The fix is in. The scam is on. And the suspense, as modest as it was, is prematurely over.
The Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Group is expected to release a report that is heavy on regional talks but light on talk of withdrawal timetables. Anticipating this, the Bush administration has preemptively fabricated a presto of regional confabs -- Bush in Jordan and Cheney in Saudi Arabia -- while remaining characteristically mum on any talk of a timed, phased withdrawal. Hence when the report is officially released next month, the administration will tout, We're way ahead of you -- all that could be done is already being done.
As added cushion -- read "cover" -- for doing what it planned on doing anyway, the administration by then will also have its "independent" Pentagon and National Security Council reports on hand, saying much the same: Stage a diplomatic chat now and then, set no enforceable conditions, and pray like hell that things somehow work out.
It's the Ronald Reagan equivalent of launching supply-side economic policy. His budget director predicted a deficit disaster, but golly shucks, Ron really, really wanted massive tax cuts. Reams of expert forecasts filled with the commonsensical outcomes of soaring outgo and dwindling income would not deter him. He was prepared to simply cross his fingers and see how things worked out.
That was quite literally Reagan's attitude, much to his budget director's horror and ghastly realization that presidential will can be both profound in its ignorance and supreme in its authority.
Bush's Iraq policy is only a bleak reminder that the right-wing ideology of faith trumping reality is nothing new. It has towered over us at home for at least a quarter-century; Bush is merely operating a new branch of its blindness overseas. Happy days. Now the world can stumble through guaranteed, foreseeable disasters right along with us.
One ISG operative told the Times that when meeting with commission members two weeks ago, Bush spent an hour and a half “essentially arguing why we should embrace what amounts to a ‘stay the course’ strategy.” Nothing is about to deter him, and we're about to see that played out after all the ballyhooed anticipation of the Baker-Hamilton report.
This leaves Congressional Democrats in a truly sticky wicket. They put all their procrastinating eggs in the ISG's findings, which, along with two other self-justifying reports, the administration will claim are already being sagely implemented. Bush's status quo will then have the bipartisan imprimatur of "the best and the brightest" among the "Wise Men," two other terms that hark back to another, incubating era of dead-end faith that we once thought had been rejected forever.
The only realistic option left for Democrats is to cut the war's funding, which is, of course, as realistic of an expectation as Bush's overcoming ignorance and stubbornness.
All of which does indeed prove the mindless and enduring power of faith -- and it's about to leave us and 150,000 human targets stuck in Iraq for at least another two years.
So much for "New Directions." Democrats' political faith in electoral cover will trump the deed of doing the right thing, Bush's faith in God only knows what will persevere, and we'll all helplessly watch foreseeable catastrophe unfold -- just as we've been doing for decades.
To paraphrase Churchill, the one-two punches of Reagan's fiscal madness at home and Bush's addition of disastrous policies abroad may not be the beginning of the end of America's superpower status, but they are undoubtedly the end of the beginning -- courtesy the right-wing ideology of faith over reality.