Tannishblog

Just hours after president Bush fed the media bovine offal regarding bipartisan cooperation in Washington, the lame duck Republican congress starts leveraging for John Bolton. Look for them to try to cement more of their worst decisions before they go.

Now, those damned cut-and-run Democrats are angling for troop withdrawals in Iraq. No doubt righty bloggers are told-you-soing as I write this. So much for bipartisanship.

"You keep using that word… I do not think it means what you think it means."

Perhaps the dictionaries have the word mis-defined. It certainly mystifies me. Neither party will miss a chance to defy the other, or should I say mis-defy the other. I guess we should pronounce the term "my-partisanship."

As things pertain to Iraq: Something new must be tried. While I cannot say if withdrawal is a good idea, I feel certain that staying the course ™ hasn’t worked. As near as I can fathom (without digging too deep in the loamy mire of Right Blogistan) the argument against troop redeployment goes something like this: "We can’t leave now! The country will devolve into civil war!"

Somehow, I gather, it’s better to stay there and kill-or-be-killed, to risk more Iraqi families breeding anti-Americanism as they mourn their dead while Americans patrol their streets, to risk more American lives, than is it to leave gradually, and let them kill themselves as they are doing already, to have them mourn their loved ones while wondering where their nation’s peacekeepers are hiding. They’ll hate us either way. We deserve it. Iraqi problems stem from a well-documented historical hatred that, like him or not, Saddam Hussein we able to control. America doesn’t have patience or resources to stay in Iraq for the couple of generations necessary to restructure cultural biases toward diversity. If indeed that can be accomplished.

So let’s get out. Let’s try that and see how it goes. After all, we’ve shown the world how easily we can go right back in. It’s not like we can fix this war anymore than we can fix our political polarization.