Don't you dare call it a change of course!

Or flipflopping, going back on his word, changing his mind, or actually asking for directions!

He's just widening the field of options, opening up the discussion, uh... developing a new plan (#327)....

The Bush administration is retooling its Iraq war strategy. U.S. diplomats will soon sit across the table from their Iranian counterparts, as they did recently with the Syrians, to discuss ways Iraq’s neighbors can play a more positive role. Washington reportedly has also invited the United Nations (Guardian) to have a more direct presence in Iraq, including a larger role for its humanitarian missions and even the potential creation of a UN command. Finally, once the surge of troops into Baghdad tapers down, the U.S. military will increasingly look to shift its role in Iraq away from combat operations and into training and advisory missions (WashPost).

If any of these steps sound familiar, it’s because many of them were recommendations from the Iraq Study Group report, the blue-ribbon panel commissioned by Congress to find an alternative strategy on Iraq. Coolly received by the White House after its publication last December, the report has been dusted off and given a second look by Bush administration officials.

Soon it will have been Georgie's idea all along cuz he meant to do that. He's the Deciderer, remember. The Commander Guy does not change his squinty steely vision of the world. The world changes for him.

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.

The Big Surge isn't, won't, and can't

Steve Gilliard tells us how bad it actually is in Iraq, what the surge will not do because of the militias and our mercenaries, and what will happen:

But in the end, it doesn't matter if the surge happens. It won't change anything but who dies in Iraq.

However, this has placed the Bush administration on very dangerous ground in the US. By ignorng the Iraq Study Group, he has made it clear that the Republican Party is on it's own. The impeachment drumbeat has been in the background since last summer. It's a popular idea outside the beltway.

The Republicans voting for resolutions today are the Republicans who will demand Bush resign by the end of summer. As the surge fails and Bush has no answers, the establishment will demand something be done. Bush and Cheney act as if they have unlimited power. They do not. His polling numbers are under 30 percent and won't be going higher. The public wants the war to end.

Bush acts as if he can continue like this for two years. I doubt he can do this for six months. All the Sadrists have to do is spring one massive ambush and his Iraq policy will collapse. What will Dave Petraeus say when one of his little De Lattre forts are overrun and 30 dead Americans are left while the Iraqis disappear?

Our Iraq policy hangs on one failure. One. Once it happens, Bush loses any moral standing to prolong the war. I take Bush at his word that he will leave withdrawal to the next president. However, that president is likely to be Nancy Pelosi or John Warner and it won't be in 2009

A convenient lie

"The administration has continued to offer inaccurate information to Congress, the American people and sometimes to itself. The Iraq Study Group, in its December report, concluded, for example, that the U.S. military was systematically under-reporting the violence in Iraq in an effort to disguise policy failings. The group recommended that the military change its reporting system.

Whether many of the administration's statements about Iraq for nearly five years have been deliberately misleading or honest but gullible mistakes hasn't been determined. The Senate Intelligence Committee has yet to complete an investigation into the issue that was begun but stalled when Republicans controlled the committee.

On Thursday, frustration over the accuracy of administration statements on Iraq boiled over during Rice's testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing.

"Madam Secretary," said Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., "I have supported you and the administration on the war, and I cannot continue to support the administration's position. I have not been told the truth over and over again by administration witnesses, and the American people have not been told the truth.""

Bush said three words that described his opinion of the ISG report

"A flaming turd."

I believe he has really described all the actions of his administration and himself: Preznit Fartjokes.

And if you look up turd in the dictionary:

Bush's most importantest speech ever

And as Keith Olbermann points out:
"today it is his credibility versus that of generals, diplomats, allies, Republicans, Democrats, the Iraq Study Group, past presidents, voters last November, and the majority of the American people."

No wonder Georgie looked so nervous.

Bush: Cuz I gotta look likes I've thunk about this!

It's gotta be differenter from what Baker and those loonies in the ISG offer! I'm gonna be better'n Poppy!

Condi says no to talking with Syria and Iran.

Der Spiegel:
"One key recommendation of the Iraq Study Group's report was that the US look to Syria and Iran to help quell the violence in Iraq. However, Condoleezza Rice has rejected the proposal, saying the price that these regimes may want in return could be too high.

The Iraq Study Group may have recommended in its keenly-anticipated report that the US engage in dialogue with Iran and Syria to try to stabilize Iraq, but it appears the White House is not willing to swallow this bitter pill. US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has rejected the bipartisan panel's advice, saying that the two countries could demand too high a price for any help over Iraq."

ISG off by 95,000 contractors.

They said there were 5,000. There are 100,000 unsupervised and unaccountable contractors loose in Iraq.

And look who the ISG did not talk to: "For all of the time they spent learning about America's war in Iraq, the Iraq Study Group failed to study the war at its most critical level: that of the grunts. Nothing makes this clearer than the report's appendix, which lists scores of men and women interviewed for the report, but none below the rank of lieutenant colonel."

The ISG report told Bush to stop lying

No wonder Georgie is getting other people to give him reports, any reports to dilute such unpleasantness!

Der Speigel: (my bold)
"We were particularly drawn to Recommendations 46, 72 and 78. Under separate headings dealing with the military, the federal budget and the nation's intelligence agencies, they share one basic idea: Government officials should not lie to the public or each other, especially in matters of war."

The Deciderer has decided to pretend to listen

Thereby becoming the Listenerer!
But listening does NOT mean comprehending nor actually doing anything.

Via Josh Marshall, MSNBC:
"The challenge for Bush's team was to make the president appear as though he were taking the release of the [ISG] report seriously, without necessarily embracing its conclusions. In the days following the report's release, Bush the Decider transformed himself into Bush the Listener. Usually prickly with war critics—on the rare occasions he spoke to them at all—the president now invited them in from the cold and kept quiet.

. . .

The results of that effort will be unveiled next week, when Bush is expected to announce what he calls "The New Way Forward," his latest plan to salvage the mission in Iraq."