ISG Report

We can all breathe a sigh of relief - the Iraq Study Group has issued its report, and we are all saved!

Well, no, not really. I mean, what did we expect? As Charles Pierce said

I (have) grown tired of the MacGyver Theory Of Washington Politics -- the notion that, if we just pluck out of David Broder's moth-eaten Rolodex the people with the most gray mold on their careers, they will all get together and build a solution out of two coconut shells and a handful of magic beans.

He laments ...

(the) reverential coverage of the Iraq Study Group and its hunt for the pony in the pile. For example, where was the instant and withering contempt from our courtier political press over the presence on the ISG of a useless old vampire like Edwin Meese, who started his career calling for detention camps to be set up to house student demonstrators at Berkeley, and ended it, two steps ahead of the law, by giving the Iran-Contra crowd just enough time to shred what they needed to shred?

And, anyway, what in the name of Christ's sweet strawberry preserves does Edwin Meese know about Iraq? Why not just hire him to re-wire the space shuttle and design the new levees in Louisiana while he's at it? County commissioners go to jail for putting their idiot nephews on county road crews, but, on the bloodiest question of the past 30 years, supposedly educated people wait with their tongues hanging out for a viable solution to emerge from what appears to be the Petrified Forest, and nobody points out the absurdity that's sitting right there, listening to its arteries harden.

As I heard mentioned elsewhere, the "bi-partisan" study group, which was noted for being staffed largely by people who knew nothing about the situation in Iraq, was filled with those who "ran the gamut of thinking the war in Iraq was a good idea, to those who thought it was a really great idea". As Senator Feingold pointed out, the only people not represented in the group or those giving testimony to the group were those of us who were against the war from the start. You know, those of us who got it right. As he said on Olbermann:

The fact is this commission was composed apparently entirely of people who did not have the judgment to oppose this Iraq war in the first place, and did not have the judgment to realize it was not a wise move in the fight against terrorism. So that's who is doing this report.

Then I looked at the list of who testified before them. There is virtually no one who opposed the war in the first place. Virtually no one who has been really calling for a different strategy that goes for a global approach to the war on terrorism.

So this is really a Washington inside job and it shows not in the description of what's happened - that's fairly accurate - but it shows in the recommendations. It's been called a classic Washington compromise that does not do the job of extricating us from Iraq in a way that we can deal with the issues in Southeast Asia, in Afghanistan, and in Somalia which are every bit as important as what is happening in Iraq. This report does not do the job and it's because it was not composed of a real representative group of Americans who believe what the American people showed in the election, which is that it's time for us to have a timetable to bring the troops out of Iraq.

The more things change, the more they stay the same. Or something like that. After all, in Bushworld, incompetence is its own reward.