Bush Lays Out Plan, Sort Of

Stay the course. Vital national interests. The front in the War. Total victory.

George W. Bush must be crazy, delusional, disassociated from reality. All this gibberish spewed to a captive crowd of Naval cadets, some of the best and brightest of our privileged youth, with the blood of more than 2,000 US soldiers on Bush’s hands, and despite a mountain of evidence, the President continues to believe this “war” can be won.

Won, how? First of all, Bush has it wrong – what is happening in Iraq isn’t a war, it’s the back end of an invasion, an occupation of one nation by another of superior military might. Iraq never posed a credible or imminent threat to the US, never attacked the US, and was most certainly not in cahoots with Al Qaeda.

And note to George: Iraq wasn’t the center of the War on Terror until your deluded policies made it so.

As the political winds blow, Bush’s rationale for the Invasion/Occupation changes; in the beginning it was all about WMD, anthrax stockpiles, mustard gas and whatnot. When the WMD failed to turn up on cue, the rationale changed to creating democracy in Iraq, giving the long-suffering Iraqis the magic power of self-determination.

Guaranteeing US oil interests access to Iraq’s reserves never enters into the discussion, though OIL hovers in the background of every purported reason for our spilling blood in Iraq in the first place.

Bush is right to say that a war cannot be won on a timetable, but wrong to make this assertion regarding Iraq. An occupation can most certainly be ended on a predetermined timetable.

As long as the US maintains a military presence on Iraqi soil, there will be fighting, car bombs, suicide missions, and strife. When and if we depart, Iraq may descend into civil war or its various factions will figure out a way to coexist, either in a democratic framework or something else.

W has got to stop channeling LBJ and Nixon. The Occupation is not going well, the American citizenry are fed up with the human and monetary cost, and the longer the US remains the worse this wretched deal gets.

Sometimes the greatest act of leadership is to stare reality in the face, admit error, and call for a retreat. This takes guts and wisdom in equal measure, traits that W doesn’t appear to possess.