"Why Escalation?" and "Why Won't Bush Face Reality?"

Dave Johnson:

Calling for an escalation in Iraq just as the Democrats take control of the Congress is a typical Rovian strategy that accomplishes two things:

- It rechannels the debate away from whether we should leave -- now we're all discussing whether to escalate or not rather than whether to get out or not.

- And it places "stay the course" as the reasonable compromise between leave or escalate.

John Emerson:

Bush's stubbornness doesn't require a psychological explanation. He's a cornered rat with no other choice. Yes, he's throwing good money after bad, but it's not his money. His money has been gone for a long time - he's using our money to try to win his own money back.

The people on the Bush team have all staked their reputations and their careers on this war, and they cannot afford to admit that they were wrong. If they did, they'd have to admit that they are failures whose adventurism has done serious damage to the nation they led. (In old Japan they would all have been expected to commit suicide, but we don't work that way.)

Someone with a solid reputation and good credibility can admit a mistake and still remain respected, but before the war few of the Bush people had accomplished anything. Bush, Cheney, Perle, Ledeen, Feith, Rumsfeld , Wolfowitz, Kagan, Libby, Frum .... before the Iraq war they were nothing much. This war was their shot at the big time, but it failed. Instead of the heros they planned to be, they have become less than nobodies, and will live on in history as object lessons in the perils of arrogant adventurism.

In government, in the media, and in the world of ideas the people who gave us this war cannot be persuaded. They have to be displaced and made harmless. They're going down, and we can't let them take their country down with them.