New York Times: "In the Christmas spirit, the time has come for the reality-based community to reach out to the White House.The Bush warriors are so deluded, they're even faking their fakery.
This week, the president presented a plan-like plan for 'victory' in Iraq, which Scott McClellan rather pompously called the unclassified version of their supersecret master plan. But there would be no way to achieve victory from this plan even if it were a real plan. If this is what they're telling themselves in the Sit Room, we're in bigger trouble than we thought.Talk about your unknown unknowns, as Rummy would say.The National Strategy for Victory must have come from the same P.R. genius who gave President Top Gun the 'Mission Accomplished' banner about 48 hours before the first counterinsurgency war of the 21st century broke out in Iraq.It's not a military strategy - classified or unclassified. It's political talking points - and not even good ones. Are we really supposed to believe that anybody, even the most deeply delusional Bush sycophant, believes the phrase 'Our strategy is working'? The president talked about three neatly definable groups of insurrectionists. But as Dexter Filkins reported in yesterday's New York Times, there are dozens, perhaps as many as a hundred, groups fighting the U.S. Army in Iraq, and they have little, if anything, in common. Mr. Bush's presentation claimed that the U.S. was actually making progress in Iraq. But outside the Bush-Cheney-Rummy bubble, 10 more marines were killed by a roadside bomb outside Falluja, for a total of 2,125 U.S. military deaths so far. The administration must realize it needs a real exit strategy, because it's advertising for one. The U.S. Agency for International Development is offering more than $1 billion for anyone - anyone at all - who can come up with a plan to pacify and rebuild 10 Iraqi cities seen as vital in the war."