Bush still delusional about Iraq?

I know about stubborn. I can be quite mulish a lot of the time. I come from a family with an aptitude for cutting their noses off to spite their faces. However, I have good enough sense to know that these traits make me wholly unfit for elected office. I saw that same kind of stubbornness in Bush back in 2000 when he got cornered by press in Maine about some DUI that had slipped his mind. He had no idea of how to deal with the questions gracefully and there was rage in his eyes. Now I am wondering if there is more than just stubbornness but stubbornness and an raging, outsized ego. Or is he just nuts?

This from The Sunday Herald of Scotland:

If the leaks are right, and the US plumps for "surging troops" and "surging resources", this will be the antithesis of what James Baker's Iraq Study Group recommended at the end of last year. At the time, the former secretary of state made it clear that his findings represented joined-up thinking and should not be cherry-picked by the president.

Although Bush has great respect for Baker and acknowledges the depth of his experience in the Middle East, he has clearly paid lip-service to the findings of the group and has listened instead to advisers like Kagan and Keane. With their siren voices ringing in his ears, Bush has come to believe that 2007 will be a crucial year in Iraq and one on which history will finally assess his

presidency.

This is from The Age in Australia:

And who will trust the Americans now, after this and Abu Ghraib and hurricane Katrina, to get any process right in any country including their own? Not the British soldiers on the ground in Helmland Province, Afghanistan. Not the Australian "security guards" in downtown Baghdad. Not the Iraqi dentists, doctors, nurses, restaurateurs and university lecturers daily fleeing the country. Not the children with toothache. Not the pregnant women with nowhere to go to give birth. Not the grandmothers of dead babies in humidicribs whose electricity gave out. Not the middle-class parents afraid to put their children on school buses lest they never see them again.

And who in the US will trust the American Army, the State Department and the current American rulers of Baghdad either? Not the 30,000 boys and girls wounded, nor their families. Not the 13,000 or 15,000 parents and siblings bereaved. Not the mayors of the towns the 3000 dead kids came from. Not the Democrat local members Bush is now asking for more soldiers, more weapons, more money, more patience, more time in a Long War as long, perhaps, as the Cold War.

The US is facing outright defeat — and worldwide contempt as never before — because of the Saddam gallows Grand Guignol and the secular Golgotha his jeering, black-hooded captors turned it into. And none of this need have happened. All the cluey US spin-men had to do, after consulting a few legal experts, was yield him up to lengthy trial by the UN War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague; let him give big speeches the media would soon tire of; and let him grow very old and sad in jail.

These are from countries who are allied with us in Iraq. We can say that they are not representative but then we have this from The London Times:

I have not heard one remotely plausible game plan for the “Battle of the Surge”. Leaks have indicated that commanders on the ground are strongly opposed to giving the enemy yet more targets. Pentagon chiefs are equally opposed to the cost in men and money of a transient boost in control on the ground. American public opinion and Congress are overwhelmingly against the plan, which Chuck Hagel, the Republican senator, calls “Alice in Wonderland”.

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American puppets in Baghdad’s green zone will do as they are told, but the only real enthusiasts are neocon diehards and Tony Blair. They were represented on this page two weeks ago by Frederick Kagan, in a fantasy revival of the 2003 “clear and hold” strategy, which amounts to telling American soldiers to commit suicide.

Leaders contemplating defeat far from the front are always tempted to order “one last push”. Thus did Hitler order the battle of the bulge, Nixon the bombing of Cambodia and Reagan the blasting of the Shouf to cover his retreat from Lebanon. A general must pretend to victory even in the jaws of defeat, or his soldiers will not fight. America has 1m men under arms. Surely they are not to be beaten by a few hundred guerrillas in the suburbs of Baghdad? So Bush will tell them to make one last heave, however pointless. He does not want to share his father’s legacy of cutting and running from Iraq.

By the way, The London Times I think is still owned by Rupert Murdoch of Fox News.

For something American, and far to the left side of liberal, here is an article from The Nation: Selling the Surge.

2009 cannot come soon enough.