Old Yeller

My old friend Sid Lee pushed back gently on my sorrow and sadness post:

"I can relate to your feelings," he said, "but - having painted ourselves into this corner, how do we get out? Leaving Iraq to a massive civil war, is just another hopeless answer. So what is a good answer? Bush has none. Someone must have - where are the good answers?"

I think that's a fair question in response to what I hope began as a fair question from me. My answer is, he's hit the nail on the head.

My rage toward Mr. Bush -- and I was no fan before -- began during the roll-up when it became clear that he had the brush and the paint and seemed completely unaware there was a corner behind him.

One night during the news that winter, I told my neighbors "He's painted himself into a corner today, and us with him."

Which is where we find ourselves still.

I want to rub his nose in it and say "Look what you did!" because I believe deeply and am convinced thoroughly that he is responsible for this. There were other ways and he knew it and we knew it and he misused his power and there's a straight line between his actions and these tragic near term outcomes.

This is a monumental failure of imagination. We'll never know what might have been had he been more creative, more disciplined, more…mature.

As Ms. Sheehan said in the post I cited, he has no skin in the game and never did. I'm persuaded this is adventurism and it is inexcusable.

Errol Morris made a remarkable film comprising an extended postmortem by Secretary of State Robert McNamara. It's called The Fog of War. Of Mr. McNamara's "Eleven Lessons," I believe Mr. Bush and Mr. Rumsfeld have failed every one except, perhaps, Lesson #9: "In order to do good, you may have to engage in evil."

The transcript of the film is on Mr. Morris' website and is, as they say, a hell of a read. TheDVD is worth renting if you're a visual learner.

So..We're in an unspeakable mess for which no one is accountable and this frustrates me half to death.

My suspicion is, the Senate is going to have to sort this out. I think they are going to have to hold the Administration's feet to the fire beginning next month.

I think some people have to lose their jobs -- I think the neocon fundamentalists have to be put out to pasture to write their books explaining why their second massive washout is not a failure of philosophy but just another failure to execute (good luck with that).

I think we have to abandon this insane quest to construct a New American Century, muzzle the apologists, put real diplomats on the ground in every nation in the region and every nation in the EU and on the floor of Nato and the United Nations and get about finding win/win solutions.

In a speech last weekend, Anne Lamott said that part of her struggle as a writer is her American conviction that things are more valuable if they are solitary and grimly difficult. She pointed to the prosecution of this war as an example of this cultural twist. I think she's right about this. We have to stop acting crazy. We have to conclude that if we always do what we always did, we'll always get what we always got. I think we have to act on that conviction and seek shalom as if our lives depended on it.

Old Yeller isn't going to get better. Sorry, but I think it's time for someone to take him to the woods.