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Originally Posted by roachboy
.....the bush people have obviously created about the worst possible climate for this diplomatic project--but they really have to suck it up, eat some shit and deal with it---- and this they seem wholly unwilling or unable to do--and it is here that the extent to which american options have been boxed in by the disaster that is neocon-influenced policy remains fully in force. instead of a coherent diplomatic strategy that worked in tandem with the military deployment, you get dickwaving in the direction of iran--a dickwaving that is at this point the best friend of ahmadinejad (whose administration is in a vry very weak position, likely to fall but for american dickwaving--and i would have thought that the administration considers him to be a problem rather than a kind of screwy tactical asset--if he is a problem, then maybe not doing things that prop him up, that help keep him in power, might be a good idea--but not in bushworld--go figure).
fact is that the bush administration appears to reject the notion of coupling a diplomatic strategy--which is the condition of possibility for a coherent withdrawal--to its military strategy. and it is because this administration has made this choice that all options seem to be equally zero-sum.
the problem is the bush administration itself.
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roachboy, what this is about now, is the divergence between the interests of the US people ("the troops" are located in that group, too), versus the interests of the Bush/Cheney presidency in it's waning days, specifically, it's legacy, assuming that they will withdraw from office when the provisions of current constitutional mandate it....
They're still trying to "move the ball"; working up their "hail mary" pass "play", as their offense is poised to take the "field", one last time....
Quote:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16960414/site/newsweek/
<b>Bush's Truman Show</b>
By Holly Bailey, Richard Wolffe and Evan Thomas
Newsweek
Feb. 12, 2007 issue
....The president did seem mildly chastened by his party's defeat in the midterm elections—but not inclined to change course dramatically in Iraq.
He compared his situation to the crisis Harry Truman faced in the early days of the cold war. Then, as now, Bush said, the United States confronted a dangerous ideological foe. Truman had answered with the Truman Doctrine, a vow to protect free peoples wherever they were threatened with communist domination.......
.......The Truman comparison didn't seem quite right to Durbin. When the president went to him for comment, Durbin voiced his doubts. <b>"Harry Truman had allies," Durbin pointed out.</b> The Truman administration had helped create the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to contain communism. After Britain withdraws its troops later this year, <b>Durbin says he told Bush, "we will be virtually alone in what we are trying to accomplish there."</b> Durbin says that Bush did not become angry, but he did seem irritated and "insisted that this was an ideological struggle, which wasn't my point at all," says Durbin. "He was very defensive." (White House spokesman Tony Snow confirmed the exchange between Bush and Durbin but said "the president was not really trying to compare himself to Harry Truman so much as to talk about the duration and nature of the struggle.")
Bush's grasp of history may have been a little shaky, but there is no doubting the force of his conviction. Bush wants his legacy to be the long-term defeat of Islamic extremism. Indeed, senior officials close to Bush who did not wish to be identified discussing private conversations with the president tell NEWSWEEK that Bush's plan after he leaves the White House is to continue to promote the spread of democracy in the Middle East by inviting world leaders to his own policy institute, to be built alongside his presidential library......
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I predict that the Bush "policy institute" will be a very lonely place....