Warring Is Hard Work
Yes, the report that Bush is seeking a new Eye-Rack War czar to handle his problems with that shitmire is truly pathetic, but as the New York Times analysis of the situation says, it's not the first time WorstPresidentEver has delegated responsibility for the war:
Four years after the fall of Baghdad, the White House is once again struggling to solve an old problem: Who is in charge of carrying out policy in Iraq?Once again President Bush and his top aides are searching for a high-level coordinator capable of cutting through military, political and reconstruction strategies that have never operated in sync, in Washington or in Baghdad.
Once again Mr. Bush is publicly declaring that his administration has settled on a strategy for victory — this time, a troop increase that is supposed to open political space for Sunnis and Shiites to live and govern together — even while his top aides acknowledge that the White House has never gotten the execution right.
. . .It is telling that Mr. Hadley and Mr. Bush are still wrestling with this problem. Four years ago, both had hoped and expected that by 2007, Iraq would essentially be a cleanup operation, involving a comparatively small American force. Instead, the current force of 145,000 is building to 160,000.
For both men, deciding who in Washington should take the reins on Iraq strategy is hardly a new task.
It was in August 2003, five months after the American invasion, that Mr. Bush ordered the formation of an Iraq Stabilization Group to run things from the White House. That action reflected the first recognition by the White House that Donald H. Rumsfeld’s Pentagon was more interested in deposing dictators than nation-building.
When that group was formed, Mr. Rumsfeld snapped that it was about time that the National Security Council performed its traditional job — unifying the actions of a government whose agencies often spent much of their day battling one another. That approach worked, for a while.
But then the insurgency in Iraq grew formidable, reconstruction efforts were slowed, the State and Defense Departments reverted to bureaucratic spats, and the White House never managed to get its arms around the scope of the problem, in Baghdad or in Washington.
That was evident earlier this year when Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and the new defense secretary, Robert M. Gates, openly clashed on the question of who would provide the personnel for new Provincial Reconstruction Teams that were charged with trying, once again, to rebuild Iraq.
But that was only a small part of the problem: When the Iraq Study Group turned out its recommendations in December for revamping strategy, it cited “a lack of coordination by senior management in Washington,� declaring that “focus, priority setting, and skillful implementation are in short supply.�
Yep, after all his fuckups, Bush still thinks he has a leg to stand on to challenge the Democrats who want this war to end. Bully for him.