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The vice presidency, John Nance Garner is alleged to have told his fellow
Texan Lyndon Johnson, isn't worth a bucket of warm spit. A lame-duck
presidency isn't worth much more. While George W. Bush was traveling through
Europe on what should have looked like a triumphal journey, back home,
Republican senators were burying his immigration reform bill and the
secretary of defense was confessing that he could not reappoint Bush's
handpicked chairman and vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Does
Bush comprehend that the public and Congress are repudiating him? His jaunty
swagger on the shore of the Baltic Sea does not look like a man with his
back to the wall.
The appointment of new military leaders may represent a dying gasp of the Iraq war, though, as Navy Adm. Michael Mullen, Bush's choice as new chairman of the JCS, suggests it may be a gasp that goes on for 10 years. Neocon commentator David Brooks argued on PBS the other night that the new leadership will be able to sell a new strategy in September when it becomes evident that the "surge" of troops into battle has been less than a complete success. He described this newest of plans -- what others are calling Plan B -- as one that the next president would be able to support, hinting that the next president would have no choice but to accept it when he takes office. |
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Plan B will involve "a draw-down" of troops before next year's elections,
the concentration of American forces in "forts" (a string of Fort Apaches?),
and preparations for a "long war" like the one in Korea. Americans would no
longer attempt to police Baghdad, and there would be fewer casualties. If
Plan B is a "success," Bush can stumble out of office in a year and a half
with another "mission accomplished" and the claim that he had won a victory
in the "war on terror." Plan B sounds like another cockamamie scheme cooked up by the neocons. The Democrats in Congress will tear it to shreds. Their presidential candidates will repudiate it. The public will be profoundly skeptical. There is no reason to believe that it would work any better than previous brilliant strategic schemes. Nor will it diminish the public demand that the United States get out of Iraq immediately. A new president, even if he is a Republican, will find it very hard not to respond to such a demand. Indeed, the conceit that an unpopular -- and increasingly despised -- lame-duck president can control the decisions of his successor is the most arrogant assumption yet of an administration that has lived off arrogance. |
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There is also a moral issue. A war that was unjust at the beginning
because it was based on deceptions does not become any less immoral because
it ends slowly. Besides, if one believes the current polls, the three finalists in November 2008 will be liberal Democrats -- indeed, New York Democrats. Sen. Hillary Clinton is a real Democrat, and Mayor Rudy Giuliani and Mayor Michael Bloomberg are both liberal Democrats who masqueraded as Republicans to win a place on the mayoral ballot that they could not win in a Democratic primary. (The polls also show that any of the Republican candidates, real or fictional, would beat Clinton.) Bush has made such a mess of the country (the passport foul-up is Hurricane Katrina written small) that such a comedic end of his years in the White House is not impossible. It may be time for Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia to prepare a court decision to cancel such a crazy election and declare Vice President Dick Cheney president for life. .
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