Frank Rich's op-ed column in today's Sunday NY Times is blunt & downright ballsy. With President Bush on a five week vacation & Cindy Sheehan sitting in a ditch outside his ranch, have we reached a turning point in these dog days of August? Is the war really "over" as Rich suggests?

Nothing that happens on the ground in Iraq can turn around the fate of this war in America: not a shotgun constitution rushed to meet an arbitrary deadline, not another Iraqi election, not higher terrorist body counts, not another battle for Falluja (where insurgents may again regroup, The Los Angeles Times reported last week). A citizenry that was asked to accept tax cuts, not sacrifice, at the war's inception is hardly in the mood to start sacrificing now. There will be neither the volunteers nor the money required to field the wholesale additional American troops that might bolster the security situation in Iraq.

What lies ahead now in Iraq instead is not victory, which Mr. Bush has never clearly defined anyway, but an exit (or triage) strategy that may echo [Lyndon] Johnson's March 1968 plan for retreat from Vietnam: some kind of negotiations (in this case, with Sunni elements of the insurgency), followed by more inflated claims about the readiness of the local troops-in-training, whom we'll then throw to the wolves. Such an outcome may lead to even greater disaster, but this administration long ago squandered the credibility needed to make the difficult case that more human and financial resources might prevent Iraq from continuing its descent into civil war and its devolution into jihad central.

Via Daily Kos. Pretty bleak, huh? Damn incompetent f**kers.

MP3 Wilco - "War on War"
From Wilco's seminal 2002 LP, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot.

MP3 Kings of Convenience - "Winning a Battle, Losing the War"
From Kings of Convenience's 2001 album, Quiet is the New Loud.

MP3 Pavement - "Bad Version of War"
Bonus Pavement track off disc two of last year's expanded 2CD re-issue, Crooked Rain Crooked Rain: L.A.'s Desert Origins.

[I'll expand on these songs further, have a little patience...] Eh, screw it.

This entry was posted by mr gilbert at 8/14/2005 08:45:00 AM.