Someone Tell the President the War Is Over(Frank Rich)

[MattSWin]

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/14/opinion/14rich.html?ei=5070&en=4bcd44283d71655c&ex=1124683200&emc=eta1&pagewanted=print



A president can't stay the course when his own citizens (let alone his own allies) won't stay with him. The approval rate for Mr. Bush's handling of Iraq plunged to 34 percent in last weekend's Newsweek poll - a match for the 32 percent that approved L.B.J.'s handling of Vietnam in early March 1968. (The two presidents' overall approval ratings have also converged: 41 percent for Johnson then, 42 percent for Bush now.) On March 31, 1968, as L.B.J.'s ratings plummeted further, he announced he wouldn't seek re-election, commencing our long extrication from that quagmire.

It was on these false premises - that Iraq was both a collaborator on 9/11 and about to inflict mushroom clouds on America - that honorable and brave young Americans were sent off to fight. Among them were the 19 marine reservists from a single suburban Cleveland battalion slaughtered in just three days at the start of this month. As they perished, another Ohio marine reservist who had served in Iraq came close to winning a Congressional election in southern Ohio. Paul Hackett, a Democrat who called the president a "chicken hawk," received 48 percent of the vote in exactly the kind of bedrock conservative Ohio district that decided the 2004 election for Mr. Bush.

The endgame for American involvement in Iraq will be of a piece with the rest of this sorry history. "It makes no sense for the commander in chief to put out a timetable" for withdrawal, Mr. Bush declared on the same day that 14 of those Ohio troops were killed by a roadside bomb in Haditha. But even as he spoke, the war's actual commander, Gen. George Casey, had already publicly set a timetable for "some fairly substantial reductions" to start next spring. Officially this calendar is tied to the next round of Iraqi elections, but it's quite another election this administration has in mind. The priority now is less to save Jessica Lynch (or Iraqi democracy) than to save Rick Santorum and every other endangered Republican facing voters in November 2006.

[henslee]

1. This adminsistration is an unquallified disaster.

[Kolesar]

2. Someone Tell Frank Rich the War Is Not Over

by Norman Solomon
On Sunday, the New York Times published a piece by Frank Rich under the headline "Someone Tell the President the War Is Over." The article was a flurry of well-placed jabs about the Bush administration's lies and miscalculations for the Iraq war. But the essay was also a big straw in liberal wind now blowing toward dangerous conclusions.
...snip...
Mocking President Bush's assertion on Aug. 11 that "no decision has been made yet" about withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq, Rich concludes: "The country has already made the decision for Mr. Bush. We're outta there."

But of course Americans are not outta there. And President Bush reasserted last Thursday that withdrawal of U.S. troops is contingent on the U.S.-allied Iraqi forces achieving standards of performance and self-sufficiency that are little more than mirages.
...snip...
We're not "outta there" – until an antiwar movement in the United States can grow strong enough to make the demand stick. And we're not there yet. Not by a long shot.
...end...
That's our job.

[katty]

3. Indeed-NOT over