A hollow, failed presidency
By ROBYN E. BLUMNER, Times Perspective ColumnistPublished March 12, 2006
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"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.- Percy Bysshe Shelley
Like a modern day Ozymandias, President Bush doesn't know that his legacy has already crumbled, leaving nothing but ruin behind.
Despite the weight of the evidence, Bush hasn't figured out that Iraq is a lost cause. He nods when the vice president confabulates about the insurgency in its "last throes." He nudges people like Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, onto Sunday talk shows to assure us all how "very, very well" things are going. He should be listening to William F. Buckley Jr., who wrote a Feb. 24 column in the National Review titled "It Didn't Work," in which the fierce conservative argues that Bush's next step is "the acknowledgment of defeat."
The bombing of the gold-domed Askariya shrine, one of the holiest places for Shiite Muslims, will one day be remembered as the first major salvo in Iraq's civil war. American soldiers in the thick of it know this well enough, which is why 72 percent of troops serving in Iraq as surveyed by Zogby International say we should cut our losses and leave within a year.
When a tribal nation seething in sectarian rivalries has more guns than classroom seats, the only democracy that will emerge is a zero-sum form where the majority takes the whole prize. The Iraqi elections illustrated how far this nation is from anything resembling a liberal democracy. Almost all Iraqis who voted put their ethnic and religious allegiance over common, nationbuilding ideals.
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