At the blessed season of Christmas 2006, politics in the United States of America offers the following spectacle.
With Iraq (not to mention the situation in Afghanistan disintegrating at blinding speed, with U.S. military forces almost "broken" in the words of leading generals, the President delivers the following message to an increasingly angry nation: I'll get back to you with my new plan in January. Have a good holiday!
It's instructive to chart how this stunning impasse and vacuum of strategic options developed.
Six weeks ago, the voters overwhelmingly repudiated the war in Iraq and the leadership that produced this disaster.
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, discredited and despised above all by the U.S. military for his arrogance and incompetence, was immediately sacrificed. Now the Democratic Party, with majorities in both houses of Congress, shares responsibility with George W. Bush's Republican administration for running this hated war.
Shortly afterward, the "Iraq Study Group" headed by Bush family crony James Baker and Democratic elder statesman Lee Hamilton, issued its breathlessly awaited report.
According to conventional
Selected wisdom, this council of wise people was to bring a new regime of "realism" in imperialist world management to replace the ideological fanaticism of the neoconservative and religious right.
The report, when issued, was no model of analytical brilliance or strategic clarity -for political reasons, it had to avoid stating what the whole world knows, that Iraq already a lost war and major U.S. defeat.
The report therefore lacks coherence, consistency or convincing power.
But anyone could work out the meaning beneath the ISG's rather pedestrian recommendations (retraining Iraqi forces, trying again to dismantle sectarian militias, etc.): the United States has to get itself out of Iraq, and we'd better be well on our way out a With a virtual paralysis of policy and vacuum of strategy, the Bush gang is preparing to adopt one of the ISG's tactical suggestions: a "short-term surge" of 20-30,000 extra troops to "secure Baghdad," is the option most surely destined to fail. year from now to avoid a foreign policy and domestic meltdown.
None of this was terribly surprising, but what happened next was: every single meaningful initiative implied FOR