We're Ruled By The Criminally Insane

Burt Lahr in "Waiting for Godot" (Explained after the jump)

So what's David Ignatius' excuse? He may be stupid, but "criminally insane" is a reach, as it is not for Bush/Cheney and all who have drunk of the cool-aid.

The singular purpose of Ignatius' latest column, out today in the welcoming pages of the Wa Po opinion section, is to make sure that Democrats get a good portion of the blame for all the bad things to come in Iraq.

Getting into Iraq was President Bush's decision, and history will judge his administration harshly for its mistakes in the postwar occupation. But getting out of Iraq is now partly in the hands of the Democrats who control both houses of Congress. History will be equally unforgiving if their agitation for withdrawal results in a pell-mell retreat that causes lasting damage.

Well, at least he makes it explicit.

So what the hell is it that Ignatius is cautioning Democrats they'd better be on board for?

According to Ignatius, the major question facing the US in Iraq is whether or not Democrats will join the emerging "consensus" about what must be done to avoid catastrophe.

And that consensus would be what exactly?

You guessed it; some version of the Iraq Study Group's suggestions.

As you will have noted, the usual straw men are being rounded up here. Who in hell is suggesting a pell-mell retreat?

Is it really possible that Mr. David, who, please remember, is one of our "betters," is unaware that under this President's policies, Iraq has been and continues to be an on-going catastrophe that only gets worse and worse, and from which some sort of sane exit is increasingly unlikely, primarily because of this President's determination to leave the next President an insoluble and lethal situation, not just in Iraq, also through-out an increasingly destabilized Middle East, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.

Never let it be said that this Bush administration doesn't do things in a big way.

I'm beginning to think that the centrist consensus in Washington is in a panic that Bush's mistakes have been so grave that Democrats are going to be strengthened electorally above and beyond even the worst of David Broder's nightmares.

And what is with this Democrats control both houses of congress? The use of filibusters by Democrats that so exercised the Beltway 500 prior to November, 2006, is perfectly fine with them now that, as Shane-O points out here, Republicans have come up with their own 41 % solution, even when it is used to cut off debate about whether or not our troops are being given sufficient rest before being reposted back to Iraq.

That means American men and women will die or be gravely wounded because their comrades are tired, or distracted, or too ground down to function at their best.

And who was it who roundly rejected the report by the ISG and all of its recommendations? Wasn't that the Bush administration, roundly supported by every bloody Republican member of congress?

Ignatius admits it was Bush, but prefers to focus on Ryan Crocker, our ambassador to Iraq, and Robert Gates, our Secretary of Defense, fine men, members in good-standing of the foreign policy elite, all dues paid up, just as Ignatius has put his reputation on the line, (at least that would have been what was at stake in a less criminally insane world), by wishing on the setting star of Condi Rice's commitment to diplomacy.

Do any of these jokers remember this administration's performance last Summer in Lebanon? Rice skipping over to Beirut to reassure the Lebanese that our refusal to suggest Israel stop bombing their entire country stemmed from a desire to play mid-wife to what they should be happy to view as the tolerable birth pangs of a new and improved Middle East? The Lebanese were neither amused nor convinced.

In fact, it was only in late May of this very year that Ignatius reported, with a completely straight rhetorical face, that a Plan B was emerging about what to do in Iraq that wasn't simply "we're going to make Plan A work no matter how long it takes, damnit.

And what was that Plan?

Why, Plan B-H, for the Baker-Hamilton IRS recommendations.

In that column, barely five weeks old now, Ignatius, using quotes from White House insiders, tried to goad Democrats into joining that consensus.

But isn't that the same consensus?

Well, not quite. Apologies for the long quote coming up, but you need to get the woof and the warp of Ignatius's discourse in order to understand how well and truly fucked we are:

The internal debate seems to have been quite open for a White House that sometimes appears to be operating in a bubble. Officials say it helped that the president has a new team on Iraq -- from White House Chief of Staff Josh Bolten to Defense Secretary Robert Gates to Centcom commander Adm. William Fallon to Ambassador Ryan Crocker and Gen. Petraeus.

The question now is whether Plan B-H can regain the bipartisan ground on which the Iraq Study Group framed its recommendations last December. Administration officials see little sign so far that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is willing to lay down the cudgel, but they didn't expect she would. Observes one official: "Will Nancy Pelosi and [Senate Democratic leader] Harry Reid stand next to the president and say, 'We're glad he finally saw the light'? No."

While the Democratic leadership isn't likely to join Bush in a top-down push for consensus, White House officials hope that by embracing Baker-Hamilton, they can begin to build out from a new center. The goal is a policy that has broad enough support that it could last into the next administration.

The best hope for pulling off this three-cushion shot lies, paradoxically, in the diplomatic discussions with Iran that began Monday in Baghdad. Sources say that during their four-hour meeting, Crocker and his Iranian counterpart described in almost identical terms the two countries' shared interest in the success of Iraq's Shiite-led government. Crocker insisted that the Iranians back up those words with deeds -- by halting the shipment of deadly projectile bombs and the training of Shiite militiamen in their use. If Tehran takes that step, then Plan B-H may be for real.

What's needed is time: Iran's deputy foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, seemed to recognize this when he told the Financial Times that although he favored a plan for eventual withdrawal of U.S. troops, "immediate withdrawal could lead to chaos, civil war, could turn Iraq into a failed state. This is a fact. No one is asking for immediate withdrawal of foreign forces from Iraq."

Syria's foreign minister, Walid al-Moallem, told me last December that a quick U.S. withdrawal would be "immoral." But do U.S. politicians agree? We'll find out this summer.

In fairness, I should say that Ignatius doesn't blame only Iraq and Syria for the failure of Plan B-H to emerge beyond anything but the talking phase. In this current column he concedes Bush's failure here.

The release of the Baker-Hamilton report in December provided an opportunity; Bush missed it. Another chance arose in late May, when Bush himself proclaimed that his strategy for the future was " Plan B-H," meaning Baker-Hamilton. But he didn't follow through.

The president should have gathered the members of the Iraq Study Group in the Rose Garden the next day and dispatched them to visit members of Congress. Sorry, Mr. President, but Democratic Study Group members Vernon Jordan and Leon Panetta would be more effective lobbyists right now than anyone from the White House.

No kidding. And why would Ignatius have thought for a single nano-second Bush would follow through?

He doesn't tell us. Nor does he explain why he would expect talks with the Iranians that only make demands on them, offering nothing but increasingly hostile words and deeds in return, would be successful.

Of course it couldn't be that David Ignatius was being had back there in May?

The internal debate seems to have been quite open for a White House that sometimes appears to be operating in a bubble. Officials say it helped that the president has a new team on Iraq -- from White House Chief of Staff Josh Bolten to Defense Secretary Robert Gates to Centcom commander Adm. William Fallon to Ambassador Ryan Crocker and Gen. Petraeus.

Gee, I wonder why there would be this kind of open debate if the administration, i.e., Bush/Cheney had no real plans to follow through? It couldn't be to use someone like David Ignatius for propaganda purposes? And because they know that they will never be called to account, not by David Ignatius.

Nor could it be that people like Gates and Crocker and Patraeus may be trying to get something intelligent done, but will never succeed as long as they work for and with this administration?

Ignatius assures us, by the end of his current column, that what to do about Iraq ain't all that hard to figure out, if the angry passions of partisan politics could only be set aside.

That there could be differences of policy well worth fighting over, for, or against, is a possibility absent from the mind-set of our leading pundits. But in what cave, penthouse, beach house, or asylum has Ignatius been holed up these last six and a half years that he can write something like this:

The Iraq debate in Washington this week is intense and angry. But as with the Palestinian conflict, the rhetorical fireworks mask the fact that there's an emerging consensus on what the final result should be. Leaders on both sides endorse the broad strategy proposed in December by the Iraq Study Group: a gradual withdrawal that shifts the American mission to training, force protection, counterterrorism and border security. That formula gets wide support from members of Congress and administration officials alike. As a senior administration official puts it, it's "where everybody agrees you want to go." The problem is getting there.

The essential elements of the compromise that's necessary don't seem all that complicated. Democrats need to be assured that the troops are beginning to come out; the administration needs to be assured that they aren't coming out so quickly that it will undermine regional security.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates appears to recognize what's necessary, politically and strategically. He is said to favor an announcement by September that the United States will withdraw some troops from Iraq before year-end as a sign that it is committed to a "post-surge" redeployment. The opportunity for a modest drawdown will arise this fall, when two battalions, several thousand troops at most, are scheduled to rotate out of Iraq. One of those is a Marine battalion in Anbar province, where the administration has been touting U.S. success. A good way to underline the gains in Anbar would be to reduce U.S. troop levels there.

Another chance for compromise is the United Nations authorization for the U.S. troop presence in Iraq, which must be renewed this year. Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki wants a plan to reduce the number of American troops in his country as much as any member of Congress does. Here's the real opportunity for "timelines" on withdrawal -- ones jointly negotiated by U.S. and Iraqi diplomats rather than imposed by Congress. In a perverse sense, that's the greatest gift America can bestow on the Iraqi government -- to engineer the joint "liberation" of Iraq from U.S. occupation, but "slowly, slowly," as the Arabs like to say.

edit

There's broad agreement on the need to put Iraq policy on a sustainable path that will gradually withdraw American forces without producing the bloodbath that frightens people such as Ryan Crocker in Baghdad. But Bush and the Democrats are running out of opportunities to make it happen.

BTW, Ignatius doesn't mean we're running out of time because of the horrifying blood bath going on in Iraq, or the reconstitution of Al Quada, or the perilously fragile tenure of Mussarrif in Pakistan, or the increasingly failed statehood of Afghanistan. No, he means that those dumb voters who are disgusted with the astonishing failures of this administration abroad are going to make it politically impossible to do any of this "slowly, slowly."

David Ignatius is still waiting for Godot.

Others have noted the parallels between the Bush/Cheney policies in Iraq and Beckett's great play. Usually, though, it's pointed out that Bush is the one waiting for the mysterious signifier to show up who will make sense of what Bush hath wrought in Iraq.

I don't think it's Bush up there on that bare stage, graced only by a tree as bare. No, it's our beltway pundits who seem to be auditioning to play Vladimir or Estragon, or Pozzo or Lucky.

Bush knows there are no improvements to be made and that the only changes to come are going to be in the wrong direction. He just doesn't care; in fact, I think it entirely likely that he privately revels in the thought that he will leave behind a broken military and a foreign policy in tatters as a special gift to the next president. Perhaps he believes he was unfairly left just such a situation by Clinton. He wasn't, of course. All this president cares about, at this point, is not being forced to change anything about the way he does business.

Unfortunately for all of us, the Godot whom the beltway gasbags like David Ignatius insist on waiting for is Bush, a reconfigured Bush, who at last will be responsive to or constrained by the built-in safeguards of a constitutional democracy, i.e., the rule of law, the constitution, the separation of powers, the right of the people to have a say in how they are governed, and what is done in their name.

There is much more to critique in both columns, even in the portions I present here; feel free to use the comments to do so.

Ignatius current column is here, the May 31 column is here.