You know, it's good to see consistency in the way the Bush White House runs its business.
In the past, the Bush Administration was all about selling policy with catchy words. "Clearer Skies." "No Child Left Behind." "Eduring Freedom." "No Blow Jobs in the Oval Office."
Of course, as anyone who hasn't drunk the kool-aid realizes by now, most of these policies did exactly the opposite of what their billing promised. But credit where credit is due: to our knowledge, Bush has not been blown in the Oval Office.
So it's particularly exciting to watch the Bushies wrestle with the latest potential word problem: civil war.
The worst-case scenario for Iraq -- the one predicted by Bush Sr. when he decided not to take Baghdad -- was that Iraq would descend into civil war. And just yesterday, former Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi meekly said,
It is unfortunate that we are in civil war. We are losing each day as an average 50 to 60 people throughout the country, if not more. If this is not civil war, then God knows what civil war is.
Whoa. That's the last thing the Bushies want to hear. An expert of no less authority than the former Prime Minister saying that Iraq has fallen into the worst case scenario. Today, true to form, the Bushie word police were on the job:
Bush: "We're implementing a strategy that will lead to victory in Iraq," Bush said Sunday. "And a victory in Iraq will make this country more secure and will help lay the foundation of peace for generations to come."
Cheney: "Clearly there is an attempt under way by the terrorists, by Zarqawi and others, to foment civil war."
Nice work, Dick, putting the Bushie's preferred term for the situation in Iraq in there: "terrorism." It's not civil war in Iraq, see, just because Sunnis and Shiites have organized militias which are killing each other, it's just that Iraq has a small problem with "terrorists."
Look, whether there's a civil war which rises to meet the formal definition doesn't really matter. The point is, as most of us on the left predicted it would be, Bush's Iraq policy has been a dismal failure. Three years after the war started, the situation in Iraq is just as bad now as it was under Saddam -- possibly it's much worse. So the Iraqis are worse off. Has the war made us safer here in America? No, we're worse off. Is the region better off? Not when Turkey, Iran, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia are all concerned about spillover effects of the Iraqi civil war.
For all of their fancy slogans, the Republicans are pretty terrible at running the country. And I'd gladly allow Bush to get blown in the Oval Office if it meant that nearly 2,500 American soldiers didn't have to die for a failed policy. Bring the troops home.
Update: Professor Juan Cole has the top ten disasters of the third American year in Iraq.