The Strategy Revealed

I just decided that one of my New Year's resolutions is to blog periodically. Not because I think you care what I have to say, but because it might help me to keep my writing sharp. Here we go...

The New York Times has a good response to the President's lackluster presentation tonight of his new plans for Iraq. Here's what I decided after reading it (plus a less damning piece at the Washington Post):

When President Bush unveiled his new tactics for Iraq tonight (and I think that any relatively unbiased observer would agree that they represent, at most, a shift in tactics, not strategy), he unwittingly confirmed for us his actual strategy, which I believe he settled on some time ago. The President has concluded that, given the current state of affairs in Iraq, the only logical thing to do is to look as though he's trying his best until January of 2009, when the problem will suddenly belong to someone else.

The idea that Bush can't bring himself to change course in any meaningful way is interesting: is he absolutely resistant to change, or simply unable to make the move? After reading David Rose's recent article in Vanity Fair, in which the leaders of the neocon movement lament Bush's mismanagement of the war, I'm fascinated by the view among neocon insiders that Bush, the self-anointed decider, is anything but. Here's an excerpt in which in which Rose recounts a discussion with Richard Perle.

Yet Bush "did not make decisions, in part because the machinery of government that he nominally ran was actually running him." That, I suggest, is a terrible indictment. Perle does not demur: "It is." Accepting that, he adds, is "painful," because on the occasions he got an insight into Bush's thinking Perle felt "he understood the basic issues and was pursuing policies that had a reasonable prospect of success." Somehow, those instincts did not translate into actions.

You really have to read Rose's article, it's fantastic, and it hammers home a point that I have heard sporadically in the past: the President isn't dumb, in fact he's quite smart. Unfortunately, he's never been a successful manager of anything, and right now he's foundering at the top of the largest bureaucracy in the world.

I'll leave you with another piece from Rose (the link is mine).

The most damning assessment of all comes from David Frum: "I always believed as a speechwriter that if you could persuade the president to commit himself to certain words, he would feel himself committed to the ideas that underlay those words. And the big shock to me has been that, although the president said the words, he just did not absorb the ideas. And that is the root of, maybe, everything."