1 Boring Old Man

This Is The Week When Nothing Will Happen

"Watershed"? "Pivotal"? "D-Day for Iraq Policy"? Oh, puhleez. President Bush’s prime time stay-the-course speech has already been written. Public opinion has already concluded that the Petraeus report will sugarcoat the statistics, that the Crocker report will move the goalposts, and that "victory" in Iraq will be no less absurd an American mission at the end of the week than at the beginning. Magical September will make Republicans no less likely to wag their lapdog tails at the White House, or to rattle their cut-and-run sabers at the Democrats, than will Magical March, the probable next location of the turning-point mirage. Democrats, for their part, will seize on the possible January withdrawal of one brigade of the surge as a bipartisan triumph, and their fear of being branded anti-troop and pro-terrorist by a bunch of chickenhawk demagogues will lead them to hail a non-binding non-deadline nonconditional footnote to the next defense appropriation as though they had drawn some heroic line in the sand..

This doesn’t mean there will be any lack of yammering this week. The media will cover it with all the fanfare and ersatz sobriety that they afford to other pseudo-events, like State of the Union addresses. We will be told over and over how Very Serious these reports are, just as we were told how Terribly Important the report of the Iraq Study Group was. Experts and editorialists will announce how very crucial The Next Six Months — the blogosphere’s beloved Friedman Unit — will be, despite the abundant, Googleable carcasses of previous and equally useless Next Six Months punditry stretching back to Mission Accomplished. There may even be some chatter about the virtues of our system of separation of powers, as though these hearings actually constitute Congressional oversight, as though they were not simply a stage show whose outcome is as foregone as any performance of kabuki.

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This week is also, of course, the anniversary of 9/11. Republican presidential candidates can be counted on for a splendid dick-size tourney, which will be as consequential as any of the pious huffing and puffing we’ll hear from the Hill. None of the candidates will brag of a wide stance, but several, no doubt, will boast of an admirably strong stream. Sensible Americans, except for the 20 percent or so who still constitute the Republican base, and except for the media who confuse covering the opinion of an extreme right-wing fringe with covering the issues of a presidential election, will sensibly ignore the adolescent tape-measure antics of the GOP field, just as they have already discounted the Frat-Boy-in-Chief’s we’re-kicking-ass-in-Iran delusions.

Will terrorists try something terrible this week? It’s possible. It’s always possible. And if tragedy strikes, God forbid, it won’t be a pseudo-event. But whether it happens or not should be no reason to conclude that the White House deserves unchallenged power and unchecked authority. A bazillion words will be spilled this week about war and terror. But none of them will matter as much as the real blood being spilled in pursuit of a delusional policy which has criminally diverted our urgent attention from a world-wide war with violent Islamic extremists that no outcome in Iraq is going to end.