No Bloody Face-saving for Cowardly AWOL Bush

I found the unanimous opposition of the Joint Chiefs to the idea of throwing more troops into the fire a reassuring indication that the White House madness might not be quite as contagious as it used to be. Perhaps some have taken their shots! Most importantly, perhaps some have remembered they are supposed to have a spine.

But it was discouraging to hear today that some senior commanders as well as some troops on the ground were supposedly welcoming reinforcement. Obviously not everyone in uniform has the courage, insight, intelligence, or guts to actually consider thinking for themselves. They're trained and re-trained not to think for themselves, you understand. That's the drill. Especially in the case of the dudes with all sorts of swanky cute bars and stars on their breast and shoulders it is improbable in the extreme that they would ever publicly express an opinion in opposition to the administration. So the prior contrarian position by the Joint Chiefs should be considered earthshaking, and any subsequent obsequiousness by others merely the normal boot-licking.

Just take Colin Powell as an example. He reputedly has some decent history as a member of the military, including being the exponent of some good principles as to when and how we should even contemplate undertaking war. But today of course he is a shameful spectacle, having sold his soul to a criminal administration.

It seems essential to refute at every opportunity the idea that intelligent, well-informed but non-suborned military are generally in support of "surging" the troops in Iraq. And beyond that, it must be made clear that neither they, nor the American people, are in favor of sustaining this invasion and occupation with its dire day-to-day consequences largely to prevent sorry little George Bush from losing face.

Josh Marshall has it this way at Talking Points Memo:

Sunday's Times reports that the top US commander in Iraq, Gen. George W. Casey Jr., is now, as the article's headline puts it, "Open to Troop Surge."

Says a 'senior Defense Department official': “They are open to the possibility of some increase in force. They are supportive of taking steps to support the Iraqis in their plan, including the possible modest augmentation in U.S. combat forces.”

This is a silly game we now seem ready to play. In theory at least, senior military commanders give frank advice to the commander-in-chief. But the president is their ultimate superior in the chain of command. They work for him. So they do what he says. Period. The only real alternative is principled resignation. But let's not get distracted from the main point. It seems clear that most of the Army brass oppose an expanded troop presence in Iraq. As the Times notes, until recently, Casey himself has "argued that sending more American forces into Baghdad and Anbar Province, the two most violent regions of Iraq, would increase the Iraqi dependency on Washington, and in the words of one senior official, 'make this feel more like an occupation.'"

The premise of this narrative is that the president is slowly persuading the generals of the logic of his position that we should escalate the conflict in Iraq by inserting however many tens of thousands of new troops into the country. But the premise is bogus because it is the duty of the three and four star generals to come around after the president does not accept their contrary opinions. He's in charge. They're not in charge. That is how we all want it to work -- though, admittedly, it is somewhat harder to stomach when the president is a stubborn, serial bumbler

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Bush, Parade-less? Send in the Clowns!

I've agreeably shilled for Dan Froomkin here before (one in a company of a half-dozen or so). The work he does in wading through wads of MSM stuff (and, mercifully for him and us, on-line material that tends to be less fettered to the established thinking in DC and thus more interesting and in general more rewarding), is estimable. And then he crafts full, coherent sentences about it and offers cogent opinion! By damn this is almost like having an inside track with a Journalist! By Jove he's got it!

Relax, I will not be breaking into any "rain in Spain" here.

But this end-of-the-year offering seems well worth sharing. Admittedly most of the content is made up of prior Froom-posts. I suspect there is more than one column here that I may have stuck your nose in already - hopefully with your eventual approval. But it is all very timely and clearly in the tradition of the year-end wrap-ups we will be inundated with for the next 10+ days. This is one of the ones you actually need to attend to and pass on. To me the intro material is some of the most potent and laudable stuff DF has published in this venue.

Froomkin called it Bush Loses His Parade, I tagged it "Shoots, Hides, and Leaves: the Sequel" when I circulated it at work (shhh).

The year 2006 started with President Bush firmly in denial about how terribly wrong his war in Iraq has gone. It ends that way, too.

But in between, something changed: Bush lost his parade.

Somehow, Bush had managed up until this year to lull voters -- and seduce journalists -- into complicity with a worldview that was simply not based in reality.

There's been plenty of evidence for years now that Bush was living in a self-imposed bubble of non-reality, particularly when it came to the situation in Iraq.

But it wasn't until Bob Woodward's book "State of Denial," came out in September that it was definitively established, to the full satisfaction of Washington's cocktail-party circles, that the president is not to be taken seriously on Iraq.

It wasn't until November, when the voters resoundingly threw Bush's congressional enablers from power, that it became undeniably clear that Americans reject Bush's leadership.

And Bush's response to this month's report from the bipartisan Iraq Study Group is making it manifestly obvious that, for all the White House's attempts to give the impression that Bush listens to people who disagree with him, he does not.

He appears to still listen pretty much only to two people -- Vice President Cheney and political guru Karl Rove -- even though both were proven catastrophically wrong in 2006.

The Iraq debacle, after all, is Cheney's doing almost more than it is Bush's. It was Cheney who whispered into Bush's ear that it would all work out just fine. Apparently, that continues.

And it is Rove who is responsible for Bush's aversion to finding common ground with his political enemies. That also appears to continue, even though this year's election proved quite conclusively that the politics of division have a limit.

These days, when Bush turns around to see who's marching behind him, he sees Cheney and Rove -- and increasingly few others.

A Look Back at 2006

Here's a look back at the year that was, through a sampling of White House Briefing columns:

* Feb. 3: It's the Credibility, Stupid
President Bush's fundamental challenge as he tries to regain his political footing is that most Americans don't trust him anymore.

* Feb. 8: The Captive President
President Bush almost never hears criticism to his face. Certainly not in public.

But yesterday, at the widely-watched funeral of civil rights icon Coretta Scott King, a fidgety president had no choice but to sit quietly and listen as several speakers reproached him for not having learned the lessons that King and her martyred husband, the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., spent their lives teaching.

* Feb. 13: Shoots, Hides and Leaves
The vice president of the United States shoots someone in a hunting accident and rather than immediately come clean to the public, his office keeps it a secret for almost a whole day. Even then, it's only to confirm a report in a local paper.

And still from the White House, no details, no apologies, and no Cheney.

No one is suggesting that Cheney shot his hunting buddy on purpose. But could he have been negligent? What does he say happened exactly? What do the others there -- not just their hostess -- say took place? Shouldn't there be some sort of investigation? Does Cheney take any responsibility?

And just when was he planning on letting the press know?

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* May 1: All Kidding Aside
President Bush on Saturday night had the audience at the White House Correspondents' Association Dinner in stitches. With doppelganger comedian Steve Bridges alongside -- playing his inner self -- Bush poked gentle fun of his own mangling of the English language, his belligerence and his feelings about the media.

Then Comedy Central satirist Stephen Colbert ripped those stitches out.

Colbert was merciless, reserving his most potent zingers for the people in spitting distance: The president who took the nation to war on false pretenses and the press corps that let him do it.

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* Oct. 27: Most Ridiculous Moment?
It may go down as one of the most ridiculous -- and ridiculed -- utterances of the Bush presidency.

In an interview with ABC News broadcast on Sunday, President Bush gamely suggested that "we've never been 'stay the course'" when it comes to Iraq.

With mid-term elections just around the bend -- and with public opinion starkly and unhappily focused on Iraq -- it's understandable that Bush might want to rewrite history. But his attempt failed miserably.

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As the Year Ends

Michael Abramowitz writes in this morning's paper: "Yesterday, in an interview with The Washington Post, while acknowledging that the United States is not winning in Iraq, Bush bluntly dismissed the suggestion that the midterm elections meant voters want to bring the mission in that country to closure. He said he interpreted the election results 'as people not satisfied with the progress' in Iraq."

In other words, he can't hear what the voters were really saying.

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