Getting back to George Bush and Iraq (incorporating blog review #18)

I haven't done as many reviews of other blogs this year as last year and that's largely because the new version of blogger has removed the 'recently edited blogs' list from the bottom right hand corner. This means that I have to use the 'next blog' flag at the top of any blog to go from one blog to the next randomly, and as it is a sad fact that most blogs are not even worth reviewing, it can take ages to get anything useful.

I was lucky today, though, when I happened on Random Comment first time round. In some ways this is like a US version of giroscope... it's a collection of comments on various interesting stuff that's in the news from a sound political perspective. The guy (Aldous Bukowski - that must be a made up name, right?) also throws in a couple of film reviews once in a while.

His post on the State of the Union address from 24th January reminded me about George Bush and after I'd finished vomiting I realised that it's been a very long time since I said anything about Iraq on this blog and I wanted to put that right, so here goes. My last post on Iraq was back in October when I argued that "adaptation means withdrawal" (I just got a googlewhack on this when I was searching for the post - bloody great. I can't remember getting one before. If only I'd had Dave Gorman's idea before he did...) In other words, Bush's announcement that 'military tactics in Iraq will keep changing to deal with insurgents' was, I believed back then, an attempt to start a withdrawal without losing face. When the Democrats won both houses in the US mid-terms in November on a 'George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld have f***ed up the occupation in Iraq' ticket, that strengthened my belief that phased withdrawal, along the lines of Vietnam, was only weeks away.

Instead we find that Dubya has increased the troop numbers by 21,500 and there may be an attempt to get a few thousand more on top of that. This seems the most idiotic policy possible. How will a marginal increase in total troop numbers (about 15%) turn a dire situation, with civil war in many parts of the country, around? All this will do is drag the US slightly deeper into a quagmire which is pretty much unresolvable. The Democrats opposed the troops increase but lack the balls necessary to stop the whole operation in its tracks, which is within their power; military spending has to be authorised by the US Congress and they could pull the plug on funding for the war. This would of course be a radical option, but with public approval for Bush's handling of the war running at about 25%, and 60% of Americans wanting troops out within a year, maybe it's time to push the boat out a bit. Sometimes in politics your only enemy is spinelessness rather than witlessness.

The extension of the Iraq policy proves that Bush, while a more than adequate slugger in the heat of an election campaign, is a moron on foreign policy (and indeed domestic policy) who knows he will probably be remembered as one of the worst US presidents of all time and has decided to deliver a big "F*** YOU" to the US electorate, to Congressional Republicans who will have to run for office in the wake of this debacle in 2008, and finally to anyone, in the world, with a brain. Of which there are still a few dozen of us left. Let me know if you're one of them and I'll invite you round for some beers.