And by “rich” I mean rich in irony:
President Bush formally launched a sweeping internal review of Iraq policy yesterday, pulling together studies underway by various government agencies, according to U.S. officials.
The initiative, begun after Bush met at the White House with his foreign policy team, parallels the effort by the bipartisan Iraq Study Group to salvage U.S. policy in Iraq, develop an exit strategy and protect long-term U.S. interests in the region. The two reviews are not competitive, administration officials said, although the White House wants to complete the process before mid-December, about the time the Iraq Study Group’s final report is expected.
I guess he wasn’t completely happy with the prospect of being taken to the woodshed by Jimmy Baker, so he’s decided to attempt a pre-emptive strike against the Iraq Study Group’s report. I wonder who gets assigned the blame under Bush’s official Iraq review? Anyone want to place a bet?
My guess is Rumsfeld, based on who is being put in charge of this effort at whitewashing Bush 43’s backside:
(cont.)
The administration’s new review “was not done in response to the ISG, but it came about as a result of everybody looking at facts on the ground,” a State Department official said. But the administration is basically trying to do in one month what the ISG has done over eight months.
The review will knit together separate efforts that have been underway at the State Department and the Pentagon over the past six weeks, U.S. officials said. It will also include reports by the CIA and the National Security Council. National Security Adviser Stephen J. Hadley will oversee the expedited review and integrate the various papers, officials said.
In a measure of the suddenness and importance of the review, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice this week postponed a long-planned trip to an Asia-Pacific conference in Vietnam to take part in discussions about Iraq.
Rice has been doing “a lot of thinking” about the issue over the past two months, State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said yesterday. “The primary focus is on the State Department’s role in Iraq and are we pursuing the proper policies, are we seeking the right objectives, are we using the right means to achieve those objectives, following the right strategies and right tactics?” he told reporters.
Hadley is Rice’s man, so you can bet she won’t garner any of the fallout. And the fact that Rice rushed back to Washington tells you Bush was none to happy with what he heard from Baker and the other members of the ISG with whom he met Monday. He ordered this review almost immediately after he got that heads up from Baker and Company. I suspect he got on the phone with Condi the minute Baker left the oval office, and she was the one who told him the White House needed to do its own “parallel” review of the situation in Iraq. Bush is desperate to make it appear that whatever action he takes is one he came up with on his own, rather than one forced upon him by Poppy’s retainers.
I guess this Newsweek cover story featuring Daddy as coming to Junior’s rescue really set our Preznit off:
Nov. 20, 2006 issue – George Herbert Walker Bush is a proud father; tears easily come to his eyes when he thinks of his children, all of them, and there is gracious deference in his tone when he talks about the son he calls, with emphasis, “The President.” He is not given to boasting about or bragging on his family; he still hears his mother’s voice warning him to avoid “the Great I Am,” but several times over the past few years the 41st president has mentioned to visitors that the 43rd president has read the Bible in its entirety—not once, the father says, but twice, sticking two fingers in the air. If so, then the incumbent may recall the Song of Moses: “Remember the days of old, consider the years of many generations; ask thy father, and he will show thee; thy elders, and they will tell thee.”
In a conference room filled with commemorative shotguns in his Houston offices last Wednesday, the father settled in to watch his son’s post-election press conference on TV. Lunching on pizza, Bush Senior listened as George W. Bush said the loss of Congress was a “thumping,” promised to “work with” a commission on Iraq chaired by James A. Baker III and Lee Hamilton, and announced that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was resigning. Within two hours the president was in the Oval Office with Rumsfeld and his replacement: Robert M. Gates, Bush Senior’s CIA director and the president of Texas A&M University, the home of Bush 41’s presidential library.
In Houston the phones started ringing, and Bush 41 staffers were pulled away from their pizza. Reporters were calling and e-mailing: would 41 talk about 43’s shake-up? The answer was no, though two perfunctory statements were issued (one for the College Station Eagle and one, as the former president put it, “for everybody else”). Still, the reality spoke for itself. Dad’s team was back—a remarkable course correction in the political life of the son and, quite possibly, in the life of the nation.
Yes, for George the younger, nothing could be worse than being bailed out of trouble once more by his Dad. The fact that whatever report Hadley and Rice can cobble together over the next month will be deeply flawed and superficial is irrelevant. Appearance to this man, who can never admit when he’s wrong, is everything. To him, it will look far better if he is seen as having taken the advice of Rice and Hadley regarding our future course in Iraq, rather than accepting any of the options to be presented to him by Baker and the other ISG members.
So you can forget about whatever plan the ISG comes up with for Iraq. To paraphrase former Nixon Press Secretary Ron Zeigler, the ISG report is “no longer operative” before it even became operative.
