``I fully expect for him to continue to assert that we can have success in Iraq, in spite of any evidence to the contrary, until the day he leaves office. He will stall, patch things together, anything to avoid the appearance of an acknowledgment of failure...''
------
I came to this conclusion sometime in late summer or early fall when I thought about the possibility that the Democrats could win back the House and maybe the Senate. I was thinking about the consequences for them. What would they win? Nothing but a huge mess partly of their own making. If they didn't move quickly and clearly to turn around the ruin of the Congress by all the internal or institutional rules installed by the Republican majority as their first order of business, and then proceed to dismantle the legislative nightmares, they were going to inherit all the failures and mess of the last six years, including Iraq.
Re-setting the clock on all the legislation is probably something they can't do, since most of it would require voting over rides on vetoes. But if they made the effort, and let the vetoes stand, then that would put the responsibility on the re-calcitrant Bush executive branch. And then there are the hearings, subpoenas and other means to begin dismantling the outrageous concentration of power installed by the president.
The other thing the Democrat led Congress can do is start dividing the military by going back to recent retired top brass and policy makers and get them to testify to all the blunders, mistakes, and illegalities that have attended this war, and are still going on.
And of course they can develop their own legislative program to highlight the costs of the war, separate out the direct military expenditures from all the obscurities the Pentagon wants to use as a mask. And it would certainly help this effort a lot if the Democrats had the backbone to go after the egregious corporate waste, fraud, and abuse privatizing the military has costed the Rumsfeld Pentagon, including of course the disasters of reconstruction in Iraq.
All of the above sets up a solid political foundation, that is a solid and detailed account of disaster after disaster for getting out of Iraq in a direct confrontation with Bush.
The basic theory here is that once a long and detailed record of abuse and failure is established on the record and in the public eye, then Bush will not be able to creditably stall out the clock and then claim the Democrats lost Iraq. Of course he and the Republicans will do just that, but it will have no weight at all. It will just be the last lie in a very long chain of lies.
Yes, I've been dreaming...
CG