Our hard-headed decisive leader strikes again:
President Bush said he had no regrets about donning a flight suit to give his “Mission Accomplished” speech on Iraq in May 2003 and would do it all over again if he had the chance, according to excerpts from an television interview released on Sunday.
When asked by Fox News if he still would have put on a flight suit to declare major combat operations in Iraq over, Bush replied, “Absolutely.”
I guess that means we’ve had 900 Americans die in “minor” combat operations, if that’s any comfort to their families.
Several bloggers have noted how this response illustrates how detached from reality Bush is. But it really shouldn’t surprise anyone, should it? For months Bush has been boasting on his ability to smash U.S. foreign policy into the Iraqi wall without blinking. Do you think he’s going to lose sleep over a speech?
I think the more startling or disturbing part of the released excerpts is this:
Amid a rising U.S. death toll and a rash of abductions and beheadings in Iraq, some members of Bush’s own Republican Party have criticized him for not doing enough to secure insurgent areas in Iraq sooner.
But Bush said he also did not regret the decision to withdraw U.S. forces from the rebel stronghold of Falluja earlier this year because he believed the conflict there could have jeopardized the June handover of sovereignty to Iraqis.
You remember Falluja, don’t you? It’s the place where, against the military leaders’ best judgment Bush ordered a rushed attack against the city’s insurgency, then ordered them to pull out before they had finished their objectives. And the reason why? Because Bush didn’t want military operations interfering with the symbolic transfer of power.
How typical. The top priority in Bush world is not in doing the hard work to fix problems, it’s to “keep promises” for use on the campaign trail and to conduct meaningless photo-ops. And that’s one of the reasons Iraq is a mess today.