On Escalation ( err surge)

Todays Laugh,

The Postal Service created a stamp with a picture of President Bush. The stamp was not sticking to envelopes. This enraged the President, who demanded a full investigation.After a month of testing, a special Presidential commission presented the following findings:1) The stamp is in perfect order.2) There is nothing wrong with the applied adhesive.3) People are spitting on the wrong side
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Todays Quote,
Silence is betrayal, and I believe it is a betrayal not to speak out against the escalation of the war in Iraq,"John Edwards said to a sustained standing ovation.
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Bush: My decisions have made things worse in Iraq President George W. Bush acknowledged on Saturday that some of his decisions have contributed to instability in Iraq. "I think history is going to look back and see a lot of ways we could have done things better. No question about it," Bush said.
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Iraq Policy isolates Bush
By JENNIFER LOVEN, Associated Press Writer Sun Jan 14, 1:16 PM ET
WASHINGTON -

President Bush once said he was determined to stick with the

Iraq war even if his wife and his dog were the only ones left at his side
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Bush's isolation recalls Lyndon Johnson predicament when opposition to the Vietnam War convinced him that he should not run for re-election.
Likewise, Zelizer said the now-open revolt of increasing numbers in Bush's own party could be "very dangerous" for the president.
It makes it much more difficult for Bush to get support during the final two years of his presidency, increases the likelihood his policies will be seen by history as a mistake and puts his party in a very difficult position leading up to 2008, Zelizer said.
Bush believes that the "long march of history" will prove him right and is content to stand alone, if he must, until that day.
He is so sure of eventual success in Iraq that he once told some leading Republicans, "I will not withdraw even if Laura and Barney are the only ones supporting me," referring to the first lady and his Scottish terrier, according to Bob Woodward's recent book, "State of Denial."
Bush has always said he sleeps soundly, admitting to no fretting about his decisions and no concern about polls. Johnson, by contrast, famously obsessed over the war night and day, asking to be awakened every time someone died.
"I'm wondering if this is not some kind of tragically misguided notion of statesmanship on the part of Bush, that there is something noble about ignoring public opinion," said Margaret Susan Thompson, who teaches a Modern Presidency course at Syracuse University's Maxwell School.
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Excerpted from Frank Rich Sunday in NY Times
But that would mean asking Americans for sacrifice, not giving us tax cuts. Mr. Bush has never asked for sacrifice and still doesn't. If his words sound like bargain-basement Churchill, his actions have been cheaper still. The president's resolutely undermanned war plan indicated from Day 1 that he knew in his heart of hearts that Iraq was not the central front in the war against 9/11 jihadism he had claimed it to be, only the reckless detour that it actually was. Yet the war's cheerleaders, neocon and otherwise, disingenuously blamed our low troop strength almost exclusively on Mr. Rumsfeld.
Now that the defense secretary is gone, what are they to do? For whatever reason, you did not hear Mr. Kagan, General Keane or Mr. McCain speak out against Mr. Bush's plan even though it's insufficient by their own reckoning - just a repackaged continuance of the same "Whac-A-Mole" half-measures that Mr. McCain has long deplored. Surely the senator knows that, as his loosey-goosey endorsement attests. (On Friday, he called the Bush plan "the best chance of success" while simultaneously going on record that "a small, short surge would be the worst of all worlds.")
The question now is how to minimize the damage before countless more Americans and Iraqis are slaughtered to serve the president's endgame of passing his defeat on to the next president. The Democrats can have all the hearings they want, but they are unlikely to take draconian action (cutting off funding) that would make them, rather than Mr. Bush, politically vulnerable to blame for losing Iraq.
I have long felt that it will be up to Mr. Bush's own party to ring down the curtain on his failed policy, and after the 2006 midterms, that is more true than ever. The lame-duck president, having lost both houses of Congress and at least one war (Afghanistan awaits), has nothing left to lose. That is far from true of his party.
Even conservatives like Sam Brownback of Kansas and Norm Coleman of Minnesota started backing away from Iraq last week. Mr. Brownback is running for president in 2008, and Mr. Coleman faces a tough re-election fight. But Republicans not in direct electoral jeopardy (George Voinovich of Ohio, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska) are also starting to waver. It's another Vietnam-Watergate era flashback. It wasn't Democrats or the press that forced Richard Nixon's abdication in 1974; it was dwindling Republican support. Though he had vowed to fight his way through a Senate trial, Nixon folded once he lost the patriarchal leader of his party's right wing.
That leader was Barry Goldwater, who had been one of Nixon's most loyal and aggressive defenders until he finally realized he'd been lied to once too often. If John McCain won't play the role his Arizona predecessor once did, we must hope that John Warner or some patriot like him will, for the good of the country, answer the call of conscience. A dangerous president must be saved from himself, so that the American kids he's about to hurl into the hell of Baghdad can be saved along with him
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Meanwhile, in Baghdad


John Burns provides, as usual, indispensable analysis. But this paragraph, buried by the NYT, leapt out at me this morning:
A Shiite political leader who has worked closely with the Americans in the past said the Bush benchmarks appeared to have been drawn up in the expectation that Mr. Maliki would not meet them. "He cannot deliver the disarming of the militias," the politician said, asking that he not be named because he did not want to be seen as publicly criticizing the prime minister. "He cannot deliver a good program for the economy and reconstruction. He cannot deliver on services. This is a matter of fact. There is a common understanding on the American side and the Iraqi side."
Views such as these — increasingly common among the political class in Baghdad — are often accompanied by predictions that Mr. Maliki will be forced out as the crisis over the militias builds. The Shiite politician who described him as incapable of disarming militias suggested he might resign; others have pointed to an American effort in recent weeks to line up a "moderate front" of Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish political leaders outside the government, and said that the front might be a vehicle for mounting a parliamentary coup against Mr. Maliki, with behind-the-scenes American support. [My italics.]
If this is the case, this president is lying to us once again. It's one lie too far. If all of this is a ruse to depose Maliki and attack Iran, the constitutional consequences of a runaway, duplicitous president are profound.