Slowly the global dawn of awareness breaks; we all know that the media and journalists outside our borders have been perceiving the miserable failure as the engineer of the greatest foreign policy trainwreck since Casey Jones was high on Cocaine...
President George Bush has an exit plan for Iraq. Its blurry outline was revealed this week as the worst violence since the fall of Saddam Hussein exploded in the country.
Mr Bush flagged his strategy on Tuesday. It calls for rapidly increasing the "Iraqification" of the conflict. By Thursday Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, were spelling out what this meant. The idea is to push many more Iraqi police and security officials into the front lines against the insurgency while at the same time declaring political victory on the ground.
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But in the face of the escalating conflict, Mr Bush, Mr Rumsfeld and Mr Wolfowitz all declared major progress was under way. Indeed, Mr Wolfowitz had gone to Iraq last week to give Mr Bush a progress report on the stabilisation of the country and to speed up "Iraqification". He was brutally interrupted by the rocket attack on his hotel.
Despite this, Mr Wolfowitz came home with a positive report for the President. "There is plenty of good news in Iraq," he said.
In a passionate speech on his return, Mr Wolfowitz drove home one point. Whatever Iraq's future, it is already a huge improvement on the past; therefore the Administration can chalk up the war as a success.
"War is an ugly thing, I agree with that. But butchers like Saddam Hussein are incredibly ugly," said Mr Wolfowitz. "I don't think there's much question here about the morality of having gotten rid of that regime."
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But Mr Bush has little alternative except to put his faith in the Iraqification plan. If it works, he can begin to welcome home a respectable number of troops before next year's Republican convention.
If not, he can only hope that the good news on the US economy will distract most American voters from the casualties in Iraq.
Purchasers of the 1600 Crew loads o' crap, please form a line on the left behind Andrew Sullivan, Bill Kristol and Michael Ledeen. Body bags for your loved ones can be purchased from George Nethercutt over against the wall for a discounted price, no pictures please.
If the "Iraqification" is run out of the White House by the Mayberry Machiavelli group (Mail stop 666), the last troops will be getting on Air Force transports as the Miserable Failure is giving his acceptance speech. In the final five minutes of the speech, Iraqi TV will show live pictures of a haggard, thin, bearded Saddam Hussein declaring victory and ordering the arrest, and execution of anyone who collaberated, starting with Ahmed Chalabi.
And that's Real Politik, 2004. Let's see if it happens, and hope it doesn't.
