BUSH Is Delusional: "What I Want To Hear Is How We're Going To Win-Not How We're Going To Leave"

[kpete]

Chaos Overran Iraq Plan in ’06, Bush Team Says
Constantly lagging a step or two behind events on the ground.

By DAVID E. SANGER, MICHAEL R. GORDON and JOHN F. BURNS
Published: January 2, 2007

WASHINGTON, Dec. 31 — President Bush began 2006 assuring the country that he had a “strategy for victory in Iraq.”
He ended the year closeted with his war cabinet on his ranch trying to devise a new strategy,
because the existing one had collapsed.

...............

“We could not clear and hold,” Stephen J. Hadley, the president’s national security adviser, acknowledged in a recent interview, in a frank admission of how American strategy had crumbled. “Iraqi forces were not able to hold neighborhoods, and the effort to build did not show up. The sectarian violence continued to mount, so we did not make the progress on security we had hoped. We did not bring the moderate Sunnis off the fence, as we had hoped. The Shia lost patience, and began to see the militias as their protectors.” Yet if Mr. Bush does send in more American forces, historians may well ask why it took him so long. Some Bush officials argue that the administration erred by refusing to send in a bigger force in 2003, or by sufficiently bolstering it when the insurgency began to take hold.

This year, decisions on a new strategy were clearly slowed by political calculations. Many of Mr. Bush’s advisers say their timetable for completing an Iraq review had been based in part on a judgment that for Mr. Bush to have voiced doubts about his strategy before the midterm elections in November would have been politically catastrophic.

Mr. Bush came to worry that it was not just his critics and Democrats in Congress who were looking for what he dismissed last month as a strategy of “graceful exit.” Visiting the Pentagon a few weeks ago for a classified briefing on Iraq with his generals, Mr. Bush made it clear that he was not interested in any ideas that would simply allow American forces to stabilize the violence. Gen. James T. Conway, the Marine commandant, later told marines about the president’s message.

“What I want to hear from you is how we’re going to win,” he quoted the president as warning his commanders, “not how we’re going to leave.”

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more at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/02/washington/02war.html?hp&ex=1167800400&en=23c364788b8d276e&ei=5094&partner=homepage

[bdamomma]

1. he is truly delusional didn't he say a few weeks ago we were

not winning? He is totally losing it, his theme is sacrifice, but he has not sacrificed shit. 3,003 deaths for what? for this frat boy? :puke:

[DoYouEverWonder]

2. Bush will never leave his Precious

His precious oil that is.

[C_U_L8R]

3. win WHAT ??

there is nothing to win !!

whatta strategery. yikes.

[pansypoo53219]

7. we will win the oil

silly. and republikkkans will win, because they are the party of conflict. can't trust namby pamby democrats like FDR to win.
or truman. oh wait, korea was a draw.
and and RR 'won' the cold war.

[indepat]

4. What is winning? Will we know it when we see it?

[Mark E. Smith]

5. In other words he doesn't know how to win in Iraq

But if you don't tell him how to do it, then you have no ideas of your own and everything is your fault.

Nyah!

[gratuitous]

6. Gee Coach, the clock's running, there's six seconds left . . .

The other team has the ball and we're down by 25. How do you propose we "win" Coach?

[Batgirl]

8. Just another failure to be denied in his lifelong pattern of behavior

Bush is a classic loser and it's easy to find lists of his past ventures and see how everything he touches turns to shit.

When a normal person screws up, our friend reality is there to teach us the error of our ways. Many of us have areas where reality has to whap us over the head with a board a few times before we really learn not to engage in certain behaviors. I personally still have some of the dents.

I know there are people born into wealth, privilege and political power, who are allowed to experience negative consequences of poor judgment just like everyone else. For some reason, Bush isn't one of them. He's always been shielded from learning these lessons.

How different might things be right now if no one had rescued him from having to go to Viet Nam, or at least, if no one had stepped in to keep him from the consequences of bailing out on his NG service. Or if he hadn't been continually rescued from his business failures by rich and powerful friends of his father. If only they'd stood back and let him find his own way out of the messes he created, even just once or twice. Instead of always being there to clean up after him and rewrite the official history. To rewrite reality.

And now it sounds like he's stomping his feet and insisting that's what must now happen in Iraq. He isn't the one who must change, reality itself must be altered to be in alignment with his fantasies of being a heroic war president.

A few of Bush's greatest hits which show how inevitable it was we would be where we are today WRT Iraq:

"If Bush’s performance in the National Guard were an anomaly, one could reasonably argue that it was just a case of a young man behaving irresponsibly. But the pattern of privilege and deception has repeated itself over and over again in Bush’s life, continuing to this day.

Bush was the C-student who went to prestigious Andover Academy then to Yale.

He was a Vietnam War supporter who avoided going to war by leaping ahead of others on the waiting list to enter the Texas Air National Guard even though he earned the lowest acceptable score on the entrance tests.

He was a heavy drinker and partier who was caught at least once driving while drunk, but again avoided serious trouble. He apparently used cocaine and possibly other hard drugs, though has never been forced to fully account for this destructive behavior.

He was the oilman who couldn’t find oil but still managed to make millions of dollars in business thanks to financial backing from family friends and benefactors.

He was the director of Harken Energy who was once warned by lawyers not to sell stock in the company or risk the appearance of insider trading, but sold the stock anyway without being held accountable. The Securities and Exchange Commission at the time was run by his father’s appointee.

He rose to the highest office in the land by becoming the first person to be sworn in as president without winning the popular vote since 1876.

On Aug. 6, 2001, when he got the CIA’s warning, “Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the U.S.,” he went fishing and never convened his counterterrorism experts to put the government on high alert.

Bush vowed to get bin Laden “dead or alive,” but changed his tune several months later by saying “I truly am not that concerned about him. I know he is on the run. … I just don’t spend that much time on him.”

In March 2003, when Bush ordered the invasion of Iraq – though it had no role in the Sept. 11 attacks – he defied military advice calling for more troops. Though the U.S. military defeated the Iraqi army in three weeks, the undermanned U.S. forces found themselves incapable of restoring order or protecting vital sites, such as the arms depot at al Qaqaa where nearly 380 tons of high-grade explosives disappeared.

When “post-war” Iraq descended into bloody chaos, Bush blamed the situation on what he called “catastrophic success.”

Despite obvious mistakes, Bush has consistently refused to admit any personal errors beyond regrets about a few appointees whom he would not identify. "

Excerpted from http://www.consortiumnews.com/2004/103104.html