I dunno. Maybe formulate a PLAN?

Maybe admit you can't pacify a country with 150,000 troops -- and then do something about it?

Maybe open his eyes and make a frank assessment of the situation and figure out what is and is not achievable, and at what cost?

Instead of just smiling and saying "everything will be fine" and continuing to poorly execute a bad idea?

I'm a member of the "we broke it, we bought it" camp; we have to stay until some semblance of order is established. But that presupposes that Bush is doing something useful to establish that order.

I'd like to see some frank talk from Bush that indicates he is able to recognize reality, and then hear how he plans to deal with it. Instead we get more vacuous bromides about how we have to be "strong" and it will be "tough" but we'll win in the end.

That sounds less and less convincing every time he says it.

I get so frustrated when I see mistakes compounded by sheer ignorant stubbornness. We went in with too few troops and *zero* plan for the postwar period. Zero. Nada. Zilch. Then we disbanded the Iraqi Army and began the ill-thought-out deBaathification campaign.

That's bad enough; but do you suppose over the intervening two years we might have learned our lesson and fixed it?

No. Instead I see western representatives and the Iraqi government hiding behind barricades in the Green Zone. I see our military conduct "sweeps" -- retaking the same ground over and over again, watching the insurgents move out ahead of our units and then move back in once we've gone. We know from decades of hard experience that such tactics don't work. But we're resorting to them because we don't have enough boots on the ground.

We're training the Iraqis to take over -- but two years in there's barely a brigade that U.S. commanders trust, and much of the military and police forces are infiltrated by either terrorists or militias. And we're reluctant to give the Iraqis weapons for fear those weapons will be used against us.

And let's not talk about the political situation. Hard Driver talks about making sure we arm the democrats and not the fanatics -- well good luck telling them apart.

We're trying to rebuild Iraq -- in a situation where security is so bad that projects are ruinously expensive, contractors are attacked in broad daylight and infrastructure is damaged almost as fast as we put it up.

And we're doing it all alone because Bush flipped off the rest of the world in his eagerness to invade.

Now the Brits and the Shia are squaring off in Basra, perhaps a sign of things to come in the heretofore mostly peaceful south. Meanwhile, our presence in Iraq is riling up the entire Muslim world, creating thousands of new terrorists and giving them valuable battlefield training.

The number of ways we continue to screw up because Bush refuses to recognize reality just stagger the mind. And all at the bargain basement price of $400 billion and 2,000 American lives.

Feh. Sorry about the screed. I get so frustrated sometimes that Bush has dug us such a deep hole that we have no honorable choice but to "stay the course." And instead of recognizing the hole and the bad decisions stacked upon bad decisions that led to it, he smiles vacantly and says "everything will be fine." And keeps digging.

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Man up.