Four years after declaring victory, Bush vetos Iraq withdrawal plan
Four years to the day since he landed a plane on an aircraft carrier dressed in a pilot's costume and declared "mission accomplished", the deserter George Bush has vetoed a bill promising $124bn (£62bn) for American troops. He has done so because the said bill also includes a withdrawal date for the troops, which prevents Bush being able to hand the responsibility for the Iraq war over to his successor, which is actually his deepest wish.
Bush wants to be able to claim that he did not lose the Iraq war and is anxious to push that ignominy towards whoever succeeds him, and he's not too concerned over how many young men and women, both American and Iraqi, have to die to enable him to carry out this subterfuge.
The truth is that Bush has no plan for victory. His "surge" is simply an attempt to take Baghdad in the hope that, having control of the capitol, the rest of the country will fall into line. This theory has already been revealed as flawed in Afghanistan where Karzai controls Kabul and bugger all else. But then, the point of "the surge" has never actually been victory, the point of "the surge" is to stave off the day when the size of Bush's defeat becomes impossible to ignore.
On that day Bush hopes to be no longer in office so that he can claim that, were he still the President, he would have handled things differently.
It's not a particularly honourable way to behave, but then, he's not a particularly honourable man.
3,350 US servicemen have died in a war that has cost more than $400 billion and Iraq is less stable now than it was four years ago.
Mr Reid and Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the House of Representatives, are due to meet President Bush today to discuss a way forward, but nothing the latter said last night contained any hint of compromise.
Such a clash on war powers between America's executive and legislature is rare, even though the Iraq conflict has lasted longer than America's involvement in the Second World War. Even the "quagmire" of Vietnam produced nothing quite like it, although that war lasted eight years and claimed 58,000 US lives.
The Democrats have suggested that a possible compromise might be to impose a series of benchmarks upon the new Iraqi government, but all indications are that the Bush administration will resist this. The administration's line appears to be to warn the Iraqis that their patience is not "unlimited" whilst showing them that, as long as Bush is in power, their patience will never run out.
However, there are some signs that Bush's own party may be growing tired of his intransigence.
But the Republican whip, Roy Blunt, the party's No 2 official in the House, said it would be " premature" to rule out benchmarks. Republican wavering reflects the unpopularity of a war that two-thirds of Americans oppose. These doubts are set to grow as the 2008 election approaches and with it the prospect of another Republican drubbing.Any Republican who faces re-election in 2008 knows how deeply unpopular this was has become and there must surely be many who would like to face the electorate with this nightmare behind them.
The notion that this war can simply be fronted out and turned into a question of patriotism has been shown by the campaign of Senator McCain to be a suicide course. The American public aren't going to buy that line.
So, I can see why it suits Bush to try to stave off the inevitable, but I can't for the life of me see how this helps his party.
Maybe these rubber stamping lemmings will eventually act to save their own skins, for if they don't, then the November mid terms will be only a taster for the fate that awaits them in 2008.
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