"Get your head around it."

That's what Josh Marshall concludes as he puts into words what is almost certainly the prognosis for the future regarding Iraq:

[Bush] won't ever change course.     ...     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.

It's only been a few days now since the Iraq Study Group issued its report and people are still trying to get an idea of what, if anything, Bush will do about the situation in Iraq. Bush only went so far as to say he'd read the report, and therefore it was "important". But other signals coming from the White House indicate that nobody there is really interested in the hard work (really hard work) necessary to implement a change for the better, or even the possibility of a change for the better.

Bush (and Cheney, too) are not going to change anything they control So will there be change? Only if the situation in Iraq overwhelms the U.S. military. That's unlikely. The U.S. military has the air power, artillery and tanks, that insures they can't be defeated in a straight-up military contest. And, there is literally no competition.

So they could remain in Iraq for years, just like the Crusaders did, finding refuge in their castles when the lands they tried to occupy became uncontrollable. About the only event that could displace the U.S. would be some sort of disruption of the supply line from Kuwait, and even then they could probably get by with air delivery.

If Bush doesn't change course (as Marshal and this blog and others anticipate), what will the politics of it be like? It could get to the point where the public accepts the state of affairs and concludes that

"We just have to wait until Bush is out of office before we can get out of Iraq"

In other words, the public acceptance of an uncontrollable president. It might actually fly, mostly because the costs of the war are not being felt for the most part. It's being paid for with borrowed money and the troops at risk (or already dead) come from a small subset of the population who have been largely ignored.

And so we wait. Until January 2009.


posted by Quiddity at 12/08/2006 10:19:00 PM