TPM Reader YF: “Wait for it. When Iraq breaks out into a full blown regional conflict and openly declared civil war as it appears ready to do at any moment you can bet your !#@ the Bush Administration will say: ‘Look, as soon as you people start talking about pulling out all hell breaks loose’, blaming it all on the ‘appeasers’. Bush, whose foreign “policy” more and more resembles an argument you might hear in a bar, won’t be able to help himself. From the current position I only see the local politics of this getting uglier.”

George Will’s take on Jim Webb’s now famous exchange with Bush.

In his edited version, the President asked Webb “a civil and caring question,” only to be met with “calculated rudeness.”

TPM Reader PJM responds to YF …

President Bush’s war of choice in Iraq has now lasted 45 months with no end yet in sight. By contrast, the US war against Germany officially lasted 41 months and the war against Japan 44 months, and the US battled these countries and their allies simultaneously, around the globe. This means that America’s will in Iraq has already been tested longer than our will in all of WWII.

President Bush has frequently asked, “If people disagree with my policies why do they keep re-electing me?” Earlier this month voters resoundingly rejected Republican war policy by electing Democratic congressional majorities. Yet President Bush now ignores the will of the same people he previously used to justify his policies.

The blame for the Iraq fiasco clearly belongs on this Administration’s failure to define a clear mission and achieve it, not on America’s lack of will. Any attempt by President Bush to blame Democrats for the situation in Iraq should be treated as the shallow, self-serving response it represents.

In Florida’s 13th, the state tests continue while the evidence mounts that the voting machines’ glitches threw the election.

It’s enough to sink a political career: still more evidence of Mitt Romney’s social tolerance emerges. What’ll we tell the children?

Stanley Kurtz’s excuse: “The underlying problem with this war is that, from the outset, it has been waged under severe domestic political constraints. From the start, the administration has made an assessment of how large a military the public would support, and how much time the public would allow us to build democracy and then get out of Iraq. We then shaped our military and “nation building” plans around those political constraints, crafting a “light footprint” military strategy linked to rapid elections and a quick handover of power. Unfortunately, the constraints of domestic American public opinion do not match up to what is actually needed to bring stability and democracy to a country like Iraq.”

It may be a form of literary grade or concept inflation to call it irony. But the irony of this ludicrous statement is that from the outset it has been the American political opposition (the Democrats) and the internal bureaucratic opposition (sane people in the US government and military, not appointed by George W. Bush) who’ve pushed for a much larger military footprint in Iraq and much more real nation-building. These weren’t ‘domesic political constraints’. These were ideological constraints the adminstration placed on itself.

I would say Stanley should go back and familiarize himself with the debates in 2002, 2003 and 2004. But of course he was there.

We’re now down to the Iraqi people or the American people as the primary culprits behind George W. Bush’s disaster.

For what it’s worth, I think substantially more troops would have made a big difference earlier on. Now, however, the Army and Marines are too worn down for any more troops to be available. And, more importantly, the sectarian chaos in the Iraq has taken on far too much momentum on its own for more troops to bring it under control. Would the 400,000 troops Gen. Shinseki wanted have led to a successful occupation? Probably not. But there are a thousands gradations of worse. And I think it wouldn’t have been nearly as bad as it is now. The truth is that so many things were done so wrong in this disastrous endeavor that it’s inherently difficult to pick apart the relative importance of each screw up to the eventual result.

I know there are a lot of people who either think that Iraq was a doable proposition that was botched or a project destined for failure no matter how it was handled. There are, needless to say, fewer and fewer in the former category. And I’d basically class myself in the latter one, if pushed. But both strike me as needlessly dogmatic viewpoints which make it harder to learn from the myriad mistakes that were made while telling us little about how we extricate ourselves from the mess.

Watching the president snap back to his usual state of denial, what I’ve been thinking about recently is how much of a difference it would have made if the White House had publicly recognized, say back in 2004, that Iraq was on a slow slide toward anarchy and started rethinking things enough to stem the descent to disaster. Let’s say early 2005. Earlier the better. But let’s give the benefit of the doubt and say it would have been hard to make the course correction in the midst of a presidential election. How much could have been accomplished? How much of this could have been avoided if the White House hadn’t continued to pretend, for political reasons, that things were going well? And since the president now seems inclined to continue with his disastrous policy for the next two years, should we ask in advance what could have been avoided over the next two years if he’d only had the courage to confront reality today.

TPM Reader MR: “Earlier this week, Bush said, “There is one thing I’m not going to do. I am not going to pull our troops off the battlefield before the mission is complete.” What exactly is the mission? Is the mission the same this week as it was last week, or the month or year before? And what was the mission at the beginning of the war? “

It’s a great line, but will it fit on a bumper sticker?

Rep. William Jefferson (D-LA) in a new TV ad: “I have never taken a bribe from anyone.”

One more point about Stanley Kurtz’s argument that the American people don’t have what it takes to win in Iraq. TPM Reader GG points out that in addition to needing a larger army and more, his argument would have required a lot more money. And not the kind the president is accustomed to using on the credit card from Chinese Central Bank, but, the dread word, taxes.

There’s no free lunch and no free wars. Except in punditry.

Rep. Alan Mollohan (D-WV) is set to head up the panel that controls the purse strings for the FBI — which is investigating him for his earmarking habits. Does anybody see that as a problem?