It's a disaster! Let's keep it up! --Huh?

If you’re keeping score at home, and the Constitution says we’re supposed to, we were just treated with a nifty piece of rhetorical ju-jitsu by President Bush.

Every argument against starting a war in Iraq is now being used as an argument for adding troops. Opponents originally said, “Evil as he is, Saddam Hussein is keeping factions from fighting each other, and counterbalancing Iran. Once you remove Saddam, the country will be ungovernable. There’ll be competing factions, including radical Islamists.”

Tonight, Bush said, “The consequences of failure are clear: Radical Islamic extremists would grow in strength and gain new recruits. They would be in a better position to topple moderate governments, create chaos in the region and use oil revenues to fund their ambitions. Iran would be emboldened in its pursuit of nuclear weapons.”

Another statement confused me. The President said that “my national security team, military commanders and diplomats conducted a comprehensive review.” Didn’t the President just relieve from command those military leaders who disagree with this new strategy?

Then he said, “We benefited from the thoughtful recommendations of the Iraq Study Group — a bipartisan panel led by former Secretary of State James Baker and former Congressman Lee Hamilton.” Hard to understand exactly how they benefited, other than disregarding their recommendations.

The one theory that did make sense in the President’s speech tonight was his explanation that soldiers will clear an area of terrorists, but once the soldiers leave that area, the terrorists return. America’s military leaders have been complaining about this for a while, although it’s hard to imagine that 20,000 troops is some sort of magic number that will dramatically improve the situation.
Democracy wouldn’t be worth the bother if we didn’t accept the idea that someone else’s idea might work better than our own. With all the loss of life and limb in Iraq, in a war we’re paying for, I find myself, once again, praying that there’s a greater wisdom at work here than is manifest to me.