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by Susan Lenfestey
The last six weeks have been curiously devoid of the sort of elation you'd think those of us who "won" the midterm elections might be feeling. Sure, there are the individual victories to savor, where decent and deserving candidates won hard-fought races, but the cumulative effect lacks the heady fizz of victory.
For one thing, the president and his posse have created a heckuva mess in Iraq and thereabouts, and getting that one right, if possible at all, is going to take some serious effort, along with a big dollop of good luck.
For another, the newly empowered Dems are inheriting a Congress that makes a Carnival cruise ship seem serious of purpose and -- antiseptic. The Dems couldn't do any worse than the profligate committee chairs they're replacing -- Sen. Tim Johnson's health willing -- and we won't know their exact agenda until they take over in January, but so far it's been like watching crocodiles vie for the sunniest log in the slough: important to the crocs, uninspiring to the rest of us.
Rummy's departure was another case of good news being tempered by the bad, in this case the incredible loss of life and treasure his arrogant mismanagement has caused. His classified memo to the White House, obtained by the New York Times after his resignation, acknowledged privately that things in Iraq weren't going well, but was shaded by his concern with saving face rather than saving lives.
As if to illustrate his delusional arrogance, he paid a final vanity visit to Iraq, thanking the men and women he so heedlessly dispatched on a mission that was as short on planning as it was on armor. Real war heroes do this with humility and grace -- think Eisenhower or Churchill -- but with Rummy, as with the Decider-in-Chief, it's the stuff of a sentimental war movie, complete with props and backdrops, and more about the starring actor than the supporting cast.
Then there was the spectacle of watching President Bush get taken to the woodshed by the Iraq Study Group (ISG) -- and by James Baker, no less, the mastermind who helped bring us this boy-president in the first place. It provided a good jolt of I-told-you-so pleasure, and yet this too is diminished by the horror of the "dire" situation and the scope of the task at hand -- the sort of relief you might feel when your doctors finally find the tumor that's been giving you migraines (especially if they've been suggesting that you're maybe just a little bit nuts) but tell you that the course of treatment will be long and difficult, with a limited chance of success.
To make matters worse, the president still doesn't want to hear this bad news or follow the prescribed course. Meeting with the ISG panel, he blinked and fiddled with the printed report, looking like a resentful schoolboy being given an assignment that he had no intention of reading. And despite James Baker's admonition not to pick through the recommendations like a fruit salad, the very next day that's just what he did.
Of course the report itself is no panacea, and its soft-core recommendations are causing dissent, at home and in the Mideast and in the White House. Even though George Bush does not seem like a man well served by a smorgasbord of options, he'll wait for three more reports -- one from the Pentagon, one from the State Department and one from the National Security Council -- before announcing his new strategy, oh, one of these days. It's not easy being the decider.
Well, no hurry. By the first of the year we'll likely see the number of Americans killed in Iraq top 3,000, with 22,000 wounded, and the death toll of Iraqi civilians, already estimated at 46,000, continuing to soar.
So hold the champagne. We won something big on Nov. 7, but the world continues to burn as George Bush picks through his fruit salad.
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