Clift on Bush: "He’s brought ruin to Iraq & helped create a nuclear Iran"

[Human Torch]

The Fear Factor
President Bush’s new argument for staying the course in Iraq: It’ll only get worse if we leave.

By Eleanor Clift
Newsweek
Updated: 1:47 p.m. MT Aug 25, 2006



http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14515978/site/newsweek/

Aug. 25, 2006 - If you think things are bad now, they will be worse if we leave. That’s the essence of President Bush’s argument for staying the course in Iraq. Bush is doing what he always does—shamelessly ramping up the fear factor. He says if U.S. troops leave Iraq, the terrorists will be right behind them, bringing Baghdad to America. He’s brought ruin to Iraq and his policies are helping create our worst nightmare, a nuclear Iran. How much worse can it get?

Bush’s original sin was to politicize U.S. intervention in Iraq. He used the war to transform an aimless presidency into one of Churchillian dimensions, and now that it’s all turned sour, he has nothing to fall back on. Bush is as beleaguered now as Lyndon Johnson was during Vietnam—with one key difference. The worse the news is from Iraq, the more positive Bush is that he’s right. As Vietnam raged on, Johnson became less certain he was doing the right thing.

Victory no longer appears possible in Iraq, yet Bush’s rhetoric is more bullish than ever about the correctness of his course. U.S. forces are not leaving Iraq as long as he’s president. His model is Prime Minister Winston Churchill, defeated by an ungrateful British public after leading the country through war, a lonely figure vindicated by history. To achieve stability in Iraq, Thomas Ricks, Pentagon correspondent for The Washington Post and author of “Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq” (Penguin 2006), says U.S. forces can expect to stay for 10 to 15 years, on top of the three they’ve already been there. “And that’s the optimistic scenario,” he says.

We learned from tapes of phone conversations released years after the fact how skeptical Johnson was that the war in Southeast Asia could be won, and how he worried about the senselessness of sending people to die there. His dilemma, which he articulates, is that he didn’t want to be the first American president to lose a war. In the spring of ’64, well before the major troop escalation, Johnson had serious doubts about U.S. involvement in Vietnam. “It just worries the hell out of me ... I don’t think it’s worth fighting for,” he told his national security advisor, McGeorge Bundy.

[acmejack]

1. W is filled with certitude!

He is a fool playing with the lives of other people's children (OPC), so it will never bother him in the least, either. If it were personal, which it isn't perhaps it would sink into his tiny drug addled pea-brain, that this isn't worth it to his constituency (his minions). But to him, the oil is most definitely worth having. OPC is capital, he will spend it ("It is my style")foolishly, historically, that has been his style.

We must close the bank he prevent him from squandering any more of the precious OPC until he invests his children into the account.

[ananda]

2. Well, since it's already worse,

it can only get worse than worse.

As Lamont said, it's chaos there now and not a good place for
people to live... unlike the pre-war Iraq under Saddam, which
was a secular state and much better for people than the way
things are under much-worse-than-Saddam BushInc.

[grytpype]

3. Great article... the last para is pretty scary...

Bush believes victory is possible in Iraq if only he perseveres. True enough, the history of the region is yet to be written, but in the short term—say the next generation—the prospects are grim. “The name of the game right now is not achieving victory—it is preventing a major defeat from becoming a catastrophic defeat,” says Dr. Ernest Evans, a military scholar who teaches at several schools connected to the U.S. Army Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. “I would define a major defeat as pulling out of Iraq and leaving behind complete chaos. I would define a catastrophic defeat as attacking Iran in a desperate effort to salvage Iraq and igniting a regional war. These are the painful choices before the Republic.”

[HereSince1628]

4. Bush is an alcoholic and his propensity for addiction spreads across

his psyche.

The notion of staying the course is essentially a common symptom found in those with gambling addictions, Bush's Iraq Strategy is a textbook example of the sunk-cost effect.

Having lost every previous roll of the dice, he ups the ante and seeks to roll again because afterall, the _next_ roll will bring redemption. A win will vindicate the losses so far incurred and so he submits more and more to the desire to roll again and again and again. And he rationalizes it, he has a nobel purpose...bringing freedom and democracy to the middle east.

And the addict argues, the cost spent so far on the gamble will be recouped, because the law of averages WILL bring a lucky roll. You just have to stay in the game and not run out of money to bet. Thus the vacation money, the children's college fund, retirement savings, the cars, and the house are eventually anted up...AND LOST.

Unfortunately for us Bush is in the perfect position to keep on betting because he and the "adults" in control can simply keep running up his tab as the national debt. Unfortunately for us the rubber stamp republican congress is facilitating this addictive behavior. For the sake of the nation, it's time to take away the republicans' access to the nation's treasure, and drag Bush kicking and screaming from the table.

On edit: I forgot to mention that this is what the generals fear, attacking Iran is a real possibility for our president lost to the sunk-cost effect, it's nothing more than raising the ante to recoup the losses in Iraq.