We're never going to leave, are we?

The war in Iraq is intensifying. More American combat troops are arriving. They are in more battles with insurgents. And from Washington there is a crescendo of briefings accusing the Iranians of flooding Iraq with money and weapons and even of arming Sunni insurgents. We shouldn't be surprised - this is what George Bush and his war planners intended. Even the Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Group, in its report before Christmas, said it could support a short-term "surge" to try and regain control of Baghdad.

The bottom line is that the president, the study group and most Washington policy-makers want to get as many US combat troops as they can out of Iraq by the US presidential elections in 2008. But that doesn't mean pulling out.

[snip]

The miserable fact is that today the Iraqi army still can't repair and overhaul by itself the useable weapons and vehicles it does have. Nor can it supply food, fuel and ammunition to its units, nor even move troops and patch them up when they're wounded. American commanders can't even say how many Iraqis they've trained in logistics. The Pentagon refuses to give Congress meaningful data about the combat-readiness of American-trained Iraqi forces.

As for the Iraqi police, the Americans are powerless within a Shia-controlled interior ministry rife with torture, death squads and thousands of ghost employees on the payroll. Millions of dollars-worth of new hardware have gone missing, including more than 13,000 Glock 9mm pistols, now probably in the hands of the militias.

The study group's solution to this legacy of gross incompetence and corruption is to transfer the paramilitary Iraqi national police and border guards (now within the interior ministry) to the defence ministry. This would neatly put them under the thumb of US military advisers, leaving the interior ministry with Iraq's detectives and cops on the beat. Fat chance. To many Shias this looks suspiciously like a crude attempt to disarm them.

The unpleasant truth is that George Bush, James Baker's study group and many who support them agree that Iraq is much too important to American interests to be trusted entirely to the Iraqis. They also agree that US troops are going to stay in Iraq to fight on their own and to run the Iraqi army. Which means the war will get worse. Which means there are going to be a lot more dead Iraqis even if - and it's a big if - there are fewer body bags carrying dead US soldiers by the next American elections.

Baker sends a subtle message

which is promptly ignored by the boy king.



(Pic hijacked from Whig.)

Why Baker is the wrong man to assess the mess in Iraq

Because he is too incestuously tied to the Bush cabal, the Saudis, and the war itself. You don't get someone who supported the war to go and criticize it.

As Glenn Greenwald says:
"If you go to a doctor for an operation and he completely botches your surgery and you lose an organ due to his abject ineptitude and recklessness, you don't go back to that doctor for repair surgery; you find another one. If you go to a lawyer who almost destroys your company through complete ignorance of your basic legal obligations, you don't stay with that lawyer in the hope that he will get you out of the disaster he created for you; you retain another one. All of that is just basic common sense.

Yet here we are, revering and listening to and following the same dense, amoral people who could not have been more wrong about everything they recommended and asserted prior to this war, while we scorn or (at best) ignore those who were so right. As but one example, one of the appointees on the Commission was the wildly extremist, warmongering American Enterprise Institute's Michael Rubin, though he is really different only in degree, not in kind, from most of the other Commission members and "experts" on whom they relied.

Worse, the people to whom we are listening do not recognize they were wrong. They believe they were right and that what we need is more of their great wisdom and advice, in greater doses. As a result, they are using exactly the same premises and assumptions and moral calculus that they used to bring about this tragedy, and astoundingly, there seem to be enough people -- at least in Washington -- willing to embrace the fantasy that somehow, this time around, listening to them will bring about better results."

John Aravosis at Americablog:
"... I do get the sense that the Study Group never really considered the possibility that Iraq is already lost. Simpson and Perry seemed almost surprised when I suggested that they convince me that Iraq isn't already dead. I fear that it's still not PC to suggest in polite company that the war is over, we lost. And I fear just as much that the Study Group may not have seriously considered this possibility - the proposition that nothing we do will matter in the end, and that as bad as it sounds, the only solution is to get out now."

We're not leaving Iraq until the job is done. We're not! We're not! We're not!

"President Bush today proclaimed Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki "the right guy for Iraq," and said the two had agreed to speed the turnover of security responsibility from American to Iraqi forces. But Mr. Bush dismissed a reported decision by an independent bipartisan panel to call for a gradual withdrawal of troops."

[snip]

"The news conference came against a backdrop of rising violence in Iraq and increasing tensions between the two leaders. On Wednesday evening, Mr. Maliki took the unusual step of backing out of a planned meeting with the president, an embarrassment to the White House that came on the heels of publication of a classified memo from National Security Adviser Stephen J. Hadley that raised doubts about Mr. Maliki's leadership.

Today, both men tried to tamp down any suggestion that the relationship was strained. Mr. Bush said yet again that he has confidence in the Iraqi prime minister."

[snip]

"Still, tensions seemed to bubble just under the surface. The two leaders barely looked at one another during the news conference. And when Mr. Bush, at one point, asked the prime minister if he wanted to continue taking questions from reporters, the prime minister swiveled his head toward the president and shot Mr. Bush an incredulous look."

Bush pushes Poppy and Baker away, refusing to let them fix his mess:

"But the conventional wisdom may have underestimated the president's stubbornness -- and Cheney and Rove's tenacity.

Because at today's press conference in Jordan, following his abbreviated meeting with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, Bush made it abundantly clear that he is waving off the rescue attempt by longtime Bush family fixer James A. Baker III. He'd rather stay the course.

News reports this morning indicate that Baker's bipartisan Iraq Study Group will next week officially recommend a gradual pullback of American troops from Iraq.

But in Amman, Bush went out of his way to mock the notion of a "graceful exit" -- and to insist that he's in Iraq for the long haul. "This business about graceful exit just simply has no realism to it at all," Bush said."