Kaplan writes: And it is still unclear, after all this time, how Bush defines "win."
But it is VERY clear. "Win" means preserving the tax cuts tailored for the rich, and preserving viability in the future for the radical right, tax-cuts-uber-alles political tendency. Once you understand this, evreything else becomes very clear.
Look, if Bush actually gave a rat fuck about the war against terror, we wouldn't be in Iraq at all. He would have focused on Afghanistan. It is obvious from how things have played out that force levels of even half that used in Iraq, plus cooperation from other countries sympathetic to the blow we received on 9/11, would have Bin Laden totally out of the picture and the country neutralized completely as any form of threat to the United States or Europe. By 2004, at the latest, the elimination of those who struck at us on 9/11 would have been over.
I'm not going to go into the whys of Bush's decision to take on Iraq, because there are so many -- some even defensible to a point. But what even the most benighted Bush apologists should acknowledge, if they have a shred of concern for their country, is that once it became obvious that the war in Iraq -- the supposed "war for civilization" -- was not going to be a cakewalk, Bush simply bagged the whole thing.
You don't fight a "war for civilization" while you're cutting taxes and refusing any significant increase in boots on the ground. The last time fascists blindsided this country, in 1941, we put 15 million men under arms and kept them there until the sons-of-bitches were beaten, and then kept a goodly number of those men under arms just in case anybody got the idea they it might be tried again. Compare this with what Bush has done and what you see is somebody who isn't fighting a "war for civilization." You see somebody who has an agenda that he values more than that. I say it's protecting his tax cuts, but any Bush loyalists who have an alternative vision are welcome to correct me.
The problem is that Bush's victory in the 2004 election, bought narrowly with strongly partisan attacks based upon his policy of "staying the course" in Iraq, didn't translate into support for the rest of his domestic agenda. The Democrats lost both houses of Congress but they had juuuuust enough people in the Senate to sink SocSec "reform" and othre measures which no doubt would have followed that. By 2006, the fact that we weren't going to win in Iraq was obvious enough that the Republicans lost Congress. Bush's gamble was this: keep the war going as a political device with which to batter the Dems but for God's sake don't do what is necessary to WIN it, because that will sink your tax cuts. After the 2006 elections, however, this strategy was dead.
So now we're in fallback mode, which is to keep alive the future usefulness of the "Democrats are wimps" mantra by keeping the war rolling along regardless of how well or badly it's going. The assumption now is that the Democrats will take the White House in 2008, but the men whose fortunes ride with Bush and Cheney know that it is highly likely that there will be another terrorist attack on U. S. soil between 2009 and 2012, and the plan is to be back in office in 2013 because "Democrats are wimps." The tax cuts will have been repealed, of course, but the economy is in for a rough time over the next few years no matter what ANYBODY does about taxes, so they can blame that on repealed tax cuts.
In short, Bush defines "win" as victory for the super-rich in their never-ending struggle against the working class. And his speeches pounding the same old drum about Iraq, even as it becomes obvious that he is completely out of touch with the realities there, are completely consistent with THAT strategy for "victory."
Never forget -- if you work for a living in the United States, YOU are the enemy of George Bush and his ilk.
