President Bush insists "we can win this fight in Iraq," which is childlike presidential fantasy or political flimflamming that flies in the face of unnerving estimates from genuine intelligence professionals with nothing but bad news to report.
Listen to CIA director Michael Hayden: "The inability of the (Iraqi) government to govern seems irreversible," adding he couldn't "point to any milestone or checkpoint where we can turn this thing around."
Listen to Thomas Fingar, chief of the National Intelligence Council: No positive change since January.
Listen to the National Counterterrorism Center: Al-Qaeda has rebuilt itself and is better positioned to strike Western targets, despite President Bush and Vice President Cheney's boast that al-Qaeda was "on the run."
Despite the bumbling expedition into Iraq, the president wants more time to make the worst U.S. foreign policy blunder in history work.
More time?
Five years, a half trillion dollars and counting, more than 3,600 U.S. dead GIs and more than 27,000 wounded, a majority of U.S. troops saying it's time to go home, worldwide recruiting of terrorists spiked by the U.S. invasion, isolation from the global community, congressional distrust—isn't that collectively enough proof the lame cause in Iraq is lost?
President Bush also has forgotten the most important tenet in Gen. Colin Powell's doctrine of when not to fight a war. Bush lacks public support.
Subduing crazed, religious terrorists who are re-fighting centuries-old tribal enmities is hopeless. The U.S. military is broken, exhausted and uninspired about its mission. Resources have been so drained the National Guard is incapable of responding well to domestic U.S. disasters. Military commanders are out of ideas.
If Bush is blind to the collapse of order in Iraq and the futility of this war, he should read the history of Israel, the Middle East's most awesome military power, which has failed to conquer terrorists and terrorism, even with billions of dollars in aid and equipment from Washington, in 60 years of year-round fighting.
George W. Bush is slipping into the foggy, delusional mindset of another Texan trapped in an unwinnable war, Lyndon Baines Johnson. Admitting privately the Vietnam War couldn't be won, LBJ nevertheless publicly wouldn't allow his enormous Lone Star ego to level with the public and do what should have been done—end the war and bring troops home.
George W. Bush should not do the LBJ thing—hurl more GIs to their deaths and drain the treasury of more billions just to nourish an egocentric need to look like a winner at all costs.
