Wednesday, November 12, 2003
Bush's Glass Jaw
Bush Looking to Transfer Power to Iraqis, U.S. Aide Says0 comments
—The New York Times
This smells.
This smells like a dead rat caught in your walls. In fact, many dead rats.
We've dragged every terrorist in the known world into Iraq. And gotten ourselves and everyone else inside that country drenched in blood.
But, since the bullies in the Bush administration can't take a punch, they now want to cut and run.
Leaving millions of vulnerable Iraqis and some VERY unfortunate (but VERY well paid) employees of Halliburton and Bechtel behind to figure things out for themselves when the great jihad starts and the place looks more like Little Big Horn than a desert paradise.
Many thousands of people more will die due to the incompetance of this administration. That is a certainty. It'll all be on Wolf Blitzer.
Over the next couple of months, you'll hear plenty of uplifting, warm & fuzzy reasons why we're speeding up the transfer of Iraq to chaotic, untrained Iraqi hands.
But make NO mistake. This is about polls. Polls in an election year, to be exact. Of course, this administration doesn't read and respond to polls. They just go in for informed strategic maneuvering.
Right now, George W. Bush's closest advisors—and the ones which political guru Karl Rove leans on the most—are named, Harris, Gallup, Zogby, Yankolovich, Quinnipiac and Pew. The Horsemen of the Major Polling Organizations.
Bush's domestic poll numbers keep dropping despite periodic, momentary upticks which the conservative press touts with all the fervor of VJ Day, until the next depressing numbers are inevitably released, and all the hoopla disappears.
The unraveling of Iraq—and the stunningly stupid job this administration has done while mucking up everything it touches there—is finally starting to catch up with Bush, as people keep seeing things go wrong on a massive scale before their very eyes. Perfectly healthy young American military men and women keep turning up dead on the 24-hour news channels, along with a whole lot of innocent Iraqis and the other odd foreign nationals from those few countries silly enough to have thrown their lot in with Bush.
So, now that Iraq has passed from being Bush's crowning glory to being his defining albatross, the decision has been made to dump it and run.
So, this post marks The Official Beginning of the Gotham Notes "October Surprise" Watch. You know that Rove will try something stunning to drag his horse across that finish line first. And we're ready!
As things stand now, by next summer, Bush's numbers may be in Jimmy Carter territory as the economy doesn't get better, and Iraq gets worse and Bush gets out.
Voila! He'll be an hombre again.
And, besides, what's the only thing more Commander-In-Chiefy than winning a cool war? Why, being the Benificent Leader who brings our Gallant Sons and Daughters Home. But he has to do it fairly quickly, so that we'll still have some left standing to bring home.
The Vietnamization of Iraq is in full swing.
Of course, this is what administration critics have been calling for, ever since Dick Cheney first told Bush to go invade that accursed country. Just not HOW.
It stills stuns many that the easy way out of all this is right in front of us, and has been steadfastly rebuffed. How long do we give these guys before we pull the plug on them? Cheney will never let Bush go to the UN as we should have done in the beginning, to say this is now a shared deal: we all put in troops and money, and we all get to have a say in re-ordering a democratic Iraq.
But here's what would happen if he did:
Our troops get relieved, and can come home to embrace their families.
Money flows into Iraq from around the world, so that we don't meet the same fate as the Soviet Union and go bankrupt.
The entire Islamic world slowly stops pointing at us as the Great Occupying Devil.
L. Paul Bremer III can come home to some of that gooood CEO money before they start regulating things again.
And Bush's Republican Guard in Congress gets to put away the rubber stamps, and go back to learning the ancient ritual of representing their districts.
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Here's the Realtime Iraq Invasion Cost Clock!
posted by Gotham 9:18 PM
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