Not Shocking: Bush to double-down in Iraq
Let’s just take a moment to sum up. The Decider got decidedly crushed in the 2006 elections. Then in a move that was shocking only because it seemed demonstrate a grip on reality, Bush fired Don Rumsfeld. The speculation was he was waiting for the Iraq Study Group to release their findings so he would have the political cover to redeploy troops out of Iraq. And thus, the President’s hold on reality sadly proved fleeting. When the Baker-led panel suggested withdrawal and diplomacy, Bush rejected their recommendations out of hand.
So all this change of course rhetoric coupled with all this get the job done rhetoric leads to what new course in Iraq? If you guess an increase in troop deployment and an escalation in conflict, you’d be correct.
The BBC is reporting what we already know but Bush won’t tell us until January, probably in the State of the Union Address:
US President George W Bush is likely to boost troop levels in Iraq next year, an administration official has said.
While we’ll make plenty of jokes about this situation in the future, we’ll continue not to make jokes after the jump.
We will, however revel in the idea that the President is too delusional to take the advice of the panel that was set up to bail him out of the mess that he made by blindly following his advisers into an impossible war. That was the entire purpose of the Study Group. Jim Fucking Baker, man, the guy that argued the Florida recount case in front of the Supreme Court, his Dad’s best friend, commissioned by a Republican Congress known for, among other things, it’s absolute resistance to the idea of commissioning anything that might prove the President wrong.
This is certianly a turning point for Bush. Before he put all his faith in his advisers; it was the blind leading the blind. Now, he really is running his own administration. There is rift between the President and Dick Cheney and Rumsfeld has been fired. But Bush still lacks the gift of sight. This is his holy war; it is the blind dragging everyone else over a cliff.
The bravest thing the Democrats could do is to cut off the funding for this war. Instead, they have opted to incorporate war dollars into the regular budget. They have streamlined the process.
There is a war consensus. We’re going into two very bloody years.
