Lowered Expectations

Is anyone really surprised by this sort of shit anymore?

The Bush administration is significantly lowering expectations of what can be achieved in Iraq, recognizing that the United States will have to settle for far less progress than originally envisioned during the transition due to end in four months, according to U.S. officials in Washington and Baghdad.

The United States no longer expects to see a model new democracy, a self-supporting oil industry or a society in which the majority of people are free from serious security or economic challenges, U.S. officials say.

"What we expected to achieve was never realistic given the timetable or what unfolded on the ground," said a senior official involved in policy since the 2003 invasion. "We are in a process of absorbing the factors of the situation we're in and shedding the unreality that dominated at the beginning."

Dr. Tom More makes a decent case for the anonymous "senior official involved in policy" being Rumsfeld, which again would surprise no one. Certainly the abrupt verbal cadences and jargon-laden syntax have the whiff of Brylcreem and Ben-Gay, like pretty much everything else Rumsfeld touches. The only thing missing is his usual asinine habit of asking himself rhetorical diversionary questions.

Do we wish that what we expected to achieve had been realistic given the timetable and the unfolding of events on the ground? Sure, but you go to war with the retard half-assed policy-makers you have, not the intelligent, rational, reality-based decision-makers you want.

Administration officials still emphasize how much they have achieved despite the chaos that followed the invasion and the escalating insurgency. "Iraqis are taking control of their country, building a free nation that can govern itself, sustain itself and defend itself. And we're helping Iraqis succeed," President Bush said yesterday in his radio address.

Iraqi officials yesterday struggled to agree on a draft constitution by a deadline of tomorrow so the document can be submitted to a vote in October. The political transition would be completed in December by elections for a permanent government.

But the realities of daily life are a constant reminder of how the initial U.S. ambitions have not been fulfilled in ways that Americans and Iraqis once anticipated. Many of Baghdad's 6 million people go without electricity for days in 120-degree heat. Parents fearful of kidnapping are keeping children indoors.

Barbers post signs saying they do not shave men, after months of barbers being killed by religious extremists. Ethnic or religious-based militias police the northern and southern portions of Iraq. Analysts estimate that in the whole of Iraq, unemployment is 50 percent to 65 percent.

Does Bush even feel any pang of conscience when he spouts such obscene nonsense? I doubt it; in five years of lawn-darting this country (and the rest of the world right along with it), the one characteristic that has defined this buffoon is his certitude. Forget speculating about whether he second-guesses any of his decisions that turn out to be completely wrong -- he doesn't even seem to first-guess them, as it were. He goes with his gut, and the rest of the world is expected to just go right along with that. After all, he's the preznit.

This is not a small thing. Bush genuinely seems to feel that one of the trappings of his station is that everyone just has to do whatever he says. Well, that's what people call a monarchy. Someone seriously needs to sit this asshole down and explain the differences to him. In a democratic republic, you do not have divine right. In a democratic republic, the people are the boss -- you are supposed to do what they want you to do.

Right now, Bush's ideas from top to bottom poll consistently in a steadily decreasing minority. We learned to sneer and scoff at focus groups and push-polling and other such things during the Clinton years, and no one's saying that one poll of 49% means you must turn the ship around 180º, but Bush has been polling in the high 30's and low 40's for six months straight, on Iraq, on Social Security, on health care, on stem-cell research, on pretty much every major concrete issue. (Polls on intangibles like "likability" and "honesty" are useless and stupid. Not only do they require the sort of mind-meld that Shit-For-Brains claimed to have pulled on his former main squeeze Pooty-Poot, but they don't provide a clean metric to what exactly is being asked.)

Anyway, Bush has a clearly defined pattern of regarding any sort of scrutiny of his prior deeds and words to be some sort of admission of guilt. In his case, it is, because a lot of people have paid for his miscalculations and retard rhetoric with their lives. I defy George W. Bush to ask either Americans or Iraqis whether they're better off now than they were three years ago. I fucking dare him to. He can ask them again in 2008. I certainly hope the Democrats do.

The ferocious debate over a new constitution has particularly driven home the gap between the original U.S. goals and the realities after almost 28 months. The U.S. decision to invade Iraq was justified in part by the goal of establishing a secular and modern Iraq that honors human rights and unites disparate ethnic and religious communities.

But whatever the outcome on specific disputes, the document on which Iraq's future is to be built will require laws to be compliant with Islam. Kurds and Shiites are expecting de facto long-term political privileges. And women's rights will not be as firmly entrenched as Washington has tried to insist, U.S. officials and Iraq analysts say.

"We set out to establish a democracy, but we're slowly realizing we will have some form of Islamic republic," said another U.S. official familiar with policymaking from the beginning, who like some others interviewed would speak candidly only on the condition of anonymity. "That process is being repeated all over."

Dumb motherfuckers. What they're objectively saying here is that we spent $300 billion, sacrificed thousands of troops and tens of thousands of innocent lives, completely squandered both our allies' goodwill and our enemies' fear -- so that we could turn Iraq into an Iranian-influenced theocracy. Nice going, assholes.

It would be even nicer if these "senior officials" had the fucking balls to just go on the record, but I suppose that's just too much to ask.

But let us dispense with the "liberation" boilerplate once and for all. Iraqis lived in fear under Saddam's totalitarian nightmare, but they also had jobs, lives, homes, families, electricity and water. Now they have villages cordoned off with razor wire, cities that require biometric scans to enter or exit, Islamic thugs terrorizing women and, um, barbers, about eight hours of electricity in 125º heat, and no fucking jobs.

Again, good job, guys. You should all give each other Medals O' Freedom. You've really earned 'em.

Yet another insight into just how the mind of this small, petty man clicks and clunks along, as he comes up with a whopper of an excuse as to why he can't spare even five minutes for grieving Iraq War mother Cindy Sheehan:

President Bush, noting that lots of people want to talk to the president and "it's also important for me to go on with my life," on Saturday defended his decision not to meet with the grieving mom of a soldier killed in Iraq.

Bush said he is aware of the anti-war sentiments of Cindy Sheehan and others who have joined her protest near the Bush ranch.

"But whether it be here or in Washington or anywhere else, there's somebody who has got something to say to the president, that's part of the job," Bush said on the ranch. "And I think it's important for me to be thoughtful and sensitive to those who have got something to say."

"But," he added, "I think it's also important for me to go on with my life, to keep a balanced life."

The attitude basically boils down to "if I talk to her, I gotta talk to everybody". But that's not necessarily true -- thus far, only Cindy Sheehan has been this vocal about wanting a personal explanation from Bush. He really is damned if he does and damned if he doesn't, and he seems to know it. There's no upside for him to talk to her, politically speaking -- and no matter how many of these T-shirted morons waddle around claiming Bush is some sort of man of God, he is a cravenly political, calculating little man.

And he clearly doesn't give a shit whose lives get destroyed by the misery he's caused -- Americans or Iraqis. It all just interferes with his narcissistic, delusional vision of himself.

The comments came prior to a bike ride on the ranch with journalists and aides. It also came as the crowd of protesters grew in support of Sheehan, the California mother who came here Aug. 6 demanding to talk to Bush about the death of her son Casey. Sheehan arrived earlier in the week with about a half dozen supporters. As of yesterday (Saturday) there were about 300 anti-war protesters and approximately 100 people supporting the Bush Administration. In addition to the two-hour bike ride, Bush's Saturday schedule included an evening Little League Baseball playoff game, a lunch meeting with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, a nap, some fishing and some reading. "I think the people want the president to be in a position to make good, crisp decisions and to stay healthy," he said when asked about bike riding while a grieving mom wanted to speak with him. "And part of my being is to be outside exercising."

On Friday, Bush's motorcade drove by the protest site en route to a Republican fund-raising event at a nearby ranch.

As Bush rolled by, Sheehan held a sign that said, "Why do you make time for donors and not for me?" [emphasis mine]

Yeah. God forbid he interrupt nappy time to listen to someone who disagrees with him, whose life has been permanently altered by Bush's "instinct" and his "gut". And really, I defy him to give one (1) example of a "good, crisp decision" he's made that benefited ordinary Americans. Just one. Ordinary Americans, them reg'lar folks Bush incessantly insists he's one of, though he's never ever been one, will be dealing with the consequences of Bush's "good, crisp decisions" for the next generation or so -- just like they had to pay off all the money his dipshit brother Neil "lost" in the savings and loan scandals of the 80's.

Too bad for Cindy Sheehan. If she were a "ranger" or a "pioneer", Bush would make time for her, much more than the perfunctory ten minutes he gave her last year, when he called her "Mom" because he clearly had no idea who she was or what her son's name was. Just another kid donating his life so that Iraq could become a violent theocracy with sharia courts and burqas. Such a noble cause.

More people whose names Bush will never remember, nor care about, have donated their lives to this cause with no end, no plan, no strategy, nor even just a simple description of goals and ambitions. They gave their lives so that we could move the goalposts clear out of the stadium and just settle for another Wingnutistan. Iraq wasn't a dangerous hotbed of terrorism with access to WMD before, but thanks to their new good friend Iran, and the feckless irresponsibility of Dear Leader, they're about to become exactly that.

Roadside bombs have killed five US soldiers in a weekend of attacks across Iraq which also claimed the lives of three Iraqi policemen.
In the deadliest attack, a bomb went off on Friday evening in Tuz, about 180km (110 miles) north of Baghdad, killing three and wounding one.

Iraqi forces report finding a recently dug mass grave during a battle with militants near the capital.

....

A mass grave found near Baghdad at Awereej contains the decomposed bodies of 30 people, including two women, Iraqi security forces said.

One report quotes police as saying the grave is about six months old.

So it's bad and getting ever worse, and Bush is just completely disconnected and unconcerned with the reality of it all. He struts around trying to appear resolute, talking tough on Iran's nucular ambitions. Well, okay, how the hell do you plan to take military action if necessary? Are all these bumper sticker/ribbon idiots ready to send their kids over to get slaughtered for this "man"'s inchoate ambitions and whimsical dreams? Does Bush seriously think that the Chinese and Russians will just sit idly by and let us (or the Israelis) bomb the Bushehr facility?

Supposedly Bush has an MBA. I find this difficult to believe. I have nary a couple of semesters of Macro and Micro under my belt, twenty years ago at that, and even I know that one of the biggest elements of business decision-making is the cost-benefit analysis. There is simply no way Bush could have done an honest cost-benefit analysis on this engagement, and reached a conclusion that would have permitted an outcome such as the one we have.

At a certain point, people have to look at the facts, the events, and the attitudes and deeds and words of the major players in all this, and ask "cui bono?". Who benefits from all this? The entire Middle East is now in disarray; Iraq is in ruins; Iran is in expansionist mode and is flush with cash and is upfront about its nuclear ambitions; the withered and corrupt House of Saud is undergoing a sea change, as their tenuous hold on a fanatic populace begins to get even more unstable. What is the common consequence of all those events?

Did you see what the price of a barrel of oil was when the market closed Friday? Do you think the odds are greater that by the end of the year, oil prices will increase, decrease, or stay the same? And in the event of A or C, cui bono?

How do you think Dick Cheney's stock portfolio looks these days? And even if we dismiss the usual parade of conspiracy-mongering, it's still impossible to ignore the sheer incompetence and ineptitude that have led us to this point, to the brink of multi-theater war, to economic implosion and bankruptcy, to dances of encirclement and possible confrontation with an enormous world power (China) that already has us by the financial short hairs.

Two of the three countries in Bush's vaunted Axle Of Elvis now either have actual nuclear weapons, or are on the verge of getting them. They were working on them already, but it is difficult -- if not outright retarded -- to think that they weren't at least partly motivated by Bush's ignorant bluster to step up the pace of their respective (if not collaborative) research in that dangerous area.

The problem is that Bush really does have the reasoning capacity of a willful child. He will not brook dissent, he refuses to debate the factuality of the things he assumes and asserts. This is a recipe for disaster for all us reg'lar folks to run our lives in such a manner; it's certainly no way to run a nation of 300 million people.

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Finally, Frank Rich has some sage observations about the delusions of a man whose greatest priorities right now are napping and fishing, while the planet burns.

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.

But our current Texas president has even outdone his predecessor; Mr. Bush has lost not only the country but also his army. Neither bonuses nor fudged standards nor the faking of high school diplomas has solved the recruitment shortfall. Now Jake Tapper of ABC News reports that the armed forces are so eager for bodies they will flout "don't ask, don't tell" and hang on to gay soldiers who tell, even if they tell the press.

And none of this means anything to Bush, quite literally. It appears that even if only 10% of Americans supported him and his policies, he'd rather hang on to that 10% and tell the other 90% to fuck off. That is how he does things. He thinks he's guided by principle in that regard, but as we discussed before, sincerity only gets you so far -- it does not grant certitude.

Those statistics -- growing disapproval among a clear majority of American citizens, consistent shortfalls in military recruiting despite the Army lowering their recruitment goals to make them easier to meet -- should be a clear indicator to Bush that his support is dwindling. And while principle is important, he is supposed to be the preznit of all Americans, not just the ones that slavishly follow him with moony Peggy Noonan crushes. If more and more Americans are unwilling to trust the lives of their children to his muddled idealism, that should tell him something.

But willful children, by definition, can never admit when they're wrong. Funny how 51% of the popular vote was some sort of huge mandate, but a 34% approval rating -- eh, who cares what people think? People will think what they're told to think.

As if the right-wing pundit crackup isn't unsettling enough, Mr. Bush's top war strategists, starting with Mr. Rumsfeld and Gen. Richard Myers, have of late tried to rebrand the war in Iraq as what the defense secretary calls "a global struggle against violent extremism." A struggle is what you have with your landlord. When the war's über-managers start using euphemisms for a conflict this lethal, it's a clear sign that the battle to keep the Iraq war afloat with the American public is lost.

That battle crashed past the tipping point this month in Ohio. There's historical symmetry in that. It was in Cincinnati on Oct. 7, 2002, that Mr. Bush gave the fateful address that sped Congressional ratification of the war just days later. The speech was a miasma of self-delusion, half-truths and hype. The president said that "we know that Iraq and Al Qaeda have had high-level contacts that go back a decade," an exaggeration based on evidence that the Senate Intelligence Committee would later find far from conclusive. He said that Saddam "could have a nuclear weapon in less than a year" were he able to secure "an amount of highly enriched uranium a little larger than a single softball." Our own National Intelligence Estimate of Oct. 1 quoted State Department findings that claims of Iraqi pursuit of uranium in Africa were "highly dubious."

It was on these false premises - that Iraq was both a collaborator on 9/11 and about to inflict mushroom clouds on America - that honorable and brave young Americans were sent off to fight. Among them were the 19 marine reservists from a single suburban Cleveland battalion slaughtered in just three days at the start of this month. As they perished, another Ohio marine reservist who had served in Iraq came close to winning a Congressional election in southern Ohio. Paul Hackett, a Democrat who called the president a "chicken hawk," received 48 percent of the vote in exactly the kind of bedrock conservative Ohio district that decided the 2004 election for Mr. Bush.

These are the tea leaves that all Republicans, not just Chuck Hagel, are reading now. Newt Gingrich called the Hackett near-victory "a wake-up call." The resolutely pro-war New York Post editorial page begged Mr. Bush (to no avail) to "show some leadership" by showing up in Ohio to salute the fallen and their families. A Bush loyalist, Senator George Allen of Virginia, instructed the president to meet with Cindy Sheehan, the mother camping out in Crawford, as "a matter of courtesy and decency." Or, to translate his Washingtonese, as a matter of politics. Only someone as adrift from reality as Mr. Bush would need to be told that a vacationing president can't win a standoff with a grief-stricken parent commandeering TV cameras and the blogosphere 24/7.

That's it right there. Bush continues to indulge his childish whims at the very risk of his own party's short-term futures. Hackett's near-victory in a very red district is a clear indication what's to come if this mess doesn't start getting wrapped up.

But how can they? It would be morally repugnant, after visiting the mayhem of cluster bombs, checkpoints, power outages, rampant unemployment, and sharia theocracy on Iraq, to just leave it to civil war and Iranian interference. Not only that, but if we're coming home, then what the hell are we building a dozen permanent forward-deployment bases there for? Are we going to be there for the next 60 years, like we're still in Okinawa and Korea?

WHAT lies ahead now in Iraq instead is not victory, which Mr. Bush has never clearly defined anyway, but an exit (or triage) strategy that may echo Johnson's March 1968 plan for retreat from Vietnam: some kind of negotiations (in this case, with Sunni elements of the insurgency), followed by more inflated claims about the readiness of the local troops-in-training, whom we'll then throw to the wolves. Such an outcome may lead to even greater disaster, but this administration long ago squandered the credibility needed to make the difficult case that more human and financial resources might prevent Iraq from continuing its descent into civil war and its devolution into jihad central.

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.

Amen. And make no mistake, we are more vulnerable right now in the event of another attack. What happens if the next attack takes place in a city or area that doesn't have huge emergency services? New York City has enormous police and fire departments; they're practically paramilitary organizations unto themselves. But how about Topeka, or Omaha? That was what the National Guard and Army Reserves was for, but that's done. So what happens if they hit, say, a dam or a bridge? Somehow, I don't think it'll go nearly as efficiently as the rescue efforts at the World Trade Center did (and they did -- the death toll could very easily have been 5 or 10 times what it was; nearly 50,000 people worked in those towers).

There's no indication that Bush has any clue or care as to what to do. They can't even decide on nomenclature, for Christ's sake -- if you can't decide between GWOT and GSAVE, or whatever, how the fuck are you going to be on top of your game enough to evacuate entire cities if a dam gets hit or a dirty bomb goes off?

I hope Bush's nappy time went well, and I hope he caught a fish. And I hope he raised lots and lots of money the other day. He oughta be ashamed of himself, but we all know he isn't.