As if reliving the fast-draw gunslinger days of old Texas, President Bush now says he's willing to use the military option on Iran and its emerging nuclear capabilities as he did in Iraq.
Neither Congress nor the public, however, would tolerate another foolhardy Bush war justified on fabricated tales of disaster and pursued with the bumbling bedlam of an Inspector Clouseau.
The costly folly in Iraq has grown larger.
More than 13,000 wounded represent a new generation of young veterans who'll require lifetime disability payments and/or medical treatment and therapy for decades. The more than 1,800 dead U.S. servicemen who served bravely leave families as permanent testaments to the true cost of the war.
And even after two years and five months in Iraq, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's war-on-the-cheap remains a scandal, fully justifying Republican Sen. John McCain's lament that he lacks confidence in the defense chief.
Tens of thousands of new pieces of body armor are being rushed to GIs whose protective gear is useless against a new surge of attacks by insurgents that Vice President Cheney airily claims are "in their last throes." Poorly armored military vehicles continue to be death traps.
And as John Crawford, a returned GI, writes in his new best-selling book, "The Last True Story I'll Ever Tell: An Accidental Soldier's Account of the War in Iraq," when his unit left Iraq their "uniforms were in tatters (and) night vision goggles had been packed away seven months earlier when all our replacement parts ran out."
Homefolks have valiantly supported the troops. Clearly, the president and his mismanagement managers have not.
