Another Day, Another Justification For Iraq

The surge used to have a political solution as its end goal. The point was to give "breathing space" for the Iraqi government to reach a reconciliation. Now that the surge has been in place and absolutely no political movement has occurred, the new end goal is security. The Bush Administration is just fundamentally dishonest, and listening to their pronouncements with any kind of rational standard is simply folly.

McClatchy actually got this right, as they are wont to do:

Year-by-year, month-by-month, now even day-to-day, we're treated to a different rationale for the Iraq war from a different President George W. Bush.

In the beginning, the reasons for invading Iraq and toppling the dictator Saddam Hussein were his possession of weapons of mass destruction, his nuclear weapons program and his links to the real al Qaida.

When no evidence of the truth of any of those reasons could be found after a year and millions spent in a desperate, failed search, the rationale became the installation of a freely elected democratic government in Baghdad.

That's an important editorial, a chronicle of failure in Iraq. The truth is that even on the Administration's new terms (security),the surge is not working. Violence still reigns and more refugees are leaving in droves, which artificially brings down violence numbers lower than they would be normally.

By both using security as the only benchmark that matters, fudging the numbers about that security, and placing the blame for a lack of political progress on mean ol' Nouri al-Maliki, the President will try to change the way the country views Iraq. The country won't buy it; but sadly, the Congress might.