Just Don’t Call It a Timetable
Posted on | August 25, 2008
A few months ahead of the November election comes the news that President Bush has suddenly discovered a need to pull troops out of Iraq. This was the war that we had to have, and had to keep fighting, but it seems that that was then.
In agreeing to pull U.S. combat troops out of Iraqi cities by June, and from the rest of the country by 2011, President Bush has apparently consented to precisely the kind of timetable that, when Democrats called for one, he dismissed as “setting a date for failure.” Bush can call it an “aspirational goal” until he turns blue, but a timetable is exactly what it is, thank you very much.
Bush has repeatedly warned that politics and public opinion should have no role in the decision about when to leave Iraq, but apparently he just meant American politics and public opinion. A clear majority of Americans has favored a withdrawal timetable for several years now, putting anti-war Democrats in control of Congress in 2006.
Bush ignored them. But in the end, he bowed to the will of the Iraqis’ elected representatives. After five and a half years of occupation, it was their turn to put a gun to Bush’s head: The timetable was the price they demanded for agreeing to let American troops remain in the country beyond the expiration of a United Nations mandate in December.
Bush’s acquiescence pulls the rug out from under Republican presidential candidate John McCain, whose position on Iraq was largely identical to Bush’s — pre-backflip. In some ways, the new timetable is even shorter than the one proposed by Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama….
But Bush’s real accomplishment here is that he has stalled long enough that none of the deadlines he has now agreed to will be on his watch. This will all be somebody else’s problem.
Oh, it’s a little late in George W. Bush’s political career to feign surprise that someone else will be left to clean up the mess. He has played the dilettante with the short attention span all his life, as student, airman, oil executive and governor. He’s full of fail, and now we come to the end of his disastrous reign as Boy King of America, in which he did more damage than anyone can repair.
Comments
Leave a Reply
