Bush determined to prolong lost war

[RedEarth]

The time for bumper-sticker bombast, sound-bite strategizing and gotcha politics as practiced by the politicians who infest the nation's capital needs to end right now, at least where it intersects with the disaster that is the Iraq War.


There's no high ground left to capture by either a stubborn president who won't see or hear the truth about where his path to "victory" in a lost war really leads, or the new Democratic majority in Congress, which is too timid and fearful of doing what they were elected to do - bring an end to the war as swiftly as possible.

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Bush - who vetoed the Iraq funding bill on the fourth anniversary of his infamous "Mission Accomplished" speech that declared an end to combat in Iraq on an aircraft carrier off San Diego - seems ever-more divorced from reality as he heads into the final 20 months of his time in office.


The bumbling incompetence of his appointees and cronies, not to mention their corruption, is revealed by the day. His lawyer buddy from Texas, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, can't remember anything he did or didn't do in his busy days at Justice. The White House can't remember what it did with 5 million e-mail messages. Rove, the president's brain, and GOP political appointees throughout government didn't remember that the Hatch Act prohibits doing political work on government time and in government facilities.


Perhaps, with the passage of the years, the American people will be able to forget that they voted in a president and an administration that visited so bitter a harvest and so sordid a legacy on them. Not once but twice.


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ABOUT THE WRITER


Joseph L. Galloway is former senior military correspondent for Knight Ridder Newspapers and co-author of the national best-seller "We Were Soldiers Once ... and Young." Readers may write to him at: P.O. Box 399, Bayside, Texas 78340; e-mail: [e-mail].





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