Bush's Final Year Off To A Hell Of A Start

The Bush Administration kicked off their final year by acknowledging that there wouldn't be any progress on the international front.

Only a few months ago, senior officials predicted that before their exit, they could deliver the Middle East peace deal that had eluded so many predecessors. But this month, as President Bush toured Israel and the West Bank, officials made it clear that the deal he's now talking about is not a long-awaited final agreement, but a preliminary pact to set the terms for talks.

In addition, the administration's efforts to get North Korea and Iran to end their nuclear programs have suffered deflating setbacks in recent weeks. And although the administration's greatest foreign policy undertaking, Iraq, has seen encouraging security improvements, the goal of Iraqi political reconciliation remains distant.

The upshot is that the Bush administration is going to be spending the next year managing crises and tidying up messes until the next president takes over, rather than reaching legacy milestones, as officials recently had hoped.

Amazing, so you apparently can't spend seven years neglecting global problems and then expect to solve them all in the way that a college student crams for a test.

The foreign policy landscape, from the perspective of the Bushies, isn't actually so bad. No, they're not likely to get their glorious war in Iran, no matter how much the President disavows the assessments of the intelligence community. This clumsy Gulf of Tonkin facsimile, forever to be known as the Filipino Monkey incident, will make any other effort to propagandize for war fall on deaf ears.

So no, they didn't get their war. But they're hoping to escape Iraq by the skin of their teeth, creating a situation that is untenable but that they won't be blamed for. And that was the entire point.

As the violence in Baghdad and Anbar province abates, the political and economic dysfunction enveloping Iraq has become all the more apparent. The recent agreement to rehabilitate some former Baathists notwithstanding, signs of lasting Sunni-Shiite reconciliation are scant. The United States has acquired a ramshackle, ungovernable and unresponsive dependency that is incapable of securing its own borders or managing its own affairs. More than three years after then-national security adviser Condoleezza Rice handed President Bush a note announcing that "Iraq is sovereign," that sovereignty remains a fiction [...]

In short, the surge has done nothing to overturn former secretary of state Colin Powell's now-famous "Pottery Barn" rule: Iraq is irretrievably broken, and we own it. To say that any amount of "kicking ass" will make Iraq whole once again is pure fantasy. The U.S. dilemma remains unchanged: continue to pour lives and money into Iraq with no end in sight, or cut our losses and deal with the consequences of failure.

In only one respect has the surge achieved undeniable success: It has ensured that U.S. troops won't be coming home anytime soon. This was one of the main points of the exercise in the first place. As AEI military analyst Thomas Donnelly has acknowledged with admirable candor, "part of the purpose of the surge was to redefine the Washington narrative," thereby deflecting calls for a complete withdrawal of U.S. combat forces. Hawks who had pooh-poohed the risks of invasion now portrayed the risks of withdrawal as too awful to contemplate. But a prerequisite to perpetuating the war -- and leaving it to the next president -- was to get Iraq off the front pages and out of the nightly news. At least in this context, the surge qualifies as a masterstroke. From his new perch as a New York Times columnist, William Kristol has worried that feckless politicians just might "snatch defeat out of the jaws of victory." Not to worry: The "victory" gained in recent months all but guarantees that the United States will remain caught in the jaws of Iraq for the foreseeable future.

There's enough going on for the fabulists to continue the lie about success, and the military can bomb the place into submission so that they can create a narrative that things are stable. But really, the Bushies are invested in forcing the successor to keep the war going, mainly by ensuring that the Iraqis are so dependent on us that leaving would unleash short-term chaos.

We're now seeing a lame duck just trying to get out of Washington before everything caves in.