Well Bush didn't say these exact words, but here'sthe comments from a beautifully-unnamed "senior administration official" in the Washington Post who we take it speaks for Bush: "If you say the next two months are make or break, I think I can predict what we'll see. We will see a sustained series of suicide attacks. It's a really harmful approach. There is a risk you can push [the Iraqi government] off a cliff."
Now, first of all, what is the value of these attacks getting circulated by the Washington Post from unnamed "senior administration officials"? Is Jonathan Weisman breaking news, or engaging in investigative journalism by "cultivating" this kind of "source"? Or is he giving the opportunity for Dick Cheney to rip the opposition anonymously, while all the Democrats in the article come forward under their own names.
Why would the administration makes its comments under the cloak of anonymity? In part, no doubt, because these comments are a direct attack on the voters in 2006. Americans voted for change and we have seen the result:
- Immediate Withdrawal = precipitous catastrophe
- Delayed Withdrawal and timetable = tying the hands of the generals.
- Benchmarks to continue receiving funding = "pushing Iraq off a cliff".
These comments are deeply at odds with the American people, and start to show what happens, in a Democracy, when politicians try to continue a failed and deeply unpopular war. They begin to attack -- and, indeed, make enemies of -- their own citizens. Because Bush specializes in knee-capping and attack, and because this war was such a rankly and noxiously partisan one from the beginning, these attacks are unusually vitriolic. In the next nine months, Bush is going to have no choice but to attack the American people, through the loosely veiled instrument of their representatives, as weak, cowardly, unpatriotic, foolish, incapable of looking ahead, selfish, short-sighted and murderous.
This won't go over well.
Democrats need to frame the attacks in this way: not run away from them but stand up for average citizens who are being smeared. Americans want and have every right to insist on change. We need to take this "pushing off a cliff" line from Bush and his henchman and throw it back at them, rather than being cowed by its aggressiveness. To say that we are "pushing the [Iraqi government] off a cliff" implies a bunch of things
a) that we are cowardly -- you can only push someone off a cliff be being right behind them and then betraying them.
b) that we will produce catastrophe -- the fall off the cliff will be a sudden and precipitous decline
c) that the Iraqis are on firm ground now.
This phrase takes the peaceful, rational, passionate efforts of voters and representatives to end this war and recodes these efforts in terms of violence. It's a classic Rove tactic, accuse your opponent of the very thing that you're doing or have done (as when John Kerry got Bush's own cowardice in the Vietnam War insanely displaced onto him). But this time they are attempting to do this against the American people themselves, who have mandated our government to change course in Iraq, and are horrified by and oppose the continuing carnage, the surge, the lack of timelines, etc.