Day: December 12, 2006

Wingnuts wig out: It’s finally started to happen — things have gotten so bad in Iraq and the president is doing such a horrendously crappy job of leading the nation that his once-solid Republican base is eroding. Not that they actually “get it,” they apparently are just tired of staying the course with George, according to National Journal’s PollTrack:

President Bush’s approval numbers have long been somewhat deceptive. On the one hand, a popularity rating hovering in the 30s and 40s indicates that a lot of Americans don’t care for him. But partisan breakdowns have often revealed that he’s still popular with his conservative Republican base. A new CBS News survey shows the Iraq war sapping some wind from Bush’s sails.

In a poll that CBS News conducted with the New York Times in late October, 68 percent of Republican respondents approved of Bush’s war policy. Just 21 percent of independents and 7 percent of Democrats said the same.

Fast-forward to now. The long-awaited Baker-Hamilton report on Iraq is out, and Bush is scrambling to hear alternatives on how the White House should proceed before announcing what has been billed as a significant policy change in Iraq. The most recent CBS poll, conducted late last week, tracked a 21-point drop-off among Republicans in support for Bush’s handling of Iraq. Three-quarters of all respondents disapproved, a hike from the 64-percent disapproval in the previous survey.
[…]

They way the newsers tell it, Pres. Bush and his team read the Iraq Study Group’s indictment of their abysmal war-making in Iraq last week and immediately set out to get advice on the war from a wide range of experts in Washington.

After the president has gathered advice, he, as the Decider, will formulate a new way forward. He’ll announce the plan in a speech to the nation.

It sounds reasonable, but it is not true.

The Bush team has known the contents of the report for weeks, if not months. Condi and crew undoubtedly negotiated with the ISG over the wording, especially the sections describing Bush’s incompetence.

The president’s strategy sessions this week are strictly from Potemkin. The Bushies know what they must do in Iraq, and hardly anything can stop them from doing it. It’s all about politics for them. The deaths of military personnel and innocent civilians are unfortunate collateral damage attendant to their political goals. Ditto the billions of taxpayer dollars.

Their political goal in taking the country to war was to give Bush status as a “war president,” so that, among other things, he would sail to reelection in 2004. Now they are focused on their legacy. They urgently need to de-escalate the violence. which is why they have probably already decided to go for the “surge” of an additonal 30,000 to 50,000 more troops into Iraq that John McCain and others have proposed.

This is literally the last-ditch military solution and it fits their timeframe. Any new major operation needs to be over or winding down by January 2008, when the political necessities of the Republican presidential candidates, especially McCain, begin to assert primacy over Bush’s desire to tart up his legacy.

Sending in a large wave of troops is problematic because it is similar to a failed strategy Pres. Lyndon Johnson undertook during the Vietnam War. On July 28, 1965, he announced he was committing an additional 50,000 troops to the war effort. Then as now, the goal of the deployment was to quell escalating violence so that order could be established.

It failed utterly. The enemy was energized and met the surge with counter-offensives. The war dragged on for another 10 years, until the fall of Saigon on April 30, 1975.