Another
superb essay from
New York Times foreign policy wonk Tom Friedman. He reams the President and his #1 minion:
"...[The war] takes resources and legitimacy, and the Bush team has provided too little of both.
From the start, this has always been a Karl Rove war. Lots of photo-ops, lots of talk about "I am a war president," lots of premature banners about "Mission Accomplished," but totally underresourced, because the president never wanted to ask Americans to sacrifice. The Bush motto has been: "We're at war, let's party -- let's cut taxes, forgo any gasoline tax, not mobilize too many reserves and, by the way, let's disband the Iraqi Army and unemploy 500,000 Iraqi males, because that's what Ahmad Chalabi and his pals want us to do...
I know the right thing to do now is to stay the course, defeat the bad guys, disarm the militias and try to build a political framework that will hold the now wavering Shiite majority on our side -- because if we lose them, the game is over. But this will take time and sacrifice, and the only way to generate enough of that is by enlisting the U.N., NATO and all of our allies to make the development of a decent state in Iraq a global priority.
Without more allies, without more global legitimacy ... we cannot win in Iraq. We will be building a house with bricks and no cement. In that case, we will have to move to Plan B. Too bad we never really had Plan A."
Sounds like a strong argument for a
regime change at home, doesn't it?
Cross posted at Points West.