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Bush's Private War Susan Estrich The president is not going to be rushed.
Imagine reading that if your kid, your husband, your loved one, is over there waiting to hear, as so many are, waiting to see how many more die before we make the last-ditch move that leads to the final move, to the end.
How many more must die while the president is not being rushed, until the dying ends and the losing is over? Story Continues Below
The president doesn't see it that way. "I've heard some ideas that would lead to defeat. I reject those ideas — ideas such as leaving before the job is done, ideas such as not helping this government take the necessary and hard steps to be able to do its job." But if he doesn't like the ideas he's heard, he's given no signs yet that he's got any better ones.
That, presumably, is what we're waiting for. Instead of an idea, a delay. Instead of an answer, an extension.
It would be laughable, but this is not a game or test; this is not about forms being filled out. This is a war in which people are dying while the president bristles at being rushed. As if the world is pushing him, not the other way around.
President Bush wants his new secretary of defense to have plenty of time to get up to speed on this war business. Who created this crunch? Who appointed whom?
Up to speed from whom? His old secretary of defense? From the people who have been running the war so successfully up to now? And whose war is this anyway? I thought it was George Bush's. From start to finish, beginning to end.
To hear the president talk, you'd think he'd inherited this war from some other failing administration, instead of having produced the failure himself. If only it were a Democrats' war, like the rest of them.
Tony Snow defends the president, as if those who are seeking action are somehow urging him to skip over the necessary steps, as if we who are haranguing him to hurry are going to be the ones to cause mistakes.
Four years into the war, Tony describes the decision-making process: "You would expect and desire a commander in chief, looking at a situation, to examine military concerns, security concerns, diplomatic concerns, internal political concerns within Iraq, regional ramifications, how you get people to work in concert with one another."
You would expect and desire a commander in chief to do these things before he got us into a war, not four years into it. You would expect to resolve these concerns before the war, not once it went south. You're examining these concerns now, over Christmas, while kids die.
You're still examining, four years in, still trying to figure it out. How can this be an excuse for the president not acting now?
Meanwhile, as the president ponders, the neocons and their friends who brought us this disaster are cooking up plans to save face, if nothing else, by lining up behind the idea of a "last ditch" offensive requiring more troops — for a losing cause, before we finally give up.
They are serious.
They may yet convince the president that this is a rock in the quicksand, the place to stand and look for someone else to blame.
How can more troops be the answer? The fact that the commander on the ground hasn't asked for them, and that the political support in this country doesn't exist to provide them, doesn't necessarily mean it's a bad idea, one of my correspondents suggests.
That's just politics, he complains, dismissing every argument against more troops except the military one that doesn't fly either.
Just politics? Even if the military case for more troops were stronger, a war requires political support.
Does the president really think he'll get more of that by waiting? If so, he's likely to be in for a very long wait. COPYRIGHT 2006 CREATORS SYNDICATE INC. Editor's note:
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