I have a seven-year-old daughter, whose seven-year-old mind is a clinical study in determined opposition to mature, sensible advice. Whatever I suggest as a parent, she as a child is sure to treat as a conspiracy to upset her well-ordered world, which is generally quite divorced from the given situation's surrounding reality. Since I'm not a pediatric neurologist, I know not what synaptic connections that form mature thought are struggling to find their way. All I do know is that most people grow out of such determination to battle maturity.
George hasn't. Hence mature, sensible and (some literally) parental counsel against military involvement in Iraq was sure to be confronted with indignant rebelliousness. Similar advice against an escalation of the mayhem was also, for sure, to meet the same fate. No one tells George what George should do. Any sound advice contrary to his natural inclinations is perceived as intrusive, parental-like authority meant only to upset his comfortable, self-defined reality. To wit ...
The Joint Chiefs -- those military folks on whom George dumps loads of adoration as long as they pat him on the head -- have fervently and persistently warned "that a modest troop increase could lead to more attacks by al-Qaeda, provide more targets for Sunni insurgents and fuel the jihadist appeal for more foreign fighters to flock to Iraq to attack U.S. troops."
What's the infantile mind to do? Why of course: increase our presence, encourage more attacks, provide more targets and fuel foreign jihadist enlistment. Take that.
Probably the oddest excuse-making for George's behavior comes from experienced enabler Philip Zelikow, formerly of the State Department. "The president wasn't satisfied with the recommendations [reality] he was getting, and he thought we need a strategy that was more purposeful and likely to succeed if the Iraqis could make that possible."
His implication was that the Joint Chiefs, as advice-dispensing badasses focused exclusively on ruining George's day, conspired to present Junior only with recommendations void of purpose and designed to fail. Only our plucky president in his wide-eyed and searching innocence recognized the need for a strategy "likely to succeed."
Zekilow's analysis would as funny as it is odd, if it wasn't grounded in something so tragically puerile.
And naturally the millions of other amateurs telling George two months ago, in the form of pulling a lever, what to do was met with a sudden case of ... presidential deafness. Whenever my daughter fails to heed a request for some certain chore to be done, her later and not uncommon defense is that she simply didn't hear the request. Similarly the White House has dispatched its spokesman, Tony Snow. National election? You think that had something to do with the war? No, no. We didn't hear that at all. (It was about corruption, if you're wondering.)
The best evidence, however, for the case to be made that a mere, developmentally arrested child with all the childlike attributes of rebelliousness and unreasonableness reigns in the White House is the latter's reaction to the Iraq Study Group.
To quote the WP once again: "Some staff members on the National Security Council became enamored of the idea of sending more troops to Iraq in part because it was not a key feature of Baker-Hamilton." You're permitted one guess as to where the NSC got the idea it could formulate key policy based on your-mama-wears-army-boots nose-thumbing.
My daughter's occasionally exasperating immaturity can be forgiven. She's only seven. George is 60.