Mission Accomplished

What a difference four years make.

Four years ago, after his triumphant landing on the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, the president, violating every superstitious rule my mother ever taught me about speaking too soon, announced that our mission was accomplished. Four years later, 175,000 American troops are on the ground, there are five times as many Sunni insurgents as there were four years ago and we have just ended one of the deadliest months in the long war.

Are we better off today than we were four years ago?

Are the Iraqis?

In Baghdad today, most people live without electricity for most of the day. The reconstruction projects we promised and supported are literally crumbling. The Green Zone, where the government is headquartered along with the United States military command and the American media, is an armed fortress, and it still provides no guarantee of safety. The busiest business in Baghdad is the morgue.

Iraqis risk their lives every day just to live. No, there is no Saddam, but going to the market to buy food or to the bus station to get to work means putting yourself in the path of a would-be suicide bomber. If there is a crowd, there is a risk. Bad luck and you're dead. Today's best news, the possible death of Al Qaeda's top man in Iraq, is a testament not to the effectiveness of the American or Iraqi security forces, but to the growing rifts among the insurgents about how far they will go to destroy Iraq in the name of saving it.

And yet George Bush, ignoring the Congress, ignoring the public, ignoring the world community, ignoring the $500 billion price tag and the views of anyone who disagrees with him, continues to be committed to "winning" a war we have no business being involved in.

We may be, as Barack Obama likes to put it, only one signature away from ending the war, but there is no chance of getting it from this man.

What cloud is George Bush living on?

Writing about Lyndon Johnson during the Vietnam war, former Press Secretary George Reedy described the intense isolation of the presidency, the cocoon in which the president operated and the absence of any contact between the chief executive and anyone outside his circle of yes men and women. Clearly, nothing has changed.

Does anyone around George Bush tell him that he is wrong and they were, too? Does anyone tell Dick Cheney that his facts are lies and he has blood on his hands? George Tenet describes a process that should have led him to scream bloody murder and refuse to play the game. Instead, he waited until he was on the outside to write a book. Big help.

How many more books will we get from former insiders, claiming, after the fact, that they knew better? What good does it do us now? Why didn't they use their position when they had the president's ear, not the media's?

I used to be the one, among my Democratic friends, who was always saying that "hating" George Bush was the wrong approach. We should respect the presidency, I would argue, remembering some of the vicious attacks on Bill Clinton, even if we disagree with the policies of the person holding the office. You know, Civics 101.

But I can't do that anymore. At a certain point, a leader can be so profoundly wrong, so completely isolated, so totally out of touch with the people he is supposed to govern that he is no longer deserving of respect, even for the office he holds. This is where George Bush now stands. It is not only the war that is a failure, but also his presidency.

Four years later, like most Americans, I cannot think of my president without getting angry. But will anyone tell him?

To find out more about Susan Estrich and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

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