Just because Bush says we've been making progress in Iraq doesn't mean we've been making progress in Iraq. As Bush convenes his "strategy session" with his "war cabinet", it's painfully clear that the opposite is true:
Three years of efforts to accomplish those goals have largely failed. Billions of dollars have been spent on both electricity and security, yet residents of Baghdad get only five to eight hours of power a day, and the American ambassador acknowledged on Friday that the city is "more insecure now than it was a few months ago."The last, best chance? That's comforting. What a disaster. A complete and total disaster. And, there really seems to be no way out. Three years later, the Bush team is finally doing a "strategy session" to figure out what the hell to do in Iraq. And, you have to love the way they describe it:
One of the senior officials involved in the strategy session characterized it as a "last, best chance to get this right," an implicit acknowledgment that previous American-led efforts had gone astray.
It is also an effort to hand off leadership to Mr. Maliki's government and, in an analogy used by several American officials, to begin to let go of the bicycle seat and find out if the Iraqi government can stay upright with less American support.Seems to me, and I'm no foreign policy expert, that running a country, especially a country that's in the middle of a civil war, is a tad more complicated than learning to ride a bike.
