Junior’s MO Is Shirking Responsibility

May I interrupt the clamorous political debate raging in Washington over Iraq to set the record straight? Contrary to what his critics say, President Bush does have a timetable for ending the war. He plans to hand the disaster over to his successor at high noon on Jan. 20, 2009.

If Iraq is going to have an ugly ending, as it almost surely will, Bush is determined to see that it doesn’t happen on his watch, and there’s not much the Congress can do to foil him short of cutting off funds for the war, a step Democrats apparently are not ready to take.

Bush will keep asking for more time and money. As long as American forces are in Iraq, as long the fighting goes on, the war cannot be labeled a failure, at least in Bush’s mind. To admit defeat, to acknowledge that they blundered and destroyed a nation in the process, and maybe set the stage for even greater mayhem in the Middle East, is not the way of the swaggering pseudo-cowboy from Texas or his delusional and treacherous vice president.

Iraq is an immense human tragedy and major foreign policy debacle, and Bush’s troop surge only delays the terrible day when this fact must be faced. At this point, what happens in Iraq is far more consequential than what happens in Washington, and there is little reason to expect much good news from Iraq in the coming months. So far, the main result of the troop surge is a painful spike in U.S. casualties. It has not quelled the violence or moved Iraq’s sectarian factions closer to political reconciliation. There is no reason to believe the Shiite-dominated Iraqi government, even if it wanted to, is capable of reaching a political accord acceptable to the minority Sunni insurgents, who are inflicting most of the U.S. casualties.

Other than the cost in American blood, does it really matter whether we start withdrawing U.S. forces from Iraq on Oct. 1, as the Democrats called for in the bill Bush vetoed last week, or after the next presidential election? The outcome is likely to be the same – bloody chaos as sectarian factions slaughter each other and settle scores. Is postponing that awful day of reckoning worth the lives and the limbs of hundreds or even thousands more American soldiers?

The president talks about a “way forward” in Iraq; Democrats are talking about a way out of Iraq, and most Americans are with them. But Bush continues to defy both.