The New Champion Of The Media Gloom & Doom Crowd

…The chilling realization is spreading in Washington that Bush’s Iraqi debacle may be the mother of all presidential miscalculations – an extraordinary blend of Bay of Pigs-style wishful thinking with a “Black Hawk Down” reliance on special operations to wipe out enemy leaders as a short-cut to victory. But the magnitude of the Iraq disaster could be far worse than either the Bay of Pigs fiasco in Cuba in 1961 or the bloody miscalculations in Somalia in 1993.

…Few analysts today, however, believe that George W. Bush and his senior advisers, including Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, have the common sense to swallow the short-term bitter medicine of a cease-fire or a U.S. withdrawal. Rather than face the political music for admitting to the gross error of ordering an invasion in defiance of the United Nations and then misjudging the enemy, these U.S. leaders are expected to push forward no matter how bloody or ghastly their future course might be.

…Now, the argument holds, that since the troops have been committed to battle, any result that leaves Saddam in power would be a humiliation to Washington and embolden other dictators around the world.

Here the historical analogy is closer to the Vietnam War during which Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon argued that a U.S. military withdrawal would have dangerous strategic consequences, touching off falling of dominoes across Southeast Asia. That logic led to a deepening U.S. military commitment in Vietnam and the expansion of the war beyond Vietnam’s borders. Only after a decade of bloody fighting did Washington painfully negotiate a withdrawal from the conflict.

In Iraq, Bush is demanding that the American people follow him into this new “big muddy” and that having taken the first steps into the swamp there’s now no choice but to press on. As a person who has never had much interest in history or other cultures, Bush may be only dimly aware of the worrisome historical precedents surrounding the trail he has chosen.

…Bush also has guessed wrong on the one crucial ingredient that would separate meaningful victory from the political defeat that is now looming. He completely miscalculated the reaction of the Iraqi people to an invasion.