Bush Cornered

The Bush regime finally appears to be cornered. The Republican stalwarts in Congress who have shielded Bush/Cheney all these years are unhappy and showing signs they may actually be about the join the angry villagers with their torches and pitchforks.

Bush/Cheney had figured they had until at least mid-October before they had to admit that the Iraqi government has utterly failed to meet any of the "benchmarks" set early in the year. September was to be the deadline. The "surge" was foisted off on everyone as an effort to pacify Baghdad sufficiently to let the Maliki government get things done, make things happen. Those "things" instead fell by the wayside.

But mid-October isn't in the cards any longer for Bush/Cheney. Those torches and pitchforks are getting just way too close for congressional Republicans who see their own futures going up in smoke if they continue to defend a hapless master against the angry mob.

Bush/Cheney sees all this coming. Two options: weather out the siege or buy their way out of this, placate the mob. That, according to the New York Times is the issue under debate right now in the White House.

Four more Republican senators have recently declared that they can no longer support Mr. Bush’s strategy, including senior lawmakers who until now had expressed their doubts only privately. As a result, some aides are now telling Mr. Bush that if he wants to forestall more defections, it would be wiser to announce plans for a far more narrowly defined mission for American troops that would allow for a staged pullback, a strategy that he rejected in December as a prescription for defeat when it was proposed by the bipartisan Iraq Study Group.

“When you count up the votes that we’ve lost and the votes we’re likely to lose over the next few weeks, it looks pretty grim,” said one senior official, who, like others involved in the discussions, would not speak on the record about internal White House deliberations.

They described Mr. Hadley as deeply concerned that the loss of Republicans could accelerate this week, a fear shared by Mr. Rove. But they also said that Mr. Rove had warned that if Mr. Bush went too far in announcing a redeployment, the result could include a further cascade of defections — and the passage of legislation that would force a withdrawal by a specific date, a step Mr. Bush has always said he would oppose.

There it is, the cave-in. Notice that this is now all about preserving the dwindling political future of Bush/Cheney. Completely absent from this equation are factors like, oh say, the troops, the people of Iraq, the Kurds, the militias, Iran, the dead and soon to be dead, the coalition allies, al-Qaeda and Islamist extremism, everything except Bush/Cheney.

There's an object lesson in all of this for nations involved in American-driven coalitions elsewhere, like the one in Afghanistan. The very essence of "the mission" is a mirror image of the political fortunes of two guys in Washington and you're only kidding yourself if you believe it's anything more. The Leader of the Free World, Commander in Chief of the Global War Without End on Terror, is staggering under the weight of his own duplicity.