The grotesque absurdity of this war, the Groundhog Day feeling that everything said or written about the war today was said or written three years ago, has taken the term "Kafka-esque" to unimagined new levels.
What is clear is that no matter how he tried to finesse it in his speech, the interests of George Bush are not at all the same as the interests of anyone else: not the opposition party, not his own party, not the American or Iraqi people, not the globe. In this intractable quagmire he is the only one who is starting to see some daylight. A little over a year from now he will finally, finally, have pulled himself out of Iraq and back to Crawford.
This is a guy who has never worked hard in his life. If an easy answer wasn't immediately apparent he just skipped that question and moved on to the next.
That is why in his mind he has already pulled up stakes. A little over a year from now he will be able to say, in the immortal words of Freddie Prinze back on the old show Chico and the Man, "'snot my job, man."
How on earth can his fellow Republicans be so stupid as to follow him into retirement? Are they just like him? Do they all just want to play golf for the rest of their days?
George Packer in the new New Yorker has written yet another excellent and exhaustive piece on the list of (bad) options for detaching ourselves from the tar baby that is Iraq. Where he keeps getting stuck is his insistence that if we leave, more hell breaks loose in a land where hell is already firmly entrenched. Nevertheless, he solicits advice from every major player so his piece is required reading.
The most amazing quote is from our U.N. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, one of Bush and Wolfowitz's staunchest neoconservative enablers and our former ambassador to Iraq: "We've made mistakes," he said. The U.S. has "been like a five-hundred-pound gorilla, sucking the air out of getting any kind of cooperation, rather than giving others a chance."
What?! How many Iraqis, how many Americans have died because you personally, Ambassador, oversaw an American imperialist pipe dream? And when I say pipe I mean oil pipeline. Tar is an oil derivative so tar baby is a perfect analogy. Cheney's greed coupled with your neoconservative incompetence is doing what neither the Soviet Union, al Qaeda or the French could do: defeat the world's last remaining superpower.
We are stuck to Iraq while China and Europe and Russia can prepare for a future without our hegemony. I have often likened us to a bullying mastodon who stumbled into a tar pit (again with the oil derivative analogy). The other mastodons look on while we slowly sink.
The only way out is for the others to lower us a branch to help us out. The problem is that they have no compelling reason to. We were mean and arrogant and they are more powerful with us sidelined, perhaps sidelined forever.
What the President cannot bring himself to understand is that the only way out of this mess is through international cooperation. Barack Obama mentioned it in his major policy speech yesterday but even he didn't emphasize it as much as it needs to be.
We need to find creative ways to make it in the interest of the world to help us clean up our mess.
For Europe we can promise them a significant share in the oil revenues Cheney so wanted to hoard for himself.
For the Arab world we can give them something more important than what they already have so much of: pride. If we, the sole remaining superpower, humbly ask for a pan-Arab and Muslim solution to this mess then they will have a compelling emotional stake, not just a geopolitical stake, in a stabilized Iraq. The Arab world is understandably touchy about the West's derision for their culture. Partnering with them fully in Iraq might just help diminish their suspicions about us and our motives.
The final weapon in our arsenal should be money. Developing Muslim countries with significant armies like Egypt and Indonesia could be paid handsomely to come to our aid.
The Iraq war was lost by Bush's incompetence years ago. Today our leaders must realize that bogging down our entire military until Bush's term expires threatens to lose us so much more than just Iraq.