Posted on 06/22/2007 10:15:52 AM PDT by Chi-townChief
The vice presidency, John Nance Garner is alleged to have told his fellow Texan Lyndon Johnson, isn't worth a bucket of warm spit. A lame-duck presidency isn't worth much more. While George W. Bush was traveling through Europe on what should have looked like a triumphal journey, back home, Republican senators were burying his immigration reform bill and the secretary of defense was confessing that he could not reappoint Bush's handpicked chairman and vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Does Bush comprehend that the public and Congress are repudiating him? His jaunty swagger on the shore of the Baltic Sea does not look like a man with his back to the wall.
The appointment of new military leaders may represent a dying gasp of the Iraq war, though, as Navy Adm. Michael Mullen, Bush's choice as new chairman of the JCS, suggests it may be a gasp that goes on for 10 years. Neocon commentator David Brooks argued on PBS the other night that the new leadership will be able to sell a new strategy in September when it becomes evident that the "surge" of troops into battle has been less than a complete success. He described this newest of plans -- what others are calling Plan B -- as one that the next president would be able to support, hinting that the next president would have no choice but to accept it when he takes office.
Plan B will involve "a draw-down" of troops before next year's elections, the concentration of American forces in "forts" (a string of Fort Apaches?), and preparations for a "long war" like the one in Korea. Americans would no longer attempt to police Baghdad, and there would be fewer casualties. If Plan B is a "success," Bush can stumble out of office in a year and a half with another "mission accomplished" and the claim that he had won a victory in the "war on terror."
Plan B sounds like another cockamamie scheme cooked up by the neocons. The Democrats in Congress will tear it to shreds. Their presidential candidates will repudiate it. The public will be profoundly skeptical. There is no reason to believe that it would work any better than previous brilliant strategic schemes. Nor will it diminish the public demand that the United States get out of Iraq immediately.
A new president, even if he is a Republican, will find it very hard not to respond to such a demand. Indeed, the conceit that an unpopular -- and increasingly despised -- lame-duck president can control the decisions of his successor is the most arrogant assumption yet of an administration that has lived off arrogance.
There is also a moral issue. A war that was unjust at the beginning because it was based on deceptions does not become any less immoral because it ends slowly.
Besides, if one believes the current polls, the three finalists in November 2008 will be liberal Democrats -- indeed, New York Democrats. Sen. Hillary Clinton is a real Democrat, and Mayor Rudy Giuliani and Mayor Michael Bloomberg are both liberal Democrats who masqueraded as Republicans to win a place on the mayoral ballot that they could not win in a Democratic primary. (The polls also show that any of the Republican candidates, real or fictional, would beat Clinton.)
Bush has made such a mess of the country (the passport foul-up is Hurricane Katrina written small) that such a comedic end of his years in the White House is not impossible. It may be time for Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia to prepare a court decision to cancel such a crazy election and declare Vice President Dick Cheney president for life.
agreel@aol.com
Mayor Rudy Giuliani and Mayor Michael Bloomberg are both liberal Democrats who masqueraded as Republicans
Bush has made such a mess
(snot-nosed phony priest still)
I stopped reading here..
When Bush announced the war on terror he did say it would last 10 years or more. At which time I realized was longer than his remaining term and that therefore victory was at risk in case a Democrat was elected.
That's a laugh line when it comes from a liberal.
It will fail, but not for the reasons this jerk hopes it will.
The truth is that the only way any ‘nation’ in the Middle East will ever find it’s way to democracy and decency is when someone who’s determined to do it wipes the desert floor with them and reduces them to despicable wretches subsisting on grubs, insects and puddle water, and makes a practical demonstration that their current culture, religious belief, political and economic system, etc, is INHERENTLY BANKRUPT AND INCAPABLE OF SUCCESS.
The ONLY way to do that is to wage a campaign of toal war, complete annhiliation, from the first day that hostilities are commenced. The enemy must lose all hope in anything that he is familiar with and made desperate enough to eagerly, and willingly, accept any alternative offered to him.
This administration did not do so, and therefore, anything it does afterwards will fail (if only because a return to ture war now will only serve to constitute a public-realtions disaster for this administration, and will be a tacit admission of failure). The need to be seen as the guy in the white hat in this “war” has handcuffed us from day one.
If you wish to fight a “war” on anything, then it behooves you to remember what war truly is, and what it entails.
Andrew Greeley: Smug ignorance admiring itself in the mirror.
Why go to Plan B when the surge is working perfectly...violence in Al Anbar has quelled to a slow drip and Bahgdad is around 65 percent free of terror. The problem is that (thanks to the incompetence of Don Rumsfeld) the surge wasn't enacted soon enough and requires time (i.e no one should expect a kettle of cold water to immediately boil). The sad fact is that Bush (again thanks to Dumbsfeld who, IMO, ought to be imprisoned in Gitmo for his mismanagement of the war) is now being tarred with the former plan rather than the newer one.
This whole article exists because Greeley has heard tell of a planned change which, he fears, Bush or the "Neocons" or someone might be able to paint as success/victory. He therefore wrote this article to help shore up the new (impossible) definition of success/victory in warfare to make sure that the United States still can't do it. He also wants to remind Democrats in Congress to do their part ("Democrats in Congress will tear it to shreds") and continue to stick to the definition of success/victory according to which the United States can't possibly do it. (Shoring up this definition requires constant effort and maintenance)
This is all a rhetorical battle at this point. In reality, the United States actually won "The Iraq War" (tm/2003) in 2003. What's going on now is merely a battle over the verbal definition of winning/success. And the lefty intelligentsia has basically won that battle because even most conservatives don't realize we won "The Iraq War".
So, like I said, Greeley is right.
The idea is to try to avoid the WWII aftermath when we won the war but lost the peace.
Hey Greeley, go to hell.
I don't follow. Whose idea is this? And I've never really cottoned to the phrase "losing the peace". What does it mean, exactly? IMHO this notion of "losing the peace" is part and parcel of the recent ongoing effort to re-define victory/success so that it's impossible for the U.S. to achieve it.
“The idea is to try to avoid the WWII aftermath when we won the war but lost the peace.”
Huh?
Exactly how did we “lose the peace”? Nazisim, Fascism, and Japanese militarism were soundly defeated. The systems which they built were completely discredited. The “war aims” of this country in the Second World War were the elimination of Hitler, Tojo and Mussolini and the systems which allowed their rise, in which we were ultimately successful. Democracy was restored in Gemany, Italy and Japan in the aftermath of that war.
What “peace” was lost?
Excuse me, that was supposed to be directed to Chi-town. My apologies, mimaw.
Care to answer Chi-town?
Sadly, it will take the loss of an entire major US city before that happens.
No, we won the war in Iraq. The idea now is to win the peace, i.e. do not allow dictatorships enslaving and killing millions of people to re-emerge like we did after WWII.
Pile this stack of fertilizer next to that pile of mulch.
“Bush’s” plan on Iraq has all ready mostly succeeded. Gone about as well as anything ever does in war.
It just the liars in the “News” media will never ever admit they have been wrong about Iraq from the start. No matter what happens, they will keep practising the “Big Lie” propaganda tactics until they can claim “they were right about Iraq”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_of_Iraq
Try actually finally learning something about Iraq instead of clinging to your emotion based hysteria about Rumsfeild.
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