Stop the speculation

Let's put an end to the questions of whether Bush will accept the recommendations of the Iraq Study Group. He won't.

Bush said, "There is one thing I'm not going to do. I am not going to pull our troops off the battlefield before the mission is complete." Does that sound like he's looking for a graceful exit from Iraq? Or any exit?

And what is that mission, anyway? Kill every terrorist in the world, so nobody remembers how to utilize the TACTIC of terrorism? Kill enough people that the Iraqis start loving the United States, beg us for some democracy at gunpoint, accept our values and beliefs, and build statues of George Bush, their liberator?

A statue would beat the shit out of Baghdad's tribute to poppy. Take that, old man.

Call me old fashioned, but I'm of the school that believes an Oedipal pissing contest is an insufficient reason for leaving our troops in harm's way.

But although the administration will reject the ISG's recommendations, it will pretend to consider them. After all, considering them is what adults would do.

White House advisers say Bush won't react in detail to the ISG report for several weeks, while he assesses it and awaits various internal government reports on the situation from his own advisers. Bush tells aides he doesn't want to "outsource" his role as commander in chief. Some Bush allies say this is a way to buy some time as the president tries to decide how to deal with rising pressure to alter his strategy in Iraq and hopes the critical media focus on the Iraq war will soften.

Translation: We will look for some face-saving opportunities that don't require us to do anything that could be intrepreted as admitting failure.

"We have a classic case of circling the wagons," says a former adviser to Bush the elder. "If President Bush changes his policy in Iraq in a fundamental way, it undermines the whole premise of his presidency. I just don't believe he will ever do that."

I was going to write essentially the following, but Josh saved me the trouble.

I'm not sure I've ever heard anything truer said on the whole sorry topic of this war. And it gets to the heart of the issue. He won't ever change course. Not because there's anyone who can't see that the present course is a catastrophe, but because changing course would cut the legs from under the collective denial of the president and his supporters. As bad as things get they can still pretend they're on the way to getting better. It's a long hard slog to January 2009 when it becomes someone else's fault. Once they pull the plug themselves, though, they admit it was all a disaster, that the whole presidency was, in Dick Gephardt's half forgotten phrase, "a miserable failure."

That is why we're in Iraq today. Get your head around it.

Bush is not pulling the troops out. His strategy is to do nothing until Iraq becomes someone else's problem. Because at this point, the strategy isn't about a U.S. victory in Iraq, it's about Bush's avoiding blame for failure.