Fred Hiatt is now in a corner. He has zero faith in the President, the surge, the plan, the future. But he’s still hanging tough. In an editorial headlined The Least Bad Plan, he tepidly endorses more of the same.
PRESIDENT BUSH’S explanation of his latest plans for Iraq last night was marred by a couple of important omissions. First, the president failed to acknowledge that, according to the standards he himself established in January, the surge of U.S. troops into Iraq has been a failure —
…If the war were going worse than it is, the deployment schedule probably couldn’t have been much different…
…Yet Mr. Bush’s plan for the coming year is based, once again, on the hope that Iraqis will take steps that will make the added security provided by U.S. troops sustainable — and prevent a worsening of the situation when American brigades withdraw. Though this hope proved illusory during the past eight months, there will be no change in the U.S. mission.
It’s impossible not to be skeptical that the necessary political deals and improvements in Iraqi security forces will take place. Unless there is progress that justifies withdrawals going well beyond those he announced last night, Mr. Bush is unlikely to achieve the agreement in Washington on Iraq he said he now aims for.
And yet:
But according to Gen. Petraeus, Mr. Crocker and the consensus view of U.S. intelligence agencies, if the U.S. counterinsurgency mission were abandoned in the near future, the result would be massive civilian casualties and still-greater turmoil that could spread to neighboring countries.
Mr. Bush’s plan offers, at least, the prospect of extending recent gains against al-Qaeda in Iraq, preventing full-scale sectarian war and allowing Iraqis more time to begin moving toward a new political order. For that reason, it is preferable to a more rapid withdrawal. It’s not necessary to believe the president’s promise that U.S. troops will “return on success” in order to accept the judgment of Mr. Crocker: “Our current course is hard. The alternatives are far worse.”
The Washington Post has always been a stalwart advocate of America’s idiotic attempt to rule the world by eradicating left-leaning governments anywhere they raise their ugly heads. But this is getting ridiculous.
They need to admit failure. If you really think about it, Bush’s failure signifies a failure of our entire post-Cold War foreign policy. You can blame the neo-conservatives for taking our Establishment off the rails, but the Washington Post waved their pom poms as the Establishment built the apparatus that enabled the neo-conservatives.
Even now they are cheerleading an attack on Iran. The sad fact is that any genocide or regional conflagration that occurs in the Middle East as a direct result of our policies is going to be justifiably blamed on the people at the Washington Post that advocated those policies. And they recognize this. That is why they will do everything in their power to forestall the day of reckoning. And that means that they will advocate a 10-year occupation of Iraq. Because if the day ever comes when they have to account for what they have endorsed, no one will ever listen to them again.
It’s interesting, if not pleasant, to watch your empire implode. It happened to Rome: the Roman empire ultimately collapsed.
But the Romans did not have the Internet. We do, so we can run a public commentary on the collapse of our empire for the public record, as we are doing, even though we can no more prevent the collapse of our empire than the Romans did of theirs. Empires are inherently unsustainable.
Last night was just bizarre, watching Bush’s little speech. I kept thinking of V for Vendetta.
Olbermann and Matthews actually exposed his lies right afterward, and still the Republican party and press kept on with their charade. As you just said, we can’t seem to do anything but record the fall…impeachment should not be off the table. The guy is a madman.
Bush’s address to the joint session of Congress after 9/11 reminded me of Triumph of the Will.
The washington post op-ed page is pure garbage (although last night after the speech the front page of their url tallied off overy single lie and distortion, thank god for the firewall between news and opinion).
As I wrote a couple of days ago, their o-ed writers are nothing more than cranks and idiots. I don’t know anyone who reads them, never mind takes them seriosuly.
then again, I[m a normal human being: i don’t live in DC.
I think you got it dead on right. The Washington foreign policy establishment is imperial, and loss of empire is never easy. There’s a difference, though, between the present state and say, 40 years ago. The Cold War provided justification and I think a real rationale for a ‘forward’ policy. But there were always misgivings and rhetorically at least (and a lot of us believed that rhetoric), we were helping underdeveloped countries develop. What’s happened in the long Republican reign since 1980 is that the true Imperialists gained total command of American foreign policy. Under Bush they simply stopped pretending it isn’t what it is.
There is going to be hell to pay when the American people realize what their leadership has done to them; it won’t be pretty, and for Hiatt and the Moustache of Understanding it won’t be nice at all.
Because if the day ever comes when they have to account for what they have endorsed, no one will ever listen to them again.
Sadly, I don’t think that will ever happen. For one, I don’t think they have nay shame and two, the wingnuts have too many outlets that will provide shelter to these failures. A great example of this is Rumsfeld. He’s been appointed a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and in November, will receive a statesmanship award from the Claremont Institute.
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