Bush and Blair acknowledge Iraq “setbacks”

President Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair acknowledged difficult times in the Iraq war they launched together in 2003, but both vowed to keep troops there until the new Iraqi government takes control.

This is indeed great news, as we who opposed the war simply have to wait till the Iraqi government can take control. (Well, maybe it’s not such great news, since it appears that the new government won’t be ready for anything until Bush and Blair say so.)

“Despite setbacks and missteps, I strongly believe we did and are doing the right thing,” Bush said Thursday evening in a White House news conference with Blair.

Back when I was a neocon, I listened to Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity. They both said that Democrats and liberals don’t care about the outcome of their social programs; as long as those who instituted the programs had good intentions and believed they were doing “the right thing,” they were successes—whether they failed or not. Limbaugh and Hannity, of course, felt that it was stupid to count failures as success, and I did and still do agree with that.

However, good intentions and the-right-thing feelings are meaningless when they come from Republicans, too. And why shouldn’t they be meaningless? Saying you’re doing the right thing because you think it’s the right thing is like saying that telling your wife that you thought about getting her a present for her birthday is just as good as actually getting her the present.

(And didn’t BTK think he was doing the right thing?)

For his part, Blair declared that after a meeting earlier this week with Iraq’s new prime minister, “I came away thinking the challenge is still immense, but I also came away thinking more certain than ever that we should rise to it.”

Of course, because it really wouldn’t be a success unless we were there to see it through.

Bush declined to discuss news reports that the Pentagon hoped that the U.S. force, now at 131,000 troops, could be reduced to about 100,000 by year’s end.

He called that “speculation in the press.” He said he has not discussed troop levels with commanders on the ground. “We’ll keep the force level there necessary to win,” Bush said.

I thought we won the war shortly after we started it? That sign behind the president said “MISSION ACCOMPLISHED,” did it not? Of course, the definition of victory keeps on shifting at the coercion of the coalition so as to prolong our stay over there in order to convince citizens of the countries in the coalition that their governments are “doing the right thing.”

There’s much “more” to the article, but I don’t have the stomach to comment on all of it.

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