Kicking A.S.S.

Congressional hearings on Iraq this week, featuring the report by General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker on the Surge, became a showcase for Democrats to rake the Bush Administration over the coals for its grotesque bungling and mismanagement of the Iraq occupation.

President Bush, speaking in Australia, claimed that his Surge was “kicking ass.” But given the level of violence, which even under the most optimistic assessment has only receded to its 2006 level, Bush’s “kicking ass” comment was used repeatedly as a point of ridicule. If a slight reduction in horrific violence can be called “kicking ass”, then it’s hard to imagine how much lower the bar for success in Iraq can be set.

The most important question of today’s Senate hearings came from Barack Obama, and it went unanswered. In essence, he wanted to know under what circumstances the Ambassador and General would recommend that we withdraw our forces without our goals being met.

It’s more than a fair question. And the absence of an answer tells us that the Bush Administration and its minions want to meet their “goals” under any circumstances, suffering any losses.

But their “goals” have always been wildly unattainable and misguided. They wanted to kill every individual in Iraq who fit the description of a terrorist, as if this were a finite number. They wanted to impose order and security, apparently in the fashion that we enjoy here in America. And they wanted an American-style democracy to flourish, absent any notion of ethnic or tribal identity. Now, as then, these goals are tragically laughable, deranged and effectively impossible.

The latest goal, facilitated by the Surge, has been to provide better security while the government, military and police "stand up". But the Surge has done little to change the facts on the ground in Iraq. Other developments unrelated to the Surge have given small glimmers of hope. That the Sunnis have grown sick of Al Qaeda and kicked them to the curb is the most important of these. But the long-running and deep-seated conflicts and resentment among tribes and clans is not going to go away any time soon.

Thus, it is becoming clear that we remain faced with two hideous choices. Stay the course without any end in sight, with mounting casualties and with no guarantee of success, or begin a phased withdrawal and hope that Iraq doesn’t fully implode.

The only thing getting its ass kicked these days is President Bush and his policies.

- JT Compton

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It's About A Failed Presidency, Stupid

The recently scrapped Senate bill requiring a timeline for withdrawal from Iraq was ridiculed by conservatives as an attempt by Congress to micro-manage the “war” in Iraq. But their scorn misses a much larger and more ominous point, eclipsing mere policy disputes.

How should America deal with a President who is incompetent, corrupt and holds the actions of his administration above the law?

Even Republicans are increasingly conceding that President Bush mismanaged the invasion of Iraq, often using the phrase “mistakes were made” to substitute for a more realistic, catastrophic and lamentable description.

But beyond Iraq, Bush has done deliberate and entirely avoidable harm to a broad range of important institutions and policies at home.

He turned governmental agencies and departments – Justice, Interior, Energy, Environmental Protection, etc. – into extensions of the Republican party, in some cases clearly violating the law.

He staffed those same institutions with unqualified cronies or with partisan members of the industries those institutions were supposed to regulate, resulting in tragedy ("Heck of a job, Brownie!").

He supported and sustained immoral policies such as torture and rendition that shattered our credibility in the world community and put our troops at risk.

He held no high official responsible for the outrageous abuses at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, which further damaged our international standing.

He held none of his cabinet responsible for the illegal and disgraceful outing of a covert CIA officer despite clear supporting evidence.

He failed to respond adequately to the ravages of Hurricane Katrina, and continues to fail to provide adequate, much less competent, support for the victims of that disaster.

He failed to respond effectively and continues to ignore the genocide in Darfur.

And so on.

When a President botches a war we shouldn’t trust that same person to clean up the mess. Yet we’ve been forced to wait almost five years for President Bush to come up with a plan to sort out what many now call the worst foreign policy disaster in our nation’s history.

Republicans acknowledge that “mistakes have been made” but they still can’t embrace what so many Americans have already concluded – that the real issue has little to do with military strategy and everything to do with our national response to a failed and catastrophic Presidency.

Do we have to wait until a President gets caught on tape covering up a robbery or lying about adultery before we can act to limit his power or remove him from office? The Constitution allows for impeachment when the President commits “high crimes and misdemeanors”. A misdemeanor, in modern usage, could mean a traffic violation or drunk and disorderly.

Certainly the failures and scandals of the Bush White House are more egregious than drunk and disorderly.

If the actions of President Bush and his cabinet aren't excellent and proper candidates for impeachment, much less outrage, it’s hard to imagine what would be.

- JT Compton

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Bush to America: Go To Hell

George Bush refuses to accept the will of the American people. Despite polls showing overwhelming support for a timetable for phased withdrawal from Iraq, the President and his embattled, scandal-scarred inner circle continue to defend the course of their grotesquely mismanaged war by implying that their fellow citizens are traitors.

Every day, whether from the floor of Congress or TV talk-shows, the few remaining Bush dead-enders continue to question the patriotism of the Democrat’s plan, including anyone who supports it, labeling the entire enterprise “defeatist” while claiming it impossible to support both the troops and withdrawal. But the divisiveness of this tactic smacks of McCarthyism and its logic seems blatantly disingenuous.

It’s a plain fact that soldiers who disagree with our mission in Iraq—or aren’t even sure what the real mission is nowadays—feel supported knowing that their fellow citizens are trying to bring them home. In the view of many, a timetable for withdrawal is supporting our troops.

And calling withdrawal “defeatist” ignores another sad fact. We have already been defeated. Not just by bombs or terrorists, but by the historic blunders of our own civilian leadership. By ignoring the cultural realities of Iraq and invading without a robust plan to secure the country, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and others all but ensured the outcome we now face. Their ignorance and incompetence let the Chaos Genie out of the bottle, and an extra twenty thousand troops won’t come close to putting it back.

We may never know what it would take to restore order in Baghdad because we have never been able to maintain order in Baghdad. If securing Baghdad has been the objective, we have been failing almost from day one. And Americans understand this. They understand that asking a few hundred thousand soldiers who don’t speak the language and don’t understand the customs or culture to police an entire nation is a recipe for failure, especially when that “nation” is actually an artificial fusion of three radically different tribal communities with long-standing hatreds and grievances.

A new zenith of Presidential arrogance and defiance will occur this evening when George Bush vetoes broadly supported legislation that ties further Iraq war funding to a phased withdrawal. His administration’s bruised but stubborn ego will continue to cling to a failed policy, even if he has to tell the vast majority of voting citizens, including our soldiers, to go to hell.

- JT Compton

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