Bush does not commit blunders. He is a walking, strutting, stumbling blunder. He (& Cheney & Rumsfeld, & Co.) did not think out what they were doing in Iraq. They did not perform if-then calculations. They did not think through what was possible and desirable in Iraq--any more than they have reasoned about global warming, disaster planning, Social Security, port security, deficit spending, intelligent design, late-term abortion, "no child left behind," or for that matter, whether to take al-Qaeda seriously before September 11, 2001.The Bush administration consists largely of people who are living in a fantasy world because they never could deal with reality, and 9/11 frightened them badly. Their reaction has been to retreat much deeper into that fantasy world. Their fantasy takes the form of fantasizing a utopia they desire, then giving orders to members of the government to create that utopia. They do not bother to consider the steps and resources required to create that utopia. Worse, they refuse to listen to the people who try to tell them what can and cannot be done or tryg to predict the real cost.
What most liberal hawks don't see (Peter Beinart is an exception) is that the fantasist nature of the Bush gang was evident before March 2003. They are not in the thinking-through game. They are in the hallucinating, fact-bending, reality-canceling game.
No discussion of where to go from here can begin without wrapping the mind around just who is running the country.
Sadly, the administration is headed by Bush and Cheney, both of whom probably should be in psychiatric treatment rather than in the White House. In Iraq we are watching the intersection of their fantasies with the world of reality when the administration acts out its fantasies using the American military, and one of the fantasies is that the U.S. military can do any thing they are told to do at no cost.
This is the unrestrained Conservative Movement laid bare.
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