Happy Mission Accomplished Day!

Maha Barb has been doing some high-quality writing recently, and today's Mission Accomplished Day post is pretty much the only one you need to read.

Iraq has become, for us, a nearly perfect lose/lose situation. If we stay and fight, we serve bin Laden’s interests. If we retreat, we serve bin Laden’s interests. The only Iraq policy we might have adopted that didn’t serve bin Laden’s interests would have been to leave Saddam Hussein where he was.

Those are among the several thousand reasons why talk of “winning” in Iraq is absurd. Even if we destroyed every single militant in Iraq who so much as hurls raspberries at us or the Iraqi government, that would not accomplish the purported “mission” of making America safer from terrorist attack.

As retired Army Lt. Gen. William Odom says, “The challenge we face today is not how to win in Iraq; it is how to recover from a strategic mistake: invading Iraq in the first place.”

In today’s New York Times, Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Jeff Zeleny write that Democrats are planning a special ceremony this afternoon when they send the timetable-laden Iraq war funding bill to President Bush, who will veto it.

It's gotten to the point where I was happy to see Bushnev go on TV to 'justify' his veto of Iraq funding this evening. Every time he opens his mouth to justify his decisions, he justifies the opposite. His squinty, 'looks concerned, but is really just struggling to read the teleprompter' delivery, polished off by his cocky, 'heckuva job, Brownie' smirk, just reaffirmed to 60+% of the country that the Democrats are the ones on the side of truth and, well, logic. It would be encouraging if the whole thing weren't so disgustingly depressing.

And if you decide to read a second MA Day post, try this one from digby:

He truly believed that he could force the rest of the world to come in and help pay for his misdaventure after the fact with troops and money. I don't know why any country would want to take on such a moral hazard, and they very obviously didn't, but Bush had so bought into his own hype that he believed he was not only the undisputed and sole leader of America, he thought he was Emperor of the world.

The American people must understand when I said that we need to be patient, that I meant it. And we're going to be there for a while. I don't know the exact moment when we leave, David, but it's not until the mission is complete. The world must know that this administration will not blink in the face of danger and will not tire when it comes to completing the missions that we said we would do. The world will learn that when the United States is harmed, we will follow through.

The world will see that when we put a coalition together that says "Join us," I mean it. And when I ask others to participate, I mean it.

As if the problem was that the world didn't think he meant it. The problem was, the world knew he meant it.