[Mb-civic] SHOULD READ: No Way Out for Bush and Co. - Eugene Robinson - Washington Post Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

No Way Out for Bush and Co.

By Eugene Robinson
Tuesday, November 22, 2005; Page A29

As visual metaphors go, it was a lavishly gilded lily of an image, a 
hanging curveball across the plate, a George Tenet-style slam-dunk: A 
weary President Bush, trying to escape a news conference in Beijing on 
Sunday, strides away from the microphone to a pair of locked doors, 
which he pulls and tugs in vain. No exit , the image screamed. No way 
out. Of course, George Bush will inevitably get out of the mess he has 
made -- he leaves office in three years and two months, not that 
anyone's counting. But the rest of us will be left with his handiwork: 
crushing national debt, rising economic inequality, a poisoned political 
atmosphere and, oh, yes, the war in Iraq. We're the ones trapped in the 
dark with no exit sign in sight.

As the debate over the war grows in passion and bitterness, the 
administration can't seem to settle on the right way to answer its 
critics. Last week the party line was that attacking the war was somehow 
beyond the pale. The president quickly endorsed Vice President Cheney's 
snarling sound bite -- that it was "dishonest and reprehensible" to 
suggest that anyone cooked the prewar intelligence on Iraq. And when 
Rep. John Murtha (D-Pa.) called for a withdrawal of U.S. troops, the 
White House response was to link the 73-year-old decorated Vietnam 
veteran with filmmaker Michael Moore and the "extreme liberal wing of 
the Democratic Party."

House Republicans dutifully followed the script and went on the attack, 
but before the weekend was over the White House had changed tack. Now 
the line is that criticism is to be expected in a democracy, even 
criticism of the war. The president is all but sprinkling Murtha with 
rose petals.

Even Cheney, the hawks' hawk, managed to turn conciliatory. Sort of. In 
a speech yesterday, he swallowed his castor oil: "I do not believe it is 
wrong to criticize the war on terror or any aspect thereof," he said, 
going on to describe Murtha as "a good man, a Marine, a patriot." He 
then repeated his "dishonest and reprehensible" line to describe those 
who would impugn the administration's honesty, and went on to give the 
same muddled rationale for U.S. Iraq policy that we've heard in the 
past. The fact is that the White House is losing the public debate over 
Iraq -- and it's not hard to understand why.

Cheney's umbrage aside, there are legitimate questions about whether the 
nation was snowed into a costly war. Even if you give the administration 
the benefit of the doubt and assume that the prewar intelligence 
failures stemmed from incompetence, not dishonesty, there's still no 
defense for the mistakes that were made in the conduct of the war. And 
the abuses that have been committed in the name of the United States -- 
arbitrary and indefinite detention, wholesale flouting of the Geneva 
Conventions, a string of secret prisons, interrogation by torture, Abu 
Ghraib -- should result in more people being sent to jail than a couple 
of ill-trained enlisted reservists.

The administration is losing the public debate because of its many 
missteps and failures, but also because of its insistence on conflating 
the war in Iraq with the larger "war on terror." Does anyone understand 
what "war on terror" means? The country was attacked by a murderous 
association of Islamic fundamentalists led by Osama bin Laden. Last we 
heard, he was still alive and well, probably in some cave in 
northwestern Pakistan. That's a long way from Iraq.

The president says that Iraq is a test of our nation's resolve, that 
anything less than victory will confirm the enemy's view that America 
lacks the stomach for a fight. But "stay the course" doesn't play as a 
strategy when the course seems to lead nowhere. What is victory in Iraq? 
When will we know we've won? When the simmering, low-level civil war 
we've ignited sparks into full flame and somebody takes over the 
country? When a new government in Baghdad declares its eternal 
brotherhood and friendship with Tehran?

The mess that George Bush and Co. have created in Iraq doesn't have an 
unmessy solution. Murtha's plan -- just get out -- isn't really 
attractive, but at least it's a plan. The saying goes that when you're 
in a hole, the first thing to do is to stop digging. But the president, 
like the optimistic kid in the old joke, just keeps burrowing deeper 
into the pile of manure, even though by now we can be pretty sure that 
there's no pony down there.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/21/AR2005112100970.html
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