During the 2000 election campaign, then-Governor Bush made a talking point out of deriding President Clinton's (in)famous habit of constantly changing his positions as the situation warranted, calling it "waffling." He promised that as President, he would stick with it no matter what.
Well, he was right about that.
President Bush, the man who never ever ever changes his mind, has forcefully responded to the Iraqi civil war and the spectacle of American men and women caught in the crossfire as Sunnis and Shi'ites slaughter each other by the thousands. "There's one thing I'm not going to do," he talked tough in Latvia. "I'm not going to pull our troops off the battlefield before the mission is complete."
Which begs the question: what exactly is "the mission?" Frankly, that depends on which day it is.
Once upon a time, it was Saddam Hussein's gigantic WMD stockpiles. When it became painfully clear that such stockpiles did not in fact exist, the purpose of the invasion changed into Saddam's connections with al Qaeda. Nope, those didn't exist either. From there, the definition of "the mission" has wandered all over the place, from building democracy to defeating terrorism to controlling Iraq's oil - the last one being an extremely rare example of Bush actually being honest about something. Now, it has settled into this vague, amorphous mass of "finishing the job" and "completing the mission."
The simple truth appears to be that Bush et al have no idea what to do in Iraq other than staying the course. Except it's no longer called "staying the course." If our supposed leaders really have no clue what we're doing there anymore, it's a pretty good bet that it's time to get out. Now.
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