from All Headline News:

President George Bush's quarterly approval rating, for his 25th quarter in office, has reached a new low. According to a USA Today / Gallop Poll, only 35 percent of Americans approve of the job President Bush is doing in the Oval Office.

Bush continues to live in his bubble surrounded by staffers who tell him exactly what he wants to hear. It's an unhealthy situation and most Americans now understand that we have a problem. The only suprising thing about Bush's poll numbers are the number of Republicans still supporting his failed presidency. But even that is beginning to change.

Bush's Reality and Accountability Problem

Bush has admitted making mistakes but which ones if he cannot even admit what the reality is beyond generalities? I don't completely agree with the Iraq Study Group but their report is far closer to reality than anything we have seen from Bush, including the inane and dishonest speech he made last night (the chattering heads who point to Bush's sincerity in the face of his blatant lies or who point to admission of mistakes should ask themselves if he even understands his own speech; I would argue that Bush's admission of mistakes is no different than a young person blowing off an adult with, "Yeah, whatever.").

Juan Cole of Informed Comment has an excellent post on Bush's speech:

To listen to Bush's speech on Wednesday, you would imagine that al-Qaeda has occupied large swathes of Iraq with the help of Syria and Iran and is brandishing missiles at the US mainland. That the president of the United States can come out after nearly four years of such lies and try to put this fantasy over on the American people is shameful.

(snip)

...the main problem is not "al-Qaeda," which is small and probably not that important, and anyway is not really Bin Laden's al-Qaeda. They are just Salafi jihadis who appropriated the name. When their leader, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, was killed, it didn't cause the insurgency to miss a beat. Conclusion: "al-Qaeda" is not central to the struggle. Izzat Ibrahim Duri and the Baath Party are probably the center of gravity of the resistance.

Bush admitted that the Sunni guerrilla destruction of the Askariyah (Golden Dome) shrine at Samarra set off an orgy of sectarian reprisals. But he does not seem to have actually absorbed the lesson here. The guerrillas did not have to hold territory in order to carry out that bombing. They just had to be able to sneak into a poorly guarded old building that Bush did not even know about and blow it up. The symbolic and psychic damage that they did to the Shiites was profound. ...

There are other such targets. The Shrine of Imam Kadhim at Kadhimiya, the shrine of Ali in Najaf, and the shrine of Husayn in Karbala, and the person of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani himself, also the person of Hujjat al-Islam Muqtada al-Sadr. (The arrogance and ignorance of the US chattering classes is such that they openly talk about "taking out" al-Sadr, as though that would calm the Iraqi Shiites down. Saddam thought like that when he offed Muqtada's father; didn't work.) ...

In point after point, Dr. Cole points out the blatant misconceptions of Bush's new 'strategy' which closely resembles a collection of the old failed assumptions that have created such a fiasco in Iraq. Bush is being profoundly dishonest with the American people and there needs to be public airing in Congress of what the problems are and if Bush still pursues his nonsense, there needs to be a reckoning. In the meantime, Congress should do everything it can to slow down Bush's reckless gamble before a greater war ensues.

The Prince Who Couldn't Make Up His Mind

The most important thing that the Iraq Study Group called on President Bush to do was to face reality. That apparently is not going to happen. There will be a public relations nod or two to the failures of the last number of months in Bush's speech tonight and nothing more. It's back to business as usual.

Perhaps the most disturbing thing about Bush's policies in Iraq was when it became obvious early on that if things don't go according to his latest delusion, Bush would sit on his hands hoping for the best while calling that behavior 'staying the course' (given how much the government and its policies are run by Cheney, we can only assume that Cheney has his own way of responding or not responding such as slinking off to a dark corner to brood over a martini or two or three as he did a year ago when he accidentally shot a friend). Even today, it's not much different. When Bush should have found a way to send an extra hundred thousand troops three or even four years ago, the president will now send an extra twenty thousand temporary troops as he has on several occassions and he will try to sell this as a decisive action.

It has occurred to Robert Scheer that our president has become Hamlet; here's his column in Truthout:

To surge or not to surge, that is the question. As our prince proposes, once again, to take arms against a sea of troubles, he responds not to the disaster that he has visited upon Iraq, but rather embraces a desperate strategy for salvaging what remains of his reign.

To win, perchance to dream. Few Americans, a mere 17 percent, according to the latest Washington Post/ABC poll, think that sacrificing more Americans in patrols on the streets of Baghdad will reverse the slings and arrows of our outrageous Iraqi fortune, but giving a speech about it might provide our hapless Hamlet with some temporary political cover.

"All the world is really watching," proclaimed Bush press secretary Tony Snow, "and it's important to get this right."

...it's important to get this right. Ahhh. And thereby hangs the tale. Hamlet is sometimes seen as the prince who couldn't make up his mind. That describes Bush very well except for one key difference. Hamlet didn't have the image-maker behind the throne who would create the confident and decisive illusion of the prince strutting across an aircraft carrier; the image-maker being Karl Rove, of course.

*Sigh* Getting this right. I opposed the war before it began, but once it began, I hoped it would be a quick war and that the president would get it right. It took less than a month to get the uneasy feeling a fiasco was already unfolding. No weapons of mass destruction. No plan. Uncontrolled looting. Arms caches left untouched. And the unraveling of Bush's many deceptions and delusions, too numerous to list in this post today.

How many chances should a president have? At what cost? For what benefit? Where are the successes that Bush and his supporters can point to that says Bush knows what he's doing? Where is the record that says Bush has been straight with the American people? Should a president been given one more chance knowing he's thinking seriously of starting a war with Iran? A president should have benchmarks for his own performance. Any benchmark one can use for Bush, though, would only show failure. Except in one area: Bush still succeeds in his capacity to deceive.

The Bush Illusion

The Bush illusion is easy to summarize: he believes, at this late date, that he can ignore the Iraq Study Group. The illusion that a few right wing pundits and a small handful of generals have is that Bush suddenly knows what he's doing. The illusion in historical terms is that somehow the United States has unlimited military power and economic resources to keep throwing at Iraq.

Along with other bloggers, Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo zeroes in on some of the flaws in the 'surge' arguments from the Bush side, including the point that 20,000 more troops is not going to do the job (and, in my opinion, simply extends the period needed for our military to rebuild):

While we're all talking about the president's 'surge' plan, I want to make sure everyone sees Fred Kaplan's piece in Slate yesterday. It's a good example of why the most appropriate name for what the president is planning is neither 'surge' nor even 'escalation' but rather 'punt' -- a strategically meaningless increase in troops meant to allow the president to avoid dealing with the failure of his policy and lay the ground work for getting the next president to take the blame for his epochal screw-up.

(snip)

What's sad about this (and it's hard to know where to start on that count) is that a few years ago, much, much more would have been possible with more troops on the ground. Alternatively, if the president and his key advisors hadn't lied to the country about the number of troops required to stabilize and police Iraq (then-Army Chief of Staff Shinseki said 400k+, I think) we might not have pulled the trigger in the first place.

We're living in the wreckage of the president's lies. And this is just one more of them.

There are signs that even a number of Republicans are beginning to see the writing on the wall. We need to get our foreign policy under control and that means reining in the most failed president in American history (and thinking long and hard how such an incompetent administration came to be). It's going to take time to wind Iraq down, but wind down we must.

CBS Poll Says Bush's Approval at 30%

Four years ago, various Bush Administration figures said that Iraq would be a cakewalk. They assured us they had all the answers. We have since learned otherwise.

Bush still has no plan for Iraq. The recent elections are two months old and Bush is still dawdling and doing everything he can to ignore the report by the Iraq Study Group. In the meantime, Donald Rumsfeld is gone. John Bolton is gone. Now Harriet Meiers is gone. Two generals have been replaced. Negroponte is going over to work for Condi Rice.

Will playing musical chairs save George W. Bush? The only way Bush can save his presidency is to knock off the politcal games for which he is so famous and show a little humility and willingness not just to change but to do more than just talk or do the opposite of whatever sound advice he receives.

CBS reports that Bush's approval ratings now sit at 30% (hat tip to Talking Points Memo); here's more:

Americans are generally optimistic about the new Democratic-controlled Congress that convened on Thursday, according to a CBS News poll. ...

Sixty-eight percent of those polled said they had optimistic feelings about the 110th Congress, which will be led by Democrats for the first time in 12 years. Just 25 percent said they were pessimistic.

The poll goes on to say that only 20% of Americans think Bush has a plan for Iraq. I wish the question had been this, "Bush still talks about victory. Do you believe he has a plan for victory in Iraq?"

There will be no victory. Not in the sense of a viable, democratic Iraq as an ally of the US. That's gone. The only thing that can be accomplished is to minimize the damage to our country and our foreign policy as we begin to withdraw and force the Iraqis to come to terms with their future. It will take a year or so to draw down most of the troops but our troops will probably have to remain closeby for another two or three years. Some troops may have to remain in the Kurdish areas on standby; there may even be occassions when some troops have to come back and engage in military action in trouble spots for a week or more. We will probably have to continue to make the whole of Iraq a flyover zone to protect it from its neighbors. In fact, to end the flyover zone, will require serious negotiations on our part with Iraq and its neighbors.

Let me note one other thing about the CBS poll: only 23% of Americans approve of the way Bush is handling Iraq. So let's review:
Only 20% of Americans think Bush has a clear plan.
Only 23% of Americans approve of Bush's handling of Iraq.*
Only 30% of Americans approve of Bush's overall performance.

I think we're finally getting down to the hardcore right wing Republicans who support Bush; I suspect the number is around 23-25%. George W. Bush has no mandate in Iraq and clearly no mandate for a broader war in the Middle East. In January of 2007, that is where we are.


*I can only surmise that 3% of Americans don't think Bush has a plan in Iraq but believe he has the astonishing ability to—what?—wing it, muddle his way through, roll the dice double or nothing? I leave readers to conjecture.

Bush's Wobbly Way Forward

Instead of listening to the Iraq Study Group, Bush is going to rely on his less than successful foreign policy instincts. Actually, the only thing he knows is politics and spin, and—surprise—there's every indication that he will attempt more photo ops and spin. Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo puts it as succinctly as I've seen it:

Administration official: Surge "more of a political decision than a military one."

For a fuller analysis, here's Dan Froomkin of White House Briefing:

So what is President Bush about to do? By all indications: escalate. His "new way forward" in Iraq appears to call for more troops -- along with a series of other measures that might have helped if he'd taken them three years ago.

News reports suggest that Bush's plan is not likely to win enthusiastic support, even from within his own party. But my question is: Where's the outrage?

If the vox populi and the cognoscenti agree that throwing more American bodies at the problem will only result in more American deaths, then how is the apparent Bush plan anything short of a betrayal of the troops and an expression of contempt for the will of the people?

And is there any more plausible explanation for Bush's behavior than that he is willing to sacrifice more troops so he won't have to admit -- at least not yet -- that he made a mistake? Is that a good enough reason to ask even one more soldier to die?

Here's a simple question for the average, sensible American: when it comes to the Iraq Study Group, should a president with failing policies continue to trust his own judgment or should he trust those with a reasonable record of success? The answer is obvious but Bush and his neoconservative followers still think they know best. Actually, Bush's father in 1991 knew best and junior pretty much knows it by now. For him, it's now reduced to pure politics and the avoidance of accountability. Bush has no right to saddle Americans any further with his blunders.

Dealing with Bush's Failed Presidency

Near the end of January, President Bush will trot out his latest State of the Union and it is likely to be another charade that has little to do with how things really are and it will call for things that will do little to solve the problems that Bush has given us or has simply neglected. But as the problems become increasingly clear, the question that hangs in the air is whether the American people fully understand what we are facing as things now stand and if things continue without correction. There are tough choices ahead and there is evidence Bush and his right wing friends are not unpleased that the choices are difficult thanks to their recklessness. The phrase Peter Schrag of the Sacramento Bee uses to describe Bush's last six years is 'vast carelessness':

The year-end debate about the Iraq Study Group's unequivocal diagnosis of failure and its grim list of uncertain remedies is the real measure of the hopelessness of the mess America made. The ISG's 79 recommendations -- some wise, some impolitic, some impossible -- is itself a confession that all the choices are bad.

That's not the commission's fault: No one else has a persuasive idea either, least of all the president -- the self-proclaimed decider -- who started and ran this misbegotten war.

As Nick Carraway says about the privileged and insouciant Tom and Daisy at the end of "The Great Gatsby" (1925): "They were careless people ... they smashed up things and creatures and then they retreated back to their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made ... ."

It's a strong column, though Schrag makes the careful point that the American people themselves are ultimately not excused either; I recommend reading the rest. Bush and his Republican friends are exactly like rich and spoiled children who are rapidly going through their parents' fortune; they are indifferent to the effect their reckless actions have on hundreds of millions of people here at home and around the world.

Bush's Obscure Iran Policy

It's bad enough that Bush's foreign policy as far as Iraq is concerned is in tatters. We should not forget that Bush's Iran policy is largely a muddled mess though there's the usual pretense coming from the White House that they know what they're doing. Here's a story from a week ago that I missed by Laura Rozen in American Prospect:

News reports based on military sources indicating that the United States plans to move a second aircraft carrier and its supporting ships to the Persian Gulf next month, where it will overlap for several months with the USS Eisenhower, have piqued attention (and anxiety) on the Potomac this week: is the Bush administration laying the groundwork for a spring air war against Tehran, even as it comes under growing domestic pressures to consider talking with Iran and Syria?

(snip)

Are the amassing air power in the region and sanctions signs of looming war? Not yet.

Interviews with U.S. officials and knowledgeable Iran watchers indicate the stepped up measures are meant for now as a message to Iran to step back from an alleged up-tick in its recent efforts to destabilize Iraq, Lebanon, and the Palestinian territories, and to prevent Iran from taking retaliatory actions against the anticipated sanctions like, for instance, closing off the Straits of Hormuz.

(snip)

While U.S. officials and Iran watchers interviewed suggested the recently announced U.S. actions are intended mainly as intimidation to forestall Iranian retaliation, many interviewed acknowledged that U.S.-Iranian tensions have significantly ratcheted up in recent weeks. Examples include the U.S. intelligence revealing an alleged Iranian role in Shiite terrorism against coalition forces in Iraq, recent efforts by Iranian backed Hezbollah to bring down the Siniora government in Lebanon, and alleged Iranian support to Palestinian Islamic Jihad. The New York Times reported last month that Iranian security forces and Iranian-backed Hezbollah have been training and supplying explosives and other sophisticated munitions to Iraqi Shiite militants directly involved in killing coalition forces in Iraq. ...

(snip)

A U.S. official indicated that one reason for the perceived need to demonstrate a show of force towards Iran now is to counter the perception in the region, generated in part from coverage of the Iraq Study Group report, that the Bush administration was coming under increased domestic pressure to offer concessions to Iran and Syria. “People in the region read the ISG report and thought the Americans are surrendering,” this official said. “Nothing could be further from the truth.”

Laura Rozen also has a blog, War and Piece, and is an excellent journalist.

One of the proofs that we have a broken foreign policy is that we have a White House that insists on a ideological view of the world that leads to garbage in and garbage out. The new interpretation that we have to 'get tough' with Iran because of the Iraq Study Group is a complete sham. Bush continues to pretend that he knows what he's doing though the chaos in Iraq and the domestic disaster after Hurricane Katrina paint a different story.

One of the more bizarre events of the last few weeks is that we have been increasingly turning against Sadr and his militia (one of many militias in Iraq I should add) who supports Maliki and opposes Iran; Sadr is a difficult person and deeply involved in the sectarian fighting (despite a brief one-time alliance with the Sunnis when our troops destroyed his newspaper) but he's also the proof that we had no idea of what our invasion would unleash. Meanwhile, we are in the strange position of increasingly turning towards Shiites who have close Iranian ties. One should remember that the Bush Administration came close early on to turning the Iraqi government over to neoconservative darling Ahmed Chalabi who also happened to have close ties with Iran. The situation in Iraq is so confused that Bush and his neoconservative friends can concoct whatever story they want out of the chaos. On the contrary, the growing chaos itself is the proof that we need to get out of there. Bush's simplistic black and white vision of the world and his tendency to rationalize his blunders have not been assets in a place like Iraq with its three-dimensional chessboard of ethnic groups, religious factions, local tribes and multiple alliances.

There is also the Bush Administration pretense that the only outside country interfering with Iraq is Iran (though sometimes Syria is included); most countries in the region, however, are involved in one way or another (and one shouldn't forget the hundreds of thousands of refugees crossing borders) and some are physically helping the Sunnis. Finally, there is the pretense that we have been negotiating with Iran since May; but those negotiations have been closer to a public relations sham similar to Bush's mindless photo ops. Of course, the Iranians have not handled themselves well during this period but the lack of real dialogue usually can only lead to more distrust; and it is Americans who have repeatedly turned down opportunities for dialogue.

As for Lebanon, the greatest threat to the Lebanese government was the nearly random bombing by Israel during the summer fighting that often targeted Lebanese not in any way involved with Hezbollah. Israel blew the opportunity to isolate Hezbollah and instead used a clumsy strategy that resembles the kind of thing our own neoconservatives manage to contrive.

There have been signs for a year that Bush is itching for a war with Iran despite the fiasco in Iraq. He may still get one if he can manuever his way into it despite the strategic blunder it would involve. Like the lead up to Bush's war in Iraq in 2002, there have been lies, damn lies and, in the right wing media, a third category of lies that I can't think of a word for other than outright warmongering (go to Google Blog Search and type in World War Three).

I have no doubt the Bush Administration is trying to keep its options open, including the option of a much broader war that it half wants and is half likely to stumble into. We are potentially getting very deep into impeachment territory because we cannot rule out that some of Bush's actions and even some of his interpretations of events in the last year can be considered deliberate provocations in an effort to start a war with Iran without Congressional approval. It is time for some cooler heads on all sides.

Analysis of Iran's Falling Oil Exports

Iran's oil exports are falling. Falling exports means falling profits and a growing inability over the next ten years for Iran to finance mischief. The issue is complicated for a number reasons, but it once more provides Bush with a diplomatic opportunity. But Bush tends to be blind when diplomatic opportunities stare him in the face. Here's an analysis as reported in The Plain Dealer by Barry Scweid of AP:

Iran is suffering a staggering decline in revenue from its oil exports, and if the trend continues, the income could virtually disappear by 2015, according to an analysis published Monday in a journal of the National Academy of Sciences.

Roger Stern, an economic geographer at Johns Hopkins University, said in the report and in an interview that Iran's economic woes could make the country unstable and vulnerable, with its oil industry crippled.

(snip)

Stern's analysis supports U.S. and European suspicions that Iran is trying to develop nuclear weapons in violation of international understandings. But, Stern says, there could be merit to Iran's assertion that it needs nuclear power for civilian purposes "as badly as it claims."

He said oil production is declining and gas and oil are being sold domestically at highly subsidized rates.

At the same time, Iran is neglecting to reinvest in its oil production.

"With an explosive demand at home and poor management, the appeal of nuclear power, financed by Russia, could fill a real need for production of more electricity," the report said.

It's ironic that Bush's foreign policy and energy policy have strengthened Iran and weakened the United States. If we had never gone to war in Iraq, Iran's oil problems would be more serious than they are and a real energy policy would have us on the way to being relatively free of the oil politics of the Middle East. Five years ago, Iran helped us in Afghanistan but Bush failed to take advantage of the opportunity to improve relations. Clearly, Bush's way doesn't work.

The more one reads, the more it becomes obvious that James Baker and the Iraq Study Group make far more sense than the president. The Baker report is not without flaws but it urges the president to begin talks for a regional settlement and that is something that would improve our situation far more than a repackaged agenda of 'stay the course' or a disastrous bombing campaign against Iran.

Richard Nixon was the ultimate Cold War hawk but he managed to improve relations with Russia and China. Bush only has to deal with Syria and Iran, though it would help if he would bring in some serious foreign policy heavy-weights. But more of the same just isn't acceptable.

Is Colin Powell Finally Speaking Up?

One appearance on Face the Nation contradicting some of Bush's assertions does not represent a major effort to get Bush to accept reality but it may be a step in the right direction for former Secretary of State Colin Powell. Think Progress caught two interesting points in Colin Powell's interview; here's the first:

Today on CBS’s Face the Nation, former Secretary of State Colin Powell said he agreed with the Iraq Study Group that the situation in Iraq is “grave and deteriorating.” He disagreed with incoming Secretary of Defense Robert Gates’ assessment that the U.S. is neither winning nor losing in Iraq. “We are losing,” Powell said.

And here's the second catch by Think Progress:

Today on CBS’s Face the Nation, former Secretary of State Colin Powell said he did not support surging tens of thousands more troops in Iraq, a plan that Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) supports and that President Bush is expected to carry out. “I have not seen a case that persuades me that [Iraqi security] would be better” with more forces, he said.

Powell also pointed out that the military has no more troops to send. ...

So, according to Powell, we're losing and more troops won't make much difference. Unlike the right wingers who are trying to trash the Baker report that came out of the Iraq Study Group, Powell says the report is largely an accurate analysis of the situation. Besides finding people they can bully into telling them what they want to hear, Bush and Cheney, who are very fond of cherry picking, can still find a general or two to defend their policies and a few out-of-it politicians from the past to trot out for public relations. But the heavy weights of the last thirty years are nearly unanimous that Bush's Iraq policy is a disaster and that it's time to talk and time to find an exit.

The Secretary of State: Competence, Incompetence and a Dose of Hypocrisy

It's interesting to watch the various figures of the Bush Administration continue to talk as if anyone still talks their nonsense seriously. The bipartisan Iraq Study Group (5 Republicans, 5 Democrats) led by Republican James Baker has shattered any remaining illusions that we're winning in Iraq or that 'staying the course' is somehow going to work. 'Staying the course' has been repackaged so many times by the Bush team that everyone now recognizes it as the clunker it so obviously is. And every time Bush comes up with a new reason why we're in Iraq, after the latest reason has fallen apart, it just makes everybody's eyes roll.

It was ludicrous to hear Dick Cheney describe Donald Rumsfeld as the greatest Secretary of Defense ever and I intended to write about that until I came across a few things Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had to say. Here's the story by Reuters on Yahoo News:

U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has rejected a bipartisan panel's recommendation that the Bush administration engage Syria and Iran in efforts to stabilize Iraq, The Washington Post reported on Friday.

The "compensation" required for any such deal might be too high, Rice told the paper in an interview.

Rice said she did not want to trade away Lebanese sovereignty to Syria or allow Iran to obtain a nuclear weapon as a price for peace in Iraq, the Post reported.

She also argued that neither Syria nor Iran should need incentives to help achieve stability in Iraq, the Post reported.

"If they have an interest in a stable Iraq, they will do it anyway," Rice said.

The bipartisan Iraq Study Group included talks with Iran and Syria among its key recommendations it presented to the White House last week for dealing with the worsening chaos in Iraq.

Oh, where to begin! When Rice talks about the notions that Syria and Iran 'should not need incentives to help achieve stability in Iraq,' she omits that both countries sought to improve relations early in the Bush's first term and were actually helpful in dealing with al Qaida. But they were rebuffed by President Bush on more than one occassion early on.

In addition, Bush has vaguely threatened military action against Syria and Iran and Bush's friends on the far right have been even more vocal, even going so far as to call for the use of nuclear weapons against Iran; much of Bush's attitude seems based on an idea of Syria and Iran that goes back ten to thirty years instead of dealing in the terms of this era.

If Bush or Condi Rice are serious about real negotiations, they have to back off one or two steps from a threat posture and then knock off the phony preconditions for talks. In addition, Bush has yet to declare to the Iraqis that we do intend to leave, and sooner than later.

By sending more troops, Bush is likely to increase the tensions in the Middle East; he has sent more troops in the past without result and there is nothing to suggest that this time he has some answers to his fiasco. Just to be clear, let me be blunt for a moment: our military could kill 2 million Iraqis in the next year and it would not change the outcome; if anything, it would potentially lead to a broad regional war. Too many blunders have been made. At this point, we don't need a military solution so much as we need a political solution. Political solutions require talks. Political talks require the full use of all our foreign policy tools. Those tools have been neglected or poorly used in the past six years. There are dozens of qualified people, even qualified Republicans, who are waiting for their talents to be used. It's time for Bush and Condi Rice to utilize them.

The main problem I have with Condi Rice is her arrogant incompetence. As the national security adviser to Bush, she missed the terrorist threat from al Qaida and the broader stateless terrorism problem. And even before she became Secretary of State, she was personally doing a poor job of improving relations with Russia, an area she's supposed to be an expert on. Then, this last summer, instead of working hard and long to defuse the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah, she went to the Middle East to give, of all things, a piano recital! Her blather about not giving away some of Lebanon's sovereignty is a ridiculous straw man as an objection to serious negotiations with Syria, and it's unhelpful that she even talks like that; but it's important to note that Bush's unwilling to defuse this summer's mini-war did far more serious damage to Lebanon than any concession regarding Lebanon that might conceivably be given to Syria, and the Lebanese are not happy about it.

I'm a Democrat with certain principles and I won't pretend that James Baker was perfect but he was a successful Secretary of State and was far more competent than Dr. Rice; for her to dismiss the analysis and advice of the Iraq Study Group suggests she's just as delusional as the president. When you're in trouble, when you have almost no accomplishments to your name, it's time to lose the arrogance. Rumsfeld may be gone but Republicans in Congress should think long and hard about continuing to support Bush, Cheney and Rice. The members of the Bush inner circle are in danger of going from reckless incompetence to a sullen ideological stubbornness that will continue to do enormous damage to our nation in the continued pursuit of a war that we all know was optional. The excuses, the posturing and the blame need to come to an end.

The voters sent a powerful message to Bush in November and it's not clear that he's gotten the message. As long as Bush has the veto, there is a limit to what Democrats can do in the next two years. Two years is a long time. Not many Americans fully understand it yet, but our nation is in crisis. Unless Bush changes course in a serious way instead of pursuing the same failed foreign policy, we're heading for a deeper crisis; instead of admitting their blunders, some neocons and right wingers are insisting on a broader war despite the fact they haven't been right about very much.

If you're up to your waist in quicksand, it's time to stop digging. Bush's foreign policy experiment is a failure. It's time to return to the more successful policies of the last sixty years, the policies in fact that made us the leader of the free world and therefore strong.

Condi Rice's loyalty to the president would be admirable if Bush were running a small company somewhere, but her loyalty is hurting the nation. If she can't face Bush's failures, she needs to resign. Or she needs to face the facts and talk to the president. Simply put, it's time for Bush to pull back from the abyss. If he won't do it, Congress must exert its constitutional responsibilities.

Bush's New Strategy: Delay Decision

It's never about doing what's right. It's about politics and control of the image. Here's CNN with the story on the delay:

President Bush on Tuesday put off until early next month announcing a new approach to the Iraq war, and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Bush should take whatever time necessary to decide his next steps.

The White House initially indicated that Bush might deliver the speech before Christmas.

While administration officials said Bush had largely decided on where he wants to go in terms of a new policy, he gave no public hint of his plan at a meeting with the country's Sunni vice president.

The problems in Iraq have been obvious for more than three years. For three years, we've needed a policy shift. Bush's bold new decisive plan... ....is to delay a decision until January. Think Progress has the story from CNN's John King:

King said the White House has postponed the announcement of the policy shift to January because Bush “has asked for more advice about” how he could send 20,000 additional U.S. troops to Iraq, and administration officials “need more time to put all that on the table.”

King said the White House sees a political benefit to delaying the announcement. “If you are going to disagree with the Iraq Study Group and not accept its major recommendations, then let some time go by, let the American people forget about that a little bit” and “buy some time for critics” to attack the ISG.

Bush's presidency is crumbling and our foreign policy is in disarray. Even George W. Bush's public relations gambits are failing if he thinks Americans will soon forget the failures of his Iraq policy and the stark F given to him by the Iraq Study Group. Sometime this month or in January, it is probable that more than 3,000 of our soldiers will have died in Iraq. In the meantime, one cannot escape the conclusion that the president is waiting for the best photo op to try once again to sell his reckless incompetence. If the bottom line is that Bush's new policy is to send another 20,000 troops, that is no different than other occassions when he has sent more troops. Bush needs to come to terms with his failed policies and make major changes.

Bush Believes History Will Vindicate Him

The White House is in disarray. In the meantime, Republicans who supported the war in Iraq are either shaking their heads or urging more war but there are very few people who believe Bush has done a fine job. And yet, Bush's disconnect from reality continues. Thomas M. DeFrank of the New York Daily News says the president still thinks history will vindicate his foreign policy:

In 72 hours last week, a bipartisan commission harshly repudiated Bush's Iraq policy. Incoming Secretary of Defense Robert Gates told senators the U.S. isn't winning the war. Then a British journalist snarkily asked at a White House press conference if Bush weren't "in denial" about Iraq.

For good measure, a new poll found only 27% of Americans back his Iraq policy, a new low. And a moderate GOP senator termed the policy "absurd" and possibly criminal.

"He'll be fine but he can't be doing very good," said a well-placed Bush source who talks with the President often. "It's been a terrible year, and it keeps getting worse."

Yet Bush is described by another recent visitor as still resolutely defiant, convinced history will ultimately vindicate him.

"I'll be dead when they get it right," he said during an Oval Office meeting last week.

This is from a guy who deludes himself into believing he's a self-made man and that he became president on his own merits without his daddy's help (in the last week, there's been speculation that the senior Bush had originally intended Jeb Bush to become president).

This isn't the first time that Bush has declared that history will vindicate him. But Bush doesn't bother to say what it is that will be vindicated. President Bush has never been able to articulate exactly why we're in Iraq and most of the reasons he has offered have fallen by the wayside. The war on terror? WMDs? Democracy? Oil? Regime change? Bush now resorts to vague generalities about winning and victory without saying, as an example, what it is we'll win if we ever get there.

Think of it: George W. Bush believes history will vindicate him which means history will have to explain why we're in Iraq, something the president is unable do.

Other than wishful thinking, what evidence does Bush have that he will be vindicated? If Bush had shown competence in other areas of his presidency, that might be evidence that maybe he knows what he's talking about. If he had a record of accomplishing things like James Baker, maybe his word would have more weight than a former Secretary of State who has worked for four presidents. What has Bush accomplished in six years? Conservatives point to Bush's tax cuts but most of those tax cuts are unpaid for and went to the wealthiest Americans, people, in fact, who didn't need the tax cuts; the consequence is a deficit as far as the eye can see. In domestic policy, Bush has accomplished very little and he will always be remembered as the president who sat on his hands during Hurricane Katrina, perhaps the biggest natural disaster in our nation's history. In foreign policy, the United States is held in low esteem and we have blown areas of foreign policy that involve North Korea, Pakistan and potentially, due to gross neglect, Afghanistan. Thanks to Bush,our influence in Russia and China has waned.

When Bush isn't talking about winning, he increasingly seems to be resorting to fancy verbal footwork to explain more or less that we're in Iraq to clean up the mess he made. For me, after you distil everything that was said, that's what the report by the Iraq Study Group says but in plainer language. Cleaning up the mess in Iraq is not an adequate solution, but it's a major step towards coming to grips with reality.

Now Republicans Turning on Republicans

The major voices in the Republican Party who still support George W. Bush are running out of people to scorn. However flawed the report from the Iraq Study Group may be, it is a major, overdue indictment of Bush's foreign policy. The principles of unilateralism and preemptive military action are dead. Just about every policy Bush favors concerning Iraq has been a fiasco.

Committee reports, particularly bipartisan committee reports with ten members who decide on a unanimous position, are often a compromise that satisfy few people, but the Iraq Study Group report is damning and it dispels any illusion that Bush may still manage to grab and hide behind in order to avoid reality. Reality has come home to Washington and is now sitting like vultures in the trees in sight of the White House. That's an ugly metaphor but scratch the surface of Bush's public relations paint job and there's rot underneath.

The neoconservatives are watching their power decline and they don't like it. They've been wrong about so much it's a bit hard for them to swallow their saliva, and so they and their right wing enablers are still making plenty of noise. The neoconservatives who still defend Bush, or support more war but blame Bush's poor performance, still have the arrogance to ignore reality. Baker and his bipartisan report is now their latest target. Glenn Greenwald of Unclaimed Territory has some useful points to make:

The one positive aspect of the Baker-Hamilton report is that the reactions it is provoking -- both positive and viciously negative -- have shed as bright a light as one could hope for on our current predicament. Never before have the reasons we are in Iraq -- and staying indefinitely -- been as clear as they are now.

(snip)

As I argued immediately after the election, the disaster of the Iraq War and the resulting rejection of Bush-Republican policies presents a real opportunity to isolate, and relegate back to the fringes, the neoconservatives and more generic crazed warmongers who have dictated our foreign policy over the last five years -- the Bill Kristols, Rush Limbaughs, John McCains, Charles Krauthammers, Joe Liebermans, American Enterprise Institutes and Rich Lowrys, who have an insatiable appetite for endless wars that degrade America's credibility, resources, strength, security and national character.

At a time when most Americans have recognized that this war is a disaster and want to withdraw, this group of radical warriors continues to insist not only that the invasion of Iraq was the right thing to do, but that we need more of it -- more troops, more fighting, more threats, less diplomacy, less concern for world opinion, more regime change, more wars. John McCain and Bill Kristol favor a policy -- i.e., deploy as many more American troops as possible to Iraq -- which only a tiny percentage of Americans (ranging from 8% to 16%) support. Although the media has yet to realize it, this group is already on the outer fringe of our political spectrum.

Greenwald goes on to discuss the obsession the neoconservatives have with Israel. I don't have much to say on that issue except to point out that it's astonishing to me that anyone would allow another nation, even an ally, to overly influence our foreign policy. We should help Israel when it makes sense and, frankly, when their own policies make sense, but there are far too many other issues involved to allow our foreign policy to be obsessed with what Israel wants. It's a mystery to me why the media hasn't challenged neonconservatives on that issue.

There's nothing new about the neoconservatives and their right wing allies. There have been ultraconservative intellectuals and right wing blowhards since the 1930s selling a strange mix of nationalism and xenophobic isolationism at the same time. And there have also been bandwagon hawks of both parties who fear they might lose an election if they aren't hawkish enough. None of this is a way to run a foreign policy.

The other day Rumsfeld talked about the need for patience, but the lack of patience is exactly the single greatest flaw in Bush's foreign policy. You can't impose democracy in the space of a year or two; you can't launch an optional war without take time to figure out what happens after the country is occupied; you can't rush to war because you don't want to negotiate with the UN or because you don't want to let the weapon inspections process be finished. Unilateralism implies a president too impatient to build alliances. Preemptive strikes (or preventive war, whatever semantics one prefers) suggest a president too impatient to allow diplomacy to do its work and too impatient to continue working on containing people like Saddam Hussein.

The one opportunity Bush completely blew was the year after the fall of the Taliban. He had the attention of every nation in the broader Middle East and could have used the period even up to now to accomplish much without war, including real progress towards democracy. But the war in Iraq now appears to have been about making a point that was utterly without value and that had little to do with democracy.

Should I also mention that Bush and the neoconservatives are too impatient to be imaginative or to understand the real powers of the United States? I'm not a pacifist but it seems fundamental that military force should be pursued as a last resort. There are good reasons why people in the last sixty years have worked hard to develop the broad tools of diplomacy and international engagement. Easy answers from the radical right only cost us more in the end. That is why rational Republicans (even if they are conservative) are now turning on Republican ideologues.

Bush's Stubbornness Continues

It's ironic that Bill Bennett is still defending the president. Bennett has a small gambling problem and it seems he wants the president to go for double or nothing on a failed policy in Iraq. The media may still take seriously the ultraconservatives still defending George W. Bush but the American people have caught on to an incompetent president and the brazen war-mongering of his diehard supporters in the media who would like to see an expansion of the war. Incompetence is a hard thing for ultraconservatives to confront in themselves.

There's a growing chorus across America and the message is this: Bush must change direction and discard his failed foreign policy. Democrats and independents have come to that conclusion for some time and a growing number of Republicans, including five Republicans that were part of the Iraq Study Group, have come to the same conclusion. It should be noted that James Baker III and others in the group have a track record of competence. The president does not.

The Democrats have their hands full with the Decider-in-Chief and will have to do what the previous Republican-controlled Congress failed to do: get the president to return to the reality-based universe and if he refuses to accept the obvious, increase the pressure, hold hearings and step by step hold him to account. The Iraq Study Group report has slammed the president for his failures and we now wait for him to come to terms with the calls for change. The early signs from the president are not good as reported by William Douglas and Margeret Talev of the McClatchy Washington Bureau (hat tip to Think Progress):

Top Democrats in Congress left a White House meeting with President Bush on Friday frustrated over what they perceived as his reluctance to embrace major recommendations from the bipartisan Iraq Study Group.

(snip)

Bush said he talked about "the need for a new way forward in Iraq" in his morning session with leaders from both parties and chambers of Congress, "and we talked about the need to work together on this important subject."

But some Democrats came away unconvinced that major changes were coming.

"I just didn't feel there today, the president in his words or his demeanor, that he is going to do anything right away to change things drastically," Senate Majority Leader-elect Harry Reid, D-Nev., said following the Oval Office meeting. "He is tepid in what he talks about doing. Someone has to get the message to this man that there have to be significant changes."

Instead, Bush began his talk by comparing himself to President Harry S Truman, who launched the Truman Doctrine to fight communism, got bogged down in the Korean War and left office unpopular.

(snip)

Durbin said he challenged Bush's analogy, reminding him that Truman had the NATO alliance behind him and negotiated with his enemies at the United Nations. Durbin said that's what the Iraq Study Group is recommending that Bush do now - work more with allies and negotiate with adversaries on Iraq.

Bush, Durbin said, "reacted very strongly. He got very animated in his response" and emphasized that he is "the commander in chief."

We have learned from previous episodes, that when Bush gets animated, he tends to be something other than presidential. Bush apparently believes that if he metaphorically jumps up and down and throws a tantrum, he can change the subject. But our nation is now in a crisis and Bush is directly and unavoidably in the center of it. And standing behind him, of course, is Dick Cheney.

Bush's comparison of himself to Truman is largely absurd. For one thing, Truman did not start the war in Korea; and to put it bluntly, when the Chinese crossed the North Korean border later in the war, Truman was trying to stop World War Three from happening, not encourage it.

Bush's tirades and rambling rhetoric are getting tiresome; his arrogance has simply become a pathetic shield to avoid change as well as responsibility for his failures. Bush has compared himself to Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and now Truman. His strange megalomania is not a pretty sight to behold. But the pressure on Bush must continue. There is no other choice but to rein in the most incompetent and reckless president in our nation's history.

Larry Wilkerson on the Iraq Study Group

Larry Wilkerson worked as chief of staff for Secretary of State Colin Powell. He has intimate knowledge of how the Bush Administration works. His article appears in the New York Daily News; here are some points he makes (hat tip to White House Briefing):

Jam-packed as the ISG's report is with recommendations and assessments, it is not a panacea for what ails the Bush administration. Even if its recommendations are spot-on, even if the President accepted every detail, there is not the requisite diplomatic skill and expertise within this national leadership to pull it off.

(snip)

Capable, risk-taking, bold and decisive leadership - leadership that does nuance and not simply black and white - as well as consummate diplomatic skills at key junctures are absolutely necessary to carry out such efforts.

This leadership and these skills do not reside in the current administration, even with the addition of the new Secretary of Defense Robert Gates.

(snip)

And then there is the vice president. How to circumvent him and his minions? It seems an impossible undertaking. With 88 people working directly for him on his own personal staff - an unprecedented number - and others strategically placed throughout the federal bureaucracy, Cheney is a formidable force. Isolated by the President or not, he can still wreak havoc... ...

Wilkerson says we have betrayed the Iraqis and that the ISG report is wrong to blame them. He's essentially right on the analysis. In some respects, the ISG report gives Bush some political cover, but only if he changes his policy and implements the major recommendations, the most important one being the need to deal diplomatically with the surrounding nations.

And of course, Wilkerson is spot on when he points out that even if the Bush Administration accepts all the recommendations of the ISG report, it doesn't necessarily have the competence to implement the recommendations. In fact, the real problem facing the United States is the breakdown of our foreign policy under Bush. We can't help the Iraqis or anyone else or even ourselves until repairs are made to the policy and the staffing.

If Bush decides to change course, he can cut Cheney down to size, ask for several more resignations and bring in highly qualified people, including experienced diplomatic envoys, to implement a number of important changes; he won't win the war but he can begin to clean up the mess and repair our foreign policy.

Let there be no doubt: our country has been in a constitutional crisis for more than a year (longer if we include the lying that got us into the Iraq war). The Republican-controlled Congress has done nothing to deal with the crisis; Republicans just assumed Bush had the Republican majority locked up, but the American people have informed them otherwise.

If Bush decides to remain stubborn, there will be a continuing effort to limit what he can do and the pressure on him will grow. The longer Bush remains defiant, the deeper the constitutional crisis will grow. In reality, the crisis could last all the way to January of 2009, or longer, but let's hope ways can be found to keep our country and our foreign policy from drifting for the next two years.

Democrats will do what they can but their majority in Congress is slender; the institution of the legislative branch has also been damaged in the last twelve years. The key is how much longer Republicans in the House and Senate wish to prolong the crisis. Given that most Republicans are nearly as ultraconservative as the president, it's not certain what will happen.

Dissatisfaction with Bush Growing

What is it that our incompetent president understands that the American people don't? What evidence does he have that he's right and everybody else is wrong? The Iraq Study Group report is considered flawed by many Bush critics but the report is far closer to the American people than it is to the Bush Administration. James Baker and the others on the Iraq Study Group have proven their competence. George W. Bush has not, and even his public relations skills are pointless at this late date.

Yahoo carries a story by Nancy Benac of AP on the dissatisfaction with the president (hat tip to The Huffington Post):

Americans see no easy exit from Iraq: Just 9 percent expect the war to end in clear-cut victory, compared with 87 percent who expect some sort of compromise settlement, according to the latest AP-Ipsos poll.

(snip)

Dissatisfaction with President Bush's handling of Iraq has climbed to an all-time high of 71 percent, according to the AP-Ipsos survey, which was taken as a bipartisan commission was releasing its recommendations this week for a new course. Just 27 percent of Americans approved of Bush's handling of Iraq, down from his previous low of 31 percent in November.

That 27 percent is close to the 25 percent that I believe indicates the true strength of the Republican right wing base—we're getting there as Bush's support among more traditional Republicans is peeling away.

If Bush's stubbornness continues, even Republicans in Congress need to start thinking about where the president is taking their party and, more important, where he is taking the nation.

It's Bush Choice: The Baker Report Has Thrown Him a Life Preserver

If some kind of bipartisan seriousness can be brought back to our foreign policy that is free of of what we now know is a disastrous neoconservative ideology, I'm for it, even if I don't agree with everything that is said. The signs from the White House, however, are not good. There's something unserious about a president who keeps talking about 'victory' or 'winning' without bothering to mention what he means. And it's unserious that the president ignores the failure of some of his early goals and acts as if he knows what he's doing. And it's unserious at this late stage that Bush is still unable to tell Americans the simple facts.

Like many right wing Republicans, Bush can sometimes be something of a blowhard—that can work for a while, at least politically, or on the campaign trail, but it hasn't worked since Hurricane Katrina and the growing fiasco in Iraq. No one wants Bush to fail for two more years. But the hour is late and no one is going to hold his hand. So it's his choice: he can nurse his ego for two more years and continue to flounder, or he can do what's right for the country and accept plenty of bipartisan help.

Ron Hutcheson of the McClatchy Washington Bureau has a story on the next phase in the ongoing crisis in the White House: what will Bush do?:

The question now is whether President Bush will listen.

The Iraq Study Group delivered an unmistakable message Wednesday: Change the course in Iraq.

Bush can be a stubborn man, proud of his reputation for decisiveness and commitment to what he sees as principle, but he's shifted gears before in response to political pressure, though never on an issue of such magnitude.

(snip)

The bipartisan group's report leaves Bush more politically isolated than ever.

"Now the president has the ball in his court," said incoming Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev. "And we're going to be watching very closely."

While the president reserved judgment on the report, it essentially repudiates his entire Middle East policy. It called for withdrawing nearly all American combat troops by early 2008, precisely the kind of timetable that he's denounced repeatedly. It presses for direct U.S. talks with Syria and Iran. And it endorses much more U.S. pressure on Israel to reach a peace with Palestinians.

Bush may still believe in his decisiveness but his decisiveness has led only to fiascos. What Bush calls decisiveness, some of us call reactiveness (curious how close that is to 'reactionary'). Reacting based on gut instincts without much thought and failing to recognize the dismal consequences of off-the-cuff ad hoc decisions is nothing to be proud of.

Now some Bush critics are arguing that the Baker report doesn't go far enough, but the reality is that the report goes farther than anything we have seen in Washington the last three years; the report can only go so far since, after all, it is a bipartisan effort. But the fundamental message of the report is quite simple and quite powerful: stop digging a hole, stop damaging American foreign policy.

Here's another excerpt from the McClatchy article:

"I know there's a lot of speculation that these reports in Washington mean there's going to be some kind of graceful exit out of Iraq. We're going to stay in Iraq to get the job done, so long as the (Iraqi) government wants us there," he said at a news conference with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. "This business about a graceful exit just simply has no realism to it at all."

This kind of pointless posturing on the part of Bush has to end. Let's turn around what he says. There is nothing graceful about the current American occupation of Iraq. Sooner or later, we are leaving, probably before the 2008 election; the only question is whether we can clean up some of the mess before we go, nothing more. It will be impossible to leave the region entirely and we will have to position ourselves in some strategic manner. But for all practical purposes, we are leaving. Bush's schemes, whatever they were, are finished.

Bush says he will be talking to advisers within his own administration, but we have grown accustomed to his echo chamber. If his advisers merely echo what the president wants to hear, the fiasco in the Middle East will only grow. Bush should listen to the Iraq Study Group.