Saving Himself

Four years ago today, (p)resident Bush made a big show of landing on an aircraft carrier off the coast of San Diego, resplendent in a pilot’s suit to declare...

“My fellow Americans, major combat operations have ended. In the Battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed. And now our coalition is engaged in securing and reconstructing that country.”

It is a fair guess there are less buildings standing in Iraq than when this silly speech was made and so much for the reconstruction.

After some self-congratulatory business about “liberty” and “peace,” and other concepts nobody associates with his policies, the (p)resident continued, “Operation Iraqi Freedom was carried out with a combination of precision, and speed, and boldness the enemy did not expect, and the world had not seen before.”

All of which turned out to be a bunch of hooey from a guy who has little sense of history. The enemy clearly expected an overwhelming display of force and quietly melted away to resurface as myriad guerilla forces with lots of time on their hands.

They can kill 10 guys a week until the end of time because it’s their country and they have no plans to leave.

Here’s a simple AP report on the 104 American soldiers killed in April, “one of the deadliest months of the war so far for U.S. forces.”

Lucky the major combat operations have ended, or this thing would be a real bloodbath.

Meanwhile, the nation is being asked to believe the (p)resident’s escalation of the war, in the face of a contrary and majority viewpoint that it should end, is somehow “working.”

Instead it seems the more Americans he puts over there, the easier it is to find and kill them.

Around the time Bush’s big “Mission Accomplished” bash was going down, the highway scribe was reading Gore Vidal’s “Julian” about a Roman Caesar who raced his army through the heart of Mesopotamia to a “victory” not unlike the one produced by Fox News according to the administration’s script.

Julian wound up hunkering down while his guys got picked off, one by one, two by two, and then by the hundreds.

There’s nothing like picking up a history book every now again, but the Boy Wonder could not have been expected to understand how old and universal realities apply to him.

He’s never heard the word, “no,” although the Democratic Congress is straining to open his ears to it.

Here’s something else he said at the time: “With new tactics and precision weapons, we can achieve military objectives without directing violence against innocent civilians. No device of man can remove the tragedy from war. Yet it is a great advance when the guilty have far more to fear from war than the innocent.”

Well, a few hundred thousand dead Iraqis later should remind the (p)resident that he is not the only guy making decisions in a war; that there is an opposing army or, in this case, armies, with goals different than those of Captain Liberty.

Then there was this whopper: “The war on terror is not over, yet it is not endless. We do not know the day of the final victory, but we have seen the turning of the tide...”

Unless he is talking about the tide at the surfing hotspot, “Staircases” Beach, in Malibu, it is mostly rising, at least according to this AP piece with the comforting headline, “Report says terror attacks up sharply.”

Here’s a tidbit from the article by Matthew Lee:

“In its annual global survey of terrorism, the [State] department said 14,338 attacks took place in 2006, mainly in Iraq and Afghanistan...”

Which is mainly where the (p)resident has been squandering the country’s future and resources.

Check out this “Cost of War” ticker, a regular feature at highwayscribery.

Finally, the man who would make anew the troubled and oppressed regions of the world through violently imposed democracy, vetoed a measure giving him another $120 billion of our shared national treasure with a deadline, rather far away in time, for ending the war.

That bill was an expression of the American peoples’ rejection of his pet project. w. said he’s open to “listening to the opinions of others,” but is apparently willing to sacrifice as many lives as it takes to reverse his doomed legacy as dolt and butcher.

Bush desperately links his tribulations to those of Abraham Lincoln, because he’s sticking to his “principles.”

But Lincoln’s principle was trying to save the union; w. wants only to save himself.