Bush's Frustration

NY Times yesterday:

President Bush made clear in a private meeting this week that he was concerned about the lack of progress in Iraq and frustrated that the new Iraqi government — and the Iraqi people — had not shown greater public support for the American mission, participants in the meeting said Tuesday.

Those who attended a Monday lunch at the Pentagon that included the president’s war cabinet and several outside experts said Mr. Bush carefully avoided expressing a clear personal view of the new prime minister of Iraq, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki.
But in what participants described as a telling line of questioning, Mr. Bush did ask each of the academic experts for their assessment of the prime minister’s effectiveness.
“I sensed a frustration with the lack of progress on the bigger picture of Iraq generally — that we continue to lose a lot of lives, it continues to sap our budget,” said one person who attended the meeting. “The president wants the people in Iraq to get more on board to bring success.”

More generally, the participants said, the president expressed frustration that Iraqis had not come to appreciate the sacrifices the United States had made in Iraq, and was puzzled as to how a recent anti-American rally in support of Hezbollah in Baghdad could draw such a large crowd. “I do think he was frustrated about why 10,000 Shiites would go into the streets and demonstrate against the United States,” said another person who attended.
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From the Daily Kos:

...reality is coming back to bite BushCo in the butt--all the purple fingers in Iraq can't actually bring about democracy. An election conducted during a foreign occupation and absent any domestic normalization or reconciliation isn't a real election, and the violence just keeps getting worse.

Along with a sharp increase in sectarian attacks, the number of daily strikes against American and Iraqi security forces has doubled since January. The deadliest means of attack, roadside bombs, made up much of that increase. In July, of 2,625 explosive devices, 1,666 exploded and 959 were discovered before they went off. In January, 1,454 bombs exploded or were found....

"The insurgency has gotten worse by almost all measures, with insurgent attacks at historically high levels," said a senior Defense Department official who agreed to discuss the issue only on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak for attribution. "The insurgency has more public support and is demonstrably more capable in numbers of people active and in its ability to direct violence than at any point in time."

A separate, classified report by the Defense Intelligence Agency, dated Aug. 3, details worsening security conditions inside the country and describes how Iraq risks sliding toward civil war, according to several officials who have read the document or who have received a briefing on its contents.

The administration continues to steadfastly deny that Iraq is sliding toward civil war, much less in the throes of one right now. Despite all evidence to the contrary, they insist that everything is going according to plan. Meanwhile, commanders on the ground have to try to marshall limited resources to respond to increasing violence around the country, like some kind of gruesome game of whack-a-mole, deploying troops first here and then there, with casualty counts continuing apace and serious injuries increasing.

Some see movement in the administration on Iraq, an indication that perhaps what can only be called the real reality is sinking in.
"Senior administration officials have acknowledged to me that they are considering alternatives other than democracy," said one military affairs expert who received an Iraq briefing at the White House last month and agreed to speak only on condition of anonymity.

"Everybody in the administration is being quite circumspect," the expert said, "but you can sense their own concern that this is drifting away from democracy."

But I don't buy it. Here's Bush today:
President Bush said critics of his Iraq policies are advocating a "cut and run" strategy that would draw terrorists to American soil.
"Leaving before we complete our mission would create a terrorist state in the heart of the Middle East, a country with huge oil reserves that the terrorist network would be willing to use to extract economic pain from those of us who believe in freedom," Bush said Wednesday.
"If we leave before the mission is complete, if we withdraw, the enemy will follow us home," he said.

Is Bush an idiot? I'll leave the final word to Wolcott:

Is water wet?
Is Colin Farrell stubbly? . . .

Unlike other two-term presidents, Bush hasn't grown in office, become an old familiar whose irritating traits and lapses could be accepted almost affectionately, like Reagan's dottiness. He's demonstrably diminished, dwarfed by the reality that he continues to deny and repeating himself in press conferences like a robot whose wiring is on the fritz, for whom words and phrases are nothing more than pre-programmed units of sound. He's more irritating and dangerous than ever before, because he doesn't know anything, doesn't know or care that he doesn't know anything, and yet persists in a path of destruction as if it were the road to salvation. It's finally dawned on responsible minds that Bush could take all of us down with him before he and the neocons are through.
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I'm sure that nobody could have anticipated the fact that Iraqi's wouldn't respond well to a pre-emptive invasion and occupation.... experimenting with unfamiliar forms of government, a death toll well above 50,000 people and so on. That's a sweet deal! I'm sure American's would respond passively if we were invaded by France tommorow. Nobody could have anticipated....