“If we were to start withdrawing now, we'd have a crisis in our hands in Iraq,” President Bush tells Scott Pelley on CBS’s 60 Minutes. It will empower Iran, which would pose, “a significant threat to world peace” and “provide safe haven” to the extremists who still want to attack us.

“If the [Iraqi] government falls apart,” he continues, there will be “sectarian enclaves and violence, it'll invite Iran into the Shia neighborhoods, Sunni extremists into the Sunni neighborhoods, Kurdish separatist movements.” All of these horrible outcomes, he proposes, “would threaten moderate people, moderate governments…which will end up creating conditions that could lead to attacks here in America.” And his observations are absolutely correct. All of these things will probably happen when we leave.

Missing from the discussion was the reality that all of these things have already happened. Missing from the discussion was an honest acceptance of the enormity of ineptitude obvious to everyone not trapped in the bunker with him. When Pelley pointed out that it was his administration “that created the instability in Iraq”, Bush replied that his administration, “took care of a source of instability in Iraq.” When Pelley challenged Mr. Bush’s answer by stating how much more unstable it is now, the President said it was not his decisions but “decisions [that] have [been] made” by, perhaps, Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy. All are part of the World of Wishful Thinking over which this president presides.

“I'd like to see stability and a unified Iraq,” he says. Wouldn’t we all, but mistakes have consequence.

“A young democracy will provide the stability we look for.” Yes it would have, but all hope of accomplishing such a feat has been shattered as a consequence of mistakes, like Abu Ghraib and ‘bring’em on’, to which the president admitted.

“If we just isolate ourselves from the Middle East and hope for the best, we will not address the conditions that had led young suiciders to get on airplanes to come and attack us in the first place.” Yes, and in spite of his inability to comprehend the difference between an adjective and a noun, that is true.

And contrary to his Trumanesque mea culpa statement, that, “if the people want a scapegoat, they got one right here in me”, no one wants a scapegoat. A scapegoat is a patsy like Michael “Yer doin’ a great job” Brown, someone who, through no fault of their own, takes the fall for the ineptitude of his superiors. Americans want someone to be accountable.

What, for me, are the most troubling aspects of the fairy world in the Bush bunker is not the sycophants at the American Enterprise Institute or his Republican enablers in Congress, but his penchant for living only in the moment, living in a world in which even the most egregious errors have no consequence.

He doesn’t like the Democratic plan of withdrawing troops because it doesn’t look like his plan, even though he is one of a handful who believes his plan will work. For him, it is not even a plan. Thus, when Pelley asks about the Congressional move to limit funding for the escalation, his response is, “Yeah. I will resist that.” His reason: such limitations would not support “a plan that I believe will work and solve the situation.”

And there’s the rub. He’s made his decision, he’s going forward, so it will be up to a hostile Congress to “explain to the American people and the soldiers” why their plan will work.

So follow the effects and the consequence of our bunkered president living in the moment and listening to the Siren’s songs coming out of the AEI and Fox News. For practical purposes, the Iraq War has been funded through the summer; essentially the money has already been either allocated or spent. So, during the spring and summer Congress crafts and passes a budget in which the war is funded to, say, January of 2008; it includes language that all troops must be redeployed by then. Bush signs it begrudgingly, but with a signing statement that essentially says he’ll ignore the limiting language. And he keeps the troops in Iraq.

More about Bush-style personalities here.

Outstanding piece! You made so many excellent points that I couldn't possibly touch on them all while awaiting dinner . I really don't know how we intend to resolve the situation in Iraq when we are so lacking in understanding of the culture there. We went in without sufficient understanding or cause, and now that some of "our" soldiers are killed, we want to bring them home? Never mind that we have instigated the deaths of tens of thousands of Iraqi people and contributed to the total dismantling of anything resembling a country. "Hey, we came in a totally messed up your world, but our boys and girls are getting killed, so we're outta here." How American is that! It was incredibly sad that we went in there in the first place, and it would be nothing short of heinous to leave that country in the shambles it is in now. It wouldn't matter how long we had to stay or how many lives we had to lose. We shouldn't have gone there and made a mess in the first place, but now that it has been made, we surely need to clean it up. Maybe I'm just too old school, but my mom taught me to clean up the messes I made, not leave them for others. But then again, I'm one of those legal aliens and wasn't born here.

Tamaj13

Welcome, Tamaj13!

Thanks for your comments- and WELCOME ABOARD! It's great to see a new face here. Hope to see you post again soon.

Buttttt... we can't stay. They have to finish breaking everything they're gonna break before we can help them fix what we broke. We unleashed a genie 13 Centuries in the bottle, and now that it's out, it will destroy until it is no more. Then we can help. Only then.

Tamaj hits upon the one thing that makes me feel "guilty" about wanting to leave Iraq: we made the mess and we really ought to clean it up. On the other hand, I am not sure that is possible... lately I have been feeling that something has been set in motion that has to play itself out before any semblance of clarity rises from the chaos. And I feel that, at this point, we are just continuing to add to the chaos because, as Tamaj reiterates, we do not understand the culture.

Common ground: we never should have gone in and my heart breaks for the Iraqi people.

I don't know about you Pie, but guilt is the last thing I feel. Rage, anger, betrayal, violation, dirty- but not guilt. I fought against this war since it was an ugly cloud on the horizon, and have been fighting against it ever since. I signed petitions, went on marches, wrote letters to everyone I could think of, gave speeches and lectures, wrote essays, and endured humiliation for the last five years. I have nothing for which to feel guilty. Those who now see how horrible things are- they should feel guilt. For them, I just feel zero at the bone.

I was speaking of guilt in the sense that I am an American, WS. I opposed this incursion, too, as you know, and the resultant mess was all too predictable. I didn't vote for bush- yada, yada. But it is our country which has done this, in our name. Like it or not (and I do not). So while I do not feel personal guilt, I do feel a collective guilt... if that is the proper way to express it. Perhaps guilt is the wrong word ?

I guess that's the differrence between men and women, Pie. Women feel guilty when they are raped; men just want to kill the damned rapist.

You may have hit on something there, WS. I feel so deeply saddened for the families- the innocent Iraqis who have lost everything...
and all the refugees who have fled to Jordan and Syria...
it just breaks my heart.
I think about how I would feel if we were invaded because bush is such a blankity-blank...
and my husband was killed
and my kid could not go outside
or I lost my home and had to flee...
and yet I was just an average citizen who happened to live in country with a despot as a ruler-
a man not of my choosing.

Thanks for the welcomes!

If I am understaning correctly, Pie, Winston, you are advocating that although we created the mess, since we can't fix it, we need to leave the mess for the Iraqis to handle. Then, after the country has been reduced to absolute rubble, we can go back and help rebuild it. We pull out and save "American lives" while more tens of thousands of Iraqi lives are lost as a result of our action. How did American lives become more valuable than Iraqi lives? Which supreme being(s) decreed that American values were to be global values, so immaculately universal that we could attempt to impose them on others by force of arms? And, which American values suggest that we can instigate the implosion of a society, contribute to the deaths of tens of thousands of its citizens, and then say, "Oops, our mistake, but we gotta go. Sorry, but we can't help you clean up the mess we made. It's getting far too expensive. It's costing us too many lives, too much money, and it's bound to cost somebody an election. We can't have that! No siree Bob?"

Tamaj13

Tamaj,

If you go back thru our posts it will be really obvious to you that we don't feel that way at all, so I'll deal with your response as if it were rhetorical. Pie can deal with it from her own perspective but she and I usually have similar points of view about Iraq.

Our president got us into a war that should have never been, but we're there. Our armed forces have destroyed an incredible amount of capital assets, but capital assets can be repaired. However, when our armed forces did nothing to contain the looting and violence in the immediate aftermath of the war, and then inserted an incompetent government that did nothing to restore infrastructure and order, it created an environment toxic to a structured society. That is when Iraqi started killing Iraqi. We can't stop that without inserting 500,000 troops- an impossibility because that would be nearly 1/2 of our entire armed forces. So the Iraqis will have to accomplish that feat on their own; they will have to place a value on the lives of their citizens. When Iraqis finally decide that the life of a Sunni is as valuable as a Shia or Kurd, then all life will be of equal value and our nation can return to repair the damage we wrought.

I don't think that our soldiers should sit idly by and watch the bloodbath evolve, but until the Iraqis begin to value order over chaos and place a greater value to all life, there is no reason for us to place a lesser value on our own.

I have been proposing we get rid of Halliburton, Big Oil and all the foreign contractors that work for them. We should revoke Bremer's Production Sharing Agreements (PSA) that are an attempt to rob the Iraqis of their Oil. We should give all the jobs to the Iraqis. All the Infrastructure rebuilding including Electricity, Water, Sewage, etc. should be being done by Sunnis for Sunnis, Shias, for Shias, and Kurd for Kurd. All Iraqi Police and Armed forces should similarly be deployed where they are from, in order to protect their own and hopefully lessen the bloodshed by balancing the forces so wholesale slaughter will be minimized.

We should redeploy our troops to the border regions in a rough circle while we attempt to convene a conference with the tribal leaders and the politicians, so they may try to hash out the resource distribution and their other issues. We should tell the regional powers that unless they want an independent Kurdistan on their border they should help stabilize Iraq.

This plan is somewhat simplistic, and I don't claim to know enough about Iraq or Military matters, but I think something like this plan at least has a chance to do several things.

1. Get our troops out of harms way and out of whatever civil war is going on.

2. Foreign Jihadis will have to come across relatively open ground to attack our troops.

3. The terrorists attacks on the infrastructure will put them at direct odds with the Iraqis, who are better equipped culturally to ferret them out.

4. The Iraqis and the region will see that we are not there to steal their Oil.

My position, exactly. The U.S. can not want peace for Iraq more than the Iraqis want it. Mailiki's givernment MUST do what's necessary to find political solutions and all (or at least the vast majority) of the Iraqi police and military must be dedicated to rooting out the miltia death squads. If that doesn't happen there's no point in us remaining in Iraq because we can not solve problems unless the Iraqis are totally committed to solving those problems. It's a sad state of affairs but unrealistic positions aren't going to solve the problems in Iraq.

Since none of us are in the circles of power, all of our solutions are merely simplistic hypothecations. That does not make them invalid or ill-concieved. It seems that many, including me, would agree to the seminal truth of your ideas.

TRU's plan seems to make some sense to me but I know little to nothing about the geographic and demographic constellation of Iraq. I like the fact that the plan doesn't entail running away and leaving the mess that we created, but keeps the US there in a major capacity attempting to help restore the country, or at the very least attempting to bring some sort of normalcy back to the lives of millions of people.

An argument I seem to hear from others is that it doesn't matter that we created the mess in Iraq, now that the mess is out of hand, we need to save our soldiers. Unless there is a good rationale that suggests removing the US presence from Iraq would make the Iraqi situation better, I can't see any ethical and justifiable resaon for doing so. Saving our own skins hardly seems very ethical and justifiable when we have unleashed a flood of blood in the desert. It would be like my buddies and I going into the zoo, releasing the lions, and running away because we can't figure a way to get them back in their cages. Sure, it would make sense for us to get the heck out of there and let the other people in the zoo pay the price, but I don't see how it would be the right thing to do. Even if each of us dies in the attempt, that's what we would need to do if it saves one life that had nothing to do with unleashing the lions. I know, I know, what am I bringing ethics into this for huh?

Tamaj13

According to Al-Maliki, Talabani, and about 60% of the Iraqi population, things will get better if our troops are removed. Will they? Probably not- in fact, they will probably get worse and remain bad for a decade or two. However, since 85% of Iraqi's think it's perfectly OK to kill American soldiers, and since there is nothing we can do under the current circumstances to improve the lives of the ordinary Iraqi citizen, there is no reason to keep our soldiers in harms way other than some guilt factor of "we broke it and have to stick around to fix it".

And I'm not sure if the argument- we created the mess and now it is out of hand so we need to save our soldiers- is anything more than a straw man. The argument today is: our soldiers have done all they can do, and the onus is on the American and Iraqi politicians to do what they are supposed to do. In about 100 days of combat, we systematically broke almost everything in Iraq, and we broke it badly. But in the last 3 years the Iraqis themselves have broken everything we didn't; thus there is a shared responsibility for putting Iraq back together again. Our troops, like all invading forces, have nothing to do with rebuilding- their job was to destroy and they did a great job of doing that. Their job is done. America has said they will help in the reconstruction, but the Iraqis have to be on board for that to happen.