"Someone has to get the message to this man that there have to be significant changes." -- Senate Majority Leader-elect Harry Reid, D-Nev.
DETROIT -- Good Luck. Even his daddy's buddies and a bipartisan panel can't get him to listen. It's not the message; it's his closed ears. President George W. Bush will never admit Iraq is disintegrating and his policies were doomed from the outset.
The body language screamed out as the Baker-Hamilton group leaders made their formal presentation to Bush. He gave his cavalier assurance that he deemed the report "interesting" and "worthy of study." So much so that he claims he actually read it. Methinks he's fibbing. I'm reading it now.
If the White House reporting wimps have any nerve they'll quiz him at his next availability about recommendation 72, starting on Page 91, that states, "Costs of the war should be included in the President's annual budget request, starting with FY 2008: the war is in its fourth year, and the normal budget process should not be circumvented. Funding requests for the war in Iraq should be presented clearly to Congress and the American people. Congress must carry out its constitutional responsibility to review budget for the war in Iraq carefully and to conduct oversight."
Bush will never come clean with the costs of his war, and the idea that he would bring Congress in to discuss his unbridled spending and welcome a review of the Pentagon's no-bid contracts with Halliburton is unthinkable. War, in the Bush-Cheney perverted view, is the exclusive domain of the unitary executive. They consider congressional oversight a quaint concept best left in civics textbooks.
Bush will take the Iraq Study Group Report, grab a couple of insignificant shards from it, feature his "military assessments" (read: what he wants to hear and what Gen. Peter Pace, the sycophant chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, will dutifully provide), toss in a bunch of bromides, and then have a prime-time pre-Christmas address to the nation where he'll sell his massaged policy as the path for "victory" in Iraq.
Bush declared the Iraq Study Group Report was "an opportunity to come together and work together," when in fact, he is already scrapping any aspects of the report that don't satisfy his appetite for unilateralism and don't conform with the neocon madness built on the fantasy that invading Iraq was the way to spread democracy in the region, protect western corporate interests and make Israel more secure in the process.
With those delusions in mind, Bush set out like a picky adolescent spooning through a fruit salad looking for all the maraschino cherries and rejecting the grapefruit, apples and other tart-yet-healthy choices. Just give me those sweet cherries and I'll call them "bipartisan," Bush thought. He'll use the report for a little political cover and then toss the bulk of the recommendations into the trash heap of history.
Testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee the next day, Jim Baker said that his report outlined a "comprehensive strategy" and warned, "I hope we don't treat this like a fruit salad and say 'I like this but I don't like that.'" By that time Bush's tongue was already scarlet.
Vice President Dick Cheney doesn't even bother with the niceties and lip service his underling in the Oval Office so disingenuously employs. Cheney sat and scowled as James Baker and Lee Hamilton, co-chairs of the Iraq Study Group, presented their report.
As the camera panned, we got a glimpse of Cheney, who had the gas-pained look of someone who had just scarfed down four Taco Bell bean burritos with green onions for breakfast.
Cheney is still fuming over his buddy and mentor Donald Rumsfeld's ignominious departure from the Pentagon. He blames Jim Baker and Bush the Elder's crew for dumping Rummy and trying to get the younger Bush to see the light of the dark failure in Iraq.
Cheney, for now, will retreat to his bat cave to work on a plot to have a military confrontation with Iran, the next move in the neocon playbook for American dominance in the Middle East and beyond.
Big Dick is still a skilled infighter and, like his boy Bush, the more wrong they are, the more disastrous their polices, the more intransigent they become. Facts don't faze them -- only their messianic mission matters.
Just ask Cheney. He'll still tell you al-Qaeda was in cahoots with Saddam Hussein, a 9/11 hijacker met with Iraqi intelligence agents in Prague, Iraq had a reconstituted nuclear weapons program and the insurgency is in its "last throes."
Bush reaffirmed his Iraq delusions at a joint news conference with British Prime Minister Tony Blair where the leaders vowed not "to quit" the mess they created in Iraq. Refusing to even consider what he and his neocon corner men did with their fantasies, ignorance, arrogance and incompetence, Bush warned we must focus on bailing out these "sorcerer's apprentices," somehow salvaging his mad mission: "If we were to fail, that failed policy will come to hurt generations of Americans in the future."
He is incapable of introspection and reflection. Bush only looks at the present fiasco and still clings to his claim that even though all the reasons used to support the war were unfounded, it still was a dandy idea to topple Saddam, in spite of the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians, nearly 3,000 American troops and the result of turning Iraq into a terrorist training ground to spread more violence throughout the region and world.
The Baker-Hamilton report stated bluntly that "the United States cannot achieve its goals in the Middle East unless it deals directly with the Arab-Israeli conflict and regional stability."
The report reminded Bush of his own words, which for now remain just words: "There must be a renewed and sustained commitment by the United States to a comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace on all fronts: Lebanon, Syria, and President Bush's June 2002 commitment to a two-state solution for Israel and Palestine."
Blair underscored that point, saying, "It is important that we do everything we can in the wider Middle East to bring about peace between Israel and Palestine." Blair will soon go to the Middle East and engage in personal diplomacy. Bush has never been personally involved in the Israel-Palestine conflict, and his malign indifference helps sustain the violence. Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert was quick to reject the Baker-Hamilton report's linkage of the Palestinian conflict to broader issues in the region.
Olmert showed his shameless fealty to Bush during a recent White House visit when he said, "We are very much impressed and encouraged by the stability which the great operation of America in Iraq brought to the Middle East." Only fools and professional asskissers would utter those words.
Instead of being "an honest broker" for peace, as Blair urged, under Bush there's not a dime's worth of difference between U.S. policy toward Palestine and the position of whatever fractious Israeli government happens to be in power at the moment.
Bush is unlikely to renounce permanent U.S. military bases in Iraq and he'll never agree to prevent American and British corporations from making claims on Iraqi oil reserves. The agony in Iraq is exposing the true, craven U.S. ambitions in the nation.
The biggest failure in the Iraq Study Group Report was the legislative restriction in its creation limiting the panel's focus to the present mess and not even considering how we got into the quagmire. No looking back. All eyes on "the way forward." We are in the midst of the worst foreign policy disaster in U.S. history, but don't dare think about how we got there. How can we learn and understand with such artificial political restraints?
As the Congress adjourns, Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kansas, the outgoing chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, got his way, lying and stonewalling efforts to examine the White House's use and abuse of intelligence before the invasion of Iraq.
The loathsome Roberts had promised for years that the so-called Phase Two investigation -- an examination of the misuse and distorting of intelligence -- was proceeding. Roberts is the poster boy for the Republicans' choice to abandon congressional oversight and protect the administration's lies and abuses of power.
The new Congress with the Democrats in charge will certainly do better; a family of orangutans could. But with prominent party leaders like Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., and Joseph Biden, D-Del., still clinging to their notion that invading Iraq was a good idea and sound policy -- just poorly executed under Bush -- the Democrats still bear significant culpability for the ongoing fiasco there.
Bush is now in the phase of his failed presidency other mentally unbalanced megalomaniacs experienced in the Oval Office. Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon are now the best Bush models.
The deeper they got into the pit of Vietnam, the more unhinged they became. Nixon dropped more bombs in Southeast Asia than were used during the entire Second World War. Johnson once told an aide in a tape-recorded conversation discussing Vietnam that "it's just the biggest damn mess I ever saw." At least Johnson recognized what Bush will never admit when he added, "It's damned easy to get in a war, but it's gonna be awfully hard to ever extricate yourself if you get in."
George W. Bush is desperately trying to save face and prove his vision to change the Middle East is an inspiration he worked out with God. He will never change his disastrous course.
Bush's presidency is in the same situation as the Baker-Hamilton group described Iraq being in, "grave and deteriorating."
| Niagara Falls Reporter | www.niagarafallsreporter.com | December 12 2006 |