As sure as the sun goes up , so long as America continues to occupy/liberate/help Iraq, 230 American troops will be killed every 100 days. Macabre? Defeatist? Perhaps, but it is unavoidably true. And this sorry fact is the result of the Adminstration’s inability to confront reality. (Ultimately, reality does matter.) What’s worse, when confronted with reality, the Adminstration doesn’t know what to do. Here we are, more than three years into this mess in Iraq and they are "investigating" what to do evidence Mr. Gates recent trip to Iraq. What was he looking for? Who knows, but we will have to wait until after the first of the year to find out. After the first of the year? Where is the urgency? I can’t imagine Roosevelt assuring America that he’d respond to the Germans attack at the Battle of the Bulge after the first of the year.
There are 140,000 Americans in a war zone working under an admitted failed plan and our President says he won’t be able to reformulate a plan until after the first of the year. Huh? Those American men and women are in harms way now and they deserve a revised plan yesterday. I guess Bush was suddenly surprised things were not going well and a revised plan needed to be formulated. Forgetting for a moment that a plan should have already been formulated for a worse case scenario before we invaded – most adults do this sort of planning all the time – the real insult is that when the Administration was finally forced to acknowledge the facts in Iraq they have done nothing. No increase in troops, no decrease in troops, no redeployment of troops, nothing. All they have done is vocie platitudes and accuse their detractors of being wimps. The fact of the matter is that since the election where Bush and his ilk were effectively told that his Administration’s handling was useless, he has done nothing. It’s eight weeks since the election and all we have to show for it is the resignation of Rumsfeld for Gates, who is "investigating" what to do in Iraq. Well, I for one am not fooled. Mr. Bush has been a failure in virtually everything and his reformulated plan will fail as well. He's got he Midas touch in reverse. And the losers? Those 233 Americans who get killed every 100 days. And for what? Nothing. It's the second Texan President in my lifetime who hasn't got the nads to do the right thing for fear of looking like a wimp. In short, too much testosterone and not enough brains.