i-sako.com

Sen. Robert Byrd’s recent remarks on the trouble in Iraq probably took more time to deliver than Bush has been spending on briefings on the situation in Iraq.

It is staggeringly clear that the Administration did not understand the consequences of invading Iraq a year ago, and it is staggeringly clear that the Administration has no effective plan to cope with the aftermath of the war and the functional collapse of Iraq. It is time—past time—for the President to remedy that omission and to level with the American people about the magnitude of mistakes made and lessons learned. America needs a roadmap out of Iraq, one that is orderly and astute, else more of our men and women in uniform will follow the fate of Tennyson’s doomed Light Brigade…

I’m not sure how much time Senator Byrd spent preparing these remarks, but I bet it would have taken him more than 20 minutes, which is how much attention Bush has been paying to the increasingly dire situation in Iraq.

Insurgency spreads across Iraq

At his ranch near Crawford, Texas, President Bush held a 20-minute telephone conference call to discuss the fast-breaking events in Iraq with top Cabinet officials including Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, national security adviser Condoleeza Rice and Richard Meyers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Mr. Bush, the fine men and women of our armed forces are dying in a war that you have mismanaged from the very beginning. Would it be too much to ask for you to spend, say, even one minute per life lost keeping abreast of the situation? I mean, I understand that you’ve got some serious brush problems on that ranch of yours, but don’t you feel any sort of, you know, responsibility for making sure that this whole “liberation of Iraq” thing goes well?

Call me a workaholic, but I would forego vacations during periods of armed conflict if:

• I were commander-in-chief
• I had started the war myself, on false pretenses, in spite of the fact that it was widely recognized as a distraction from the war I should be fighting
• the guy seeking to replace me was publicly accusing me of “one of the greatest failures of diplomacy and failures of judgment” ever
• I had a self-imposed deadline to hand over power coming up in, oh, a few weeks

Any of these things ringing a bell?