"It took three or four years for the Bush administration and top military officials to say, 'You know, what we’re doing here isn’t working.' And effectively, they said, 'Okay, General Petraeus, if you’re so smart, you do it.'” ...Tom Ricks in an interview
The Bush administration has done its best to hand off responsibility for the war. The basis for staying on the job is a series of statistics which are pessimistic even though they have been chosen for presentation as the least damning the White House could find. Now, this morning, the news gets worse. The oil law compromise has falled through.
A carefully constructed compromise on a draft law governing Iraq’s rich oil fields, agreed to in February after months of arduous talks among Iraqi political groups, appears to have collapsed. The apparent breakdown comes just as Congress and the White House are struggling to find evidence that there is progress toward reconciliation and a functioning government here.
Senior Iraqi negotiators met in Baghdad on Wednesday in an attempt to salvage the original compromise, two participants said. But the meeting came against the backdrop of a public series of increasingly strident disagreements over the draft law that had broken out in recent days between Hussain al-Shahristani, the Iraqi oil minister, and officials of the provincial government in the Kurdish north, where some of the nation’s largest fields are located. ... James Glanz writing in the New York Times
What this will to do alter the votes in Congress isn't clear. What is clear is that the Democrats are prepared, once again, to compromise their way into sharing responsibility for an ill-begotten, cruel war.
Democratic leaders in Congress have decided to shift course and pursue modest bipartisan measures to alter U.S. military strategy in Iraq, hoping to use incremental changes instead of aggressive legislation to break the grip Republicans have held over the direction of war policy. ..."We're reaching out to the Republicans to allow them to fulfill their word," Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (Nev.) said yesterday. "A number of them are quoted significantly saying that come September that there would have to be a change of the course in the war in Iraq." ...And House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (Calif.) blocked consideration of a bill to force the Bush administration to plan for withdrawals after antiwar Democrats denounced it. But after months of false starts and dead ends, Democratic leaders are taking a pragmatic turn. ... Jonathan Weisman in the Washington Post
"Antiwar Democrats"? The left needs to face the the truth. It has lost its party even as the party once again moves past the center to the right simply to accomodate what have been lies and bad judgments from the very start.
The left finds its epoxied to a group -- from Hillary Clinton to James Inhofe -- which authorized the invasion of Iraq and then went on to support it in terms which ranged from "pragmatic" to fervent even as the whole scheme fell apart. The resulting mess of insurgency and corruption should have been the legacy of Bush and the Republican Party. But it has become the legacy, too, of the Democrats. Democrats are now in the disgusting position of appearing almost enthusiastic about sending kids to fight in wars abroad but unwilling to fight for peace or justice -- or the Constitution -- on home ground.
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