Measures of Their Failure

All hell seems to be breaking loose today in Congress as everyone tries to figure out how to back away from and/or flee their former support for the ill-conceived war in Iraq. With Bush's approval numbers plummeting, the administration has spent the last few days claiming that everyone who supported the war had the same intelligence in hand that they did. Not the case by any means, but Democrats are being disingenuous if they claim they were completely hornswoggled; they jumped on the WMD bandwagon pretty easily, and only now that the American public has realized their mistake are they suddenly trying to paint themselves as innocent.

Be that as it may, the right thing to do, now that we've most of us realized how wrong this war is (or at least how wrong it's going), is to figure a way out. Quoth President Bush:

"One of our top commanders in Iraq, Maj. Gen. William Webster, says that setting a deadline for our withdrawal from Iraq would be, quote, 'a recipe for disaster.' "

Yeah, the administration doesn't need a recipe: they've been cooking up a great big steaming batch of disaster without one just fine.

Now what's going to happen is they're all going to break into a fight about the how of getting out of Iraq, with the net result of . . . nothing.

I am no less disappointed in our congressional representatives today than I was the day they voted for this war. And the longer they spend fighting about it, the more young lives will be lost. Count the number who've died in the war, yes, but keep count, too, of how many more have died since so many members of Congress claim to have seen the light.