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| Joe Gandelman commentary (a moderate voice) |
BeelzeBUSH |
04/06/06 |
Bush Makes It Clear: Iraq War And U.S. Role Will Last Beyond His Term
by Joe Gandelman
To those who have been pressuring or clamoring for the U.S. to end the war in Iraq or pull out a significant number of troops, President George W. Bush had this message in his press conference: not on MY watch.
He made it clear that (a) he stands by existing policy, (b) it'll be up to the next president to decide when to pull the troops out (c) he stands solidly behind Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and is brushing aside calls for Rumsfeld's resignation (d) he rejects a top Iraqi politician's characterization of Iraq as being in a state of civil war.
President Bush said Tuesday that American forces will remain in Iraq for years and it will be up to a future president to decide when to bring them all home. But defying critics and plunging polls, he declared, "I'm optimistic we'll succeed. If not, I'd pull our troops out."
The president rejected calls for the resignation of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, chief architect of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. "Listen, every war plan looks good on paper until you meet the enemy," Bush said, acknowledging mistakes as the United States was forced to switch tactics and change a reconstruction strategy that offered targets for insurgents.
He also rejected assertions by Iraq's former interim prime minister that the country had fallen into civil war amid sectarian violence that has left more than 1,000 Iraqis dead since the bombing last month of a Shiite Muslim shrine.
"This is a moment the Iraqis had a chance to fall apart and they didn't," Bush said, crediting religious and political leaders with restraint.
Indeed, if there seemed to be policy thread in this it couldn't be called neocon-ism anymore but an official policy of "optimism."
The Guardian's lead puts it even more succinctly:
George Bush yesterday raised the vision of an American troop presence in Iraq that would extend for the next three years, an admission that a US withdrawal was unlikely during his term in the White House.
With US forces entering their fourth year in the country since the invasion, Mr Bush's comments suggest he foresees a longer military commitment in Iraq than that experienced by troops in the second world war or the Korean war.
Asked at a White House press conference whether he could foresee a complete withdrawal from Iraq, Mr Bush held out little hope. "That will be decided by future presidents and future governments of Iraq", Mr Bush told reporters.
What can you say about this? It underscores Bush's commitment to see the war through. But it also also rips away any fig leaf that Republicans who are running in 2006 could have used when confronted with rising bipartisan souring on the war, since Bush now makes it clear that there will be no big troop reduction and that he apparently sees no major flaws in existing policy, the implementation of it or the quality of the job performance of officials assigned to oversee it.
To Washington Post op-ed columnist Eugene Robinson, what's unfolding is "The Planet of Unreality":
This is not good. The people running this country sound convinced that reality is whatever they say it is. And if they've actually strayed into the realm of genuine self-delusion — if they actually believe the fantasies they're spinning about the bloody mess they've made in Iraq over the past three years — then things are even worse than I thought.
Here is reality: The Bush administration's handpicked interim Iraqi prime minister, Ayad Allawi, told the BBC on Sunday, "We are losing each day an average of 50 to 60 people throughout the country, if not more. If this is not civil war, then God knows what civil war is. Iraq is in the middle of a crisis. Maybe we have not reached the point of no return yet, but we are moving towards this point. . . . We are in a terrible civil conflict now."
Here is self-delusion: Dick Cheney went on "Face the Nation" a few hours later and said he disagreed with Allawi — who, by the way, is a tad closer to the action than the quail-hunting veep. There's no civil war, Cheney insisted. Move along, nothing to see here, pay no attention to those suicide bombings and death-squad murders. As an aside, Cheney insisted that his earlier forays into the Twilight Zone — U.S. troops would be greeted as liberators, the insurgency is in its "last throes" — were "basically accurate and reflect reality."
Maybe on his home planet.
What Bush essentially did during the press conference was to reaffirm his faith in the U.S. course, say he's not going to significantly change it and that it's up to a future President to do that. This likely won't be welcome news to Republicans because now, Americans who are either militantly against the war, troubled by it, or frustrated over the execution of it may feel that, since Bush has essentially rejected any compromise with the critics who now are now dotting diverse parts of the political spectrum, the only way to get a change is....change. Perhaps starting in November....
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