Bush Changes Iraq Rhetoric Again; Still No Plan

A BUZZFLASH NEWS ALERT

President Bush's press conference yesterday with Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki revealed a great deal about the Bush Administration's failures and their continuing lack of a real strategy to redeploy our troops. The only substantive matter Bush discussed was his desire to "accelerate" Iraq's ability to handle its own security problems:

"We talked today about accelerating authority to the Prime Minister"

"As opposed to saying, America, you go solve the problem, we have a Prime Minister who's saying, stop holding me back, I want to solve the problem. And the meeting today was to accelerate his capacity to do so."

"My plan, and his plan, is to accelerate the Iraqis' responsibility. See, here's a man who has been elected by the people; the people expect him to respond, and he doesn't have the capacity to respond. And so we want to accelerate that capacity."

"We made a step toward as soon as possible by transferring a -- accelerating the transfer of authorities, military authorities to the Prime Minister."

"Today we had a meeting that will accelerate the capacity for the Prime Minister to do the hard work necessary to help stop this violence."

"And the reason I came today to be able to sit down with him is to hear the joint plans developed between the Iraqi government, the sovereign government of Iraq, and our government, to make sure that we accelerate the transfer of capacity to the Prime Minister."

Looks like "accelerate" is Bush's new buzzword. The obvious question we should demand is why - after nearly four years - the Administration is only now trying to expedite Iraqi self-sufficiency. If there is room to do more now, they should have been doing it from the beginning. (Of course, we know for a fact from congressional testimony that Bush and Rumsfeld ignored our generals on the ground about Iraq's internal security concerns and took no action to rebuild Iraq's security forces)

But the implications of Bush's words are equally ominous for the future. Bush has still refused to set any concrete goals in terms of timelines or objectives so that the Iraqis can better plan for autonomy (and so we can get our troops home). "All that does is set people up for unrealistic expectations," Bush said yesterday.

Then why not simply set up a realistic timeline, George? Even Maliki was able to declare today that "Iraqi forces will be ready, fully ready" to take over by June. Should this prediction transpire, there is absolutely no reason why we will need today's full coalition combat presence in July. Such a pullout would be in accordance with the pending recommendations of the Iraq Study Group to withdraw nearly all of our combat forces by early 2008.

But Bush will have none of this reasonability and is determined to stick to his plan (or lack thereof). "This business about graceful exit just simply has no realism to it at all," Bush said. His rhetoric suggests that he believes he can not be blamed for failure in Iraq so long as the troops stay and the war remains pending when he leaves office in two years, and it all becomes someone else's problem.

The reason for going into Iraq has changed a dozen times, and the rhetoric for staying there has changed even more. Logistically, let alone politically, it will take several weeks at the least to fully redeploy coalition troops. Let's go on and make a real plan - an accelerated one.

A BUZZFLASH NEWS ALERT

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