Reveals

The GOP know they've lost in Iraq. Even the Bush Administration now knows it, no matter how hard it will be for Bush to ever admit defeat, (he'll punch someone, like the American public, on the way down to ameliorate his pain), no matter that psycho Dick Cheney probably won't ever admit it to himself. The key is the language they're using now:

Of all the words that President Bush used at his news conference this week to defend his policies in Iraq, the one that did not pass his lips was "progress."

For three years, the president tried to reassure Americans that more progress was being made in Iraq than they realized. But with Iraq either in civil war or on the brink of it, Bush dropped the unseen-progress argument in favor of the contention that things could be even worse.

What we're seeing now is like Act III in The Wizard of Oz when Toto tugs the curtain back to reveal the little man behind the big gassy icon. This reveal will continue well into November, despite GOP efforts to create more fog, like conflating the War on Terror (see previous post for the inanity of this lingual construct) with the War in Iraq (on Iraq? vs. Iraq?), or making it seem like the Dems are for immediate withdrawal.

Even overrated Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) is running away from the Administration he has failed to oppose strongly enough to make even a scratch in their disastrous policy, despite his "reputation" as a "maverick":

"One of the biggest mistakes we made was underestimating the size of the task and the sacrifices that would be required," McCain said. "'Stuff happens,' 'mission accomplished,' 'last throes,' 'a few dead-enders.' I'm just more familiar with those statements than anyone else because it grieves me so much that we had not told the American people how tough and difficult this task would be."

How about the real truth, John, that invading Iraq was a mistaken foreign and military policy in the first place. We have the very same monumental screw-ups who got us into that war complaining now that the public isn't being force-fed an alarmist fear diet on Iran like they were able to manipulate the intelligence apparatus and the press into doing with Iraq.

We've done everything Iran could have asked to strengthen their hand in the Middle East, ridding them of their two strongest enemies (the Taliban in neighboring Afghanistan and Saddam Hussein on their Western flank) and now the corrective is more of the same?

I don't downplay the threat of the fundamentalist regime in Iran, mainly to the survival of Israel. However:

The consensus of the intelligence agencies is that Iran is still years away from building a nuclear weapon. Such an assessment angers some in Washington, who say that it ignores the prospect that Iran could be aided by current nuclear powers like North Korea. "When the intelligence community says Iran is 5 to 10 years away from a nuclear weapon, I ask: '‘If North Korea were to ship them a nuke tomorrow, how close would they be then?'"” said Newt Gingrich, the former Republican speaker of the House of Representatives.

"The intelligence community is dedicated to predicting the least dangerous world possible,"” he said.

Some veterans of the intelligence battles that preceded the Iraq war see the debate as familiar and are critical of efforts to create hard links based on murky intelligence.

If you want to see a smart, hard-headed approach to U.S. foreign policy, check out Howard Dean here on Hardball. I think Dean's been penalized the way a lot of pioneers are, for being first when public opinion was going the other way, in this case being a pioneer in truth vs. truthiness.

Chris Matthews tries to get Dean to say he's for an immedwithdrawalrawel, or maybe that's something Matthews favors. In any case, Dean continues to say Dems are for a thoughtful withdrawal plan, based on intelligence that El Presidente may have access to that others don't, while keeping a presence somewhere in the Middle East, just not in the middle of the Civil War.

I think that the reveals are good for the country. I think the Dems do have their philosophy together.

At this point it's enough to say, about virtually every direction our entirely GOP controlled government has been going:

"Change the Course."