President Bush’s strategy for Iraq, 2006: Stay the course.<\/p>\n
President Bush’s strategy for Iraq, 2007: Stay the course. Only with more troops.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
I’d like to say something snarky, or insightful, or something<\/i>, but the truth is that I got nothing. There’s really nothing left to be said. The President has proven time and time again that he will do whatever the hell he wants, regardless of what anyone else — including the majority of the American public — thinks about it. I suspect that what he most wants is just to ride out the next year-and-a-half until somebody else can take over the Oval Office (and the blame for however the Iraq War ends) and he can get back to the ranch and all that important brush clearin’ that needs to be done.<\/p>\n
For the record, I was opposed to going into Iraq from the very beginning. I thought it was a fool’s errand that was never adequately justified by the president’s ever-shifting rationales, that was motivated by a personal vendetta and a belief in a ridiculously utopian vision of recreating the Middle East to our liking (you’d think someone would’ve asked why, if the Domino Theory failed to work out for communism, would it work so well for democracy?), and that was a dangerous and unnecessary distraction from pursuing our real target, Osama bin Laden.<\/p>\n
Not that any of that matters now, of course. We’re there, and it’s a real damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t pickle of a situation. If we stay, it’s more of the same, and we look like impotent fools while our soldiers get knocked off a few at a time. If we pull out, it’s chaos and genocide and we look like monsters for allowing it to happen. Either way, we’re screwed.<\/p>\n
I don’t pretend to have a clue of how to fix things in Iraq. Maybe I’m just one of those pessimistic libruls<\/i>, but I don’t think the situation is<\/i> fixable, let alone winnable. Maybe it was once — I doubt it, personally — but we squandered the opportunity if it was there. And I think the president maybe, just maybe, has finally gotten that through his thick skull. And he doesn’t have the faintest idea of what to do about it, either. So he just does more of the same and hopes, against all common sense, that this time it will work. I guess we’ll see, won’t we?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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