Bush and the Blind Staggers

We're leaving, we're staying, we're behind you all the way, we're with you to the end, you're the right guy for the job. The more you listen to George Bush these days the more confused you're bound to become.

President Bush no longer can state anything that even resembles a coherent policy on Iraq. He may deny it, but he's very much stuck in "stay the course" mode.

As much as the Bush administration would like to make some progress, any progress on stabilizing Iraq and beginning to withdraw US forces, the goal eludes them. A big part of their problem is the mystery of who is going to emerge as the key power in that country.

Obviously the future leader of Iraq won't be a bumbler like Maliki. It won't be a Sunni - the Shia have had quite enough of that. It won't be a Kurd - they don't want to get caught in the Arab civil war in the south. It will have to be a Shia but just who that will be is very much up in the air.

Muqtada al Sadr has been named as the guy most likely to prevail among the Shia but that isn't certain yet. There are reports that Sadr's Mahdi army, his powerful militia, is beginning to suffer defections as component militias break away.

The future of Iraq, even if there is to be a future for Iraq, will likely become apparent in the course of the power struggle among the Shia. America no longer has much say in that, having been relegated to bystander status.

Bush isn't the only one reeling in this confusion. So are many from the far-right who persuaded him to do their bidding. The neo-cons who planted Chalabi in the Pentagon and the White House now try to duck any responsibility for the failure of the Iraq invasion by putting the blame entirely on Bush and Rumsfeld.

So bereft of ideas are these pundits and critics that some of them are even talking about invading Iraq. Yeah, that's right, they want the United States to invade Iraq - again. Here's the idea: gather a much larger force, another 150,000 (can you say Shinseki?) and roll into the country all over again, tossing the Baghdad government and crushing the militias and then just start fresh.
New York Times columnist Tom Friedman, a guy who kept chanting that Iraq was winnable even if he had to keep his eyes closed to do it, now argues that it's either re-invade or get out ASAP.

Think about that. The US should just write off the 3,000 coalition deaths and their scores of thousands of wounded along with the hundreds of thousands of dead and soon-to-be-dead Iraqi civilians to a macabre 'learning experience' and then go back in and take another whack at it.

That, by any measure, is a clear case of the blind staggers.