What World Are They Living In?
They say the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, each time expecting a different result.
That’s about how I felt watching President Bush get testy, then downright angry, at last week’s press conference with Tony Blair. It’s painful to watch Bush struggle to explain why we are still in Iraq and why we will remain there. He and those yes-men left standing seem to think Americans just don’t “get it,” so he will have to explain it to us rubes over and over, until it penetrates our thick skulls. Watching Bush talk about Iraq these days makes me feel like I’m three years old and Daddy is explaining to me yet again why I shouldn’t take the scissors to the cat’s whiskers.
Here’s a perfect example, from the press conference following his meeting with Tony Blair:
I also believe we’re going to succeed. I believe we’ll prevail. Not only do I know how important it is to prevail, I believe we will prevail. I understand how hard it is to prevail.
Yes, we get it, for crying out loud: success is good. Failure is bad. Success is achieved by prevailing. Quitters never win, winners never quit.
Then came the most disturbing part:
But I also want the American people to understand that if we were to fail — and one way to assure failure is just to quit, is not to adjust, and say it’s just not worth it — if we were to fail, that failed policy will come to hurt generations of Americans in the future.
No one is suggesting we quit. No one has said it’s not worth it. What Bush and his ilk fail to understand is that we do get it. We get every last bit of it. A change of strategy is not quitting. Timelines for troop withdrawals coupled with diplomacy and negotiations over things like borders and oil revenue and plans to maintain terrorist surveillance operations is not quitting. It’s a different way of doing things. Bush and his minions keep telling us that if we don’t do it their way, we’re quitting. But their way is to keep doing the same old failed tactics that have led to thousands of dead soldiers and civillians and saddled our grandchildren with an enormous debt.
Bush then painted a grim picture of what might happen if we “quit”:
And as I said in my opening statement, I believe we’re in an ideological struggle between forces that are reasonable and want to live in peace, and radicals and extremists. And when you throw into the mix radical Shia and radical Sunni trying to gain power and topple moderate governments, with energy which they could use to blackmail Great Britain or America, or anybody else who doesn’t kowtow to them, and a nuclear weapon in the hands of a government that is — would be using that nuclear weapon to blackmail to achieve political objectives — historians will look back and say, how come Bush and Blair couldn’t see the threat? That’s what they’ll be asking. And I want to tell you, I see the threat and I believe it is up to our governments to help lead the forces of moderation to prevail. It’s in our interests.
Yes, indeed, it’s really too bad that no one “saw that threat” oh, maybe, back in the 1970s, after Iran took American hostages for a year, after the Arab Oil Embargo, after gas rationing had shown Americans how vulnerable they are to foreign oil cartels. It’s really too bad that no one heeded a president named Jimmy Carter, whose radical energy plan, if we’d stuck with it, would by now have us independent of foreign oil, and the kind of scare tactics Bush describes. It’s too bad that the first thing a president named Ronald Reagan did was remove the solar energy panels from the White House roof, because they weren’t manly enough.
Now, who didn’t see what coming? And you think the GOP has got the smarts and vision to get us out of this mess? Puh-leeze, they’re the ones who got us into this mess to begin with.
Those of us on the left who have been crying for higher CAFE standards, government conservation incentives, investment in non-fossil energy R&D, and other energy independence strategies have been laughed off as “tree huggers” and “crunchy-granola hippie-types.” Dick Cheney called energy conservation “a sign of personal virtue, but it is not a sufficient basis for a sound, comprehensive energy policy.” Right, but war is? Give me a break.
War is not the answer. It’s not the answer to the energy problem and it’s not the answer to Bush’s faltering legacy. There are other, better ways of achieving our goals in the 21st Century. Sadly, President Bush and the GOP just don’t seem to “get it.”