You know – I honestly don’t know whether we need to:

(a) get all of our troops out of Iraq,

(b) increase the number of troops in Iraq beyond the pissant surge so that we can make a real difference, or

(c) follow a third way, i.e. the Iraq Study Group recommendations or something else.

All I know is that we need someone else to make the decisions. If we had a completely different president, someone thoughtful and responsible and open-minded, and that president said that we need to stay in Iraq for the longer term, I might be more inclined to believe it.

Because the main issue is really a meta-issue. It’s no longer about what needs to be done — it’s about having the right person in place to make those decisions. This administration is completely through; it hasn’t an ounce of credibility left; we have a president who doesn’t even understand the war HE HIMSELF started, a president who spouts nonsense every time he opens his mouth.

And we still have 557 days of this crap to go.

It’s times like this that a parliamentary system looks really good.

Seriously, though – here’s the thing. I’m not a foreign affairs expert. None of my friends who blog are foreign affairs experts, either. None of us knows what to do about Iraq. We’ve all got opinions and emotions, and we express them, which is our right. But none of us really knows what to do. That’s why we elect a president to make those decisions for us.

If you’re a good president, or jeez, even a halfway decent president, you make those decisions by starting without preconceived notions, without hubris, without thinking that you’re a messenger of God and therefore better than other people; you gather all the top experts you can, and you listen to them all, and then you listen to them again; you realize that the world is a complicated place and it’s not us vs. them.

There used to be a lot more monarchs in the world. Rulerships passed down by heredity. You could never be sure who you might get stuck with; a great king might have a dolt of an eldest son and then you’d be stuck with him for the next 30 years. So I bet there used to be a lot more stupid wars then there are now.

But we live under a constitution that was supposed to prevent things like that from happening anymore.

Granted, we’ve had some lame presidents in the past, presidents who were incapable or parochial. It’s not just the modern media’s fault; in fact, people are (one hopes) much better informed today than they were in the days where you could buy votes by handing out whiskey and pretending that your candidate grew up in a log cabin.

Still, Bush was elected not once but twice (okay, maybe legitimately just once; because Theresa LePore designed a stupid ballot, almost 4,000 U.S. soldiers have died in Iraq and the Middle East is the biggest hellhole it’s been in years; if a butterfly ballot flaps its wings…). There are still tons of people who still think Saddam had something to do with 9/11.

People are still people, and lots of them either aren’t smart enough, just don’t know how to think, or are too busy to pay attention. Unfortunately they’re not too busy to vote.

I don’t know where I’m going with this. I guess I’m just ranting.

But God I hope things get better.

This cracks me up. It totally appeals to my sense of humor. I particularly like the second one.

Andrew Sullivan scathingly describes Bush’s press conference this morning:

Worse, the president conflated every single radical element in the Middle East into one amorphous anti-American entity. It appears that he sees Shiite militias, Hezbollah, al Qaeda, Hamas and the Sunni insurgents as indistinguishable. He has even said baldly that the people bombing and murdering in Iraq are the same people who attacked us on 9/11. The Shiite militias? The Baathist dead-enders? Is he serious? He seems to be still operating under the premise that the fundamental dynamic is one between democracy and radicalism. At some very broad and general level, that’s not wrong. But in terms of forming policy, it’s close to useless. Actually, it’s worse than useless. We have a president who seems unable to understand the critical dynamics of the war he is allegedly waging. Is he capable of understanding the complexity? Does he really think we need another lecture on the evil of al Qaeda? Does he really think that’s what we’re arguing about at this point? …

[W]hen the president speaks spontaneously about the war, he reveals vast amounts of ignorance, denial and deception, self and otherwise. The patronizing soundbites stick in the craw at this point. His formulation that we do not know whether the war can succeed but that it nonetheless must succeed is about as disorienting a leadership call as I have heard. The rank condescension toward the American people is also staggering. Look, Mr President, most Americans aren’t as dim as you seem to be. Maybe it’s time you realized that.

Some people, particularly some gays, still seem to have a visceral hatred of Sullivan, but I like him. His online search for poz-on-poz sex a few years ago is none of my business (and anyway, it takes two people to have unprotected sex). More importantly, I’ve forgiven him for his earlier rah-rahs in favor of Bush – he changed his mind and saw the light sometime in 2004. Even though that was much later than some other people, he’s shown a great capacity for critical self-examination, and I think he’s a brilliant writer. I don’t always agree with him, but I wish I could write as well or as often.