http://www.cnn.com/2006/POLITICS/11/28/bush.ap/index.html It really figures. I do like how he didnt use the word accomplished. I am also curious to know how complete (or victory, or accomplished) would be defined, and if said definition would be concrete or, as it seemingly has been, remain fluid. And a nice tip of the hat to al qaeda who is apparently to blame for the rising violence over there. Im surprised bush didnt also blame the democrats victory at the polls a couple of weeks ago - it wouldve been just as credible.
Don't worry, when we leave and the thing becomes an absolute disaster, they will blame the Dems. That's easier to predict than another bizarre Tom Cruise incident.
I am trying to remember the name of the General in Iraq whom I saw on television last week mentioning that a-q wasn't much of a presence in the insurgency. Course he's just a General on the ground; what would he know. Really, at this point, is there ANY subject that Dubya could weigh in on that would seem believable? What a complete fool...
"Becomes"? Do people blame Nixon for Vietnam? No. They rightly blame Kennedy. Iraq is now a no-win situation for Bush. It was his war from the get-go and he not only got played like a sucka by Iran to go blundering in but then completely botched almost every aspect of the occupation. If we do the Nixon thing again and declare victory while fleeing with our tail between our legs, Bush will rightly get the blame. Even if we somehow miraculously "win" (whatever that means), Bush will still be remembered as the guy who bungled it and made someone else a hero for pulling our asses out of the mess Bush created.
Bush will not withdraw while he is still the president, let the next one do it so they can be the one blamed for the final defeat.
Without getting into a long discussion about the Vietnam War, I believe that LBJ gets most of the blame, at least in popular culture.
Ratdog misunderstood me, I meant that 'they' (Bush and his apologists) will blame the Dems. But nobody will fall for it. This is dubya's fiasco, nobody else's. And when we leave, it will be a much bigger disaster than it is now. And 'they' should have had the foresight to have known it.
I'm beginning to wonder about that. The one thing that unites all the factions is a desire to see the US leave. If US troops were removed I think the various Iraqi armed groups would eliminate any foreign Al Qazeda presence rather quickly.
Someone forgot to tell the Generals: http://www.defenselink.mil/news/Jan2006/20060113_3923.html This was less than a year ago.
Probably. And he deserves plenty of blame--JFK got us there, but LBJ got us in deep. And letting Nixon off the hook because he finally threw up his hands is stupid (that's not what ratdog said, I'm just making a point). He kept us there for years, had Kissinger sabotage peace talks to help the '68 campaign, and that's without considering the secret bombing, taking the war into Cambodia and Laos, etc. Nixon "got us out," yeah--after half a decade of inflicting a great deal of death and carnage on the people of southeast Asia.
They didn't even have the foresight to plan for the occupation, as it turns out. I have a good friend who lives and works in Iraq, first as a civilian contractor and now as a State Department employee. He's done a lot of good work there; there are villages in Iraq with a better standard of living now than they had under the twin oppressive regimes of Saddam and the sanctions. There are a lot of good, smart, competent people like my friend over there doing their very best to help ordinary Iraqis rebuild their country from years of Baathist mismanagement, psychopathic one-man rule, war, and severe economic restrictions. And, sadly, it's probably going to be for naught. Because while most of the specialists and engineers and urban planners and grant writers and so forth on the ground are serious and committed and capable, they were operating under the twin handicaps of incompetent or even buffoonish leadership (Paul Bremer, take a bow) and an unnecessarily dangerous security situation. History will record that the insurgency, and the violence in Iraq during the occupation, started out slow and built as the insurgents gathered strength and systematically eroded the Iraqi public's trust in our ability to safeguard them while the physical and civic infrastructure of their nation was being rebuilt. We blew it, because the Bush team were cocksure of their ability to massage reality to fit their rhetoric, and the president himself is constitutionally incapable of asking basic questions of the people around him. Any attempts by Bush supporters to shift the blame must be vigorously opposed.
Thats pretty naive, we elected the guy twice afterall. Personally I don't see how anyone except the hardcore %30 that still suppot him and always will even if he were to personally rape and murder a baby on a primetime national television show can take anything Bush says seriously anymore.
Yeah, you got a point there. The Dems are always capable of going off the deep end and making even dubya's lame spin seem reasonable.
During the build-up to the invasion, the Dems were pretty much in line with Bush. There was no oversight and no accountability. Dianne Feinstein, a San Francisco democrat, supported the invasion. Generals that dissented with Rummy's strategy of smaller forces were dismissed. Case in point was Shinseki's removal. The New York Times and NPR, as well as other media outlets, repeated the administration's justifications for invading Iraq. Plenty went wrong.
Yeah, the list goes on and on. Supposedly the democrats are looney anti-war types, but most democrats did exactly nothing to prevent the invasion or provide oversight on the occupation. Now we are in debt and fighting a stupid pointless war that is creating more, better trained terrorists.
The Dems were just caving because they didn't want to look like cheerleaders for Saddam and wmd. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowicz were living in a fool's paradise, paying stooges like Chalabi to tell them what they wanted to hear and clobbering Powell when he advised caution. Dubya should be impeached for such wanton negligence, but then we'd get Cheney if dubya got the boot. Big upgrade, huh? Besides, if the Dems impeached dubya, they'd probably screw it up by making Cindy Sheehan the lead prosecutor or something.
Looks like W ain't gonna listen to Daddy's buddy Baker and the ISG: http://thinkprogress.org/2006/11/30/bush-baker-hamilton/ So yet again, BushCo provides the appearance of progress, but no actual movement.
I think this is a very, very significant story. IMO, BigMedia has really changed the way it reports on the Bush administration in the last year, and at an ever-accelerating pace. They're about ready to go into full attack mode, they're just waiting for the signal. And if Bush slaps down BigMedia's Great Wise Men, that'll be it. BigMedia will come after Bush like he's Clinton and it's 1993, or 1998. And unlike Clinton, Bush doesn't have the list of accomplishments to withstand it. To pick a key example of how this will matter, BigMedia will cover the Dems' panoply of hearings with a very sympathetic, probably, frankly, biased, eye. The pressure on Bush will be immense. Given his (in my view) fragile psyche, I wonder how he'll stand up to it. It wouldn't shock me if he cracked. I'm dead serious.
My concern is that Bush will feel the need to do something drastic before his term ends to save his legacy. Even he must realize that he's not going into history as a great president (to make the understatement of the year).
True, but my point was that people normally blame those who start the war, not those who end it. Well, that makes more sense then. Well, that depends on how we leave it. I we try to insist on saving the fiction of "Iraq" when there is no such thing, then yeah, the FUBAR will get even more FUBARed. If we "Balkanize" the place and give the three main warring parties their own territories, then we might, emphasis on "might", be albe to limit the carnage and also limit Iran's influence in the region.
I'm with him as long as he can define the "mission." However, since the "mission" appears to be fluid, he's not really saying anything.