Bush doesn't seem capable of admitting he serious errors

Bush doesn't seem capable of admitting he serious errors
BY ANDREW GREELEY
Copyright by The Chicago Sun Times
December 15, 2006

The long-awaited report of the Iraq Study Group was dead on arrival. It was designed as a proposal by a bipartisan commission of wise men that would provide President Bush with a way out of the Big Muddy into which he had led the country. There was no particular reason to think that any of the major recommendations would in fact change the situation in Iraq.

Certainly, the Shiites and the Sunni must reconcile, but they've been fighting each other for 12 centuries. Attempts to force the Iraq government to end the conflict are doomed from the beginning. Patently, the conflict in Palestine must end for the Middle East to settle down. However, hard-liners on both sides don't want to pay the price of peace, as the failure of President Bill Clinton's Camp David negotiations confirmed.

Clearly, there cannot be peace in Iraq without some kind of cooperation between Iran and Syria. But there is little reason to think that either country wants to take the United States off the hook -- and it is unlikely that the president would negotiate with those countries even if Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice would permit him. James Baker and Lee Hamilton were quite clear that there was no guarantee that any of these efforts would work or even be accepted by the president.

However, they would provide the administration with something to do for the next year before the president began to "draw down" American troops in the first quarter of 2008, just before the presidential campaign began in earnest.

The president and the residual hawks in his administration could say, "Look, we tried to do everything they suggested and it's just not working." Presumably Baker, who helped the president steal the election in 2000, thought that his protege was flexible enough to take that route out of the Big Muddy.

It seemed obvious from the beginning that the president was not about to buy into such a scenario. He was still the commander in chief, his spokesman told us. He was still the "decider." The ISG members were repeating, in muted language, the criticism of the "liberals," who are cowards who want to cut and run. His scary behavior at the press conference with Tony Blair, in which he verbally assaulted a British journalist, left no doubt that he was not backing off from his previous views. Jabbing his fingers, shouting, swaggering, smirking, he was fighting off all his enemies. When he feels he is under attack, the president digs in and strikes back.

It is late in the day to wonder if the president has the character required of a man who must play his role. Strength for him means single-minded stubbornness and very little else. He does not seem capable of admitting that he has made serious mistakes -- which presidents such as Kennedy, Johnson, Reagan and Clinton were able to do. He is innocent of his father's suave flexibility, to say nothing of the evasiveness of FDR, for whom there was no hole deep enough that he could not slip out. Even if the country and his party and his legacy are deep in the Big Muddy, there is nothing in his personality which permits this president to lead the way out until the mission is accomplished. He will certainly not change his goals merely because the Democrats won a mid-term election.

The "new strategy" that he is going to unveil as a Christmas gift to the nation will likely be a spin on the old strategy. He will tell us that he has read all the recommendations and this is what he has decided. This spin might well hearten some of his faithful followers and win him a few points in the polls for awhile, but it will not stop the killing in Iraq.

It will be interesting -- and horrible -- to keep track of how many Americans die in Iraq during 2008.

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, who strongly supported the war in 2003, now says that it will take either 10 minutes or 10 years to end the Iraq incursion. One must end it by ending it. Despite the caution and the hopes of the ISG, it will require a different president to grasp that overwhelming truth.