My work here is finished and I am safely ensconced in the Marriott. I have been watching the goings on at CNN. So far I have seen Hillary, Dennis, Al, Obama and Jim Bakker's evangelical punk son. It is all rather depressing. I only watch CNN when I am trapped in hotel rooms with no Food Channel so it is always rather shocking when you really start seeing the content that serves so many Americans their daily diet of news. It is no wonder that "low information" is the perfect definition of most Americans. That must be why I spend so much time in the blogosphere. (the blogger spell checker doesn't like "blogosphere" btw).
Not really a point to this post other that some random thoughts on what is bubbling through my head tonight, so don't expect a memorable treatise on anything special.
What is becoming clear is that the Bush administration has decided that the best way to deal with the ISG report is to let it die a slow death and not even address "Finding A New Way Forward" until after the holidays. I think they are hoping that some miracle happens between now and then and there won't be a need for radical change or in other words that "stay the course" will make more sense after we have stuffed and spent ourselves into oblivion between now and 2007.
More and more I am sensing that the Dems are going to fail us on Iraq when they engage in January. Pelosi is saying that she will not use the budget knife to castrate Bush's war and is signaling that we will continue to approve funding for the misadventure. This, I think, is a mistake. If Bush gets his funding he will continue to try and "win" this thing even though most Americans have joined us traitors on the progressive left in knowing that this is no longer and never has been a militarily winnable "thing". The day we invaded Iraq for no reason we lost.
No, I think we are at the point now that we have to realize that we are dealing with the equivalent of an alcoholic and we have to stop enabling him. We have to let him hit the bottom and look up from the gutter and finally internalize the reality of his predicament and then ask for help. Never forget that he is just a "dry drunk" who has never addressed the issues and personality flaws that lead him to medicate himself into oblivion for the first 40 years of his life.
If the Democrats vote to continue funding for this fiasco then they have just bought themselves a used and thoroughly screwed up war from GWBush. If they fund it they own it.
We are at the point now where we have to make some very hard decisions and the first one is to stand aside and say no more. We will pay to bring the troops home but we will not pay to have them stay for one minute more than is necessary for a sane and safe withdrawal. We have been shown over and over that the Iraqi are not going to "stand up" and we are now just spending lives and treasure training the people who will try and kill us and their countrymen next week or month.
The idea that we can find a non-military solution by trying to find a "good Shiite faction" to support and then use them to marginalize Sadr is just wishful thinking. We have spent the last couple of years training and equipping his army. We are already seeing Sunni neighbors react to this possibility with threats of funding Iraq Sunni and calling for armed conflict against Shiites. It is too late to pick sides in Iraq. We have now reached the point where our only viable alternative is to cut our losses and apologize to Iraq and rest of the world for our foolishness and false bravado.
This is not going to be easy but sooner or later you reach those "band-aid" moments where you just have to do it fast and get the pain out of the way as quickly as possible.
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