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Bush is the issue. Not Iraq…

Posted on Tuesday 11 September 2007


The next six months in Iraq are crucial – and always will be. That noise you heard yesterday on Capitol Hill was the can being kicked further down the road leading to January 2009, when George W. Bush gets to hand off his Iraq fiasco to somebody else.

It’s clear by now that playing for time is the real White House strategy for Iraq. Everything else is tactical maneuver and rhetorical legerdemain – nothing up my sleeve – with which the administration is buying time, roughly in six-month increments. Appearing before a joint hearing called by the House Armed Services and Foreign Affairs committees, Gen. David H. Petraeus probably won the respite Bush wanted when he said that U.S. military objectives "are in large measure being met."

Never mind whether those objectives make sense. Oh, and if anyone mentions that Congress is supposed to decide what wars this nation fights, not generals or diplomats? Attack them for impugning our nation’s finest – and give that can another kick…
It’s September 11th. Six years ago, Osama Bin Laden’s al Qaeda Terrorists proved the wisdom of President Clinton’s attempts to assasinate him in Afghanistan, and Richard Clarke’s entreaties to the Bush Administration to focus on this Terrorist group practicing for war in the Afghani desert. In the muddled period that followed, our own government – newly elected – decided to opportunize on Bin Laden’s attack to invade Iraq according to the plan of the extremist neoconservative hawks that pervaded this new Bush Administration. Their justification was to connect al Qaeda with Iraq and to fabricate evidence that Hussein was a dire threat to us. Neither of those things were true.

The government of Iraq was assasinated, leaving Iraq to plunge into a Civil War that has raged, more or less unabated, for the next six years. Throughout that period, we have continued to occupy Iraq, pouring billions of dollars and our entire military into that country with one goal in mind. Our continued presence there has had one goal – the establishment of this American style democracy. Progress has been measured by whether this American style democracy was functioning and whether the Iraqi security forces were taking up the goals and objectives of its creators – namely us. As Eugene Robinson points out, every six months, we are told that we are making progress in these goals – the security forces are stronger, the American style democracy is on the verge of blossoming. We are told that we are helping the Iraqi people move toward their destiny. In the process. we are increasingly moving away from ours – our destiny. The naive Project for the New American Century was for the United States to jump into the vacuum created when the Berlin Wall fell and become the "sole superpower." What we found as Bush lead us down this path is that what’s in a vacuum is no air, and now we’re gasping as expected.

Bush is determined to push us down this road until he’s gone, postponing the collapse of his efforts until he’s no longer responsible. If the collapse comes after he’s gone, he’ll blame it on the Democrats. If there’s a modicum of success, he’ll feel vindicated. What’s right? Not allowing him to get there, to the end of his road. The verdict is in. He and his friends have invaded America as deceitfully as they invaded Iraq. The only real question on the table is whether his day of reckoning is now, or later in history books [written in another language]…

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