President Bush and Iraq: Kicking the Can Down the Road to 2009
Am I the only person who didn’t realize until after President Bush’s speech last week on Iraq that he all but came out and said what we have known for some time — that it would be up to his successor to end the war?
You too, eh?
In retrospect, this was far and away the most important aspect of a speech that has been dissected to a fairthewell but an aspect that was overlooked by a mainstream media that seems only marginally capable to sussing out the big picture.
There are three different groups of Americans when it comes to the war these days, and polling after Progress Report Week showed that virtually no one’s mind was changed:
* The vast majority who just want the war to go away and are literally and figuratively shopping at the mall where, poor dears, they may inconveniently catch a glimpse of a bloody street scene from Iraq on the TVs in the window of an electronics store.
These are the people that the White House is really counting on.
* The small but vocal minority for whom the war started in January with the advent of the surge strategy. The nearly four years between the fall of Saddam Hussein are a blur, don’t count, or both — and the limited successes of recent weeks are all they need to get behind “Return to Success,†the Orwellian name of the administration’s latest slogan for Bush’s Forever War.
These are the people that the White House is counting on to push back against the third group.
* This is the also small but vocal minority whose memories are not so short. We have not forgotten the insurgency, the collapse of the Provisional Coalition Authority, the first battle of Falluja, the Abu Ghraib scandal, the onset of a civil war and the emergence of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia as a result of a failed occupation.
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5 Responses to “President Bush and Iraq: Kicking the Can Down the Road to 2009”
So what is that first grp supposed to do to get the troops home? The president isn’t going to bend and we can’t simply cut funds and withdraw immediately. Not only would that be political suicide but its also extremely bad for Iraq and its people. With that in mind, what are the “poor dears” supposed to be doing?
Sam:
Shopping for bargains on HDTVs while fighting off having their homes foreclosed on.
And we’ll be out of Iraq just as fast as if they protested, wrote their representatives, and promised to clear all the brush from Crawford TX themselves. Basicaly, when we have a new president.
Kicking the can down the road is right. Let’s see, get a bunch of your clueless, sociopathic buddies together, start an unnecessary war based on false pretenses, drag the entire country and part of the world into it, turn it into a classic quagmire – all the while misrepresenting and denying the realities involved, and then drag it out, killing untold thousands, spending hundreds of billions of dollars, and in the end leave it for someone else to try and clean up the mess. And oh yeah, forget about that little accountability thing. Ahhh What a country! And the citizenry here? Let’s just say the founding fathers would never have believed anyone could have the luck to inherit the keys to such a nation, such a government as this – only to willingly turn them over to the worst kind of mercenaries. Sorry, but my back hurts tonight, and that just kind of takes the pretty talk right out of me.
The way I see it, the most dangerous content in the kicked can is the permanent secutiry arrangement Bush is seeking to sign with Iraq. It will make it very difficult for the next administration to reassess the advisability and troop levels according to unkonwn conditions of the future.
In the meantime it’s an annoucement to the Arabs that we’ll be there as occupiers permanently. The comparisons to Korea and Europe are false comparisons, as we made no promises in the midst of a civil war and without knowing what the future governement would be like.
Whether keeping some troops in Iraq iis a good or a bad idea is a separate debate. The fact of making a formal agreement now, in the midst of turmoil is the problem. His locking in of future administrations is unconscionable, IMO.
Come to think of it, I don’t know why anyone would want to be the next president and have to pick up the can kicked to him. We have some brave souls out there campaigning, either brave or overconfident.