Reality Bites

via Glenn Greenwald, guest poster Anonymous Liberal gets it down to the real nitty-gritty:

Iraq in a Nutshell

By Anonymous Liberal

“What I want to hear from you is how we’re going to win,” he quoted the president as warning his commanders, “not how we’re going to leave.”


That's the reality. For two more years, we are stuck with a president who equates any exit strategy with defeat, a president who is "not interested in any ideas that would simply allow American forces to stabilize the violence." Bush is a man paralyzed by a need to salvage his own historical legacy, a man so personally invested in a failed policy that he cannot allow himself to see it for what it is, much less fix it.

It's time to stop proposing magical plans that Bush will never implement. It's time to stop coming up with ways of providing Bush "political cover" for leaving Iraq; he doesn't want it. It's time to start playing hardball. It's time to start holding hearings and exerting whatever leverage is available to put pressure on the White House. The only way significant change will occur is if Bush finds himself so politically isolated that those around him feel it necessary to stage some sort of intervention.