No Reality In Sight

The Bush Administration, led by the man in the Oval Office, is notorious for refusing to face reality. It is well known that President Bush and his inner circle are content to live in their own little fantasy world, where everything works properly and everyone loves us. (Of course, this gets an Orwellian makeover around election time, when the world is suddenly transformed into a mortal threat.) This goes a long way towards explaining Bush's poll numbers, which haven't seen the sunny side of 50% in months.

For anyone who reads the news and pays attention, it has been obvious for a very long time that our Iraq strategy of "stay the course" just isn't working. Our soldiers are getting slaughtered on a daily basis trying to keep the peace in a land where there is no peace. Indeed, American military commanders admit that we cannot even secure the capital city of Baghdad, much less the rest of the country.

Bush took to the cameras this morning for a rare press conference which was billed as a major announcement but which turned out to be - well, more of the same. No change in strategy, no realization that the (official) goal of a democratic Iraq is in ruins, no meaningful deviation from "stay the course." In fact, the only change of sorts is that Bush abandoned the macho "stay the course" slogan while continuing to embrace the disastrous "stay the course" mentality.

How typical for a White House which sees failing policies not as evidence that the policy needs to be changed, but rather that a new sales pitch is needed as the old one wasn't working.

He did claim that we "are constantly adjusting our tactics to stay ahead of our enemies." He did not, of course, mention that if the overall goal is unattainable and the strategy doesn't work, all the tactical adjustments in the world aren't going to make the slightest bit of difference.

In a very small concession to reality, he grudgingly admitted that "some of the Iraqi security forces have performed below expectations." In fact, the fledgling Iraqi army has been the source of many if not most of the sectarian death squads bringing so much killing and misery to the "wrong" Iraqis.

Overall, it was little more than the same stuff we've been hearing for years. "My administration will carefully consider any proposal that will help us achieve victory," Bush said. This appears on its face to be moderation, but here's the catch - he defines victory, so he defines anything that will help him "achieve victory." Anything that disagrees with his version of victory is by definition anti-victory and will therefore be ignored, just like all the other experts he brought in for photo ops and then tossed aside once their usefulness had been exhausted.

But let's face it - Bush's audience was not the soldiers he put in harm's way, nor their families, nor the Iraqi people. His audience was the American voting public, whom he is terrified will finally deprive him of his rubber stamp on Capitol Hill and replace it with a Congress which stands up to him for a change.