Will He Budge? Can He Be Pushed?

The Rumsfeld memo, the Hadley memo, the Iraq Study Group report and now it's Kofi Annan writing off the American occupation of Iraq as an utter failure. The outgoing UN Secretary General stated the obvious, that levels of violence being sustained daily in Iraq are much worse than civil wars in some other nations. He also pointed out that Iraqis once had to live under a dictator but their quality of life was so much better than what they have today.

Bush is taking a battering from all sides. Now what? Everyone is agreed there are no good options. Changing may help Iraq, it may help the US forces stuck there but, for Bush and his presidential legacy, it will amount to heaping a bad option atop a failed option. Put simply, doing something constructive at this point may be worse for Bush than doing nothing, at least in the short term.

In the long term, it's doubtful that any of the options open to the US will do much good for Iraq and the country's civil war. The US hasn't been able to stop it so it's going to have to be fought out until the leaders of Iraq's disparate ethnic and religious groups have had enough.

George Bush is so much more isolated now than at any time in his presidency. The old swagger is gone. Both houses of congress have been recovered by the Democrats. His coterie of aides and handlers has been shredded. After 9/11 he reached out to the neo-cons. Now they've left. Even Dick Cheney is lying low, good news for small game shooters everywhere.

Bush cracks under pressure, he always has. Now he's under immense pressure and it's showing through quite plainly. He still sees 'victory' for the US in Iraq. He's back to 'stay the course.' This is a man firmly in the iron grip of denial who refuses to see reality.

If you went into work unable to distinguish reality from fantasy, you would be out of work in short order. What then when this happens to the ostensible 'leader of the free world'? What happens when the guy orchestrating the Global War Without End on Terror in which we have enlisted shows that he's out to lunch? Do we leave him in charge, do we stay, do we go?

Bear in mind that what happens in Iraq will have a quick and powerful impact on 'the mission' in Afghanistan. Conditions on the ground may become much more dangerous for the NATO forces.

If, as it appears, George Bush is going to dig his heels in on Iraq, Americans will have to deal with that. We, on the other hand, need to get assurances that NATO will have prompt and substantial American assistance in Afghanistan if the situation there worsens suddenly.