Yes, you could say mistakes have been made
By CARL HIAASEN
President Bush's prime-time TV appearance on Wednesday night was way more than a speech. It was a séance.
The man was plainly in a deep trance, channeling Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon.
Give us more, more, more, the president kept saying, and we'll fix this mess.
More soldiers. More money. More time.
It's what is best for the country, Bush recited somberly -- our national security is at stake.
Good morning, Vietnam!
The president didn't mention that nasty ''conflict'' by name, but he didn't need to. You remember the old script -- just scratch out ''communists'' and pencil in ``terrorists.''
Bush has been well-coached by the ghosts of LBJ and Tricky Dick to stoke fear, invoke patriotism and selectively skirt the facts. It helps, of course, to be in a delusional fog.
When the president said, for example, that Anbar Province has become a hotbed for al Qaeda, he didn't point out that al Qaeda was nowhere to be found in Iraq before the U.S. invasion.
By his own pig-headed blundering, he created a new home for the terrorists, and therefore we must stay and fight to the bitter end. It's vintage Vietnam-era logic, from a guy who never got within 9,000 miles of Saigon during the war.
Here's what happened in Iraq while Bush and his speechwriters rehearsed, communing with the spirits of dead presidents: Scores of Iraqi civilians were murdered, and the total of U.S. military casualties rose to 3,008. By the time you read this, it probably will be higher.
The Pentagon hasn't released the name of the most recent fatality, a soldier from the 13th Sustainment Command, who was blown up by an improvised bomb near Fallujah.
Borrowing a guilt-inducing line from Johnson and Nixon, Bush said that pulling out of Iraq would be a disservice to all the troops who've given their lives there.
Get us out
Only victory, the president declared, will do honor to our fallen heroes.
Victory, like truth, is a fluid concept in this administration. Attacking Iraq was one of the most vaingloriously stupid decisions in the history of U.S. foreign policy, and Bush desperately wants to salvage for himself a legacy other than that of bungler-in-chief.
A huge majority of Americans, including many in his own party, want the president to commence getting us out of Iraq -- not sinking us deeper.
The nation has turned against the war out of concern for the very troops whose valor and sacrifices Bush is using as a justification to send more. Our young men and women are dying at the rate of more than 100 a month with no end in sight, and it's nothing but patriotic to ask: For what?
Nearly four years after bombing Iraq, the president has finally gagged down his pride and said mistakes have been made.
Gee, you think? We bombed and occupied a neutral country because Bush claimed it had weapons of mass destruction, which turned out to be a line of crap.
Now we're mired in the middle of a bloody civil war that's costing about $100 billion a year, which is sweet for the vice president's pals at Halliburton but not so good for the deficit.
Blasted to pieces
Meanwhile, our troops are getting blasted to pieces by folks they were sent to liberate.
Yeah, you could say mistakes have been made.
Yet Bush still insists that victory lies within our grasp. All he needs is 21,500 live bodies . . . for now.
Hardly anyone believes the shaky Iraqi government will be able to stop the sectarian slaughters and stabilize Baghdad anytime soon. Even after the president's speech, seven of 10 Americans oppose expanding our forces there, according to an Associated Press poll.
Bush will send the soldiers, anyway, Congress will howl, and the flag-draped coffins will keep arriving.
Top generals who opposed the troop surge have been replaced by others who are more inclined to say what Bush wants to hear. And when he's not listening to his posse of cheerleaders -- led by Dick Cheney and Condi Rice -- he's evidently listening to the ghosts of those who botched Vietnam.
Dispirited exhaustion
''Peace with honor,'' was Nixon's mantra, though he was gone from the White House by the time U.S. troops made their chaotic exit from Saigon. Bush will be out of office, too, chopping wood down in Texas when the last American soldier leaves Baghdad.
Who knows when that will happen. The Vietnam War ended in dispirited exhaustion, and so will Iraq. There's no quick and bloodless way out.
This time, though, the deeds of those men and women who served will not be diminished by the outcome. The same cannot be said of Bush's standing in history.
To the end, he'll insist that he was right and everyone else was wrong, because that's the dreamy, disconnected nature of his trance.
And he will never snap out of it.
