Frank Rich, and Nero on the Potomac
Our beloved dubya clears brush on his range while the brush fire he started in Iraq burns on and on. Frank Rich of the NYT wrote a brilliant article (reproduced below) on how dubya fiddles as Iraq burns. If nothing else it is good for a laugh and cry.
In the end it may be as critics have suggested that Iraq will turn out well, like Western Europe or Japan after WW II. Or it may turn out as the south did after the Civil war (another comparison that I had read — Sunnis == Southern whites, Shiites == blacks). No matter how this turns out, the costs to the Iraq people, U.S. soldiers, and world stability have already been terrible. All of it for an elective war.
Since I wrote this I have realized that I shouldn’t quote it word for word, so below is the start and end of it and here is the link (pay link) if you wish to read it all
——————————————————————————–
August 14, 2005
Someone Tell the President the War Is Over
By FRANK RICH
LIKE the Japanese soldier marooned on an island for years after V-J Day, President Bush may be the last person in the country to learn that for Americans, if not Iraqis, the war in Iraq is over. “We will stay the course,” he insistently tells us from his Texas ranch. What do you mean we, white man?
A president can’t stay the course when his own citizens (let alone his own allies) won’t stay with him. The approval rate for Mr. Bush’s handling of Iraq plunged to 34 percent in last weekend’s Newsweek poll - a match for the 32 percent that approved L.B.J.’s handling of Vietnam in early March 1968. (The two presidents’ overall approval ratings have also converged: 41 percent for Johnson then, 42 percent for Bush now.) On March 31, 1968, as L.B.J.’s ratings plummeted further, he announced he wouldn’t seek re-election, commencing our long extrication from that quagmire.
…….
Thus the president’s claim on Thursday that “no decision has been made yet” about withdrawing troops from Iraq can be taken exactly as seriously as the vice president’s preceding fantasy that the insurgency is in its “last throes.” The country has already made the decision for Mr. Bush. We’re outta there. Now comes the hard task of identifying the leaders who can pick up the pieces of the fiasco that has made us more vulnerable, not less, to the terrorists who struck us four years ago next month.