The Most Depressing Night of the War

I found last night's Bush address and the response by the Democrats to be utterly demoralizing. Bush meant to rally a nation, to offer the twin lures of modest lowering of violence in some areas with the prospect of troop withdrawals to keep his party from completely abandoning him on the war. But Bush's speech last night, like the seven addresses about the war that preceded it, seemed delusional. Even if there has been a modest turning of the tide in the now oft-discussed Al Anbar provence where the Sunnis have decided to align against the Jihadists, that doesn't mean that the rest of the country is anything less than a Hobbesian state of war. As Joe Biden said last night on MSNBC, and as he told the president, if you got rid of every Jihadist in Iraq you'd still have a civil war going on, one that we're still expected to police. Bush's fantasy discussion of the 37 nations that are helping us there--who?--is even more absurd now that the original figleaf of international coverage has been blown away. The Spainards, the Poles and so many others have left. The Brits are packing up. It's our fight alone and the attempt to kid us into thinking its not was bizarre. The idea that there's a central Iraqi government that's asking for our help is absurd. The central government is a joke, with no clout in Kurdistan or the Shia south or even beyond the fantasy world of the Green Zone. The idea that Bush will keep 130,000 troops there through the end of his term and dump this on the President Romney or Obama or Clinton or Giuliani is maddening. He kept talking about the need to have an Iraq that would keep out Al Qaeda and be a buffer to Iran and all I could think of was, "Yes, Saddam."

jack Reed's response was better, but not great. He didn't address the central question that bugs so many Americans: What if we leave? And he never addressed the Petraeus claim that we are making progress.

I don't know what will happen now. My guess is that Bush's speech did not tame all the Republican defections, but enough of them so that Bush's policy will continue unabated, with maybe a slight increase in troop withdrawal. Of course, it's not withdrawal at all, just the long slope of decline in the surge.

And then there's the faux outrage over the MoveOn.org ad about Gen. Petraeus. Obviously it was crude and ugly to suggest that he's somehow betraying his country. But given all the vitriol that has spewed out of the right about war critics, it's hard to see this as anything but ginned up indignity designed to avoid the real questions of how we get out of this mess.