Bush and NYT: Blame The Generals

This article has a number of amazing statements in it:

The original plan, championed by Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the top commander in Baghdad, and backed by Donald H. Rumsfeld, then the defense secretary, called for turning over responsibility for security to the Iraqis, shrinking the number of American bases and beginning the gradual withdrawal of American troops. But the plan collided with Iraq’s ferocious unraveling, which took most of Mr. Bush’s war council by surprise.

This implies that the problem was a matter of bad timing, that the “they stand up, we stand down” plan was not Bush’s but Casey’s, and that strangely it did not “mesh” with what was happening on the ground somehow. But later the same article says this:

General Casey repeatedly argued that his plan offered the best prospect for reducing the perception that the United States remained an occupier — and it was a path he thought matched Mr. Bush’s wishes. Earlier in the year, it had.

But as Baghdad spun further out of control, some of the president’s advisers now say, Mr. Bush grew concerned that General Casey, among others, had become more fixated on withdrawal than victory.

What this utterly ignores is that the catastrophic events, the bombing of the mosque in Samarra, the explosion in nonstop torture and killing across the land, not only made a “victory” plan impossible, but made it even more important to plan withdrawal than it had been at the beginning of the year, when this “matched Mr. Bush’s wishes.” So Bush now seems determined to fire Casey, not because his planning was faulty, but because he refuses to tell Bush what he wants to hear – that “victory” is something that can readily be achieved. If Casey is fired soon, as this article predicts, he may be scapegoated in the process, but he will be the luckiest scapegoat in the world, when you consider how much worse it would be for him if he was forced to stay on the job doing the bidding of a Commander in Chief who is recklessly opposed to facing reality. There are now 3,003 dead US soldiers due to this insanity.