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Edited on Tue Nov-14-06 07:38 PM by KoKo01
Poppy's Last Rescue by digby Now, he's widely seen as having to call in his daddy's consigliere and top spook. He can't be happy about that.
But the truth is that even daddy's rich, loyal pals can't bail him out of this one.(Read this if you want to see just how hopeless the situation seems at this moment. It's a nightmare.) I suspect that the best they can hope for this time is to stanch the bleeding until they can safely whisk him back to Crawford, dump the mess on the next guy and try to blame the Democrats for the failure.
I hope people understand that James Baker and Robert Gates are in the Bush family business not the "wise old sage who will do what's right for the country" business. Indeed, their entire lives have been devoted to bailing out Bushes.(And they haven't always been successful. Jimmy may have pulled one out for Junior in Florida, but he was called back, much against his will, to get Poppy re-elected and failed.) Their job is simply to try to save Junior from ignominy and that is not necessarily what is in the best interest of the US or Iraq.
It is clear that no matter what this country does now in Iraq, it is impossible to "fix" in any substantial way. We didn't just break the pot at the Pottery Barn, we blew up the whole neighborhood. Going in was, as James Webb wrote back in 2003, "the greatest strategic blunder in modern memor" the war's execution has been the greatest series of tactical mistakes in modern memory --- so much now that it's impossible to see a way out that even leads to some kind of authoritarian stability, much less democracy. And it's very, very easy to see how it can lurch out of control in a dozen different ways.
James Baker and Robert Gates and Joe Lieberman aren't magicians. And they are not going to let anybody say they and Junior "lost Iraq." Don't get your hopes up about these "grown-ups." They are just looking for a way to keep Bush (and in joe's case, himself) from looking like a loser --- and real withdrawal (as opposed to cosmetic) is not going to accomplish that. Everything they do for the next two years will be to save Bush's face and the Republican party, period.
I'm sorry to be so cynical, but I lost any hope that the Bush administration was capable of doing the right thing a long time ago.Scroll down for topic: http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2006_11_01_digbysblog_archive.html#116344678135108734
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