The Price We Will Pay For Bush's Folly

On the same day that the totally bonkers Liz Cheney pens an op-ed in the WSJ where she says this:

The president has so effectively diminished American strength abroad that there is no longer a question of whether this was his intent. He is working to pre-emptively disarm the United States. He advocates slashing our nuclear arsenal even as the North Koreans threaten us and the Iranians close in on their own nuclear weapon. He has turned his back on America's allies around the world and ignored growing threats.

we find out that we will all be paying for Bush and Cheney's folly in Iraq and Afghanistan for decades to come. 

Abstract: The Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts, taken together, will be the most expensive wars in US history – totaling somewhere between $4 to $6 trillion. This includes long-term medical care and disability compensation for service members, veterans and families, military replenishment and social and economic costs. The largest portion of that bill is yet to be paid. Since 2001, the US has expanded the quality, quantity, availability and eligibility of benefits for military personnel and veterans. This has led to unprecedented growth in the Department of Veterans Affairs and the Department of Defense budgets. These benefits will increase further over the next 40 years. Additional funds are committed to replacing large quantities of basic equipment used in the wars and to support ongoing diplomatic presence and military assistance in the Iraq and Afghanistan region. The large sums borrowed to finance operations in Iraq and Afghanistan will also impose substantial long-term debt servicing costs. As a consequence of these wartime spending choices, the United States will face constraints in funding investments in personnel and diplomacy, research and development and new military initiatives. The legacy of decisions taken during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars will dominate future federal budgets for decades to come.

Remember what we were told 10 years ago?  James Fallows does:

A little over ten years ago, George W. Bush fired his economic advisor, Lawrence Lindsey, for saying that the total cost of invading Iraq might come to as much as $200 billion. Bush instead stood by such advisors as Paul Wolfowitz, who said that the invasion would be largely "self-financing" via Iraq's oil, and Andrew Natsios, who told an incredulous Ted Koppel that the war's total cost to the American taxpayer would be no more than $1.7 billion.

So what does the Harvard Kennedy School of Government report see as the greatest security threat?

One of the most significant challenges to future US national security policy will not originate from any external threat. Rather it is simply coping with the legacy of the conflicts we have already fought in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Get that Liz?  Our biggest security threat are the actions of your father and George W. Bush.
Go read the entire report (pdf) for a breakdown of the costs.

General Tommy Franks?

Let's suppose you are running against a President that ordered the operation that resulted in the Death of Osama bin Laden what general would you chose to endorse and advise you?  If you are Mitt Romney it would be the general that lost Osama bin Laden at Tora Bora.

If you're a presidential candidate looking to establish your national security cred with a war-weary American public, who might be the worst frontman you could choose for your cause? How about the guy who oversaw the campaign that lost Osama bin Laden at Tora Bora, then bungled planning for war in Iraq? In a news release Wednesday night, Mitt Romney announced the 300-plus members of his "Military Advisory Council," and that man led the list of endorsements:

"I'm proud to be supporting Mitt Romney in this critical election about our nation’s future," said General Tommy Franks, USA (Ret.), Past Commander, U.S. Central Command. "Governor Romney is committed to restoring America's leadership role in the world. Instead of playing politics with our military, he will strengthen our defense posture by reversing the President's devastating defense cuts. The fact of the matter is that we cannot afford another four years of feckless foreign policy. We need level-headed leadership which will protect our interests and defend our values with clarity and without apology."

Few living Americans can speak with as much authority about "years of feckless foreign policy" as can Tommy "Rumsfeld's water boy" Franks, who comes in at No. 4 on a Foreign Policy list of worst US generals ever. As readers of our lie-by-lie Iraq timeline will recall, Franks oversaw CENTCOM from 2000 to 2003 and scripted the initial conduct of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. 

This just goes to show how wedded Romney is to the failed foreign policy of George W. Bush. It is also obvious that Romney is in favor of maintaining the welfare to the military industrial complex.

Mitt Romney and George W. Bush

George W. Bush is still blamed by a majority for what is wrong with the United States and the world for that matter.  So one would think he would be trying to distance himself from the Bush years but he's not.

Ezra Klein:

In fact, that’s Romney’s biggest problem. It’s George W. Bush, not Barack Obama, who has made voters skeptical of many of Romney’s core policies. It’s George W. Bush, not Obama campaign strategist David Plouffe, who persuaded voters that our economic troubles aren’t mainly Obama’s fault. And so it is, in a sense, the electorate’s lingering fear of George W. Bush, as much as its residual affection for Barack Obama, that Romney needs to beat if he’s to become president.
At Tuesday’s debate, Romney was given a chance to do just that. A voter from Nassau County stood up and asked: “Governor Romney, I am an undecided voter, because I’m disappointed with the lack of progress I’ve seen in the last four years. However, I do attribute much of America’s economic and international problems to the failings and missteps of the Bush administration. Since both you and President Bush are Republicans, I fear a return to the policies of those years should you win this election. What is the biggest difference between you and George W. Bush, and how do you differentiate yourself from George W. Bush?”

So this was the perfect opportunity for Romney to distance himself from Bush but he didn't. He didn't even answer the question.

“Thank you,” Romney said. “And I appreciate that question.” But his mind was still on the previous question. “I just want to make sure that, I think I was supposed to get that last answer,” he complained to moderator Candy Crowley.

Instead he chose to continue to answer the previous question.

Notice what he didn’t say there. He didn’t say that Bush had gotten anything wrong before leaving office as one of the most unpopular presidents in history. He didn’t say, “You’re right to be skeptical of Republicans, because we didn’t live up to your expectations last time.” He said, rather, “Have you heard about my five-point plan?”

Daniel Larison:

What’s remarkable about Romney’s answer was that he didn’t even acknowledge or endorse the questioner’s main concern, which was that the Bush administration presided over major debacles that are still adversely affecting the U.S. The questioner was worried that Romney would repeat Bush’s errors, and he responded by rattling off a campaign agenda that Bush could and did run on. Like Bush, Romney talks about fiscal conservatism, but Romney gave the woman no reason to believe he would govern differently. It was Romney’s “just trust me” argument all over again, and he failed to acknowledge that one of the reasons so many people don’t trust him is that he doesn’t seem to have many major differences with Bush.

Romney's problem is the same problem the Republicans have in general -  they can't admit that George W Bush did anything wrong.  The Democrats should be taking more advantage of this and they will have the opportunity in the Foreign Policy debate on Monday.
Update:
Ed Kilgore has a valid observation

But Obama’s follow-up to Mitt’s evasions was interesting as well. He could have done what Ezra did in his column in pointing out that the big economic policies that led to the 2008 disaster remain part of the Romney/Ryan agenda. But instead, he focused on the areas where Romney has parted company with Bush in a more radically conservative direction: immigration reform, most obviously, but also Medicare voucherization (half-true) and a ban on funding for Planned Parenthood (which W. would probably have supported if asked, despite Poppy’s identification with the group).
In taking this tack, Obama sacrificed the opportunity to identify Mitt with W. in order to attack the “Moderate Mitt Meme.” But it might have been a lot more effective had he pointed out that Mitt’s party has decided almost unanimously that Bush was a bad president because he was too moderate. This was the verdict after the 2008 defeat, and was the constant refrain of the 2012 Republican primary season: the GOP had erred not by pursuing endless high-end tax cuts or relentless deregulation of the financial sector or a dumb war with Iraq followed by a disastrous occupation, but by creating Medicare Part D and No Child Left behind and embracing comprehensive immigration reform. Bush was equally faulted for failing to undertake (with the exception of his abortive Social Security offensive in 2005) the kind of assault on the big New Deal and Great Society programs now associated with the Ryan Budget.

Obama missed an opportunity to tie Romney to Bush, something that could cost him the election.  

Delusion and denial

George W. Bush is about the only one left who doesn't think the US is already in a recession. Today at The Economic Club of New York he did admit that the economy going through 'tough time' but once again denied it was in recession. Now I really hate to compare George W. Bush to Herbert Hoover, Hoover was a very intelligent man and a true humanitarian, but Hoover's anti government ideology led to the Great Depression and George W. Bush seems to be advocating the dame ideology.

NEW YORK - President Bush preached optimism and Republican orthodoxy of minimalist government intervention Friday as the best approach to an increasingly troubled economy.

[.....]

His main message, aside from displaying confidence in the U.S. economy’s underpinnings and historical resilience, was to caution against overreaction by policymakers that could damage the economy’s short- and long-term prospects, something he did about a half-dozen times in 40 minutes of remarks.

Now Bush may deny the economy is in dire straights but the rest of the world doesn't. As I pointed out below much of the world sees the dollar as little more than Monopoly money. And we have this:
US Faces Severe Recession, Feldstein Says

The United States has entered a recession that could be "substantially more severe" than recent ones, former National Bureau of Economic Research President Martin Feldstein said Friday.

"The situation is very bad, the situation is getting worse, and the risks are that it could get very bad," Feldstein said in a speech at the Futures Industry Association meeting in Boca Raton, Florida.

NBER is a private sector group that is considered the arbiter of U.S. business cycles.

Feldstein said the federal funds rate is headed for 2 percent from the current 3 percent.

He added that lower short-term rates from the Federal Reserve would not have the same impact in the current downturn, in terms of reviving economic activity.

And he repeated what Krugman said earlier, there isn't much the FED can do about it at this point.

There isn't much traction in monetary policy these days, I'm afraid, because of a lack of liquidity in the credit markets," he said.

The Fed's new credit facility, announced on Tuesday, "can help in a rather small way ... but the underlying risks will remain with the institutions that borrow from the Fed, and this does nothing to change their capital," Feldstein noted.

There is another big difference between Hoover and Bush, Hoover had several administrations preceding him that contributed to the economic armageddon, in Bush's case it's all his.

McCain's Bush Problem

As Jazz pointed out yesterday and I discussed here John McCain's biggest problem in November will not be Clinton or Obama but George W. Bush. Writing at Larry Sabato's Crystal Ball Dr. Alan Abramowitz agrees.
THE REAL THREAT TO MCCAIN?
Disgruntled GOP moderates could impact party unity

A lot of Republicans are unhappy with their party this year. Some conservative Republicans, following the lead of talk show hosts such as Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, have been threatening to sit out the November election or vote for a third party candidate because they don't consider their party's presidential nominee, John McCain, to be sufficiently conservative.

Since emerging as the clear frontrunner for the Republican nomination on Super Tuesday, Mr. McCain has been working hard to win the support of conservatives by stressing his hawkish views on Iraq and his conservative positions on social issues such as abortion. In a further effort to ease the concerns of conservatives, McCain recently promised to oppose any tax increases during his term as president.

But a careful examination of the evidence from the 2006 midterm elections as well as voting patterns in recent primaries indicates that it isn't conservatives who pose the biggest threat to Republican unity in the fall. It's moderate-to-liberal Republicans who represent the biggest challenge to John McCain in uniting his party against the Democratic nominee, especially if that nominee is Barack Obama.

While conservatives may continue to complain about McCain, they will almost certainly end up voting for him against a much more liberal Democrat. But a large number of moderate-to-liberal Republicans could actually defect to the Democratic nominee if they perceive McCain as moving too far to the right in his effort to appease party conservatives.

In the 2006 midterm elections, defections by moderate-to-liberal Republicans contributed to the Democratic takeover of the House of Representatives and were largely responsible for Republican defeats in three major Senate races in states that had voted for George Bush by wide margins in 2004: Missouri, Montana and Virginia.

John McCain has morphed into John McBush in order to win favor from the "conservative" base. This will cost him votes among independents to be sure but when one looks at the 2006 midterm elections it could also cost him 10 to 15 percent of the Republican votes. By jumping in bed with George W. Bush McCain has made the 2008 election one about the Bush administration.

McCain ‘Is Not Going To Change’ My Foreign Policy
~George W. Bush, March 5, 2008

Enough said!

Look who's talking

In spite of the fact that I still think Obama is an empty suit I am leaning in his direction in large part because of Clinton fatigue. That said this article by Dean Barnett, Obama Unplugged, while in large part true is still absurd when one considers the source. Has Barnett listened to to George W. Bush over the last few years? While Obama may be better with a teleprompter he can still talk coherently without one. Barnett says:

In spite of Obama's obvious strengths in this area, questions linger regarding Obama's gifted speechifying. Do his speeches give us a glimpse at a very special man with a unique vision? Or are we merely witnessing a political one-trick pony? Yes, Obama can turn a phrase better and do more with a Teleprompter than any other modern era politician. But does his special skill set here actually mean anything, or is it instead the political equivalent of a dog walking on its hind legs--unusual and riveting, but not especially significant? Regardless, the liberal commentators have gushed their praise nearly every time Obama has opened his mouth before a Teleprompter the past few months.

Consider the source and his past support for George W. Bush.

End of the coalition

Jack Balkin points out what we have we have been saying here that the coalition that has resulted in Republican wins since 1980 is all but dead and credits George W. Bush for it's death.

If 2008 turns out to be a pivotal election, defining a new political era, it is important to give credit where credit is due. Two key reasons for the change will be the crackup of the coalition of the dominant party of the era, the Republicans, and the almost complete political failure of George W. Bush and his chief political adviser, Karl Rove. Let me begin with the second reason, and then move to the first.

The Bush/Rove strategy of accentuating divisions along partisan lines was a bold gamble that ultimately failed, because it depended on the Bush presidency being successful. Think of it this way: If Bush does well at his task, then people at the margins gravitate toward the winning side and the Republican coalition slowly expands over time, rejuvenating the party and producing a post-Reagan vision (organized, for example, around the War on Terror and the opportunity society) that extends well into the future. But if Bush does badly, or as it turned out, very badly, the same strategy that encourages increased partisanship and divisiveness will tend to make Americans believe that these features of political life are also the cause of political failure. They will seek both change and a sense of unity. This is precisely what Obama has tapped into, which is why he has been successful so far. Obama, if you will, is what Bush's strategy has produced.

Now I think that the coalition was bound to unravel anyway but the failure of George W. Bush may have sped it up. The Reagan Revolution itself was responsible. The social conservatives could only be expected to vote against their own economic interests for so long. For that reason I think Huckabee may deserve more of the credit than Bush. As I explained the other day:

People are not voting for Huckabee because he's a likable guy they are voting for him because they are scared. Not of the Islamo terrorists but they are afraid of losing their jobs, their house and their medical insurance.

[.....]

They don't trust the leaders in government or the leaders in business to look out for them. And we are not just talking about the working poor - there are families with six figure incomes that have the same fears.

Born again

John Cole has left the Republican party. He has strayed so far that he is now defending Hillary. This is what Karl Rove and George W. Bush have done to the Republican coalition. Some legacy!

The Trouble With Romney

I like to make fun of David Brooks - sometimes his columns are idiocy personified. Occasional he takes off his partisan dunce hat and his delusional rose colored glasses and gets it right. Today is one of those times as he talks about the snake oil salesman, Romney.

Road to Nowhere

Earnestly and methodically, he has appealed to each of the major constituency groups. For national security conservatives, he vowed to double the size of the prison at Guantánamo Bay. For social conservatives, he embraced a culture war against the faithless. For immigration skeptics, he swung so far right he earned the endorsement of Tom Tancredo.

He has spent roughly $80 million, including an estimated $17 million of his own money, hiring consultants, blanketing the airwaves and building an organization that is unmatched on the Republican side.

And he has turned himself into the party’s fusion candidate. Some of his rivals are stronger among social conservatives. Others are stronger among security conservatives, but no candidate has a foot in all camps the way Romney does. No candidate offends so few, or is the acceptable choice of so many.

And that is why Romney is at the fulcrum of the Republican race. He’s looking strong in Iowa and is the only candidate who can afford to lose an important state and still win the nomination.

And yet as any true conservative can tell you, the sort of rational planning Mitt Romney embodies never works. The world is too complicated and human reason too limited. The PowerPoint mentality always fails to anticipate something. It always yields unintended consequences.

And what Romney failed to anticipate is this: In turning himself into an old-fashioned, orthodox Republican, he has made himself unelectable in the fall. When you look inside his numbers, you see tremendous weaknesses.

Brooks sees something that many of us have seen but that most Republicans have refused to acknowledge - the end of a coalition.

But his biggest problem is a failure of imagination. Market research is a snapshot of the past. With his data-set mentality, Romney has chosen to model himself on a version of Republicanism that is receding into memory. As Walter Mondale was the last gasp of the fading New Deal coalition, Romney has turned himself into the last gasp of the Reagan coalition.

That coalition had its day, but it is shrinking now. The Republican Party is more unpopular than at any point in the past 40 years. Democrats have a 50 to 36 party identification advantage, the widest in a generation. The general public prefers Democratic approaches on health care, corruption, the economy and Iraq by double-digit margins. Republicans’ losses have come across the board, but the G.O.P. has been hemorrhaging support among independent voters. Surveys from the Pew Research Center and The Washington Post, Kaiser Foundation and Harvard University show that independents are moving away from the G.O.P. on social issues, globalization and the roles of religion and government.

If any Republican candidate is going to win this year, he will have to offer a new brand of Republicanism. But Romney has tied himself to the old brand. He is unresponsive to the middle-class anxiety that Huckabee is tapping into. He has forsaken the trans-partisan candor that McCain represents. Romney, the cautious consultant, is pivoting to stress his corporate competence, and is rebranding himself as an Obama-esque change agent, but he will never make the sort of daring break that independent voters will demand if they are going to give the G.O.P. another look.

And the following observation is not the kind I have come to expect from Brooks.

The leaders of the Republican coalition know Romney will lose. But some would rather remain in control of a party that loses than lose control of a party that wins. Others haven’t yet suffered the agony of defeat, and so are not yet emotionally ready for the trauma of transformation. Others still simply don’t know which way to turn.

Brooks and other Republicans (and former Republicans) are beginning to realize the the politics of Karl Rove that were supposed to keep the "Reagan revolution" going forever in fact destroyed it. That will be the lasting legacy of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Karl Rove.

Update
We all know that the vast majority of politicians are phonies. That said Matt Yglesias makes what may be a vaild point about Romney.

...to give Romney the benefit of the doubt, one thing I can say about him is that there's some indication he might make an okay president. He ran a successful business. He managed the Olympics well. He took over a state that enjoyed a high standard of living and during his years of governor it continued to enjoy a high standard of living and he never tried to do anything crazy. He's taken a lot of repugnant stands in the campaign, but that's clearly because he's telling people what he thinks they want to hear. When he thoughts his constituents wanted to hear about gay equality and a women's right to choose he said that stuff, too. He's a giant phony. But also a technocrat with some record of competence -- basically a risk-averse guy who knows what he's doing and understands how to color between the lines. It's impossible to imagine him being a great president, but it's relatively easy to imagine him being an okay president.

The others in the field, not so much. Who knows what wars Rudy Giuliani or John McCain would start? And Mike Huckabee can't even fake knowing what he's talking about for fifteen minutes.

I'm not sure I'm entirely ready to buy that but he probably is the pick of the litter.

How low can they go?

It would appear that the government ruled over by the Bush/Cheney cabal can only continue to reach new lows. Not even the Hitler analogy is enough but perhaps Stalin is. The news that the CIA had destroyed tapes of interrogations was certainly not a surprise - outrageous but just part of a pattern. I don't think I fully realized just how outrageous is was until I read Kevin Drum's WHAT THE TAPES WOULD HAVE SHOWN.

And here is Barton Gellman's gloss of Ron Suskind's The One Percent Doctrine:

Abu Zubaydah, his captors discovered, turned out to be mentally ill and nothing like the pivotal figure they supposed him to be....Abu Zubaydah also appeared to know nothing about terrorist operations; rather, he was al-Qaeda's go-to guy for minor logistics.

.......

Which brings us back to the unbalanced Abu Zubaydah. "I said he was important," Bush reportedly told Tenet at one of their daily meetings. "You're not going to let me lose face on this, are you?" "No sir, Mr. President," Tenet replied. Bush "was fixated on how to get Zubaydah to tell us the truth," Suskind writes, and he asked one briefer, "Do some of these harsh methods really work?"
Interrogators did their best to find out, Suskind reports. They strapped Abu Zubaydah to a water-board, which reproduces the agony of drowning. They threatened him with certain death. They withheld medication. They bombarded him with deafening noise and harsh lights, depriving him of sleep. Under that duress, he began to speak of plots of every variety — against shopping malls, banks, supermarkets, water systems, nuclear plants, apartment buildings, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Statue of Liberty. With each new tale, "thousands of uniformed men and women raced in a panic to each...target." And so, Suskind writes, "the United States would torture a mentally disturbed man and then leap, screaming, at every word he uttered."

So here's what the tapes would have shown: not just that we had brutally tortured an al-Qaeda operative, but that we had brutally tortured an al-Qaeda operative who was (a) unimportant and low-ranking, (b) mentally unstable, (c) had no useful information, and (d) eventually spewed out an endless series of worthless, fantastical "confessions" under duress. This was all prompted by the president of the United States, implemented by the director of the CIA, and the end result was thousands of wasted man hours by intelligence and and law enforcement personnel.

As Digby reminds us this should come as no surprise since the resident of the White House has a history of being one sick SOB.

But there are times, when a candidates says something so revealing that the hair on the back of your neck stands up. This was one of those times:

While driving back from the speech later that day, Bush mentions Karla Faye Tucker, a double murderer who was executed in Texas last year. In the weeks before the execution, Bush says, Bianca Jagger and a number of other protesters came to Austin to demand clemency for Tucker. 'Did you meet with any of them?' I ask.

Bush whips around and stares at me. 'No, I didn't meet with any of them,' he snaps, as though I've just asked the dumbest, most offensive question ever posed. 'I didn't meet with Larry King either when he came down for it. I watched his interview with [Tucker], though. He asked her real difficult questions, like 'What would you say to Governor Bush?' 'What was her answer?' I wonder.

'Please,' Bush whimpers, his lips pursed in mock desperation, 'don't kill me.'

I must look shocked -- ridiculing the pleas of a condemned prisoner who has since been executed seems odd and cruel, even for someone as militantly anticrime as Bush -- because he immediately stops smirking.

'It's tough stuff,' Bush says, suddenly somber, 'but my job is to enforce the law.'

Why should anyone be surprised that that man would demand that a mentally ill prisoner with a broken leg be denied pain medication and tortured?

The idea that he didn't know about these torture session is ludicrous. It was one of the perks.

I worked for the Defense Intelligence Agency in the late 60s and early 70s and attended the DIA interrogation school. The first thing they taught us is that torture doesn't work. When you torture people they don't tell you the truth they tell you what they think you want to hear. Does that explain this administration's fascination with torture? I think so. They have demonstrated over and over that they have no interest in the truth and only want to hear what they want to hear. The lunatics have taken over the asylum. Foreign policy of the US is being formulated by rage filled psychopaths who are so good at using the weapon of fear that they got the country to go along with their madness.

When you drink your own snake oil

Matthew Dowd is not the first member of Bush's inner circle to regret selling the idiot from Texas and his evil puppeteer, Dick Cheney to the American people and he won't be the last. It took him years to recognize what many of us saw from the start. This will be just one of many mea culpas we will have to endure as people try to distance themselves from the worst presidency in American history.
Bush strategist looks back in sadness

Dowd, 46, is one of the nation's leading political strategists, a onetime Democrat who switched sides to help put Bush in the White House, then win a second term. He spent years shaping and promoting Bush's policies -- policies that Dowd now views with a mixture of anguish and contempt.

He began expressing his disillusionment, tentatively at first, at a UC Berkeley conference in January. Since then, he has grown more forceful.

On the administration's response to the Sept. 11 attacks: "I asked, 'Why aren't we doing bonds, war bonds? Why aren't we asking the country to do something instead of just . . . go shopping and get back on airplanes?' "

On the White House stand against same-sex marriage: "Why are we having the federal government get involved? . . . Does a thing limiting someone's rights and aimed at a particular constituency belong in the U.S. Constitution?"

On the war in Iraq: "I guess somebody would make the argument, well, the Iraq war was about defending ourselves. But it seems an awfully huge stretch these days to say that."

With a rueful laugh and, at one point, a catch in his throat, Dowd offered a lengthy account of his break with Bush during hours of conversation at his 18-acre ranch in the green Hill Country outside Austin. He puffed a cigar, and then another, as the fading sun glinted off the Blanco River. A CD player cycled through sacred music and country songs.

Dowd is not the first Bush ally to part with the administration. Former Treasury Secretary Paul H. O'Neill contributed to a book that likened the president at Cabinet meetings to a "blind man in a roomful of deaf people." John J. Dilulio Jr., who led the White House office of faith-based initiatives, left with a shot at "Mayberry Machiavellis." Retired Army Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, who once led U.S. forces in Iraq, accused the administration of going to war with a "catastrophically flawed" plan.

But Dowd was a part of Bush's political inner circle, enjoying a degree of power and intimacy that made his criticism all the more unexpected -- and hurtful to those still close to the president, many of whom are Dowd's friends.

I have no sympathy for Dowd and others that foisted this disaster of a President upon the US and the world. I really don't know what his motivation was but he is responsible for the disaster and if he didn't see what he was selling he's even dumber than George W. Bush. If he did see it he's lower than pond scum. Sorry Mr Dowd, it's too little too late.

Red Zone Blues

A few weeks ago I read Pepe Escobar's
Red Zone Blues:
a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge
Escobar returned to Iraq to see for himself what Iraq was like during the surge. In my review of the book I wrote the following:

Escobar starts his trip in Damascus, Syria the home of thousands of Iraqi refugees.

This is a biblical exodus—the YouTube version. Welcome to Little Fallujah—previously Geramana, southeast Damascus. The Nahda area of Geramana now boasts at least 200,000 resident Iraqis. They visibly came with all their savings—and made good use of it. The congested main drag of al-Nahda is an intoxicating apotheosis of anarchic capitalism, business piled upon business—Hawaii fruits, Galilia underwear, Call Me mobile, Snack Bambino, Discovery software school, Eva sunglasses, boutique Tout le Mond, all Iraqi owned.

Yes, many of the people who should be building Iraq are no longer there-driven out by ethnic cleansing and violence.

One of those who was driven out is a blogger that many of us has followed since the invasion and occupation, River at Baghdad Burning who has supplied her first post since leaving Baghdad for Damascus.

Syria is a beautiful country- at least I think it is. I say “I think” because while I perceive it to be beautiful, I sometimes wonder if I mistake safety, security and normalcy for ‘beauty’. In so many ways, Damascus is like Baghdad before the war- bustling streets, occasional traffic jams, markets seemingly always full of shoppers… And in so many ways it’s different. The buildings are higher, the streets are generally narrower and there’s a mountain, Qasiyoun, that looms in the distance.

[.....]

It is estimated that there are at least 1.5 million Iraqis in Syria today. I believe it. Walking down the streets of Damascus, you can hear the Iraqi accent everywhere. There are areas like Geramana and Qudsiya that are packed full of Iraqi refugees. Syrians are few and far between in these areas. Even the public schools in the areas are full of Iraqi children. A cousin of mine is now attending a school in Qudsiya and his class is composed of 26 Iraqi children, and 5 Syrian children. It’s beyond belief sometimes. Most of the families have nothing to live on beyond their savings which are quickly being depleted with rent and the costs of living.


Within a month of our being here, we began hearing talk about Syria requiring visas from Iraqis, like most other countries. Apparently, our esteemed puppets in power met with Syrian and Jordanian authorities and decided they wanted to take away the last two safe havens remaining for Iraqis- Damascus and Amman. The talk began in late August and was only talk until recently- early October. Iraqis entering Syria now need a visa from the Syrian consulate or embassy in the country they are currently in. In the case of Iraqis still in Iraq, it is said that an approval from the Ministry of Interior is also required (which kind of makes it difficult for people running away from militias OF the Ministry of Interior…). Today, there’s talk of a possible fifty dollar visa at the border.

She describes the return to the Iraqi/Syrian border for new Visas and concludes with this.

By the time we had reentered the Syrian border and were headed back to the cab ready to take us into Kameshli, I had resigned myself to the fact that we were refugees. I read about refugees on the Internet daily… in the newspapers… hear about them on TV. I hear about the estimated 1.5 million plus Iraqi refugees in Syria and shake my head, never really considering myself or my family as one of them. After all, refugees are people who sleep in tents and have no potable water or plumbing, right? Refugees carry their belongings in bags instead of suitcases and they don’t have cell phones or Internet access, right? Grasping my passport in my hand like my life depended on it, with two extra months in Syria stamped inside, it hit me how wrong I was. We were all refugees. I was suddenly a number. No matter how wealthy or educated or comfortable, a refugee is a refugee. A refugee is someone who isn’t really welcome in any country- including their own... especially their own.

We live in an apartment building where two other Iraqis are renting. The people in the floor above us are a Christian family from northern Iraq who got chased out of their village by Peshmerga and the family on our floor is a Kurdish family who lost their home in Baghdad to militias and were waiting for immigration to Sweden or Switzerland or some such European refugee haven.

The first evening we arrived, exhausted, dragging suitcases behind us, morale a little bit bruised, the Kurdish family sent over their representative – a 9 year old boy missing two front teeth, holding a lopsided cake, “We’re Abu Mohammed’s house- across from you- mama says if you need anything, just ask- this is our number. Abu Dalia’s family live upstairs, this is their number. We’re all Iraqi too... Welcome to the building.”

I cried that night because for the first time in a long time, so far away from home, I felt the unity that had been stolen from us in 2003.

This is what George W. Bush's war for greed and oil has done. Is it any wonder that 75% of the Iraqis think it's OK to kill Americans?

Over the cliff

I haven't talked about Bush's veto of SCHIP and I'm glad I didn't because Joe Gandelman does a great job of summing it all up and pointing out what this will do to the Republicans in 2008. Go read Joe's post but here is a snip:

It takes some financially well-off, pampered politicians who themselves receive government health insurance to sour — or perhaps if the illnesses are grave even end -- a kid’s childhood because they seek to make political statements, pursue personal ideological jihads, or try to position themselves or their political party.

Their supporters will angrily deny it, but in these politicians are not viewing children as physically and emotionally fragile and impressionable members of our society who deserve our utmost protection and nurturing and our highest lets-pull-out-all-stops priority.

The Republicans who hope to be elected in 2008 should realize that's the way a vast majority of voters will see it.

A glass completely empty

The fact that Fred Thompson looked good for awhile to republicans certainly doesn't speak well for the rest of those running for the Republican nomination. Fred only looked good because they really didn't know him. He is not a glass half full or half empty - he is a glass that's completely empty and it seems he proves it every day.
ANOTHER FRED GAFFE

More gaffes from Fred Thompson: Not only has he misspoken or said he didn't know about Terri Schiavo, or the controversy about oil drilling in the Everglades, or that he was unaware that a federal judge had ruled that lethal injection procedures in his home state of Tennessee were unconstitutional, last night in Iowa he said that the Dems controlled congress when John Roberts went through his confirmation hearings for Chief Justice.

That is wrong, the Republicans still controlled the Senate and the Judiciary Committee of course, and Fred was designated to make the rounds on Capitol Hill at the time as Roberts’ shepherd.

OK Republicans, bring Fred on. Do you really think that the country is ready for another lazy and intellectually lazy President after eight years of George W. Bush.

I hope he is right!

Steve Clemons thinks that the relatively sane Rice and Gates will prevail over the criminally insane Cheney and the neocons when it comes to Iran.
Why Bush won't attack Iran

To date, however, nothing suggests Bush is really going to do it. If he were, he wouldn't be playing good cop/bad cop with Iran and proposing engagement. If the bombs were at the ready, Bush would be doing a lot more to prepare the nation and the military for a war far more consequential than the invasion of Iraq. There is also circumstantial evidence that he has decided bombing may be too costly a choice.

First, journalist Joe Klein documents a December 2006 meeting in which Bush met in "the Tank" with his senior national security counselors and the military's command staff and walked out with the impression that either the costs of military action against Iran were simply too high, or that the prospects for success for the mission too low.

Then Bush asked about the possibility of a successful attack on Iran's nuclear capability. He was told that the U.S. could launch a devastating air attack on Iran's government and military, wiping out the Iranian air force, the command and control structure and some of the more obvious nuclear facilities. But the Chiefs were -- once again -- unanimously opposed to taking that course of action.

Why? Because our intelligence inside Iran is very sketchy. There was no way to be sure that we could take out all of Iran's nuclear facilities. Furthermore, the Chiefs warned, the Iranian response in Iraq and, quite possibly, in terrorist attacks on the U.S. could be devastating. Bush apparently took this advice to heart and went to Plan B -- a covert destabilization campaign reported earlier this week by ABC News.

After this meeting, Bush immediately tilted away from the Cheney-dominant view that military action was the most preferable course and empowered and released other parts of his administration to animate a third option.

Secondly, we know via material first reported on my blog, the Washington Note, and subsequently confirmed by the New York Times, Time and Newsweek, that Cheney and his team have been deeply frustrated by the "engage Iran team" that the president empowered and felt that they were losing ground to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell and the president's new chief of staff, Joshua Bolten.

One member of Cheney's national security staff, David Wurmser, worried out loud that Cheney felt that his wing was "losing the policy argument on Iran" inside the administration -- and that they might need to "end run" the president with scenarios that may narrow his choices. The option that Wurmser allegedly discussed was nudging Israel to launch a low-yield cruise missile strike against the Natanz nuclear reactor in Iran, thus "hopefully" prompting a military reaction by Tehran against U.S. forces in Iraq and the Gulf. When queried about Wurmser's alleged comments, a senior Bush administration official told the New York Times, "The vice president is not necessarily responsible for every single thing that comes out of the mouth of every single member of his staff."

We know Bush rebuffed Cheney's view and is seeking other alternatives. That is the most clear evidence that Bush is not committed to bombing Iran. Even if Bush wanted to make the Iranians believe that he could go either way -- diplomacy or military strike -- Bush would not so clearly knock back one side in favor of the other to the point where the "bad cops" in a good cop/bad cop strategy would tell anyone on the outside that they did not enjoy the favor and support of the president.

Bush is aware that America's intelligence on Iran is weak. Even without admitting America's blind spots on Iraq, the intelligence failures on Iraq's WMD program create a formidable credibility hurdle.

Bush knows that the American military is stretched and that bombing Iran would not be a casual exercise. Reprisals in the Gulf toward U.S. forces and Iran's ability to cut off supply lines to the 160,000 U.S. troops currently deployed in Iraq could seriously endanger the entire American military.

Bush can also see China and Russia waiting in the wings, not to promote conflict but to take advantage of self-destructive missteps that the United States takes that would give them more leverage over and control of global energy flows. Iran has the third-largest undeveloped oil reserves in the world and the second-largest undeveloped natural gas reserves.

Bush also knows that Iran controls "the temperature" of the terror networks it runs. Bombing Iran would blow the control gauge off, and Iran's terror networks could mobilize throughout the Middle East, Afghanistan and even the United States.

In sum, Bush does not plan to escalate toward a direct military conflict with Iran, at least not now -- and probably not later. The costs are too high, and there are still many options to be tried before the worst of all options is put back on the table. As it stands today, he wants that "third option," even if Cheney doesn't. Bush's war-prone team failed him on Iraq, and this time he'll be more reserved, more cautious. That is why a classic buildup to war with Iran, one in which the decision to bomb has already been made, is not something we should be worried about today.

What we should worry about, however, is the continued effort by the neocons to shore up their sagging influence. They now fear that events and arguments could intervene to keep what once seemed like a "nearly inevitable" attack from happening. They know that they must keep up the pressure on Bush and maintain a drumbeat calling for war.

What we have learned is that the neocons can be beaten down but they won't give up. Has Bush suddenly realized that the insanity of Dick Cheney has already resulted in what will be a dismal legacy? Another factor that Clemons doesn't really mention is the powerful business interests. Big business went along with Cheney's Iraq war because they thought there was money to be made. I doubt that they see such opportunities in a strike at Iran and in fact the inevitable economic turmoil would be very bad for business.

More of the same

The best, and some might say the only, news organization in the US is McClatchy. Their motto is Truth To Power and they live up to that with their story:
New Bush plan recalls Iraq strategies past

WASHINGTON — Eight months after President Bush made public a plan he hailed as the "New Way Forward" in Iraq, he's announced a new plan, this one called "Return on Success."

The new plan was reminiscent of last year's "Operation Together Forward," which called for U.S. troops to secure neighborhoods in Baghdad and hand them over to Iraqi security forces. It bore similarities to an even older plan commonly articulated with the catchphrase "as they stand up, we'll stand down."

But on Thursday, Bush declared success and said troops were coming home, despite a range of government reports that says Iraqi civilian casualties remain high and that Iraqi security forces remain incapable of taking control.

Our "success in meeting these objectives now allows us to begin bringing some of our troops home," the president said.

Largely gone from the president's speech Thursday was his January insistence that the Iraqi government meet 18 benchmarks and sort out its differences on the most divisive issues in Iraq.

In January, the talk was tough: "America will hold the Iraqi government to the benchmarks it has announced," Bush said then. "I've made it clear to the prime minister and Iraq's other leaders that America's commitment is not open-ended. If the Iraqi government does not follow through on its promises, it will lose the support of the American people — and it will lose the support of the Iraqi people. Now is the time to act."

The president was conciliatory Thursday in the face of Iraqi failure.

"The government has not met its own legislative benchmarks — and in my meetings with Iraqi leaders, I have made it clear that they must," Bush said. "Yet Iraq's national leaders are getting some things done."

Go read the entire thing.

New Slogan but still no strategy

The only Iraq strategy we saw this week was an attempt to avoid losing even more support for Bush's failed occupation. The congressional testimony of Petraeus and Crocker and Geroge W. Bush's speech to the base turned out to be nothing but more spin and deception directed at the diminishing base so that Bush can buy time and pass his latest mess onto the next administration. The paper of record, the New York Times, which is partly responsible for selling the ill conceived invasion and occupation of Iraq has an excellent analysis today.
No Exit, No Strategy

This was the week in which Americans hoped they would get straight talk and clear thinking on Iraq. What they got was two exhausting days of Congressional testimony by the American military commander, hours of news conferences and interviews, clouds of cut-to-order statistics and a speech from the Oval Office — and none of it either straight or clear.

The White House insisted that President Bush had consulted intensively with his generals and adapted to changing circumstances. But no amount of smoke could obscure the truth: Mr. Bush has no strategy to end his disastrous war and no strategy for containing the chaos he unleashed.

Last night’s speech could have been given any day in the last four years — and was delivered a half-dozen times already. Despite Mr. Bush’s claim that he was offering a way for all Americans to “come together” on Iraq, he offered the same divisive policies — repackaged this time with the Orwellian slogan “return on success.”

That's right - the only thing new was the slogan.
Reality VS Spin

Before he spoke, Iraq’s brutal reality had debunked the claims of political and military success made by Gen. David Petraeus, the top American commander in Iraq, and Ryan Crocker, the ambassador in Baghdad. First, The Times reported that the only sliver of political progress — a tortuous compromise on sharing oil revenues — was evaporating. Then came news of the assassination of the Anbar tribal leader whose decision to fight alongside the Americans was cited by Mr. Bush as proof that the war’s tide was turning — even though it had nothing to do with the increase in forces.

Mr. Bush’s claims last night about how well the war is going are believable only if you use Pentagon numbers so obviously cooked that they call to mind the way Americans were duped into first supporting this war.[see below]

If Bush were serious

If Mr. Bush were serious about ending the war, rather than threatening Iran and Syria, he would make a serious effort to persuade them that they too have a lot to lose from a disintegrating Iraq. And he would enlist the help of the leaders of Britain, France and Germany for serious negotiations. Then, perhaps, Mr. Bush’s promise from January to stanch the flow of men and weapons into Iraq from Iran and Syria would not have sounded so hollow.

Once again, it is clear that Mr. Bush refuses to recognize the truth of his failure in Iraq and envisions a military commitment that has no end. Congress must use its powers to expose the truth and demand a real change in strategy. Democratic leaders, forever parsing polls, are backing away from proposals to impose a deadline for withdrawal and tinkering with small ideas that mostly sound like ways to enable the president’s strategy of delay.

While this is a good editorial it once again takes Paul Krugman to get to the meat.

Now here’s the thing: Ray L. Hunt, the chief executive and president of Hunt Oil, is a close political ally of Mr. Bush. More than that, Mr. Hunt is a member of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, a key oversight body.

Some commentators have expressed surprise at the fact that a businessman with very close ties to the White House is undermining U.S. policy. But that isn’t all that surprising, given this administration’s history. Remember, Halliburton was still signing business deals with Iran years after Mr. Bush declared Iran a member of the “axis of evil.”

No, what’s interesting about this deal is the fact that Mr. Hunt, thanks to his policy position, is presumably as well-informed about the actual state of affairs in Iraq as anyone in the business world can be. By putting his money into a deal with the Kurds, despite Baghdad’s disapproval, he’s essentially betting that the Iraqi government — which hasn’t met a single one of the major benchmarks Mr. Bush laid out in January — won’t get its act together. Indeed, he’s effectively betting against the survival of Iraq as a nation in any meaningful sense of the term.

The smart money, then, knows that the surge has failed, that the war is lost, and that Iraq is going the way of Yugoslavia. And I suspect that most people in the Bush administration — maybe even Mr. Bush himself — know this, too.

After all, if the administration had any real hope of retrieving the situation in Iraq, officials would be making an all-out effort to get the government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki to start delivering on some of those benchmarks, perhaps using the threat that Congress would cut off funds otherwise. Instead, the Bushies are making excuses, minimizing Iraqi failures, moving goal posts and, in general, giving the Maliki government no incentive to do anything differently.

And for that matter, if the administration had any real intention of turning public opinion around, as opposed to merely shoring up the base enough to keep Republican members of Congress on board, it would have sent Gen. David Petraeus, the top military commander in Iraq, to as many news media outlets as possible — not granted an exclusive appearance to Fox News on Monday night.

All in all, Mr. Bush’s actions have not been those of a leader seriously trying to win a war. They have, however, been what you’d expect from a man whose plan is to keep up appearances for the next 16 months, never mind the cost in lives and money, then shift the blame for failure onto his successor.

In fact, that’s my interpretation of something that startled many people: Mr. Bush’s decision last month, after spending years denying that the Iraq war had anything in common with Vietnam, to suddenly embrace the parallel.

Here’s how I see it: At this point, Mr. Bush is looking forward to replaying the political aftermath of Vietnam, in which the right wing eventually achieved a rewriting of history that would have made George Orwell proud, convincing millions of Americans that our soldiers had victory in their grasp but were stabbed in the back by the peaceniks back home.

What all this means is that the next president, even as he or she tries to extricate us from Iraq — and prevent the country’s breakup from turning into a regional war — will have to deal with constant sniping from the people who lied us into an unnecessary war, then lost the war they started, but will never, ever, take responsibility for their failures.

Now I think that this is about right but as I said below I don't think it will work.

Now don't get me wrong, I think the neocons and Republicans will try to hang this on the Dems but using the Vietnam example it won't stick. There is a very vocal minority who still think we could have won in Vietnam and blame the Democrats for the defeat. They are very vocal but they are very much the minority.

This Bush is owned by George W. Bush and the neocons. Like Vietnam a majority of Americans have had it with this war and see it as a mistake - Mr Bush's mistake. They recognize that it will be unpleasant when we leave but also recognize we simply can't do anything about it.

"Tell me how this ends."

"Tell me how this ends."
As David Ignatius tells us that is a question that none other than General David Petraeus asked in March of 2003. Since then we have had a number of reasons for the war and alleged happy endings. The first of course was the elimination of the threat of Saddam's WMD. Of course as it turned out that was the easiest one - he didn't have any. Then of course there was the promise of a Jeffersonian Democracy in Iraq. A strange promise from an administration that seems opposed to a Jeffersonian Democracy here at home but then that one really didn't work out anyway. The happy endings have continually become a little less happy with each move of the goal posts. The Jeffersonian Democracy morphed into a stable and centralized Iraq - kind of like what we had when we invaded. Well the stabilized and centralized part hasn't worked out either so we are at plan A3 or is it A4. As a loyal member of the DC cocktail weeny circuit Ignatius is praising the new plan A.

This bottom-up style of Petraeus and his group represents a decisive break with the cocksure, top-down ethos of Donald Rumsfeld's Pentagon -- and with a military leadership that bought into Rumsfeld's idea that technology had transformed the nature of warfare itself. Nonsense, said the colonels who advised Petraeus, many of whom, like him, are on their third tours in Iraq. They have learned the hard way to be skeptical of big ideas.

Petraeus and his team understand, too, that this war is about people -- and helping them one by one to break the cycle of intimidation. When I asked Col. H.R. McMaster, a key Petraeus adviser, to name a turning point in Anbar, he cited the day in February when al-Qaeda deposited at a Ramadi hospital an ice chest containing the severed heads of the children of several sheiks who had been cooperating with the United States. Rather than submitting to this barbarous act, the enraged sheiks deepened their alliance with the U.S. military.

We need to be honest about what's happening now in Iraq: Local solutions are better than no solutions; tribal power is better than terrorist intimidation; pop-ups can be better than the preplanned models. But Petraeus's ad hoc, ground-up security framework is not the same thing as stabilizing the country. In the time remaining, he has to pull things together as best he can -- connect local successes to provincial and national institutions; extend the Sunni rebellion against extremists into the Shiite regions; break the control that Shiite militias exert over the Interior Ministry and the police.

"Local solutions are better than no solutions"; I heard Tom Ricks, the military reporter from Ignatius' own paper on NPR today who said it simply isn't so. The "bottom up" - "local solutions' are nothing more than the US undermining the central government and arming both sides of an enhanced civil war. This is not success but an admission of failure and an attempt to stall. All part of Bush's plan to make the next administration clean up the mess he has made.

Nonsense - Iraq - Vietnam

I don't often disagree with Juan Cole but they he is wrong on this one. Professor Cole thinks that the Democrats are being set up to take the fall for the inevitable chaos in Iraq.

If the Democrats cannot prevail in withdrawing before Bush goes out of office (and they cannot), and if they then rapidly draw down the troops on taking office in 2009, they face the real prospect of a "Gerald Ford meltdown" of the sort that occurred in 1975 when the North Vietnamese and their VC allies took over South Vietnam.

You will note that Ford only served a couple of years as president and lost his election bid to a relative unknown named Jimmy Carter. Although economic stagflation and the stain of Watergate contributed to his defeat, I think the spectacle of the debacle in Indochina harmed Ford a great deal. The United States lost a war, and lost out to its ideological rival in an entire subcontinent of Asia in the midst of the Cold War. That would cause at least some Republicans to stay home in 1976, a sure way for Democrats to win an election.

[.....]

But in all likelihood, when the Democratic president pulls US troops out in summer of 2009, all hell is going to break loose. The consequences may include even higher petroleum prices than we have seen recently, which at some point could bring back stagflation or very high rates of inflation.

In other words, the Democratic president risks being Fordized when s/he withdraws from Iraq, by the aftermath. A one-term president associated with humiliation abroad and high inflation at home? Maybe I should say, Carterized. The Republican Party could come back strong in 2012 and then dominate politics for decades, if that happened.

Now don't get me wrong, I think the neocons and Republicans will try to hang this on the Dems but using the Vietnam example it won't stick. There is a very vocal minority who still think we could have won in Vietnam and blame the Democrats for the defeat. They are very vocal but they are very much the minority. Over at Balloon Juice Tim F. is talking about Norman Podhoretz but what he says applies here as well:

Honestly, it’s fine with me if luminaries like Norman Podhoretz want to base their grand analogy for leftish perfidy on Vietnam. Unless a wave of Vietnam nostalgia has swept the nation since the last time I checked, only the loopiest of hard-liners think we should have gone on throwing kids into that bloody guerilla war ad infinitum. Even Robert MacNamara finally recognized when it is time to stop digging.

Podhoretz almost certainly hangs out with the same group of ultra-hardliners whom he has known since the sixties, so he might just not realize that his diatribe accomplishes exactly the opposite of what it intends. Rather than condemning the left, for most normal people Podhoretz just underlines that once again he and a small band of crazies stand on the wrong side of a conflict that a growing majority of America recognize to be a bloody waste of men, materiel and prestige.

And TPM reader TB agrees:

Ask yourself more than 30 years on, who gets the blame for the Vietnam catastrophe? Richard Nixon, or Lyndon Johnson? Did Nixon or Ford get the blame for losing Vietnam after the pullout? Did Gerald Ford lose in 1976 because the Democrats blamed him for losing the war?

This is Mr. Bush's mess - he and his Party cannot escape it, or history.

Like Vietnam a majority of Americans have had it with this war and see it as a mistake - Mr Bush's mistake. They recognize that it will be unpleasant when we leave but also recognize we simply can't do anything about it.

That was no General

The testimony of General Petraeus yesterday was not to rally Americans, it's too late for that. Petraeus was there to throw red meat to the base. He may have been wearing a uniform with lots of medals but he was not there as a general but as a PR hack. George Will saw through the smoke and mirrors.

Before Gen. David Petraeus' report, and to give it a context of optimism, the president visited Iraq's Anbar province to underscore the success of the surge in making some hitherto anarchic areas less so. More significant, however, was the fact that the president did not visit Baghdad. This underscored the fact that the surge has failed, as measured by the president's and Petraeus' standards of success.

Those who today stridently insist that the surge has succeeded also say they are especially supportive of the president, Petraeus and the military generally. But at the beginning of the surge, both Petraeus and the president defined success in a way that took the achievement of success out of America's hands.


The purpose of the surge, they said, is to buy time -- "breathing space," the president says -- for Iraqi political reconciliation. Because progress toward that has been negligible, there is no satisfactory answer to this question: What is the U.S. military mission in Iraq?

Many of those who insist that the surge is a harbinger of U.S. victory in Iraq are making the same mistake they made in 1991 when they urged an advance on Baghdad, and in 2003 when they underestimated the challenge of building democracy there. The mistake is exaggerating the relevance of U.S. military power to achieve political progress in a society riven by ethnic and sectarian hatreds. America's military leaders, who are professional realists, do not make this mistake.

Of course as we all know by now the purpose of the Petraeus PR blitz was to postpone the inevitable until Bush leaves office.

WASHINGTON -- -- The talk in Washington on Monday was all about troop reductions, yet it also brought into sharp focus President Bush's plans to end his term with a strong U.S. military presence in Iraq, and to leave tough decisions about ending the unpopular war to his successor.

The plans outlined by the U.S. commander in Iraq, Gen. David H. Petraeus, would retain a large force in the country -- perhaps more than 100,000 troops -- when the time comes for Bush to move out of the White House in January 2009.

The plans also would allow Bush to live up to his pledge to the defining mission of his presidency, and perhaps to improve his chances for a decent legacy. He can say he left office pursuing a strategy that was having at least some success in suppressing violence, a claim that some historians may view sympathetically.

"Bush has found his exit strategy," said Kenneth M. Pollack, a former government Mideast specialist now at the Brookings Institution. As Petraeus met with lawmakers and unveiled chart upon chart showing declining troop levels, the U.S. commander seemed to have opened a new discussion about how the United States would wind up its commitment to Iraq. Yet viewed more closely, his presentation, and that of U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker, were better suited to the defense of an earlier strategy: "stay the course."

Of course leaving a mess for someone else to clean up is the story of George W. Bush's life. I hope that General Pretaeus doesn't realize the part he is playing here. If he does the MoveOn ad was way to kind.